Orkneyjar - The Ness of Brodgar Excavations 2008 :: Progress Update

Orkneyjar - The Ness of Brodgar Excavations 2008

It's always good to see archaeologists blogging their digs as they go, and in this instance we hear from Carla Cassidy, writing for the site diary, and who is currently working at the excavations at the Ness of Brodgar, just along from the four-week dig at the Ring O' Brodgar, mentioned in a previous post.

I have been on a fair few excavations, but this is one of the best for me – I love all things Neolithic so this site is a real treat. It’s wonderful to be digging on a site of this significance, we’re right between the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness and driving to work of a morning seems a little surreal.

Architecturally, we have something quite outstanding, namely the "Great Wall of Brodgar". Gavin tells me today that they (in Trench N) are guesstimating the ditch to be at least 8-10m wide.

Some of the finds have been really encouraging too, we have the by now-famous polished stone axe (yes Johnny, you did mention that you found it) and some lovely decorated stones, not to mention all the sherds of Grooved Ware that are turning up by the minute.

Those decorated stones sound interesting, as does this...

I have been working in Structure 1, which is looking more and more like Structure 2 over at the Barnhouse Settlement.

The place is huge and we’re now realising how high up there with a lot of archaeology beneath us. We’re making some great progress.

Initially, we found that the structure had a rubble covering that might be due to a collapse; there is evidence that this building was being used after the collapse too, possibly in the early Bronze Age, also a later, curvilinear wall had been added to almost de-size the interior, we can follow this around too and it’s really quite extensive.

It's clear from looking at the photos that somebody once went to a lot of time and trouble to construct the traces of what the archaeologists are now seeing for the first time, and although it's difficult as yet to discern the exact appearance of the original structure, it seems likely that at some point in the future, its architecture will be able to be reproduced, though whether its true purpose can be divined, is less clear.

But in the meantime, should you happen to be in this part of Orkney, the archaeologists advise us that it's possible to visit them the site itself...

Meanwhile, the Ness of Brodgar is beginning to give up some of its secrets and is changing everyday. We have tours around the site at 11.00am and 3pm daily and they’re given by the archaeologists who are digging here, we’d love to see you here and tell you more, so come along.

Just as I was concluding the post, I noticed another update, for July 29th, written by Siobhan Ross, whose entry you can read here; the image at the top of this post is taken from her update, and to read the previous diary entries, each one submitted by a different member of the team, just click here - there is also a collection of nice images added throughout, which help shed a little light on this enigmatic discovery.

The Glorious 46th Edition of Four Stone Hearth at Testimony Of The Spade

The glorious 46th ed of 4SH @ Testimony of the spade

This afternoon, the entire staff of remote central (Jones, T.) initiated the preliminary stages of relocating to its summer quarters, i.e. the beach, and during that time spent a good 5 minutes (possibly even longer) pondering the model of evolution espoused by Sam Sparro, in Black & Gold, which goes pretty much like this...

If a fish swam out of the ocean
And grew legs and they started walking,
And the apes climbed down from the trees
And grew tall and they started talking

...which made me think it rather odd that along the way to where were are now, we emerged from the sea after billions of years therein, walked around for hundreds of millions of years on dry land in a myriad of shapes and sizes, then climbed into the trees for a bit, just so that a while later, we could come down from those startled trees, and start walking across the face of the Earth on our own two feet - eventually to sit down and write songs that relate the entire journey in the few brief lines of a single verse.

I then remembered that Four Stone Hearth was due out today, and accordingly made a mental note to spend no longer than a few hours listening to the roar of the incoming surf gradually drowning out the iPod, as a star some 93 million miles distant, made its presence felt in the way only a solar entity can do, given a clear blue sky through which to burn.

Upon my somewhat later return home, and in an après-sun cream frame of mind, I launched my browser into the Mare del Blog, whereupon I made land-fall at Testimony of the Spade; once there, it transpired that the 46th edition of the anthropology blog carnival mentioned above, was indeed online, courtesy of Magnus Reuterdahl, who by all accounts is having a more subterranean summer experience.

Lots of good posts to check out, so take a deep breath, and dive straight in.

image from here

Louise Leakey Digs For Humanity's Origins | Video on TED.com (review)

Louise Leakey digs for humanity's origins | Video on TED.com

TED have recently posted another batch of good videos, including this one featuring palaeoanthropologist Louise Leakey, currently heading up the Koobi Fora Research Project at Lake Turkana, and who moreover is of course, a member of the Leakey family that over three generations, has devoted so much time to hunting out fossils of our most distant hominid ancestors in the Rift Valley of East Africa.

Naturally enough, a theme of this talk is evolution, and our place as Homo sapiens sapiens within the Hominidae family tree, our startling similarities to the bonobo and how in her opinion, we are all directly descended from African ancestors who migrated out of Africa around 70 kya.

The most interesting segments of this presentation concerned the work she and her parents, and grand-parents before them, have been doing in the Lake Turkana Basin these past decades, and the fossils they have found; one very good point she makes, when discussing our distant ancestors, is that it has been the norm for multiple species of Homo to have co-existed at the same time, if not in exactly the same places together.

As she points out, the actual processes by which fossilised remains of our ancestors reach us today are quite complex, 2 million years ago in the case of Turkana Boy, aka KNM-WT 15000, a 12 year-old Homo erectus who appears to have died after falling into a swamp from which he was unable to extricate himself. One of the most notable aspects of this find, apart from the sheer quantity of his remains that were found, was the implication that because of disabling illness, he must have been cared for by those around him for many years, which at 2 million years ago, is perhaps quite an unexpected behaviour.

Although Louise Leakey describes him as being on the cusp of humanity, which might be true in an anatomical context, care of the sick and infirm by other members of his species over a period of time spanning many years, sounds ostensibly like fully human behaviour to me. And as we hear, his inverted skull had been used as a water source from a tree, which obligingly wrapped its roots around it, preventing the fossil skull from being transported from its location, and probably lost in the process.

The very fact that researchers and their teams are able to find any fossils of our distant ancestors requires, (apart from exceedingly good eye-sight and a trench-full of patience and dedication on the part of those searching) something akin to a kind of cosmological constant whereby very specific sets of circumstances must be in place. For example the hominid alive at the time might need to die in an environment wherein the bones are quickly covered, often by water or mud, which later hardens to rock, until such time as erosional processes bring those remains back to the surface for modern -day researchers to find whilst out gleaning the baking hot surface beneath a ferociously hot sun, for tiny fossil fragments that aren't easy to spot in amongst the vast numbers of rocks, stones and countless other bone fragments from any number of faunal fragments that strew the dessicated landscape.

She wraps things up by quoting her father, Richard Leakey, who suggest we are the only species that routinely makes bad decisions related to our short and long-term survival - particularly in the way that human population growth is currently running at 80 million new souls per year, and that unless we reduce our numbers, or at least slow the growth of same, our future survival as a species is in a constant state of jeopardy.

All in all, a very good brisk talk, and one that I imagine would be especially useful to anyone not immediately familiar with the huge significance of the contribution to what we have learned about our distant past that has been made by the Leakey family. Moreover, the description of how a fossil comes to be, and the geological and erosional processes which then allow it to be found by modern humans is clearly explained, particularly in the context of Lake Turkana, but overall this is a good chance for people who are familiar with all this to hear from someone out in the field, conducting ongoing research in what has become one of the most important areas in the world by virtue of the huge amount of information it has imparted to us from so long ago.

Here's a brief word from Koobi Fora Research Project website...

The Koobi Fora Region has, over the last 35 years of exploration, produced a wealth of paleontological, geological and archaeological data. Research in the area has revealed a complex history of volcanism, tectonics and sedimentary cycles preserving fluvial and lake phases of the basin. Some 16,000 fossil specimens have been collected from the Turkana basin, almost 10,000 from the Koobi Fora Region.

This includes an impressive 350 hominid specimens from the basin and this has contributed significantly to our present understanding of human origins and hominid diversity through time. Hominid behaviour, including tool use, has been interpreted from the archaeological remains. The huge collection of fossil mammals provides an opportunity to trace the evolution of numerous mammalian lineages back in time.

Ad whilst we have the privilege of being able to look back 2 million years into our own past, we can hardly imagine how people alive 2 million years into the future will be able to detect signs of our present day existence - assuming of course, that 2 million years hence, there are any humans left alive to do the searching, either on planet Earth or elsewhere.

Prehistory of Koobi Fora

Leakey.com - 100 Years of the Leakey Family in East Africa

binnall of america : audio: Season 3 Finale : Jacques Vallée: Messengers of Deception

binnall of america : audio

Tim Binnall wraps up Season 3 of his esoteric radio show, hosting an interview with Jacques Vallée, who in my opinion, makes a good number of pertinent observations regarding that segment of our reality which is inhabited by all manner of strange sightings, odd encounters, and any number of anomalous incidents, which between them encompass those things that are known today as ufos, or as they are referred to on his website, unidentified aerial phenomena.

He is best known for having written a series of books in the 1980s, after which he effectively vanished from the scene until about a year or so ago - and those titles have recently been republished by Anomalist Books.

If you have even the faintest of passing interests in ufos and aliens etc, and want to hear a reasoned and thoughtful discussion of what these things may or may not be, as well as an overview of how human culture has embraced, misinterpreted and mis-represented a vast range of sightings of and encounters over the past decades, centuries and millennia, Jacques Vallée is one person worth listening to. I've included here a few notes and comments on the show, but these do scant justice, and as such, I'd recommend listening to this free interview in its entirety.

It's only in the past year or so that Vallée has re-surfaced on the ufo scene, and confesses himself to be somewhat surprised and disappointed that no real progress has been made in the 25 years or so since he wrote his series of books; he eschews the ufology scene, and the 'noise' it generates, such are the polarised views of many within it - this polarisation is echoed in the current mainstream media, (although in their case, that's an observation that can be applied across a vast swathe of topics they cover).

Formerly an astronomer, he was one of a handful of scientists to address ETH going back several decades, pointing out that far from being a modern phenomenon, people have been documenting strange things and beings in our skies and immediate vicinities for all of written history, and notes how little the so-called 'alien' technology has changed in all those thousands of years.

Regarding close encounters, and the idea that ET is visiting our planet to observe and monitor, he surmises that it's not necessary for beings to make continued landings on the same planet over and over, or even to have alien boots on the ground - for example, the way we study Mars and the solar system is by using remote robotic systems that can collect and send vast amounts of data; but it's unlikely, for practical reasons alone, we'd continually send groups of individuals down to the surface of a planet with intelligent life, there to appear and disappear before the eyes, over periods of thousands of years

He later goes into why science is unable to address much of ufology as many of its more mysterious elements appear nonsensical, and as such discourage scientists from becoming involved in trying to make rational analyses. For example, the aliens reported by people in the modern era behave in similar ways to elves, fairies, leprechauns (little green men) and the like, and going back further in time, mentions historical characters such as Joan of Arc, as well as encounters with what are frequently assumed to be angelic entities, whose presence loomed so large they warrant multiple mentions in the Bible. I can't recall whether he mentions ghosts as well, but ostensibly such perceived phenomena could reasonably be included within the paranormal whole.

He opines that partly due to the lack of a scientific input in the modern era, people are inclined to believe 'almost anything', a situation that endangers not only the individual but others who get sucked into someone else's reality construct. 35 minutes in he discusses ufo cults, the whole contactee movement and Scientology, Heaven's Gate and so on - how for some people it's very tempting to give up on the rational world, and in some cases even lose their lives because of someone else's crazy and manipulative belief sets. He also notes how some of the early alien contactee organisations had indirect links to the Nazi beliefs related to the supposed existence of higher or superior races , and warns us of the dangers that still exist today.

At 1hr 20 he discusses whether reported ufos could really be 'nuts-and-bolts' advanced spacecraft, transporting small crews of aliens intent on fulfilling whatever missions we might imagine them to be on - (with reference to some reports that they have been seen taking off 'through trees' - people firing bullets at them have heard the first shot sounding as if it hit metal, the second as if it had hit something soft like a phone directory, while the third shot evinced no sound at all, causing him to wonder whether these 'craft' aren't also manipulating space-time.) Some commentators have even noted how what appear to be nuts-and-bolts craft show signs of being sentient themselves, or in some cases living entities.

But he stresses that hyper-sceptics who insist that everything ufo/alien is an illusion or hallucination aren't correct either, and an inability to explain the phenomena shouldn't be a reason to try and explain it away in negatively dismissive ways isn't a realistic response either.

Vallée is one of the most interesting commentators in that although he has personally interviewed people who consider themselves to have been abducted he is more of a historian rather than someone pushing an alien agenda or related paradigm, or even their idea of what reality might or might not be, content instead to document cases rather than offer conclusive answers or explanations. Indeed tells us that in effect, he has no conclusive idea to explain it all, and warns against believing anyone who claims to understand the big picture.

My overall, (and admittedly under-informed) impression, in common with one or two other commentators, is that something somewhere is projecting parts of itself from another reality, exploiting a human propensity for irrational reality mapping, and one that has been with us for thousands of years. Or maybe human consciousness itself exerts some weird 'gravitational ' force that inadvertently pulls in parts of other realities, parallel dimensions etc, that our senses and nervous systems interpret, or are hijacked into interpreting, in the bewildering array of beliefs that constitute a considerable chunk of modern human culture.

And if human culture and society as a whole has really been subtly or even profoundly influenced - for example, mainstream religion relies heavily on all-powerful, all-knowing beings inhabiting abstract or supernatural realms - it might very well be worth science trying to figure out at least part of this conundrum, if only to free ourselves of fundamentalist belief systems that appear to be doing us great harm, even as we progress through a technologically advancing 21st century.

We have got to the stage now that we as a human race almost expect to make contact with other intelligent life from elsewhere in the galaxy, and despite various warnings, it seems unlikely that the entire social order would collapse were such contact to be made. What people might find it a lot harder to deal with would be an announcement along the lines of we've found a parallel Earth, which not only is populated by all manner of strange and not necessarily friendly beings, and who by the way, had unlimited access to us, but there was no way for us humans to be able either to restrict their access to us, or exert any control over what those beings did once they were here in our physical realm.

From an archaeological perspective, I think at least some attention has to be paid when considering the motives of those people who first began to use symbolism associated with funerary practices, considerations of good and evil influences from seemingly supernatural realms, and so on. The biggest problem with that is that we have no idea what was in the minds of those people - whether they too had experienced sightings and encounters with what they thought were the spirits of the dead, godly apparitions from the sky, or even animals and rocks that talked to them, prompting them in some cases to entertain beliefs in life after death, produce rock art, build the first temples and shrines, consult oracles and so on.

Rock art both in America and Australia contains all manner of strange beings and entities, and of course there has been speculation that in some or even many cases, the artist was reproducing something from his or her memory, as seen or described to them by others. In European Palaeolithic rock art, we tend to see more figurative works, with an animal/human blend or mix of characteristics, and wild speculation aside, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that people going back 20,000, 50,000 years or more were just as prone as we seem to be today to seeing and/or experiencing events that depart radically from the everyday - and thus we shouldn't be surprised to see odd beings, hybrids and plain eerie creations emanating from the hands and minds of peoples past. It may of course be true that everything non-figurative depicted from that era came from the imaginations (or hallucinations) of the artists themselves, but in my opinion I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that humans have been having unexpected meetings with unfathomable others from the very depths of prehistory.

Although we have moved on from ideas of animal and human sacrifice, which are heavily oriented towards currying favour with abstract beings, or perceived deities, such is the vigour of religious fundamentalism in the world today, I sometimes wonder whether such activities haven't merely morphed into more 'justifiable' activities such as religious and idealistic warfare.

It's opined that if science could somehow prove that these beings and what appear to be their craft aren't real, in the conventional sense, probably aren't some sort of mythical 'space brothers intent on improving the lot of humanity, or coming here to enslave us in various gold or soul mining operations, whilst accepting at the same time that people who experience odd and anomalous phenomena aren't necessarily mad or hoaxing the rest of us, we might make some small progress in divining something else of the true nature of reality, or other realities similar to our own.

But because most of what people experience can't be readily replicated, duplicated and falsified, it's no surprise that science can't begin to address the conundra - it might even turn out that as Martin Rees and others have suggested, we are not as real as we like to think we are, and that we are the organic creation of an intelligence so advanced and sophisticated, that we have no more chance of contemplating its reality any more than a bacteria has of understanding it lives on a planet zooming round a star, populated by a myriad of complex life-forms, of which we are supposedly the most intelligent.

Michio Kaku makes a similar point regarding the lives of fish living in a pond - one day a hand enters the water, pulls out one of their fellow fish, which sometime later is returned to their midst. The abducted fish would have no way of explaining to the others that it had just been in an outside world, full of strange beings living in an environment where they didn't need to be submerged in water to survive, any more than it would be able to describe the humans, what they did, how they lived, their technology or even what that technology comprised.

The archaeological record only preserves some tangible artifacts and related responses made by humans, especially in prehistory, and it would be interesting to know at what point a sense of 'other' first manifested itself, and why it has since taken such a strong hold over our lives, thoughts and imagination to this day, with no sign of abating anytime soon.

If you want to hear more from Vallée, there's an interview over at The Paracast from March 9th 2008, in which he addresses many of the same topics, as well as others, such as an interpretation of the events at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, where 70,000 people gathered to witness a predicted 'apparition' event.

He also devoted a few minutes to criticising those who use hypnosis as a means of helping those trying to re-live so-called abduction events in their own lives - hypnosis is seemingly better used as a behavioural modifer than a total recall tool, and he describes practitioners employing such means on potentially vulnerable people as irresponsible.

Season 4 of Binnall of America is slated for October 2008, and in the interim, I'd recommend interested readers/listeners to check out The Paracast; this show is similar in scope to Binnall of America, and indeed some of the same guests appear.

One of the things I like about this show is that they're not afraid to heap criticism -and on occasion outright scorn - on those whom they believe to be deliberately misleading people, or are in it solely for the attention and/or money, or in some cases are just completely nuts - one of their recent victims was Steven Greer and his expressed ideas on governmental alien disclosure, his own Orion Project, Tesla, free energy and his supposed scientific team assembled to conduct scientific research. I've heard too many interviews with such people, especially on Coast to Coast, wherein some guests are a given free reign to spout at will, without having to face much if anything in the way of objective criticism or comment - which given an estimated audience for Coast of several million per show, means that a persuasive enough guest can influence a great many people, so from time to time it's good to hear people making wild and unsubstantiated claims being taken to task.

Anyway, to hear someone address these matters in a much more articulate and informed manner than I 'm able to do here, I'd definitely recommend listening to the linked interview at BoA with Jacques Vallée, followed by the Paracast interview from March this year - and keep your ears out for BoA Season 4 this coming autumn - and don't forget, the entire archives of BoA audio files from the first three seasons are still available to listen to online, or by downloading them to the mp3 player of your choice.

Western Australia's Aboriginal Rock Art In Danger

Australia's ancient Aboriginal rock art at risk, experts say - Yahoo! News

In recent weeks I've written a couple of posts regarding European Palaeolithic caves in which rock art is considered to be in grave danger, one from mould destroying the actual fabric of the original paint materials, (Lascaux) and the other (Praileaitz) that finds itself uncomfortably near quarrying activities and the frequent detonation of explosives.

But for this post, we're going to be travelling across to the other side of the world to north-western Australia, where in the open air, is to be found the world's greatest concentration of rock art, similarly endangered, once again due to the proximity of commercial enterprises which threaten to compromise the integrity of the site, as individual rocks and boulders are moved from their original locations. Local mineral extraction activities edge ever nearer, and pollution threatens to erode countless petroglyphs over the coming decades.

The rock art in question is spread over an area slightly bigger than 50 square miles, on the Murujuga Peninsula in Western Australia, and more commonly known in the present day as the Burrup Peninsula, which formerly belonged to an Aborigine people known as the Yaburara, until they were massacred by the British in 1868, more of which later.

But for an account of the present woes afflicting this remote corner of the world, we turn to the august pages of Yahoo! News, from which the following is taken...

Australia's greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art is at risk of being damaged or destroyed because it sits at the epicentre of the country's resources boom, experts say

The etchings of men and animals on the rocks of the Burrup Peninsula, some of which are believed to be up to 30,000 years old, lie in Western Australia's remote and mineral-laden Pilbara region.

Images carved onto the red rocks scattering the landscape include kangaroos, lizards and emu tracks as well as the extinct native Tasmanian tiger which died out on the mainland 6,000 years ago.

Among the most significant panels are those showing human faces and activities and what experts believe are mythical figures.

"One of the pictures is depicting movement, is showing a man climbing a tree; probably to go hunting a possum or something like that," says archaeologist and anthropologist Sue Smalldon.

"The depiction of movement is quite rare in historic art around the world."

However, there appears to be no shortage natural resources, which in this part of the world appear to be particularly abundant, and which in this case, pose the greatest danger to the long-term future of this vast site, part of which, Dampier, has previously been brought to the attention of the outside world by Robert Bednarik, who is credited with discovering the rock art there some 40 years ago, during which time there has been increasingly widespread destruction of sites where panels of engravings had previously been located.

But the peninsula is also seeing increasing industrial activity, including a gas processing plant, a fertiliser factory and iron ore port facilities, making it the only place in Australia to feature on the World Monuments Fund's list of the most endangered sites.

Smalldon believes the rock art has suffered since mining took off in the Pilbara, which holds some of the richest mineral deposits on earth, in the 1960s.

"We had nearly one million panels of rock art," Smalldon told AFP.

