PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—A recent study* of an ancient wildland-urban interface managed by ancestors of Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico could provide an alternate model for modern fire management. As communities expand into fire-prone wildland regions, the threat of wildfire hazards such as property loss increase. Christopher I. Roos and colleagues worked with the Pueblo of Jemez and three other tribes to reconstruct fire use and human impact near settlements in the dry ponderosa pine forests of the Jemez Mountains across centuries. The authors analyzed charcoal and pollen from six sites to look at patterns of fire activity, vegetation change, and herbivore abundance over a 2,000 year period. The authors modeled fire behavior over time by factoring in population size, agricultural land use, fuelwood harvest, and human ignition. Initial settlement from 1100-1300 CE increased fire frequency in the landscape. Wood harvesting and frequent, patchy fires led to landscape that burned often but not extensively. Population collapse following the Spanish invasion brought the return of frequent, widely spreading fires. According to the authors, the landscape avoided extreme fire behavior even given large fires or conducive conditions like drought, and the experiences could inform local management of fire and fuels at modern wildland-urban interfaces.
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Archaeological remains of a “fieldhouse” in Jemez ponderosa pine forests. More than 3,000 similar structures surround more than two dozen villages and towns occupied by Jemez people from 1100-1700 CE. Kacy Hollenback
If you think archaeology is much like the popular depictions we often experience through the entertainment industry, you need to think again.
In a report published in the scientific journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History relate how real archaeology, the archaeology practiced today by researchers and scholars throughout the world, is actually radically different than the classical archaeology performed by explorers a century or more ago, exemplified typically by scenes of people digging within controlled earthen square units, unearthing remarkably preserved, sensational artifacts—a stereotype often projected to the public by the media. But, as the researchers relate in the paper, much ‘archaeology’ as we know it today is actually more often conducted in the labs behind the scenes, where new techniques and technology is applied to analyze the finds brought from the field, employing a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding not only the artifacts themselves but the contextual landscapes of the finds, human settlement patterns and behavior, and how it all relates to other subject matter and disciplines. As noted in the subject Max Planck Institute press release by Nicole Boivin, lead author of the study and Director of the Institute’s Department of Archaeology: “Archaeology today is a dramatically different discipline to what it was a century ago. While the tomb raiding we see portrayed in movies is over the top, the archaeology of the past was probably closer to this than to present-day archaeology. Much archaeology today is in contrast highly scientific in orientation, and aimed at addressing modern-day issues.”*
“Addressing modern-day issues” is an operative phrase here. Key to understanding the evolution of the discipline today, say the study authors, is recognizing how archaeological research is now bing applied to studying and developing solutions to present-day issues. “It is clear that the past offers a vast repertoire of cultural knowledge that we cannot ignore,” states Professor Boivin in the Max Planck Institute press release.* Recognizing this, researchers are examining the way people in past societies enriched their agricultural land, mitigated or prevented devastating fires, moved and distributed water and made their settlements ‘greener’ without using fossil fuel energy sources.
The study authors emphasize that today’s advancements in the application of technological and social solutions to global present-day problems, such as climate change, must work in tandem with archaeology.
“It’s not about glorifying the past, or vilifying progress,” states Boivin in the press release. “Instead, it’s about bringing together the best of the past, present and future to steer a responsible and constructive course for humanity.”
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Around the world today, we can find many examples of how past cultural and technological practices and solutions are being revived to address pressing environmental and land management challenges. Examples include (left to right) mobilization of ancient terra preta (anthropogenic dark earth) technology, revitalization of landesque capital (long-term landscape investments) and adoption of traditional fire management regimes. Michelle O’Reilly
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Archaeological studies of low-density, agrarian-based cities such as ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia are increasingly being used to inform the development of more sustainable urban centers in the future. Alison Crowther
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*Article Source: A new archaeology for the Anthropocene era, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Walking through this lush, tropical forest, visitors may not realize at first that they are among the monumental remains of a large ancient Maya center. Where are all the great stone pyramids, ball-courts, temples, and other monuments so often attributed to great ancient Maya centers? Yet, one sees a tropical landscape that is anything but flat. There is a jungle-shrouded mound here, another one over there. A well-planned walking path winds through what a visitor might describe as the Maya version of the Garden of Eden. Like the very first 18th and 19th century explorers of the Maya world, one sees what could be ancient structures still hidden beneath their canopy shroud. Some of them here have now been partially exposed, betraying what might lie beneath and leaving the rest to the imagination. Visitors soon acquire the impression that this place is very different than any other encountered in the Maya world. Straddling the border between Guatemala and Belize, it is known as El Pilar. It has been explored and studied by archaeologist Dr. Anabel Ford of the University of California, Santa Barbara for decades.
“Based on excavations exposures, several key locales at El Pilar have been consolidated for viewing under the forest canopy, while most have been preserved under a mantel of earth for later consideration,” wrote Ford and co-author Maggie Knapp in a previous article about the site*. “Partial exposures offer examples of the monumental architecture, while the covered temples can be compared with those exposed at other sites. The objective of Archaeology under the Canopy [the program plan for excavating and researching El Pilar] is to maintain architectural harmony and integrity and to give priority to the monuments at risk.” With this approach, Ford hopes to better preserve the site’s monumental features, sustaining the stability of the structures that otherwise would deteriorate due to environmental temperature, humidity, and precipitation effects — all factors that erode plaster walls and the delicate, elaborate facades that characterize ancient Maya works.
Thus, most of the monumental features of this ancient city remain ‘hidden’ beneath its tropical forest shroud. But now, teams of researchers, led by Ford, have recently undertaken a new way of “seeing” the ancient settlement and its surrounding context with high-tech eyes, significantly expanding their understanding of the true complexity and size of its otherwise ‘invisible’ human-modified landscape.
“We have integrated LiDAR imagery into settlement surveys for seven years to examine the landscape beyond“downtown” El Pilar,” writes Ford and her team of researchers about their recent research**. LiDAR is a method for measuring distances in the topography of an area by directing laser light from aerial positions to the surface and then measuring its reflection with a sensor. The differences in laser return times and wavelengths are then applied to mapping technology to create digital 3-D and other images of the landscape, as well as creating new data sets about the landscape.
“We have documented over 1,862 structures over the 14 square kilometers surveyed to date, with more to be added by future work,” says Ford and her colleagues**.
Much more than this, Ford and her team of researchers have also identified a variety of other features related to how the ancient inhabitants managed or modified their environment within El Pilar’s landscape ‘footprint’, including aguadas (small reservoirs), chultuns (storage pits), berms, depressions, terraces and quarries — all features that would otherwise elude the casual eye as one traverses the area on foot, but which signal site investigators where to look on the ground for evidence of the ancient peoples’ presence and activities.
Additionally, by consulting and cooperating with the indigenous people of today’s El Pilar area — the ‘citizen scientists’ — the researchers have greatly enhanced their ability to accurately interpret what they are finding. Altogether, combining the LiDAR surveys and analysis with the input and knowledge of the indigenous participants have provided a gold mine of information for analysis, promising a fuller and more detailed understanding of the settlement, agricultural activity, and clues to the lifestyle of these ancient people.
Ford believes this overall approach has important implications and significance for the study of the ancient Maya across all of Mesoamerica.
Says Ford and her colleagues: “The combination of these different ways of knowing has a synergistic effect, which deepens mutual understanding across cultures and creates a more holistic framework for conducting research, and we are excited about the direction we are headed.”**
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Map of the El Pilar core, or “city center”, made possible by LiDAR. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar
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For more about this, see the article, Modeling Ancient Maya Landscapes, in the Winter 2021 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.
As Founder and Editor of Popular Archaeology Magazine, Dan is a freelance writer and journalist specializing in archaeology. He studied anthropology and archaeology in undergraduate and graduate school and has been an active participant on archaeological excavations in the U.S. and abroad. He is the creator and administrator of Archaeological Digs, a popular weblog about archaeological excavation and field school opportunities.
Marking Popular Archaeology Magazine’s 10-year anniversary, here are the most compelling published stories over the last 10 years. Some have an element of controversy, some discoveries took place decades before, and others entail findings that may lead to further discoveries yet to come. In all cases, they represent the excitement and adventure of archaeology as it opens new and fascinating windows on humanity’s collective past.
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The discovery of the world’s largest trove of ancient writings opened an unparalleled window on a vanished world. Read About It Here
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The story of a forgotten explorer and his intrepid journey to discover great ancient Arabian cities of the Incense Road. Read About It Here
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How an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life. Read About It Here
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Two remarkable sites are shedding light on a critical transitional period in human evolution. Read About It Here
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The startling discovery of million-year-old human footprints on a beach in the United Kingdom had scientists jumping. Read About It Here
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The recent controversial discoveries, and a renowned scholar’s quest to uncover the historical truth about Jesus of Nazareth. Read About It Here
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Excavations of princely tombs are shedding new light on a formative time before the high florescence of the Mycenaean civilization. Read About It Here
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An anthology of articles focusing on the findings that are informing a new paradigm about the early settling of the Americas. Read About It Here
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Archaeologists are unearthing new clues to America’s historic “lost” colony. Read About It Here
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The in-depth story about the controversial discovery of a 130,000-year-old human presence in Southern California. Read About It Here
Kathlyn (Kara) Cooney proves that the value of a great scholar and speaker is timeless and priceless. A few years ago, Richard (the interviewer) met her after her lecture on ancient Egypt at One Day University in New York City. This was a poignant example of how an afternoon immersion in the land of the Nile can lead to all sorts of tributaries and surprises. Kara (pictured below) is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture and Chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department at UCLA. She is currently researching coffin reuse in ancient Egypt and has studied nearly 300 coffins around the world. Her two books – The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (Crown, 2014) and When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (National Geographic Press, 2018)—have been generously reviewed. In late fall 2020, National Geographic released a special edition on Kara’s work on female pharaohs.
In 2008, Kara co-wrote and produced the Discovery Channel’s Out of Egypt, an exploration of ancient cultures, architecture and the sacred, with a special emphasis on timeless, archetypal shapes: cities and civilization go hand in hand, but disease and strife are not far behind. Kara was also co-curator of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened in 2005. She was also a member of the team that excavated the artisan’s village of Deir el Medina in Egypt. This interview focuses on King Tut and his remarkable parents, Akhenaten and Nefertiti.Kara is interviewed here by author and professor Richard Marranca.
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Kara Cooney onsite in Egypt. Courtesy Patina Productions
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RM:It is exciting that you curated the Tut (Tutankhamun) exhibit in Los Angeles. Do you think Tut returned to the old gods and rejected the “monothesism” of Akhenaten on his own, or was he forced into that? Why did he abandon the new capital, Amarna, in the desert?
KC: Interestingly, our history of Tutankhamun is inseparable from our history of Nefertiti (the queen and royal wife of Pharaoah Akhenaten); more and more Egyptologists are realizing that the end of the Amarna period was being shaped by a powerful female rather than a powerful male. Tutankhamun is famous today because of his funerary material; but one of the only reasons I’m interested in his funerary material is because it’s a reflection of Nefertiti as ruler before him. And if anybody returns to the old gods and the old ways and traditions, it was Nefertiti. It was not Tutankhamun.
He was actually the beneficiary of her activities. Yes, he was born Tutankhaten and became Tutankhamun, but that likely happened before he took the throne. It probably happened when he was quite a young boy. And even when I experience my own son, who is now 10, I consider that even though Tutankhamun was brought up in the Amarna religion as a young boy, his earliest memories would have been shaped by Nefertiti, likely moving Egypt back to traditional ways, with the entire court quickly falling in line.
So the pendulum was already swinging in that direction. Whatever the ruler did after Akhenaten, I think everybody knew they needed to swing back into that direction. It doesn’t seem that Tutankhamun was raised with any protective nature towards his father’s religion. I think that’s his earliest memories, but his most formative memories as a child, starting around six, seven or eight years of age, would have been of the old religion rather than his father’s new religion.
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Close-up detailed view of Tutankhamun’s innermost coffin found within his tomb. Jon Bodsworth, Pubic Domain, Wikimedia Commons
RM:Tut’s uncle or father Akhenaten is one of the most enigmatic figures in history. Bob Brier said that he was the first “hippie” and monotheist. Can you be a monotheist if you think you’re a god yourself? Can you tell us about him?
KC:Akhenaten may have been the father of Tutankhamun. Or he may have been the grandfather or uncle. We actually don’t really know. The lack of clarity is of itself very suspicious. Akhenaten is quite the character, and there’s been much attention on him by Egyptologists trying to figure out what made him tick and why he did what he did. Opinions are quite varied, and it’s difficult to determine the truth because of course we’ve never been able to meet the guy. He never put his thoughts into writing in a way that would allow us to understand why he did what he did. The “hippie” idea is the traditional way of looking at this guy. He implemented these great ideas, and then people didn’t like them. But there’s this hippie 1968 sort of feeling about him that he’s about peace and love and it’s an amazing time of experimentation. What is god? What is the universe? It seems all ‘poppies and rainbows’. But even hippies have a dark side. Right? There was the Summer of Love in ’69 and then things got really dark in the ‘70s. You have things like Charles Manson, Patty Hearst kidnappings and all kinds of bombs going off and revolutionary thinking — “You Say You Want a Revolution”, as the Beatles song goes. But I wouldn’t call Akhenaten a revolutionary. That’s the wrong word. A revolution comes from the grass roots of society. This is coming from the very pinnacle, from the very top, the most authoritarian regime one can possibly imagine. And I wouldn’t call him a monotheist, necessarily.
