Steppe Societies Revisiting the Andronovo Culture

The Late Bronze Age (~3200-1200 BC) horse-back riding cultures of Asia, sometimes called Andronovo culture, have always been an interest to me. But I admit, I haven't written much to date. The problem has been the scarcity of data to be gathered from such a huge, huge area: a lot of it isn't in English. Previous syntheses pulled together what disparate data there was from a dozen different countries, but frankly, as a non-specialist, I've found it hard to get a reasonable handle on it.

Steppes Region of Central Asia. CIA World Factbook

In a new article in Current Anthropology this month, Michael Frachetti provides a new synthesis of the recently gathered data across the broad region of Asia, and argues that the mobile pastoralists arose from three separate trajectories, rather than just one big "Andronovo culture" block out of the Black Sea. He built his new set of theories on recent research, and emphasizes the variations in the region, rather than the similarities: my impression, bolstered by that of the people who commented on the article, is that this new set of theories both riles up long-standing paradigms and excites new ideas.

In his article, Frachetti uses an "Inner Asian Mountain Corridor" as a proposed route through which central Asia connected to the Eurasian steppes--one of his commenters suggests another. The commentaries provided by eminent scholars from the different countries, and their presence next to the article, exemplifies why Current Anthropology is among my favorite journals. The study has lit my fires to probe a bit deeper, and perhaps it will light yours as well.

• Read my introduction to Steppe Societies (much more to come)

Frachetti MD. 2012. Multiregional emergence of mobile pastoralism and nonuniform institutional complexity across Eurasia. Current Anthropology 53(1):2-38. With comments by David W. Anthony, A.V. Epimakhov, Bryan K. Hanks and R.C.P. Doonan, Nicolay N. Kradin, C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Sandra L. Olsen, D.T. Potts, J. Daniel Rogers, and Natalia Shishlina.

ReSculpting Our Planet Megafaunal extinctions

Archaeologists and paleontologists examining the historical pathways of modern humans as they left Africa and colonize the remainder of the planet have discovered a disturbing combination of effects.

Mastodon Sculpture, Page Museum La Brea Tar Pits, California, photo by Rons Log

It seems that, wherever we went, severe impacts to both plant and animal life and climate change came with us. After humans colonized the Americas and Australia, those lands were irreversibly altered. Dozens of species of plants and animals died, and cooling and then warming of the local climate occurred at the same time. The problem is and likely will be for some time to come, that we don't know which came first. It is possible that climate change in the form of glaciation and deglaciation drove migrating peoples from one continent to another. It is possible that humans over-predated the new species they found, because those species were on able to save themselves from the new predator. It is also possible that the death of massive number of animals drove climate change by upsetting the existing balance of plants and animals in the region.

So we don't really know who's at fault: it is perhaps most likely that the three elements of massive movements of human population, climate instability, and massive extinction of the genera of species of animals fed into each other, eventually creating the current balance of life and climate on our planet.

• Megafaunal extinctions
• American megafaunal extinctions

25 Centuries of Architecture at Butrint

Butrint, on the coast of Albania across from the island of Corfu, is an astonishing blend of architecture. Founded in the 6th century BC, the strategically important port was owned by Greeks, Romans, Normans, Venetians, Byzantines and Ottomans, all of whom left their imprint on the city's architecture.

Portion of a mosaic installed for the emperor Justinian in his 5th century basilica at Butrint. Photo by PawelMM

The astounding architectural variety of Butrint's ruins (second only to Constantinople in Turkey) owes a lot to its location on a promontory jutting into the Mediterranean. There it played crucial roles in battles for trade supremacy by both the Roman Caesar Augustus and the Ottoman Pasha of Ioannina, some 18 centuries later. But really, you should read all about it...

• Butrint, Albania, my summary of the history and recent archaeological research there
• Explore Butrint, the official webpage

The Oldest Pottery in the World

One of the top ten inventions of the world, as far as I'm concerned, is ceramic containers. The earliest of these are bag-shaped, and a good guess (unsubstantiated because, of course, I can't talk to anybody from 20,000 years ago about their creative spark) would be that they were modeled on net bags.

Pottery fragment from Xianrendong, layer 3C1B. Ten radiocarbon dates from this layer range between 17,488-19,577 cal BP. Image courtesy of Science/AAAS

Up until recently, the earliest known ceramics came from the island of Japan, associated with Jomon hunter-gatherers of around 17,000 years ago. Archaeologists have suspected for years that the technology arose on the mainland: and archaeological evidence from two sites in the Yangtse River valley of China have been found recently, a few thousand years earlier than incipient Jomon.

