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Heritage at Risk

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, Archaeology and 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 Laura and 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 with other 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

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Invisible Beauty

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.

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New perspectives in human behavior and culture

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

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Article Source: Arizona State University news release

*”Perspectives” in Science, “Behavioral convergence in humans and animals,” by Kim Hill and Rob Boyd.

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A Newly Discovered Indonesian Cave Painting May Be the World’s Oldest Known Figurative Artwork

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.

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First modern human stone tool culture lasted 20,000 years longer than thought

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

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

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Sharing leftover meat may have contributed to early dog domestication

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

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Article Source: Scientific Reports news release

*Excess protein enabled dog domestication during severe Ice Age winters

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Oldest hominins of Olduvai Gorge persisted across changing environments

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

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

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Genetic Analyses Reveal the Spread of Early Northeast Asian Human Populations – and Plague-Causing Bacteria

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.

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Article Source: The open-access journal Science Advances  AAAS news release

*“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.

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Evidence for a massive paleo-tsunami at ancient Tel Dor, Israel

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

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Video credit: The Qualcomm Institute, CC-BY”

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*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

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Ancient DNA retells story of Caribbean’s first people

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

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Article Source: FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY news release. Writer: Natalie van Hoose

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Ancient DNA sheds light on the peopling of the Mariana Islands

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

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Article Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY news release

Original publication:

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

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Discovery of 66 new Roman Army sites shows more clues about one of the empire’s most infamous conflicts

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

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Article Source: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER news release

The findings have been shared with cultural and heritage organisations so they can be protected in future. Follow the work at http://www.romanarmy.eu.

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The aroma of distant worlds

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—Exotic Asian spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana had already reached the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. A team of researchers working alongside archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU) has shown that even in the Bronze Age, long-distance trade in food was already connecting distant societies.

A market in the city of Megiddo in the Levant 3700 years ago: The market traders are hawking not only wheat, millet or dates, which grow throughout the region, but also carafes of sesame oil and bowls of a bright yellow spice that has recently appeared among their wares. This is how Philipp Stockhammer imagines the bustle of the Bronze Age market in the eastern Mediterranean. Working with an international team to analyze food residues in tooth tartar, the LMU archaeologist has found evidence that people in the Levant were already eating turmeric, bananas and even soy in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. “Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had thus reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than had been previously thought,” says Stockhammer. “This is the earliest direct evidence to date of turmeric, banana and soy outside of South and East Asia.” It is also direct evidence that as early as the second millennium BCE there was already a flourishing long-distance trade in exotic fruits, spices and oils, which is believed to have connected South Asia and the Levant via Mesopotamia or Egypt. While substantial trade across these regions is amply documented later on, tracing the roots of this nascent globalization has proved to be a stubborn problem. The findings of this study confirm that long-distance trade in culinary goods has connected these distant societies since at least the Bronze Age. People obviously had a great interest in exotic foods from very early on.

For their analyses, Stockhammer’s international team examined 16 individuals from the Megiddo and Tel Erani excavations, which are located in present-day Israel. The region in the southern Levant served as an important bridge between the Mediterranean, Asia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BCE. The aim of the research was to investigate the cuisines of Bronze Age Levantine populations by analyzing traces of food remnants, including ancient proteins and plant microfossils, that have remained preserved in human dental calculus over thousands of years.

The human mouth is full of bacteria, which continually petrify and form calculus. Tiny food particles become entrapped and preserved in the growing calculus, and it is these minute remnants that can now be accessed for scientific research thanks to cutting-edge methods. For the purposes of their analysis, the researchers took samples from a variety of individuals at the Bronze Age site of Megiddo and the Early Iron Age site of Tel Erani. They analyzed which food proteins and plant residues were preserved in the calculus on their teeth. “This enables us to find traces of what a person ate,” says Stockhammer. “Anyone who does not practice good dental hygiene will still be telling us archaeologists what they have been eating thousands of years from now!”

Palaeoproteomics is the name of this growing new field of research. The method could develop into a standard procedure in archaeology, or so the researchers hope. “Our high-resolution study of ancient proteins and plant residues from human dental calculus is the first of its kind to study the cuisines of the ancient Near East,” says Christina Warinner, a molecular archaeologist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and co-senior author of the article. “Our research demonstrates the great potential of these methods to detect foods that otherwise leave few archaeological traces. Dental calculus is such a valuable source of information about the lives of ancient peoples.”