More accurately, I would say Akhenaten was likely the first fanatic. He’s the first to take religion and make it not just exclusionary, but fanatically tell people what is right and what is wrong. And when people don’t go along with what he says, there is a reaction. Here the Egyptians are not clear about what happened. But there was probably some level of coercion to what Akhenaten implemented in his country. He leaves the traditional capitals of Memphis and Thebes, funneling money away from those very archaic temple institutions. He moves them into a new direction and founds this new capital city in the middle of nowhere.
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Relief of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and two daughters adoring the Aten. 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten. Between -1372 and -1355 BC. The Royal Tomb, Tell el-Amarna, Egypt. Photographer Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France. Attribution 2.0 Generic license, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
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RM:It was very bold and quixotic — bringing all those followers out to the desert.
KC: When he makes that move, he marshaled his main support from the army. Because it comes from the military part of society, this implies that the priests were not interested in going along with these ideas. Does that mean he is coercing the rest of the population to either get in line or not say anything against him? It’s not clear, but the Egyptian regime was always authoritarian and people never spoke against their king in a public or documented way. This wasn’t a Greek democracy or a Roman tribunal senatorial system. This was an authoritarian divine kingship and the king was not to be questioned. And so, we wouldn’t expect to see dissent clearly recorded anywhere. And so I think the best evidence that people were suffering under Akhenaten’s rule and his fanatical religious changes was the return to the old ways in the aftermath of his rule, to the polytheism of before, and the temples functioning as they had before.
There was also a great destructive event after Akhenaten was gone. When that happened is not clear. But his new city of Amarna was destroyed down to the blocks, down to the foundation. Those blocks were subsequently hauled off to other places and reused. The statues were smashed into tiny bits that archaeologists have tried to piece together in whatever way they can. And the city itself was swallowed up by the sands, later to be discovered by a variety of archaeologists—British, German, and others.
Akhenaten is a person I’m very interested in and I think I will do some more writing about him in the future. But because of the amount of ink that’s been spilled, the research that goes into it would have to be quite thoroughly and carefully done and I would need to formulate a position on how I interpret his life and times. And then there comes the interesting tidbit that Akhenaten’s history is very much being sorted out right now, particularly the aftermath — what happened after his totalitarian fanatical regime was over and the return to the old ways. Who was really responsible for doing that?
As to Tutankhamen, it is thought that he was the major king following Akhenaten, but there seems to have been another king named Smenkhkare, who ruled in between; Smenkhkare may have been none other than Nefertiti herself, taking on a masculine role. Also, Nefertiti may have been a co-king alongside Akhenaten. So there’s a lot of interesting elements to this story that we’re just sorting out now as Egyptologists unravel these different strands of history.
RM:I recall a unique image of Nefertiti in battle. And about Akhenaten – aren’t there images of him giving out necklaces? And didn’t analysis show that their people may have been starving or very low on calories?
KC: Yes. How did he get people to do what he wanted them to do? Well, he relied on the army. And secondly, he paid them off. And he’s wasn’t shy about showing it. So you see in the elite’s tombs scenes of the Window of Appearances, with the king and his bride, Nefertiti, often accompanied by their daughters, throwing gold at the people, tying the gold of honor necklace around an elite neck, essentially bribing people, paying them off, making them rich to accompany his fanatical journey. That is very clearly represented, although it has taken Egyptologists some time to see the more cynical side of that exchange.
Regarding the people (his subjects), there’s a lot of focus on that through archaeological work in Amarna now, led by Barry Kemp and his many specialists. They are examining the bodies of the laborers who built this city, comparing them to peasants’ bodies from other parts of Egypt. Forensic analysis suggests these people led a brutal existence — numerous broken bones, stress fractures in people who were too young to be working, injuries that had no time to heal; and also evidence of malnutrition, of people not having enough to eat and the right foods to eat and yet simultaneously doing this work probably at the end of a whip.
So it seems that Akhenaten was doing a lot with less and less resources as time went on. He paid off his elites with a great deal of gold. Those elites in turn wanted to keep the resources that they could, and so they didn’t let that wealth trickle down to the people who were working for them and instead ended up exploiting people quite cruelly. The scientists who examined the remains of the people who were buried in those workers’ cemeteries could see that they were treated differently than those they found in the workers’ cemeteries at Giza or Deir el-Medina, where you see stress fractures and work-related injuries but nothing like the poorly healed injuries and the evidence of back-breaking labor forced at Amarna. That was probably a nail in the coffin for Akhenaten’s fanatical religious changes.
Richard is a college teacher and author. His recent publications were in Minerva Magazine, Raven’s Perch, Paterson Literary Review and Months to Years. He has authored two books in print, Dragon Sutra and New Romantics: Ten Stories, and four books online, such as Alexander in India and NY Interviews. He, his wife Renah and daughter Inanna produce videos, the latest being Childe Hera’s World on YouTube (educational travel).
As a child, Richard was given books on history, archaeology and folklore/myth; his interests have never changed. He and his wife have traveled to sixty countries. Richard studied in Greece for a semester through New York University, from where he obtained his Ph.D. From 2002-2003 he was awarded a Fulbright to teach at LMU in Munich, Germany, as well as six NEH summer seminars, such as Andean Worlds, Transcendentalists/Concord and High Plains Indians. Richard is currently finishing up a collection of speculative stories and The Story of the Egyptian Mummy, a collection of interviews with Egyptologists about mummies.
Salima Ikram is Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. She is perhaps best known for her work with ancient Egyptian animal mummies, and is currently the founder and co-director of the Animal Mummy Project at the Egyptian Museum. As such, she is the world’s leading expert on animal mummies. Ikram has a prominent media presence, authoring articles on Egyptology in Egypt Today, National Geographic, and KMT. She has also appeared in documentaries and specials for PBS, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic Channel, and the BBC. Salima is interviewed here by author and professor Richard Marranca.
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RM:Why is the Isis and Osiris story so important to the idea of creating mummies and much else in ancient Egyptian religion and politics?
SI:The Story of Isis and Osiris is so compelling because it is a love story as well as a promise of eternal life and resurrection. It has all the components for a good tale of swashbuckling, good vs evil, drama, romance, with the good guys winning in the end. For the ancient Egyptians this established and explained the role of divine kingship as well as the idea of eternal life and was key to both state religion as well as personal piety in terms of funerary beliefs.
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Article Insert
Isis and Osiris
The family of Osiris. Osiris on a lapis lazuli pillar in the middle, flanked by Horus on the left and Isis on the right (22nd dynasty, Louvre, Paris). Between 874 and 850 BCAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 France license, Wikimedia Commons
To begin to understand ancient Egyptian religion and culture, one must fist know the story of Osiris. It begins with the murder of the godOsiris, a primeval king of Egypt, by his brother Set. Set subsequently usurps Osiris’s throne. Osiris’s wife Isis restores her husband’s body (thus the introduction of the concept of resurrection), allowing them to posthumously conceive their son, Horus. The rest of the story revolves around Horus, who as a child is protected by his mother, but then becomes Set’s rival for the throne. Their violent conflicts end with Horus’s triumph, which restores Maat (or cosmic and social order) to Egypt after Set’s unrighteous and dark reign and ultimately completes the process of Osiris’s resurrection.
The story is key to understanding ancient Egyptian views of kingship and succession, the eternal conflict between order and disorder, and death and the afterlife. Mummification represents the process of resurrection embodied at the core of the Osiris story.
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RM:What is the history behind the study of ancient Egyptian mummification?
SI:The majority of the early mummy and skeletal studies used basic tools to extract limited information from mummies. The most simple and common method, sometimes the sole one used when in the field, is visual examination. Such examinations yield crucial information about the bandage patterns, amulets and other objects placed on the mummy, body and arm positions, cosmetics, tattooing, and hairstyles. Although the unwrappings and resulting autopsies are destructive, they still provide invaluable detailed and useful information. Several scientific autopsies were carried out on mummies during the 1970s, with multidisciplinary teams of researchers involved in the investigations (Cockburn et al. 1975; Hart et al. 1977; David 1979; Cockburn et al. 1980: 52–70; Millet et al. 1980; Reyman and Peck 1980; David and Tapp 1984; Goyon and Josset 1988).
Diseases can also be tentatively identified with the naked eye, although such identifications are unreliable. For example, visual examination identified a possible case of poliomyelitis in the mummy of the Pharaoh Siptah (Smith 1912: 70–73). Polio is a viral infection of the central nervous system that manifests itself in the paralysis of one or more muscle groups: Siptah has one short and withered leg. On the other hand, the same symptoms can result from certain types of cerebral palsy. Smallpox has also been suspected in the mummy of the pharaoh Ramesses V, due to the pox markings visible on his face (Smith 1912: 90–92). Visual examination can be augmented by scientific analyses that can provide information about other aspects of mummification, such as identification of the materials used in mummification, or a study of mummified tissues. As the sciences evolved, so did mummy studies.
The first mummy to be submitted to a professional chemical analysis (in an effort to determine the materials used in its manufacture) was the ‘Leeds Mummy’ (George 1828); although the results of this examination raised more questions than answers, it was the first such scientific investigation carried out on a mummy, setting the foundation for further studies, particularly those performed by Alfred Lucas in the early twentieth century. Lucas collaborated extensively with Egyptologists and physical anthropologists on identifying the different materials used in mummification (Lucas 1910, 1931, 1932, 1962). The first microscopic examination of ancient Egyptian tissue was performed by the Viennese laryngologist, Johan Czermak (1852). This sort of study increased dramatically in the twentieth century with the advent of ‘palaeopathology’—a term coined by Marc Armand Ruffer (1921), Professor of Bacteriology in Cairo, meaning the study of ancient diseases from the tissues. One of this field’s major aims is to trace the origins, development, and disappearance of specific diseases and to study the effects of diseases on society (Brothwell et al. 1967). Ruffer used microscopic examination on many samples from mummies and managed to identify diseases as well as organs that had dried beyond recognition (Ruffer 1921, 1911; Moodie 1931). Nowadays of course we have X-rays and very good CT scans that allow for much more nuanced imaging. Of course, it is always helpful to have the data from the earlier studies as it helps us to interpret things that might not be immediately clear or apparent on the CT scan. Imaging methods allow us to study mummy’s nondestructively, which is a great boon.
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Article Insert
The Mummy Mask
In ancient Egypt, mummified bodies were intended to receive the ba, or spirit. A mask, usually made from linen and plaster and then painted with images of gods and spells for protection, was placed over the head and shoulders of the mummy so that the spirit could recognize it and enter. The mask typically represented the young, ideal image of what the person would look like in the afterlife. The mummy and mask was placed in a painted wooden coffin and surrounded by the food, tools, and gifts needed in the afterlife. This image shows an unidentified mask currently maintained in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
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RM: Can you tell us about the Animal Mummy Project?
SI: Animal mummies are fascinating, as they seem such a curiosity to us today. They tell us a lot about how the ancient Egyptians thought of animals, and the complex way in which they viewed the world. Pets were beloved and they were preserved so that the souls of the animals and their owners could be united for eternity.
But animals also provided food, and thus food mummies were made to nourish the dead forever.
Animals were thought to have a unique position in the realm of the gods, and each god had a totemic animal. In some cases, the god’s spirit would enter into one of his/her totemic animals, recognizable to the priests by special markings. The animal would be worshipped and cared for during its lifetime and after its death it would be mummified and buried with great pomp in special tombs. The god’s spirit would move to the body of another uniquely marked creature, a bit like the migratory spirit of the Dalai Lama.
Animals were also given as votive offerings to the gods, but of course these would be animals that bore no special markings. These were sometimes killed deliberately and given as mummies by pilgrims, taking their prayers to the gods. Curiously many of the animals mummified for this purpose were killed deliberately. Perhaps the priests felt that these animals had been especially blessed as they had been chosen as messengers to the gods.
Recently, there has been an extraordinary find of cat, crocodile, and other mummies at Saqqara. One of the most wonderful was the identification of a lion cub mummy.Also at Saqqara, we found at a place that contained at least 7.8 million dog mummies!
Animal cults provided people with a more intimate relationship with the gods, and votive offerings of animal mummies might have been seen as a more powerful way of interacting with the gods. These mummies also played a significant role in the economy as this practice involved temple personnel to look after the animals, to obtain them, to mummify them, and other people might have sourced animals as well. Additionally, natron, resins, oils, and bandages had to be obtained, as well as pottery vessels and coffins for the creatures. Thus, a network of trade with huge economic ramifications depended on this practice.
