Stone Pages - Archaeo News (Americas)

Nomads and Networks: Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:11:11 +0100

When one thinks of historic Kazakhstan, a vision of rough-riding, nomadic, gypsy-like people on horseback, traversing a vast, flat, steppe-like landscape, comes to mind. The ancient cultural and artistic achievements of this people might surprise you, however.
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University (ISAW) will present the first U.S. exhibition with a comprehensive overview of the unique nomadic culture of ancient Kazakhstan. On view from March 7 through June 3, 2012, 'Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan' focuses on the peoples of the Altai and Tianshan regions from the eighth to first centuries BCE.
Artefacts include bronze openwork offering-stands, superbly decorated with animal and human figures; petroglyphs marking important places in the landscape; and sophisticated gold adornments that marked the social status of those who wore them. A highlight is recently excavated, never-displayed material from a fourth-third century cemetery near the Russian/Chinese border, where permafrost conditions enabled the preservation of organic materials. Included here are such objects as saddles and expertly carved horse trappings that display hybrid mythical animals, among a variety of other artefacts.
Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age, and archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated the horse in this region. Horse-riding defined their activities, and equestrianism and horse-racing remains a national passion.

Edited from Popular Archaeology (3 February 2012)

4,000-year-old artifact found in Connecticut

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:53:31 +0100

An ancient spearpoint was found at an excavation site in Connecticut (USA) during a Norwalk Community College-sponsored archaeology dig. Chelsea Dean, senior at Fairfield Ludlowe High School, took the Introduction to Archaeology course with Professor Ernest Wiegand last fall as part of the schools avocation program. During the last dig of the semester, Chelsea found a spearpoint more than 4,000 years old.
"It's like an arrowhead. The section I was working on had a lot of stuff coming up, but nothing was complete. When the actual projectile point came up, it was the first intact artifact I found," she said. "One of the things I learned taking the course is that I want to continue with archaeology, whether it's a career or recreational," Chelsea said.
Mr. Wiegand, coordinator of the college's archaeology club, said Chelsea discovered a spearpoint made of white quartz. This type of ancient artifact is known as a Burwell projectile point and was probably used as the tip of a spear. The excavation at Gallows Hill Rd. has been a 10-year project by Mr. Wiegand and his students. "The point type is the first of its kind found at the site," he said. "It is one more clue to tell us as to who was there." The artifact is being kept with other findings from the Gallows Hill site, where dig will continue when Mr. Wiegand and his students return in the spring.
Daniel Cruson, a local historian and archaeologist, said the spearpoint finding is not uncommon for this area. During several digs at Putnam Park Mr. Cruson has headed since 2001, a component of an Indian camp was uncovered along with other findings. "We found a complete projectile point, six or seven broken points and stone bifaces made of quartz," said Mr. Cruson. These findings also date to between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Edited from The Redding Pilot (25 January 2012)

Early evidence of popcorn found in Peru

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:29:01 +0100

The first evidence of the domesticated production of corn in the Americas can be found in Mexico and dates back to 7,000 BCE. It was developed from a wild grass called teosinte. After a few thousand years its usage and cultivation spread over South America and evidence has been found in areas even before the use of pottery.
Until now the earliest evidence had only dated back as far as 3,000 BCE. Now a team of scientists from the Washington Natural History Museum (USA) have found evidence of processed (cooked) corn in Peru, dating from approximately 4,700 BCE.
Dolores Piperno, a curator of New world archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is quoted as saying "These new and unique races of corn may have developed quickly in South America, where there was no chance that they would continue to be pollinated by wild teosinte. Because there is so little data available from other places for this time period, the wealth of morphological information about the cobs and other corns remains at this early date is very important for understanding how corn became the crop we know today".