“Our approach breaks new scientific ground,” explains LMU biochemist and lead author Ashley Scott. That is because assigning individual protein remnants to specific foodstuffs is no small task. Beyond the painstaking work of identification, the protein itself must also survive for thousands of years. “Interestingly, we find that allergy-associated proteins appear to be the most stable in human calculus”, says Scott, a finding she believes may be due to the known thermostability of many allergens. For instance, the researchers were able to detect wheat via wheat gluten proteins, says Stockhammer. The team was then able to independently confirm the presence of wheat using a type of plant microfossil known as phytoliths. Phytoliths were also used to identify millet and date palm in the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but phytoliths are not abundant or even present in many foods, which is why the new protein findings are so groundbreaking – paleoproteomics enables the identification of foods that have left few other traces, such as sesame. Sesame proteins were identified in dental calculus from both Megiddo and Tel Erani. “This suggests that sesame had become a staple food in the Levant by the 2nd millennium BCE,” says Stockhammer.

Two additional protein findings are particularly remarkable, explains Stockhammer. In one individual’s dental calculus from Megiddo, turmeric and soy proteins were found, while in another individual from Tel Erani banana proteins were identified. All three foods are likely to have reached the Levant via South Asia. Bananas were originally domesticated in Southeast Asia, where they had been used since the 5th millennium BCE, and they arrived in West Africa 4000 years later, but little is known about their intervening trade or use. “Our analyses thus provide crucial information on the spread of the banana around the world. No archaeological or written evidence had previously suggested such an early spread into the Mediterranean region,” says Stockhammer, although the sudden appearance of banana in West Africa just a few centuries later has hinted that such a trade might have existed. “I find it spectacular that food was exchanged over long distances at such an early point in history.”

Stockhammer notes that they cannot rule out the possibility, of course, that one of the individuals spent part of their life in South Asia and consumed the corresponding food only while they were there. Even if the extent to which spices, oils and fruits were imported is not yet known, there is much to indicate that trade was indeed taking place, since there is also other evidence of exotic spices in the Eastern Mediterranean – Pharaoh Ramses II was buried with peppercorns from India in 1213 BCE. They were found in his nose.

The results of the study have been published in the journal PNAS. The work is part of Stockhammer’s project “FoodTransforms–Transformations of Food in the Eastern Mediterranean Late Bronze Age,” which is funded by the European Research Council. The international team that produced the study encompasses scientists from LMU Munich, Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. The fundamental question behind his project – and thus the starting point for the current study – was to clarify whether the early globalization of trade networks in the Bronze Age also concerned food. “In fact, we can now grasp the impact of globalization during the 2nd millennium BCE on East Mediterranean cuisine,” says Stockhammer. “Mediterranean cuisine was characterized by intercultural exchange from an early stage.”

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Excavation of Megiddo (Area K). Image credit: the Meggido Expedition

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3D reconstruction of Grave 50 from Megiddo (Area H). Image credit: the Meggido Expedition

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Article Source: LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES news releases

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Researchers deconstruct ancient Jewish parchment using multiple imaging techniques

FRONTIERS—A picture may be worth a thousand words, but capturing multiple images of an artifact across the electromagnetic spectrum can tell a rich story about the original creation and degradation of historical objects over time. Researchers recently demonstrated how this was possible using several complementary imaging techniques to non-invasively probe a Jewish parchment scroll. The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Materials.

A team of scientists from Romania’s National Institute for Research and Development in Optoelectronics extracted details about the manuscript’s original materials and manufacturing techniques employing various spectroscopic instruments. These specialized cameras and devices capture images that the human eye normally can’t see.

“The goal of the study was … to understand what the passing of time has brought upon the object, how it was degraded, and what would be the best approach for its future conservation process,” explained Dr Luminita Ghervase, a co-author on the paper and research scientist at the institute.

The manuscript the team investigated was a poorly preserved but sacred scroll containing several chapters of the Book of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. An artifact from a private collection, little was known of the object’s provenance or history.

“The use of complementary investigation techniques can shed light on the unknown history of such an object,” Ghervase noted. “For some years now, non-invasive, non-destructive investigation techniques are the first choice in investigating cultural heritage objects, to comply with one of the main rules of the conservation practice, which is to not harm the object.”