According to Ikram, pets were loved by their owners and mummified so the animal souls could be united with them throughout eternity. They were also a source of food, so their mummies served to nourish the dead in the afterlife. The Egyptian pantheon of gods also owned totemic animals. Sometimes the spirits of the gods would possess one of their totemic animals. These animals were identified by specific marks by the temple priests, given special care while living and then mummified and memorialized after death. Additionally, animals were killed, mummified and given as votive offerings to the gods, many of which were intended to carry messages to the gods. The practice of mummifying animals was important to the ancient Egyptian economy, in that significant resources were required and exchanged to administer it, involving sourcing the animals and mummifying them, which included the acquirement of natron, resins, oils, bandaging, pottery vessels and coffins, all relying on an extensive trade network.
Recently, Akrim was involved in the discovery of a large cache of animal mummies in a tomb near the recovery of a remarkably well-preserved priestly tomb in Saqqara. The finds included cat, crocodile, and other animal mummies, including a well-preserved lion cub, a first of its kind at Saqqara. Other animal mummy discoveries at Saqqara, said Akrim, included a location containing “at least 7.8 million dog mummies”.
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RM: I viewed Secrets of the Dead: Egypt’s Darkest Hour, where you are featured. What you discussed in that film was both interesting and macabre – the mass grave of mummies and body parts strewn about from the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Can you describe that history and carnage?
SI:The end of the Old Kingdom was brought about by a variety of factors. The most significant was of course climate change, where a series of Low Niles and an increasing desertification caused famine, and therefore unrest. In addition to that, King Pepi the second had an extraordinarily long reign, during which time a lot of power slipped out of his hand and into that of provincial nobility. He also allowed the royal women to marry provincial elites, which gave those people greater power legitimacy, diluting the power of the king.
In order to make sure that the priesthood supported him, he allowed temples not to pay taxes to him and this series of exemption decrees also decreased royal power and general control. In general, what happened is that with this decrease of central authority and control, a lot of the provincial elites started to flex their muscles and challenge central authority, particularly upon the death of the King.
Egypt then fell into a group of warring city states, with the nobles having their own armies, and probably also bringing in mercenaries, both from the south and north-east. These battles were in part responsible for the mass graves. Of course, what you saw on television was really also a result of secondary looters in modern times.
RM: Are there curses in the tombs?
SI:The idea of curses is actually a false one. Tutankhamen’s tomb had no curse inscribed within it. That was made up by journalists. There are some tombs, however,that do have curses and they basically say that if anyone comes in to violate the tomb, or is impure, then may they be strangled like a goose and may the gods sit in judgement of the violator. A few of them do have more colorful variations on this theme, saying may the snake, may the crocodile, or may the lion destroy you.
RM:What did ancient authorities do when they realized it wasn’t safe to keep mummies in their tombs – bring them into more secure hiding spots?
SI:Moving mummies was something that really seemed to happen mostly in the Third Intermediate period, although it is quite possible that violated tombs were reconsecrated and bones gathered together and reburied in earlier periods, as well. Of course, in times of political turmoil when raiders, whether Egyptian or from abroad, were terrorizing the countryside, burials had to be protected and this is why bodies were moved about and put into caches for safe keeping.
RM:Beginning in ancient times, the theft and abuse of mummies is rampant. Can you tell us about them being used for fuel and medicine, for amusement and parties?
SI: In addition to eating them for medicine, once the mummies got to Europe they provided people with further ghoulish entertainment: unwrappings. These became social events and were very much a part of Victorian parlor entertainment, with special invitations being sent out for them. Mummy unwrappings did not start in the nineteenth century; many other curious individuals had staged unwrapping shows in previous years. One of the earliest recorded unwrappings occurred in September 1698, when Benoit de Maillet (1656-1738), Louis XIV’s consul in Cairo, unwrapped a mummy before a group of French travelers. Unfortunately he, as with most of his successors in unwrapping, did not record anything concerning the mummy; they only mention some of the amulets found on it. Mummies were so abundant that despite the mania for collection and unwrapping, there still remained sufficient mummies in Egypt for what might be termed ‘useful purposes’.
A special paint, called Mummy Brown, was derived from fragments of mummified bodies and used in oil painting. One singularly pious artist was so upset to find that actual bodies of humans had been used to manufacture his paint, that he took all his tubes of Mummy Brown into the garden and gave them a decent burial. In the nineteenth century an American paper manufacturer from Maine, Augustus Stanwood, used linen mummy wrapping to make brown paper. This paper was sold to butchers and grocers who wrapped meat, butter, and the like in it. Once people found out the source, this stopped being common practice. Cat mummies were shipped from Egypt to Europe for a twofold purpose: first, they helped provide a bit of ballast for the boats; second, they were used as fertilizer until public outcry put a stop to it. Mummies suffered many ignominies in Egypt, as well. They were burnt as firewood. Since wood was scarce and mummies plentiful, their arms and legs were used as torches when people wished to explore sepulchres or see their way at night. Mark Twain reports (one suspects with his tongue firmly in his cheek) that they were even reported as being used as fuel to fire locomotives.
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A fragment of mummy linen, typically used to wrap the body during mummification. ca. 1550 BC. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.
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RM:Can we talk about museums and displaying mummies for the public? In “From Thebes to Cairo, the Journey, Study, and Display of Egypt’s Royal Mummies, Past, Present, and Future,” you wrote that there have been “religious and political sensibilities.” Can you speak about this?
SI:It is an issue as to whether one should display dead bodies and how one should display them if one is going to. It is hard to say that there is one right or wrong answer. I think that if I were dead and on display in a museum after my death I would not mind particularly, though I would like to be shown in a slightly decent way with some covering. We cannot ask each ancient Egyptian about what he or she thought about this display business. I think that perhaps the way they have been displayed in the Royal Mummy Room with only the heads visible is acceptable. And I also think that maybe if one says a prayer, that is also helpful, but that is a personal opinion. Depending on each person’s religious or personal beliefs, the ideas of whether one should or should not display the dead will vary.
RM: In your books (as well as essays you shared with me), there are state-of-the-art displays of mummies. I recall Meresamun, a temple singer, at the Oriental Institute. The exhibit includes objects from her life, CT scans, and forensic reconstructions of her face. Is the concept here to be very informative, respectful and holistic?
SI:I think yes because then you can see her in all of her glory as a mummy as well as a human being. And for me the most important thing is to think of the ancient Egyptians as human beings because that is why I’m interested in them. I want to know as much as I can about them as individuals, which is why I perhaps prefer non-royalty to royalty.
Richard is a college teacher and author. His recent publications were in Minerva Magazine, Raven’s Perch, Paterson Literary Review and Months to Years. He has authored two books in print, Dragon Sutra and New Romantics: Ten Stories, and four books online, such as Alexander in India and NY Interviews. He, his wife Renah and daughter Inanna produce videos, the latest being Childe Hera’s World on YouTube (educational travel).
As a child, Richard was given books on history, archaeology and folklore/myth; his interests have never changed. He and his wife have traveled to sixty countries. Richard studied in Greece for a semester through New York University, from where he obtained his Ph.D. From 2002-2003 he was awarded a Fulbright to teach at LMU in Munich, Germany, as well as six NEH summer seminars, such as Andean Worlds, Transcendentalists/Concord and High Plains Indians. Richard is currently finishing up a collection of speculative stories and The Story of the Egyptian Mummy, a collection of interviews with Egyptologists about mummies.
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For more about mummies, see the story about the amazing work experts are doing at the Penn Museum to conserve and study mummies and coffins, and the fascinating things they are learning about them. Published previously at Popular Archaeology.
A single-engine Cessna soars over the tropical Mesoamerican forest, revealing the splendors of an ancient city in stunning, three-dimensional detail. Such stories, and the breathtaking images that accompany them, have captured the popular imagination over the past decade, as Maya archaeologists have incorporated Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology into their toolkit. Sophisticated imaging techniques used to visualize these high-resolution remote sensing data have revolutionized settlement pattern studies in the region, allowing archaeologists to study ancient Maya cities and their surroundings at a level of detail previously unimaginable. Our work at El Pilar has been at the leading edge of this tectonic shift in Maya studies, and we continue to push the boundaries of what LiDAR can help us learn about life in the Maya Forest.
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Fig 1: Animation of aerial LiDAR survey.
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Fig 2: Map of the El Pilar site and its local and regional context. Thomas Crimmel
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El Pilar and LiDAR
El Pilar is a large Maya center, located on the edge of an elevated limestone escarpment that extends north and west into Petén, Guatemala, the heartland of Maya civilization in the southern lowlands. The modern Belize/Guatemala frontier splits the site epicenter—the “downtown” core containing the largest temples, palaces, and administrative buildings—roughly in half, with monumental structures spread over two kilometers in both countries. Anciently, this location was politically strategic, placing El Pilar within 50 km of the massive capital Tikal to the west, between 10 – 20 km from the major centers Naranjo, Holmul, and Xunantunich, and within the same distance to numerous medium-sized sites in the upper Belize Valley to the south. Several distinctive landforms—upland ridges, foothills, lowland plains, and the Belize River valley—also converge at an ecotone near this area, which provided a range of plant, animal, and geological resources to the ancient inhabitants. Twenty-square-kilometers of protected reserve land now surround El Pilar in Belize and Guatemala, but the influence of the city in ancient times would have spread over a much larger area.
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Fig 3: Central Maya lowlands and elevation cross-section (El Pilar within its local context and the elevation profile). Thomas Crimmel
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Fig 4: Map of El Pilar core area showing structures in their context (“downtown”). Thomas Crimmel
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Above and below: Most of the El Pilar structures remain enshrouded in foliage, a natural strategy for conserving its remains. Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar Program
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Archaeological projects across the Maya region now employ LiDAR, and most share the primary goal of settlement prospection: the identification of ancient occupation over vast expanses of dense tropical forest. Areas that would take years or decades to systematically survey on foot can be imaged in hours or days, allowing researchers to locate new settlement areas, understand the extent of cities, and generate population estimates. Our settlement survey program at El Pilar shares these goals, although we view settlement prospection somewhat differently. Knowing where people lived, and estimating how many people lived somewhere, are important aspects of understanding life in the past, but settlement and population size are only the starting points for understanding how the Maya lived within, and shaped, their environment.
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Fig 5: LiDAR surveys in the Maya lowlands (after Canuto).
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Above: Settlement features validated after LiDAR at El Pilar, from 1986 to 2020. Thomas Crimmel. Slideshow by canva.com
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More Than Monuments
We have integrated LiDAR imagery into settlement surveys for seven years to examine the landscape beyond“downtown” El Pilar. Images produced by processing LiDAR data provide a starting point for ground-truthing settlement remains. We have documented over 1,862 structures over the 14 square kilometers surveyed to date, with more to be added by future work. LiDAR provides the most accurate renderings of topography that, when analyzed in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, can produce detailed datasets to measure the slope of the ground surface, the flow of water, and other facets important to understanding how the Maya used their landscape.
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Fig 7: LiDAR slope classification at El Pilar. Slopes range from 0 degrees (dark brown) to 90 degrees (dark blue). Thomas Crimmel
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Fig 8: LiDAR-derived water flow model at El Pilar. Elevation ranges from the high (red) to low (green) with contour lines (brown) indicating 10 meters of difference. Thomas Crimmel
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Fig 9: LiDAR-derived hilltop and basin locations at El Pilar. Concavity ranges from convex (yellow) to concave (dark blue). Thomas Crimmel
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Fig 10: Validated Looter’s Trenches (red points) at El Pilar. Roads (dotted lines) and architecture (black lines) are also shown. Thomas Crimmel
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The landscape of ancient Maya cities included more than houses and monumental precincts. A quick examination of any Maya settlement map will show large open spaces between residences, and the topographic detail revealed in LiDAR images allows archaeologists to model how the Maya may have used those seemingly “empty” spaces (see Figure 4). For example, calculations of the slope of the ground surface, derived from LiDAR measurements, reveal what areas within El Pilar were suitable for farming. Working from the premise that slope gradients above 14-degrees would be too steep to effectively grow crops, we can exclude these areas of the landscape from analyses of food production capacity, and we can apportion the remaining areas into individual farmers’ fields using our GIS. This gives us a starting point for modeling which areas within the city were intensively managed for resource production and which were left as managed forests. Sophisticated hydrological models, also partially based on slope measurements, provide methods to explore how water flowed, pooled, and was perhaps diverted and stored. El Pilar is separated from the Belize River by 10 km of rugged terrain, so managing water supplies—especially during the months-long dry season when no rain falls—would have been imperative to its inhabitants. Analyzing these aspects of the landscape brings us much closer to understanding the experiences of thousands who lived in similar centers across the Maya Lowlands.