"That's what so important about it. Yes, it's important to culture, yes, it's important aesthetically and for other reasons. But from an international perspective, it's the greatest concentration of rock art in the world."

She said the threat to the art has intensified in recent years as mining and energy companies drain the region of iron ore, natural gas and other resources to feed the huge demand for raw materials from Asia.

Smalldon cites the removal of rock art from the area by energy producer Woodside Petroleum to build a new liquified natural gas (LNG) plant, as an indicator of how industrial development threatens the works.

For their part, Woodside Petroleum point to the fact that the LNG they produce has a greatly reduced carbon footprint, and as the demand from Asia for such products continues to grow, they are duty-bound to their share holders to take maximum advantage of the resources to which they have access, thus their plans to build a rig in the area. Additionally, they claim to have taken a course of action which causes the least damage to the local rock art they have encountered during the course of operations...

Woodside said it tried to avoid rock engravings when it designed its Burrup LNG Park but that 170 boulders containing art which could not be avoided were moved to nearby natural settings with the guidance of indigenous custodians.

"No rock art was damaged or destroyed during this process and the relocated boulders are now indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape," a spokesman for the company told AFP.

But Smalldon is unimpressed.

"It's like saying Stonehenge is a round circular site, let's remove two of the stones," she said.

"You're removing a percentage of the rock art and therefore reducing the significance of it. You've got to think of it as the Aboriginal people think of it -- as a whole. They see it as a place, they don't see it as individual rock art."

Here's some additional reportage and comment from Neue Zuricher Zeitung, January 22, 2008 (pdf), translated from the original text in German...

“We would like approval to remove some rocks and boulders, because we intend to build an oil rig at the site mentioned” – can anybody imagine such an application to the authorities if it concerned world famous sites such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Gizeh or Angkor Wat in Cambodia? Hardly.

Not only imaginable but indeed officially sanctioned is such a course of action at the Murujuga [Burrup] Peninsula in Australia’s Northwest. Even though it is the location – as archaeologists think – of the greatest cultural treasure on the 5th continent and one of the most important in the world: a huge accumulation of rock carvings [petroglyphs], a fantastic encyclopedia of human presence for the last 8,000 years.

With regard to Stonehenge and the ongoing problems there, it is reported that one Labour MP did actually suggest moving the entire monument, so we can see that cultural myopia isn't restricted to the Murujuga Peninsula alone; here's a word from Robert Bednarik...

"Western Australia has one of the lowest population densities in the world. We have oodles of land, we have enormous stretches of coastal spinifex plains that are completely unoccupied," he said.

"And what do we do? We put the biggest industrial development in the country at the same site as the biggest cultural heritage site in the country. It's incredible."

Austrian-born Bednarik, an epistemologist who has published widely on archaeology, believes industrial emissions pose the biggest risk to the art and will gradually strip away the etchings.

"The only rock art, the only petroglyphs that you are going to see 100 years from now are those very, very deeply carved. And they of course are a small minority," he said.

And here's some background on Pilbara rock art as a whole, with particular reference to Dampier...

The first published reports of Pilbara rock art are those in the account of Captain John Wickham, whose ship, the HMAS Beagle, visited Depuch Island in the Dampier archipelago in 1840.

The motifs and roles vary immensely between engravings. Some are images of flora and fauna from the area while some are Dreaming sites. Others have a role as Thalu sites,places of great spiritual power, something equivalent to the Christian notion of a shrine.

A clan member would perform ceremonies at the Thalu site to regenerate and multiply the elements of the earth necessary for the clan's survival.

All the sites contain a spiritual essence. This essence gives off an energy which resonates with the traditional people from that particular area. The energy is considered dangerous to outsiders who venture into the area without ritual preparation.

Until the area was earmarked for development in the early 1960x, the rock engravings were largely unknown.

For a much more detailed look, this pdf, 'The Dampier Rock Art Precinct' is essential reading, contains some nice images, and towards the end addresses the previously mentioned topic of the damage emissions from industry are likely to cause - as opposed to the short-term damage to the site caused by moving 165 boulders, and the alleged activities of various visitors to the area, said on occasion to help themselves to some of the smaller engraved rocks, either for souvenirs, or more likely in this day and age, to be sold on the black market to unscrupulous collectors - much in the same way, albeit on as yet a smaller scale, as Iraq is being looted of its archaeology, or a multitude of ancient sites across North and South America robbed of theirs.

Here's a word from officialdom, in this case the government of Western Australia, once again via Yahoo! News (scroll down)...

Western Australia's Deputy Premier Eric Ripper said the state government was establishing Murujuga National Park, to be jointly managed with the indigenous community, over parts of the Burrup that lie in National Heritage areas.

An Aboriginal heritage management plan to guide the protection of indigenous heritage and culture in the wider Dampier Archipelago had also been developed.

"We recognize the immense national cultural and heritage values of the area and believe a cooperative approach between all of these groups is the best way to manage and protect those heritage values," he said.

But local Aboriginal leaders such as Wilfred Hicks, from the Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo people which claim a connection to the Burrup, remain concerned about the site.

"I'm very worried about it. All my people are worried about it because it's destroying all the Aboriginal art," he said.

And to wind up, here's an assessment from ICOMOS of the overall situation there - they note for example, that due to air pollution, some rock art on the Murujuga Pensinsula will start to disappear as early as 2030....

The Burrup Peninsula (Murujuga) is a unique ecological and archaeological province on the north-west coast of the Pilbara, Western Australia.

The Burrup features what is regarded as one of the world's largest and most significant collection of petroglyphs, ancient rock-art engravings dating back tens of thousands of years. Thousands of carvings cover the rocky landscape of the peninsula and surrounding islands. The area also possesses a major corpus of standing stones, the largest occurrence in Australia.

The Burrup is an artificial peninsula, formed when Dampier Island was connected to the mainland by a causeway constructed in the 1960s, when major industrial facilities were established in the remote region. Currently six giant gas processing plants are proposed for the peninsula, together with associated development - including infrastructure corridors, port expansions, water-desalination plants and quarry expansions.

If this development proceeds, rock art is in danger of being damaged or relocated during construction, and the future emissions of sulphur and nitrogen from these plants may form acidic compounds that could gradually destroy the carvings.

Scientific data predict that the rock art will begin to disappear by 2030. Concern has been expressed that the management plan for the area will afford no real protection for this significant rock art.

Reports indicate that, collectively, the proposed heavy industry in the region may be responsible for emitting an additional 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, and this may also have a deleterious effect on the regions' unique ecosystem.

Furthermore, there appear to be prudent and feasible alternatives to the proposed location of the development, in particular the Maitland Heavy Industry Estate on the mainland, which would allow the development to proceed but also conserve the Burrup Peninsula's significant collection of petroglyphs (Sourced from Bednarik 2002, and the web pages 'Save Dampier Rock Art' and 'Dampier Information Page').

Looking at the history of the region over the past couple of centuries, especially in this brief but telling article by Robert Bednarik, 'The Killing Fields of Murujuga'(pdf) and the way it has been effectively commandeered by central government and given over to industry, it's hardly a surprise to learn that the value of what Bednarik estimates to be 200,000-250,000 petroglyph panels has been somewhat ignored, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

It is clear that there are billions of dollars to be made from exploiting the natural resources in this part of Western Australia, and it could be argued that anything that benefits the national economy so greatly, works towards the greater good, as the citizens of that economy supposedly experience the so-called 'trickle-down' effect; in contrast, even if all the rock art is saved and preserved, and some related tourism can be generated, there is no way that anything like the same amount of cash could be generated in the same time-frame.

So while it has to be accepted that further damage to the area and its petroglyphs is more or less inevitable, there's a great deal that can and should be done to save as much as possible, which means properly funded projects to record what exists now, the restriction of some areas as is deemed suitable, and effective management of a vast cultural resource that once gone, can never be replaced.

Should you feel so inclined, there is an online petition to which you can add your name.


Save Dampier Rock Art

Ancient Secrets of Lost Art

Burrup National Trust pdf

AURA

ICOMOS

Australian Archaeological Association Conference, December 2008



image (plus more) from here

The Archaeology Channel - Water Witch: Traversing the Seas of History - Video (review)

The Archaeology Channel - Welcome

In a previous post, I reviewed a TV documentary that could have been a lot more interesting if there had been a lot less in the way of bombastic graphics, and this latest offering from TAC is a classic example of how to make a clear and coherent documentary with the minimum of fuss, whilst informing and entertaining the viewer at the same time.

I'd have to confess that video documentaries featuring sunken boats from the American Civil War era aren't something that would normally quicken my pulse, but the mark of a good archaeology documentary, whatever the subject, and be it 20 minutes or 2 hours in duration, is its ability to draw in the viewer, sustain interest throughout, with as little extraneous 'noise' as possible.

In this 18 minute film, we follow an archaeological team in the locale of Savannah, Georgia, as they search the Vernon River using surveys, magnetometer and sonar to try and locate the USS Water Witch, lying on the bottom of the Vernon River since December, 1864. The team have been afforded the opportunity to carry out this research as part of the proposed Truman Parkway Bridge construction project, and the Georgia Department of Transportation has duly produced said film.

We open with some quiet music, scenes of the archaeologists on their boat and a few shots of the Vernon River and its immediate surroundings, i.e. setting the scene in a ship-shape and orderly fashion, without recourse to intrusive voice-over, so the viewer is allowed to drift into the film, rather than being grabbed by the lapels and slung head-first into the river with a mighty splash, so to speak.

As for the ship itself, it was a Federal gunboat captured by the Confederates in June 1864, led by Moses Dallas (scroll down to The Confederate States Navy - The Savannah Squadron) who along with a handful of others, was killed in the attack; the Water Witch was eventually burned and sunk to avoid its recapture in December of that year, lying undiscovered ever since; this will be the team's only chance at locating the Water Witch, so immediately you have the element of conflict, if any were needed, to propel the story along.

Tidewater Atlantic Research are the people hired to survey the river bottom, led by Dr. Gordon Watts, an underwater archaeologist of many years' standing, and Harry Pecorelli, a former student of his at East Carolina University, and thus it we see their efforts to find the wreck, using a magnetometer and sonar device as they painstakingly search a stretch of the river that flows past the Vernonburg community, originally inhabited by German settlers in the 18th century.

The team's task isn't helped by shallow waters, and at first their efforts bring forth no reward, and to find out how the investigation progresses, why an old map from 1865 proves to be more valuable than modern electronic equipment, and even whether or not they find the object of their attentions, you'll need to watch the rest of it for yourself.

But suffice it to say that although you might not see this kind of documentary appearing on TV over at The History Channel, films such as this demonstrate the role the Internet can play in bringing to our attention some of the less charted backwaters of archaeology. And because such films actually record the research being done on-site as well as the participating archaeologists, it's probably not stretching a point too far to suggest that such films become a valuable part of the archaeological record itself.

However, this particular story still has a few chapters to run, and hopefully at some point in the future, we will be able to return to Savannah in order to resolve at least some of the questions that remain open at the time of posting this, as well as catch up on how the project to build a replica of the ship is coming along.

(Film was produced in 2008 by the Georgia Department of Transportation, in cooperation with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus, and the Federal Highway Administration.)

More links can be found accompanying the online presentation at TAC.

image of USS Water Witch from National Civil War Naval Museum

'Journey to 10,000 BC' - A Review (Heavy Heavy Monster Edit)

The story this dvd is attempting to tell is the origins, dates and life-ways of hunter-gatherers, or foragers, in the New World of 12,000 years ago, and how supposedly at around this time, humans were for the first time entering the new and perilous world of America, as if the world these intrepid humans were entering was any different from where they had originally come.

I read somewhere that the graphics were stunning - technically, a sharp blow to the head with a blunt instrument can also be thought of as stunning, so I guess it just depends on interpretation, but this is one documentary that wastes too much time on irrelevant detail, almost all of which is contained within these 'stunning' graphics, which if truth be told, range from the truly awful to ok in places. I wasn't too keen on the eerie lighting effects, which gave an other-worldly effect when it wasn't needed.

We open with a grrrrr, a feline face and a baleful eye, along with a herd of mammoth so laughably fake you're wondering if this was an accidentally included scene. We're then told that intrepid humans are entering a deadly and terrifying new world, and we see a group of said humans, surveying a landscape, seemingly devoid of all animal life - even the mammoth and smilodon are nowhere to be seen - disappointingly, neither is there any sign of 'that' pyramid.

What the makers signally failed to do was portray the New World as it would have been viewed and experienced by its first human visitors - who arrived considerably earlier than is at first suggested - and the bewildering array of exotic wildlife that would have inhabited the landscape, prior to the megafaunal extinction event. When attempting to relate events and episodes of times past, it's of vital importance to ensure the correct background and characters are established from the outset, because without those, the entire exercise is inevitably doomed to eternal pointlessness.

So for my opening scenes, rather than go for some supposedly high end computer generated images, I'd have gone for something a lot simpler, in this case hiring an artist who has portrayed floral and faunal suites of now vanished worlds - for example as this book cover by illustrator J. Agusti, to name but one of many illustrators of a similar ilk. It's easy to see how a much more convincing sketch of the era could be realised very effectively just by use of some still images - if the budget was big enough, animation based on such illustrations could equally convey the message.

The other point about the frequent use of mammoth and smilodon/sabre-toothed cats is the repeated implication that humans entering Pleistocene America suddenly found themselves facing previously unencountered fearsome creatures - whereas the mammoth and sabre-tooth cat species were beasts that humans had already been running into - and away from - across the length and breadth of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, and in the case of the latter, Africa too - so why America should have been any more or less dangerous than the rest of the world, I'm not too sure.

It would also have been good to see a reasonably detailed description of the geology of the American continents, how they came to be configured in their current setting, how that had affected speciation and evolution of life in general, why it would have been difficult for humans to get there - all this could have been done in the opening 10 minutes of this documentary, and would have laid a much firmer foundation for what was to follow.

The more interesting parts of this documentary included Dennis Stanford making his case for a Solutrean incursion from Europe, with the contention that the fluted aspect of Clovis lithics was a modification of the Solutrean technology which had come from afar. Many disagree with this idea, saying there is a missing gap of several thousand years between the end of Euro-Solutreanism and the beginnings of American Clovis. However as Stanford points out, stone tool technology in Siberia from around the same time was so radically different from Clovis, that there seems to be no connection between the two - he further opines that as Clovis seems to originate in northeastern America, the location would have marked where people arriving from southwestern Europe would have made landfall and eventually settled.

However, that doesn't mean that Clovis couldn't have been invented locally by early Americans already in situ, and more data gathered in future years should help to prove or disprove the Solutrean theory; even if this turns out to be true though, there are indications from Mexico and Baja California that humans could have been in the New World some 20,000 years before the Solutreans, and it may well be that we never discover the identity of those first - and probably very few - humans, who first set foot there.

But so far, almost all the lithic evidence comes from land-based sites, and coastal regions that may have been occupied by early Americans are now submerged by seas that rose as the climate warmed. It is only in the present day, and with the advent of the necessary technology, that archaeologists are beginning to explore what are now off-shore locations, and which would have been dry land before sea-levels began to rise, so it will be interesting to see what the current expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, led by C. Andrew Hemmings and James Adovasio will reveal.

And sticking with the maritime environment, the documentary gives a good account of what happens when the North Atlantic Conveyor shuts down, helping to lower temperatures further as more cold fresh water gets dumped in the ocean. It has been reported in recent years that this process has been occurring spasmodically, and should it shut down permanently, places like Britain will find winters suddenly become more Scandinavian in nature, as temperatures plummet and snowfall increases dramatically.

The Younger Dryas had a profoundly negative effect on a human population that was a great deal smaller than that of the present day, and we can only imagine how many millions of people would suffer from a similar thousand-year plus episode of global cooling - the current lack of sun-spot activity already has one or two people nervously predicting that despite the current global warming we are experiencing, the net result could be for us all to be plunged into an Ice Age, through which our agricultural-reliant communities and economies would surely not survive. I'd have included some mention of the fact that we modern humans are just as liable to fall prey to natural disasters, global climate change and so on, rather than the triumphalist tones at the end of the dvd, announcing how we humans were shaping our destiny as if we were some kind of demi-gods, immune from mortal dangers like incoming comets etc.

As David Meltzer tells us, some 80% of America's large animals disappeared when the Younger Dryas hit - today we are heavily reliant on grazing animals and fields full of growing crops, and it seems to be a toss-up whether global warming will drown our coastal communities, or wherher we'll all freeze and starve to death in an Ice Age - either prospect is daunting, and there seems little we can do to prevent either situation. If past disasters are anything to go by, chances are we'll have to deal with both scenarios in rapid succession, and that's not even considering the dangers posed by incoming comets and asteroids, which seem to hit us a bit more regularly than we might once have supposed.

Which leads us to another interesting segment which features Drs. Allen West and Al Goodyear at work on the Topper site, with Dr. West searching for nano-diamonds, in his quest to prove that the Clovis culture really was obliterated by a comet that is thought to have exploded over the diamond fields of Canada - too bad we couldn't have spent longer at Topper, and I'm still not sure why there appears to be no mention of the Gault site, surely one of the most important Clovis sites in all of North America.

Critics of the Clovis comet theory, such as David Meltzer, claim that as there is no impact crater, the theory has yet to be proved, but Dr. Luann Becker points out that samples from the Topper site contain fullerenes, essentially stardust from outer space, though to be carried to Earth in comets - and presumably asteroids, depending on their point of origin. Dr West believes that the comet may have impacted the Laurentide ice sheet, since melted, and taking with it any evidence for a crater. Another theory holds that the comet could have exploded in mid-air, but either way, the evidence that appears in the stratigraphy across a range of sites, the onset of the Younger Dryas and the disappearance of so many large beasts indicates to many that that a comet was indeed the trigger for the Clovis collapse. I'd be very surprised if some other cause of the Younger Dryas and extinction event made a better fit than the comet - time will tell.

There's a brief visit to the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, and the contents thereof, discovered in 1969, the story of which is related by Dr. Christopher Shaw. But I couldn't help feeling that the amount of carnivores found there might have unduly skewed the creative input of this dvd, but who knows. In my capacity as armchair director, I would have put this part nearer the beginning, as it gives us a clearer view of the huge variety of fauna that inhabited Late Pleistocene America.

Rather than watch some computer generated mammoth duking it out, along with a host of other rendered scenes, which between them must account for at least a third of this presentation, I'd have preferred to see much more of the actual archaeology that has been done - in a story as compelling as the early peopling of the Americas, the details of the real story are far more interesting and revealing when related based on what is already known and recently discovered, whereas trying to embellish it with what I assume are meant to be exciting 'action' scenes just detracts from the real story.

Furthermore, there is almost no reference to the 'outside' world in this documentary - at 12,000bp, one of the most extraordinary episodes of human cultural evolution was happening in the Near East for example, as evidenced by the Epi-Palaeolithic/Natufian/Pre-pottery Neolithic, early monumentalism, the first -co-resident communities/villages and the strange settlements in which people at that time and place, lived and/or worshiped.

My point being that it should be possible to make a much better documentary than this on the same budget, just by sticking to what's known, referencing the state of ongoing archaeological and palaeo-anthropological research, not just in the New World, but across the globe as a whole - humankind was branching out in many directions, abstract as well as geographical, and to understand one part it's necessary to stand back and consider the big picture, rather than merely watching cgi-enhanced snapshots that could have been taken anywhere, and at any time in the past few hundreds of thousands of years, featuring as they do, humans pitting their wits against big scary beasties.

I'd also have the humans walking around in real locations - it's not as if the North American continent is short of its own stunning scenery, far more convincing than anything on view here - about the only time we see anything of America itself is as background to the various doctors and professors talking us through the more interesting parts of the documentary, although I'd also like to have seen them discussing some of the topics with each other, rather than each individual putting forward his or her own ideas in isolation from everyone else. If the producers wanted to introduce an element of conflict to this dvd, I'm sure the combined might of American academia could have provided a suitably rich source of material, judging by some of the widely differing views of the peopling of the New World extant within it.

There hardly seemed to be any mention of coastal migration either, which given the land-based slant of this documentary wasn't altogether surprising, and once again, a chance was missed to paint a clearer picture. I was wondering if the film-makers had decided to dispense with as much complexity as possible, in order to better portray the peopling of the New World as a pitched battle between man, beast, comet and polar desert; dramatic maybe, but in this case, a little overstated.

So if you want to watch this dvd, my advice would be to skip the cgi scenes altogether, listen to what the various interviewees have to say, and keep abreast of current news releases from the various archaeological sites and people working there, either online or through the journals etc. There is no advice on the dvd regarding further reading, good websites or blogs to check, which in this day and age, is something that really should have been included.

Other commentators as listed by Kris Hirst

Green Stone Beads At The Dawn of Agriculture - a review

This is a review of a recent paper by Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer and Naomi Porat, who argue that the sudden appearance of green stone beads in the Late Natufian, dated in this paper as occurring between 13,000-11,500 (cal) bp, coincided with the onset of agriculture, and that the green colour of the beads was associated with fertility, symbolising the green shoots of growing crops - it is also thought that these same beads may have been thought capable of warding off evil. Here's the abstract...

The use of beads and other personal ornaments is a trait of modern human behavior. During the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods, beads were made out of shell, bone, ivory, egg shell, and occasionally of minerals. During the transition to agriculture in the Near East, stone, in particular green stone, was used for the first time to make beads and pendants. We observed that a large variety of minerals of green colors were sought, including apatite, several copper-bearing minerals, amazonite and serpentinite.

