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AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 10 January 2022: Archaeologists from the University of Western Australia (UWA) have determined that the people who lived in ancient north-west Arabia built long-distance ‘funerary avenues’ – major pathways flanked by thousands of burial monuments that linked oases and pastures – suggesting a high degree of social and economic connection between the region’s populations in the 3^rd millennium BCE.

Publication of the findings in the journal The Holocene caps a year of tremendous progress by the UWA team, working under the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), in shedding light on the lives of the ancient inhabitants of Arabia.

The existence of the funerary avenues suggests that complex social horizons existed 4,500 years ago across a huge swathe of the Arabian Peninsula. The finding adds to the steady progress by archaeologists working under the auspices of RCU in understanding the hidden story of the ancient kingdoms and earlier societies of north Arabia.

The UWA team’s work is part of a wider effort that includes 13 archaeological and conservation project teams from around the world collaborating with Saudi experts in AlUla and neighbouring Khaybar counties in Saudi Arabia.

Amr AlMadani, CEO of RCU, said: “The more we learn about the ancient inhabitants of north-west Arabia, the more we are inspired by the way our mission reflects their mindset: they lived in harmony with nature, honoured their predecessors, and reached out to the wider world. The work done by our archaeological teams in 2021 demonstrates that Saudi Arabia is a home for top-flight science – and we look forward to hosting more research teams in 2022.”

Dr. Rebecca Foote, Director of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Research for RCU, said: “Projects that have been conducting fieldwork in AlUla and Khaybar for over three years, such as the UWA team, have started publishing their results, and it is terrific to see how analyses of the data are elucidating so many aspects of life from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in north-west Arabia. These articles are just the beginning of the many publications that will advance our knowledge of prehistoric to modern times and have significant implications for the wider region.”

The new article is the UWA team’s fourth publication in less than a year in a peer-reviewed scientific journal on research at AlUla and Khaybar:

• In August in the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy the team dated the pendant-shaped tombs of the Khaybar Oasis to the 3^rd millennium BCE – the first published radiocarbon evidence dating the tombs. This was also the first article in a peer-reviewed journal regarding the Bronze Age in Khaybar. Archaeological exploration of the mysteries of Khaybar is still in its infancy.
• In April the team wrote in the journal Antiquity that the monumental structures known as mustatils are much older than previously believed, dating as far back as 5,200 BCE, and appear to have had a ritual function.
• In March the team reported in the Journal of Field Archaeology that they had discovered the remains of the oldest known domesticated dog in Arabia.

The UWA team’s latest research, with Dr Matthew Dalton as lead author, used satellite imagery analysis, aerial photography, ground survey and excavation to locate and analyse funerary avenues over an area of at least 160,000 square km in north-west Arabia. They recorded more than 17,800 ‘pendant’ tombs in their primary study areas of AlUla and Khaybar counties, of which around 11,000 formed part of funerary avenues.

Whether on basalt plains or mountain passes, the densest concentrations of funerary structures on these avenues are located near permanent water sources. The direction of the avenues suggests that many were used to travel between major oases, including those of Khaybar, AlUla and Tayma. Other avenues fade into the landscapes surrounding oases, suggesting they were used to move herds of domestic animals into nearby pastures during periods of rain.

Dr. Hugh Thomas, project director, said: “The research by the UWA team and our colleagues working across AlUla and Khaybar shows how important the archaeology of this region is for our understanding of the Neolithic and Bronze Age across the Middle East. Our findings demonstrate that these structures linked various populated oases, situated across a vast area, and that the funerary avenues were established around 4,500 years ago. They are especially dense around Khaybar, which is one of the densest visible funerary landscapes anywhere in the world.”

The RCU has embarked on a 15-year masterplan, The Journey Through Time, to regenerate AlUla and parts of Khaybar as a leading global destination for cultural and natural heritage.

The archaeological research in AlUla and Khaybar counties by teams from Saudi Arabia and abroad is deepening and nuancing The Journey Through Time narrative of the region and providing a foundation for the Kingdoms Institute, a world-class centre for archaeological and conservation research with a focus on AlUla’s 200,000 years of human history.

This flagship institution, now active as a research organisation, will open its doors to the public as a permanent physical presence at AlUla by 2030. Its most prominent buildings will be established at the red sandstone mountains opposite the archaeological site of Dadan, with design inspired by the Dadanite civilisation that prospered during the heyday of the incense trade in the 1^st millennium BCE.

José Ignacio Gallego Revilla, RCU’s Archaeology, Heritage Research and Conservation Executive Director, said: “There is much more to come in 2022 and the years ahead as we reveal the depth and breadth of the area’s archaeological heritage, which for decades was underrepresented but which will finally have the showcase it deserves in the Kingdoms Institute.”

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Above and below: Pendant tombs and funerary avenues discovered in north-west Saudi Arabia. Courtesy Royal Commission for AlUla.

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Article Source: Royal Commission for AlUla news release.

About the Royal Commission for AlUla

The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) was established by royal decree in July 2017 to preserve and develop AlUla, a region of outstanding natural and cultural significance in north-west Saudi Arabia. RCU’s long-term plan outlines a responsible, sustainable, and sensitive approach to urban and economic development, that preserves the area’s natural and historic heritage, while establishing AlUla as a desirable location to live, work, and visit. This encompasses a broad range of initiatives across archaeology, tourism, culture, education, and the arts, reflecting a commitment to meeting the economic diversification, local community empowerment, and heritage preservation priorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 programme.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – RIVERSIDE—A new study* casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. 

There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation.

However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

“Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,” Santiago said.

Some of the toughest plants the Maya would have turned to include cassava with its edible tubers, and hearts of palm. Another is chaya, a shrub domesticated by the Maya and eaten today by their descendants. Its leaves are high in protein, iron, potassium, and calcium.

“Chaya and cassava together would have provided a huge amount of carbohydrates and protein,” Santiago said. 

Unable to find a master list of indigenous Maya food plants, Fedick recently compiled and published one that draws on decades of Maya plant knowledge. Faced with much speculation about drought as the cause of Maya social disruptions, he and Santiago decided to examine all 497 plants on the list for drought tolerance. 

“When botanists study drought resistance, they’re usually talking about a specific plant, or a particular ecosystem,” Fedick said. “One of the reasons this project was so challenging is because we examined the dietary flora of an entire civilization — annuals, perennials, herbs, trees, domesticates, and wild species. It was a unique endeavor.”

Though the researchers do not have a clear answer about why ancient Maya society unraveled, they suspect social and economic upheaval played a role. 

“One thing we do know is the overly simplistic explanation of drought leading to agricultural collapse is probably not true,” Fedick said. 

The research also demonstrates the importance of exploiting a variety of plants to survive drought and climate change. 

“Even given a series of droughts, maintaining a diversity of resilient crops would enable people, both ancient and modern, to adapt and survive,” Santiago said.

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Cassava, a drought-resistant edible plant grown by the ancient Maya. Thamizhpparithi Maari

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – RIVERSIDE news release

*Large variation in availability of Maya food plant sources during ancient droughts, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 4-Jan-2022. 10.1073/pnas.2115657118 

Cover image, top left: Early Maya mask. Wolfgang Sauber, Public Domain

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UNIVERSITY OF READING—Human DNA can be extracted from the ‘cement’ head lice used to glue their eggs to hairs thousands of years ago, scientists have found, which could provide an important new window into the past.

In a new study, scientists for the first time recovered DNA from cement on hairs taken from mummified remains that date back 1,500-2,000 years. This is possible because skin cells from the scalp become encased in the cement produced by female lice as they attach eggs, known as nits, to the hair.

Analysis of this newly-recovered ancient DNA – which was of better quality than that recovered through other methods – has revealed clues about pre-Columbian human migration patterns within South America.  This method could allow many more unique samples to be studied from human remains where bone and tooth samples are unavailable.

The research was led by the University of Reading, working in collaboration with the National University of San Juan, Argentina; Bangor University, Wales; the Oxford University Museum of Natural History; and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Dr Alejandra Perotti, Associate Professor in Invertebrate Biology at the University of Reading, who led the research, said: “Like the fictional story of mosquitos encased in amber in the film Jurassic Park, carrying the DNA of the dinosaur host, we have shown that our genetic information can be preserved by the sticky substance produced by headlice on our hair.  In addition to genetics, lice biology can provide valuable clues about how people lived and died thousands of years ago.

“Demand for DNA samples from ancient human remains has grown in recent years as we seek to understand migration and diversity in ancient human populations. Headlice have accompanied humans throughout their entire existence, so this new method could open the door to a goldmine of information about our ancestors, while preserving unique specimens.”

Until now, ancient DNA has preferably been extracted from dense bone from the skull or from inside teeth, as these provide the best quality samples. However, skull and teeth remains are not always available, as it can be unethical or against cultural beliefs to take samples from indigenous early remains, and due to the severe damage destructive sampling causes to the specimens which compromise future scientific analysis.

Recovering DNA from the cement delivered by lice is therefore a solution to the problem, especially as nits are commonly found on the hair and clothes of well preserved and mummified humans.

The research team extracted DNA from nit cement of specimens collected from a number of mummified remains from Argentina. The mummies were of people who 1,500-2,000 years ago reached the Andes mountains of the San Juan province, Central West Argentina. The team also studied ancient nits on human hair used in a textile from Chile and nits from a shrunken head originating from the ancient Jivaroan people of Amazonian Ecuador.