Maya cities also contain a variety of features related to landscape management that are neither residences nor public structures. Our survey effortshave mapped a range of landscape modification features—aguadas (small reservoirs), berms, chultuns (storage pits), depressions, quarries, and terraces—that may, or may not, display strong LiDAR signatures. Long, linear features, such as terraces stretching more than 100 meters, show up clearly in LiDAR images, while smaller, irregularly shaped berms often do not. Large and deep aguadas may also be easily identified, but smaller aguadas, as well as depressions possibly serving similar water-storage functions, typically await discovery in the field. Quarries and chultuns have proven to be the most elusive features in LiDAR images, although the subterranean nature and small size of chultuns makes their low visibility predictable. Understanding the distribution of these features indicates how the Maya used different areas of their cities, and how intense their activities may have been.
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Fig 11: Example areas at El Pilar showing locations and cross-sections of Amatal, Berms, and Corozal. Thomas Crimmel
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Fig 12: LiDAR image of Amatal, points of interest, and survey results. By Justin Tran. Slideshow by canva.com
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Fig 13: LiDAR image of Berms, points of interest, and survey results. By Justin Tran. Slideshow by canva.com
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Fig 14: LiDAR image of Corozal, points of interest, and survey results. By Justin Tran. Slideshow by canva.com
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Fig 15: LiDAR cross-sections of Amatal, Berms, and Corozal (Note: High points are unidentified flying objects!)
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Making Sense With Traditional Knowledge
Interpreting how archaeological features, and the “empty” spaces around them, combined to form the structure of an ancient Maya city is not a simple process, and it cannot be accomplished without an appropriate frame of reference. To understand how the Maya domesticated the landscape in and around their cities, and to begin unraveling the meaning encoded in settlement and topographic data, we have partnered with Indigenous citizen scientists since the beginning of our research program. The contemporary Forest Gardeners of the Maya Lowlands are living encyclopedias of traditional ecological knowledge, skills, and practice. Their insights about land use and agriculture provide bridging arguments to make sense of ancient occupations.
Traditional knowledge of agricultural methods is particularly important to developing models of landscape use and management in ancient Maya cities and the contemporary Maya Forest. The Indigenous foundation of food production in the Maya Forest is the milpa cycle, which is frequently derided as “slash-and-burn” agriculture and cited as a factor in environmental degradation. Our citizen scientist partners, however, reveal the complexity of the milpa cycle: using hand tools, fire, and skills accumulated over generations of living in the forest, Forest Gardeners carefully tend their plots to provide food, construction materials, utensils, medicines, and many other necessities of daily life. They manage the succession of forest plants and trees in these fields, over an average of twenty years, to ensure the ability to produce goods that transcend their “daily bread.” In addition to their direct productive utility, milpa land management practices endow ecological benefits including animal habitat and water conservation, soil fertility maintenance, and erosion reduction on the Maya Forest landscape. We have learned about the wealth of resources this managed forest environment can provide through close collaboration with our citizen scientist partners—who help us identify and map the distribution of economically useful plants in the forest today—and we have incorporated this knowledge into hypotheses for understanding the lives of their ancestors.
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Fig 16: Example tree species identified by citizen scientists at validated mapping points. By Justin Tran. Slideshow by canva.com
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Understanding Life in the Forest
The synthesis of archaeological data, LiDAR imaging, and traditional ecological knowledge at El Pilar pushes our research into new realms of understanding. Our settlement survey, for example, has identified numerous mounds that are the remains of ancient structures, sometimes arranged together in groups and sometimes in isolation. Archaeologists regularly view these mounds as household remains and use counts of mounds as the basis of population estimates. Forest Gardeners across the Maya Lowlands, however, traditionally build small structures in fields located away from their homes. This information allows us to distinguish primary residences—the main home of a household, consisting of more than one mound—from secondary residences or field-houses, which would enter the archaeological record as small, isolated mounds and impact population estimates.
Knowledge of the traditional size of milpa plots, which typically average about one hectare, informs our efforts to understand how space was used at El Pilar. We are building land-use models that combine this information with LiDAR slope data to examine how land may have been allocated within the milpa agricultural cycle, which will reveal the dynamic and complex landscape this cycle could create. Modeling the milpa cycle allows us to explore the productive potential of the city and the forest in which it was built, and to test prevailing explanations that the Maya deforested their environment.
Work at El Pilar endeavors to understand life in the Maya Forest, both past and present, by bringing together different threads of knowledge to expand the limits of archaeological research. While the acquisition of LiDAR data continues to have a profound effect on our archaeological survey, it is the inclusive nature of our project that propels our research forward. Incorporating LiDAR has greatly benefited our settlement survey and enhanced our ability to topographically model the landscape. Our citizen scientist partners enrich our understanding of this landscape and work with us to build land-use models that reflect traditional practices. The combination of these different ways of knowing has a synergistic effect, which deepens mutual understanding across cultures and creates a more holistic framework for conducting research, and we are excited about the direction we are headed.
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Fig 17: Above and below: Is it “Field or Forest” or “Field and Forest”? It is not a trade, it is a cycle.
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Fig 18: Milpa cycle land-use model incorporating LiDAR-derived slope measurements and validated sites.
From historic forest fires in Australia to thawing permafrost in Greenland, global warming is wreaking havoc on archaeological sites around the world. The southeastern US is no exception, where heritage sites are being destroyed not only by more frequent and more intense hurricanes, but by flooding and incessant coastal erosion exacerbated by rising sea levels. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, for example, made history. It began more than two weeks early, with the formation of Tropical Storm Arthur on May 14, and became the most active hurricane season of the satellite era. That season shattered numerous records, producing the most named storms, the highest number to make landfall in the contiguous United States and the most to strike Louisiana. What does this mean for archaeologists in the Southeastern United States? Hurricanes are just one of many growing threats to the thousands of at-risk heritage sites they are working to document and preserve.
To gain a better understanding of the challenges archaeologists are facing, I interviewed Mark Rees,Director, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Sarah Miller, Florida Public Archaeology Network, Chair of the Heritage at Risk committee for the Society of Historical Archaeology; Tad Britt, Chief, Archaeologyand Collections, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, National Park Service; and Meg Gaillard, Heritage Trust Archaeologist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Here is what they had to say:
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Florida • Sarah Miller
Describe the at-risk heritage sites found in Florida.
Miller: The State came up with an informal estimate a few years back of all types of at-risk historic sites: 34,786 sites affected by a two-meter rise and 16,015 sites by a one-meter rise. I tend to focus on the 3,000 archaeological sites to be potentially impacted with a one-meter rise as it’s a smaller number I can start to wrap my head around. These are close to estimates by Anderson et al. that focused more on archaeological sites—3,959 with a one-meter rise and up to 32,301 with greater than five meters in SLR (Sea Level Rise). There are models for SLR that get down to small units like square meters to show it’s not just inching up, but whole pine flats that could flood all at once. Add to that storm surge zones, which change after major storms like Matthew and Irma. Then you have to consider changes to individual sites. Some will erode away, some will become flooded but generally stay in place. Others will be fine, but the access to the sites will flood. Sites that are already submerged are not out of danger either. There is increased temperature and salinity that erode underwater sites as the oceans warm up. There is migration of sea grasses that hold sites in place as they get further under water. In diving, it’s all about more bottom time. As sites get deeper, it will cost more and increased safety stops make dive operations more complicated.
How have past hurricanes and storm events damaged the sites?
Miller: There are sites we know about, that we’ve been able to see and verify their condition. We’ve seen all above-ground features at cemeteries in the Keys wiped out in a single hurricane. We’ve seen the gradual erosion of nine meters of shoreline expose a historic coquina (stone) well that was maybe 20 feet inland and flush to the ground, now fully exposed and the stack of stones detached from the bluffline. We’ve seen flood lines on pre-Columbian mounds from even minor storms. They don’t have to be hurricanes. One of the issues this time of year are the king tides coupled with nor’easters. In St. Augustine, a tornado during Irma came onshore across the lawn of the Castillo de San Marco and wreaked havoc in Huguenot Cemetery. I work for the Florida Public Archaeology Network and I developed the Heritage Monitoring Scout (HMS Florida), which is a participatory site stewardship program to monitor sites to be potentially impacted by climate change. The information I’m sharing here is due in large part to the 1,971 Scout reports we’ve received from 677 volunteers to date.
What impact have storms and hurricanes this year had on these sites?
Miller: This year has had less activity so far, but Sally brought major flooding. After Isaias, we had a Scout report a tree down and artifacts observed on the surface of a mound near Fort Pierce. There is also a pre-Columbian canoe in the same area we’ve had our eye on, which is currently sandbagged to keep it from eroding out of the shore. After Isaias, the sandbags need to be replaced as within a month there was enough wave action to start impacting the site.
Are you noticing an increase in damage to at-risk heritage sites in recent years?
Miller: Oh, yes! We just happened to have our monitoring database up and running right before Matthew hit. At FPAN, we were not tracking it as closely until then. Right away, the database became incredibly useful to track changes over time. The only problem was, in some cases, we didn’t know what the sites looked like before. For example, at one of our flagship sites, we noted after Matthew some impacts, but later saw some of the trees were actually down before that storm. With before and after images, it’s much easier to attribute damage to a storm event with certainty.
How important is it to have archaeologists and citizen scientists in place to monitor heritage sites in real time?
Miller: I’d say absolutely essential. If you look at the Register of Professional Archaeologists, there are 147 archaeologists in the state of Florida. But there are over 180,000 cultural resources listed in the Florida Master Site File. It is really impossible to keep eyes on them all. Many are under state or federal jurisdiction, but many are on private land or in remote areas that are difficult to monitor. It’s also true that after a storm, archaeologists living where the storm hit may have other complicating factors, like their own home has been impacted, or they are deployed to other areas as part of their job. After Matthew, we had a call that there were “shoeboxes” of sherds (pottery pieces) observed near where the shoreline had a new inlet carved out literally overnight. By the time we got to the site, there was a 40-foot pile of sand placed where the sherds had been noted. The Army Corps of Engineers placed the sand as part of a previously approved project and filled in the gap. There was only a short time to observe and record impacts to this area. Another example, at Shell Bluff Landing, we saw a lens (thin layer) of scallops shell not observed before and recorded what we could. The next week another nor’easter came through and the lens was no longer visible.
What threats do future hurricanes and storm events pose to heritage sites in Florida?
Miller: Anything and everything. You never know what will be impacted or where. Sites are disappearing at such a fast rate, and those are the ones we know about. The sites we don’t even know about create another major issue, especially in areas where no comprehensive coastal zone surveys have happened. I read a statistic that Florida has the most number of sites to be potentially impacted, but Louisiana has the most land loss: a football field of land lost every hour to the ocean. In any state, sites that seem safe and upland could be impacted by migration of communities away from the coast in frequent flooding areas.
What is the biggest threat to at-risk heritage sites in Florida?
Miller: Lack of education and coordinated action. It may be easier in other countries where the right to roam and private property do not come in to play as much as they do here in the US. We have lots of jurisdiction issues that are quite complicated and create this patchwork quilt of great disparities between what’s been surveyed, what’s being monitored and managed, and places we have no idea what resources are there nor who is responsible for them. One threat that’s not very sexy, but is a major issue, is our current preservation laws. The main law that protects cultural resources on the federal level, and is replicated on the state level here in Florida, is Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. The process described in that section involves a lengthy consultation, and having permits issued requires a crystal ball to know what will be impacted and where to get coverage for monitoring activities. These sites are disappearing so rapidly, we really need a new system for monitoring that allows for more opportunistic and autonomous monitoring by citizen scientists. Some places have such a participatory site stewardship model in place. We are constantly working with our State Historic Preservation Office, which is very supportive of our efforts. Looking to the future, we hope we can have much greater impact to assist in resilience planning and implementation in the next 30 years, which is critical in the SLR timeline.
Are there actions the archaeology community can take to mitigate these threats to at-risk sites?
Miller: There are great examples internationally and nationally of programs activated to help: SCAPE in Scotland, CHERISH in Ireland and Wales, Midden Minders in Maine, state stewardship programs that are constantly monitoring sites, especially out west. Networking is essential, and borrowing any effective tools from others is important as we are out of time for many to develop programs and resources from scratch. Everyone is doing their part to help reduce carbon emissions and keep the planet and biodiversity healthy. Living shorelines are a great option for sites in places like Florida, so look for opportunities to help with that form of heavy lifting. Stay current in heritage at-risk issues. We have the EnvArch group on Facebook that people can join to share the latest resources and post best practices. If anyone in Florida wants to join HMS Florida, we put out a monthly Scout report with a resource and challenge to keep volunteers active and learning. If you are outside of Florida, the first national site stewardship conference that was scheduled in Las Vegas was recorded and videos will be posted free to all. Let your elected officials know this topic is important to you and that we need to do more to advance regional and local planning efforts. Get in touch with your local State Historic Preservation Office (every state has one) to see if they have a monitoring or stewardship program you can join.
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FPAN staff member Emily Jane Murray during a Heritage Monitoring Scout training at Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Esturine Research Reserve (GTM-NERR) outside of Saint Augustine Florida. Courtesy FPAN
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Sarah Miller excavating at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park in Saint Augustine Florida. Courtesy Sarah Miller
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South Carolina • Meg Gaillard
Which heritage sites in South Carolina are most at risk from hurricanes and other severe weather events?