There seems to be an increase with time of distance from which the green minerals were sought. Because beads in white, red, yellow, brown, and black colors had been used previously, we suggest that the occurrence of green beads is directly related to the onset of agriculture. Green beads and bead blanks were used as amulets to ward off the evil eye and as fertility charms.

Although it might be true that the use of stone beads is a facet of modern human behaviour, researchers such as Bednarik suggest a much earlier use for shell beads, extending back to the Lower Palaeolithic, though whether their purpose was anything other than decorative is unknown.

The use of beads in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic is known, but for the purposes of this paper, the authors focus on stone beads in the Near East, dating to the Late Natufian, and the initial stages of the Neolithic, an era before the appearance of fired pottery, and accordingly referred to as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, further sub-divided into PPNA and PPNB. It was at this time that wheat was domesticated and then cultivated on an increasingly wide scale by Near East farmers, although it now appears from research at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, and related sites, that agriculture itself was adopted as a means of feeding large numbers of people who gathered at what have been described as the world's oldest known temples, possibly dating to around 12,000 bp.

The 221 beads analysed in this study are derived from eight locations, of which Rosh Horesha, Eynan, Gilgal II and El Wad date from the Late Natufian, Hatoula, Gilgal I and Gilgal III are designated PPNA, with one PPNB site, Kefar ha-Horesh. Despite trying to write up an accurate description of the stone beads themselves, I couldn't do so in a clearer way than the original text, hence this rather long quote from the text...

Typologically, the bead shapes of these periods include a round ‘‘disk bead,’’ whereby the height of the bead is less than one-third of its diameter (Fig. 1, beads 1, 2, 4, and 5), as well as oval pendant with two holes (one at each end) (Fig. 1, pendants 6–12), long and short cylindrical beads (Fig. 1, bead 3; Fig. 2, beads 5–9), and cylindrical bead blanks (that have not been perforated; Fig. 2, items 1–4). Of special interest are the oval double-holed pendants that are found only in Late Natufian and early PPNA sites and can serve as a chronological marker. A detailed typological and technological analysis will be published elsewhere (unpublished data).

The beads’ colors were described in detail, and then divided into four main groups: white to pale yellow, black to brown, orange to red, and gray to green. White, brown, yellow, red, and black beads made of shell, bone, teeth, ivory, ostrich egg shell, and amber, all of biological origin, as well as steatite, ochre, and hematite, which are inorganic materials, have been known from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic (7, 20). However, green minerals are found for the first time in significant numbers, in the context of archaeological entities that bear evidence of being in the midst of an economic change in subsistence strategy, the beginning of cultivation.

In all of the sites studied thus far, beads of white and red limestone, quartzite, ochre, basalt, and clay, as well as shell were present. Most sites contained also beads made of apatite, fluorapatite, malachite, chrysocolla, turquoise, amazonite, and serpentinite, minerals that are in various shades of green, and appear for the first time in the archaeological record of the Near East during the periods discussed here (Fig. 3). Table 1 summarizes the green stone beads of the Late Natufian, PPNA, and PPNB sites.

We next learn that the materials required for the manufacture or production of the green stone beads came from various sources that were not in the immediate vicinity of the sites at which they were found, so it's worth pausing here to consider the nature of the raw materials involved. For the sake of quick reference I've used Wikipedia's descriptions of these materials, plus other more esoteric sites for modern interpretations of the uses to which the materials can be used.

Apatite, of which fluorapatite is a derivative, is thought to have been obtained from Jordan or Israel - interestingly, apatite is used today as a fertilizer by tobacco growers in Virginia, as it apparently restricts the flow of nitrogen to the growing plant, supposedly imparting a better flavour. In it's crystalline form, it has a distinctive green hue, and can be translucent or transparent. Fluorapatite beads were found at six of the eight sites, two of which also contained apatite beads. Apatite is today described here as the 'mind over matter stone', and is said by purveyors of crystals to relieve stress, whereas other sources suggest it can "enhance communication and increase psychic abilities".

Chrysocolla bears a strong resemblance to turquoise, and along with the remaining materials to be described, is found in association with copper, although in the context of this study, it should be borne in mind that copper wasn't mined, smelted and utilised until the Late Neolithic, sometime after 6,000 years ago. The bead makers are thought to have obtained both their chrysocolla and malachite from 'the Faynan and Timna copper mine areas', and the turquoise from what other copper mine areas in the Sinai.

Amazonite is, as its name might suggest, found in abundance in the Amazon, but for the stone bead makers, their source was likely to have been Saudi Arabia. Today, it is apparently known as 'hope stone', and is only definitely identified from one PPNB site, Kefar ha-Horesh, although it has been tentatively tagged as having been found in the Late Natufian context at Eynan/Ain Mallaha.

Turquoise was found at Gilgal II and Hatoula, and it has been noted how its colour has been compared to that of the Mediterranean Sea - this is a relevant observation, because as I perceive some of these minerals, their bluish colours certainly evoke images of sky and sea, rather than young green leaves of growing crops. In Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, turquoise was thought to symbolise the Vault of Heaven.

The authors also draw attention to the fact that some of the pendants have two holes, and I've seen it suggested elsewhere that these might be buttons - pretty unlikely as the holes are too far apart, but of more interest is the authors' suggestion that double-holed-pendants may have represented cowrie shells, which had been in abundant use across a wide swathe of south-western Asia at the time.

And in his paper, 'Neolithisation in Southwest Asia - The Path to Modernity', (pdf) Trevor Watkins refers to the fact that people of the Natufian era ha` been living in built structures for many centuries, and that this change in the social dynamic may have been responsible for a change in the way people viewed themselves in a social context. These 'co-resident communities' as he calls them, may have lived such radically different lives from their forebears, that entirely new methods of coping in a socially organised and ordered context had to be invented; this is quite along paper, which I'll address in another post, but this gives an indication of its perspective...

I have written elsewhere (Watkins, in press (a)) about the complexity of symbolic construction of community, a subject on which the anthropologist Anthony Cohen has concentrated over a number of years of study and thought (see Cohen 1985 for a succinct account). Epi-palaeolithic, and even more so early Neolithic, co-resident communities (I hesitate to call them villages) extended beyond kin-groups and beyond the scale for which the biologically evolved human brain were capable of managing the exponentially complex social relations (Watkins in press (b)).

At a higher level, co-resident communities participated in active networks of similar communities,-or some kind of interaction sphere (Watkins in press (a)) seeks to take up and modify Renfrew’s idea of the peer polity interaction sphere – Renfrew 1986). In this kind of system of multi-layered networks, we can see how individual communities exchange items through a wider network (obsidian, marine shells, attractive stone or objects made of attractive stone), and share cultural ideas and practices.

However, each community may articulate those ideas and practices in their own way. There were no text-books in circulation that defined how houses should be designed or how dead bodies should be treated. General observations of widespread cultural phenomena, such as the “the PPNB culture” (which I have criticized at some length in Watkins, in press (a)) or “the skull cult”, break down as soon as they are examined in detail, because practices are usually not precisely replicated from site to site.

There are domestic architectural forms that are found from site to site across a region. For example, Brian Byrd and Ted Banning have written about the pier-house in the later aceramic Neolithic of'the southern Levant (Byrd & Banning 1988). And in southeast Anatolia, settlements had very large and substantially`built houses, constructed from mud brick on stone and mud mortar foundations (Schirmer 1990).

One of the points he is making is that this process of change was done pretty much on the fly, and although we can make out general patterns of activity and behaviour, it's very difficult to apply universality of cause and effect throughout this phase; additionally he deals with previous ideas that the changing climate was a driving factor in the establishment of sedentary farming - and elsewhere in the same paper, he gives us a good look at Göbekli Tepe, which I'm hoping will enable me to finish writing that up after I've reviewed that paper and written something on the Epi-Palaeolithic and Natufian eras, to establish a broader context for what seems a very sudden event as evidenced by the construction of that site, and others.

It's quite interesting to note and compare the way in which bursts of cultural innovation in the Natufian/Neolithic transition began happening at diminishing intervals - i.e. a long primary phase, followed by several phases, each occurring at a smaller interval than the previous one - tis is still echoed today by the way technological progress appears to accelerating at increasing speeds, and over the longer term, the way in which life on this planet emerged from billions of years of very simple life forms, followed by bursts of evolution which occurred at ever shorter intervals.

Watkins also mentions that there might now be a problem with the very term 'Neolithic' itself, and I'd agree - before I started reading about the Natufian and PPN, I'd been under the vague impression that nothing much was going on in the millennia immediately following the end of the Pleistocene, but it has become apparent that in Southwest Asia, change was taking place at a breathtaking pace, and witnessed some of the most profound changes in human behaviour at any time during recent prehistory.

And looking at the designs and motifs carved on the T-shaped stelae at GT and other sites, a clue is given to at least one factor that may have made a deep impact on the minds of some of those people who began a phase of what could almost be viewed as the real cultural revolution of Homo sapiens,some 11,000-12,000 years ago.

Despite their ostensible break with a tradition of beadmaking that might not have had any symbolic import, the green stone beads which are the subject of this paper shouldn't therefore be considered in isolation from the other archaeology of the period, especially that of the Natufian culture, which immediately preceded the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and which indicates that a highly sophisticated culture-set was already in place before early farmers turned their hands to producing stone beads of green.

A green stone pendant from Shanidar in present day Iraq is also described in a paper by Andreas Hauptmann, 'Export of Ore and Copper: The Importance of Faynan in Prehistoric Palestine', of which the following is the abstract...

"With the domestication of plants and animals at the beginning of the 8^th millennium BCE, the evolving husbandry became an economic basis of human societies for the first time. This change from food gathering to food production was an important cultural evolution. This ‘Neolithic revolution’ is the most obvious factor, which divides the hunter and gatherer society of the Palaeolithic from that of the early or Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The same time period witnesses new uses of color having importance and meaning throughout the entire Eastern Mediterranean.

During the Palaeolithic, the colors used in symbolic contexts such as the well-known cave paintings, were mainly red and black, made from iron and manganese (hydr)oxides. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, green achieves more and more importance. Individual objects made from green minerals or stones had already been found in the Epipalaeo-lithic/ Protoneolithic, for example a pendant from serpentinite with malachite in the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq (Solecki 1969) or pieces of secondary copper ore from the settlement of Hallan çemi Tepesi in Anatolia (Rosenberg 1994).

But the widely distributed use of green mineral pigments can be considered the third characteristic of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and here particularly for the PPNB. The use of ‘greenstone’, as these materials are collectively known in archaeology, has been observed all over Palestine and Transjordan (Garfinkel 1987) as well as in the entire Eastern Mediterranean as far as the Balkans (Glumac 1985). It continues uninterrupted through the remainder of the Neolithic up to the beginning of the Bronze Age at the turn of the 4^th to the 3^rd millennium.

When considering whether green stone beads would have been made with agricultural concerns in mind, it's probably important to bear in mind what prompted the onset of farming and the domestication of wheat in the first place; we have seen at Göbekli Tepe for example, that the enigmatic structures erected there, high up on a mound built on a hill overlooking the Harran Plain, went up before agriculture has been adopted, and current theory holds that people began growing wheat in order to provide food for the large numbers of people who would have been present there and other sites, like Karahan Tepe, and possibly others besides. From that it could be implied that agriculture was at first a secondary consideration at Gobekli Tepe, and that people then may have been more concerned with whatever idea it was that caused them to embark on this precocious era of monumentalism during PPNA. Here's some comment related to amuletic use of these green stone beads, and how the onset of farming could have enhanced their perceived power...

"The use of green and blue beads is encountered in all archaeological periods that follow the Neolithic, and recent ethnographic studies clarify their meanings. Ethnographic studies supply ample evidence for the significance of beads and pendants as artifacts with symbolic meaning (e.g., 23–26). The meanings of beads are far and wide and consist of beliefs intended ‘‘to prevent misfortune and danger, to counteract or divert the effects of supernatural powers, and to bring luck and.strength’’ (25).

Many of these beliefs existed well before the agricultural revolution and were expressed in symbolic behaviors as early as the Middle Paleolithic era. However, the onset of agricultural practices brings with it a special interest in fertility both of plants and animals and of humans. This interest, in turn, brought on a change in human demography caused by higher birth rates and a greater rate of deaths after child delivery, in addition to other ailments (29–31). This increase in health problems required new means of coping.

It is likely that medicinal plants were used for curing some of the conditions, but symbolic practices and the use of apotropaic artifacts undoubtedly complemented the plant treatment. It is likely that the same green beads that were ‘‘in charge’’ of improving crops were also,responsible for keeping the well being of the farmers that raised these crops."

Slightly off-topic, but maybe worth a mention; Despite some of these mineral resources being available in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain, I can find no trace of green or blue stone beads or pendants from this time - as far as I can tell, beads in Neolithic Britain tended to be made from amber, jet and shale etc., so the custom of green stone beads associated with fertility and warding off evil doesn't appear to have taken hold there.

However it is interesting to note that a key component from the earliest days of Stonehenge was Preseli bluestone, and although it was deployed in large monolithic blocks, recent suggestions by Professors Darvill and Wainwright that its purpose may have been curative, and that Stonehenge was a kind of prehistoric Lourdes may not be accurate, but they might not be totally wide of the mark either.

It's possible that the idea of bluestone being used to ward off evil was a reason for its use at Stonehenge, though I'm not sure whether it was also considered to be of use in ensuring fertiility of people and crops as well - but if such concerns were to the forefront of the Neolithic mind, perhaps it's not unreasonable to consider such an idea.

However, an earlier suggested presence of bluestone at Boles Barrow on Salisbury plain, at a Neolithic long barrow, and presumably used in a funerary context, would suggest against its use as a healing stone, but might allow for a consideration of it being able to ward off evil spirits and the like. Such is the gloomy aspect of the Stonehenge monument and surrounding landscape, it may have been that it was thought necessary to try and alleviate the gloom by using bluestone as a potential remedy.

However, unless there had been a single, or series of events in the dim and distant past at Stonehenge, deemed so bizarre or in some way evil or threatening to humans witnessing such things, it's hard to imagine why they went to all the trouble of shipping in the bluestone from 250 miles way in South Wales, just to ward off the occasional evil spirit, or ghostly apparition of a feared ancestor.

Overall, the connection between green and blue stone beads of the earliest Neolithic, and bluestone monoliths of the Late Neolitihc, some 6,000-7,000 years later, seems tenuous to say the least, but although improbable is not conclusively impossible. There is no evidence of bluestone being used for stone beads during the Neolithic or Bronze Age, but as this stone is reputedly even harder than granite, its suitability for carving and perforating for decorative use is obviously limited.

Moreover , if the bluestones really were supposed to have had healing or strong amuletic properties, nobody from prehistory appears to have chipped off bits of the monoliths for personal use, which is something we might expect to see, certainly in later historical times - so it seems more probable that all the standing stones at Stonehenge were (at least in part) associated more with the dead than protection for the living.

Here's the concluding paragraph from the paper we began with at the top of this post....

In 1930, Budge wrote that ‘‘green stones, e.g., nephrite, the emerald, green jade, Amazon stones, etc., are connected with luxuriant vegetation and the rain that causes it, and fertility inlman and beast, and virility and strength generally’’ (37). Our study provides archaeological evidence for the emergence of these beliefs. To conclude, the occurrence of green stone beads is highly associated with the transition to agriculture and may signify the first use of this color to ward off the ‘‘evil eye’’ that is mentioned already in Mesopotamian texts (38 and references therein). This tradition may have begun in the Near East as early as 10,000 years ago.

So overall, I think the authors make a very good point in suggesting the links with green stone beads, fertility and protection from perceived evil - whether it can be conclusively proven whether early Neolithic people first spotted the raw materials and devised an application for their use, or whether they had the idea of using green and blue stone for specific symbolic reasons, and went searching for it accordingly, we'll never know. But it is worth noting that the first metal that humankind managed to extract from the ground and and subsequently shape for their own use, was copper, the metal that is found in association with most of the bluer stones that were used for bead-making.

It may well be that these humans, so desirous of green and blue stone beads inadvertently and in some small way, made the discovery and use of metals possible, thousands of years later as their descendants heated up large rocks and watched the yellow metal trickle forth - copper was born, and it appears that this may have happened at Tinma, in modern-day Israel, one of the proposed sources, along with Faynan, for the chrysocolla and malachite that was found at five out of the eight sites where various of the stone beads referred to in this paper, were found.

And although copper at the time was highly prized - even Otzi the Iceman had a splendid copper axe, when he died some 5,300 years ago, even though its usefulness as a working metal was limited, because being a very soft metal, it blunted easily, requiring continued sharpening. If blue stone minerals associated with copper were thus revered, we might ask to what extent copper may have been considered to possess any of these perceived properties; the very act of being able to extract copper from rock, smelt and shape it would have been a skill limited at first to very few people, and it would be interesting to know how their social status rose or otherwise changed as admiring people, seeing metal manufactured objects for the first time, contemplated the results of their handiwork

If we fast-forward to the present day, and specifically to our own technological and cultural worlds, both off- and online are for the most part, powered by millions of miles of soft and malleable copper wire, which we might consider to be an indirect gift from people living more than 10,000 years ago, in south western Asia.

As a final word from me, just to say many thanks to Greg Laden who very kindly forwarded me a copy of this paper, which I found not only to be very interesting in its own right, but a very useful perspective to add my fairly limited appreciation of just how complex and dynamic this part of the world was for several millennia immediately following the Pleistocene, encompassing the Younger Dryas and on into the period of stabilised climate which certainly played a part in allowing humans to experiment with new ways of living in and thinking about the rapidly changing world around them.

References:

Green Stone Beads At The Dawn of Agriculture - Daniella E. Bar Yosef Mayer and Naomi Porat
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jun 24;105(25):8548-51. Epub 2008 Jun 16.
(from which the image at top is taken)

Neolithisation in Southwest Asia - The Path to Modernity - Trevor Watkins, Documenta Praehistorica XXXIII (2006)

Export of Ore and Copper: The Importance of Faynan in Prehistoric Palestine
Andreas Hauptmann, Natural Science in Archaeology, The Archaeometallurgy of Copper, Evidence from Faynan, Jordan, 2007

Beads and the Origins of Symbolism - Robert Bednarik, 2000

Orkney Archaeological Round-up, July 2008

Having just checked the front page at Orkneyjar, to see if there was any news from the Ring of Brodgar dig, it transpires that there are a few other excavations at other locations under way, so this post is to highlight two of them, and to that effect I've included the opening paragraphs of each article, but be sure to check to the actual posts in their entirety for further clarification.

First it's to South Walls, where investigations into a large mound there indicate that the site is a Neolithic chambered cairn; as we see...

A two-week excavation of Outer Green Hill, adjacent to the road leading to the Cantick lighthouse, drew to a close on Saturday. Excavation supervisor was Dan Lee, from the Orkney Research Centre of Archaeology (ORCA), based at Orkney College.

He explained: “The project continues the work of the late Judith Robertson, who undertook an archaeological landscape survey of the area in 2006 and then conducted targeted geophysical surveys of the main features last year. “Outer Green Hill was interesting as it did not display the geophysical responses typical of a broch - large outer ditches, associated settlement and circular internal walls.

The geophysics results suggested a squared internal structure, perhaps more indicative of a Neolithic tomb, a period only represented by the Dwarfie Stane in North Hoy, or a Norse stronghold, as the area is mentioned in the sagas.”

There is an update from South Walls, and quite curious it is too, in that it discusses voles, and their unusual distribution across the islands...

During the recent ORCA excavations of the mound known as Outer Green Hill in South Walls, among the remains of sheep, cattle, red deer, bird and fish bones recovered were the teeth and bones of ancient Orkney voles.

Why is this so important, given the fact that the bones of this subspecies of the common vole (Microtus arvalis orcadensis) have already been recovered (sometimes in large numbers) from many of the famous archaeological monuments of Orkney?

What makes the South Walls finds unique is the fact that they have been found on one of several large islands in the county which now have no Orkney vole population.

The absence of common voles on mainland UK and Ireland, and their very strange distribution in Orkney, has been the subject of much debate and ongoing research into their likely introduction from western continental Europe by Neolithic farmers.

The new South Walls evidence provides an exciting and important new twist to the ongoing story of the colonisation and dispersal history of Orkney voles.

It's thought that the vole may have been present from times when the modern-day islands that comprise Orkney were all part of the same land-mass, before sea-levels rose at the end of the last glaciation, and that various populations became isolated on the islands, gradually becoming extinct for reasons that are not yet fully understood - I'm assuming that the presence of voles is a good indicator of contemporary climatic conditions, which presumably would have been relatively temperate, and when we bear in mind that arrowheads found there indicate a possible human presence going back 10,000-12,000 years, it would appear that Orkney has been habitable and indeed inhabited by humans and voles alike for longer than previous estimates have suggested.

On now to the Brough of Deerness, a site whose origins and purpose have never been fully understood - a situation which archaeologists are currently attempting to address more fully, as we see...

After decades — if not centuries — of speculation, an archaeological excavation on the Brough of Deerness is beginning to shed some much-needed light on the site.

Although visible traces of a tight cluster of settlement have long been visible on top of the Brough — alongside the reconstructed remains of a 10th-12th century chapel — little is known about it.

Despite excavations on the Brough in the 1970s, until now nothing was known about the site to allow it to be dated exactly, or even show what it was used for.

A five-week excavation, by the University of Cambridge, is, at long last, remedying this.

It seems that past debates have centred around whether the site was monastic or a chieftain's stronghold, and current opinion appears to be supporting the latter option.