The samples used for DNA studies of nit cement were found to contain the same concentration of DNA as a tooth, double that of bone remains, and four times that recovered from blood inside far more recent lice specimens.

Dr Mikkel Winther Pedersen from the GLOBE institute at the University of Copenhagen, and first author, said: “The high amount of DNA yield from these nit cements really came as a surprise to us and it was striking to me that such small amounts could still give us all this information about who these people were, and how the lice related to other lice species but also giving us hints to possible viral diseases.

“There is a hunt out for alternative sources of ancient human DNA and nit cement might be one of those alternatives. I believe that future studies are needed before we really unravel this potential.”

As well as the DNA analysis, scientists are also able to draw conclusions about a person and the conditions in which they lived from the position of the nits on their hair and from the length of the cement tubes. Their health and even cause of death can be indicated by the interpretation of the biology of the nits.

Analysis of the recovered DNA from nit-cement revealed and confirmed:

• • The sex of each of the human hosts
  • A genetic link between three of the mummies and humans in Amazonia 2,000 years ago. This shows for the first time that the original population of the San Juan province migrated from the land and rainforests of the Amazon in the North of the continent (south of current Venezuela and Colombia).
  • All ancient human remains studied belong to the founding mitochondrial lineages in South America.
  • The earliest direct evidence of Merkel cell Polymavirus was found in the DNA trapped in nit cement from one of the mummies. The virus, discovered in 2008, is shed by healthy human skin and can on rare occasions get into the body and cause skin cancer. The discovery opens up the possibility that head lice could spread the virus.

Analysis of the DNA of the nits, confirmed the same migration pattern for the human lice, from the North Amazonian planes towards Central West Argentina (San Juan Andes).

Morphological analysis of the nits informed that:

• • The mummies were all likely exposed to extremely cold temperatures when they died, which could have been a factor in their deaths. This was indicated by the very small gap between the nits and scalp on the hairs shaft. Lice rely on the host’s head heat to keep their eggs warm and so lay them closer to the scalp in cold environments.
  • Shorter cement tubes on the hair correlated with older and/or less preserved specimens, due to the cement degrading over time.

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A mummified adult man of the Ansilta culture, from the Andes of San Juan, Argentina, dating back approx 2,000 years. Universidad Nacional de San Juan

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF READING news release.

*Ancient human genomes and environmental DNA from the cement attaching 2,000 year-old head lice nits, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 28-Dec-2021. 10.1093/molbev/msab351 

FRONTIERS—All the royal mummies found in the 19th and 20th centuries have long since been opened for study. With one exception: egyptologists have never been bold enough to open the mummy of Pharaoh Amenhotep I. Not because of any mythical curse, but because it is perfectly wrapped, beautifully decorated with flower garlands, and with face and neck covered by an exquisite lifelike facemask inset with colorful stones. But now for the first time, scientists from Egypt have used three-dimensional CT (computed tomography) scanning to ‘digitally unwrap’ this royal mummy and study its contents. They report their findings in Frontiers in Medicine.

This was the first time in three millennia that Amenhotep’s mummy has been opened. The previous time was in the 11th century BCE, more than four centuries after his original mummification and burial. Hieroglyphics have described how during the later 21st dynasty, priests restored and reburied royal mummies from more ancient dynasties, to repair the damage done by grave robbers.

“This fact that Amenhotep I’s mummy had never been unwrapped in modern times gave us a unique opportunity: not just to study how he had originally been mummified and buried, but also how he had been treated and reburied twice, centuries after his death, by High Priests of Amun,” said Dr Sahar Saleem, professor of radiology at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University and the radiologist of the Egyptian Mummy Project, the study’s first author.

“By digitally unwrapping of the mummy and ‘peeling off’ its virtual layers – the facemask, the bandages, and the mummy itself – we could study this well-preserved pharaoh in unprecedented detail,” said Saleem.

“We show that Amenhotep I was approximately 35 years old when he died. He was approximately 169cm tall, circumcized, and had good teeth. Within his wrappings, he wore 30 amulets and a unique golden girdle with gold beads.”

“Amenhotep I seems to have physically resembled his father: he had a narrow chin, a small narrow nose, curly hair, and mildly protruding upper teeth.”

Saleem continued: “We couldn’t find any wounds or disfigurement due to disease to justify the cause of death, except numerous mutiliations post mortem, presumably by grave robbers after his first burial. His entrails had been removed by the first mummifiers, but not his brain or heart.”

The mummy of Amenhotep I (whose name means ‘Amun is satisfied’) was discovered in 1881 – among other reburied royal mummies –  at the archeological site Deir el Bahari in southern Egypt. The second pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th dynasty (after his father Ahmose I, who had expelled the invading Hyksos and reunited Egypt), Amenhotep ruled from approximately 1525 to 1504 BCE. His was a kind of golden age: Egypt was prosperous and safe, while the pharaoh ordered a religious building spree and led successful military expeditions to Libya and northern Sudan. After his death, he and his mother Ahmose-Nefertari were worshipped as gods.

Sahar Saleem and her co-author egyptologist Dr Zahi Hawass, had previously speculated that the main intention of the restorers from the 11th century was to reuse royal burial equipment for later pharaohs. But here they disprove their own theory.

“We show that at least for Amenhotep I, the priests of the 21^st dynasty lovingly repaired the injuries inflicted by the tomb robbers, restored his mummy to its former glory, and preserved the magnificent jewelry and amulets in place,” said Saleem.

Hawass and Saleem studied more than 40 royal mummies of the New Kingdom in the Egyptian Antiquity Ministry Project that was launched since 2005. Twenty-two royal mummies, including that of Amenhotep I, were transferred in April 2021 to a new museum in Cairo. The face of the mummy of Amenhotep I with its mask was the icon of the spectacular ‘Royal Golden Mummy Parade’ on March 3rd, 2021 in Cairo.

“We show that CT imaging can be profitably used in anthropological and archeological studies on mummies, including those from other civilizations, for example Peru,” concluded Saleem and Hawass.

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Facemask of the never-before unwrapped mummy of pharaoh Amenhotep I. S. Saleem and Z. Hawass

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The pharaoh’s mummy, showing his shrunken skull and skeleton within the bandages. S. Saleem and Z. Nuwass

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The pharaoh’s skull, including his teeth in good condition. S. Saleem and Z. Hawass

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Article Source: FRONTIERS news release

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study uncovers remains of Late Bronze Age tsunami victims in the Mediterranean. The Late Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano on the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea was one of the largest natural disasters in human history. Despite the magnitude of the eruption, remains from human victims have not been identified and evidence of tsunamis is scant. Vasıf Şahoğlu, Beverly Goodman Tchernov, and colleagues performed archaeological and sediment analysis on stratified deposits at Çeşme-Bağlararası in Turkey. The study area encompassed disturbed fortification walls and a layer of rubble and chaotic sediments along with a volcanic ash layer and a bone-rich charred layer. The results include evidence of seawater inundation and building collapse consistent with a series of at least four tsunamis impacting the site. The authors also found articulated skeletons of a young male human and a dog buried in the debris flow. The authors suggest that misshapen pits in the study area were attempts to recover victims from the debris. Calibrated radiocarbon ages suggest that the Thera eruption and subsequent tsunamis occurred no earlier than 1612 BCE. According to the authors, the results illustrate the multigenerational impact of a compound disaster such as the Thera eruption.

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Excavated skeleton of a tsunami victim. Vasıf Şahoğlu.

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Aerial view of the Çeşme-Bağlararası archaeological site and surrounding neighborhood. Vasıf Şahoğlu.

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Volcanic ash, victims, and tsunami debris from the Late Bronze Age Thera eruption discovered at Çeşme-Bağlararası (Turkey),” by Vasıf Şahoğlu et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2114213118

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A study of blocks of resin-impregnated archaeological sediment collected over the past 40 years from prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America found that the solidified sediments can act as archives of ancient DNA from hominins and other mammals; according to the authors, DNA can remain stably localized in the sediments over long periods, predominantly preserved in small particles of bone and feces, and microsampling of archived sediment blocks can recover DNA of ancient hominins, such as Neanderthals, and link genetic information to archaeological and ecological records at a detailed level.

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A researcher samples a block of resin-impregnated archaeological sediment for ancient DNA analysis. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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Article Source: PNAS news release

*“Microstratigraphic preservation of ancient faunal and hominin DNA in Pleistocene cave sediments,” by Diyendo Massilani et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 27-Dec-2021. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2113666118

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NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY—Analysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family.

By analyzing DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals entombed at Hazleton North long cairn in the Cotswolds-Severn region, the research team was able to detect that 27 of them were close biological relatives. The group lived approximately 5700 years ago – around 3700-3600 BC – around 100 years after farming had been introduced to Britain.

Published in Nature, it is the first study* to reveal in such detail how prehistoric families were structured, and the international team of archaeologists and geneticists say that the results provide new insights into kinship and burial practices in Neolithic times.

The research team – which included archaeologists from Newcastle University, UK, and geneticists from the University of the Basque Country, University of Vienna and Harvard University – show that most of those buried in the tomb were descended from four women who had all had children with the same man.

The cairn at Hazleton North included two L-shaped chambered areas which were located north and south of the main ‘spine’ of the linear structure. After they had died, individuals were buried inside these two chambered areas and the research findings indicate that men were generally buried with their father and brothers, suggesting that descent was patrilineal with later generations buried at the tomb connected to the first generation entirely through male relatives.