One of the more common imaging techniques is multispectral imaging, which involves scanning an object within specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Such images can show otherwise invisible details about the manuscript’s wear and tear. Different ultraviolet modes, for example, revealed a dark stain on the scroll that might indicate a repair using an organic material such as a resin, because the spot strongly absorbs UV light.

A related technique, hyperspectral imaging, was used to determine the material basis of the ink on the aged parchment. The scientists detected two distinct types of ink, another indication that someone may have attempted to repair the item in the past. They also used a computer algorithm to help characterize the spectral signals of individual pixels to further discriminate the materials – a method that holds promise for reconstructing the text itself.

“The algorithm used for materials classification has the potential of being used for identifying traces of the ink to infer the possible original shape of the letters,” Ghervase said.

The team also employed an imaging technique known as x-ray fluorescence (XRF), which can identify the kinds of chemicals used in both the ink and the manufacturing of the parchment. For instance, the XRF found rich concentrations of zinc, a chemical often linked to the bleaching process, but possibly another indication of past restoration efforts. Finally, the scientists employed a Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer to identify other chemicals present using an infrared light source to measure absorption. Specifically, the FTIR analysis provided an in-depth view regarding the deterioration rate of the collagen in the scroll, which is made from animal skin, among other insights.

Employing these various imaging techniques to dissect the parchment could help conservators restore the object closer to its original condition by identifying the materials used to create it.

“They can wisely decide if any improper materials had been used, and if such materials should be removed,” Ghervase said. “Moreover, restorers can choose the most appropriate materials to restore and preserve the object, ruling out any possible incompatible materials.”

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Details of the scroll, showing various types of degradation. The authors

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UV fluorescence examination. The authors

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Hyperspectral imaging. The authors

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Article Source: FRONTIERS news release

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Shipwrecked ivory a treasure trove for understanding elephants and 16th century trading

CELL PRESS—n 1533, a Portuguese trading vessel carrying forty tons of gold and silver coins along with other precious cargo went missing on its way to India. In 2008, this vessel, known as the Bom Jesus, was found in Namibia, making it the oldest known shipwreck in southern Africa. Now, an international collaboration of researchers in Namibia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States reporting in the journal Current Biology on December 17 have found that the ship’s cargo included more than 100 elephant tusks, which paleogenomic and isotopic analyses trace to many distinct herds that once roamed West Africa.

The study is the first to combine paleogenomic, isotopic, archeological, and historical methods to determine the origin, ecological, and genetic histories of shipwrecked cargo, according to the researchers. That’s noteworthy in part because ivory was a central driver of the trans-continental commercial trading system connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia via maritime routes. The findings also have implications for understanding African elephants of the past and present.

In the new study, the team, including Alfred L. Roca and Alida de Flamingh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with Ashley Coutu and Shadreck Chirikure, affiliated with the University of Oxford and University of Cape Town, wanted to pinpoint the source of elephant ivory that was widely circulated in the Indian and Atlantic trading systems during early trade and globalization.

“Elephants live in female-led family groups, and they tend to stay in the same geographic area throughout their lives,” de Flamingh explains. “We determined where these tusks came from by examining a DNA marker that is passed only from mother-to-calf and comparing the sequences to those of geo-referenced African elephants. By comparing the shipwreck ivory DNA to DNA from elephants with known origins across Africa, we were able to pinpoint the geographic region and species of elephant with DNA characteristics that matched the shipwreck ivory.”

“In order to fully explore where these elephant tusks originated, we needed multiple lines of evidence,” Coutu adds. “Thus, we used a combination of methods and expertise to explore the origin of this ivory cargo through genetic and isotopic data gathered from sampling the tusks. Our conclusions were only possible with all of the pieces of our interdisciplinary puzzle fitting together.”

The team’s analyses, including DNA from 44 available tusks and isotope analysis of 97 tusks, showed that the ivory had come from African forest elephants. Their mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to calf, traced them to 17 or more herds from West as opposed to Central Africa. That was a surprise, Chirikure says, because the Portuguese had established trade with the Kongo Kingdom and communities along the Congo River by the 16th century. “The expectation was that the elephants would be from different regions, especially West and Central Africa.”

Four of the mitochondrial haplotypes they uncovered are still found today in modern elephants. The others may have been lost due to subsequent hunting for ivory or habitat destruction. Isotope analyses also suggest the elephants lived in mixed forest habitat, not deep in the rainforest, the researchers report.