“Chris Morris, who excavated the chapel in the 1970s, first raised the idea that the Brough was a chieftain’s stronghold, and the new evidence is pointing in that direction.

“If, for the sake of argument, we say it was a chiefly site, then why here? It’s very strange. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to somebody making a point.”

“The aim this year was a trial excavation and what we wanted to determine was, firstly, whether there was a long chronological sequence and, secondly, how well-preserved it was,” said Dr Barrett. “The results so far are very promising.”

Two trenches were opened, uncovering the remains of two Norse houses. Although full examination of the artefacts found inside will be required to provide a precise date, Dr Barrett suspects the structures date from the 11th century and are, therefore, contemporary with the last phase of the nearby chapel.

But the site itself appears to date from earlier still, and as yet it's unknown whether there was a pre-Norse presence there, so by delving deeper into the ground, it is hoped that this question may be resolved.

In fact, it's something of a surprise that any archaeology still exists there at all - during the First World War, the area was used for target practice by the Royal Navy, and today there are numerous metal shell fragments that litter the area, all of which have to be gathered and analysed, an activity that doubtless encroaches on valuable time.

There's a curious foot-note to this story concerning a land-bridge, which may have been natural or artificial, because up until the 14th or 16th century, the Brough was still connected to the mainland, but how physical contact was lost isn't clear...

Meanwhile, the site is referred to as the Borch of Dernes in a 14th century list of islands in Orkney, compiled by John de Fordun.

However, examination of the area has highlighted a geological fault - a fault, which saw the land bridge collapse a long time before the Brough settlement.

The project’s geologist, Professor Donna Surge, was clear: “There could not have been a land bridge there 1,000 years ago.”

Instead, she suggested a bridge had been constructed to provide access. And that at the Brough-side of this bridge, which would have been no mean feat of engineering, was a defensive rampart.

Should you happen to be in the locality of Brough of Deerness, this coming Sunday July 20th, there is an Open Afternoon at the site between 2pm and 5pm, and if you're still around the following Thursday, July 24th, Dr. James Barrett, who has previously worked at another Viking site, Quoygrew in Westray, will be giving a talk in the Deerness Hall, at 7.30pm, tickets £2.

image 'ruined chapel', Brough of Deerness, from here

Current Anthropology Volume 49, Number 3 (June 2008) - Out Now

Current Anthropology
Volume 49, Number 3
(June 2008)

(subscription required)

is now available at
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/49/3

	Anthropological Currents
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 359-360. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (92 KB)

	Current Applications
	S. Etting
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 361. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (143 KB)

	Articles
	Cultural Relativism 2.0
	Michael F. Brown
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 363-383. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (276 KB)

	Cereal Cultivation at Swifterbant? Neolithic Wetland Farming on the North European Plain
	R. T. J. Cappers and D. C. M. Raemaekers
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 385-402. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (890 KB)

	Divination and Power: A Multiregional View of the Development of Oracle Bone Divination in Early China
	Rowan K. Flad
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 403-437. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (985 KB)

	History and Its Discontents: Stone Statues, Native Histories, and Archaeologists
	Cristóbal Gnecco and Carolina Hernández
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 439-467. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (680 KB)

	Articles CA Forum on Anthropology in Public
	Community Involvement in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management: An Assessment from Case Studies in Southern Africa and Elsewhere
	Shadreck Chirikure and Gilbert Pwiti
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 467-485. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (896 KB)

	Reports
	Clothing and Climate in Aboriginal Australia
	Ian Gilligan
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 487-495. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (325 KB)

	Hydrology, Ideology, and the Origins of Irrigation in Ancient Southwest Arabia
	Michael J. Harrower
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 497-510. Abstract | Full Text with Enhancements | PDF Version (889 KB)

	The Barefooted Foreigner: A Case Study of the Scapegoat in Nineteenth-Century Gibraltar
	Lawrence A. Sawchuk and Stacie D. A. Burke
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 511-518. Abstract | Full Text | PDF Version (161 KB)

	Sex Identification of Children Sacrificed to the Ancient Aztec Rain Gods in Tlatelolco
	Isabel De La Cruz, Angélica González-Oliver, Brian M. Kemp, Juan A. Román, David Glenn Smith, and Alfonso Torre-Blanco
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 519-526. Abstract | Full Text with Enhancements | PDF Version (311 KB)

	Books
	Risk in Real Time (Perin's Shouldering Risks)
	Joseph Masco
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 527-528. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (92 KB)

	Experience on Key (Jay's Songs of Experience)
	Michael Lambek
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 528-529. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (77 KB)

	The Evolution of Music and Language (Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals)
	Neil Smith
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 529-530. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (77 KB)

	Distilling Hope (Miyazaki's The Method of Hope)
	Allen Abramson
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 530-531. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (76 KB)

	Representing Africa (Moore's Suffering for Territory)
	Alan Grainger
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 531-533. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (84 KB)

	Bulgaria in Transition: Musical Perspectives (Buchanan's Performing Democracy)
	Galit Saada-Ophir
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 533-534. Citation | Full Text | PDF Version (76 KB)

	Books Received
	Current Anthropology June 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3: 534-537. Citation | Enhanced Abstract | PDF Version (69 KB)

Four Stone Hearth #45 - Caves, Graves and Audio-files Edition

Caves, Graves and Audio-files

Welcome to this latest edition of Four Stone Hearth, which once again, I'm very pleased to be hosting here. The title refers to a few of the topics that comprise this issue, but there's also a pretty wide variety and sizeable quantity of all sorts of other anthro reading to get stuck into as well.

The 'Caves' element in the headline refers to a couple of endangered caves I've linked to at the end of this, whilst the 'Graves' and 'Audio-files' entries will make themselves apparent as you read through.

I've included a fair few archaeology posts in this edition, the first of which is from Magnus Reuterdahl at Testimony of the Spade, who tells us of his...

components will make themselves apparent as you read through.Excavations at Konserthusparken in Linköping - Summary Week 2...., whilst the Week 1 summary and Part 2 are worth checking out too, as he and his team explore archaeology dating from the Mediaeval to the late 18th century, not helped by what he describes a as burning hot sun which makes for difficult excavation conditions - sounds like thirsty work.

And news of another dig from Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology...

Test Pitting at Djurhamn

about which which he tells us...

I spent Thursday and Friday digging test pits with a group of energetic volunteers at Djurhamn, the first two of seven planned days in the field. The great Ehrsson brothers are now joined by an equally solid Ehrsson nephew, among other hard-working people.

We're looking for archaeological evidence for historically attested land activity around a harbour whose seafloor is covered with 17th and 18th century refuse dumped from ships. Written sources collected by Katarina Schoerner mention "the big quay" and "the military camp" including an "ale hut", but we have no idea where they were, really.

see also 33 Test Pits

Antiquarian's Attic points us in the direction of a Roman shopping centre at Caerwent, South Wales - Venta Silurum was an important Roman town in the 3rd century AD, and is one of the best preserved towns of that era, largely due to the fact that over time, it lost influence, and was never built upon, leaving its traces today, largely intact across an area of 44 acres.

Afafrensis meanwhile, advises us that two somewhat older sites, Sunghir and Pech de l'Aze have their own dedicated websites, and further of Pennsylvania University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology ongoing project aimed at digitizing their entire collection.

Archaeozoology has an informative post,

'Integrating Phytoliths Within Use-Wear/Residue Studies of Stone Tools',

which discusses the use to which obsidian artefacts excavated in Papua New Guinea, were put - a phytolith preserves a floral record long after the plant itself has decayed and of which there is no other trace - a very interesting way of enabling us to reconstruct plant presence and use by prehistoric people from any number of dates and sites.

Time now for a spot of TV, as Alun at Clioaudio gives a relatively positive review of Bonekickers, currently airing on BBC 1 - I haven't seen it, and after reading some of the reviews, I wasn't sure I wanted to - so it's good to read something a little more constructive than some fo the stuff that's been appearing on what have been described to me as 'hate forums'.

And Kris Hirst chips in with a quick post on the same subject, in which she includes a useful set of links relating to the show, adding that she hopes that the negative publicity which has greeted the first episodes won't result in the series being pulled before it has time to be networked abroad.

One person who originally alerted me to the furore surrounding Bonekickers, is Dennis Price, and it's to his blog Eternal Idol that we next turn, as he asks whether or not a 10th Century Anglo-Saxon poem, 'The Ruin' could be referring to Stonehenge - at first glance it seems a long shot, and it will be up to the individual reader to make up his or her mind - but the poem itself is worth reading in it's original form - I don't understand Anglo-Saxon, but reading through 'The Ruin' it struck me as having a particularly lyrical quality to it, as I tried to imagine how it would sound when read aloud.

(correction: 18/07/08 - 'The Ruin' is of course, part of the Book of Exeter, which is a 10th century compilation. When 'The Ruin' was actually written is unknown, and in the opinion of Professor Drout, referred to in the article at Eternal Idol, could have originated some time before the various components of the compilation were assembled.)

For the 'Graves' part of the title, Anne Gilbert at 'A Writer's Daily Grind' has this post, 'Happy 100th, La Chapelle Aux Saints' which, blogged from Anthrosite discusses the discovery of this famous Neanderthal, intentionally buried after his death, some 45,000 years ago...

He was described as having been buried, and the picture above shows this quite clearly. Furthermore, someone must have cared for him in some way, before he died, since he had only a few teeth left. He was also arthritic, but this was not noticed or noted until fifty years after his discovery.

plus this snippet...

Anyway, if any reader happens to be in southwestern France between July 25 and August 8, they might want to drop by and at the very least, view the fossil, which will be on display. There are also a bunch of lectures and presentations during this time.

If you can work out how to get there, it should be well worth a visit.

More graves, and for this we're off to Chile, and the recent discovery of eight mummies dating back 4,500 years, and which are perfectly preserved - here's a note about the Chinchorro culture from Stone Pages...

Morro de Arica is known for its mummies. Several hundred of them, some as old as 7,000 years, were discovered in 1983 in the area. In 2005, University of Tarapaca archaeologists found 50 Chinchorro mummies, dating back to 4,000 BCE, during the demolition of a house. The unusually large number of mummies found in the sector indicate that one of the oldest Chinchorro cemeteries may have been located there. The Chinchorros are presumed to have died out or migrated in the first century CE.

Two final Archaeo-posts, both of which address the subject of looting, collecting, loss of data and more - Carl at Hot Cup of Joe talks us through the subject in his ongoing series, 'Stolen and Looted' with reference to the Great Basin, while Kris Hirst, in 'Artifact Collectors and Professional Archaeology' adds that the archaeology profession could embrace the collector, who in turn could be advised as to how to provide much more useful information on their finds to archaeology in general.

We next head off to South East Asia, and Maju at Leherensuge asks, 'What if...Y-DNA K Diversified After Toba?' - which was the catastrophic eruption which occurred around 74 kya, an event believed by many to have had such a devastating effect that human populations were reduced to a few thousand worldwide, creating a so-called genetic bottle-neck in the process, whereas other opinion holds that there is no real evidence to support this.

And whilst we're over in that part of the world, it's time for a more linguistic consideration of our distant past, and to that effect we have this from Realm of Manjusri

Indus Valley Civilisation Spoke Altaic....

Whilst Anthropology.net has this...

The Diversity of Languages in the Caucasus

and Babel's Dawn has this...

Language Adpated To Us, which discusses a paper '“Language as Shaped by the Brain",

...and in a similar vein, we have this from Neurophilosophy, 'The Shakespeared Brain', which discusses something called 'functional shift', as described here...

Functional shift was often employed by the Bard - for example, when he wrote "lip something loving into my ear," or when a character from The Winter's Tale says that "thoughts would think my blood". Sentences structured in such a way are linguistically economical, because the meanings in them are compressed, but they also violate the laws of grammar, and are therefore processed somewhat differently from conventionally structured sentences.

Over at Music 000001, Victor Grauer has an posted an entry, 'Music of the Great Tradition - 24, Old Europe and the Role of Women', to which this is the opening paragraph...

When Alan Lomax collected folk music in Spain and Italy during the 1950's, he was struck by certain differences in singing style between north and south in both countries, that appeared related to the role of women. Specifically, where women played a more important and active role in the society and had a certain amount of sexual freedom, as in the north, voices tended to be more open, relaxed and "well blended," and there was a tendency to sing in groups, often polyphonically.

Where women played a subordinate role, and their sexuality was strictly controlled, as in the south, voices tended to be constricted and tense, solo singing was more common, and group singing usually in harsh unison. Since Lomax was something of a Freudian -- and a disciple of Margaret Mead -- it's not difficult to see how he could have associated sexual tension with vocal tension, male-female harmony with musical harmony.

John Hawks, in 'Hearing At Atapuerca' reminds us of a 2004 study, backed up with more recent research from Atapuerca, into how analysis of the archaic middle ear has revealed than hominids living more than half a million years ago had the same aural capacities as ourselves, leading researchers to conclude that this is an indication that early humans were capable of speech much earlier than is generally accepted, and which I imagine would have allowed for an early capacity for hearing and creating music, or at least singing.

I received three submissions from Neuroanthropology...

When Pink Ribbons Are No Comfort - On Humor and Breast Cancer

...from which I've taken this explanatory paragraph...

Breast cancer is...funny? Well, no. In fact, there is nothing humorous about chemotherapy, mastectomies, hysterectomies, and the looming fear of death. But when a breast cancer patient initiates humor, especially with those outside of ‘cancer-world,’ she is forcing the receiver of the humor to recognize that there is more to her than just the disease, the doctors, and thumbs-up enthusiasm.

The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors

which is a prelude to a Critical Sciences workshop, and the five types of cultural brain that Daniel Lende is suggesting might exist, as described here...

The Symbolic Brain: Culture, meaning and the brain combined.
The Inequality Brain: Bad outcomes through society, power, and the brain.
The Theory Brain: Neuroscience impacts social science theory.
The Brain Transformed: Social science impacts brain theory.
The Critical Brain: Taking down bad brain justifications and examining the cultural uses of the brain.

There is a fuller explanation of these terms within the article, and once you've finished that, we have this essay,

'Get Into Trance: Felicitas Goodman',

which discusses the work of this German anthropologist, and specifically her studies of bodily posture and how they can relate to different states of ecstatic trance, as briefly described by her...

In addition to much abstract ornamentation, the archeological record of human artistic activity also contains human representations. Upon close scrutiny, most of these human effigies share a curious feature of a non-ordinary body posture such as the hands placed on the middle of the body, the fingers spread in an unexpected way or the tongue hanging out.

In 1977, in connection with my ongoing research concerning altered states of consciousness, I had the research subjects assume one of these non-ordinary postures and then added a rhythmic stimulation. To my surprise, the subjects reported a variety of visionary experiences. Apparently, I had inadvertently stumbled onto a very ancient shamanic system that had hitherto gone unrecognized. During initial research, a number of regularities became evident. The visionary experience varied according to the posture….

...There were postures mediating divination, shape-shifting, or even healing. It became clear that the postures were rituals, each one containing its own implicit myth.

Trance rituals would appear to have very deep roots in the human story, though at what stage in prehistory they began to be used is something of a mystery - is this activity something specific to anatomical moderns - (i.e. us), or did archaic species such as the Neanderthals have any such experiences? By this I'm wondering whether there's something specific in the way our modern brains are wired that allows for this sort of phenomena, or whether it's something that could have been allowed for by archaic brain architecture as well.

...and a final post I noticed from the same site...

More Videos and Podcasts For Your Neuroanth Pleasure

...a good few links worth checking, especially for a layperson with a general interest, for whom neuroscience academic papers might be too technical to fully grasp. I usually listen to 'All in the Mind', another weekly podcast, the most interesting of which I heard recently was Dr. Michael Gazzanigan discussing left- and right-brain research over the past 45 years, and whether free will exists, and the implications of damaged brains with regard to criminal culpability.

Next, we're heading briefly off into space, as we visit Centauri Dreams, where Paul Gilster offers some comment on...

The Ethics of Interstellar Journeying

...a topic I find to be of enduring interest is how we as humans will construct societies of the future, particularly those humans whose entire lives will be spent on other worlds or even travelling through space en route to who knows where. How humans will cope with life in the stars, and to what extent we will design humans who might turn out to be something other than human, and the types of societies they in turn will create, is as yet, anyone's guess.

On a related note, John Hawks recently wrote a post, 'Cybernetics and the Brain-controlled Robot' in which he refers to a very surprising observation, to wit...

The main purpose of the walking robot experiment was to demonstrate just how precisely brain activity could be translated, but it produced another interesting result: It actually took less time for the brain signal to travel from the monkey in North Carolina to the robot in Japan than it took to go from the primate’s brain to its own muscles. At any given moment, then, the bot was receiving the command to walk before the monkey’s body did.

Very strange indeed, but the most surprising thing I noticed on John Hawks' blog this week, was the inclusion of remote central in his Archaeology blogroll, for which I'm truly grateful (and not a little surprised), and as such I'd like to say a big thanks to him for that, and of course to everyone else who has seen fit to do likewise over this past couple of years.

Christina offers us some thoughts on nudity, prudence and censorship, and what constitutes pornography as opposed to art, in 'Nude Or Prude' - with particular reference to Sigur Ros, who recently released a video full of naked people to accompany their single 'Goobeldigook', which needless to say has been pulled from YouTube. Christina also refers to Paddy K's related post, in which he opines that in general, or at least in public, most humans tend to look better dressed - especially when out for 'A Wee Walk', up in Scotland. (I'd like to confirm that during the compilation of this 4SH, I remained fully dressed at all times.)

Next, we look at the story of how a teacher, John Freshwater, faces being for teaching so-called 'creation science' in the classroom - as well as for 'branding crosses into the arms of his students with a high-voltage electrical device' (NCSE)

Here's a more detailed discussion, 'The Firing of John Freshwater' from Café Philos, with plenty of comments to get stuck into , and which receives further wordage over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell has a post 'Darwin and Eugenics? Wrong Again'.

Off to Iraq next, and although I haven't followed the HTS debate that has been ongoing these past months, this article, ''Questioning the "Top Ten Misconceptions About the Human Terrain System" at Open Anthropology is definitely worth reading, especially if you read the 'Top 10 Misconceptions' post first - although at first reading the HTS post seems fair enough, replete with good intentions, the reality of the operations so far would seem to indicate that the program is largely ineffective in this respect.

As far as I can tell, there are very few, if any anthropologists or Social Scientists of Iraqi descent involved in this - whether anthropology in particular, or Social Sciences in general, even existed under the Saddam regime, I'm not sure.

Assuming this project will for the time being progress, in spite of the very well expressed arguments against it, in my opinion it might be better to engage - and if necessary, train and educate - Iraqi nationals who at least speak and understand the relevant languages and dialects, and who would be more directly familiar with local and national, socio-political and cultural issues and mores, than some of the HTS people appear to have been in the recent past.

In a long-term context however, I think the beneficial effects of HTS will be negligible, no matter how well-intentioned and motivated some of its proponents might be - especially given the chequered history of past involvements between the anthropology profession, government agencies and the military (not to mention corporations).

Perhaps a more constructive plan would be for the (re-?)establishment of a social sciences program in Iraq, for citizens living there - bearing in mind that the entire State infrastructure of Iraq was been effectively dismantled by the West since 2003, the least that could be done, (and where possible) would be to repair the damage, replace what has been lost, and where necessary or desirable, equip the educational system to include such fields as the social sciences, assuming there to be sufficient interest or demand for them.

(I'm almost tempted to add that if there were to be social scientists educated and trained in Iraq, there'd be no need for an HTS program during future invasions by the West, as there would be anthropologists and social scientists aplenty, already in situ, and more or less willing to help out the latest uninvited guests to their land - but as there is no apparent exit strategy, it's unlikely there will be another invasion for the foreseeable future.)

Finally, here's a couple of posts from me - I've started a mini-series of posts discussing endangered caves in Europe, where through a mixture of misfortune and maladministration, caves containing Palaeolithic art, such as Praileaitz and Lascaux are in danger of effectively being destroyed, whilst another, as mentioned by Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed, Grotta Paglicci, (see also) needs urgent aid to repair physical damage caused by collapse - I still haven't finished writing this last post, (along with about a million others) but hopefully it will appear at some point soon.

That's it for this time round, so once again, thanks for taking the time to read this, and many thanks also to everyone who contributed content to this edition; on July 30th, Magnus at Testimony of the Spade will be hosting Four Stone Hearth, so there's plenty of time to get those submissions in - and if you want to host an edition, please contact Martin Rundkvist here.



image: El Chorro/Malaga by Alex from here

- the picture at top is intended as a nod in the direction of the approaching summer holidays, and thus to wish bon voyage, feliz viaje, happy trails etc. to anyone travelling afar, using modes of transport that might include, but not be limited to, planes, trains and automobiles.

Archaeologists Mount Expedition in Gulf of Mexico in Search of First Americans | The University of Texas at Austin

Researcher Leads Underwater Archeological Expedition in Gulf of Mexico in Search of First Americans | The University of Texas at Austin

Whilst the vast majority of archaeology investigating the origins of the First Americans has taken place on dry land, very little has looked beneath the waves, a key environment when we bear in mind that surface areas now under coastal waters, were in many cases exposed dry land before the last glaciation came to and end. And as we see from above and this report from the University of Texas at Austin, efforts are under way this summer to explore the Florida Middle Grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, as we see...

C. Andrew Hemmings, research associate of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at The University of Texas at Austin, will lead an underwater archeological expedition July 30 to Aug. 12 in the Gulf of Mexico to search for submerged evidence of the first Americans.

