remote central

Green Stone Beads At The Dawn of Agriculture - a review

2008-07-23T04:08:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-17T02:37:00.002+02:00

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

2008-07-16T15:45:00.004+02:00

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

2008-07-16T09:00:00.022+02:00

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.