The sherd illustrated above comes from the Xianrendong Cave, reported in the June 29, 2012 issue of Science magazine to be securely dated to ~20,000 years ago.

• Invention of Pottery
• Xianrendong Cave, China
• Top Ten Inventions

Wu X, Zhang C, Goldberg P, Cohen D, Pan Y, Arpin T, and Bar-Yosef O. 2012. Early pottery at 20,000 years ago in Xianrendong Cave, China. Science 336:1696-1700.

Exchange Systems and Trade Networks

An important concept used in archaeological and anthropological study for the past 150 years or more is that of exchange systems or trade networks. Exchange systems are the way consumers connect with producers of goods, services and ideas.

Pochteca Traders with Their Cargo. Illustration from the Florentine Codex, Late 16th century.

Our modern exchange system often involves the Internet: in fact your reading this blog at this moment is an example of our exchange system at work. But those modern exchange systems have been developed from many millennia of bartering, trading and redistribution, all of which is reflected in the archaeological record.

• Read more about Exchange Systems
• Sourcing

The Harbor at Ostia Antica

Ostia Antica was the main port city for the Roman empire, located some 15 miles south west of the capital city of Rome.

One of the fabulous mosaics at Ostia Antica. Photo by Frank Kovalchek

Ostia Antica includes the city, a cemetery, several sanctuaries, and an important watercourse and harbor where ships involved in the Mediterranean trade were sheltered beginning in the first century A.D. The city, and particularly the harbor, exhibit a remarkable quality of preservation, the results of centuries of burial by the alluvial deposits of the Tiber River. Not often remembered by tourists when visiting the city of lights, Ostia makes a wonderful day trip, particularly considering the beautiful mosaics that still exist in place.

• The Harbor at Ostia Antica
• Roman Ruins

Bering Strait and Climate Control

A paper published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 9, 2012, reported the results of computer models on ocean currents affected by the closing and opening of the Bering Strait, effects of which might have a role in global climate control.

The Arctic Ocean and the location of the Bering Strait. Base map: Uwe Dedering

The Bering Strait is an open stretch of water that separates Russia and Alaska: during the Pleistocene era, when glaciers covered much of the northern hemisphere of our planet, the Bering Strait was closed, and a land mass called by scholars "Beringia" was revealed by the drop in sea levels. Long-standing archaeological theory is that the original colonists of the Americas traveled along this land mass while leaving Siberia.

What the new research seems to show is that while the Bering Strait was blocked, it interfered with oceanic currents that mix the Atlantic and Pacific oceans under the Arctic ice cap, and that interference may have caused some of the abrupt climate changes in the past.

• Read more about the research on the Bering Strait

Hu A, Meehl GA, Han W, Timmermann A, Otto-Bliesner B, Liu Z, Washington WM, Large W, Abe-Ouchi A, Kimoto M et al. . 2012. Role of the Bering Strait on the hysteresis of the ocean conveyor belt circulation and glacial climate stability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: in press.

The Revised History of Rice

Several years ago, I wrote an article on the history of rice, detailing the current scholarly understanding of how rice was domesticated and spread throughout the world. Since that time, many academic articles have been written on the subject, many of which contradicted each other: one thing about controversy, it makes it difficult to write lucid articles for the general public .

Botanical Drawing of Oryza sativa Mike Licht

The primary issue of where and when rice was domesticated was debated across many disciplines, including genetics, linguistics, geology and archaeology: the issues were in part based on what constitutes evidence of domestication, but also interpreting the evidence identified in the genetics of the plant. The breadth of the discussion begins, in the Yangtze Valley of China, but spreads to include the domestication events in the Indian subcontinent and Africa. In these areas, controversy was focused on whether the appearance of rice was a continuation of the spread of rice from China, or a secondary, independent domestication event or events.

A symposium of papers called "Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change," held at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, on September 22-25, 2011, brought together many of the scholars working on these problems. In December those papers were published in a special issue of the journal Rice, bringing a considerable amount of discussion and a new idea concerning the domestication of rice. Clearly it was time to update.

