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Science Forum Index » Archaeology Forum » Arachaeology magazine, July/August 2008...
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| Jack Linthicum... |
 Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 10:53 am |
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http://www.archaeology.org/0807/
Really good issue of Archaeology, here are some of the abstracts of
articles.
http://www.archaeology.org/0807/abstracts/bolivia.html
Amazonian Harvest Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008
by Mara Hvistendahl
Can prehistoric farming methods lead us to a sustainable future?
Clark Erickson is picking his way through the Bolivian Amazon, which
teems with snakes and malarial mosquitoes, when the visions start.
This is the rain forest, seemingly a raw, untouched tangle of exotic
plants and colorful birds. But for Erickson, an anthropologist-turned-
archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania, it is not the
pristine wilderness it seems, but a heavily managed landscape. He
reaches for a tree laden with mustard-colored fruit and seizes a waxy,
oblong leaf. "This is like finding potsherds," he says. The leaf
belongs to the cacao tree, which grows throughout this part of the
country, the Beni, in circular patches called forest islands--telltale
signs, he believes, of early settlement.
Erickson has worked in Bolivia and Peru for three decades, and he
hopes his research will bring the lessons of the past to bear on the
present, perhaps guiding sustainable agriculture here and across the
globe. He is part of a growing group of archaeologists who are
engaging and helping shape the communities in which they work, but a
few decades ago, other scholars would have thought him crazy.
The Beni is dominated by an erratic landscape called the Llanos de
Mojos, where pockets of rain forest taper abruptly into savanna. It is
the dry season now, but for half the year rain blankets the region and
water creeps to the edges of the forest islands before receding into
tributaries that feed the Amazon. When the water retreats, it takes
nutrients with it, leaving sandy brown soil inadequate for most crops.
Today, locals regularly employ slash-and-burn agriculture, a technique
introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 1600s. Without this method,
archaeologists long believed, the area's climate and soil would make
it largely uninhabitable by a significant number of people. Erickson
sees something different: 30,000 square miles dotted with round forest
islands somehow spared from the annual floods. To him, the raw jungle
is crisscrossed with signs of human interference. <more>
http://www.archaeology.org/0807/abstracts/sweden.html
Native Sweden Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008
by Zach Zorich
Indigenous Saami are rediscovering their long-lost heritage
Smithsonian archaeologist Noel Broadbent offers me a handful of
blueberries he has picked from the shrubs that hug the forest floor. I
pop them into my mouth. The pulp and seeds are sugary, rough, and
slick at the same time. In early September the leaves change color and
the berries ripen on Sweden's Hornsland peninsula. Broadbent crouches
by the trail and picks up a hunk of pale gray lichen. "This is what
the reindeer eat," he announces before letting it fall to the ground.
But the sun is beginning to dip below the treetops and I am too
preoccupied with getting to the archaeological site before dark to
notice that this is my first lesson in how the landscape fed the
ancestors of the Saami people and what meanings the geography held for
them. The Saami (formerly called Lapps) have lived in northern
Scandinavia and Russia's Kola peninsula since the glaciers retreated
some 10,000 years ago. Today, they number fewer than 100,000 people,
many of whom have assimilated into Scandinavian culture but still
maintain ties to their ancestral lands and family reindeer herds.
[image]
The black dots on the map show the distribution of places with Saami
names, evidence that they had once settled far beyond the borders of
"Lapland."
Because the Saami are historically known from the accounts of priests
and government officials, they have been stereotyped as nomadic
reindeer herders who live only in what was once called "Lapland," an
area that extends from the coast of the Arctic Ocean 300 miles south
of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Except for the work of Broadbent and a
few others, Saami prehistory before they adopted reindeer herding 400
or 500 years ago is largely a blank slate. Historic texts identified
them as hunters who traveled on skis, but said little else. This lack
of history has made it difficult for modern Saami to establish their
rights to land that was once used for grazing their reindeer. "It is a
common problem of indigenous people around the world," Broadbent says.
"People without written histories of their own can be helped by
archaeology in asserting their rights to their own history." <more>
http://www.archaeology.org/0807/abstracts/coprolites.html
abstracts
Ancient Excrement Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008
by Andrew Curry
An unexpected source of human DNA resets the clock on the settlement
of the Americas
[image]
Archaeologist Dennis Jenkins holds the earliest direct evidence of
humans living in the Americas. This 14,300-year-old piece of human
feces is changing theories about how and when the continents were
settled. (Courtesy Dennis Jenkins)
[image]
On a sunny, freezing-cold afternoon in late January, I steer my rented
SUV off Oregon State Highway 31 and onto an unmarked dirt road. I am
soon bumping through sagebrush and snow across a rutted, dry lakebed
that has been empty for the past 15,000 years. After about 20 minutes
I pull up in the shadow of a brown butte where I meet Dennis Jenkins,
an archaeologist from the University of Oregon.