“There had been some thinking that African forest elephants moved out into savanna habitats in the early 20th century, after almost all savanna elephants were eliminated in West Africa,” Roca says, noting that savanna elephants represent a distinct elephant species. “Our study showed that this was not the case, because the African forest elephant lived in savanna habitats in the early 16th century, long before the decimation of savanna elephants by the ivory trade occurred.”

In addition to these insights, De Flamingh says that these new data can now aid in tracing the source of confiscated illegal ivory. And the new findings are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be learned from studies of ivory about elephants and the people who hunted them.

“There is tremendous potential to analyze historic ivory from other shipwrecks, as well as from archaeological contexts and museum collections to understand the life histories of elephant populations, the skills and lifeways of the people who hunted and traded the ivory, as well as the many journeys of African ivory across the world,” Coutu says. “The revelation of these connections tell important global histories.”

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This photo shows an African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). Nicholas Georgiadis

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Raw elephant tusks from the 16th century Bom Jesus shipwreck. National Museum of Namibia

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Article Source: CELL PRESS news release

This work was supported by USFWS African Elephant Conservation Fund, South African Research Chairs Initiative of the National Research Foundation and Department of Science and Technology of South Africa, NRF, USDA ILLU 875-952 and ILLU-538-939, PEEC and Clark Research Support Grants, Claude Leon Foundation, and the European Union.

Current Biology, de Flamingh et al.: “Sourcing elephant ivory from a 16th century Portuguese shipwreck” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31663-8

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A non-destructive method for analyzing Ancient Egyptian embalming materials

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY—Ancient Egyptian mummies have many tales to tell, but unlocking their secrets without destroying delicate remains is challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry have found a non-destructive way to analyze bitumen — the compound that gives mummies their dark color — in Ancient Egyptian embalming materials. The method provides clues to the bitumen’s geographic origin and, in one experiment, revealed that a mummy in a French museum could have been partially restored, likely by collectors.

The embalming material used by Ancient Egyptians was a complex mixture of natural compounds such as sugar gum, beeswax, fats, coniferous resins and variable amounts of bitumen. Also known as asphalt or tar, bitumen is a black, highly viscous form of petroleum that arises primarily from fossilized algae and plants. Researchers have used various techniques to analyze Ancient Egyptian embalming materials, but they typically require preparation and separation steps that destroy the sample. Charles Dutoit, Didier Gourier and colleagues wondered if they could use a non-destructive technique called electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) to detect two components of bitumen formed during the decomposition of photosynthetic life: vanadyl porphyrins and carbonaceous radicals, which could provide information on the presence, origin and processing of bitumen in the embalming material.

The researchers obtained samples of black matter from an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus (or coffin), two human mummies and four animal mummies (all from 744-30 B.C.), which they analyzed by EPR and compared to reference bitumen samples. The team discovered that the relative amounts of vanadyl compounds and carbonaceous radicals could differentiate between bitumen of marine origin (such as from the Dead Sea) and land-plant origin (from a tar pit). Also, they detected vanadyl compounds that likely formed from reactions between the vanadyl porphyrins and other embalming components. Intriguingly, the black matter taken from a human mummy acquired by a French museum in 1837 didn’t contain any of these compounds, and it was very rich in bitumen. This mummy could have been partially restored with pure bitumen, probably by a private collector to fetch a higher price before the museum acquired it, the researchers say.

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Researchers analyzed embalming material from the neck of this Ancient Egyptian mummy, which was acquired by a French museum in 1837. Frédérique Vincent, ethnographic conservator

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Article Source: AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY news release

The authors acknowledge funding from Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France.

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Mummified baboons shine new light on the lost land of Punt

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE—Ancient Punt was a major trading partner of Egyptians for at least 1,100 years. It was an important source of luxury goods, including incense, gold, leopard skins, and living baboons. Located somewhere in the southern Red Sea region in either Africa or Arabia, scholars have debated its geographic location for more than 150 years. A new study tracing the geographic origins of Egyptian mummified baboons finds that they were sourced from an area that includes the modern-day countries of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Dijbouti, Somalia, and Yemen, providing new insight into Punt’s location. Published in eLife, the results also demonstrate the tremendous nautical range of early Egyptian seafarers. A Dartmouth-led team of researchers including primatologists, Egyptologists, geographers, and geochemists, worked together to analyze the isotope composition of baboons discovered in ancient Egyptian temples and tombs, and modern baboons from across eastern Africa and southern Arabia.