While two of the daughters of the lineage who died in childhood were buried in the tomb, the complete absence of adult daughters suggests that their remains were placed either in the tombs of male partners with whom they had children, or elsewhere.

Although the right to use the tomb ran through patrilineal ties, the choice of whether individuals were buried in the north or south chambered area initially depended on the first-generation woman from whom they were descended, suggesting that these first-generation women were socially significant in the memories of this community.

There are also indications that ‘stepsons’ were adopted into the lineage, the researchers say – males whose mother was buried in the tomb but not their biological father, and whose mother had also had children with a male from the patriline. Additionally, the team found no evidence that another eight individuals were biological relatives of those in the family tree, which might further suggest that biological relatedness was not the only criterion for inclusion. However, three of these were women and it is possible that they could have had a partner in the tomb but either did not have any children or had daughters who reached adulthood and left the community so are absent from the tomb.

Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, the first author and lead archaeologist of the study, said: “This study gives us an unprecedented insight into kinship in a Neolithic community. The tomb at Hazleton North has two separate chambered areas, one accessed via a northern entrance and the other from a southern entrance, and just one extraordinary finding is that initially each of the two halves of the tomb were used to place the remains of the dead from one of two branches of the same family. This is of wider importance because it suggests that the architectural layout of other Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated at those tombs.”

Iñigo Olalde of the University of the Basque Country and Ikerbasque, the lead geneticist for the study and co-first author, said: “The excellent DNA preservation at the tomb and the use of the latest technologies in ancient DNA recovery and analysis allowed us to uncover the oldest family tree ever reconstructed and analyze it to understand something profound about the social structure of these ancient groups.”

David Reich at Harvard University, whose laboratory led the ancient DNA generation, added: “This study reflects what I think is the future of ancient DNA: one in which archaeologists are able to apply ancient DNA analysis at sufficiently high resolution to address the questions that truly matter to archaeologists.”

Ron Pinhasi, of the University of Vienna, said: “It was difficult to imagine just a few years ago that we would ever know about Neolithic kinship structures. But this is just the beginning and no doubt there is a lot more to be discovered from other sites in Britain, Atlantic France, and other regions.”

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Hazleton Long Barrow: Courtesy of Corinium Museum, copyright Cotswold District Council. Courtesy of Corinium Museum, copyright Cotswold District Council

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Layout of the interior of the Long Cairn at Hazleton North: Credit Fowler, Olalde et al. after Saville 1990, by permission of Historic England. 

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Analysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain by a team involving archaeologists from Newcastle University, UK, and geneticists at the University of the Basque Country, University of Vienna and Harvard University, has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family. Newcastle University/Fowler, Olalde et al.

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Article Source: NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY news release.

The project was an international collaboration between archaeologists from the Universities of Newcastle, York, Exeter and Central Lancashire, and geneticists at the University of Vienna, University of the Basque Country and Harvard University. Corinium Museum, Cirencester, provided permission to sample the remains in their collection.

The work received primary funding from a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of the Spanish Government (RYC2019-027909-I), Ikerbasque – Basque Foundation of Science, the US National Institutes of Health (grant GM100233), the John Templeton Foundation (grant 61220), a private gift from Jean-François Clin, the Allen Discovery Center program, a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised program of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

*‘A high-resolution picture of kinship practices in an Early-Neolithic tomb’ Chris Fowler, Inigo Olalde et al. Nature. 22-Dec-2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04241-4 

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AARHUS UNIVERSITY—Mobility shaped the human world profoundly long before the modern age. But archaeologists often struggle to create a timeline for the speed and impact of this mobility. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Urban Network Evolutions at Aarhus University (UrbNet) has now made a breakthrough by applying new astronomical knowledge about the past activity of the sun to establish an exact time anchor for global links in the year 775 CE.

In collaboration with the Museum of Southwest Jutland in the Northern Emporium Project, the team has conducted a major excavation at Ribe, one of Viking-age Scandinavia’s principal trading towns. Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, the dig and the subsequent research project were able to establish the exact sequence of the arrival of objects from various corners of the world at the market in Ribe. In this way, they were able to trace the emergence of the vast network of Viking-age trade connections with regions such as North Atlantic Norway, Frankish Western Europe and the Middle East. To obtain a chronology for these events, the team has pioneered a new use of radiocarbon dating.

New use of radiocarbon dating

“The applicability of radiocarbon dating has hitherto been limited due to the broad age ranges of this method. Recently, however, it has been discovered that solar particle events, also known as Miyake events, cause sharp spikes in atmospheric radiocarbon for a single year. They are named after the female Japanese researcher Fusa Miyake, who first identified these events in 2012. When these spikes are identified in detailed records such as tree rings or in an archaeological sequence, it reduces the uncertainty margins considerably,” says lead author Bente Philippsen.

The team applied a new, improved calibration curve, based on annual samples, to identify a 775 CE Miyake event in one floor layer in Ribe. This enabled the team to anchor the entire sequence of layers and 140 radiocarbon dates around this single year.

“This result* shows that the expansion of Afro-Eurasian trade networks, characterised by the arrival of large numbers of Middle Eastern beads, can be dated in Ribe with precision to 790±10 CE – coinciding with the beginning of the Viking Age. However, imports brought by ship from Norway were arriving as early as 750 CE,” says Professor Søren Sindbæk, who is also a member of the team.

This groundbreaking result challenges one of the most widely accepted explanations for maritime expansions in the Viking Age – that Scandinavian seafaring took off in response to growing trade with the Middle East through Russia. Maritime networks and long-distance trade were already established decades before impulses from the Middle East caused a further expansion of these networks.

The construction of the new, annual calibration curve is a global effort to which the researchers from UrbNet and the Aarhus AMS Centre at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University have contributed.

“The construction of a calibration curve is a huge international effort with contributions from many laboratories around the world. Fusa Miyake’s discovery in 2012 has revolutionized our work, so that we now work with annual time resolution. New calibration curves are recurrently released, most recently in 2020, and Aarhus AMS centre has contributed significantly. The new high-resolution data from the present study will enter into a future update of the calibration curve and thus contribute to improve the precision of archaeological dates worldwide. This will provide better opportunities to understand rapid developments such as trade flows or environmental change in the past,” says Jesper Olsen, Associate Professor at Aarhus AMS Centre.

The global trends revealed by the study are essential for the archaeology of trading towns like Ribe. “The new results enable us to date the influx of new artefacts and far-reaching contacts on a much better background. This will help us to visualise and describe Viking Age Ribe in a way that will have great value for scientists, as well as helping us to present the new insight to the general public,” says Claus Feveile, curator of the Museum of Southwest Jutland.

Background facts

One of the most spectacular episodes of pre-modern global connectivity happened in the period c. 750-1000 CE, when trade with the burgeoning Islamic empire in the Middle East connected virtually all corners of Afro-Eurasia.

The spread of coins, trade beads and other exotic artifacts provides archaeological evidence of the trade links stretching from Southeast Asia and Africa to Siberia and the northernmost corners of Scandinavia. In the north, these long-distance connections mark the beginning of the maritime adventures that define the Viking Age. Researchers have even suggested that it was the arrival of silver and other valuable objects via Eastern Europe which sparked the first Scandinavian Viking expeditions.

It has proven difficult, however, to establish the time of arrival of the Middle Eastern beads and coins in relation to other developments in the Viking world, including the famous raids which shook Western Europe from c. 790.

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The Northern Emporium Project excavated parts of the main street and a plot with houses and workshops in the Viking-age emporium Ribe, Denmark. The excavations followed the stratigraphy of floors and waste deposits metriculously in order to trace the changing activities and arrival of trade goods at the site. Photo: The Museum of Southwest Jutland

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A selection of imported glass beads from the late eighth and early ninth century CE found in the emporium at Ribe, Denmark. As the new study shows, local glass bead production was largely replaced by long-distance imports around 790 CE. Photo: The Museum of Southwest Jutland

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Article Source: AARHUS UNIVERSITY news release.

*10.1038/s41586-021-04240-5 

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MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Humans are social creatures, but little is known about when, how, and why different populations connected in the past. Answering these questions is crucial for interpreting the biological and cultural diversity that we see in human populations today. DNA is a powerful tool for studying genetic interactions between populations, but it can’t address any cultural exchanges within these ancient meetings. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have turned to an unexpected source of information—ostrich eggshell beads—to shed light on ancient social networks. In a new study published in Nature, researchers Drs. Jennifer Miller and Yiming Wang report 50,000 years of population connection and isolation, driven by changing rainfall patterns, in southern and eastern Africa.

Ostrich eggshell beads: a window into the past

Ostrich eggshell (OES) beads are ideal artifacts for understanding ancient social relationships. They are the world’s oldest fully manufactured ornaments, meaning that instead of relying on an item’s natural size or shape, humans completely transformed the shells to produce beads. This extensive shaping creates ample opportunities for variations in style. Because different cultures produced beads of different styles, the prehistoric accessories provide researchers a way to trace cultural connections.

“It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs,” says Miller, lead-author of the study. “The beads are clues, scattered across time and space, just waiting to be noticed.”

To search for signs of population connectivity, Miller and Wang assembled the largest ever database of ostrich eggshell beads. It includes data from more than 1500 individual beads unearthed from 31 sites across southern and eastern Africa, encompassing the last 50,000 years. Gathering this data was a painstakingly slow process that took more than a decade.