Gaillard: The Heritage Preserve that is most at risk is the Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve, which is where the Pockoy Island Shell Ring Complex is located. As a whole, Edisto Island sees the highest rate of erosion of anywhere in South Carolina. Pockoy Island Shell Ring One is nearly gone. That is currently our top priority — to get in there, excavate and investigate as much as we can before we lose that site. Edisto Island has been watched for a very long time. Its rate of erosion puts it at the top of our list for immediate investigation. Once Pockoy is gone, what is next? Other places like the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center Heritage Preserve, which is another SCDNR property, also see high rates of erosion. However, I can’t tell you specifically how that compares to other coastal sites and I should be able to do that. That’s the hope of the next step of our investigations — being able to strategically and scientifically analyze the coastline, using applications like the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM), to see where our efforts need to move quickly so that we don’t lose more sites and lose that data before the next hurricane season.
How important is having a comprehensive strategy for identifying at-risk archaeological sites?
Gaillard: We need to have a way where we can identify a top priority list of sites in every state, so that we can strategically investigate and mitigate sites along the coast. There needs to be a strategic methodology to how we approach the archaeological investigations of these sites. Knowing, for example, that Edisto Island sees the highest rate of erosion, that would propel Edisto Island to the top of the list. Creating the framework and the knowledge base for that information is our next step forward. We really want to collaborate with other states in doing that so that we’re using the same methodology, not just within South Carolina but up and down the coastline.
What type of damage have heritage sites in South Carolina sustained from past storms?
Gaillard: Mostly, the damage is typical land loss. It’s everything between a meter to an entire site. With a high tide or a king tide, we could lose meters of a site overnight. It was approximately 200 feet of beachfront that was lost during Hurricane Irma off of Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve. The small events like a high tide, a king tide, or a massive event like a hurricane can strip away a couple of meters, or they can strip away an entire site overnight. When Hurricane Isaias came through, I was contacting our climate office throughout the weekend, getting updates every eight hours to see where the track of that hurricane was going. It’s not as though I could have jumped in a vehicle with the crew and gone down there and rescued anything, but just knowing what we were losing within those hourly timeframes was in a strange way comforting. We weren’t being completely isolated from the climate data and what was happening. We could strategically plan for when we could get boots back on the ground.
Did Hurricane Isaias damage South Carolina heritage sites this summer?
Gaillard: We don’t know to the meter what we lost, but we do know that we lost some from the Pockoy Island Shell Ring Complex. We received photographs from the property managers at Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve, and we know that we probably lost a good five meters off of that site. Isaias followed the path of Hurricane Dorian pretty tightly, and Dorian did a similar amount of damage to Pockoy. The high tides and strong storm surges, the constant pounding into the earth, that’s where I think a lot of people misconstrue what is destructive and what is not. Some think that if a hurricane doesn’t hit land, there will be no damage or limited damage to an archaeological site. In reality, the tide and rip current, the constant pounding of the surf is actually doing an incredible amount of damage to archaeological sites on the coast, which are literally falling into the ocean day by day. Storms that are miles and miles out into the ocean actually do an incredible amount of damage to sites that are already very fragile.
What can be done to track damage to these heritage sites?
Gaillard: The one big thing that I want to do is implement exactly what Tom Dawson and Joanna Hambly with Scotland’s Coastal Heritage at Risk (SCAPE) have done, as well as what the Florida Public Archaeology Network has been able to accomplish with citizen science programs, where we actually collaborate with people who live along the coast of South Carolina, and ask them to help us document how the coastline looks through photographs and reports. That can help us figure out where our efforts need to focus. Having more boots on the ground in the citizen science realm of things would be exponentially helpful. At the SCDNR, we’ve invited the public out to archaeology projects for over 20 years. With heritage at risk sites like Pockoy, the citizen science aspect—our volunteers—are absolutely essential to getting data out of the ground quickly, efficiently and scientifically. If we didn’t have that citizen science volunteer effort, we would not be able to do the work we do. We’ve counted thousands of hours that they’ve donated to help recover information before it’s lost. If they weren’t helping us, that data, that unwritten record, would be lost to the ocean with the next hurricane season.
Have you been able to document any increase in storm damage to the sites or is the analysis too new to establish a history?
Gaillard: It truly is absolutely new, and that’s why I’m working with people like Tom Dawson and Jo Hambly in Scotland, and Sarah Miller in Florida. Creating this baseline of data on what is most at risk really helps us move forward in our investigations. I think Sarah has the best handle on it above anybody else on the East Coast because of their citizen science efforts with the Florida Heritage Monitoring Scouts program, but even she’ll admit there are huge gaps in the data. We’re trying to figure out how we can fill these gaps and where we need to focus our efforts next. Every hurricane brings a different force inland. We might identify a place like Pockoy as being at risk, but then if Georgetown County gets hit by a Category Four, that totally changes the dynamics of where our efforts need to focus. We’re in the infancy stages of figuring out the long-term impacts to our state, and where our efforts need to focus in the future as storms become more intense and more frequent.
What threats will future hurricanes pose to heritage sites in SC?
Gaillard: My greatest fear is that we will lose sites before we even know they exist. How many archaeological sites are not identified yet that we’re going to lose before we get to them? Pockoy Island wasn’t even identified until 2016, after Hurricane Matthew when the coastline of South Carolina was re-flown, and the two shell rings that make up the Pockoy Island Shell Ring Complex were picked up with LIDAR. People had been walking over them up to that point. That’s a great concern. Then just having the funding and the personnel power to get out there and actually do the work is also of concern to all of us moving forward as we know that these storms are only going to increase in strength, severity and frequency over time.
What is the biggest threat to at-risk heritage sites in South Carolina?
Gaillard: I don’t know if there is one thing. Each site is different, and the threats can change over time. You can split the heritage risks within South Carolina into two major categories. There are the natural impacts, and the human impacts. We had the flood of 2015. We’ve had hurricanes and tornadoes. We’re on an earthquake fault. We’ve had fires. The natural list just goes on and on, but there’s also the human impact of foot traffic over sites, boat wake hitting coastal sites, or people moving into coastal environments, and not doing archaeological investigations before something is constructed.
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Pockoy Island erosion on both sides. Photo by Jamie Koelker.
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Part of the archaeology team excavating the May 2018 Pockoy trench. Photo by Taylor Main
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Meg Gaillard helping volunteers of all ages identify artifacts at a screen. Photo by Taylor Main
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Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Delta
Mark A. Rees, PhD, RPA
Tad Britt
Describe the at-risk heritage sites found along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River Delta.
Rees: Louisiana’s at-risk heritage sites include historic standing structures, such as Fort Livingston at Barataria Pass on West Grand Terre Island, and 1,300-year old Native American earthworks, such as Toncrey mounds east of Barataria Bay. There are hundreds of sites with shell midden, some still intact and many others redeposited by wave action, or now underwater, where not that long ago, Native Americans collected shellfish, fished, and hunted. All of the sites on Louisiana’s coast are endangered. An unknown number of sites are unrecorded, submerged, subsided, or destroyed, and previously recorded terrestrial sites are increasingly reported as now lying in open water. The heritage sites being destroyed include cemeteries, with graves marked as well as unmarked, and scattered bones at some sites strewn along the shoreline in each tide. New Orleans has the largest assemblage of endangered heritage, much of it now lying several feet below sea level.
Britt: We are looking at 20 coastal parishes along the coast of Louisiana, focusing more on the mouth of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya River. There are hundreds of sites out there. They are mainly reachable only by watercraft. You might have a two-hour travel time to get to a site. The marshland is expansive and there are complexes all over it. Basically, every piece of land has had some human impact to it through time.
What are the primary threats to these heritage sites?
Rees: David Anderson and colleagues have recently drawn attention to the adverse effects of sea-level rise on historic properties throughout the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast. The damage from hurricanes and storm surge is also very serious, but in the Mississippi River Delta (MRD) of south Louisiana, the situation is more complicated and, in many respects, much worse. Heritage sites on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast are critically endangered by a combination of factors: storm surge, relative sea-level rise (RSLR), erosion of coastal landforms, and subsidence. Each of these environmental processes have been around forever, but over the past century-and-a-half the effects have become increasingly anthropogenic—created, intensified, and accelerated by human transformation of the coastal landscape. The oil and gas industry made an indelible mark by dredging canals, laying a vast network of pipelines through the marsh, and obstructing bayous with spoil banks. This has diminished alluvial deposition from seasonal flooding and amplified the effects of subsidence, which is simultaneously increased by the extraction of oil and gas. Much of Louisiana’s coast is near sea level, so this has compounded the effects of RSLR, which we now know is being compounded by eustatic or worldwide sea level rise driven by global warming. Construction of an enormous levee system to protect coastal communities has ironically endangered those communities, as well as heritage sites, by exacerbating the cumulative effects of these anthropogenic processes. Hurricanes and storms can be catastrophic events, bringing intensified wave action and surge inland, accelerating shoreline erosion, and the loss of freshwater marsh, but the aftermath of each disaster must be approached as cumulative and interrelated to other processes in order to begin to understand—and hopefully address—the magnitude and complexity of the crisis.
Britt: There is general subsidence going on in the Delta, so things are sinking. You’ve got storm surges related to hurricanes. A lot of the sites have been impacted by the oil and gas industry. We’ve had canals dug through sites. It’s altered the waterways down there. The Mississippi Gulf River Outlet, which was constructed by the Corp back in the ‘60s, they shut down in the ‘80s because it was having unintended effects.
How have past hurricanes and storm events damaged the sites?
Rees: The most prevalent or visible damage on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast may be the redeposition of cultural materials, in some instances eventually resulting in entirely redeposited sites. Even these sites can provide valuable information on the people who lived there, but once underwater or buried under a meter or more of sediment, the information is less likely to ever be obtained and conserved. Storm surge from a hurricane also causes severe damage by removing trees and killing vegetation with saltwater, accelerating shoreline erosion.
Britt: Threats like wave-action and subsidence can redeposit artifacts, so they jumble up the context of the sites. What’s interesting is that many of the sites were recorded in the 1980s. Since that time, we went out to visit 27 sites and we found 21. The others had been submerged or inundated. We’re rapidly losing sites due to relative sea level rise as well as general subsidence.
How did the storms in 2020, including Hurricanes Lauraand Zeta, impact these sites?
Rees: It is probably too early to assess the impacts of the damage, especially since the response is focused on communities and industry, not heritage sites in the broadest sense. Laura made landfall on the Chenier Plain of southwest Louisiana, sparing communities and sites in the low-lying deltaic plain. Historic properties such as standing structures in Cameron Parish were devastated, but the potential impacts on archaeological sites such as the understudied Woodland Period (c. 500 BCE – 1200 CE) shell midden on Johnson Bayou or a nearby, poorly-known cemetery may never be known. Sites such as these are typically revisited as part of cultural resources management (CRM) for regulatory permitting involving a proposed undertaking, not disaster response, especially if the disaster is believed to be “natural.”
Are you noticing an increase in damage to at-risk heritage sites in recent years?
Rees: Site destruction and loss has very clearly accelerated, with archaeologists increasingly not being able to relocate sites first recorded 50 to 70 years ago. This became starkly evident during the response in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, when nearly half of the previously recorded sites could not be found, or were reported as underwater. These sites are not vanishing. They’re being destroyed by anthropogenic coastal erosion, storm surge, RSLR, and subsidence.
Britt: We’re just now starting the monitoring program. We’re trying to go out and do a basic characterization of the site through drone mapping and real-time kinematic survey on the ground tying in the control points from the drone. We’re getting a very good 3D rendering of the site, and then we can go back and compare those through time. This is a multi-year, multi-institution collaboration. We have a working group and we’ve got Tulane, LSU, ULL, NCPTT, Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, US Army Corp of Engineers, and the Coastal Protection Restoration Authority. We’ve got researchers from all of these universities and agencies working on this together. We’re all just getting into this work that we should have been doing years ago.
How important is it to have archaeologists and citizen scientists in place to monitor heritage sites in real time?
Rees: Having boots on the water is critical. A majority of Louisiana’s coastal heritage is accessible only by watercraft, and many sites are so remote that archaeologists may rarely revisit those locations. This dynamic, watery landscape is constantly changing, so rare re-visitations often find much of a site eroded, partially submerged, entirely underwater, or subsided. Unlike Florida, Louisiana does not have a public archaeology network for outreach or the education of citizen scientists for site monitoring. Louisiana’s regional archaeology program was terminated due to a lack of funding, gutting public outreach and education throughout the state. The Mississippi River Delta Archaeological Mitigation (MRDAM) working group has proposed the implementation of a comprehensive program of rapid reconnaissance, site monitoring, and sampling to mitigate the effects of coastal erosion, storm surge, RSLR, and subsidence. The goals are to advance scientific knowledge of long-term historical ecology and human-environmental interactions in the MRD, while also providing CRM planning strategies for alternative mitigation and heritage conservation. Long-term and sustained site monitoring will be essential in producing the necessary baseline data to achieve these goals and objectives, but will be costly and extremely challenging due to the remote locations and rapidly-changing environmental conditions. The MRDAM working group is proposing public education, community outreach, consultations, and additional partnerships in response to the loss of heritage sites on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
What threats do future hurricanes and storm events pose to heritage sites along the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Basin?