Edited from EureAlert! (18 January 2012) BBC News, National Geographic News (19 January 2012)

Ancient geoglyphs found under Amazonian rainforest

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:28:20 +0100

In an area on the western boundary of the Brazilian Amazon, known as Acre, rare geoglyphs have been uncovered by a farmer clearing his land. The area has long been believed to have been forested for thousands of years, with no appreciable human occupation. But this theory is now under fire.
The farmer, senhor Araújo, thought at first that they were part of abandoned fortifications from the Bolivian War but recent work by archaeologists has dated them at between 1,000 and 2,000 years old, representing a picture of the landscape in the time before Columbus arrived in the Americas.
The geoglyphs uncovered on senhor Araújo's land are deeply carved earth avenues, up to 6 and a half metres deep. Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian palaeontologist involved in uncovering some of these geoglyphs, believes that they are highly significant. He is quoted as saying "What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from the forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes".
These finds are now causing alarm bells to ring with environmentalists, as they present a view of a much smaller rainforest. William woods, a geographer who is part of the team investigating the Acre site, is quoted as saying "If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it. I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists but what else can one say?"

Edited from The New York Times (14 January 2012)

A new theory on the disappearance of Neanderthals

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:24:38 +0100

A new theory has been put forward by a team from the Arizona State university and the University of Colorado Denver (USA) on the fate of Neanderthals. The team has recently published a paper on their findings, which were the results of computational modelling.
Michael Barton, a pioneer in the area of archaeological applications of computational modelling explains what it means. "To better understand human ecology, and especially how human culture and biology evolved amongst hunter-gatherers in the Late Pleistocene of western Eurasia (approximately 126,000 to 9,500 BCE) we designed theoretical and methodological frameworks that incorporated feedback across three evolutionary systems: biological, cultural and environmental".
Their theory is based on the fact that Neanderthals were more intelligent than originally thought and adapted rapidly to changes in their environment. So, when the more populous Homo Sapiens arrived in their midst they adapted and survived by inter breeding with them and, eventually, became absorbed into their society and ceased to be recognisable as a separate species. The paper has already provoked a vocal reaction, both for and against.

Edited from PhysOrg (16 January 2012)

Remains of prehistoric hut found in southern Texas

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:43:53 +0100

Last month, workers preparing San Antonio's Mission County Park for construction found the remains of a prehistoric hut that had burned down about 3,500 years ago.
Betty Bueche, who manages county facilities, said the structure dates from the Late Archaic Period, 3000 to 1000 BCE. Evidence is being analysed by the state archaeologist and the University of Texas, San Antonio, Center for Archaeological Research. "It's determined to be the third-oldest-known structure in the state of Texas, so it's in its own category in prehistory," says Bueche.
Officials are waiting on a second round of carbon dating to establish when the structure burned. It's not known yet what the structure was used for, and its dimensions aren't certain. "In that timeframe, the structures that have been found previously are with bent poles, so they formed sort of a domed hut. These were done with upright posts, so this was a method of construction that until this find and the carbon dating that's been done, we didn't know dated that far back," Bueche said.
Few artefacts have been found at the location. "There were some chips of flint that obviously had come from dart points, but very little. We're at a very preliminary stage" of the investigation, she said. Signs of ancient human settlements have been found elsewhere in Texas, some more than 10,000 years old.

Edited from San Antonio Express-News, My San Antonio (12 January 2012)

2,000 year-old cave paintings found in Mexico

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:29:27 +0100

Mexican archaeologists found some 3,000 cave paintings, some almost 2,000 years old, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said. The discoveries were made between August and October 2011, but were not announced until specialists confirmed their antiquity and completed their analyses.
The paintings came to light through the Rupestral Art Project of the Victoria River Basin - which includes semi-desert regions in the states of Queretaro and Guanajuato - developed by INAH experts and directed by archaeologist Carlos Viramontes. INAH said that the pictographs were found at 40 rock sites. It added that the oldest images refer to rites of passage, healing, prayers for rain and mountain worship, and were created by ancient hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the area during the first centuries CE. These paintings, with yellow, red and black as the predominating colors, generally represent human figures. Often in hunting and battle scenes they carry bows and arrows.
"A great diversity of animals is also to be seen, and radiating circles that probably represent the sun," Viramontes said.
The expert said that the ancient hunter-gatherers who "created images on rockfaces were doing more than just leaving an imprint of their collective memory of historic, climatic and ritual occurrences - they painted the exposed fronts and sheltered backs of boulders as points of contact between the material and spiritual world."
The discoveries are added to the more than 70 rock-art locations discovered in Guanajuato since the late 1980s. The oldest rupestral art documented in Mexico up to now is in Baja California and dates back some 7,400 years.