Climate change and social networks in the Stone Age

By comparing OES bead characteristics, such as total diameter, aperture diameter and shell thickness, Miller and Wang found that between 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, people in eastern and southern Africa were using nearly identical OES beads. The finding suggests a long-distance social network spanning more than 3,000 km once connected people in the two regions.

“The result is surprising, but the pattern is clear,” says Wang, co-corresponding author of the study. “Throughout the 50,000 years we examined, this is the only time period that the bead characteristics are the same.”

This eastern-southern connection at 50-33,000 years ago is the oldest social network ever identified, and it coincides with a particularly wet period in eastern Africa. However, signs of the regional network disappear by 33,000 years ago, likely triggered by a major shift in global climates. Around the same time that the social network breaks down, eastern Africa experienced a dramatic reduction in precipitation as the tropical rain belt shifted southward. This increased rain in the large area connecting eastern and southern Africa (the Zambezi River catchment), periodically flooding riverbanks, and perhaps creating a geographic barrier that disrupted regional social networks.

“Through this combination of paleoenvironmental proxies, climate models, and archaeological data, we can see the connection between climate change and cultural behavior,” says Wang.

Weaving a story with beads

Together, the results of this work document a 50,000-year-long story about human connections, and the dramatic climate changes that drove people apart. The data even provides new insight into variable social strategies between eastern and southern Africa by documenting different bead-use trajectories through time. These regional responses highlight the flexibility of human behavior and show there’s more than one path to our species’ success.

“These tiny beads have the power to reveal big stories about our past,” says Miller. “We encourage other researchers to build upon this database, and continue exploring evidence for cultural connection in new regions.”

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Digital microscope images of archeological ostrich eggshell beads. Jennifer Miller

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY news release.

*Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africa, Nature, 20 Dec. 2021. 10.1038/s41586-021-04227-2 

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EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY—New evidence from the bottom of a lake in the remote North Atlantic Faroe Islands indicates that an unknown band of humans settled there around 500 AD—some 350 years before the Vikings, who up until recently have been thought to have been the first human inhabitants. The settlers may have been Celts who crossed rough, unexplored seas from what are now Scotland or Ireland. The findings appear today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The Faroes are a small, rugged archipelago about midway between Norway and Iceland, some 200 miles northwest of Scotland. Towering cliffs dominate the coasts; buffeted by strong winds and cloudy weather, the rocky landscape is mostly tundra. There is no evidence that indigenous people ever lived there, making it one of the planet’s few lands that remained uninhabited until historical times. Past archaeological excavations have indicated that seafaring Vikings first reached them around 850 AD, soon after they developed long-distance sailing technology. The settlement may have formed a stepping stone for the Viking settlement of Iceland in 874, and their short-lived colonization of Greenland, around 980.

 The new study, led by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is based on lake sediments containing signs that domestic sheep suddenly appeared around 500, well before the Norse occupation. Previously, the islands did not host any mammals, domestic or otherwise; the sheep could have arrived only with people. The study is not the first to assert that someone else got there first, but the researchers say it clinches the case.

In the 1980s, researchers determined that plantago lanceolata, a weed commonly associated with disturbed areas and pastures and often used as an indicator of early human presence in Europe, showed up in the Faroes around 2200 B.C. At the time, this was deemed possible evidence of human arrival. However, seeds could have arrived on the wind, and the plant does not need human presence to establish itself. Likewise, studies of pollen taken from lake beds and bogs show that some time before the Norse period, woody vegetation largely disappeared—possibly due to persistent chewing by sheep, but also possibly due to natural climatic changes.

Some Medieval texts suggest that Irish monks reached the islands by around 500. For one, St. Brendan, a famous and far-traveled early Irish navigator, was said to have set out across the Atlantic with comrades from 512 to 530, and supposedly found a land dubbed the Isle of the Blessed. Later speculations and maps say that this was the Faroes—or the far southerly Azores, or the Canary Islands—or that Brendan actually reached North America. There is no proof for any of this. Centuries later, in 825, the Irish monk and geographer Dicuil wrote that he had learned that hermits had been living in some unidentified northern islands for at least 100 years. Again, later speculations landed on the Faroes, but there was never any proof.

The first physical evidence of early occupation came with a 2013 study in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, which documented two patches of burnt peat containing charred barley grains found underneath the floor of a Viking longhouse on the Faroese island of Sandoy. The researchers dated the grains to somewhere between 300 and 500 years before the Norse; barley was not previously found on the island, so someone must have brought it. For many archaeologists, this constituted firm evidence of pre-Viking habitation. However, others wanted to see some kind of corroboration before declaring the case closed.

The researchers in the new study employed a non-archaeological approach. In a small vessel, they sailed out onto a lake near the village of Eiði, site of an ancient Viking locale on the island of Eysturoy. Here, they dropped weighted open-ended tubes to the bottom to collect muck—sediments dropped year by year and built up over millennia, forming a long-term environmental record. The cores penetrated down about 9 feet, recording some 10,000 years of environmental history. The scientists had started out hoping to better understand the climate around the time of the Viking occupation, but came up with a surprise.

Starting at 51 centimeters (20 inches) down in the sediments, they found signs that large numbers of sheep had suddenly arrived, most likely some time between 492 and 512, but possibly as early as 370. The telltale signs: identifiable fragments of sheep DNA, and two distinctive types of lipids produced in sheep digestive systems—so-called fecal biomarkers. (The  researchers also found bits of human DNA in the same layers, but suspect modern contamination during handling of the samples.)  A layer of ash deposited from a known Icelandic volcano eruption in 877 helped them reliably date the sediment sequences below.

“We see this as putting the nail in the coffin that people were there before the Vikings,” said lead author Lorelei Curtin, who did the research as a grad student at Lamont-Doherty. She noted that while the Faroes look rugged and wild today, practically every square inch of vegetation has been chewed up by Faroese sheep, a staple of the Faroese diet that are found nearly everywhere.

Beyond the earlier discovery of barley grains, no one has yet found physical remains of pre-Norse people, but the researchers say this is unsurprising. The Faroes contain very few sites suitable for settlement, mainly flat areas at the heads of protected bays where the Norse would have built over earlier habitations. On the other hand, “You see the sheep DNA and the biomarkers start all at once. It’s like an off-on switch,” said Lamont-Doherty paleoclimatologist William D’Andrea, who co-led the study. He points out that the markers correspond well with the Irish monks’ accounts. But, he said, “Those early writings are tenuous—it’s all circumstantial.”

So, who were these early settlers? D’Andrea and Curtin speculate that they could have been Celts, though not necessarily monks. For one, many Faroese place names derive from Celtic words, and ancient, though undated, Celtic grave markings dot the islands. Also, DNA studies of the modern Faroese show that their paternal lineages are mainly Scandinavian, while their maternal lineages are mainly Celtic. Other regions in the north Atlantic show this asymmetry—male Viking settlers are thought to have brought Celtic brides with them—but the Faroes have the highest level of maternal Celtic ancestry, suggesting an existing Celtic population that preceded the Vikings.

Kevin Edwards, an archaeologist and environment researcher at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, and coauthor of the 2013 barley-grains paper, said the new study “has produced convincing and exciting evidence from another island within the archipelago” of earlier human occupation. He added: “Is similar evidence to be found in Iceland, where similar arguments are made for a pre-Norse presence, and for which tantalizingly similar archaeological, pollen-analytical and human DNA are forthcoming?”

The other authors of the study are Nicholas Balascio of the College of William & Mary; Sabrina Shirazi and Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Gregory de Wet and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Jostein Bakke of the University of Bergen, Norway. Lorelei Curtin is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming. The research is the outcome of a collaborative project awarded by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences of the U.S. National Science Foundation to Columbia University, UMass Amherst, and William & Mary.

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The bed of this lake on the island of Eysturoy contains a sediment layer laid down around 500 AD that documents the first arrival of sheep, and thus humans, on the archipelago. Raymond Bradley/UMass Amherst

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Article Source: EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY news release.

Related: The Link Between Viking Settlements and Climate

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER—Working in a cave in Liguria, Italy, an international team of researchers uncovered the oldest documented burial of an infant girl in the European archaeological record. The richly decorated 10,000-year-old burial included over 60 pierced shell beads, four pendants, and an eagle-owl talon alongside the remains. The discovery offers insight into the early Mesolithic period, from which few recorded burials are known, and the seemingly egalitarian funerary treatment of an infant female.

“The evolution and development of how early humans buried their dead as revealed in the archaeological record has enormous cultural significance,” says Jamie Hodgkins, PhD, paleoanthropologist and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver.

The crew first discovered the burial in 2017 and fully excavated the delicate remains in July 2018. Hodgkins worked alongside her husband Caley Orr, PhD, paleoanthropologist and anatomist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Their team of project codirectors included Italian collaborators Fabio Negrino, University of Genoa, and Stefano Benazzi, University of Bologna, as well as researchers from the University of Montreal, Washington University, University of Ferrara, University of Tubingen, and the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

Arma Veirana, a cave in the Ligurian pre-Alps of northwestern Italy, is a popular spot for local families to visit. Looters also discovered the site, and their digging exposed the late Pleistocene tools that drew researchers to the area.