Rees: The storm surges from hurricanes are a major threat, especially when intensified by global warming. This is true anywhere in the US, but heritage sites in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, and especially the Mississippi River Delta, are critically endangered due to the combined effects of hurricane storm surge, coastal erosion, RSLR, and subsidence.
Are there actions the archaeology community can take to mitigate these threats to at-risk sites?
Rees: Absolutely; the MRDAM Working Group is proposing a systematic program of rapid reconnaissance, site monitoring, and alternative mitigation. The scale of the disaster is too large to address by traditional CRM mitigation measures, and regulatory CRM archaeology is frankly not geared to address the magnitude or duration of the unfolding crisis. MRDAM is a multi-institutional, collaborative undertaking that emphasizes public education and the engagement of higher education in this research. With broader recognition of the ongoing loss of heritage on the coast, Louisiana’s residents, politicians, and research universities will hopefully provide greater support for the goals of MRDAM. A multi-institutional research consortium might be most effective, promoting undergraduate and graduate archaeological research, and public outreach along the lines of the State’s former regional archaeology program. Support for the establishment of a Public Archaeology Network would also be beneficial, but would need to be adapted to Louisiana’s deltaic plain and coastal marsh. It needs to be sooner rather than later, however, as these places will not be around forever.
Britt: This is an analogue for what’s going on in deltas around the world. We are using this as a case study to compare and contrast withother deltas around the world.
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Detail of a rangia midden exposure. Photo by Tad Britt, NCPTT
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Tad Britt, NCPTT, Dr. Kory Konsoer and Students conducting site recon at 16LF292. Photo by Sam Huey, PAL
Arianna Zakrzewski is an intern and writer for Popular Archaeology. She is also a graduate from Rhode Island College with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. She has had an interest in archaeology since elementary school, specifically Egyptology and the Classics. In recent years, she has also gained an interest in historical archaeology, and has spent time in the field working in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, participating in excavation and archival research. Most recently, she completed her MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently focused on collections management and making archaeological discoveries accessible and exciting to the public.
In January 2021, the Penn Museum will reopen its doors once again, welcoming visitors with their new upcoming exhibit, Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science. With this, visitors will get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the science of archaeology in the lab, and the beauty hidden within ordinary objects of our past. “One of the reasons for this exhibit is to highlight what we do in the laboratory, what archaeologists and anthropologists do in the laboratory when they’re not excavating,” explains Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau, the Director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) at the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. “When we do have a few visitors that come and see us in the lab, they look down a microscope and they’re really blown away by what objects look like at higher magnification. There’s a beauty to these images and there’s also a lot of information, particularly showing how a very tiny sample is really packed with information about the past.”
CAAM was founded in 2014 by the Penn Museum and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Boileau, explains, “This was part of the big push for the museum to bring in students into the museum to do research and take formal classes, which really complements the museum’s Academic Engagement department.” Students of CAAM have the unique opportunity to study archeological science, an interdisciplinary field bridging the gap between the hard sciences and the humanities by researching and studying objects and specimens from the museum. “That’s actually how we captured some of these images,” says Dr. Boileau. Invisible Beauty showcases the various areas of studies students can explore during their academic careers in CAAM, from archaeobotanical remains to landscapes and more.
According to Dr. Sarah Linn, a University of Pennsylvania Alumna herself, “It is exciting that there are students who have now taken CAAM courses throughout their entire career at Penn. Undergraduates begin in these introductory courses and they ultimately come out as amazing archaeobotanists or zooarchaeologists. There is also an enormous amount of support for students doing Ph.D.’s and other intensive research projects. When I started my Ph.D. at Penn in 2009 we had nothing like this. These students have the incredible opportunity to do their coursework and then pursue their dissertations with remarkable support from archaeometallurgists and ceramics specialists. It is a great program that dovetails really nicely with the work we do in Academic Engagement, allowing us to support students in a robust way. This exhibit provides an additional opportunity for students to gain experience showcasing their work to the public.”
Invisible Beauty shows various objects from research being conducted by the Penn Museum and CAAM, imaged to reveal hidden informatio. Dr. Linn, a Mediterranean archaeologist who works closely with graduate students, was discussing a microscopic image with student Olivia Hayden [who has since completed her Ph.D.] when the idea for Invisible Beauty was born. “While talking to [Dr. Hayden] about her research and some of the images she’d been capturing throughout her research in CAAM, I was just struck by an incredibly beautiful image of a bronze needle from Cyprus. It has a great story behind it as well, but it is also just visually appealing. I reached out to Dr. Boileau, who was also excited about showing some of these images to the public, and we realized that we could do an exhibit that captures the visual appeal, but that also leads to some great stories and highlights the work we are doing in the labs, and out in the field as well.”
The exhibit showcases a range of images from around the world, spanning dates from approximately 40,000 BCE to 1967 CE. In addition to the bronze needle that started it all, visitors will also enjoy magnified images of a microscopic diatom, ceramic materials, obsidian used by students in experimental archaeology trials, textiles, and more. “One image shows a copper alloy dagger that was wrapped in a textile when it was buried, but over time the corrosion took over the textile itself, and it actually took the shape of the fibers,” Dr. Boileau explains. “We call these pseudomorphs, and so we actually have the view of what the textile weaving pattern would have looked like [had it been preserved in its original form].” All images are displayed alongside information about the instruments and magnification used to capture the images.
Some images are displayed alongside the actual object that was studied in the lab, as well. “Some of them are almost complete,” Dr. Boileau explains. “So visitors can appreciate those, but we’re also showing objects and specimens you normally would not see in an exhibit; these are fragmentary, like broken pieces of pottery, maybe very small, and they might look like there’s nothing exciting about them, but then you put them under the microscope and it comes to life.”
Not only is Invisible Beauty an aesthetically pleasing exhibit to explore, but it also showcases the kind of information archaeologists can obtain by conducting these scientific studies on everyday objects. “Scale is a big part of this,” says Dr. Linn. “We have images ranging from the microscopic diatom, which is magnified more than twenty-thousand times, all the way to large-scale landscapes in Turkey.” The magnification of these objects and specimens can also reveal important information about the crafting of everyday objects, as was the case with Dr. Hayden’s bronze needle. “The image is a striking gold-colored swirl,” Dr. Linn explains. “The object itself is not much to look at—it is a corroded bronze needle, so it really doesn’t look like much. But when you get to the actual metal and take a tiny sample of it, it’s beautiful and you can learn so much about it.” Dr. Hayden conducted a great deal of research on two needles discovered together in a tomb at a site called Lapithos on Cyprus, consisting of various forms of analysis, including elemental analysis and microscopy. She suggests the needles were actually made by the same craftsperson. Her goal was to determine how the craft is transmitted, not just the material. “As archaeologists we focus so much on trade and how people are learning to do these crafts, so to have two objects made by the same person is incredible,” she says. “You can see the swirl marks on this image that show how the craftsperson was actually turning the needle as they were hammering it.”
Dr. Boileau and Dr. Linn hope that visitors will come away from this behind-the-scenes look at the lab work done by researchers at the Penn Museum with a better understanding of the kinds of work archaeologists do when they’re not in the field, and with a sense of wonder. They want to ignite a curiosity in their viewers about objects and the information that can be unlocked when looking at things at these scales.
Invisible Beauty can be enjoyed by visitors at the Penn Museum from January 2021 to June 2021.
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About the Penn Museum
The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.
The museum is located at 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (on Penn’s campus, across from Franklin Field). Public transportation to the Museum is available via SEPTA’s Regional Rail Line at University City Station; the Market-Frankford Subway Line at 34th Street Station; trolley routes 11, 13, 34, and 36; and bus routes 21, 30, 40, and 42. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Museum admission donation is $18 for adults; $16 for senior citizens (65 and above); $13 for children ages 6-17. Admission to the Penn Museum is FREE for U.S. military, reservist personnel, and veterans, teachers, and children ages 5 and under.
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—It is at the confluence of different experiences that new theories come into being. Writing in this week’s “Perspectives” in the journal Science, ASU researchers Kim Hill and Rob Boyd comment on new science by Barsbai et al analyzing human behavior in traditional societies and advocate for a new fully integrated evolutionary theory of human behavior.*
A collaboration of these two particular researchers is not unexpected but reflects how the practical and theoretical combine to create new ideas. Hill has spent most of the last 30 years in the jungles of South and Central America, South Africa, and the Philippines living and working with indigenous hunter-gatherer communities to understand the unique aspects of our own species. Boyd is a forerunner in the field of cultural evolution, focusing on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to — and influence — human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. They are two of 17 scientists with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University who work on the cutting edge of evolutionary science to provide a better understanding of “how humans became human” and how and why we are in some ways so different from all other life forms on the planet. Both researchers are professors with the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
In their commentary, Hill and Boyd support an analysis of 339 hunter-gatherer societies that shows that “not only are hunter-gatherers behaviorally similar in similar ecologies, but even mammals and birds in those ecologies tend to exhibit the same behavioral regularities as do human populations,” validating the evolutionary perspective called “human behavioral ecology.”
However, shifting to a new paradigm that began in the 1980s, they add that social learning, cultural history, and cultural evolution are also important prime determinants of human behavioral variation. Humans cooperate more than any other primate. Because of the role of cultural and cooperation, our species has seen spectacular ecological success.
Hill and Boyd also cite Institute of Human Origins researchers Sarah Mathew and Charles Perreault’s recent paper on the causes of variations among 172 North American Native American communities that found that “the effect of cultural history seems to persist for hundred or even thousands of years.”
Together, Hill and Boyd see a need to synthesize both adaptive behavioral ecology and cultural evolution approaches into a singular, integrated, evolutionary approach to understanding human behavioral variation.
They state that “culture and genes are linked in a tight coevolutionary embrace, and this leads to complex patterns of genetic and cultural coadaptation.” Hill and Boyd hope that these recent studies, their observations, and new research currently being done will help elucidate the complex nature of human behavior and why explanations of human behavioral patterns will not simply be extensions of animal behavior models.
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Samal man from Mindanao, Philippines, fixing a fishing net. Kim Hill image
Science Advances—Scientists have uncovered a pig painting in an Indonesian cave that dates back more than 45,000 years, representing perhaps the world’s oldest surviving animal depiction and the most ancient known figurative artwork. The cave painting may also provide the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, supporting the view that the first populations to settle the Wallacea islands created artistic depictions of animals and narrative scenes as part of their culture. Indonesia has been known to harbor some of the world’s oldest surviving cave art, including previously discovered paintings on its largest island, Sulawesi. In 2017 and 2018, Adam Brumm and colleagues discovered two previously unknown depictions of the Sulawesi warty pig – characterized by its facial warts – painted in red or dark purplish mineral pigments in two Sulawesi limestone caves. A 136-by-54 centimeter pig painted in the Leang Tedongnge cave appeared to be part of a narrative scene with two less complete pigs that appeared to be confronting each other, while four hand stencils superimposed a 187-by-110 centimeter pig in the Leang Balangajia 1 cave, which was accompanied by several other poorly preserved animal paintings. Uranium-series isotope dating analyses conducted with small cave mineral deposits that overlie the images indicated that the Leang Tedongnge painting is at least 45,500 years old and the Leang Balangajia 1 painting is at least 32,000 years old. While Brumm et al. are unable to definitively determine that the pigs were painted by modern humans, they conclude that this is most likely the case, since other figurative depictions around the world have been exclusively attributed to modern humans.
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Leang Tedongnge cave mouth. AA Oktaviana
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Leang Tedongnge cave. AA Oktaviana
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Dated pig painting at Leang Tedongnge. AA Oktaviana
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Dated pig painting at Leang Tedongnge. Above, AA Oktaviana, below, Maxime Aubert
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Article Source: Science Advances news release. Science Advances is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Fieldwork led by Dr Eleanor Scerri, head of the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and Dr Khady Niang of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, has documented the youngest known occurrence of the Middle Stone Age. This repertoire of stone flaking methods and the resulting tools includes distinctive ways of producing sharp flakes by carefully preparing nodules of rock, some of which were sometimes further shaped into tool forms known as ‘scrapers’ and ‘points.’ Middle Stone Age finds most commonly occur in the African record between around 300 thousand and 30 thousand years ago, after which point they largely vanish.
It was long thought that these tool types were replaced after 30 thousand years ago by a radically different, miniaturized toolkit better suited to diversified subsistence strategies and patterns of mobility across Africa. In a paper published in Scientific Reports this week, Scerri and colleagues show that groups of hunter-gatherers in what is today Senegal continued to use Middle Stone Age technologies associated with our species’ earliest prehistory as late as 11 thousand years ago. This contrasts with the long-held view that humanity’s major prehistoric cultural phases occurred in a neat and universal sequence.
The ‘Last Eden’?