Edited from Hispanically Speaking News (8 January 2012)

Ancient cave paintings found in Peru

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:11:58 +0100

The president of the Cave Art Peruvian Association, Gori Echevarria reported the finding of cave paintings depicting humans, animals and geometric figures (circa 8-12,000 years old) in the province of Churcampa, located in the Peru's central Huancavelica region.
Echevarria said six cave paintings were identified in a 20-meter stone wall which depict humans in hunting positions. The cave is located at some 3,200 meters above sea level in Torongana mountain.
The 'Quilcas', which is the native name for this art form, are painted in red, white and black and are believed to be at least 8 to 12,000 years old, the archaeologist said. "This finding confirms the great cognitive development of ancient Peru and establishes a reference its pictorial tradition. Most important is the variation and extension of the motifs and scenes," he added.

Edited from Andina (29 December 2011)

Better view of Mississippi Indian mounds

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:48:12 +0100

Local archaeologists and volunteers are removing decades of dense overgrowth from prehistoric Native American earthworks in Indian Mounds Park (Quincy, Illinois, USA) - one of the best preserved complexes still evident in the Upper Mississippi River valley. The project began in November and will continue into spring. The mounds and nearby earthworks date from 200 BCE to 1000 CE. The state may have had as many as 10,000 mounds, but only about 500 are left - many on private land.
Work has so far revealed a terraced embankment with an enclosure surrounding three of the mounds that was only hinted at in University of Chicago archaeologist survey work done in the 1920s.
Steve Tieken, president of the Quincy-based North American Archaeological Institute, says there are 23 mounds within Quincy's park system. "We did discover one large major mound that was previously undocumented and the remnants of two to three mounds".
Concerned with the overall condition of the mounds and their long-term future, Tieken led an effort to reclaim them beginning in 2009.
Volunteers tried to assess the mounds, scaling ladders and trees to get the most accurate measurements. "It was an arduous process to measure, to see how they've changed. Even though they're protected, natural factors take their toll," says Dave Nolan, of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. "One can only imagine what the terraced enclosure must have looked like as you approached up and down river along the Mississippi. It would have been visible for miles and been an awe-inspiring landmark."
Nolan adds, "People can now come to Quincy and view these spectacular earthen monuments in a manner closer to that envisioned by the original builders".

Edited from Quincy Herald-Wing (26 December 2011)

Earthworks created for more than farming

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:54:05 +0100

Many of Ohio's ancient earthworks in the USA are aligned to astronomical events, such as the apparent rising and setting of the Sun or the Moon on key dates in their cycles. The main axis of the Octagon Earthworks at Newark, for example, lines up with the moonrise at its northernmost point on the eastern horizon. Ancient Americans were paying close attention to the sky, but why?
According to Canadian archaeologists Brian Hayden and Suzanne Villeneuve, one of the most commonly proposed answers is that farmers need to know when to plant and harvest their crops, and the solar calendar determines the growing season. Moreover, the 18.6-year-long cycle of the Moon, encoded in Newark's monumental earthworks, wouldn't be of any help at all in determining the best times to sow and reap.
Hayden and Villeneuve surveyed 79 complex hunter-gatherer societies from around the world and discovered that 63 of them "exhibited some solstice observation or monitoring, and/or calendars (most often lunar)." This means that people were doing more than simply noticing that there seemed to be recurrent patterns in where the sun and moon rose and set. In most cases, there was "careful and accurate monitoring of solar rising/setting positions by specialists using tree, post, or rock alignments viewed from special locations."
The reviewers concluded that the lunar and solar calendars were used for "setting the dates of feasts together with the rituals and ceremonies that accompany them." Such decisions were fraught with social and political ramifications - the food had to be gathered and prepared and there also was a delicate web of social obligations to consider. In order to successfully hold a large feast, leaders would need a precise method for figuring out "how many years, how many months or lunations, and which specific day all debts would be called in so that the required provisions would be delivered on time at a given location."
Feasts could be timed to coincide with visually impressive astronomical events such as moonrises in alignment with monumental earthwork walls, which might seem to confer a cosmological legitimacy on the authority of the leaders who organized the feast. Ohio's Hopewell earthworks, with their precise astronomical alignments, might be the creations of groups using their hard-earned and closely guarded knowledge of celestial movements to vie with one another for political and religious dominance.