• See the History of Rice Part 1, Rice Domestication in China
• See the History of Rice Part 2, The Spread of Rice Domestication Outside of China
• See the complete bibliography

Sites You Should Know Shillourokambos

Shillourokambos is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site on the island of Cyprus, at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea and not terribly far from the more-famous and visitable Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins at Limassol.

Location of Shillourokambos in Cyprus. CIA World Factbook 1982.

Excavated between 1992 and 2004, and occupied between 9,000-10,500 years ago, Shillourokambos holds evidence of the early process of animal management and domestication, of animals as diverse as cats, cattle and wild pigs. Although Cyprus was never closer than 50 miles or so from the mainlands of what are now Turkey and Syria, the PPNB occupants shipped in most of their animals and plants they lived on, the obsidian they used to make stone tools and many of their ideas of architecture and religion from their Levantine PPNB relatives, all of which makes Shillourokambos indeed an important site for understanding the PPNB.

• Shillourokambos
• Guide to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic

Ideologies in Archaeology A Review

I confess that I read the edited collection of articles in Ideologies and Archaeology from Reinhold Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire, published last year by the University of Arizona Press, at least six weeks ago. It took me that long to process it completely. Or at least to be able to write about it.

Ideologies in Archaeology. Cover image courtesy University of Arizona Press.

The book is a collection of articles considering the turbulent nature of the philosophy of archaeology these days. How does our own political viewpoint of the world impact what we study and write about: and how did the political control of state governments impact the past.

It's an important book to read, if you're an archaeologist, or if you crave to understand the philosophical rumblings among archaeologists today, as we attempt to discover and reposition our role in the greater world. I suspect that it will change my own philosophy, but I'm just not sure how. Yet.

Read the review: Ideologies in Archaeology

Adzes Isotopes and the LBK

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week connects some dots between strontium isotope readings in human teeth belonging to the first farmers of Europe (the Linearbandkeramik or LBK).

Man using an Adze. Courtesy Pearson (Scott Foresman)

The researchers estimated the birth localities of more than 500 men and women buried in several LBK sites between 5200-5500 BC, and then singled out men buried with adzes, considering the presence of finely worked stone adzes in a grave as indicating elite status. Bentley and colleagues suggest their results indicate that high status men tended to live in the same location they were raised as children, compared to non-high status men and all women.

• Read more about Adzes, including a summary of the study

Bentley RA, Bickle P, Fibiger L, Nowell GM, Dale CW, Hedges REM, Hamilton J, Wahl J, Francken M, Grupe G et al. 2012. Community differentiation and kinship among Europe's first farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early edition.

The Wild History of Beans

An article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes the predomestication history of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), one of the most important sources of protein, fiber and carbohydrates on our planet today.

The Colors of the Common Bean net_efekt

The bean was domesticated sometime around 10,000 years ago in Peru, and again somewhat later (perhaps: the date isn't clear yet) in Mexico: but the original bean plant started in Mexico and migrated southward on its own, adapting to climates from the lowland tropics of Mesoamerica to the highland Andes. This remarkable flexibility on the part of the wild plant, say scholars, may give us a direction to look at, when considering how to respond to the global climate changes to come.

• Read more about Bean History

Bitocchi E, Nanni L, Bellucci E, Rossi M, Giardini A, Spagnoletti Zeuli P, Logozzo G, Stougaard J, McClean P, Attene G et al. 2012. Mesoamerican origin of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is revealed by sequence data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Will Durant and Geological Consent

In 1998, I was in my first - no, it was my second year of working on this site for what was then known as the Mining Company, and I was madly collecting quotations that had been made by archaeologists, or referred to archaeological subjects. One of my favorite quotations was from the historian Will Durant, or so I thought when I found it, somewhere on the Internet. My readers wrote back and said that my attribution of the quote to Will Durant's Story of Philosophy was incorrect. They offered a wide range of authors who might've been the source of the quotation, as well as a group of related quotations from Durant himself.

The question was long enough ago that it certainly reinforced my notions of the unreliability of the Internet: it also reinforced my desire to be accurate on my own website as much as possible. I'm very pleased to say today that I've heard from James Bishop of the Will Durant Foundation who assures me that the following quotation is from Will Durant, used by him in several lectures, and first published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1946.

The quote is "Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice." Thanks to Mr. Bishop for resolving this ancient puzzle (ancient at least in Internet terms).

