Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[The Brain]

Cool stuff.

[mongers]

Something for Malthus:

Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

2 February 2018

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Mayan ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.

Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications.

The landscape, near already-known Mayan cities, is thought to have been home to millions more Mayans than other research had previously suggested.

The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten.

Results from the research using "revolutionary" Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China, National Geographic reports.

"The Lidar images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist, told the magazine.
...

Full item here with pictures:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

Bye the way, I couldn't find his archeo thread or the one about his travels in South or Central America, probably a better place to post this in.

[KRonn]

Results from the research using Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China.

"Everything is turned on its head," Ithaca College archaeologist Thomas Garrison told the BBC.

He believes the scale and population density has been "grossly underestimated and could in fact be three or four times greater than previously thought". 
...................

Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million.

"With this new data it's no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there," said Mr Estrada-Belli, "including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable."

Most of the 60,000 newly identified structures are thought to be stone platforms that would have supported the average pole-and-thatch Maya home.


The Lidar imagery shows impressive findings! They can actually look down under the ground/jungle to see size and number of structures. That is amazing. It's also impressive how large and populous the Mayan civilization was. Good link, thanks!

[Valmy]

That is very cool. But why would that turn everything on its head?

[mongers]

Yes, Kronn and Valmy, Lidar is rather cool.

I first saw it a few years back when an environment agency engineer showed me some maps of the river valley here, the resolution was 10 cm, which made it quite nifty.

[Malthus]

Something for Malthus:

Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

2 February 2018

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Mayan ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.

Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications.

The landscape, near already-known Mayan cities, is thought to have been home to millions more Mayans than other research had previously suggested.

The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten.

Results from the research using "revolutionary" Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China, National Geographic reports.

"The Lidar images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist, told the magazine.
...

Full item here with pictures:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

Bye the way, I couldn't find his archeo thread or the one about his travels in South or Central America, probably a better place to post this in.

Neat stuff!

Here's my Mexico thread: http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,12650.0.html

Damn Photobucket. 

As for the article - it isn't as much of a revelation as claimed - archaeologists have known for a long time that the Maya lands were densely populated (and indeed, overpopulation and environmental degradation often figure prominently in reasons why their civilization declined).

Knowing a thing and seeing the evidence with Lidar are, of course, two different things though - so more a case of confirming with good evidence what was already more or less known, than a new revelation.

[The Brain]

America is densely populated.

[jimmy olsen]

I wonder what it tasted like.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/hunting-for-the-ancient-lost-farms-of-north-america/

Hunting for the ancient lost farms of North America
2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they're wild weeds. What happened?
ANNALEE NEWITZ - 1/26/2018, 9:00 PM

Adventurers and archaeologists have spent centuries searching for lost cities in the Americas. But over the past decade, they've started finding something else: lost farms.

Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven't simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.

By studying lost crops, archaeologists learn about everyday life in the ancient Woodland culture of the Americas, including how people ate plants that we call weeds today. But these plants also give us a window on social networks. Scientists can track the spread of cultivated seeds from one tiny settlement to the next in the vast region that would one day be known as the United States. This reveals which groups were connected culturally and how they formed alliances through food and farming.

Natalie Mueller is an archaeobotanist at Cornell University who has spent years hunting for erect knotweed across the southern US and up into Ohio and Illinois. She calls her quest the "Survey for Lost Crops," and admits cheerfully that its members consist of her and "whoever I can drag along." She's published papers about her work in Nature, but also she spins yarns about her hot, bug-infested summer expeditions for lost farms on her blog. There, photographs of the rare wild plants are interspersed with humorous musings on contemporary local food delicacies like pickle pops.

Native to the Americas, erect knotweed grows in the moist flood zones near rivers. It's a stalky plant with spoon-shaped leaves, and it produces achenes, or fruit with very hard shells to protect its rich, starchy seeds. Though rare today, the plant was common enough 2,000 years ago that indigenous Americans collected it from the shores of rivers and brought it with them to the uplands for cultivation. Archaeologists have found caches of knotweed seeds buried in caves, clearly stored for a later use that never came. And, in the remains of ancient fires, they've found burned erect knotweed fruits, popped like corn.

Mueller told Ars Technica that erect knotweed was likely domesticated on tiny farms on the western front of the Appalachians. There are clear differences between it and its feral cousins. After years of comparing the ancient seeds with wild types, Mueller has found two unmistakable signs of domestication: larger fruits and thinner fruit skins. We see a similar pattern in other domesticated plants like corn, whose wild version with tiny seeds is almost unrecognizable to people chomping on the juicy, large kernels of the domesticated plant.

Obviously, bigger seeds would make the erect knotweed a better food source, so farmers selected for that. And the thinner skin means the plants can germinate more quickly. Their wild cousins evolved to produce fruits tough enough to endure river floods and inhospitable conditions for over a year before sprouting. But farm life is cushy for plants, so these defenses weren't necessary for their survival under human care.

Still, even the domesticated fruits of the erect knotweed have skins so tough that Mueller has not been able to crack them using the stone tools typical of the Woodland era. Working with a team at Cornell, she's been trying to reverse engineer how they could have been eaten.

"The fruit coat is really hard, and it would have been necessary to break through it," she mused. "It's like buckwheat—the sprouts are nutritious. So maybe they ate the sprouted version."

As for whether early Americans ate popped knotweed like popcorn, she was less certain. "The only way to preserve it is to burn it, so [the remains we find] could have been accidents while cooking. It might have been for drying." But yes, people from long ago might have munched on popweed.