The team spent its first two excavation seasons near the mouth of the cave, exposing stratigraphic layers that contained tools over 50,000 years old typically associated with Neandertals in Europe (Mousterian tools). They also found the remains of ancient meals such as the cut-marked bones of wild boars and elk, and bits of charred fat. To better understand the stratigraphy of the cave as it related to the artifacts, the team needed to expose potential Upper Paleolithic deposits that could have been the source of the more recently made stone tools they found eroding down the cave floor.

As the team explored the further reaches of the cave, they began to unearth pierced shell beads. Hodgkins was going through the beads back in the lab and knew the team was onto something. A few days later, using dental tools and a small paint brush, the researchers exposed parts of a cranial vault and articulated lines of pierced shell beads.

In a series of analyses coordinated with multiple institutions and numerous experts, the team uncovered several details about the ancient burial. Radiocarbon dating determined that the child, who the team nicknamed “Neve,” lived 10,000 years ago, and amelogenin protein analysis and ancient DNA revealed that the infant was a female belonging to a lineage of European women known as the U5b2b haplogroup.

“There’s a decent record of human burials before around 14,000 years ago,” said Hodgkins. “But the latest Upper Paleolithic period and earliest part of the Mesolithic are more poorly known when it comes to funerary practices. Infant burials are especially rare, so Neve adds important information to help fill this gap.”

“The Mesolithic is particularly interesting,” said Orr. “It followed the end of the final Ice Age and represents the last period in Europe when hunting and gathering was the primary way of making a living. So it’s a really important time period for understanding human prehistory.”

Detailed virtual histology of the infant’s teeth showed that she died 40–50 days after birth, and that she experienced stress that briefly halted the growth of her teeth 47 days and 28 days before she was born. Carbon and nitrogen analyses of the teeth revealed that the baby’s mother had been nourishing the infant in her womb on a land-based diet.

An analysis of the ornaments adorning the infant demonstrated the care invested in each piece and showed that many of the ornaments exhibited wear that proves they were passed down to the child from group members.

Along with the burial of a similarly aged female from Upward Sun River in Alaska, Hodgkins said the funerary treatment of Neve suggests that the recognition of infant females as full persons has deep origins in a common ancestral culture that was shared by peoples who migrated into Europe and those who migrated to North America. Or it may have arisen in parallel in populations across the planet.

Mortuary practices offer a window into the worldviews and social structure of past societies. Child funerary treatment provides important insights into who was considered a person and afforded the attributes of an individual self, moral agency, and eligibility for group membership. Neve shows that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in her society.

And because archaeology has historically been viewed through a male lens, Hodgkins worries there are many stories we’ve missed.

“Right now, we have the oldest identified female infant burial in Europe,” said Hodgkins. “I hope that quickly becomes untrue. Archaeological reports have tended to focus on male stories and roles, and in doing so have left many people out of the narrative. Protein and DNA analyses are allowing us to better understand the diversity of human personhood and status in the past. Without DNA analysis, this highly decorated infant burial could possibly have been assumed male.”

In Western society, archaeologists have historically assumed that figureheads and warriors were male. But DNA analyses have proven the existence of female Viking warriors, nonbinary leaders, and powerful Bronze Age female rulers. Finding a burial like Neve’s is reason to look more critically at archaeology’s past, said Hodgkins. 

“This is about increasing our knowledge of women, but also acknowledging that we as archaeologists can’t understand the past through a singular lens. We need as diverse a perspective as possible because humans are complex.”

The research, excavation, and analysis were made possible with funding from The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Leakey Foundation, National Geographic Society Waitt Program, Hyde Family Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program, and the Max Planck Society.

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Jamie Hodgkins, lead researcher, and team at the burial discovery site in Italy. Jamie Hodkins, PhD, CU Denver

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Illustration showing the placement of beads and shells along with the cranium. Claudine Gravel-Miguel

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The mouth of the Arma Veirana cave, a site in the Ligurian mountains of northwestern Italy. Dominique Meyer image.

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER news release.

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UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH—Researchers at the University of Zurich have investigated a unique leather scale armor found in the tomb of a horse rider in Northwest China. Design and construction details of the armor indicate that it originated in the Neo-Assyrian Empire between the 6th and 8th century BCE before being brought to China.

In 2013, a nearly complete leather scale armor was found in the tomb of an approx. 30-year-old male near the modern-day city of Turfan in Northwest China. This unprecedented find, which survived the millennia thanks to the area’s extremely arid climate, provided the international team led by Patrick Wertmann from the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich with new insights on the spread of military technology during the first millennium BCE.

Scale armors protect the vital organs of fighters like an extra layer of skin without restricting their mobility. The armors were made of small shield-shaped plates arranged in horizontal rows and sewn onto a backing. Due to the costly materials and laborious manufacturing process, armors were very precious, and wearing them was considered a privilege of the elite. It was rare for them to be buried with the owner. However, the emergence of powerful states with large armies in the ancient world led to the development of less precious but nevertheless effective armors made of leather, bronze or iron for ordinary soldiers.

Standard military equipment for horsemen

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the armor to between 786 and 543 BCE. It was originally made of about 5,444 smaller scales and 140 larger scales, which together with leather laces and lining weighed between 4 and 5kg. The armor resembles a waistcoat that protects the front of the torso, hips, the sides and the lower back of the body. It can be put on quickly without the help of another person and fits people of different statures.

“The armor was professionally produced in large numbers,” says Patrick Wertmann. With the increasing use of chariots in Middle Eastern warfare, a special armor for horsemen was developed from the 9th century BCE. These armors later became part of the standardized equipment of military forces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which extended from parts of present-day Iraq to Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt.

Two armors, distinct units

While there is no direct parallel to the 2,700-year-old armor in the whole of Northwest China, there are some stylistic and functional similarities to a second contemporary armor of unknown origin held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met). It is possible that the two armors were intended as outfits for distinct units of the same army, i.e. the Yanghai armor for cavalry and the armor in the Met for infantry.

It is unclear whether the Yanghai armor belonged to a foreign soldier working for the Assyrian forces who brought it back home with him, or whether the armor was captured from someone else who had been to the region. “Even though we can’t trace the exact path of the scale armor from Assyria to Northwest China, the find is one of the rare actual proofs of West-East technology transfer across the Eurasian continent during the early first millennium BCE,” says Wertmann.

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The ancient leather shed armour could be dated to the period between 786 and 543 BC. D.L. Xu, P. Wertmann, M. Yibulayinmu

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Article Source: University of Zurich news release

*Patrick Wertmann, Dongliang Xu, Irina Elkina, Regine Vogel, Ma’eryamu Yibulayinmu, Pavel E. Tarasov, Donald J. La Rocca, Mayke Wagner, No borders for innovations: A ca. 2700-year-old Assyrian-style leather scale armour in Northwest China. Quaternary International. November 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2021.11.014

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DARTMOUTH COLLEGE—The oldest unequivocal evidence of upright walking in the human lineage are footprints discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania in 1978, by paleontologist Mary Leakey and her team. The bipedal trackways date to 3.7 million years ago. Another set of mysterious footprints was partially excavated at nearby Site A in 1976 but dismissed as possibly being made by a bear. A recent re-excavation of the Site A footprints at Laetoli and a detailed comparative analysis* reveal that the footprints were made by an early human— a bipedal hominin, according to a new study reported in Nature.

“Given the increasing evidence for locomotor and species diversity in the hominin fossil record over the past 30 years, these unusual prints deserved another look,” says lead author Ellison McNutt, an assistant professor of instruction at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University. She started the work as a graduate student in Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society at Dartmouth College, where she focused on the biomechanics of walking in early humans and utilized comparative anatomy, including that of bears, to understand how the heel bone contacts the ground (a foot position called “plantigrady”).

McNutt was fascinated by the bipedal (upright walking) footprints at Laetoli Site A. Laetoli is famous for its impressive trackway of hominin footprints at Sites G and S, which are generally accepted as Australopithecus afarensis—the species of the famous partial skeleton “Lucy.” But because the footprints at Site A were so different, some researchers thought they were made by a young bear walking upright on its hind legs.

To determine the maker of the Site A footprints, in June 2019, an international research team led by co-author Charles Musiba, an associate professor of anthropology at University of Colorado Denver, went to Laetoli, where they re-excavated and fully cleaned the five, consecutive footprints. They identified evidence that the fossil footprints were made by a hominin—including a large impression for the heel and the big toe. The footprints were measured, photographed and 3D-scanned.

The researchers compared the Laetoli Site A tracks to the footprints of black bears (Ursus americanus), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and humans (Homo sapiens).

They teamed up with co-authors Ben and Phoebe Kilham, who run the Kilham Bear Center, a rescue and rehabilitation center for black bears in Lyme, New Hampshire. They identified four semi-wild juvenile black bears at the Center, with feet similar in size to that of the Site A footprints. Each bear was lured with maple syrup or apple sauce, to stand up and walk on their two hind legs across a trackway filled with mud to capture their footprints.

Over 50 hours of video on wild black bears was also obtained. The bears walked on two feet less than 1% of the total observation time making it unlikely that a bear made the footprints at Laetoli, especially given that no footprints were found of this individual walking on four legs.

As bears walk, they take very wide steps, wobbling back and forth,” says senior author Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. “They are unable to walk with a gait similar to that of the Site A footprints, as their hip musculature and knee shape does not permit that kind of motion and balance.” Bear heels taper and their toes and feet are fan-like, while early human feet are squared off and have a prominent big toe, according to the researchers. Curiously, though, the Site A footprints record a hominin crossing one leg over the other as it walked—a gait called “cross-stepping.”