• Will Durant on geological consent, including all of the suggestions and related quotes.
• Archaeology Quotations
• the Will Durant Foundation

Horses from the Western Steppes

New DNA evidence published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week supports the domestication of horses as having occurred one time, somewhere in the western steppe region of Eurasia, somewhere in what is today Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.

Przewalski's Horse (Equus ferus przewalskii). Pictured are Przewalski's horses, the closest wild relative of the domestic horse ancestor. image courtesy of Vera Warmuth

That's pretty much what the archaeological evidence has been saying for some time, at sites such as Krasni Yar, Botai and Kozhai I in Kazakhstan: that horses were domesticated by pastoralist nomads in the steppe societies perhaps as long ago as 5000 BC. But the new evidence certainly adds conviction to what we've been saying.

• Horse History, including a brief summary of the recent research
• Krasni Yar
• Steppe Societies

Warmuth V, Eriksson A, Bower MA, Barker G, Barrett E, Hanks BK, Li S, Lomitashvili D, Ochir-Goryaeva M, Sizonov GV et al. 2012. Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early edition.

The History of Wheeled Vehicles

I've always had a thing about roads, probably because when I was a working archaeologist, I worked for the state department of transportation conducting surveys along them. The only reason we built roads, or at least perfected road-building, however, is because we invented wheeled vehicles.

Assyrian King Hunting Lions. Reproduced from Morey's 1908 Outlines of Greek History

The history of wheeled vehicles begins about 5500 years ago, someplace in northern Europe or southwest Asia. Once invented, the idea appears to have spread like crazy: an alternative explanation is that putting wheels on a wooden box was invented several times in several different places. I figure it doesn't really matter: but the evidence is pretty clear, including some 5500 year old cart ruts in the site of Flintbek.

• History of Wheeled Vehicles
• Flintbek (Germany)
• Ancient Roads

The History of Ivory

Ivory, the stuff that comes from elephant (and hippopotamus and rhinoceros and walrus) tusks, has always been a bit of a fascination for me. Although I don't remember the circumstances of how I came to touch ivory for the first time, I clearly remember the feel of ivory, the weight, the almost vegetable-smooth texture of the polished carving. So, of course, I had to write about it.

Comb with Ibex Effigy (Hippopotamus Ivory), Naqada, Predynastic Period. Photo by Guillaume Blanchard.

Ivory is one of the things I'm going to call "raw materials". They aren't archaeological objects, per se, but they are substances, animal, vegetable and mineral, that people in the past became aware of, sought, cherished, and used in many ways. Stuff like amber and jade and obsidian, and salt and bitumen. Each of these things was specifically selected for its beauty and/or usefulness. Some, like ivory, have been recognized for 30,000 years and more.

• Ivory
• Raw Materials

Fish Traps and Archaeology

Fish traps, which go by an astounding array of terms, are at least 8,000 years old, and were invented by complex hunter-gatherers all over the world.

Fish Weir off Deer Island, New Brunswick, CanadaBill Lapp (New Brunswick)

Archaeological examples are found in Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and range in size from simple brush enclosures to massive stone built complexes to move fish just where we want them to go.

Read more about the latest information on fish traps and archaeology

Old Smyrna and Homer

According to an ancient Greek epigram, the famous poet Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, was born in one of seven different cities. No, one is not named Springfield.

Volcanic rock used as building material at Old Smyrna. Photo © Kayt Armstrong, used with permission.

But one strong possibility is that of Old Smyrna, a site located in the modern town of Izmir on the Gulf of Smyrna in what is today Turkey and occupied more or less continuously from ca 1,000 BC through ca 330 BC, when it was moved across the bay. Parked beneath a now-extinct volcano, the port city's residents had access to luxury goods from throughout the Aegean, exposure to both natural hot springs and earthquakes, and a source for beautiful building material, exemplified by these lovely blocks in the photo above.

• Read more about Old Smyrna
• See more photos of the site from Kayt Armstrong
• Archaeology of the Iliad
• Ancient History's Guide to Homer

Tobacco and the Maya

A recent residue analysis of the microscopic contents of a classic period Maya "tobacco flask" from the Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress found... evidence of tobacco! But that doesn't make the story any less interesting.

A Mayan vessel holds the first physical evidence of tobacco in the ancient culture. From the Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress. Photo courtesy the United States Library of Congress

The vessel illustrated in the picture above is what is sometimes called in the archaeological literature a "poison bottle" or "pilgrim's flask", but eventually linguistic research deciphered the hieroglyphs to read "the house of tobacco" on the exterior. And that's only a tiny tidbit of the whole tobacco story, which includes an ethnographic study of traditional healers in Peru, and another studying tobacco use among modern Maya groups.