Hemmings and James Adovasio, director of the Mercyhurst College Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pa., who serves as co-principal investigator of the project, will study ancient submerged coastlines in the northeastern Gulf to determine where early Americans, known as the Clovis culture, might have lived more than 12,000 years ago when the underwater terrain was dry land.

"The archeological record is out there, it's just underwater," Hemmings said. "The study's findings will contribute to our understanding of early humans in North America, including the timing of their arrival, lifestyles and migration patterns, and could add further proof that the peopling of the western hemisphere was a lengthier and more complicated process than is typically believed."

We have seen recently that there is an increasing amount of evidence to support a pre-Clovis peopling of the New World, and it makes a lot of sense to look off-shore where the shallow seas of today might well hide traces of early travellers to, and settlers of the New World.

Hemmings and the 12-person research team will embark July 30 on the University of South Florida's research vessel "Suncoaster" to explore an area near the Florida Middle Grounds 100 to 200 miles off Florida's west coast at depths of 40 to 110 meters. Archeological finds uncovered by past dredging operations, fishermen and geologists point to the area's potential to have hosted human inhabitants long ago, the researchers said.

In shallow depths, divers will inspect sites to collect artifacts and recover soils for radiocarbon dating. At deeper locations, the research team will use remotely operated vehicles and remote sensing tools to explore submerged sites and search for fossil remains and stone artifacts.

"We will start our investigation in shallow areas available to Clovis people 12 to 13,000 years ago, and then proceed to older, deeper landscapes that could have only been inhabited by people older than Clovis," Hemmings said.

Obviously archaeology of this nature is pretty expensive, one reason why thus far there have been so few similar expeditions, but if enough finds are made, this season's diving expedition might prove a catalyst for further investigations to take place.

The expedition has earned more than $200,000 in grant support, including $100,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Additional supporters include TARL, the Gault School of Archaeological Research in Austin, Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research, Florida Geological Survey, Mercyhurst College and the University of South Florida.

I'm not sure when news of any findings will be published, or whether news updates will be given as the expedition progresses, but as ever, if anything comes to light in the near future, a post should appear here.

Here are some suggested links from the end of the article...

To learn more about TARL's investigation of Clovis culture at other sites in Texas, read the feature story "Can You Dig It?: Archeologist works to overturn long-held theory of when people first came to the Americas."

More information about Clovis people is available at TexasBeyondHistory.net, a virtual museum produced by TARL, in the exhibit "Clovis Reconsidered."

For more information, contact: Jennifer McAndrew, College of Liberal Arts, 512-232-4730; C. Andrew Hemmings, research associate, Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, 620-757-4111.

Slightly off topic, but when looking at the NOAA site, I saw a story regarding the so-called 'dead zone' that is currently afflicting the Gulf of Mexico - this year, an estimated 8,000 square miles will be affected, the largest on record - here's a brief explanation from their article...

The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. This low oxygen, or hypoxic, area is primarily caused by high nutrient levels, which stimulates an overgrowth of algae that sinks and decomposes. The decomposition process in turn depletes dissolved oxygen in the water. The dead zone is of particular concern because it threatens valuable commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries.

It seems that the activities of modern humans are to blame here, although exactly what remedial measures can be taken to stop the flow of nitrogen into the sea, is as yet unclear.

Update 16/07/08

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is also carrying this story, and with it a little more information about the dive and what this year's expedition hopes to achieve, as well as comments from its two principal researchers, C. Andrew Hemmings and James Adovasio...

Adovasio plans to co-lead a two-week expedition in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the month to look for evidence of early American Indians along the ancient coast of Florida, now about 300 feet underwater, Mercyhurst College in Erie announced Monday.

"We have these little hints ... that there are potentially early sites off the coast of Florida," said Adovasio, former chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's anthropology department. "That is what makes this so exciting."

Here's a link to a pdf plotting the location of the forthcoming expedition). As is apparent from the image, the Gulf of Mexico has covered a great deal of land since the end of the last glaciation, and this abstract from a paper, 'Holocene Gulf Levels: Recognition Issues And an Updated Sea-level Curve' shows that there is a complex set of factors influencing the local sea-levels of today, whilst this abstract from 'The Scrub Ecosystem in Southwest Florida: Vanishing Evidence of Late Pleistocene Sea-level and Climate' might offer a broader perspective.

Back to the linked article, which explains why the researchers believe there are good reasons to conduct these archaeological operations off-shore...

Before heading inland, paleo-Indians probably hugged the American coastline, congregating around freshwater rivers, Adovasio said. At the time, much of the world's water was locked up in glaciers, causing ocean levels to be lower and exposing more of the continental shelf.

As the earth warmed and water levels rose, evidence of such settlements fell deeper and deeper below water.

"There is no question in almost all archaeological minds that the earliest examples of North American occupation are underwater," said Dave Watters, curator and head of anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "There's been a lot of discussion, but not a lot of research because you can spend a lot of time looking for something and not ever find it."

Dredging and storms have turned up tantalizing clues -- spearheads, bone tools -- that such sites are just waiting to be found in the Gulf of Mexico, said C. Andrew Hemmings, a University of Texas at Austin archaeologist who is leading the expedition with Adovasio.

As well as considering what has been found in the way of artefacts, Andrew Hemmings explains that there is some detective work involved in predicting the location of prospective sites to search for...

"These were probably very mobile hunter-gatherer folks," Hemmings said. "So we're looking for the tools that they made and the refuse of the plants and animals that they ate."

The team hopes to find a freshwater spring that once was part of the Aucilla River, which flows out of Florida's panhandle and into the Gulf. Animals would have gathered near the watering hole, making it a good place for people to find food. It is now 120 to 360 feet underwater.

Following a personal communication from D. Clark Wernecke, Executive Director of The Gault School of Archaeological Research, and reproduced here with his kind permission, is some more precise detail of the site itself, and why it would very likely have attracted people from the Clovis era, and possibly earlier...

"The site itself is an area where two of the major Florida rivers would have met and ultimately emptied into the ocean. None of these rivers have ever carried much of a silt load, there are freshwater springs in the karst AND it appears some sources of tool stone."

It's only in recent years that the technology has been available which allows archaeologists to consider exploring undersea sites, and thus open up the broader picture of the Pleistocene landscape - and here's some detail about the equipment that will be deployed, and how various interested groups have teamed up to make this expedition possible...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gave $100,000 to the project, which Mercyhurst matched. The University of Texas is providing equipment and staff. The University of South Florida is allowing the team to use its 105-foot research boat, Suncoaster.

Frank Cantelas, maritime archaeologist in NOAA's office of ocean exploration and maritime research, said the project was among the highest-scoring grant proposals.

"It's an area of underwater archaeology that's been little-explored," he said. "That early period of human occupation in North America is not really well understood, so there's been a lot of emphasis on it in recent years."

From July 30 to Aug. 12, the 12-member research crew will survey the seabed, first with tools that use sound waves to map the Gulf's topography and then with a suitcase-sized diving robot fitted with cameras. If something interesting is found in shallower water, scuba divers might be sent to explore it.

And of course, archaeological projects such as this are results-driven, and hopefully sufficient data will be retrieved this year to persuade further funding for future expeditions...

But the real work will begin next year, if the team finds enough evidence to convince someone to fund a longer expedition.

"We're going to work for two continuous weeks, as many hours each day as we possibly can," Adovasio said. "If we find something, you better believe we'll go back next year."

I imagine there will be many people keenly anticipating the results of this year's dive, and it is indeed to be hoped that not only is this year's expedition a success, but will lead to many more like it in future years.

(This update via John Hawks)

image from here

Four Stone Hearth #45 - call for submissions

I'm pleased to announce that the next edition of Four Stone Hearth will be published here at remote central, this coming Wednesday, July 16th, so as ever, if you have something you've written or read recently, and which you'd consider worth including this time round, please send it along, either to Martin Rundkvist, or directly to me, via my email address which can be accessed through my blogger profile, a mere page away from here.

There appears to be an ongoing absence of future hosts, so again, please get in touch with Martin R. if you'd like to host your own event - I'm more than happy to keep hosting 4SH for the time being, but obviously it would be much better if the carnival gained and retained greater exposure across the anthro-blogosphere.

image by mugley from here

Remote Central - Summer Reading List, 2008

Having recently bought some new reading glasses, I thought it might be an idea to try them out on some new books, hence this brief list. My book reading habits aren't that good, and it's unlikely I'll finish reading these before Summer fades to Fall etc, but as they all look to be pretty good books, readers of these pages might find them of interest.

Starting off with some fiction, which for some reason, I hardly ever read - mostly a lack of time etc, but here are four titles I have with me to hand...

'Ancient Evenings' by Norman Mailer - this is set in Egypt in the time of Rameses II and Queen Nefertiri, and judging by the reviews, I'm either going to love it or hate it; there are many writers who over the years I've never got round to reading, and Mailer certainly seems to have a style all his own (UK/US)

'How The Dead Live' (UK/US) by Will Self, and the same author's most recent offering, 'The Butt', described on the jacket as being "an insidiously allegorical account of the Western liberal conscience in the aftermath of 9/11", set in a fictional land-continent, part Australia, part-Iraq. Self is another author I've hardly read, so after hearing him talking about his latest book on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast, I thought I'd check this out. (UK/US)

'Stonehenge - A Novel of 2000 BC', by Bernard Cornwell - I've written a few articles on Stonehenge this past year, so I'm interested to see a fictional account of life back then. I almost never read 'Stone Age' fiction as it never seems to ring true, but this book has been endorsed by at least one person I know, and that's good enough for me. (UK/US)

My non-fiction starts off by following on from the last book...

'Inscribed Across the Landscape - The Cursus Enigma/Monuments of Great Britain' by Roy Loveday -following some recent coverage of the investigations in the Greater Cursus at Stonehenge, I thought I'd read up on the subject, as the cursus is indeed writ large across the Neolithic landscape, and comes in a great variety of shapes and sizes. (UK/US)

'The Ohio Hopewell Episode - Paradigm Lost, Paradigm Gained' by A. Martin Byers - a mighty tome, which in truth could easily take me an entire summer to read on its own - I wanted to check out the era of mound-building and earthworks construction that took place in that part of North America roughly 2,000 years ago, and although this book is densely packed with minute detail, it's very accessible and clearly written. (UK/US)

My last two books are compilations of essays, contributed by various authors, both of which deal with war and conflict, physical and psychological, overt and covert.

'Anthropology At The Dawn of the Cold War', edited by Dustin M. Wax comprises a collection of eight essays which between them discuss how American anthropology, the American State and even the CIA became entangled with each other during the 1950s and 1960s, and I'm interested to read this as I'm hoping it will provide a greater context, or glimpse at past history, by which to judge the current moves from within the US military, and by default, the US govt., to induct anthropologists into its ranks as a means by which to better understand (and many believe, subjugate) those peoples they encounter on their various campaigns around the world in the 21st century.(UK/US)

'The World According To Tom Dispatch' focuses on the present War on Terror, unleashed by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, and will be familiar territory to readers who regularly check the Tom Dispatch blog. One of the very few benefits of the disastrous forays into the Middle East is the amount of very good writing that is produced pointing out the follies and hypocrisies of those who instigate such wars, and it remains to be seen what influence if any, an army of motivated writers can have on bringing the whole sorry episode to some sort of conclusion, whereby not everyone loses everything. (US)

I doubt I'll finish them all this Summer, but if time and space permit, I'll attempt to post the odd review in due course.

image : 'Lesender Mann in Park', August Macke, 1914, oil on canvas.

Wade Davis on the Worldwide Web of Belief and Ritual | Video on TED.com

Wade Davis on the worldwide web of belief and ritual | Video on TED.com




Wade Davis is a travelling anthropologist and film-maker, clearly on a mission to live the most exciting life of anyone alive today, as he reports on multiple encounters he has had with various tribespeople from discrete locations around the modern world, including Polynesia, Tibet, the Andes and the Sierra Nevada - the description of how Polynesian people are able to navigate their canoes across open seas, by interpreting the swells and waves of the ocean around them, probably deserves an entire presentation in itself.

This a 20 minute talk, packed full of fascinating details of how culturally diverse peoples live their lives, and how they relate to the world around them, the metaphors and rituals which colour their ways of living, and how each different culture, no matter how small or remote, is a unique interpretation of and solution to the wider context of how to address the broader concept of civilisation. He opines that it is the quality of a society's aspirations that are more important than what it might materially or economically achieve

Although we appear to be heading somewhat uncertainly in the direction of some sort of global, commercialised culture, he emphasises how important it is for humanity to retain at least some cultural diversity, as the loss of such cannot be replaced.

He packs a lot in to this brief talk, too much to cover in this brief review, whilst his enthusiasm both for the research he's doing, and the people he encounters during that process is plain to see - this is easily one of the most enjoyable TED presentations I've seen, from one of the most inspiring speakers they've had.

Wade Davis - National Geographic profile.

Here's the transcript of an NPR interview, from 2003

Early Moon Contained Abundant Water

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Moon's interior 'did hold water'

We normally consider our Moon to be a sterile, desolate rock - albeit one in a near perfect circular orbit, and far larger than it should be, at least when compared to other moons in our solar system; but according to recent research, it appears that very early in its career as the puller of tides and light of our nights, our Moon may have contained a great deal of water in its own interior. This from BBC News...

US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed. The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object. Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water. But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.

This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence.

The earlier version of this report quoted a figure of just 3 million years ago, which would have been truly astonishing, so I'm glad not to have posted this in a hurry. One interesting aspect of this story is how the presence of past lunar water was detected - this from Science Daily...

The water clue came from lunar volcanic glasses, pebble-like beads collected and returned to Earth by NASA’s Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the decades since, scientists have sought to determine the content and origin of a class of chemical elements known as volatiles in the multicolored glasses. In particular, they searched the glasses for signs of water. But such evidence had remained elusive, consistent with the general consensus that the Moon is dry.

Now, that evidence has been found.

“What is important for me is it’s telling me something about the origin of the Moon and the Earth and the presence of water at very early times,” said Saal, the paper’s lead author.

However, this research means that our picture of Earth 1.0 might be incorrect - if the Moon was torn off as a large chunk following an impact with a planet-sized something that collided with the Earth over 4 billion years ago, and contained water from its very beginnings, then presumable the early Earth must also have contained water. Here's some detail from Science Daily...

The research also may yield additional insight into how long water has been on Earth, Saal added.

“It suggests that water was present within the Earth before the giant collision that formed the Moon,” Saal said. “That points to two possibilities: Water either was not completely vaporized in that collision or it was added a short time – less than 100 million years – afterward by volatiles introduced from the outside, such as with meteorites.”

But the notable detail appears to be the sheer quantity of water that may have been present on the Moon...

Based on their observations that nearly all the water in the lunar magma was lost to space during the eruptions, the researchers calculated that the pre-eruption magma may have contained water up to 750 parts per million — similar to the water content of primitive magmas that erupted on the Earth’s seafloor at midocean ridges.

“This suggests the very intriguing possibility that the Moon’s interior might have contained just as much water as the Earth’s depleted upper mantle,” Hauri said.

Hauri used secondary mass ion spectrometry, a technique that measures the elemental composition of solid materials, to detect the minute amounts of water in the samples.

“We developed a way to detect as little as five parts per million of water,” Hauri said. “We were really surprised to find a whole lot more in these tiny glass beads, up to 46 parts per million.”

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is due for a visit, possibly launching this coming November 8th - here's a a brief look at part of its mission brief...

The spacecraft will be placed in low polar orbit (50 km) for a 1-year mission under NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. LRO will return global data, such as day-night temperature maps, a global geodetic grid, high resolution color imaging and the moon's UV albedo.

However there is particular emphasis on the polar regions of the moon where continuous access to solar illumination may be possible and the prospect of water in the permanently shadowed regions at the poles may exist.

Updates for LRO will appear later in the year.

image from here

Save That Cave #2 :: Lascaux - Attack of the Killer Mould

Debate Over Moldy Cave Art Is a Tale of Human Missteps

Although Grotta Paglicci was my original choice for #2, it's going to take longer to write up than I'd realised, and as the Washington Post have this update on the state of play at Lascaux, here's a discussion of the problems and the difficulties in finding a solution to its ailments; I'm assuming most readers will be familiar with the site, so I'm going to concentrate on the moulds that have been appearing on the walls and floors of the cave complex, as well as other factors such as the ventilation system, and the damage caused at the cave entrance; I've covered some of this in a previous post, but such is the gravity of the problems, it's worth reiterating the events and circumstances that have led up to this state of affairs; this from the linked article...

The regal black bull painted by a Stone Age artist on a cave wall in southwestern France 17,000 years ago has survived millennia of war and pestilence just a few yards above its subterranean gallery.

Today the prehistoric bovine could face annihilation by an army of encroaching black mold spots, the latest in a series of threats unwittingly brought in over the years by tourists, scientists and bureaucrats.

"Each time we try to resolve one problem, we create another," said Marie-Anne Sire, the cave administrator who coordinates the scientific teams trying to save the endangered reindeer, potbellied ponies and woolly rhinos of the Lascaux cave, which contains one of the world's most famous collections of prehistoric art.

And therein lies one of the biggest problems - it seems that every time a particular treatment is used to remedy one problem, another symptom jumps up to take its place - even Dr. Greg House and his team would have their work cut out trying to cure this patient, (especially as they tend to treat humans, rather than caves), but it's going to need someone with a much greater degree of expertise than has been demonstrated so far to come up with the correct course of cures and remedies to solve this mystery. As we see...

Scientists have inherited a history of missteps and misunderstandings of the cave's inner workings from the day its owners opened it to visitors and the problems they brought.

Over the decades, almost every attempt to eradicate problems has spawned new dangers. A formaldehyde foot wash, for instance, used for years to disinfect people entering the cave, ended up killing off friendly organisms that might have prevented fungus from growing.

Sire took over as cave administrator in 2002 during a white fungus outbreak that followed installation of an air-conditioning system designed to keep harmful microorganisms from taking root.

The fungus covered the floor of the caves and was creeping up the walls toward wild animals painted in brilliant hues of orange, yellow, brown and black, ground from the rocks and minerals of the surrounding area.

"I was shocked," she recalled. "It looked as though it had snowed."

Fearful that the fungus would gobble the paintings, experts poured quicklime powder on the floors and wrapped the walls in cotton bandages soaked in fungicide and antibiotics.

As soon as the white fungus began to disappear, scientists launched a major project to record the condition of every animal in the cave in a computer simulation. Two people worked 30 hours a week under lights to record every spot of fungus, every crack and every abnormality on each of the cave's creatures.

These sound like some fairly extreme measures, and I'm surprised to see absolutely no mention of the much maligned ventilation system that is thought by many to be a major source of the current woes - this story seems to have been spun in such a way that the general public are shown to the sole cause, which as far as I can tell, isn't really the case, as is apparent from this snippet at the Save Lascaux website...

However, it must be noted that Lascaux was stable and free of fungus for more than two decades until lichens were found growing in 1998. The French authorities took no action then and proceeded with the invasive installation of an ill-fitted air conditioning system in 2000 which began the huge proliferation of fungus growth inside the cave on painted and unpainted surfaces.

So for more information on that, here's how Time magazine, in a May 2006 article, 'Saving Beauty' reported on that particular aspect of the problem....

That spring, (2001) workers had finished installing a €23,000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave. The new machine was a major departure from the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for the preceding 30 years. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and make sure that water condensed there, like it does on a beer can, rather than on the walls of the cave.

This passive system was only necessary during the wettest periods of the year, when it worked as a functional replacement for the earth that for millenniums had absorbed excess water from the saturated air of the cave, but that had been removed since the cave's discovery in 1940.

The new system was designed to automate the process, but also sought to improve it by using two massive high-powered fans to pull the air toward the cold point. Such an intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave.

"Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible," says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system."

I'm not sure how the decision was reached to install this system, but apparently, and not surprisingly, nobody today is willing to admit responsibility - according to Michel de la Giraudière, whose company supplied the air-con, there was no unanimous decision over which type of system was best, and he further opines that politics played a role in that decision.

Perhaps too many people were involved in the decision-making process, and while its true that there are a great many complex issues to take into account, I have a mental image of too many people in chef's uniforms ruining the soup du jour, creating an unholy mess in the process. But there were other problems created at the cave entrance...

While a roof over the entrance was removed for the installation of the new system in early 2001, drenching rains poured directly into the cave's entrance, bringing with them dirt and, some suspect, fusarium spores. The danger that spores or other biological agents might contaminate the cave had been foreseen. Jean-François Nicolas, director of contractor Forclim Sud-Ouest Alary Vimard, says his workers were under instructions to wash their feet, limit their working hours, and stay out of the painted chambers of the cave; Desplat himself installed a padlock to insure they did so.

"We worked under the rules we were given," says Nicolas. Geneste, responsible for monitoring the work once a week with Oudin's representative, contends that wasn't always the case. "The workers often ignored us and the architect's representative and didn't disinfect their feet," says Geneste.

"They didn't keep the door closed all the time; they wanted to get the job done quickly." What's more, France's Research Laboratory of Historical Monuments (lrmh), responsible for monitoring the cave's biological condition, made no inspections during the construction work.

It seems incredible that no-one from LRMH deemed it necessary to keep an eye on proceedings, especially given the international renown of Lascaux, although in September of that year, the organisation identified the fungus Fusarium solani, an entity so deadly that affected crops have to be destroyed - and the species which invaded Lascaux was even more resistant to treatment...