“Long-distance seafaring between Egypt and Punt, two sovereign entities, was a major milestone in human history because it drove the evolution of maritime technology. Trade in exotic luxury goods, including baboons, was the engine behind early nautical innovations,” explains lead author Nathaniel J. Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College.

“Many scholars view trade between Egypt and Punt as the first long maritime step in a trade network known as the spice route, which would go on to shape geopolitical fortunes for millennia. Other scholars put it more simply, describing the Egypt-Punt relationship as the beginning of economic globalization,” he added. “Baboons were central to this commerce, so determining the location of Punt is important. For over 150 years, Punt has been a geographic mystery. Our analysis is the first to show how mummified baboons can be used to inform this enduring debate.”

Ancient Egyptians revered baboons throughout their history, with the earliest evidence dating from 3,000 B.C. Baboons were even deified, entering the pantheon of gods as manifestations of Thoth, a god associated with the moon and wisdom. One species, Papio hamadryas (the sacred baboon), was often depicted in wall paintings and other works, as a male, in a seated position with its tail curled to the right of its body. The species was among the types of baboons that were mummified in this very position with the linens carefully wrapped around its limbs and tail. Another species, Papio anubis (the olive baboon), was also mummified but it was typically wrapped in one big cocoon in a manner reflecting far less care. Baboons have never however, existed naturally in the Egyptian landscape and were a product of foreign trade in the region.

The study focused on mummified baboons from the New Kingdom period (1550-1069 B.C.) available in the British Museum and specimens from the Ptolemaic period (305-30 B.C.) available in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London. In addition, the authors examined tissues from 155 baboons from 77 locations across eastern Africa and southern Arabia, encompassing every hypothesized location for Punt. The team measured oxygen and strontium isotope compositions and used a method called isotopic mapping to estimate the geographic origins of specimens recovered from the New Kingdom and Ptolemaic sites in Egypt.

Strontium is a chemical element that is found in bedrock, which is specific to a geographic location. As strontium erodes, its composition is absorbed into the soil and water and enters the food web. As animals drink the water and eat the plants, their teeth, and hair and bones, obtain a geographic signature reflecting where they have lived in the past and most recently, respectively.

Baboons must drink water every day and are considered obligate drinkers. Their bodies reflect the oxygen composition of water in the landscape. The enamel of an animal’s adult teeth reflect the unique strontium composition of its environment when the teeth formed in early life. In contrast, hair and bone have isotope signatures that reflect the preceding months (hair) or years (bone) of dietary behavior. Similar to strontium, oxygen compositions (specifically, isotopes) of water can also vary by geographic location but the researchers found data from the specimens in this category were inconclusive, and only reflected values specific to Egypt.

The findings demonstrate that the two mummified P. hamadryas baboons from the New Kingdom period, EA6738 and EA6736, were born outside of Egypt. They had most likely come from a location in Eritrea, Ethiopia or Somalia, which narrows down the location of Punt.

The data suggest that EA6736, a P. hamadryas baboon, must have died shortly, day or months, after arriving in Egypt, as results indicate that its enamel and hair did not have sufficient time to convert to the local oxygen signature of drinking water.

Five species of mummified P. anubis from the Ptolemaic period reflected strontium levels that are consistent with an Egyptian origin, which provides tantalizing hints of a captive breeding program for baboons at this time, probably in Memphis, an ancient capital in Lower Egypt, northwest of the Red Sea.

As the researchers explain in the study, their estimated location of Punt is still provisional but the role that baboons played in the Red Sea trade network and their geographic distribution is one that is integral to understanding the historic origins of international maritime commerce.

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Map of Africa and skull of specimen EA6738, a mummified baboon recovered from ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor) and now accessioned in the British Museum. Isotopic analysis of EA6738 indicates import from somewhere in the red shaded region, a likely location for the fabled land of Punt. Figure by Jonathan Chipman and Nathaniel J. Dominy.

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The baboon is one of seven examples of Papio hamadryas depicted in the rigging of Egyptian ships returning to Egypt from Punt. Photograph and figure by Nathaniel J. Dominy.