Jenkins leads me halfway up the butte over a cascade of sharp gravel,
and we are soon standing in front of five dusty caves. They are
nothing special to look at: just a few feet deep, their roofs barely
high enough to stand under. They would have been temporary shelters at
best. Which is fine, because a few minutes would have been all someone
needed to deposit what is the oldest known evidence of human presence
in the Americas some 14,300 years ago.
Jenkins and University of Copenhagen geneticist Eske Willerslev argue
that the artifacts were made by the ancestors of modern Native
Americans, then deliberately left behind. But instead of beautifully
crafted stone tools like the Clovis points that have made other early
North American archaeological sites famous, the artifacts from
southern Oregon's Paisley Caves are pieces of crap. Literally. <more>
http://www.archaeology.org/0807/abstracts/urkesh.html
abstracts
Who Were the Hurrians? Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008
by Andrew Lawler
New discoveries in Syria suggest a little-known people fueled the rise
of civilization
[image]
Excavations at the 3rd millennium city of Urkesh in Syria are
revealing new information about the mysterious people who lived there,
known as the Hurrians. This view of the city's royal palace shows the
service area (left) and living quarters (right). (Ken Garrett)
With its vast plaza and impressive stone stairway leading up to a
temple complex, Urkesh was designed to last. And for well over a
millennium, this city on the dusty plains of what is now northeastern
Syria was a spiritual center for a puzzling people called the
Hurrians. All but forgotten by history, their origin remains obscure,
but excavations led by husband-and-wife UCLA archaeologists Georgio
Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati over the past quarter century
reveal that the Hurrians were far more than just another wandering
tribe in the fractious Middle East. And during last year's season,
they found compelling evidence that the Hurrians not only strongly
influenced the language, culture, and religion of later peoples, but
also may have been present 1,000 years earlier--just as nearby
Mesopotamians began to create the first cities.
[image]
Archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati has been leading excavations at
Urkesh for nearly 20 years. (Ken Garrett)
That idea is at odds with a long-held belief among scholars that the
Hurrians arrived much later from the Caucasus or some other distant
region to the northeast, drawn to the fringes of civilization after
the rise of the great southern Sumerian centers of Ur, Uruk, and
Nippur. Scholars long assumed that the Hurrians arrived in the middle
of the third millennium B.C., and eventually settled down and adopted
cuneiform as a script and built their own cities. That theory is based
on linguistic associations with Caucasus' languages and the fact that
Hurrian names are absent from the historical record until Akkadian
times. <more>
http://www.archaeology.org/0807/etc/artifact.html
departments
Artifact: Pig Incisor Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008
by Erin E. Hayes
WHAT IS IT?
Lower deciduous incisor of a domesticated pig (Sus scrofa)
DATE
A.D. 1025-1300
DISCOVERED
The Hanamiai Dune, Marquesas, French Polynesia
DIMENSIONS
About 1 inch long and 1/4 inch at its widest
[image]
(Courtesy Jeff Veitch, Archaeology Department, Durham University)
This pig incisor, fractured from the extraction of DNA, may have
helped crack one of archaeology's great unsolved cases: how humans
settled the islands of the south and central Pacific.
About 8,000 years ago, Neolithic people in eastern Asia first began to
colonize Oceania. Their descendants eventually populated the islands
from Sumatra to Hawaii, but the origin and exact route of this massive
dispersal have remained elusive. One popular theory, based in part on
linguistic data and nicknamed "the speedboat out of Taiwan," suggests
that people took a route from China to Taiwan and then across the
Pacific. But this pig tooth and others like it may have sunk that
speedboat.
[image]
Because they could only have arrived in Oceania by traveling in the
canoes of their owners, domesticated pigs act as reliable proxies for
human settlement. Hoping to trace migration patterns of Oceanic
peoples indirectly, evolutionary biologist Greger Larson of Durham
University and an international team of researchers studied DNA
extracted from hundreds of ancient and modern pig teeth from across
Asia and the Pacific.
They identified a large number of genetically identical pigs from
Oceania, but the origin of the group was surprising. The Pacific pigs'
ancestors were found in peninsular Southeast Asia, rather than in
China or Taiwan.
This small tooth, perhaps the humble remnant of an ancient pig roast,
has helped provide modern scientists with a feast of information
suggesting that the indigenous peoples of Oceania are from much
farther south than traditionally assumed.
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| Jack Linthicum... |
| Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 11:52 am |
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On Jun 12, 5:42 pm, Peter Alaca <p.al... at (no spam) purple.invalid> wrote:
Quote: Jack Linthicum wrote, 12/06/2008 22:53:
[...]
Aracheology?
Is that about very old spiders? 
My spell checker went on leave, something about a sick aunt. or ant, I
forget witch |
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| Peter Alaca... |
| Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 4:42 pm |
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Jack Linthicum wrote, 12/06/2008 22:53:
[...]
Aracheology?
Is that about very old spiders? |
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