Not everyone is convinced that the fungus entered the cave on the thick soles of contractors' boots. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the lrmh, says that a long-term, low-level presence of formaldehyde in the cave — ironically used as a foot wash for decades to prevent such infections — may have killed off many of the other organisms that might have prevented such an explosion of fusarium.

"The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere," says Pallot-Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take off."

And therein might lie one possible solution - rather than bombard the cave interior with strong and corrosive chemicals, maybe it would be better to create a mould, or genetically modify an existing one, which could then take a hold in the cave - ideally it wouldn't cause any damage to the paintings or cave itself, but would act as a kind of biological barrier to other species of more virulent fungus; over the course of time, the environment in the cave could stabilise, and a way found to remove the 'friendly' mould in circumstances whereby none of the old horrors would return.

However, a 'fight-fungus-with-fungus' approach would take a huge leap of faith, and nobody is going to like the idea of deliberately covering the cave with a fungus of any sort, but it might be something to consider.

Another idea might be to create another patient, whilst putting the current case into a type of coma until further beneficial aid can be administered. This might require the cessation of all activity in the Lascaux cave immediately, even the manual cleaning, somehow make the cave a sealed vacuum, thus depriving it of oxygen, and presumably a suitable medium in which harmful moulds could grow.

The next step would be to find one or more caves nearby or elsewhere that were as similar as possible to Lascaux, but of no archaeological interest, and conduct experiments there - i.e. saturate the cave which harmful moulds cultured from Lascaux, treat the symptoms and note the changes, alter the mix and eventually a solution should present itself. Obviously, replicating the exact environment in Lascaux will probably be impossible, and thus a cure might be much harder to find, but it seems less risky than going into Lascaux and applying solutions with no real knowledge of what the outcome will be.

It might mean that Lascaux has to be sealed for 10, 20 or even 100 years, but it's well worth taking a long-term view rather than attempt a quick fix for political or other reasons - and as advances in fields such as microbiology etc. are made, there is good reason to hope that a permanent solution may eventually be forthcoming. Here are the closing paragrpahs form the Time article...

What doesn't exist is an independent judgment of what went wrong at Lascaux and whether it is being put right. The committee the Ministry of Culture created to perform that task includes Oudin, the architect who installed the disastrous climate system; Geneste, the curator, who accepted the plans and oversaw the installation project; Pallot-Frossard, the lab director; and all the responsible bureaucrats.

How a committee so constituted can arrive at unbiased answers is "a good question," admits Marc Gauthier, an expert on the Gallo-Roman era and the committee's chairman. But he says it's working. "Too often we've reacted to the symptoms of the problem," he says. "But for the last three years we've been reflecting and acting on the reasons." Léauté-Beasley is unconvinced. "We feel that big mistakes have happened and may still be happening," she says. "The French are dealing with them like it's their backyard, but they need to feel accountable to the rest of the world. After all, who does the past belong to?"

Lascaux's keepers are no longer using chemicals to eradicate fusarium from Lascaux: no more antibiotic patches or quicklime. But no one can be content that restorers still have to go in to pick fusarium filaments off irreplaceable paintings and run the Gregomatic on the lower walls. Geneste sees a few tiny insect colonies as evidence that a new ecological balance is slowly taking shape in the cave.

"My goal is to reopen Lascaux in 2007," says Rieu, the regional director of conservation. "If the scientists' hopes are realized, that could happen, though for very restrained numbers of visitors." Business as usual may come as a relief to the ranks of bureaucrats taught a lesson in humility by Lascaux. Whether that lesson sticks will be determined by future generations. It will be a terrible indictment of this one if it does not.

If insect colonies are returning to the cave, that might indeed be a good sign, but I'm sure they could be prevailed upon to take up residence elsewhere if the cave does need to be sealed - and they could play a vital role in the other cave used for experimental fungal treatments etc, and would be a very good indicator that treatments were having any beneficial effect or not. But it seems clear that until the problems are completely understood, and the situation brought fully under control, it's probably better to keep activity therein, human or otherwise, to an absolute minimum.

The Cave of Lascaux

Save Lascaux

Time - Saving Beauty

image from washingtonpost.com

Reznikoff, Resonance and Palaeolithic Cave Art

Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves/Science Daily

Bearing in mind that Iegor Reznikoff, amongst others, has been conducting research into the acoustics of caves and other locations where prehistoric rock art has been found, since at least 1983, it's surprising that a great deal more research hasn't been undertaken. Here's a report from Science Daily detailing some of his current experimental work...

Thousands of years later, we can view stone-age art on cave walls, but we can't listen to the stone-age music that would have accompanied many of the pictures. In many sites, flutes made of bone are to be found nearby. Iegor Reznikoff of the University of Paris reports that the most acoustically resonant place in a cave -- where sounds linger or reverberate the most -- was also often the place where the pictures were densest.

And when the most-resonant spot was located in a very narrow passageway too difficult for painting, red marks are often found, as if the resonance maximum had to be signified in some way. This correlation of paintings and music, Reznikoff says, provides "the best evidence for the ritualistic meanings of the paintings and of the use of the adorned caves."

Here's a slightly longer explanation of the overall direction of his work, as described in a 2004 presentation, called 'On Primitive Elements of Musical Meaning', of which this is the introduction...

I have been asked to give some insights on how elements of possible meanings of sounds and perhaps music could be found in my studies on the sound dimension of Palaeolithic painted caves. To describe in brief the main discovery, let us say that in the painted caves, the density of pictures in a location of a cave is proportional to the quality of the resonance of this location: the pictures are found mostly in resonant areas. It can be shown that this is not merely by chance, and we can therefore gain some understanding on how the Palaeolithic people utilized resonance.

The sounds needed to test the resonance are vocal, simple but closely related to the ‘answer’ of the cave in order to make it sound the best. Because of the resonance, the whole body is implicated, sometimes in a subtle way. The approach is essentially physical; in this respect, we may say that the sounds and the whole situation are primitive. It is indeed a very strong experience to hear in almost complete darkness the cave answer to a sound produced just in front or just under a picture of an animal, a bison or a mammoth.

Since both the body and the cave vibrate we can speak of an earth or mineral meaning of sound, but also, because of the relationship with the pictures, of an animal meaning of sound: we are thus naturally introduced to very deep elements of sound meaning. And a reflection on possible meanings which sound and music could have for the Palaeolithic tribes who adorned these caves with pictures is without doubt a very interesting subject.[1]

But when reflecting more on this subject it appeared increasingly that for a deeper understanding and clearer results, some ground material taken from studies in elementary sound perception, in sound therapy based on sound / body and sound / consciousness relationship, and more generally in what I call sound anthropology, should be introduced. Some considerations taken from ethnomusicology or from music in Antiquity will be mentioned as well.

Other researchers, such as Steven J. Waller have conducted extensive research into the acoustic context of American rock art, as he explains at his website...

Since many ancient cultures are known to have had supernatural explanations for echoes, my theory is that echoing locations such as caves and canyons would have therefore been considered sacred, and were decorated with the images evoked upon hearing the echoes. For example, I've found that echoes of percussion noises such as clapping can mimic the sound of hoof beats, and hoofed animals are a frequent rock art theme. Voices appear to emanate from rock surfaces where beings are depicted, as if the images are speaking.

I have tested over 150 sites (and have been told about many more; see list below) in France, Australia and the U.S. for sound reflection, and found echoes and/or reverberations at almost all of them (the results at some sites were indeterminate because of interference). I encourage all rock art researchers to clap or call out upon approaching rock art sites and listen to determine if the echoing is better there than surrounding terrain. Let me know the results for inclusion in the list.

I recently completed an analysis of acoustic data I collected throughout Horseshoe Canyon, and found that the five art sites correlate exactly with the five locations within the canyon possessing the greatest intensity of echoing. I presented a paper describing these results at the ARARA meeting in La Junta in May of 1997, and it has now been published in American Indian Rock Art (2000) 24:85-94 (see below under publications).

Elsewhere on his site, we documented evidence that shows how sound has been incorporated or utilised at numerous sites on every continent, over many thousands of years; there must be numerous Palaeolithic art caves in Europe where no acoustic research has been done - I can think of several where drawings, paintings or symbols, lines and abstract designs appear to have been placed at random, and it would be interesting to see whether or not they fit into this archaeoacoustic paradigm.

What looks to be a very interesting book on the subject, 'Archaeoacoustics', edited by Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson, was published in 2006, and here's the publisher's description...

'Archaeoacoustics' focuses on the role of sound in human behaviour, from earliest times up to the development of mechanical detection and recording devices in the 19th century. Recent calls for an "archaeology of the senses" have served as a timely, even overdue reminder that the past which we experience - and which others have experienced before us - is multisensory, drawing not only upon the primary field of vision, but also on touch, smell and hearing...

Megalithic tombs, Palaeolithic painted caves, Romanesque churches and prehistoric rock shelters all present specific sound qualities which offer clues as to how they may have been designed and used. Voices resonate, external noises are subdued or eliminated, and a special aural dimension is accessed which complements the evidence of our other senses.

The present volume, arising from a conference held at the McDonald Institute in 2003, brings together archaeologists and specialists in early musical instruments and acoustics in an attempt to unlock some of the meaning latent in the acoustics of such early structures and spaces. It is essential reading for all who are concerned with seeking a broader understanding of human sensory experience from prehistory up to historical times.

It appears to be only available in hardback, hence the hefty price tag, but I imagine this would be a very good read for anyone interested in adding another dimension to their understanding of why Palaeolithic people went to such trouble to enter the recesses of darkened caves, there to daub the walls with all manner of naturalistic and abstract forms, the vast majority of which were only ever seen by a tiny handful of their contemporaries.

see also :: 'Palaeolithic Multimedia' @ John Hawks

Stone Age Soundtracks, a book by Paul Devereux (UK/US)

image: Arcy-sur-Cure (Burgundy, France). An ibex in the most resonant location of the main cave. (Collection La Varende, photograph M. Girard) from here

Caves of Altxerri, Ekain and Santimamine Granted World Heritage Status

Caves of Altxerri, Ekain and Santimamine world heritage sites - eitb24.com

In a recent post I discussed the danger posed to the Praileaitz cave by local quarrying activities, so it's good to be able to report that for three other caves in the region, the future seems a little more secure; this from eitb24.com...

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee meeting in Quebec on Monday added the Basque Paleolithic caves of Santimamiñe (Kortezubi), Ekain (Deba-Zestoa) and Altxerri (Aia) to its list of World Heritage sites.

This candidacy has been proposed by the Basque Government together with the governments of Cantabria and Asturias and apart from the Basque caves it also included other caves from the Cantabrian Coast, as a way to extend the list, after Altamira Cave, in the province of Cantabria, was named world heritage site in 1985.

Basque, Asturian and Cantabrian governments began the process to extend the list two years ago.

Too bad that Praileaitz wasn't included in that list, and hopefully it won't be another two years before it too is granted WH status - it could be argued that this is such a recent find that there wasn't time for it to be processed through the paperwork, but hopefully someone will already have nominated it. More from the linked report...

Although the caves of Santimamiñe, Ekain and Altxerri are closed to the public in order to protect and preserve their Paleolithic paintings, there is a virtual tour available to visit the cave of Santimamiñe.

The richness of their Prehistoric paintings is a ‘gift’ the past has given us. Santimamiñe, discovered in 1916, has wonderful paintings of horses and bisons; in Ekain (1939), red and black horses can be found; and in Altxerri (1956) there are beautiful paintings of bisons.

It's a shame these three sites are closed to the public, but unfortunately it is we the public who can cause the most damage to what are very fragile environments within the caves - the paintings themselves probably weren't created to be viewed by crowds of humans thronging to the spot even back then, regardless of respiration damage - and in some ways it could be argued that that it's no bad thing that these secluded places retain their 'otherness', as even today they are set apart from the outside world, just as they were originally intended to be.

Maybe with the advent of future technologies, such places may be able to be protected in such a way that the public is able to visit without inadvertently destroying the fabric of the paintings in the process - but for now, the emphasis is very much on maintaining stability of climate within the caves themselves. In any case, as the limestone in which they are encased continues to erode due to natural processes such as rain, they will, over the course of many thousands of years, eventually dissolve away to nothing.

Here's a link to another report from El Correo, in Spanish, which includes a short video, in which it mentions that a total of 14 caves across Asturias, Cantabria and Pais Vasco were added to the World Heritage list.

And here are links to three of the most well-known caves in question, (which I'll try and write up in more detail in the near future)...

La Cueva de Santimamiñe

Ekain

Altxerri

see also : Leherensuge :: Some Good News For Basque Palaeolithic Art

El Pais: Arte Oculto, Santuarios de Piedra

image from here

Shovel Bum in Alaska - The Archaeology Channel - Video

The Archaeology Channel - Shovel Bum in Alaska

TAC have a new video online, and this time round we're in the company of Shovel Bum, aka Trent de Boer, who offers us an account of his travels to Alaska, the archaeology he and his colleagues were pursuing, whilst at the same time hoping to avoid the attentions of local bears. Here's TAC's Richard Pettigrew, who sets the scene thus...

Friends and colleagues: The life of an itinerant archaeological field technician alternates memorable thrills with spells of boredom, proud accomplishment with tedious frustration, and takes lots of just plain work. See more about how this plays out as the T-Bone saga of fieldwork life continues in Shovel Bum in Alaska, the latest video feature on our nonprofit streaming-media Web site,

Alaska is the setting for the fourth Shovel Bum e-zine extravaganza, featuring Trent DeBoer’s drawings and real voice. T-Bone and friends have hired out for an archaeological survey at Cold Bay, on the tip the Alaska Peninsula. Their first task is to qualify at rifle-shooting as a precaution against the numerous and huge brown bears. Braving this threat along with wolverines, gales, and floating bogs, T-Bone encounters Japanese fishing floats and huge village sites, sips whisky at the local bar, and finally returns home to Betsy with his new long beard.

There are two previous offerings at TAC from Shovel Bum...

Shovel Bum Joins The Army (Washington)

The Shovel Bum's Lot (Arkansas)

see also :: National Parks Service : Prehistory of Alaska

There's also a useful set of links at TAC...

The Alutiiq Language (Alutiiq Museum Archaeological Repository)

Archaeological Overview of Alaska (National Park Service)

Archaeology of the Tundra and Arctic Alaska (National Park Service)

Review of Shovel Bum: Comix of Archaeological Field Life (IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology)

Shovel Bum

Shovel Bum: An interview with archaeological chronicler and comic underdog Trent de Boer (Lost at Sea Magazine)

Shovel Bum: The Interview (About.com)

Southwest Alaska and Pacific Coast (National Park Service)

Special Issue: Cartoons in Archaeology (SAA Archaeological Record, Vol. 5, No. 5, November 2005)

image from here

Iranian, Foreign Experts To Excavate Salt Men's Necropolis

Iranian, foreign experts to excavate salt men's necropolis

News from Iran, where it appears that the so-called salt-men of Chehr-Âbâd, human bodies found preserved in the salt mine there, have attracted sufficient interest for an official research project to be launched; this from Payvand.com...

Archaeologists and experts on other related fields from Germany, England, and Austria will participated in the project, which is expected to begin in spring 2009 in the salt mine located in the Hamzehlu region near Zanjan, northern Iran, the Persian service of CHN reported on Monday.

"The Chehrabad Salt Mine is one of important Iranian ancient sites, on which archaeological studies should regularly be continued," the Archaeology Research Center of Iran Director Mohammad-Hassan Fazeli Nashli said.

The results of the studies carried out in UK University of York and Oxford University on the salt men, which were offered during a two-day international conference on the Iranian mummies in Zanjan in October 2007, showed how much the interdisciplinary fields have progressed and can contribute to the development of the archaeological sciences, he explained.

The researches partially shed light on the salt men's diet. Based on the studies, the experts surmise that the Fourth Salt Man had come from Mazandaran, a region in northern Iran, to Zanjan, Fazeli Nashli added.

A little background information is available here, (and also highlights the problems archaeologists have had trying to keep the mummies from deteriorating, resulting in the decision to leave any future finds in situ)...

From 1993 to December 2005, a series of salt mummies were found in the Chehrabad salt mine near Zanjan in northwestern Iran which belong to Achaemenid (550-330 BC) and Sassanian (224-651 AD) dynastic eras. Details of some of them are somehow vague, although some of them have remained almost intact. According to the released reports, four salt mummies were found until November 2006. However, the discovery of two more mummies in 2006 and 2007 raised the number of Iranian salt mummies to 6.

Work at the salt mine won't commence until Spring 2009, although there might be updates or even further discoveries made in the interim; a final word from Payvand...

Some of the salt men have been damaged over the past 14 years as a large area of the privately-owned salt mine has been bulldozed.

Studies on the Fourth Salt Man indicate that the body is 2000 years old and he was 15 or 16 years old at the time of death.

It is still not clear when the other salt men lived, but archaeologists estimate that the First Salt Man lived about 1700 years ago and died sometime between the ages of 35 and 40. He is currently on display in a glass case at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran.

Four of the salt men are kept at the Rakhtshuikhaneh Museum in Zanjan and the Sixth Salt Man was left in-situ due to the dearth of equipment necessary for its preservation.

see also :: ORAU Chehr-Âbâd Saltmen Were Parthians

image from :: Payvand :: Iranian “Salt Men” Lived Contemporarily

Kankakee Sand Islands Research Reveals Ice Sheet Vanished 5,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

Valparaiso University - Research Casts New Light on Ice Age

News from Indiana, where it appears than an area of land, the modern day Kankakee Sands Isands, previously thought to have been buried under a massive morraine until 10kya, was actually ice-free from between 15kya - 14.5kya; this from the Valparaiso University report...

A Valparaiso University professor’s research into the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Geography professor Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake and Porter counties in Northwest Indiana into northeastern Illinois – about 12 years ago.

Based upon the long-held belief that most of the upper Midwest was covered by a vast ice sheet up until about 10,000 years ago, Dr. Janke said he and other scientists surmised the Kankakee Sand Islands were created by sand in meltwater from the receding glacier. That belief was challenged, however, when he discovered a year and a half ago that the islands were composed of sand that had come from Lake Michigan – something that should have been impossible with the Valparaiso Moraine standing between the lake and the Kankakee Sand Islands.

So what happened to explain the missing ice-sheet at around 15,000 years ago? We have read recently of how it seems a comet exploded over Canada at around 13kya, but that event would seem to be have occurred well after the great melt in northwest Indiana, which presumably means that a warming episode was already under way at c.15kya, and as suggested by the comet theory, was brought to an abrupt end at 13kya, ushering in the 1300 year-long Younger Dryas, when the world was plunged once more into an episode of marked cooling. More from the linked article...

Figuring out that puzzle required taking core samples from some of the remaining islands and the development of a new test by one of Dr. Janke’s colleagues to determine when sunlight last shone on the sand. The answer that came back – the Kankakee Sand Islands were born between 14,500 and 15,000 years ago from Lake Michigan sand – was startling. “We thought the area was completely covered by ice at that time,” Dr. Janke said. “That was a really earth-shattering result for us.”

Yet it also supports research showing that North American Clovis points – a particular type of arrowhead that represents the oldest man-made object on the continent –identically match arrowheads found in Europe and made by humans at approximately the same time. And just within the last year, new research has provided strong evidence that a large meteorite struck the ice sheet covering North American and melted much of the ice shortly before the formation of the Kankakee Sand Islands.

“My research supports this other recent research because it indicates there wasn’t a massive ice sheet covering North America that would have allowed tribes to cross over from Asia via a Bering Strait land-ice bridge,” Dr. Janke said.

I don't know how long it will be available, but here's a link to the video 'Stone Age Columbus', screened by Horizon (transcript) a few years back, and which looks at the work of Bruce Bradley, Dennis Stanford, James Adovasio et al, as they attempt to establish a firm link between the lithics of European Solutrean, around 20kya, and the later Clovis tool-kits - well worth watching, and it's interesting to see it and compare how recent research continues to enhance our understanding of how and when humans began arriving in the New World, and indeed, from where they may have hailed.

Back for a final word from Valparaiso...

Dr. Janke’s research on the formation of the Kankakee Sand Islands is continuing this summer, with a focus on determining whether the islands closest to Lake Michigan are younger than the southernmost islands. At one time, approximately 1,200 of the islands stretched out in a series of curved bands north and south of the Kankakee River that are separated by a few miles and mirror the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

Though many were destroyed by human settlement, about 700 still exist today. Over the past few years, Dr. Janke said about a dozen Valparaiso students have assisted with his research on islands. He’s also been active in the Woodland Savanna Land Conservancy, an organization working to protect the Kankakee Sand Islands. Landowners have donated a handful of islands to the trust for preservation, and Dr. Janke is hopeful that others will follow their lead and perhaps eventually build enough support for some of the islands to be incorporated into Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore or their own state park.

“The Kankakee Sand Islands are archaeologically significant, with numerous Native American artifacts and burial grounds still present in the surviving islands, and they provide crucial habitat for native wildlife and plant species,” Dr. Janke said. “I’m hopeful the sand islands can be protected so we can continue to learn about and appreciate them.”

The nearest I could find to a relevant paper on the geology of the Kanakee Sand Islands was this paper, from the Illinois State Water Survey, (PDF) namely...

River Geometry, Bank Erosion, and Sand Bars Within the Main Stem of the Kankakee River in Illinois and Indiana

see also: The Nature Conservancy: Kanakee Sands

The Efroymson Restoration At Kanakee Sands: Restoration of a prairie / wetland / black-oak barrens mosaic in northwest Indiana

Chicago Wilderness : Kankakee Sands

image from here

“The Ruin” - The Earliest Description in English of Stonehenge? - Eternal Idol

Eternal Idol Blog Archive “The Ruin” - the earliest description in English of Stonehenge?