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Specimen EA6736 recovered from the New Kingdom Temple of Khons and now accessioned in the British Museum. Photo (c) The Trustees of the British Museum, and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

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Article Source: DARTMOUTH COLLEGE news release

The study was co-authored by Salima Ikram at American University in Cairo; Gillian L. Moritz at Dartmouth; Patrick V. Wheatley at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jonathan W. Chipman at Dartmouth; and Paul L. Koch at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

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Under wraps: X-rays reveal 1,900-year-old mummy’s secrets

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY—The mummified remains of ancient Egyptians hold many secrets, from the condition of the bodies to the artifacts placed within the burial garments. Now a team of researchers has found a way to unwrap those secrets, without unraveling the mummies themselves.

Three years ago, researchers from Northwestern University, in preparation for an exhibit on campus, carefully transported a 1,900-year-old mummy to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. There scientists used powerful X-ray beams to peer inside the layers of linen and resin to examine the 2,000-year-old bones and objects buried within.

The results of this experiment, the first time an intact mummy was examined using X-ray diffraction techniques, were recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The examinations confirmed several details about the mummy — the body belonged to a child of about five years old, most likely a girl, and was buried with what appears to be a scarab amulet of calcite, a sacred object meant to spiritually protect the body on its passage to the afterlife.

“We knew there were objects within the mummy, and we wanted to find out which materials were present,” said Stuart Stock, research professor of cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the first author on the paper. “Short of opening the mummy, there’s no way other than X-ray diffraction to identify those materials.”

Ancient Egyptians believed it was important to preserve dead bodies in as lifelike a manner as possible. The extensive process they used is called mummification, and it involved removing all moisture from the body before wrapping the deceased in many layers of linens sealed with resin. Egyptians began mummifying the dead around 2,600 B.C, according to the Smithsonian Institution, and continued for more than 2,000 years.

Experts dated this particular mummy back to the Roman era (beginning in 30 B.C.). It was discovered in Hawara, Egypt and excavated in 1911, eventually making its way to the library of the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary on Northwestern’s Evanston, Illinois campus. In 2018, the mummy became the centerpiece of an exhibition on campus, joining a series of Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits, representations of people embalmed within mummies that were excavated from areas near Hawara.

In preparation for the exhibit, Stock was asked to conduct research on the contents. He began by imaging it with a medical computed tomography (CT) scanner, which provided a roadmap of sorts for his work at the APS. The CT scan, Stock said, showed the team exactly where to aim the powerful X-ray beams generated by the APS, allowing them to complete their X-ray experiments in 24 hours.

“Without the CT scan to refer to, this literally would have taken two weeks,” Stock said.

The Northwestern team had the help of APS physicist and group leader Jonathan Almer of Argonne’s X-ray Science division, a co-author on the paper. Almer leads the scientific team at Beamline 1-ID, which makes use of high-energy X-rays that can penetrate larger samples. Even so, Almer said, this was one of the largest objects measured at the APS — more than three feet long, weighing roughly 50 pounds.

“This proves that we can find a needle in a haystack,” Almer said. “Often our research is looking for micron-level objects in a millimeter-sized sample. This was a scaling-up of work we do every day, and it shows that we can experiment with and see within a wide range of size scales.”

Also important, Almer noted, was that the X-ray beams could peer inside the mummy without damaging it. This non-invasive method, combined with the earlier CT scan, revealed several pieces of information that would not have been possible to determine otherwise.

The young girl’s skeleton, Stock said, is well preserved and shows no signs of trauma, meaning the child likely died of disease. While Stock and his colleagues were not able to conclusively determine the sex of the mummy, he said that evidence points to it being female, which would match the portrait discovered with the mummy. X-rays detected several small pins holding areas of the linen together, and Stock said he was able to determine they were made of modern metals, probably added 20 years ago as part of exhibiting the mummy.

Most surprising, Stock said, was the amulet (called Inclusion F in the paper), which turned out to be made of calcite, a carbonate mineral. While it is not unheard of for these amulets to be made of calcite, he said, it is rare, and knowing the composition will allow scientists to trace it to a time and place of origin.

Marc Walton, co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts and research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, worked with colleagues to place the mummy in a social and historical context for the 2018 exhibition, and was the scientist who brought Stock aboard the project. He said this study shows how an archaeological object can inspire new scientific directions.