“West Africa is a real frontier for human evolutionary studies – we know almost nothing about what happened here in deep prehistory. Almost everything we know about human origins is extrapolated from discoveries in small parts of eastern and southern Africa,” says Dr Eleanor Scerri, the lead author of the study.
To redress this gap in the data, Scerri and Niang put together a research program to explore different regions of Senegal. The program ranges from Senegal’s desert edges to its forests and along different stretches of its major river systems: the Senegal and the Gambia, where they found multiple Middle Stone Age sites, all with surprisingly young dates.
“These discoveries demonstrate the importance of investigating the whole of the African continent, if we are to really get a handle on the deep human past.” says Dr Khady Niang. “Prior to our work, the story from the rest of Africa suggested that well before 11 thousand years ago, the last traces of the Middle Stone Age – and the lifeways it reflects – were long gone.”
Explaining why this region of West Africa was home to such a late persistence of Middle Stone Age culture is not straightforward.
“To the north, the region meets the Sahara Desert,” explains Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, one of the paper’s authors. “To the east, there are the Central African rainforests, which were often cut off from the West African rainforests during periods of drought and fragmentation. Even the river systems in West Africa form a self-contained and isolated group.”
“It is also possible that this region of Africa was less affected by the extremes of repeated cycles of climate change,” adds Scerri. “If this was the case, the relative isolation and habitat stability may simply have resulted in little need for radical changes in subsistence, as reflected in the successful use of these traditional toolkits.”
“All we can be sure about is that this persistence is not simply about a lack of capacity to invest in the development of new technologies. These people were intelligent, they knew how to select good stone for their tool making and exploit the landscape they lived in,” says Niang.
An ecological, biological and cultural patchwork
The results fit in with a wider, emerging view that for most of humanity’s deep prehistory, populations were relatively isolated from each other, living in subdivided groups in different regions.
Accompanying this striking finding is the fact that in West Africa, the major cultural shift to more miniaturized toolkits also occurs extremely late compared to the rest of the continent. For a relatively short time, Middle Stone Age using populations lived alongside others using the more recently developed miniaturized tool kits, referred to as the ‘Later Stone Age’.
“This matches genetic studies suggesting that African people living in the last ten thousand years lived in very subdivided populations,” says Dr Niang. “We aren’t sure why, but apart from physical distance, it may be the case that some cultural boundaries also existed. Perhaps the populations using these different material cultures also lived in slightly different ecological niches.”
Around 15 thousand years ago, there was a major increase in humidity and forest growth in central and western Africa, that perhaps linked different areas and provided corridors for dispersal. This may have spelled the final end for humanity’s first and earliest cultural repertoire and initiated a new period of genetic and cultural mixing.
“These findings do not fit a simple unilinear model of cultural change towards ‘modernity’,” explains Scerri. ” Groups of hunter-gatherers embedded in radically different technological traditions occupied neighbouring regions of Africa for thousands of years, and sometimes shared the same regions. Long isolated regions, on the other hand, may have been important reservoirs of cultural and genetic diversity,” she adds. “This may have been a defining factor in the success of our species.”
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Freshly found artifact from Laminia, Senegal. Eleanor Scerri
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Lithics from Laminia (A-D) and Saxomununya (E-H). (A) unretouched flake; (B) bifacially retouched flake; (C) Levallois core evidencing a step fracture; (D) side retouched flake/scraper; (E, F) Levallois cores; (G) bifacial foliate point; (H) bifacial foliate. Jacopo Cerasoni. Figure licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
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Team fieldwalking along the Gambia River, Senegal. Eleanor Scerri
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—Humans feeding leftover lean meat to wolves during harsh winters may have had a role in the early domestication of dogs, towards the end of the last ice age (14,000 to 29,000 years ago), according to a study* published in Scientific Reports.
Maria Lahtinen and colleagues used simple energy content calculations to estimate how much energy would have been left over by humans from the meat of species they may have hunted 14,000 to 29,000 years that were also typical wolf prey species, such as horses, moose and deer. The authors hypothesized that if wolves and humans had hunted the same animals during harsh winters, humans would have killed wolves to reduce competition rather than domesticate them. With the exception of Mustelids such as weasels, the authors found that all prey species would have supplied more protein than humans could consume, resulting in excess lean meat that could be fed to wolves, thus reducing the competition for prey.
Although humans may have relied on an animal-based diet during winters when plant-based foods were limited, they were probably not adapted to an entirely protein-based diet and may have favoured meat rich in fat and grease over lean, protein-rich meat. As wolves can survive on a solely protein-based diet for months, humans may have fed excess lean meat to pet wolves, which may have enabled companionship even during harsh winter months. Feeding excess meat to wolves may have facilitated co-living with captured wolves and the use of pet wolves as hunting aids and guards may have further facilitated the domestication process, eventually to full dog domestication.
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Wolves and prehistoric humans may have lived symbiotically when it came to surviving on scarce food resources during the winters. Photo: Comfreak, Pixabay
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY—Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge as reported in Nature Communications, which shows that early human used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period.
Located in the heart of eastern Africa, the Rift System is a prime region for human origins research, boasting extraordinary records of extinct human species and environmental records spanning several million years. For more than a century, archaeologists and human palaeontologists have been exploring the East African Rift outcrops and unearthing hominin fossils in surveys and excavations. However, understanding of the environmental contexts in which these hominins lived has remained elusive due to a dearth of ecological studies in direct association with the cultural remains.
In the new study, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for for the Science of Human History teamed up with lead partners from the University of Calgary, Canada, and the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to excavate the site of ‘Ewass Oldupa’ (meaning on ‘the way to the Gorge’ in the local Maa language, as the site straddles the path that links the canyon’s rim with its bottom). The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago. Excavations in long sequences of stratified sediments and dated volcanic horizons indicated hominin presence at Ewass Oldupai from 2.0 to 1.8 million years ago.
Fossils of mammals (wild cattle and pigs, hippos, panthers, lions, hyena, primates), reptiles and birds, together with a range of multidisciplinary scientific studies, revealed habitat changes over 200,000 years in riverine and lake systems, including fern meadows, woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, lakeside palm groves and dry steppe habitats. The uncovered evidence shows periodic but recurrent land use across a subset of environments, punctuated with times when there is an absence of hominin activity.
Dr. Pastory Bushozi of Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania, notes, “the occupation of varied and unstable environments, including after volcanic activity, is one of the earliest examples of adaptation to major ecological transformations.”
Hominin occupation of fluctuating and disturbed environments is unique for this early time period and shows complex behavioral adaptations among early human groups. In the face of changing habitats, early humans did not substantially alter their toolkits, but instead their technology remained stable over time. Indicative of their versatility, typical Oldowan stone tools, consisting of pebble and cobble cores and sharp-edged flakes and polyhedral cobbles, continued to be used even as habitats changed. The implication is that by two million years ago, early humans had the behavioral capacity to continually and consistently exploit a multitude of habitats, using reliable stone toolkits, to likely process plants and butcher animals over the long term.
Though no hominin fossils have yet been recovered from Ewass Oldupa, hominin fossils of Homo habilis were found just 350 meters away, in deposits dating to 1.82 million years ago. While it is difficult to know if Homo habilis was present at Ewass Oldupa, Professor Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary asserts that “these early humans were surely ranging widely over the landscape and along shores of the ancient lake.” Mercader further notes that this does not discount the possibility that other hominin species, such as the australopithecines, were also using and making stone tools at Ewass Oldupa, as we know that the genus Paranthropus was present in Oldupai Gorge at this time.
The findings uncovered at Oldupai Gorge and across eastern Africa indicate that early human movements across and out of Africa were possible by 2 million years ago, as hominins possessed the behavioral ability to expand into novel ecosystems. Professor Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute notes, “This behavioral flexibility arose in the context of the dawn of the evolution of our own genus, Homo, and it set the stage for the eventual global, invasive spread of Homo sapiens.”
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Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in Oldupai Gorge, which shows that early human used a wide diversity of habitats amidst environmental changes across a 200,000 year-long period. Michael Petraglia
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Above and below: The excavations uncovered the oldest Oldowan stone tools ever found at Oldupai Gorge, dating to ~2 million years ago. Excavations in long sequences of stratified sediments and dated volcanic horizons indicated hominin presence at Ewass Oldupai from 2.0 to 1.8 million years ago. Michael Petraglia
Science Advances, AAAS—Through genetic analyses of remains from 40 individuals spanning the Stone Age to the Medieval era, scientists traced shifts in ancient northeast Asian populations over thousands of years and identified ancestors of early Arctic inhabitants.* The researchers also uncovered genetic evidence for the most northeastern occurrence of ancient Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that causes the plague, in individuals from two Siberian regions. Gülşah Kılınç and colleagues suggest this bacterium may have played a role in shaping human population dynamics in regions around Siberia’s massive Lake Baikal, noting that its presence coincided with a reduction in population size and genetic diversity about 4400 years ago. With its infamously harsh winters, Siberia is one of the least-populated regions on Earth. However, its inhabitants may have been instrumental to human history, giving rise to populations that eventually spread to the Americas. To better understand how northeast Asian populations shifted over time, Kılınç et al. sequenced genetic data from the remains of ancient individuals dating back 16,900 to 550 years in the Yakutia, Trans-Baikal, Cis-Baikal, Krasnoyarsk Krai, and Amur Oblast regions. The findings suggest that populations east of Lake Baikal remained virtually unchanged from the middle of the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, while populations west of the lake underwent transformations beginning in the Late Stone Age. Using statistical modeling, the researchers identified the Belkachi people from Yakutia as the ancestors of the ancient Saqqaq Arctic inhabitants. The researchers also discovered that the oldest individual sequenced, an almost 17,000-year-old female excavated from the Khaiyrgas Cave, represents one of the first known human groups to have settled the Central Siberian Plateau after the Last Glacial Maximum. This group marks the region’s first major genetic shift after this interval and left a genetic legacy visible in the region 6,000 years later.
*“Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia,” by G.M. Kılınç; R. Rodríguez-Varela; N. Kashuba; M. Krzewińska; A. Götherström; L. Dalén; N. Bergfeldt; J. Storå at Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden; G.M. Kılınç at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey; N. Kashuba; T. Günther; M. Jakobsson at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden; D. Koptekin; M. Somel at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey; L. Dalén; N. Bergfeldt; R. Rodríguez-Varela; M. Krzewińska; A. Götherström; E. Kırdök at The Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG) in Stockholm, Sweden; H.M. Dönertaş at European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK; D. Shergin; E. Ineshin at Irkutsk State University in Irkutsk, Russia; G. Ivanov at Irkutsk Museum of Regional Studies in Irkutsk, Russia; D. Kichigin; A. Kharinskii at Irkutsk National Research Technical University in Irkutsk, Russia; K. Pestereva; A. Stepanov at M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia; D. Volkov at The Center for Preservation of Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Amur Region in Blagoveshchensk, Russia; P. Mandryka at Siberian Federal University in Krasnoyarsk, Russia; A. Tishkin at Altai State University in Barnaul, Russia; E. Kovychev at Transbaikal State University in Chita, Russia; E. Kırdök at Mersin University in Mersin, Turkey.
PLOS—Underwater excavation, borehole drilling, and modeling suggests a massive paleo-tsunami struck near the ancient settlement of Tel Dor between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago, according to a study* published December 23, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Gilad Shtienberg, Richard Norris and Thomas Levy from the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology, University of California, San Diego, USA, and colleagues from Utah State University and the University of Haifa.
Tsunamis are a relatively common event along the eastern Mediterranean coastline, with historical records and geographic data showing one tsunami occurring per century for the last six thousand years. The record for earlier tsunami events, however, is less defined. In this study, Shtienberg and colleagues describe a large early Holocene tsunami deposit (between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago) in coastal sediments at Tel Dor in northwest Israel, a maritime city-mound occupied from the Middle Bronze II period (2000-1550 BCE) through the Crusader period.
To conduct their analysis, the authors used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of the Tel Dor site, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling to a depth of nine meters.
Along the coast of the study area, the authors found an abrupt marine shell and sand layer with an age of constraint 9,910 to 9,290 years ago, in the middle of a large ancient wetland layer spanning from 15,000 to 7,800 years ago. The authors estimate the wave capable of depositing seashells and sand in the middle of what was at the time fresh to brackish wetland must have travelled 1.5 to 3.5 km, with a coastal wave height of 16 to 40 m. For comparison, previously documented tsunami events in the eastern Mediterranean have travelled inland only around 300 m–suggesting the tsunami at Dor was generated by a far stronger mechanism. Local tsunamis tend to arise due to earthquakes in the Dead Sea Fault system and submarine landslides; the authors note that an earthquake contemporary to the Dor paleo-tsunami (dating to around 10,000 years ago) has already been identified using cave damage in the nearby Carmel ridge, suggesting this specific earthquake could have triggered an underwater landslide causing the massive tsunami at Dor.