Dennis Price, in his latest essay, asks whether an Anglo Saxon text, 'The Ruin', is an attempt at portraying Stonehenge - for an explanatory note on 'The Ruin', as well as the text itself, we have this from the linked article...

The Ruin is a famous poem written by an unknown author that appears in the Exeter Book, a tenth century collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry that’s now housed in the library of Exeter Cathedral. The book itself was damaged by fire, resulting in the poem The Ruin being incomplete, but before we examine the finer details, let’s have a look at one translation that comes from A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse by R.Hamer, London, 1970. 'The Ruin'...

The city buildings fell apart, the works
Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers
Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate,
Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape,
Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age.
And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace
Of earth, the dead-departed master-builders,
Until a hundred generations now
Of people have passed by. Often this wall
Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by
Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell.
And now the high curved wall itself has fallen
The heart inspired, incited to swift action.
Resolute masons, skilled in rounded building
Wondrously linked the framework with iron bonds.
The public halls were bright, with lofty gables,
Bath-houses many; great the cheerful noise,
And many mead-halls filled with human pleasures.
Till mighty fate brought change upon it all,
Slaughter was widespread, pestilence was rife,
And death took all those valiant men away.
The martial halls became deserted places,
The cities crumbled, its repairers fell,
Its armies to the earth. And so these halls
Are empty, and this red curved roof now sheds
Its tiles, decay has brought it to the ground,
Smashed it to piles of rubble, where long since
A host of heroes, glorious, gold-adorned,
Gleaming in splendour, proud and flushed with wine,
Shone in their armour, gazed on gems and treasure,
On silver, riches, wealth and jewelry,
On this bright city with its wide domains.
Stone buildings stood, and the hot streams cast forth
Wide sprays of water, which a wall enclosed
In its bright compass, where convenient
Stood hot baths ready for them at the centre.
Hot streams poured forth over the clear grey stone,
To the round pool and down into the baths.

My immediate impression upon reading this was that it reminded me of a description of post-Roman London, as described in Peter Ackroyd's book, 'London - The Biography', in which he alludes to Anglo Saxon folk - and their cattle, I think - living amongst the crumbling and overgrown ruins of what had once been a magnificent city, abandoned as the Roman Empire itself packed its bags and headed home.

I don't have the book with me, but if I recall correctly, and I'm not sure to what extent London was ever truly abandoned, although Roman and Anglo-Saxon London weren't sited on the exact same spots, with the former lying further east, in what is now the City of London, and the latter occupying the more westerly Aldwych and Covent Garden areas.

But I digress, so it's back to the linked article...

At first glance, it appears to be absolutely unthinkable that The Ruin could have been written with Stonehenge in mind, because it contains so many specific references to physical things such as a broken barred gate, frost in the plaster, public halls, mead halls, martial halls, a red roof shedding tiles and so forth, which is probably why no one’s ever seriously entertained the notion of a connection with Stonehenge. So, it made sense to ask Professor Drout if the author of the poem had ever actually seen the structure he was describing; my actual words were “Is there any evidence that the author of this poem actually saw “The Ruin” with their own eyes? If so, what is this evidence?”

His reply was “Not really any specific evidence. The lines about the wall being marked with lichen, stained with red, have sometimes been seen as specific description of an actual place rather than an imaginative or literary-based description, but no one knows a specific site.”

My other main thought was that it would greatly help to know when the actual poem was written, and this point is addressed thus...

I asked Professor Drout if anyone has any notion at all of who the unknown author of “The Ruin” may have been, to which he replied “No one even has any plausible candidates, and it is not clear when the poem was written, even if we know that the Exeter Book was compiled /copied between 950 and 975, it’s obviously possible for the poems in it to be much older.”

If I’m right, then The Ruin is the oldest known description of Stonehenge in English, so this is how I think the poem came to be written:

We know that Stonehenge has captivated and drawn people to it from at least 2,300 BC to the present day, while archaeological evidence that the Romans had some kind of interest in the place has recently come to light.

We know that it was the site of at least one ceremonial execution in Anglo-Saxon times, while the memory of this beheading may have been preserved in the later story of the Saxon warlord Hengist being decapitated. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that it had been the site of a conflict between the Saxons and Britons, so it wouldn’t be remotely surprising if this unique, baleful monument had been of interest to at least one traveller in the region in Anglo-Saxon times.

There is mention elsewhere, in the comments, that it's surprising there is apparently no written mention of Stonehenge dating from the Roman era, and the point is made that of course we don't have the complete historical record - who knows how many thousands of texts describing and discussing all manner of contemporary landmarks and local lore have been lost to us.

'The Ruin' itself is certainly evocative, and I'm wondering, if like the book of which its part, it might not be a combined description of two or more places, which could include Stonehenge and somewhere like Londinium or Lundenvic - Roman Bath, aka Aquae Sulis is also suggested as a possible setting, and as it's much nearer to Stonehenge, it might be a more likely bet.

A comparison is made with Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias...

Both Ozymandias and The Ruin speak of a ruined antiquity of stone, both poems have a haunting quality to them and both bring to mind a similar moral tale, namely that human fame and power are transient things. In Ozymandias, the only apparent clues to the location of the wreck are that a traveller from an antique land said it stands in the desert and that around the wreck, “boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away”. When we look for geographical clues in The Ruin, we’re only told that it has or had “wide” or “broad domains”, so on the face of it, this seems even less helpful than the directions in Ozymandias.

However, the Anglo-Saxon words are “bradan rices” - bradan means broad, but it also means flat, open, extended, spacious or wide, while rice (the singular of rices) means a kingdom or a realm. Now, I suppose this doesn’t completely rule out Bath, but if I had to chose between the two, I’d go for the rolling downs of Salisbury Plain and more specifically, the immediate Stonehenge landscape every time as a broad, flat, open or extended domain.

The Ruin spells out that the master builders, valiant men and armies lie in the earth, so the landscape surrounding Stonehenge has the further advantage of very obviously being home to the graves of heroes, masons, builders, nobles and the like in the form of the hundreds of barrows that once stood there, far more than exist today.

I'm not sure how a Roman writer would have described Stonehenge, but like the later Anglo-Saxons who occupied an ancient England replete with ruins from a past civilisation, he or she must surely have marvelled at how pre-Roman people, without recourse to Roman engineering technology, could possibly have assembled such a monument, let alone how they transported the mighty stones there from afar.

I haven't covered the entire essay, which raises a number of other good points and questions, so it's worth heading over to read it in its entirety.

Here's the Anglo Saxon version, as quoted from Wikipedia...

Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime,
scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene,
ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad
ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.
Wonað giet se ...num geheapen,
fel on
grimme gegrunden
scan heo...
...g orþonc ærsceaft
...g lamrindum beag
mod mo... ...yne swiftne gebrægd
hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond
weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre.
Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige,
heah horngestreon, heresweg micel,
meodoheall monig mondreama full,
oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe.
Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas,
swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera;
wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas,
brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon
hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað,
ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð
hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong
gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig
glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed,
wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan;
seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas,
on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan,
on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.
Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp
widan wylme; weal eall befeng
beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron,
hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic.
Leton þonne geotan
ofer harne stan hate streamas
un...
...þþæt hringmere hate
þær þa baþu wæron.
þonne is
...re; þæt is cynelic þing,
huse ...... burg....

And to finish, here's a link to a paper, (PDF)...

'Ancient Landscapes and the Dead - The Reuse of Prehistoric and Roman Monuments as Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites' by Howard Williams.

Is the Phaistos Disk a Hoax? About.com Archaeology

Is the Phaistos Disk a Hoax?

Kris Hirst comments on an article in the current July/August issue of Minerva magazine, in which Jerome M. Eisenberg suggests that the enigmatic Phaistos Disc might be the creation of a jealous archaeologist, L. Pernier, in 1908, who wanted to divert attention away from the finds of Arthur Evans at Knossos - this from the linked article...

Proving the Phaistos disk a fake is going to be difficult. Eisenberg points out that the purposely stamped and deliberately fired disk is unlike any other Minoan script. Those found at Knossos were drawn into soft clay and accidentally fired. The motives will need to be fleshed out as well. Eisenberg suggests that Phaistos excavator Pernier might have been jealous of Arthur Evans and his discoveries at Knossos, and created the disk to prove that Phaistos was just as interesting a site.

I'd love to see a book investigating the possible perpetrators, such as those that have been written on the Piltdown man hoax, wouldn't you? What might resolve the issue would be a thermoluminescence date on the disk; but so far the Heraklion Museum who displays the disk today has been uninterested in doing that. I'm not sure I blame them.

In this link to part of 'How Not to Decipher The Phaistos Disc: A Review', by Yves Duhoux, 2000, we see that the figures were impressed into the clay tablet, apparently by means of a kind of early type-writing, rather than printing as is commonly asserted, and is dated to around 1850-1800BC, although the script itself appears to be without contemporary parallel. There is also mention of why there have been some problems deciphering the Phaistos Disc...

"One first needs an established text. A surprising number of would-be decipherers have relied on the drawing published by Evans in 1909, which is unfortunately wrong; Evans' draughtsman drew five dots at the start of face B, but only four at the start of face A, even though Evans explicitly mentioned "a line showing five punctuations on both sides of the disc." This drawing has fooled many a good soul, even Alice Kober. To 'correct' an established text is impermissible, and dooms any attempt at a credible decipherment.

It's also apparently necessary to read the disc from exterior to interior, as it was stamped that way, following 'a spiral incised by a stylus', although corrections were made to the original - that in itself might imply some sort of authenticity, or else why bother correcting something that isn't real in the first place?

I suppose it could also just be an abstract creation of whoever made it, with no particular purpose in mind - or it could be a real fake from the past, created by someone who duped someone else into thinking it contained some or other arcane power to predict the future, or confer something special on the owner.

Here are some amusing extracts, quoted from the Minerva print edition, which would appear to swing the argument towards the disc being a fake, a practical joke played on someone who was exhorted to utter these sayings without understanding their true meaning, or just rambling gibberish from an ancient, wandering mind...

I'm no expert on Minoans or decipherment or any ancient language, heaven knows, but the article is, it must be said, hilarious. The translation compilation alone contains such entertainments, from the mystic ("Helmsman's-rhythm-beating-call of the blossoming radiant heaven's tree dweller"), to the romantic ("Blissful lady of the labyrinth, blissful Isonoia, lady of the coffins") to the political ("Hear ye Cretans! Quick, quick") to the instructional ("Enter the grove of Elaia: Ignite smoothened wood all around"), to the overtly sexual ("I want to wet, plow your field").

Whilst looking for additional links, I found this PDF, in which Yves Duhoux's review can be found in full - scroll down to page 185 of 234 (listed as page 599) to read it.

The pdf itself appears to be the complete issue of 'The American Journal of Archaeology' - Vol. 104, Number 3, July 2000.

Stimulus Respond - 'Time' - Preview Online

Stimulus Respond - Literature | Fashion | Art | Photography | Music | Poetry

The new issue, 'Time' can be previewed online by following this link, and here's a list of the contents and contributors...

Literature...

Carol Mavor - Ni-Ni Adolescence: Finding Boyishness with Bernard Faucon and Roland Barthes

Pierre Auboiron - When Memory Became Visible

Phil Sawdon - An Allegorical Nonsense for Three Players

Niven Govinden - Cake Before Country

Art...

Julie Masterson
Chrystel Lebas

Fashion...

Villa
Vintages Ago

Music...

Thomas Truax, Ciam

Poetry...

Geraldine Monk
Frances Presley
Robert Hampson

plus others

Four-week Excavation at the Ring of Brodgar - Orkneyjar

Orkneyjar Archaeology News - Four-week excavation at the Ring of Brodgar

This coming weekend will see the start of month of excavations at the Ring of Brodgar, as archaeologists attempt to discover more about the stone circle's origins, when it was constructed and maybe even why; this from Orkneyjar...

The month-long programme of investigations, which start next week, will be undertaken by a 15-strong team of archaeologists and scientists from Orkney College, the University of The Highlands and Islands, University of Manchester, Stirling University and The Scottish Universities Environment Reactor Centre.

Their aim will be to gather information which will enable a much better understanding of the nature of the iconic site.

Very little is actually known about the stone circle, including its exact age and the number of megaliths it once contained.

The last excavation on the ring was in the early 1970s by Professor Lord Colin Renfrew. Since then, significant developments have taken place in analytical techniques such as dating.

It is therefore hoped that the new investigations to retrieve datable material and examine archaeological and palaeo-environmental material, will reveal facts about the Ring of Brodgar and help its mysteries to be unravelled.

The excavation will follow in the footsteps of Colin Renfrew, who I think was following on from work done in the late 1920s by Gordon Childe, so it will be interesting indeed to see what new information comes to light; assuming there are updates during the course of the imminent excavations, I'll post more news as it becomes available.

In the meantime, this page at Orkneyjar is worth checking, as is the rest of their excellent website, although as yet I haven't found much in the way of academic papers which discuss past excavations at this site specifically, but here's a link to the abstract of a paper from 2006, by Gordon Noble, namely...

'Harnessing the waves: Monuments and Ceremonial Complexes in Orkney and Beyond'

...and one from 1996, by Dr. Colin Richards, who will be involved in the forthcoming dig...

'Monuments as Landscape: Creating the Centre of the World in Late Neolithic Orkney'

see also :: Orkney Archaeology Tours, which has an article on the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, aka ORCA.

and : Philip Coppens :: Orcadian Stones

image by Andrew Nixon from here

Save That Cave #1 : Praileaitz, Palaeolithic Art in Danger

Leherensuge: Praileaitz, Paleolithic Art in Danger

Over recent months there has been worrying news of several caves in Europe containing rock art from the Magdalenian or earlier, which are in grave danger of being damaged beyond repair, and in the longer term, maybe even destroyed. Readers may be familiar with the woes of Lascaux, whilst there's danger to the even older Paglicci cave in Italy from structural collapse.

In the first of what for obvious reasons, I hope won't be an overly long series of posts, here's a look at just such an endangered - and only recently discovered - site, namely Praileaitz, in the Basque Country of northern Iberia, as described over at Leherensuge...

Briefly: the cave of Praileaitz is a very original Paleolithic (probably Magdalenian) site in the Western Basque Country (Deba, Gipuzkoa), where unusual portable art and some abstract mural art has been found. It is believed that some sort of witch or shaman lived there and has been therefore nicknamed "the Shaman's Cave".

Praileaitz is different from any other cave of that era I can think of off-hand, as it appears that an individual occupant had spent some time there, and was alone responsible for what has been found there, as we see from this, via Stone Pages...

Praileaitz means in Basque "rock of the monk" and the cave has been nicknamed as "the shaman's cave", because the initial research suggested it was used by possibly a single person, speculated to be some sort of shaman or medicine-person (or at least artist).

Naturzaleak: Los tesoros escondidos de Deba (The hidden treasuries of Deba). General article on the cave that goes in some more detail about the findings of the cave and its archaeological history (see translated excerpts):

Without diminishing the importance of other nearby caves, Praileaitz is special because of its meaning, and because of what has been found in it: it is believed that in this cave lived a single person, maybe a wise person or a shaman, to whom the rest of (the community) groups would visit to consult on matters of life or related to hunting.

Also, in Praileaitz were found five necklaces dated to 15,500 years ago, with as many as 29 hanging pieces made up with polished black stones that had been gathered at Deba river, not far from the site.

The cave (...) was discovered by Mikel Sasieta and Juan Arruabarrena in 1983. Later, since the year 2000, the Archaeology team of Aranzadi Scientific Society, lead by Xabier Peñalver, retook the excavations that culminated in 2005 with the discovery of the black stones.

All well and good, until we learn that local quarrying activities threaten to damage the extremely fragile environment of the cave, a situation exacerbated by the fact the there is only a 50m exclusion zone around the site, as opposed to the 500m which has been suggested by Dr.Jean Clottes, which he believes is necessary to stop further encroachment on the site. Indeed, this exclusion zone is aimed more at protecting the archaeologists, rather than the cave in which the excavations are being undertaken, and they believe the integrity of the cave should be given far greater consideration than has thus far been the case.

The immediate danger is that posed by explosives detonated to extract the rock, and in this instance there is a 100m exclusion zone around the cave - but as anyone who has witnessed quarrying in progress, it's quite common for the percussive effects of such explosions to be felt throughout an entire valley - I recall being in the Cueva de las Monedas at Monte Castillo, and even within the deep recesses of that cave, it was still, possible to detect the occasional boom from across the valley, at least - and probably a lot more than - 500m distant, so a 100m explosion exclusion zone at Praileaitz would seem to be completely inadequate.

Although this distance of 100m applies to the cave entrance, with the painted galleries being situated further inside, we have seen from the sorry saga at Lascaux what can happen when the cave entrance is compromised; I hope to post a Lascaux update, reporting on the mould on the walls that threatens the very existence of some of the paintings there, in the near future.

At particular risk in the case of Praileaitz are the so-called banners, of which I think this image is a fair example - some detail from Stone Pages, quoting Jean Clottes...

The mural paintings are often on very fragile geological structures, called banners (as you can see in the previous post), for which "the smallest vibration, even of low intensity, is potentially dangerous".

The French expert believes that if the principle of precaution is applied to people, like archaeologists working in the cave, with even more reason it should be applied to the cave and the art inside it.

Additionally the visual and environmental impact caused by the quarry is already big and, with the current minimal protection measures would be much larger in the near future.

Clottes emphasizes that it is most important "to protect the side of the hill that faces the Deba river", where the cave is. Why? Because of (a) "the principle of precaution" and ( "the protection of the environmental context of the site".

The mural paintings are often on very fragile geological structures, called banners (as you can see in the previous post), for which "the smallest vibration, even of low intensity, is potentially dangerous". The French expert believes that if the principle of precaution is applied to people, like archaeologists working in the cave, with even more reason it should be applied to the cave and the art inside it.

Additionally the visual and environmental impact caused by the quarry is already big and, with the current minimal protection measures would be much larger in the near future.

Clottes also supports the continuity of field work in the cave. He argues that the impact that archaeologists could have on the art would be minimal, negligible, specially in comparison with the already massive environmental alterations caused by the quarry.

Clottes argues that the paintings are without doubt Paleolithic but he thinks they belong to the Magdalenian period, some 15,000 years BP. This in contrast to his colleague Marcos García, who claimed they are pre-Magdalenian (Solutrean?) with an antiquity of c. 18,000 BP.

Here's a link to a QuickTime movie of the cave interior, what has been found, and the archaeologists working therein - there's no sound, but it becomes apparent from even the few brief minutes of the video, this is a unique cave complex, and one that clearly needs to be protected in order that research can continue while it's still in a relatively pristine state, and then preserved accordingly once the research has been completed - something I can imagine would take several years to finish - and who knows what further discoveries might come to light during that time.

Here's some explanatory, or at least interpretative discussion of why this cave is so special, once more translated for us by Maju at Stone Pages, originally sourced from here...

After gathering the stones, the only inhabitant of the cave decorated almost all of them. "Pierces them to make them able for hanging and appear those beads, grouped in necklaces in different places of the two rooms that we have excavated by the moment. We were lucky, also, because a stalagmite layer had totally sealed the site, so it was totally virgin, absolutely untouched. It was perfectly preserved", recalls Peñalver.

But, besides this, we also found several ochre pencils, that he/she used to paint him/herself and that showed he marks and faceting of having been used. "There are also more than 200 sea snails... All elements are, let's say, related with that activity that surely was of ritual type.

We think that it would be a single person because at the entrance there is a bonfire, some bones of what that person ate and natural stone with a concavity where that person sat near the fire. This person could have some knowledge or special characteristics that made him the referent of all nearby caves. Possibly he/she was someone with knowledge maybe of medicine, maybe of hunting strategies, or knowledge of the area or something else that was asked by other inhabitants around", they say.

Praileaitz is totally different and absolutely unique if compared with other caves around. "It fulfills a different role. No other sites of this type are known, not just in our country but neither elsewhere - because, even if there are sites that have important ornaments, these appear mixed with, say, normal elements (...) Praileaitz gives the impression of being more specialized [than Ekain], in the sense that it seems that all the activity there realized was related with these rites", said Xabier Peñalver.

This story takes on extra urgency as we learn of what has gone on there in the past...

The excavations and the findings have been done in Praileaitz I. But there was also a Praileaitz II, now vanished and excavated by Eloisa Uribarri a decade ago.

Praileaitz II disapepared because of the work of the Sasiola quarry and it is precisely this industrial explotation which caused in some way that the research in Praileaitz I began. "Praileaitz II was at a higher altitude and now there is nothing there anymore. Praileaitz I is in that area too and that is why we began to excavate in the year 2000, because it was going to be affected by the quarry", explain from Aranzadi.

Caves containing rock art from this era are particularly vulnerable to the attentions and predations of the modern world - Altamira, in Cantabria, and of course Lascaux, have both had to be closed to the public because of damage caused by the respiration of human visitors, and the disastrous impact of unsuitable ventilation systems installed at Lascaux - both these and numerous other sites from the Palaeolithic era had been more or less sealed - by rockfalls etc - for many thousands of years, protecting their unique micro-climates from damage and degradation. It could be argued in both cases, that mistakes had been made, some lessons learned, and some remedial action taken -with varying degrees of success.

But in the case of Praileaitz, the situation is somewhat different - large-scale quarrying activities were already taking place in the vicinity long before the discovery of the cave in recent years - and it's thought that structural damage may already have been done...