“Although humans don’t typically cross-step, this motion can occur when one is trying to reestablish their balance,” says McNutt. “The Site A footprints may have been the result of a hominin walking across an area that was an unlevel surface.”

Based on footprints collected from semi-wild chimpanzees at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda and two captive juveniles at Stony Brook University, the team found that chimpanzees have relatively narrow heels compared to their forefoot, a trait shared in common with bears. But the Laetoli footprints, including those at Site A, have wide heels relative to their forefoot.

The Site A footprints also contained the impressions of a large hallux (big toe) and smaller second digit. The size difference between the two digits was similar to humans and chimpanzees, but not black bears. These details further demonstrate that the footprints were likely made by a hominin moving on two legs. But in comparing the Laetoli footprints at Site A and the inferred foot proportions, morphology and likely gait, the results reveal that the Site A footprints are distinct from those of Australopithecus afarensis at Sites G and S.

“Through this research, we now have conclusive evidence from the Site A footprints that there were different hominin species walking bipedally on this landscape but in different ways on different feet,” says DeSilva, who focuses on the origins and evolution of human walking. “We’ve had this evidence since the 1970s. It just took the rediscovery of these wonderful footprints and a more detailed analysis to get us here.”

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Model of Laetoli Site A using photogrammetry showing five hominin footprints (a); and corresponding contour map of the site at Laetoli, Tanzania, generated from a 3D surface scan (b); map showing Laetoli, which is located within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania, south of Olduvai Gorge (c); topographical maps of A2 footprint (d) and A3 footprint (e). Images (a) and (b) by Austin C. Hill and Catherine Miller. Image (c): Illustration using GoogleMaps by Ellison McNutt. Images (d) and (e) by Stephen Gaughan and James Adams.

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Image of Laetoli A3 footprint (on left) and image of a cast of Laetoli G1 footprint (on right). Analysis shows similarities in length of Laetoli A3 and G footprints but differences in forefoot width with the former being wider. Image on left by Jeremy DeSilva and on right by Eli Burakian/Dartmouth.

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Article Source: Dartmouth College news release.

*Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity At Laetoli Tanzania, Nature, 1-Dec-2021.

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PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A reduction in male canine tooth size and, possibly, aggression occurred early in human evolution, according to a study. Proportionally, humans have the smallest male canine teeth among all anthropoids and exhibit little sexual dimorphism in canine tooth size. The timing of emergence of weak canine tooth sexual dimorphism in human evolution is unclear, partly due to the difficulty of reliably determining dimorphism in weakly dimorphic fossils. Gen Suwa and colleagues applied statistical methods to estimate and compare levels of sexual dimorphism in a dataset of fossil canine teeth, including all available Ardipithecus ramidus fossils as well as fossils from Australopithecus spp., Homo spp., and extinct apes. The results suggest that weak canine tooth sexual dimorphism has characterized members of the human clade since as early as in A. ramidus, around 4.5 million years ago. The authors estimate that canine tooth sexual dimorphism in A. ramidus was lower than in bonobos, the extant ape with the lowest canine tooth dimorphism, and comparable to levels seen in modern humans. This estimate places the reduction of male canine teeth early in human evolution, broadly coinciding with the development of bipedalism. Because larger male canine teeth are associated with increased aggression and competition between males in extant anthropoids, the results suggest a behavioral shift early in human evolution toward reduced aggression between males, likely mediated by female choice, according to the authors.

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Comparison of the upper canine teeth of a male common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes (upper left), a female chimpanzee (upper right), a male A. ramidus (lower left), and a female A. ramidus (lower right). Gen Suwa.

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Article Source: PNAS news release

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY—Volcanic eruptions contributed to the collapse of dynasties in China in the last 2,000 years by temporarily cooling the climate and affecting agriculture, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.

Large eruptions create a cloud that blocks some sunlight for a year or two. That reduces warming of the land in Asia in the summer and leads to a weaker monsoon and less rainfall, reducing crop harvests.

“We confirmed for the first time that collapses of dynasties in China over the last 2,000 years are more likely in the years after volcanic eruptions,” said co-author Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “But the relationship is complex because if there is ongoing warfare and conflict, dynasties are more susceptible to collapse. The impact of a cooled climate on crops can also make conflict more likely, further increasing the probability of collapse.”

Scientists reconstructed 156 explosive volcanic eruptions from 1 A.D. to 1915 by examining elevated sulfate levels in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctic, according to the study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Scientists also analyzed historical documents from China on 68 dynasties and examined warfare there between 850 and 1911.

Erupting volcanoes can pump millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, forming vast sulfuric acid clouds that reflect sunlight and lower Earth’s average surface temperature.

Major eruptions can lead to “a double jeopardy of marked coldness and dryness during the agricultural growing season,” the study says. Impacts may be worsened by livestock deaths, accelerated land degradation and more crop damage from agricultural pests that survive during milder winters.

Scientists found that smaller volcanic “shocks” to the climate may cause dynasties to collapse when political and socioeconomic stress is already high. Larger shocks may lead to collapses without substantial pre-existing stress. Other factors include poor leadership, administrative corruption and demographic pressures.

“Mandate of heaven,” an influential Chinese concept, allowed for some continuity between dynasties. Elites and “commoners” more readily accepted a new dynasty that, by seizing power, demonstrated a divine mandate to rule that the former dynasty had lost.

The scientists’ findings emphasize the need to prepare for future eruptions, especially in regions with economically vulnerable populations (perhaps comparable to the Ming and Tang dynasties in China) and/or that have a history of resource mismanagement, as in Syria before the 2011 uprising that may have been partly triggered by drought.

Eruptions during the 20th and 21st centuries have been smaller than many during imperial China. Still, moderate eruptions may have contributed to the Sahelian drought of the 1970s to 1990s, contributing to about 250,000 deaths and resulting in 10 million refugees in this economically marginalized region. Future major eruptions, combined with climate change, are likely to profoundly affect agriculture in some of the Earth’s most populous and most marginalized regions, the study says.

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Volcanic eruptions contributed to the collapse of dynasties in China in the last 2,000 years by temporarily cooling the climate and affecting agriculture, according to a Rutgers coauthored study. Rutgers University-New Brunswick

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Article Source: Rutgers University news release.

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM—Back in the day, the Assyrians were one of the Near East’s biggest superpowers, controlling a land mass that stretched from Iran to Egypt. They accomplished this feat with military technologies that helped them win any open-air battle or penetrate any fortified city.  While today, air power and bunker busters help win the war, back in the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, it was all about the siege ramp, an elevated structure that hauled battering ramps up to the enemy’s city walls and let the Neo-Assyrians soldiers wreak havoc on their enemies.

Constructed in Israel, the Assyrian siege ramp at Lachish is the only surviving physical example of their military prowess in the entire Near East.  Now, for the first time, a team of archaeologists has reconstructed how the Assyrian army may have built the ramp and used it to conquer the city of Lachish. The team, led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel and Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), and Professors Jon W. Carroll and Michael Pytlik of Oakland University, USA, drew on a rich number of sources about this historical event to provide this complete picture.  The outstanding amount of data includes biblical texts (2 Kings 18:9–19:37; 2 Chronicles 32; Isaiah 36–37), iconography (stone reliefs depicting Assyrian battle scenes) and Akkadian inscriptions, archaological excavations, and 21st century drone photographs.  They published their findings in Oxford Journal of Archaeology*.

Lachish was a flourishing Canaanite city in the second millennium BCE and had been the second most important city in the Kingdom of Judah.  In 701 BCE Lachish was attacked by the Assyrian army, led by King Sennacherib.  Garfinkel’s analysis provides a vivid account of the construction of the massive ramp that was built by the Assyrians so that they could haul battering rams up to the hilltop city of Lachish, breach its walls, and totally overrun the city.  There have been several conflicting views on how the formidable task of constructing the ramp was achieved.  However, the rigorous method employed by Garfinkel and his team, including photogrammetric analysis of aerial photographs and creating a detailed digital map of the relevant landscape, produced a practical model that accounts for all available information about that battle.

The Assyrians had a mighty and well-equipped army that, in the early eighth century BCE, rapidly quelled growing rebellion in the Southern Levant. In 721 BCE the Kingdom of Israel was conquered. Twenty years later, the Assyrian army attacked the Kingdom of Judah, laying siege to its most important city, Jerusalem, and launching a direct assault on its second most important city, Lachish.  King Sennacherib himself went to Lachish to oversee its destruction, which began with his army building a ramp to reach the walls of the hilltop city.

According to Garfinkel, evidence at the site makes it clear that the ramp was made of small boulders, about 6.5 kg each. A major problem faced by the Assyrian army was the supply of such stones: about three million stones were needed. Where did these stones come from? Collecting natural field stones from the fields around the site would require a great deal of time and would slow the construction of the ramp. A better solution would be to quarry the stones as close as possible to the far end of the ramp. “At Lachish there is indeed an exposed cliff of the local bedrock exactly at the point where one would expect it to be,” Garfinkel shared.

The research suggests that its construction began about 80 meters away from the walls of the city of Lachish, close to where stones required for the ramp could be quarried. The stones would have been transported along human chains –passed from man-to-man by hand.  With four human chains working in parallel on the ramp each working round-the clock shifts, Garfinkel calculated that about 160,000 stones were moved each day.  “Time was the main concern of the Assyrian army. Hundreds of laborers worked day and night carrying stones, possibly in two shifts of 12 hours each. The manpower was probably supplied by prisoners of war and forced labor of the local population. The laborers were protected by massive shields placed at the northern end of the ramp. These shields were advanced towards the city by a few meters each day,” described Garfinkel.