This paleo-tsunami would have occurred during the Early to Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B cultural period of the region (10,700-9,250 years ago 11,700-10,500 cal BP), and potentially wiped out evidence of previous Natufian (12,500-12,000 years ago) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic coastal villages (previous surveys and excavations show a near absence of low-lying coastal villages in this region). The re-appearance of abundant Late Neolithic archaeological sites (ca. 6,000 BCE) along the coast in the years after the Dor tsunami coincides with the resumption of wetland deposition in the Dor core samples and indicates resettlement followed the event–highlighting residents’ resilience in the face of massive disruption.
According to Gilad Shtienberg, a postdoc at the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at UC San Diego who is studying the sediment cores, “Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast; and we never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel. Scholars know that at the beginning of the Neolithic, around 10,000 years ago, the seashore was 4 kilometers from where it is today. When we cut the cores open in San Diego and started seeing a marine shell layer embedded in the dry Neolithic landscape, we knew we hit the jackpot.”
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Geoprobe drilling rig extraction of a sediment core with evidence of a tsunami from South Bay, Tel Dor, Israel. Photo by T. E. Levy
*Study: Shtienberg G, Yasur-Landau A, Norris RD, Lazar M, Rittenour TM, Tamberino A, et al. (2020) A Neolithic mega-tsunami event in the eastern Mediterranean: Prehistoric settlement vulnerability along the Carmel coast, Israel. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0243619. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243619
FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, GAINESVILLE, Fla.—The history of the Caribbean’s original islanders comes into sharper focus in a new Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology.
An international team led by Harvard Medical School’s David Reich analyzed the genomes of 263 individuals in the largest study of ancient human DNA in the Americas to date. The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.
Reich’s lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought – likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors.
For archaeologist William Keegan, whose work in the Caribbean spans more than 40 years, ancient DNA offers a powerful new tool to help resolve longstanding debates, confirm hypotheses and spotlight remaining mysteries.
This “moves our understanding of the Caribbean forward dramatically in one fell swoop,” said Keegan, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and co-senior author of the study. “The methods David’s team developed helped address questions I didn’t even know we could address.”
Archaeologists often rely on the remnants of domestic life – pottery, tools, bone and shell discards – to piece together the past. Now, technological breakthroughs in the study of ancient DNA are shedding new light on the movement of animals and humans, particularly in the Caribbean where each island can be a unique microcosm of life.
While the heat and humidity of the tropics can quickly break down organic matter, the human body contains a lockbox of genetic material: a small, unusually dense part of the bone protecting the inner ear. Primarily using this structure, researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from 174 people who lived in the Caribbean and Venezuela between 400 and 3,100 years ago, combining the data with 89 previously sequenced individuals.
The team, which includes Caribbean-based scholars, received permission to carry out the genetic analysis from local governments and cultural institutions that acted as caretakers for the human remains. The authors also engaged representatives of Caribbean Indigenous communities in a discussion of their findings.
The genetic evidence offers new insights into the peopling of the Caribbean. The islands’ first inhabitants, a group of stone tool-users, boated to Cuba about 6,000 years ago, gradually expanding eastward to other islands during the region’s Archaic Age. Where they came from remains unclear – while they are more closely related to Central and South Americans than to North Americans, their genetics do not match any particular Indigenous group. However, similar artifacts found in Belize and Cuba may suggest a Central American origin, Keegan said.
About 2,500-3,000 years ago, farmers and potters related to the Arawak-speakers of northeast South America established a second pathway into the Caribbean. Using the fingers of South America’s Orinoco River Basin like highways, they travelled from the interior to coastal Venezuela and pushed north into the Caribbean Sea, settling Puerto Rico and eventually moving westward. Their arrival ushered in the region’s Ceramic Age, marked by agriculture and the widespread production and use of pottery.
Over time, nearly all genetic traces of Archaic Age people vanished, except for a holdout community in western Cuba that persisted as late as European arrival. Intermarriage between the two groups was rare, with only three individuals in the study showing mixed ancestry.
Many present-day Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are the descendants of Ceramic Age people, as well as European immigrants and enslaved Africans. But researchers noted only marginal evidence of Archaic Age ancestry in modern individuals.
“That’s a big mystery,” Keegan said. “For Cuba, it’s especially curious that we don’t see more Archaic ancestry.”
During the Ceramic Age, Caribbean pottery underwent at least five marked shifts in style over 2,000 years. Ornate red pottery decorated with white painted designs gave way to simple, buff-colored vessels, while other pots were punctuated with tiny dots and incisions or bore sculpted animal faces that likely doubled as handles. Some archaeologists pointed to these transitions as evidence for new migrations to the islands. But DNA tells a different story, suggesting all of the styles were developed by descendants of the people who arrived in the Caribbean 2,500-3,000 years ago, though they may have interacted with and took inspiration from outsiders.
“That was a question we might not have known to ask had we not had an archaeological expert on our team,” said co-first author Kendra Sirak, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab. “We document this remarkable genetic continuity across changes in ceramic style. We talk about ‘pots vs. people,’ and to our knowledge, it’s just pots.”
Highlighting the region’s interconnectivity, a study of male X chromosomes uncovered 19 pairs of “genetic cousins” living on different islands – people who share the same amount of DNA as biological cousins but may be separated by generations. In the most striking example, one man was buried in the Bahamas while his relative was laid to rest about 600 miles away in the Dominican Republic.
“Showing relationships across different islands is really an amazing step forward,” said Keegan, who added that shifting winds and currents can make passage between islands difficult. “I was really surprised to see these cousin pairings between islands.”
Uncovering such a high proportion of genetic cousins in a sample of fewer than 100 men is another indicator that the region’s total population size was small, said Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard.
“When you sample two modern individuals, you don’t often find that they’re close relatives,” he said. “Here, we’re finding relatives all over the place.”
A technique developed by study co-author Harald Ringbauer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich Lab, used shared segments of DNA to estimate past population size, a method that could also be applied to future studies of ancient people. Ringbauer’s technique showed about 10,000 to 50,000 people were living on two of the Caribbean’s largest islands, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, shortly before European arrival. This falls far short of the million inhabitants Columbus described to his patrons, likely to impress them, Keegan said.
Later, 16th-century historian Bartolomé de las Casas claimed the region had been home to 3 million people before being decimated by European enslavement and disease. While this, too, was an exaggeration, the number of people who died as a result of colonization remains an atrocity, Reich said.
“This was a systematic program of cultural erasure. The fact that the number was not 1 million or millions of people, but rather tens of thousands, does not make that erasure any less significant,” he said.
For Keegan, collaborating with geneticists gave him the ability to prove some hypotheses he had argued for years – while upending others.
“At this point, I don’t care if I’m wrong or right,” he said. “It’s just exciting to have a firmer basis for reevaluating how we look at the past in the Caribbean. One of the most significant outcomes of this study is that it demonstrates just how important culture is in understanding human societies. Genes may be discrete, measurable units, but the human genome is culturally created.”
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Archaeological research and ancient DNA technology can work hand in hand to illuminate past history. This vessel, made between AD 1200-1500 in present-day Dominican Republic, shows a frog figure, associated with the goddess of fertility in Taino culture. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum
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Some archaeologists pointed to dramatic shifts in Caribbean pottery styles as evidence of new migrations. But genetics show all of the styles were created by one group of people over time. These effigy vessels belong to the Saladoid pottery type, ornate and difficult to shape. Corinne Hofman and Menno Hoogland
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY—To reach the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, humans crossed more than 2,000 kilometers of open ocean, and around 2,000 years earlier than any other sea travel over an equally long distance. They settled in the Marianas around 3,500 years ago, slightly earlier than the initial settlement of Polynesia.
“We know more about the settlement of Polynesia than we do about the settlement of the Mariana Islands”, says first author Irina Pugach, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The researchers wanted to find out where people came from to get to the Marianas and how the ancestors of the present Mariana Islanders, the Chamorro, might be related to Polynesians.
To address these questions the researchers obtained ancient DNA data from two skeletons from the Ritidian Beach Cave site in northern Guam, dating to around 2,200 years ago. “We found that the ancestry of these ancient skeletons is linked to the Philippines”, says Pugach. “These findings strengthen the picture that has emerged from linguistic and archaeological studies, pointing to an Island Southeast Asia origin for the first settlers of the Marianas”, says co-author Mike T. Carson, an archaeologist at the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam.
“We also find a close link between the ancient Guam skeletons and early Lapita individuals from Vanuatu and Tonga in the Western Pacific region”, adds Pugach. “This suggests that the Marianas and Polynesia may have been colonized from the same source population, and raises the possibility that the Marianas played a role in the eventual settlement of Polynesia.”
The researchers point out that while the new results provide interesting new insights, they are based on only two skeletons that date from around 1,400 years after the first human settlement in Guam. “The peopling of Guam and the settlement of such remote archipelagos in Oceania needs further investigation”, says senior author Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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Excavation work area outside the Ritidian Beach Cave site in northern Guam, Mariana Islands. Hsiao-chun Hung
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Archaeologist Mike T. Carson during the initial uncovering of one of the skeletons. Hsiao-chun Hung
Irina Pugach, Alexander Hübner, Hsiao-chun Hung, Matthias Meyer, Mike T. Carson, Mark Stoneking Ancient DNA from Guam and the peopling of the Pacific PNAS, 22 December 2020
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER—The discovery of dozens of new Roman Army sites thanks to remote sensing technology has revealed more about one of the empire’s most infamous conflicts.
Analysis of the 66 camps shows the Roman army had a larger presence in the region than previously thought during the 200-year battle to conquer the Iberian Peninsula.
The discovery of camps of different sizes – used for training and shelter – has allowed experts to map how soldiers attacked indigenous groups from different directions and to learn more about the footprint of the Roman military presence in the northern fringe of the River Duero basin – the León, Palencia, Burgos and Cantabria provinces.
Experts analysed aerial photography and satellite images, created three-dimensional models of the terrain from LiDAR data and used drones to create detailed maps of the sites. This included resources from the Spanish National Geographic Institute (IGN) and geoportals such as Google Earth or Bing Maps. Pinpointing locations allowed fieldwork to then take place.
These temporary occupations usually left fragile and subtle traces on the surface. The ditches or the earth and stone ramparts protecting these fortifications have been filled in and flattened. Combining different remote sensing images and fieldwork shows the perimeter shape of the temporary Roman military camps, often a rectangle like a playing card.
These new sites are located at the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains, where the conflict between Romans and natives was focused at the end of the 1st century BC. This suggests soldiers crossed between lowlands and uplands, using ridges in the mountains to stay out of site and give themselves more protection.
The fact there were so many army camps in the region shows the immense logistical support which allowed soldiers to conquer the area. Sites were used to aid movement to remote locations and to help soldiers stay in the area over the cold winter months. Some of the camps may have housed soldiers for weeks or months, and overs overnight.
The aim of the occupation was to expand the empire and to be able to exploit natural resources such as tin and gold.
The research, published in the journal Geosciences, was carried out by Andrés Menéndez Blanco, Jesús García Sánchez from the Archaeology Institute of Mérida, José Manuel Costa-García and Víctor Vicente García from the University of Santiago de Compostela, João Fonte from the University of Exeter and David González-Álvarez from the Institute of Heritage Sciences, Spanish National Research Council.
Dr Fonte said: “We have identified so many sites because we used different types of remote sensing. Airborne laser scanning gave good results for some sites in more remote places because it showed earthworks really well. Aerial photography worked better in lowland areas for the detection of cropmarks.”
“The remains are of the temporary camps that the Roman army set up when moving through hostile territory or when carrying out maneuvers around their permanent bases. They reveal the intense Roman activity at the entrance to the Cantabrian Mountains during the last phase of the Roman conquest of Hispania.”
There is an important concentration of 25 sites along the valleys of northern Palencia and Burgos, as well as southern Cantabria. In the province of León, as many as 41 sites have been documented in different valleys. These range from small forts of a few hundred square meters to large fortified enclosures of 15 hectares.
Most of these Roman military sites were located in close proximity of later important Roman towns. Sasamón, a village in Burgos that was probably where nearby the Emperor Augustus established his camp during his presence in the front.
The research will continue so experts can examine the relationships the Romans established with indigenous communities, named Vaccaei, Turmogi, Cantabri, Astures and Callaeci, according to the Greek and Latin sources.
The team is currently developing a project to catalogue and document all the Roman camps in the province of León by means of drones, in order to gain a better understanding of their structures or the evolution of their state of conservation. Work is also continuing in Burgos and in Sasamón, including a study of the Cerro de Castarreño settlement and its conquest in the 1st century BC.
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Roman military presence in Castile. romanarmy.eu
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Roman military presence in Leon. romanarmy.eu
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Aerial photographs of the camp of Tortolondro (black) (A), the Roman road (white) and the camp (black) at Quintanilla de Riofresno. romanarmy.eu
Compelling stories dramatize and humanize major events and characters in the history of Ephesus, the ruins of which are a popular destination for tourists in present-day Turkey.Historium Press, 2023.Available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
WHO WERE THE AEGEANS? The exciting new podcast series exploring the mysteries of the ancient Aegeans, the Bronze Age people who inspired Homer's epic stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.
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