Also the Deputy of Culture has announced that the study by the University of Cantabria have found breaking lines in the rock, some of which cross the cave, and a serious problem of stalactic corrosion that may affect the paintings "in a relatively short geological time frame" - (what's that: ten or ten thousand years?).

The research has also found eight new caves one of which also has remains of paleontological interest. The evalution of the archaeological interest of these other caves will be done in the upcoming months. (source: Gara)

It's no surprise to learn that the local government ostensibly isn't enthusiastic about doing anything to protect the site that might harm local commerce - this is probably partly due to the fact that Spain is currently undergoing something of an economic downturn - although apparently the Basque Country isn't as yet affected as badly as other regions across Spain - and that industrial enterprises such as the quarrying at Praileaitz generate jobs and income in the local economy.

In Britain, for example, there has been a similar type of situation in Yorkshire, at Thornborough Henges, where building material extraction in the immediate vicinity of that site has damaged part of it already, and there have been rumours that findings have been under-reported, and the significance of the site under-played; and that's as nothing compared to the apparent shenanigans at Tara in Eire, whilst the very unsatisfactory outcome regarding the Rothwerwas Ribbon/Dinedor Serpent, where construction of a local service road, deemed unworthy of official government funding, went ahead anyway, at the behest of Herefordshire Council in league with local businesses, an unsavoury episode that will doubtless leave a sour taste for many years to come.

As for the lamentable state of affairs at Stonehenge, it's difficult to over-state the incompetence and irresponsibility of successive UK governments, who apart from having blown a cool £30 million plus on consultants' fees, have effectively stood by as the site and its decrepit facilities crumble and collapse, while increasingly heavy road traffic threatens the monument and surrounding landscape - see this from the Guardian, via Eternal Idol.

So it's difficult to know whether to be optimistic or not regarding the future of Praileaitz - hopefully the local authorities can be prevailed upon to upgrade the site's importance at a local level, which surely is one that should be granted a World Heritage status of the highest order, as soon as is humanly possible. I don't believe for one minute that the appalling state of affairs afflicting archaeological sites in the UK would be repeated in Guipúzcoa, the province in which Deba, the nearest town to Praileaitz, is located. But on the other hand, the commercial sector has a great deal of influence, and could reasonably argue that whilst they produce not only jobs and income, but also provide the raw material for the infrastructure, in the guise of roads and buildings etc., which are so greatly in demand from the public as a whole.

But as I've said before, financial cost expressed as profit and loss doesn't always - if ever- equate to cultural value, especially when such assets are by their nature, unique and utterly irreplaceable - and bearing in mind the vast amounts of quarrying materials that abound across the region, surely it isn't asking too much for one of the most important Palaeolithic discoveries ever made, not just in the region, but the entire world, to be granted the due care and consideration it truly deserves.

In the meantime, here's a final word from Diego, the administrator on the Stone Pages Archaeo Forums, who has this to add...

During our recent journey through Northern Spain, we met Xavier Peñalver - the archaeologist who is leading the excavation at the Praileaitz cave. We talked about this site in his office in San Sebastian and he gave us a vivid picture of the situation. About one year ago the Basque Government issued a statement that established a 50-meter protective area around the central part of the site, but this level of protection is clearly insufficient, because the cave may hide some other rooms and the whole place should be preserved.

Xavier showed us also lots of publications devoted to the preservation of Praileaitz. Among them, one was particularly impressive: a book called "Praileaitz I" containing 210 works of Basque culture representatives who published it in order to raise public awareness about the threatened cave. More info (in Spanish) about that book here.

see also : Amigos de Praileaitz - a blog devoted to highlighting the plight of the site, and whose archives go back to March 2007

Aranzadi Scientific Society

Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival: The Fourth Of July Everything is Just Fine We've Got It Under Control In America Edition

Greg Laden's Blog : Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival: The Fourth Of July Everything is Just Fine We've Got It Under Control In America Edition

It's up, it's running and it's at Greg Laden's blog, so if you want to check the latest edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth, clicking the link above will take you straight there.

The next edition is due out in less than two weeks, although as yet there is no hosting site slated, and anyone able or willing to host the next time round is strongly encouraged to apply for the vacancy.

image from here

The Archaeology Channel - The Looting of the Iraq Museum: An Interview with Donny George - video

The Archaeology Channel - The Looting of the Iraq Museum: An Interview with Donny George

Here's the latest offering from TAC, and once again we return to the scene of one of the most sustained attacks on a nation's heritage in recent years, that of Iraq, from where a vast amount of antiquities has been looted, and smuggled out into the hands of any number of greed-crazed traders and a veritable army of private collectors, all intent on taking advantage of the chaos that ensued after the US-led coalition invasion of that country back in March 2003.

Before discussing this video specifically, here's a little contextual background from a recent essay at TomDispatch, 'The Good News From Iraq' (Don't Count On It), penned by Tom Engelhardt...

"On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation.

"My fellow citizens," he began, "at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." We were entering Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."

Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted, pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and interior ministries -- were just looted shells.

Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were already bringing in the administration's crony corporations -- Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish off the job of looting the country under the rubric of "reconstruction."

Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend" $20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no effect whatsoever. They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the competition.)"

The reason I included that brief excerpt is to reiterate that whilst the pillaging of Iraq's archaeological heritage is bad enough, there has been a great deal more damage caused to the infrastructure, all done in the name of freedom, democracy and whatever other words the Bush administration deemed suitable to whip up media and public support for their disastrous - and probably illegal - assault on Iraq.

And so to the interview itself, which takes the form of an informal chat between Rick Pettigrew of TAC and Donny George, the former man in charge of the Baghdad Museum, who was eventually forced to flee to the US from Iraq because of death threats to members of his own family; had he stayed in Baghdad it's possible that Donny George might through his influence have been able to co-ordinate some sort of remedial or preventative action regarding the overall situation of looting in Iraq, and I suppose this was the reason certain people didn't want him there.

Running to around 45 minutes, the interview covers a lot of ground, and takes place in the wake of the TAC Film and Video Festival which had taken place a few days beforehand - there is no footage of events that took place in Iraq, or indeed of any of the thousands of missing artefacts or the damage done to the museum, or the thousands of looted and damaged sites elsewhere across Iraq, which was known in the past as Mesopotamia, i.e., the place-between-two rivers, which 5,000 years ago, was one of the birthplaces of what we refer to as modern civilisation.

And although I've covered some of this in previous posts, it's worth going over some of the more salient points, because the situation in Iraq has scarcely improved since I last wrote, and it's important to remind ourselves of the true scale of the destruction that has been witnessed there. In my opinion, it's as well as to warn how this disaster might well be repeated in the future, should there be further outbreaks of full-scale war and/or natural disasters at other locations across the Middle East and the world as a whole, giving similar opportunities to robbers, agents and associated collectors, eager to gorge themselves on ever larger quantities of loot and cash, at everyone else's expense.

The interview begins with the looting of the Baghdad Museum, which took place between the 10th and 12th of April 2003, and the immediate aftermath - Dr. George describes the scene as if a hurricane had hit from the inside, and then finding his office knee-deep in broken objects, desk smashed, computers and cameras all gone; to heap woe upon yet more misery, even the coffee-machine had been stolen.

We are told how in the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq, people were taking measures to protect their personal property in expectation of the mayhem that would accompany the coming war (in one instance, a friend had sealed his brand new Mercedes into his own house) - Dr. George requested that the contents of the Baghdad Museum should be put in sealed and secure storage, as had been the case in Lebanon - in 15 years of war, the Lebanese apparently didn't lose a single item from their museum inventory.

But Dr. George's request was ignored, on the basis that as long as Saddam was in power, the museum would be safe - and thus the sorry tale unfolded along its predicted fault-lines - Dr. George moved into the museum complex, and awoke one day to the sounds of gunfire in the locality - the US military was in town, and Dr. George expected to meet and greet the American forces, whom he imagined would take charge of the museum and thus keep it protected. Instead he was forced to leave the premises for fear of getting caught in the cross-fire, and that was the last time he saw the museum intact.

He first got word of the ransacking there when it was announced on April 12th, 2003, by the BBC, and thus it was he went with his colleague the following day to ask the local US forces to protect the museum - all to no avail.

Which is hardly surprising, given the events that had allegedly taken place on April 10th - a large crowd, numbering between 300 and 400 had assembled outside the museum, brandishing a variety of crowbars and other implements with which to break into the museum. An employee of museum saw this, and asked a nearby US tank commander to help prevent the crowd from breaking in - but despite a radioed request, permission to defend the museum was denied - and upon seeing this, the crowd immediately broke in and went on the rampage.

One slightly less publicised aspect of the looting took place in the National Library and Archives, as well as the library of Mosul, although the Baghdad Museum library survived largely intact, as Dr. George had previously been able to put 100,000 books and manuscripts into safe storage elsewhere.

As well as being horrified at the ransacking that took place, Dr. George is particularly mystified as to why what could not be stolen, was instead smashed to pieces - there seems to be no clear motive for this, because it is apparent that stealing was the prime motive for those breaking in, and simply breaking stuff they didn't take seems illogical. That may have been because someone was trying to cover up exactly what had been stolen, but it sounds more as if things just got out of hand, and people wanted to break things simply because they were there to be broken.

What disturbs Dr. George greatly is the fact that all this was done by Iraqi citizens, rather than any invading military force - and as he points out, it isn't only Iraq's history that has been looted, but the history of the modern world - he describes how the first writing took hold in early Mesopotamian civilisation and spread throughout the world - the major three world religions can trace their roots back to the same region.

One quite startling statistic emerged later in the interview, when the discussion addressed the broader situation across Iraq as a whole; satellite imagery has revealed that a total of 16 square kilometers of previously unexplored archaeological sites have been destroyed in Iraq. To put that into perspective, we're told that over the last 100 years, only 1.6 square km of properly excavated and recorded sites have been worked by qualified archaeologists - meaning that far from being isolated outbreaks of opportunistic looting, the damage being done is almost on an industrial scale.

The problem is made much worse because nobody knows for sure exactly what was taken, and as such, all that information is now lost for ever - even if artifacts were recovered in the future, the context of their discovery has been lost, meaning that exact dating and relationships with other archaeology cannot be firmly established.

It would not have been possible to protect all these sites beforehand - archaeology is a slow and painstaking business, and as Iraq in its entirety might be regarded as a vast archaeological site in its own right, it would probably have centuries for everything to be recorded and recovered. And bad as the looting of the museum in Baghdad may have been, the perception here is that by far the greatest damage has been done to the unrecorded sites across Iraq.

But given the voracious appetites of private collectors in the First World, most of whom don't care how their ill-gotten treasures are obtained, the situation will continue to exist as long as there is anything left to loot and sell. It's because of the demands of the international market, and the abject poverty of many Iraqis, that many local people are quite prepared to do the spade - (or even mechanical-digger) work, as they often have no other prospect of earning enough money to support their families.

Before the current epidemic of looting, there had been comparatively little robbing and destruction of these sites by local people, as lower demand meant there probably wasn't a great deal of money to be made, and in any case, more people were able to earn a normal living, albeit on a meagre scale. Following an outbreak of looting in the mid-1990s, the archaeological community of Iraq managed to quell and bring the situation back under control.

The final point I'm going to address is the sinister implication that the raid on the Baghdad museum was carefully planned beforehand, as it is clear that many items were specifically targeted by thieves, and Dr. George wants to warn other governments who might face similar situations in the future, either through war and even natural disaster. In his opinion, it's important for designers and builders of prestige museums to construct with security in mind, rather than just assume an electronic security system might suffice.

In times of trouble, all it takes is for the power grid to go down to render electronic security useless - similarly, museum buildings might look good if constructed from materials such as glass, but would be unable to withstand the attentions of mobs and robbers wishing to break in when law and order has broken down. This might sound like bunker mentality, but as the contents of such museums are by their very nature, irreplaceable, it makes sense to construct museums, (and probably libraries etc.) in such a way as to allow them to be quickly and completely locked down in the face of impending trouble and strife visited upon them by the outside world.

Although I've covered a few of the points raised and topics discussed therein, it's well worth taking the time to sit down and watch this talk in full - it might be too late to remedy the situation in Iraq, but at the very least, it should be possible for people to take note of these events, and take appropriate steps to try and ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again to other museums, or for other nations to have their heritage stripped away under cover of warfare instigated,for whatever nefarious reasons by misguided others.

image from here

More Evidence For Comet Over Canada That Killed Clovis and Megafauna

Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened by New Evidence Located in Ohio, Indiana

For many years there has been a mystery as to what exactly brought about the extinction event that wiped out most of America's megafauna almost 13,000 years ago, which had previously been ascribed to the sudden arrival of humankind in the the New World - it had been suggested that a Pleistocene Overkill event had witnessed Ice Age hunters killing so many large animals that population numbers crashed beyond a point of no return.

More recently we have read of how a comet is thought to have exploded high over Canada, and evidence for such a scenario has thus far been intriguing, as archaeologists across a wide range of sites on continental North America, had spotted an anomalous layer in ancient deposits, and how other researchers had debated the origins of the Carolina Bays.

Following on from all this, comes news of how in an attempt to disprove this theory, anthropologist Ken Tankersley succeeded in confirming its probable veracity; this from the University of Cincinnati...

Now University of Cincinnati Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley, working in conjunction with Allen West and Indiana Geological Society Research Scientist Nelson R. Schaffer, has verified evidence from sites in Ohio and Indiana – including, locally, Hamilton and Clermont counties in Ohio and Brown County in Indiana – that offers the strongest support yet for the exploding comet/asteroid theory.

Samples of diamonds, gold and silver that have been found in the region have been conclusively sourced through X-ray diffractometry in the lab of UC Professor of Geology Warren Huff back to the diamond fields region of Canada.

The only plausible scenario available now for explaining their presence this far south is the kind of cataclysmic explosive event described by West’s theory. "We believe this is the strongest evidence yet indicating a comet impact in that time period," says Tankersley...

...Tankersley was familiar through years of work in this area with the diamonds, gold and silver deposits, which at one point could be found in such abundance in this region that the Hopewell Indians who lived here about 2,000 years ago engaged in trade in these items.

Prevailing thought said that these deposits, which are found at a soil depth consistent with the time frame of the comet/asteroid event, had been brought south from the Great Lakes region by glaciers.

"My smoking gun to disprove (West) was going to be the gold, silver and diamonds," Tankersley says. "But what I didn’t know at that point was a conclusion he had reached that he had not yet made public – that the likely point of impact for the comet wasn’t just anywhere over Canada, but located over Canada’s diamond-bearing fields. Instead of becoming the basis for rejecting his hypothesis, these items became the very best evidence to support it."

Much of the work is being done in Sheriden Cave in north-central Ohio’s Wyandot County, a rich repository of material dating back to the Ice Age.

Sheriden Cave is an interesting site in its own right, as we see from the abstract of a 2005 paper titled 'Evidence of Early Paleoindian Bone Modification and Use at the Sheriden Cave Site (33WY252), Wyandot County, Ohio', from which the following abstract is taken...

The analysis of osseous (bone, antler, or ivory) beveled shafts or "rods" has become an important focus in the study of early Paleoindian tool technology. Since 1995 two carved and beveled bone rods have been recovered from Sheriden Cave in northwest Ohio in depositional strata that are radiocarbon dated to between 11,060 and 10,400 radiocarbon years B.P. These strata also contained a small, reworked, Gainey-style fluted point; cut and burned animal bone; and the remains of flat-headed peccary, caribou, giant beaver, and other taxa.

The tapered tips and overall morphology of the bone rods demonstrate that they served as projectile points as opposed to other functional types such as fore shafts. Microscopic and radiographic examinations of the bone points reveal that they were manufactured from split sections of mega-mammal bone.

These artifacts resemble bone and ivory points found at early Paleoindian sites in western North America and northern Florida but also bear significant morphological similarities to bone sugaie or javelin tips known from Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe. The close spatial and temporal associations between the Sheriden Cave artifacts suggest that they represent the remains of an early Paleoindian tool cache within a small resource extraction campsite.

We don't know what impact the putative comet would have had on the cultural life of humans living a millennia or two after the event, but it would be most interesting to know if this disaster had been passed on down the generations through word of mouth, and how this event had been interpreted. Neither will we ever know whether this catastrophe prompted the first mythologies of the New World, whether it replaced earlier ones, or even whether it even became part of mythology at all, but it's a fair bet that the story lived on in the minds of people for many generations thereafter.

Whether some or all Palaeoindians understood that a vast amount of floral and faunal life had disappeared because of a natural catastrophe, or whether they thought that humans and animals together had been punished for whatever reasons by presumably angry gods, is open to speculation - I don't know of any contemporary rock art which might depict such an event, or indeed anything else from around the world at that time that appears to directly refer to it.

However, there are at least two possible references to the events of 13 kya, expressed in the folklore of bothe the Iroquois and Pawnee Indians, and detailed in a book called 'The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes', of which Allen West is one of the co-authors.

I can't find an online text to copy and paste from at the moment, but the book reproduces an Iroquois myth, 'The Monster Mammoth and the Horned Serpent' from which this is a brief extract...

"Gradually, Thunder's onslaught drove the serpent back into the deepest part of the Lake (Ontario), but he could not kill it. In one final attempt, Thunder hurled down the most powerful thunderbolt ever seen. The concussion was so great that the mountains shook and entire forests blew over.

The stars broke loose from the sky, and some came falling down to Earth. Fearing for the safety of the tribe, Thunder tried to catch the stars, but he could not reach them all. The falling stars hurtled right toward the Iroquois camp, hissing with a fiery glare. With a ferocious blast and scorching heat, a star smashed into the Earth near their camp, blasting earth and trees in all directions.

Another star fell right into the Lake on top of the Horned Serpent, wounding it with a huge explosion of steam. The great serpent thrashed its tail in pain, and each whip of its tail sent gigantic waves coursing down the river valleys, and surging over the hills in a series of colossal floods." (retold from E. Johnson, 1881)

The above was taken from Chapter 19, 'The Main Craters' which posits that there were probably multiple impact sites; next we have this from Chapter 20,'Bays on the High Plains' which looks at craters similar to the Carolina Bays, but which are to be found 1200 miles away in Nebraska. Here's an excerpt from a story related by the Pawnee tribe, 'Stuck in the Mud', and addresses the topic of the vanished megafauna, whom having been made by Tirawa, the Creator, apparently went on something of a global rampage...

"Being so big and powerful, they did what they wanted.

After a while, they began fighting with each other to see who was the greatest and most powerful among them. This led to many fierce struggles, and their constant fighting tore up the forests, dug up the prairies, and knocked down the mountains. Because they were so strong, there was great destruction."

We are then told how Tirawa invoked a mighty flood, which caused all the large animals to drown, as they became bogged down in a rising sea of mud...

"...When Tirawa saw that all of them were finished, the god waved a hand over the land, causing the sun to dry out the Earth"

The first humans were then created, and from which all subsequent Pawnee were descended...

"Now when the Pawnee walk along the the riverbanks, sometimes they find giant bones sticking out of the silt and mud. These are the bones from the animals that Tirawa drowned. They are there as a reminder not to forget the Creator." (retold from Grinnell, 1889).

The January 2008 issue of 'Mammoth Trumpet' has a related (PDF) article, 'The Clovis Comet', from which this is the closing segment...

Although the jury’s still out on the matter, the clues unearthed by West and his team point toward a catastrophic impact at the end of the Clovis era.

But what happened, exactly? The details remain sketchy, but the culprit was apparently a heavily fragmented multi-kilometer-sized icy body, similar to but much larger than the Tunguska impactor, which exploded over the continental ice sheet covering northeastern
Canada.

A cushion of ice 1 to 2 miles thick, after all, might explain why an impact crater associated with the event hasn’t been found. While West admits that the absence of a crater blunts the theory, he argues that the other evidence more than makes up for it.

“We have more than 14 lines of evidence that there was an impact,” he points out. “We tell the people who don’t believe this to point to a single place in the geological record where all these markers occur that isn’t considered an impact.”

This week marked the centenary of the Tunguska event of 1908, when something much smaller exploded over Siberia, directly affecting an area of some 2,000 square km.)

As we have seen, Western Europe may well have also been affected by this comet, as research from from Lommel in Belgium, and mentioned in the MT article linked to above appear to indicate.

Here's a final snippet from the University of Cincinnati news article...

The timing attached to this theory of about 12,900 years ago is consistent with the known disappearances in North America of the wooly mammoth population and the first distinct human society to inhabit the continent, known as the Clovis civilization. At that time, climatic history suggests the Ice Age should have been drawing to a close, but a rapid change known as the Younger Dryas event, instead ushered in another 1,300 years of glacial conditions. A cataclysmic explosion consistent with West’s theory would have the potential to create the kind of atmospheric turmoil necessary to produce such conditions.

"The kind of evidence we are finding does suggest that climate change at the end of the last Ice Age was the result of a catastrophic event," Tankersley says.

Currently, Tankersley can be seen in a new documentary airing on the National Geographic channel. The film "Asteroids" is part of that network’s "Naked Science" series.

The new discoveries made working with West and Schaffer will be incorporated into two more specials that Tankersley is currently involved with – one for the PBS series "Nova" and a second for the History Channel that will be filming Tankersley and his UC students in the field this summer. Another documentary, this one being produced by the Discovery Channel and the British public television network Channel 4, will also be following Tankersley and his students later this summer.

There should be plenty more on this over the coming months and years, which hopefully will be addressed in as yet unwritten posts on this blog.

see also: The 2008 Allendale Paleoamerican Expedition