“Not only does this work provide historians with data on the composition of the mummy, its burial conditions, and, therefore, its biography, but the complexity of the composite object pushed the authors to innovate new methods of synchrotron-based X-ray diffraction,” he said. “Such synergy between high technology and archaeology highlights what is possible when typical research boundaries are crossed.”

Stock said that while this method of examining the interiors of mummies may not be widely used in the future, given the logistical challenges, it may help scientists answer questions that otherwise would remain mysteries.

“It may be the only way to get out important information without disturbing the mummies,” he said.

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Scientists used powerful X-rays to see inside this 1,900-year-old Egyptian mummy, getting a look at the bones and artifacts beneath layers of linens and resin without causing any damage. The mummy remains on display at Northwestern University. Mark Lopez / Argonne National Laboratory

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Argonne physicist and group leader Jonathan Almer, left, talks with Dan Silverstein of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in 2017. Almer points out the red laser beams that will guide the X-ray probe of the Egyptian mummy in the foreground. Mark Lopez / Argonne National Laboratory

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Though the exhibition, “Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Ancient Egypt,” closed in April 2018, the mummy remains on display at the library of the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University.

Video:
X-rays unwrap mummy’s secrets at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source
 — This video, produced in 2017, details the examination of a 1,900-year-old Egyptian mummy brought to the Advanced Photon Source by scientists at Northwestern University. (Video by Argonne Creative Services.)

Article Source: DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY news release

Cover image, top left: In 2017, Stuart Stock, center, of Northwestern University, talks with Rachel Sabino, right, of the Art Institute of Chicago while Argonne scientist Ali Mashayekhi, left, makes adjustments to the apparatus holding a 1,900-year-old Egyptian mummy. Mark Lopez / Argonne National Laboratory

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Warm oceans helped first human migration from Asia to North America

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON—New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America.

The new international study led by the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews and published Dec. 9 in Science Advances provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age with implications for early human migration.

The Pacific Ocean contains around half the water in Earth’s oceans and is a vast reservoir of heat and CO2. However, at present, the sluggish circulation of North Pacific restricts this heat and CO2’s movement, limiting its impact on climate.

The international team of scientists used sediment cores from the deep sea to reconstruct the circulation and climate of the North Pacific during the peak of the last ice age. Their results reveal a dramatically different circulation in the ice age Pacific, with vigorous ocean currents creating a relatively warm region around the modern Bering Sea.

“Our data shows that the Pacific had a warm current system during the last ice age, similar to the modern Atlantic Ocean currents that help to support a mild climate in Northern Europe”, said Dr James Rae, from the University of St Andrews who led the study.

The warming from these ocean currents created conditions more favorable for early human habitation, helping address a long-standing mystery about the earliest inhabitants of North America.

“According to genetic studies, the first people to populate the Americas lived in an isolated population for several thousand years during the peak of the last ice age, before spreading out into the American continents”, said co-author Ben Fitzhugh, a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington.

This has been termed the “Beringian Standstill” hypothesis and a significant question is where this population lived after separation from their Asian relatives before deglaciation allowed them to reach and spread throughout North and South America. The new research suggests that these early Americans may have lived in a relatively warm refugium in southern Beringia, on the now submerged land beneath the Bering Sea. Due to the extremely cold climate that dominated other parts of this region during the ice age, it has been unclear, until now, how habitable conditions could have been maintained.

“The warm currents revealed by our data would have created a much more pleasant climate in this region than we might have previously thought”, said co-author Will Gray, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment institute in France.

“This would have created milder climates in the coastal regions of the North Pacific, that would have supported more temperate terrestrial and marine ecosystems and made it possible for humans to survive the ice age in an otherwise harsh climatic period.”

“Our work shows how dynamic Earth’s climate system is. Changes in the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere can have major impacts on how effectively humans may inhabit different environments, which is also relevant for understanding how different regions will be affected by future climate change”, added co-author Robert Jnglin Wills, a postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

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The Pacific Ocean’s currents support a diverse ecosystem, seen here from space with green indicating blooms of photosynthesizing plankton. Warmer currents during the ice age may also have supported early human settlements.  NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, The SeaWiFS Project and GeoEye, Scientific Visualization Studio

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The research was funded by the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Other co-authors are from Scripps Institution of Oceanography; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of California, Riverside.