Edited from The Columbus Dispatch (18 December 2011)

Traverse Corridor: a prehistoric crossroads in Michigan

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:52:46 +0100

Michigan State University professor and paleoanthropologist Charles Cleland and his students began digging for information about prehistoric northwestern lower Michigan (USA) inhabitants in 1966 and have continued for 40 years. Cleland postulated that a prehistoric 'Traverse Corridor,' stretching from the base of Grand Traverse Bay to the Mackinac Straits, was used by early Native Americans during their migrations thousands of years ago.
His theory earned a National Science Foundation grant that funded the initial discovery of 30 to 40 prehistoric summer villages and many smaller camp locations in this region. Today this continuous avenue of Great Lakes coastal plains and inland lakes is known as a summer fishing, hunting and gathering ground used by two different groups of prehistoric people about 1,800 years ago at the latest.
One of those groups came from Canada to catch and dry fall-spawning whitefish and lake trout along the Great Lakes shoreline to take back to winter camps in interior forests. Archaeological evidence indicates they used gill nets by 900 CE. The second group came from the southern parts of the Upper Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and as far away as Georgia. They relied more on agriculture but also hunted, fished, grew corn and gathered a variety of foods in the open marshes, mixed lowland and upland forests around the inland lakes.
It's possible the two groups met and influenced each other during their summer migrations to an area where fish were plentiful and corn could grow. Lakes made the climate along the corridor milder than other Michigan places at the same latitude. Both groups used chert, or flint, obtained from a stone quarry on the northeast side of Grand Traverse Bay to make tools.
The average village found covered about an acre while the largest were about three acres. It's hard to determine how many people lived in them during prehistoric times but archaeologists know from early written documents that an average 150 people, or about 30 families, lived in summer villages. Evidence of fishing nets includes bark cordage remnants, piles of whitefish bones at certain fishing grounds and grooved or notched stone net sinkers lying in continuous lines on the exposed and underwater lake bottoms. Archaeologists believe the stones anchored the nets while cedar boughs were used to keep the tops afloat.

Edited from Traverse City Record-Eagle (11 December 2011)

9,500-year-old spear point discovered in Iowa

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:02:47 +0100

A portion of a spear point shaped from chert has emerged from 2.4 metres below a city parking lot along the Cedar River, in the city of Cedar Rapids (Iowa, USA). David Benn, research coordinator and principal investigator for Bear Creek Archeology of Cresco, Iowa, calls the find of the Hardaway spear point - named for a site in the state of North Carolina - 'significant', and a rare event in the state of Iowa and the Midwest region.
Its estimated age, about 9,500 years, comes from its similarity to spear points from more extensively studied sites, Benn explains. Benn says that 9,500 years ago people had already been in the area for a couple thousand years, and describes the spear point as very thin and technologically advanced over projectile points from an earlier time.
The archeological work is taking place on the east side of the Cedar River, in advance of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control project. The dig also turned up prehistoric pieces of pottery from the Late Woodland Period of 1,000 to 1,500 years ago and the Middle Woodland period of about 2,000 years ago.

Edited from Eastern Iowa Government (9 December 2011)