In about 25 days, the ramp, which was the shape of a giant triangular wedge, could have reached the city walls. “This model assumes the Assyrians were very efficient, otherwise, it would have taken months to complete,” said Garfinkel.  Indeed, the prophet Isaiah, who lived at the end of the eighth century BCE and was an eyewitness to the events, mentioned the Assyrian army in some of his prophecies. He relates to the Assyrians as a mighty, supernatural power, “None of them tired, none of them stumbling, none of them asleep or drowsy, none of them with belt unfastened, none of them with broken sandal-strap.” (Isaiah 5:27).

As the workers built the final stages of the ramp and approached the walls of Lachish, the inhabitants would try to defend their city by shooting arrows and throwing down stones on their enemy. Garfinkel suggests that the workers used massive L-shaped wicker shields, similar to those shown protecting soldiers on Assyrian reliefs.  In the final stage, wooden beams were laid on top of the stones, where the battering rams within their massive siege machines, weighing up to 1 ton, would be securely positioned.  The ram, a large, heavy wooden beam with a metal tip, battered the walls by being swung backwards and forwards.  Garfinkel suggests that the ram was suspended within the siege engine on metal chains, as ropes would quickly wear out.  Indeed, an iron chain was found on the top of the ramp at Lachish.

To get further confirmation, Garfinkel explains that he is “planning excavations in Lachish, at the far edge of the ramp in the quarry area – this might give additional evidence of Assyrian army activity and how the ramp was constructed.”  

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Lachish: The Assyrian ramp constructed with 3 million stones. Credit Yosef Garfinkel. Yosef Garfinkel

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A small segment of the Assyrian siege ramps on the Lachish relief uncovered in the palace of Sennacherib. Note the siege engine with its wheels on a paved road. Judith Dekel

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Article Source: THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM news release.

UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND—An international team of researchers, led by Professor Lee Berger from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (Wits University) has revealed the first partial skull of a Homo naledi child that was found in the remote depths of the Rising Star cave in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

Describing the skull and its context in two separate papers in the Open Access journal, PaleoAnthropology, the team of 21 researchers from Wits University and thirteen other universities announced the discovery of parts of the skull and teeth of the child that died almost 250,000 years ago when it was approximately four to six years old. 

The first paper, of which Professor Juliet Brophy of Wits and Louisiana State University is lead author, describes the skull, while the second paper, of which Dr Marina Elliott is the lead author describe the context of the area and circumstances in which the skull was discovered. 

The child was found in an extremely remote passage of the Rising Star Cave System, some 12 meters beyond the Dinaledi Chamber, the original site of discovery of the first Homo naledi remains that were revealed to the world in 2015.  

“Homo naledi remains one of the most enigmatic ancient human relatives ever discovered,” says Professor Lee Berger, project leader and Director of the Centre for Exploration of the Deep Human Journey at Wits University and an Explorer at Large for the National Geographic Society. “It is clearly a primitive species, existing at a time when previously we thought only modern humans were in Africa. Its very presence at that time and in this place complexifies our understanding of who did what first concerning the invention of complex stone tool cultures and even ritual practices.”

Almost 2000 individual fragments of more than two dozen individuals at all life stages of Homo naledi have been recovered since the Rising Star cave system was discovered in 2013.

“This makes this the richest site for fossil hominins on the continent of Africa and makes naledi one of the best-known ancient hominin species ever discovered,” says John Hawks, a biological anthropologist and lead author of a previous study on the fossil skeleton of a male naledi nicknamed “Neo” that was also found at the Rising Star cave.

The skull of the child presented in the current study was recovered during further work in the cramped spaces of the cave in 2017. The child’s skull was found alone, and no remains of its body have been recovered. The team have named the child “Leti” (pronounced Let-e) after the Setswana word “letimela” meaning “the lost one”. Leti’s skull consists of 28 skull fragments and six teeth and when reconstructed shows the frontal orbits, and top of the skull with some dentition. 

 “There were no replicating parts as we pieced the skull back together and many of the fragments refit, indicating they all came from one individual child,” says Darryl de Ruiter, a palaeoanthropologist who previously led a study of the adult skull of H. naledi and who is a co-author on the paper. 

“This is the first partial skull of a child of Homo naledi yet recovered and this begins to give us insight into all stages of life of this remarkable species,” says Juliet Brophy, who led the study on Leti’s skull and dentition.

The discovery of a hominin child skull is an extremely rare find in the fossil record as juvenile remains tend to be thin and extremely fragile. “Having skull remains associated with teeth of the same individual is extremely important for understanding the growth and development of this species,” says Christopher Walker, an expert in growth and development.

Leti’s brain size is estimated at around 480 to 610 cubic centimeters. “This would have been around 90% to 95% of its adult brain capacity,” says Debra Bolter, co-author on the paper and a specialist in growth and development. “The size of Leti’s brain makes it very comparable to adult members of the species found so far,” says Bolter. 

It has yet to be established how old Leti’s remains are. However, since other fossils of Homo naledi were found in the nearby Dinaledi Chamber and dated to between 335 and 241 thousand years ago, Tebogo Makhubela, part of the geological team investigating the discovery believes that it is likely that Leti is from a similar period, based on preservation and proximity.  

Leti’s remains were discovered in a tight passage that measures only 15 centimeters wide and 80 centimeters long and was located just beyond an area named the “Chaos Chamber”. 

“The area where Leti was found is part of a spiderweb of cramped passages,” says Maropeng Ramalepa, a member of the exploration team responsible for bringing the remains to the surface. Marina Elliott, one of the original “Underground Astronauts” in the first Rising Star expedition that originally uncovered Homo naledi and the leader of the excavation team that recovered Leti described the challenge of excavating Leti as “very difficult”. “This was one of the more challenging sites with hominin fossils we have had to get to in the Rising Star system,” says Elliott.

Since its discovery the Rising Star cave system has become one of the most prolific sites of discovery for hominin fossils in the world. Berger says that work is continuing throughout the cave system and that soon new discoveries are likely to shed further light on whether these chambers and passages are in fact a burial ground of Homo naledi, as the team originally hypothesized. 

“I do not believe there is another site quite like Rising Star,” says Steve Churchill, a palaeoanthropologist and co-author on both papers. “This is now the third locality we have described from this system with naledi remains, and we know through exploration that there are other localities.” 

With no signs of carnivore damage or damage made by scavenging, and no evidence of the skull having been washed into the narrow passage, the team does not know how Leti’s skull came to rest, alone, in such a remote and inaccessible part of the system. The authors hypothesize that it is likely other members of its species were involved in the skull reaching such a difficult place.  

“The discovery of a single skull of a child, in such a remote location within the cave system adds mystery as to how these many remains came to be in these remote, dark spaces of the Rising Star Cave system,” says Berger. “It is just another riddle among many that surround this fascinating extinct human relative.”

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A reconstruction of the skull of Leti, the first Homo naledi child whose remains were found in the Rising Star cave in Johannesburg. Wits University

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND news release.

University of Cambridge—A new study of 5,000-year old pottery has revealed how villages of the Indus Civilization developed sophisticated industries during the Bronze Age.

University of Cambridge researchers studied a range of ancient everyday pottery vessels – including jars, bowls, dishes and bottles – to reconstruct how Indus peoples developed and adopted unique technologies in the third millennium BC.

The objects were excavated from archaeological sites in Haryana in north-west India by a team of researchers from the TwoRains project, which is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University funded by the ERC.

The study, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, was carried out as part of PhD research by Dr Alessandro Ceccarelli, who is an Affiliated Scholar at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. 

Dr Ceccarelli used reverse engineering to reconstruct two main dominant technological traditions in Indus Civilization north-west India. These traditions reveal several forming, fashioning and finishing techniques in making pottery, including the use of types of “potter’s wheel” in some cases.

“This study doesn’t just look at how pottery was made – it gives a fascinating insight into some of the earliest ‘social networks’ and how people passed on knowledge and skills over centuries without the use of books or the technology we now take for granted,” Dr Ceccarelli said.

“The objects we examined suggested that while communities of ceramic makers lived in the same regions – and often in the same settlements – different traditions emerged and were sustained over centuries. There was a clear effort to keep alive their unique ways of making pottery to set them apart from other communities, like a statement of their identity.”

The evidence – shown in the materials and tools used to make the pottery, as well as markings on them – suggests that at these two ancient settlements, at least two distinct groups of Indus ceramic producers passed down unique values, skills and knowledge over generations.

Village-based pottery production also survived the widespread urbanization of the Indus Civilization in the third millennium BC, with household production of ceramics continuing to be the norm in the region for hundreds of years.

Dr Ceccarelli noted: “We also discovered that there is no clear evidence at the excavated sites for making pottery using ‘wheel-throwing’ techniques in the production of these ceramics. This offers a different perspective from the interpretations given to the vast majority of similar types of Indus ceramic forming techniques in the past.”

Senior author Dr Cameron Petrie, University of Cambridge, concluded that “This paper makes an important contribution to the work of the TwoRains project as it highlights the diversity and variability of practices in ancient South Asia, which is something that we feel made populations well suited to coping with variable and changing environmental conditions”

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Above and below: Examples of pottery samples analyzed. TwoRains Project, University of Cambridge, and Dr Alessandro Ceccarelli.