Article Source: University of Washington news release
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New evidence: Neanderthals buried their dead

Was burial of the dead practiced by Neanderthals or is it an innovation specific to our species? There are indications in favor of the first hypothesis but some scientists remain skeptical. For the first time in Europe, however, a multi-disciplinary team led by researchers at the CNRS and the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (France) and the University of the Basque Country (Spain)1 has demonstrated, using a variety of criteria, that a Neanderthal child was buried, probably around 41,000 years ago, at the Ferrassie site (Dordogne). Their study* is published in the journal Scientific Reports on 9th December 2020.

Dozens of buried Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered in Eurasia, leading some scientists to deduce that, like us, Neanderthals buried their dead. Other experts have been skeptical, however, given that the majority of the best-preserved skeletons, found at the beginning of the 20th century, were not excavated using modern archaeological techniques.

It is within this framework that an international team1 led by paleoanthropologists Antoine Balzeau (CNRS and Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, France) and Asier Gómez-Olivencia (University of the Basque Country, Spain), analyzed a human skeleton from one of the most famous Neanderthal sites in France: the La Ferrassie rock shelter, Dordogne. After six Neanderthal skeletons were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, the site delivered a seventh between 1970 and 1973, belonging to a child of around two years old. For almost half a century, the collections associated with this specimen remained unexploited in the archives of the Musée d’archéologie nationale.

Recently, a multidisciplinary team, assembled by the two researchers, reopened the excavation notebooks and reviewed the material, revealing 47 new human bones not identified during excavation and undoubtedly belonging to the same skeleton. The scientists also carried out a thorough analysis of the bones: state of preservation, study of proteins, genetics, dating, etc. They returned to La Ferrassie in the hope of finding further fragments of the skeleton; although no new bones were discovered, using the notebooks of their predecessors, they were able to reconstruct and interpret the spatial distribution of the human remains and the rare associated animal bones.

The researchers showed that the skeleton had been buried in a sedimentary layer which inclined to the west (the head, to the east, was higher than the pelvis), while the other stratigraphic layers of the site inclined to the north-east. The bones, which were relatively unscattered, had remained in their anatomical position. Their preservation, better than that of the bison and other herbivores found in the same stratum, indicates a rapid burial after death. Furthermore, the contents of this layer proved to be earlier than the surrounding sediment2. Finally, a tiny bone, identified as human by the proteins and as Neanderthal by its mitochondrial DNA, was directly dated using carbon-14. At around 41,000 years old, this makes it one of the most recent directly dated Neanderthal remains.   

This new information proves that the body of this two-year-old Neanderthal child was purposefully deposited in a pit dug in a sedimentary layer around 41,000 years ago; however, further discoveries will be necessary to understand the chronology and geographical extension of Neanderthal burial practices.

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Examining material from the 1970s excavations at the Musée d’archéologie nationale, France. Thousands of bone remains were sorted and 47 new fossil remains belonging to the Neanderthal child ‘La Ferrassie 8’ were identified. © Antoine Balzeau – CNRS/MNHN

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Reconstruction of the child’s burial by Neanderthals at La Ferrassie. © Emmanuel Roudier

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Article Source: CNRS news release

Notes

  1. 1. The other contributors to this study work at the Institut de recherche sur les archéomatériaux – Centre de recherche en physique appliquée à l’archéologie (CNRS/Université Bordeaux Montaigne), the Géosciences Rennes laboratory (CNRS/Université Rennes 1), De la Préhistoire à l’actuel : culture, environnement et anthropologie laboratory (CNRS/Université de Bordeaux/Ministère de la Culture), the Musée d’archéologie nationale and the Musée national de Préhistoire des Eyzies-de-Tayac in France; at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany; at the University of Bologna in Italy; at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
  2. 2. Dated by thermoluminescence. The result indicates how long it is since the sediment last saw light and therefore the date of the burial.

*Pluridisciplinary evidence for burial for the La Ferrassie Neandertal child, Antoine Balzeau, Alain Turq, Sahra Talamo, Camille Daujeard, Guillaume Guérin, Frido Welker, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Helen Fewlass, Jean‑Jacques Hublin, Christelle Lahaye, Bruno Maureille, Matthias Meyer, Catherine Schwab & Asier Gómez‑Olivencia, Scientific Reports, 9 December 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77611-z.

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