• Tobacco History
• Maya Tobacco

Zagorevski DV, and Loughmiller-Newman JA. 2012. The detection of nicotine in a Late Mayan period flask by gas chromatography and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry methods. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 26(4):403-411.

By the way, the earliest date I could find for tobacco was in the Late Titicaca region, between 1500 and 1000 BC. If anyone knows of an earlier date, could you pass along a reference? Thanks...

History of Olive Oil

The domestication history of various plants and animals is only the starting place to understanding what shows up on our modern dinner plates. Olive oil, for example, is often cited as one of the reasons olives were domesticated, some 6,000 years ago. But the earliest evidence of olive oil pressing is only about 4,500 years old.

These olives are from the Jaen province in Andalusia, where some of the earliest processing plants are known. Photo from JMN / Cover / Getty Images.

So, how was this lovely stuff manufactured before EVOO became a standard culinary shorthand for Extra Virgin Olive Oil?

• Read all about it in Olive Oil History.
• Domestication History of Olives

By the way, by some weird coincidence, as I was researching this article, I heard an interview on Lynne Rosetto Kasper's The Splendid Table about a new book based on a UC Davis study comparing olive oils sold in California retail stores--and their results are not even close to what you might be paying for.

• UC Davis Olive Center, click on the Evaluation of Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Sold in California for a free download of the findings.
• The Splendid Table interview with Tom Mueller, author of Extra Virginity

Great Zimbabwes Rulers

A continuing debate concerning shifting residences for rulers at the 13th-16th century AD African Iron Age capital of Great Zimbabwe makes for interesting reading today.

The Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe; photo by C.T. Snow

In an Antiquity article in 2008, archaeologists Chirikure and Pikirayi argued that there is evidence for the current pattern of shifting residences for the rulers, that, like the Shona descendants of Great Zimbabwe, when a new ruler took power, they moved residence. Huffman (in Azania in 2010) argues differently, that the shifting residential pattern is an artifact from Portuguese colonization, and that all (or most) rulers lived at the Great Enclosure.

Read more about the debate here:

• Great Zimbabwe
• Guide to the African Iron Age

Marine Isotope Stages

I must admit that the article I wrote today comes out of my frustration about a piece of jargon that shows up in archaeological literature these days: the practice of referring to marine isotope stages (MIS) and/or oxygen isotope stages (OIS) to describe the date of particular site or event.

Alexandre Duret-Lutz

MIS - OIS is a dating technique, used predominantly in paleontological studies (which include the older end of archaeology), that was developed by a group of paleoclimatologists over the past couple of decades. Basically what these folks have done is create chronology for for our planet based on the rise and fall of ice. MIS holds the promise of assisting us with the challenges ahead of us concerning potential global climate change effects, as a better defines those effects in the past.

• Marine Isotope Stages: what it is and how it works
• what is paleontology, anyway, and how is it different from archaeology?

The Original Jerky

The tasty dried meat product called jerky, available nearly everywhere, and made of nearly every conceivable kind of meat, has a name which is derived from the South American version called ch'arki.

Beef Jerky Entree at Jitlada Thai Restaurant, Los Angeles CA. Photo by Ron Dollete

Although preserving meat in a smoked, salted or freeze-dried way was certainly not (only) invented in South America, ch'arki refers to a preserved meat from the highland Andes of Peru, and it is and was made primarily (but not exclusively) from llama and alpaca meat. Ch'arki's archaeological history is pretty slim, Jim (if you'll pardon the expression), so we have to rely on ethnographic reports on traditional cooking methods. That makes it a pretty interesting story...

• Read more about Ch'arki
• Read about the Schlep Effect, an interpretive methodology derived by archaeologists
• Read about Llamas and Alpacas

Mongooses in Iberia

Mongooses (Herpestes spp) are kind of like cats, in that they really never became what you could call domesticated, but they do make great pets. Like cats, they also make for an interesting story on their quasi-domestication, nonetheless.

Egyptian Mongoose - Herpestes ichneumon, 1780 drawing by Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber. Image by Nordelch

Native to Africa and Asia, the Egyptian mongoose was brought to southwestern Iberia in the 7th century AD, when the Umayyad dynasty of the Islamic civilization conquered what is today the Andalusian region of Portugal and Spain. In the process, the Umayyads and their successors unarguably established a terrifically blended culture in the form of art, music, food and architecture. According to recent research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science last month, they also brought with them their pet mongooses.