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Article Source: University of Cambridge news release.

The research is published open access in Journal of Archaeological Science.

A. Ceccarelli, P.S. Quinn, R.N. Singh, C.A. Petrie (2021). Setting the wheels in motion: Re-examining ceramic forming techniques in Indus Civilization villages in northwest India,

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 64. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2021.101346

This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (2015–2021) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [TwoRains project: grant agreement number 648609]. It was also supported by smaller grants, such as the NTICVA Awards, Nehru Trust for the Indian Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Fitch Laboratory Awards, British School at Athens, Greece.

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416521000799?via%3Dihub

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THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG—An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg palaeoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans.

The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our closest relatives, and the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe.

However, human evolution during this age is poorly understood, a problem which paleoanthropologists call “the muddle in the middle”. The announcement of Homo bodoensis hopes to bring some clarity to this puzzling, but important chapter in human evolution.

The new name is based on a reassessment of existing fossils from Africa and Eurasia from this time period. Traditionally, these fossils have been variably assigned to either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis, both of which carried multiple, often contradictory definitions.

“Talking about human evolution during this time period became impossible due to the lack of proper terminology that acknowledges human geographic variation” according to Roksandic, lead author on the study*.

Recently, DNA evidence has shown that some fossils in Europe called H. heidelbergensis were actually early Neanderthals, making the name redundant. For the same reason, the name needs to be abandoned when describing fossil humans from east Asia according to co-author, Xiu-Jie Wu (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China).

Further muddling the narrative, African fossils dated to this period have been called at times both H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis.  H. rhodesiensis is poorly defined and the name has never been widely accepted. This is partly due to its association with Cecil Rhodes and the horrendous crimes carried out during colonial rule in Africa – an unacceptable honor in light of the important work being done toward decolonizing science.

The name “bodoensis” derives from a skull found in Bodo D’ar, Ethiopia, and the new species is understood to be a direct human ancestor. Under the new classification, H. bodoensis will describe most Middle Pleistocene humans from Africa and some from Southeast Europe, while many from the latter continent will be reclassified as Neanderthals, 

The co-first author Predrag Radović (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia) says, “Terms need to be clear in science, to facilitate communication. They should not be treated as absolute when they contradict the fossil record.”

The introduction of H. bodoensis is aimed at “cutting the Gordion knot and allowing us to communicate clearly about this important period in human evolution” according to one of the co-authors Christopher Bae (Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa).

Roksandic agrees: “Naming a new species is a big deal, as the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature allows name changes only under very strictly defined rules. We are confident that this one will stick around for a long time, a new taxon name will live only if other researchers use it.”

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Homo bodoensis, a new species of human ancestor, lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Ettore Mazza

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Artist rendering of Homo bodoensis. Ettore Mazza

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG news release.

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—While some current scientific theories point to ancient Chaco Canyon, a distinctive archaeological site in the American southwest, as simply a prehistoric ceremonial site populated only during sacred rituals — University of Cincinnati researchers are turning that popular belief on its head.

“The ancestral puebloans interacted with the local ecosystem in ways that helped them adapt and thrive for over a millennium,” says David Lentz, UC professor of biology and co-author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE titled, “Ecosystem impacts by the ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA.” *

“Many active researchers, however, align with the idea that Chaco Canyon was too arid to sustain day-to-day living, arguing that the land and architectural structures were not permanent dwellings. 

“Basically, they contend that the massive stone and timber infrastructure at Chaco Canyon, built over many centuries, was used only as a periodic ceremonial center and storage facility. But it was not that simple and our evidence contradicts many of the currently proposed theories about the occupation of Chaco Canyon in ancient times.”

Through on-site pollen and botanical analysis and lidar mapping technology during the last decade, Lentz and a team of interdisciplinary researchers from UC’s departments of anthropology, geology, geography and biology, including a select group of national collaborative scientists, reveal the economic and environmental impact of ancestral puebloans in Chaco Canyon during the culture’s great preeminence. 

“Our goals focused on providing fresh insight into the sustainability of land use practices in Chaco Canyon during the ancestral puebloan occupation,” adds Lentz. “Our findings add new data that reveal measurable changes in the juniper pinyon woodlands that occurred before 600 B.C. when the food procurement system transitioned from hunting and gathering to agricultural production.”

The shift in ancestral puebloan food resource management enhanced their ability to sustain larger populations in a harsh, barren landscape for several centuries during the pre-Columbian era. 

“But with their landscape modifications came serious environmental ramifications. At the cost of major reduction of tree density in the local woodlands, their activities ultimately contributed to a destabilizing environmental impact prior to their final exodus,” adds Lentz. 

This innovative interdisciplinary research is a stellar example of academic excellence, an ongoing tenet of UC’s strategic direction called Next Lives Here.

Early pueblo builders of the southwest

Chaco Canyon, a 34,000-acre center of social complexity located in the southwestern region of the U.S., flourished during the height of the Chaco culture between (800 to 1140 A.D.), a period Lentz refers to as the Bonito phase.

During the cultural flourishment, the hierarchical society was known for elaborate ceremonial activities, the maintenance of long-distance trade routes and impressive architectural complexes, including more than a dozen immense structures that Lentz and archaeologists refer to as “great houses.” One of the houses, known today as “Pueblo Bonito,” may have had over 600 rooms, including crypts that housed more than 100 burials. 

Earlier research revealed a system of roads that connect many Chaco culture sites with evidence of astronomical alignments, indicating that some of the structures were oriented toward the solstice sun and lunar standstills.

Against this backdrop, archaeologists generally agree that Chaco Canyon functioned as a remote trade center and ceremonial site for the Chaco culture. Until now, however, Lentz says studies lacked evidence to support human management of the canyon’s precarious environment for daily living.

Hidden clues

Using lidar aerial mapping technology and the analysis of various ancient substances including carbon isotopes, pollen content, macrobotanical remains and chemical composition of soils, the research team evaluated alternative hypotheses relating to environmental impacts by the ancestral puebloans.

It became clear to the researchers that as ancient puebloans tussled with the unpredictable environment, they kept their society thriving for more than 1,000 years through agriculture by growing a variety of crops such as corn, beans and squash in the canyon while simultaneously harnessing local pinyon and juniper tree woodlands for architectural needs, food resources and firewood for cooking.

“This is a very arid area,” says Lentz. “In arid woodlands the trees are essential for holding the soil in place. When the puebloan inhabitants removed those woodlands, the result was eventually severe erosion and the deterioration of croplands.”

The researchers found a gradual degradation of the local woodlands beginning around 600 B.C., much earlier than previously thought, Lentz says. In spite of the woodland clearance, the people living in the canyon flourished for nearly a millennium through indigenous agricultural practices while using water irrigation methods from the nearby Chaco, Escavada and Fajada Wash tributaries. 

Research team director, Vernon Scarborough, UC professor of anthropology, emphasizes the highly interdisciplinary character of the project, noting that, “Although the focus of our work was on the identification of ancient ancestral puebloan water systems within this arid environment, past landscape alterations were more broadly brought to light.”

Critical evidence for utilizing the local juniper trees for firewood to cook locally cultivated corn, beans and squash was especially important, says Lentz. The pinyon pine nuts provided a valuable source of food, so the Chacoans protected the pinyon trees from over-harvesting for firewood. But the juniper trees, an excellent source of fuel, were not spared from this extensive harvesting.

“We found a reduction of the pinyon-juniper woodlands, with a loss of mostly juniper trees, happened at about the same time there was an introduction of agriculture into the canyon along with the technology for making pottery,” says Lentz. “Through radiocarbon dating from previous studies, we know that the woodlands were established and flourishing in that area as far back as 5,000 years ago, centuries before the puebloans began the use of agriculture.”

Early environmental impact

While the juxtaposition of utilizing agriculture and local wood for cooking had shifted the way the puebloans ate and prepared food, the ongoing clearing of the juniper trees placed an inexorable demand on the woodlands, say the researchers, eventually drastically reducing the number of trees.

“In this arid area, rain tends to come in buckets,” says Lentz. “After hundreds of years of thinning out the tree root systems that hold the soil in place, the rain began washing away much of the fertile topsoil, creating an environment that suffered continuous degradation.”

Prior to the emigration of many of Chaco’s residents from the canyon, these unsustainable land use practices resulted in bouts of erosion, which reduced the resilience of the landscape and likely exacerbated the ability of the ancestral puebloans to endure the period of extensive droughts and aridity that followed, says Lentz.

Present-day Chaco Canyon

With Chaco Canyon now declared a national park and UNESCO World Heritage site, visitors to Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico can marvel at the remains of 12 great houses and more than 4,000 areas of archaeological interest in the rocky landscape. The structures and ruins are protected from destruction and development and given national monument designation by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907.

Because skywatching is deeply ingrained in the site’s past, Chaco Canyon’s 34,000-acre park was proclaimed a dark sky park in 2013, a designation intended to keep it free of light pollution, allowing visitors to see the stars. 

“This study markedly enhanced our revelation about the rate and process of early environmental change by ancient societal consumption practices and the climatic fluctuations,” says Scarborough. “This work, as well as that of others, ought to be yet another wake-up call for what is happening to our planet more generally today.”

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Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. Gerd Eichmann, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI news release.

*PLOS ONE: “Ecological impacts by the ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA”
, 27-Oct-2021. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258369

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