Prehistoric wood retrieved from Lake Huron

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:17:09 +0100

Under the cold clear waters of Lake Huron, between USA and Canada, anthropologists John O'Shea and Guy Meadows from University of Michigan, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have found a 5.5 foot-long, pole-shaped piece of wood that is 8,900 years old. The wood, which is tapered and beveled on one side in a way that looks deliberate, may provide important clues to a mysterious period in North American prehistory.
"This was the stage when humans gradually shifted from hunting large mammals like mastodon and caribou to fishing, gathering and agriculture," said O'Shea. "But because most of the places in this area that prehistoric people lived are now under water, we don't have good evidence of this important shift itself - just clues from before and after the change. One of the enduring questions is the way the land went under water. Many people think it must have been a violent event, but finding this large wood object just sitting on the bottom wedged between a few boulders suggests that the inundation happened quickly but rather gently. And this in turn suggests that we'll find more intact evidence of human activity in the area."
In 2009 scientists reported finding a series of stone features that they believe were 'drive lanes' used by ancient PaleoIndian hunters to funnel caribou to slaughter. These drive lanes were located on the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, a land connection across the middle of modern Lake Huron that linked northern Michigan with central Ontario during the low-water periods of the Pleistocene and early Holocene ages.
Since that discovery O'Shea and Meadow have worked on identifying human campsites, which are typically located away from hunting areas. In addition to the wood 'pole' specimen, they have collected many other samples from the bottom of the lake that they hope will provide clues about the environment before it was submerged by the rising lake water.
According to O'Shea, quantities of pine pollen and charcoal have been found. "Slowly, the environmental picture is filling in," he said. "There was a marsh close by this site. It seems we're narrowing in on people, but of course forest fires could have created the charcoal as well as cooking fires. So we need to wait for the analyses to be sure about what we've got here."

Edited from ScienceDaily (12 December 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/ctl73sc

Ancient sites discovered in Missouri

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:02:17 +0100

What started as a routine survey of the land surrounding a historic bridge has ended up unearthing two significant sites in Missouri, USA. Larry Grantham, an archaeologist with the Missouri Department of Transportation, said his team has discovered a pair of Native American sites bookending the bridge over the North River just west of Palmyra. On the east side of the bridge is a 1,200 to 1,500-year-old site from the late Woodland period. The site on the west side of the bridge, however, is much older - 3,000 to 5,000 years, dating to the late Archaic period.
At the late Woodland site, which dates to roughly 650 to 900 CE, the group is looking for evidence of structures. The Native Americans who inhabited that site were much less nomadic than earlier peoples, Grantham said. "By the late Woodland (period), they're building houses, and they're being semi-sedentary." He said cooking pits and storage pits also are likely to turn up.
The late Archaic site, which dates to roughly 3000 to 1000 BCE, is yielding projectile points, drills and other tools, all made from chert, a type of rock found along the Mississippi River. That suggests to Grantham that the late Archaic inhabitants moved around the northern half of Missouri in a seasonal cycle, returning to Northeast Missouri for a short time to pick up their weapons materials. "They're taking these chert (pieces), taking a lot of material off and making what we call pre-forms. They don't want to carry any more than they have to." Grantham said there's also evidence to indicate that the late Archaic people in the region were heat-treating the chert to refine its quality.

Edited from Which.com (11 November 2011)

Northwest USA natives were fishers, not hunter-gatherers

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:01:46 +0100

In two new books, the University of Oregon's Madonna Moss challenges conventional thinking about the region's early inhabitants, pointing to cultures built around fishing, fish processing and fish resource management. In her new book 'Northwest Coast: Archaeology as Deep History' (Society for American Archaeology Press), Moss provides an overview of what researchers have discovered at archaeological sites dating back more than 12,000 years.
"Most of what makes up these sites are faunal remains [animal bones and shells]. Most of the bones in these sites are fish bones. This book is about the 85 percent fish bones that make up these sites and what they can tell us about the people who lived here in the past", says Moss. "Local tribes often are confused by the term 'hunter-gatherer.' They have always thought of themselves as fishermen."
The second book looks in depth at fish remains found at numerous archaeological sites in the Northwest. "The Archaeology of North Pacific Fisheries" was co-edited by Moss and Aubrey Cannon - an anthropologist at Canada's McMaster University - and published by the University of Alaska Press. The book is aimed at their colleagues involved in environmental science, fisheries and resource managers.
It is hoped, Moss says, that readers will think differently about the evolution of cultural complexity. "I think people were complex 12,000 years ago," she said. "The indigenous people of the Northwest coast not only relied on fish, sea mammals and plants, they utilised practices, techniques and technologies that actually enhanced the biological productivity of this region," Moss said. "I would argue that their practices made it more productive than it would have been without any human presence."

Edited from Salem News (9 November 2011)