• Mongoose History
• Islamic Civilization

Ancient Roadside Inns

In one of the Time Team programs I reviewed last week, the team investigated a Roman mansio--the Empire's version of a way station or roadside hotel.

Mansio ruins in Staffordshire, UK. Alun Salt

I've always been intrigued by these kinds of archaeological sites--probably because I spent all too many years of my archaeological career staying in motels and hotels within a few miles of whatever investigation I was working on.

Ruins of an Inca Tampu at Ingapirca, Peru Julia Rubinic

For whatever reason, the Time Team videos prodded me to find out what scholars have written about way stations in the great road systems of the world: the Roman Road mansio, the Inca Trail tampu, and the Silk Road caravansary. Their similarities and differences make for fascinating investigations.

Dogubayazit Caravansary in Turkey. Charlie Phillips

Anybody else up for a road trip?

• Rest Houses and Way Stations
• Caravansary
• Roman Travel, from my esteemed colleague N.S. Gill (Ancient History at About.com)

The Dian Kingdom

The Dian Kingdom was one of several Bronze Age polities in what is today Yunnan Province, China when the Han Dynasty conquered the region in 109 BC, during their rise to power.

This bronze jar held cowrie shells, and is of a characteristic theme of the Dian culture ceramic sculpture called "tiger and bulls". Excavated from the Jinning cemetery in Yunnan province, China. Photo by Editor-at-Large

Archaeological evidence so far of the Dian Kingdom settlements shows neither palaces nor permanent buildings, but rather a collection of lake dwellings on wooden pilings, located on the shores of Lakes Dian and Fuxian. Investigations of their cemeteries, nearly 1,000 burials excavated so far, reveals a sophisticated level of craft specialization in gold, iron and bronze working, a hierarchical ranked structure and trade connections with the Vietnamese Bronze Age culture of Dongson.

• Read more about the Dian Kingdom
• Read more about Dian Kingdom Burials

The Three Sisters

The Three Sisters is (um, are?) the name of an ancient farming technique, in which beans, maize and squash were planted in the same place.

The Three Sisters, photo by Abri le Roux

The sisters work collaboratively: maize provides a stalk for beans to grow on; beans provide mineral nitrogen for nitrogen-greedy maize; beans and maize together provide shade and humidity for squash; and squash provides weed and erosion control for the other two. And that's only a taste of the benefits of the technique.

Planting beans, squash and maize together was truly a stroke of genius--not to mention a recipe for succotash--and the combination probably dates between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago.

Read More about the Three Sisters

• The Three Sisters
• Domestication History of Maize
• Domestication History of Beans
• Domestication History of Squash

Mammoth Bone Settlements

Mammoth Bone Settlements, thankfully abbreviated MBS, consist of between one to six huts built of mammoth bone coupled with hearths and storage pit features. Located in central Europe--most are in Ukraine--they primarily date to the late Upper Paleolithic. But dating them has always been a bit problematic.

Diorama display at the American Museum of Natural History, based in part on Mezhirich Mammoth Bone Settlement. Photo by Wally Gobetz

The first radiocarbon dates from the MBS in Ukraine returned dates extending well back into the Upper Paleolithic of some 20,000 years ago. More recent AMS dates suggest the majority of them date only between 14,000-15,000 years ago, what scholars are calling the Epi-Gravettian of the Late Upper Paleolithic.

But there's still one persistent outlier: Molodova, where unarguably Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals built a mammoth bone hut, and had pit features and hearths very similar to those later ones. Molodova in the Dniester valley dates some 30,000 years older than such settlements in the Dnieper valley: very strange indeed.

• More on Mammoth Bone Settlements
• Molodova I
• Mezhyrich
• Gontsy

Huaca Prieta

Over the last 20 years or so, information about the pre-ceramic cultures of South America, particularly monumental earthen mounds located near Peru's arid coasts such as Caral and Huaca Prieta, have been studied in greater detail.

Monumental Earthen Architecture at Caral. Photo by Kyle Thayer.

Although Huaca Prieta ("Dark Earth Temple") was excavated by Junius Bird in the 1940s, it is only recently that extensive excavations have been able to reveal the startling level of complexity and age of these coastal cultures. As reported in a March 2012 article in the journal Antiquity, mound building began at Huaca Prieta between 7500 and 6500 calendar years ago...

• Read more about Huaca Prieta
• Read more about Preceramic Andes

Dillehay TD, Bonavia D, Goodbred S, Pino M, Vasquez V, Rosales Tham T, Conklin W, Splitstoser J, Piperno DR, Iriarte J et al. 2012. Chronology, mound-building and environment at Huaca Prieta, coastal Peru, from 13,700 to 4000 years ago Antiquity 85(331):48-70. Also see the free-access Project Gallery at Antiquity.

Abu Hureyra

One of the most significant prepottery Neolithic sites is Abu Hureyra, located on the south side of the Euphrates River Valley of northern Syria.

Persian Goitered Gazelle - Gazella subgutturosa. photo by Alistair Rae

First excavated in the 1970s by Andrew Moore and colleagues as a salvage operation prior to the construction of the dam, which eventually flooded the area, Abu Hureyra contained a massive quantity of artifacts, including evidence on the development of agriculture, particularly the domestication process of emmer and einkorn wheat, lentils, barley, chickpeas, and field beans. Over the 5000 years of its occupation, beginning about 13,000 years ago, Abu Hureyra's residents grew wild crops and hunted Persian gazelle and eventually depended on domestic crops and domestic sheep and goats.

• Abu Hureyra
• Prepottery Neolithic
• Hunting Persian gazelle

Color Pigments

Our world is a colorful one, and by the Middle Stone Age of some 70,000 years ago, humans were already trying to incorporate colors more closely into our lives. Whether as part of our religious ceremonies, decoration on cave and house walls, used in burials, painted on ceramic pots or made into faience objects, color pigments were as important to our ancestors as they are to us today.

Photograph of a group of lions, painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, at least 27,000 years ago. Photo by HTO

The Guide to Ancient Pigments introduces you to six ancient colors studied by archaeologists and their colleagues in chemistry: Royal or Tyrian Blue, Egyptian Blue, Maya Blue, Chinese or Han Blue, Saffron, and the oldest pigment known to most cultures: Ochre or Hematite. also included is archaeological information concerning the ancient recipes for Maya blue and red ocher.

• Guide to Ancient Pigments

Making Faience

For some mysterious reason, faience--that striking turquoise colored stuff used as fake precious stones in Mesopotamia and Egypt beginning some 5500 years ago or so--has always fascinated me.

Faience tiles on Timurid dynasty (1370-1526) Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Marmontel

A new article in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science describing the cementation production technique gives me an excuse to freshen up my piece from 2007, and find this terrific photo from the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Uzbekistan.

• Read more about the latest research on faience

Matin M, and Matin M. 2012. Egyptian faience glazing by the cementation method part 1: an investigation of the glazing powder composition and glazing mechanism. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(3):763-776.

Maple Sugaring

Maple sugaring season got cut short in Wisconsin this year, due to an unseasonably warm spring, but let's face it: any time we humans can think about sweet stuff is a good time.

Child's Drawing of Sugar Maple Tree
Photo Credit: Kyle MacDonald

Chenopodium

Chenopodium is a plant with a dozen different names (lamb's quarters, goosefoot, taak, fat hen, huantzontle, quinoa among many others), and it was domesticated a half-dozen different times in various places throughout the world. Rich in nutrients and minerals, the various forms of chenopodium are considered an under-used worldwide crop that could go far in providing nutrition in many different ecological areas.

Chenopodium berlandieri Photo by Matt Lavin

An interesting debate about chenopodium is in the North American continent, where two separate species of the plant have been identified in Woodland cultures. Recent DNA studies published in December's Journal of Archaeological Science support the identification of Berlandieri ssp jonesianum as having been independently domesticated by American Archaic people in southeastern and central North America.

• Read more about chenopodium
• Guide to the American Archaic
• Guide to Plant Domestication

Whatever Happened to Amelia Earhart The Archaeological Evidence

Pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart and her co-pilot Fred Noonan disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in July of 1937, and people have been looking for her ever since. The latest evidence--the broken pieces of a jar of 1930s era freckle cream used by Earhart--was found by TIGHAR, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, who over the past two decades has discovered several tantalizing clues from archaeological research on Nikumaroro, a tiny island in Kiribati.

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. Photo in TIGHAR Collection, courtesy Purdue University Library