Another possibility is that the seeds were soaked in lime before being turned into a hominy-style porridge. Ancient Americans used lime—the chemical, not the fruit—to soften the hulls of maize before cooking it, in a technique called nixtamalization. It's very likely the Woodland peoples used this prehistoric form of culinary science on other plants, too. So people 2,000 years ago may have been eating a rich, knotweed mush.

Mueller is currently cultivating her own erect knotweed to test various forms of preparation, but she's not quite ready to go into the kitchen yet. "I'm trying to be a good farmer and put my seeds back first," she said. "In five years of looking, I've only found seven populations of this plant. I want to conserve the seeds as much I can." She's going to accumulate a sizable cache of seeds before wasting them on dinner.

A history of civilization in food
Because ancient people in North America built mostly with perishable materials, traces of their farms are all we have left of their civilizations. With a few exceptions, they didn't leave monumental pyramids behind or sprawling plazas. But their ability to domesticate plants is as much a testimony to their cultural sophistication as any stone temple.

In a recent paper for the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Mueller describes finding the earliest known example of domesticated erect knotweed at a site called Walker-Noe in central Kentucky. She found it mostly by accident. She had assumed, based on previous studies, that knotweed was domesticated in Illinois, possibly about 1,200 years ago. But then she spoke with a Kentucky museum curator who told her about a mysterious grave from the 2,000-year-old Hopewell culture, found stuffed with seeds.

Examining the seeds, Mueller identified them as domesticated erect knotweed. This find makes the plant's domestication roughly a millennium older than previously thought. But given that these fruits probably came after generations of breeding by farmers, it hints at a much older date.

Mueller believes that the Hopewell shared their seeds throughout many communities where people tended farms along the skein of rivers that connect the American South with the Midwest. But it also seems likely that the erect knotweed was domesticated at least twice: once in the Kentucky region where she found her sample, and once about a thousand years later in Illinois when the great pyramid city of Cahokia stood at the center of the Mississippian culture.

Many of these early farmers appear to have counted crops among their greatest creations. Crops were valued trade goods and shared with allies in the same way jewelry, projectile points, and fine pottery were. And, of course, they were placed in graves alongside other precious funeral goods. Farming was a science and key to survival, but it was also an art. Food and feasting were central to indigenous cultures in the Americas, just as they were to civilizations in Europe and Asia. Serving guests a delightful meal with many kinds of grains, breads, and oils would have been a source of pride and pleasure.

Losing a crop

Perhaps the strangest part of this story is the fact that people simply stopped cultivating so many crops that were central to their diets. Imagine what would happen if we decided to abandon wheat to the wilderness. Suddenly, there would be no more baguettes and pastas—not to mention cakes. Sure, we could make delicious breads from corn and tasty noodles from rice or beans. But for many of us, it would feel like an incredible loss of a comforting staple. No doubt, that's how the loss of knotweed felt to aboriginal Americans, too.

It's likely that the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC)—a catch-all term for the lost crops of North America—faded away slowly. Though we can't be sure what triggered its decline, Mueller thinks it may have suffered its first blow from one of the most popular crops in the Americas: maize, which came north from Mexico about a millennium ago.

"Maize is an amazing crop," Mueller said. "All over the world, when it arrives, people give up their old crops and start growing it. It's productive and has lots of sugar so it gives you quick energy." By the time Cahokia was at its height in the 1000s, maize was already edging out crops like erect knotweed.

But the death knell for erect knotweed probably came from Europe. Archaeologists find no more examples of domesticated erect knotweed after colonists began to settle the Americas in the 1400s, destroying local civilizations as they went. "There was so much displacement, disease, and warfare over the next couple hundred years that a lot of knowledge was lost," Mueller explained.

Still, a lot can be learned from America's lost crops, and it's not just about finding the next quinoa for health-food nerds. Mueller has been working with Smithsonian Institute anthropologist Logan Kistler to sequence the genomes of lost domesticates. He's fascinated by how many of these crops went through an entire cycle of domestication and re-wilding in the past few thousand years. Most plants that we eat, from wheat and barley to dates and beans, were domesticated more than 10,000 years ago and never went back. The EAC offers an unprecedented glimpse at what happens to plants when we turn them into food crops. And these domestication events are recent enough that we can get good genomic material from samples.

We have a fairly good sense of how domestication affects animal species over time. Domesticated pigs, horses, dogs, and even humans have all undergone physical changes, often described as "paedomorphosis," which means retaining infantile body features (softer faces, smaller bodies) throughout life. But we're just starting to understand plant domestication. "These crops have a good archaeological record that's well preserved," Kistler said. "It gives us a chance to study domestication in real time, with a good record of what comes in between wild and domestic varieties."

The EAC is also exciting for Kistler because it represents a diverse group of plants. Until recently, archaeo-botanists looked mostly at domestic plants emerging in the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic—but these are just grasses and legumes. In the Americas, Kistler explained, "We've got five good domesticated species. They're taxonomically extremely diverse and yet grown in same fields and harvested at the same time. It builds in a little bit of control for looking at multiple species."

Once he's been able to sequence these crops, we may begin to see common domestication patterns across plant species. Likely they'll be things like fast germination and larger fruit size, but we may find some surprises, too.

For Mueller, the search for erect knotweed isn't just about understanding the mechanisms of domestication. It's also about coming to terms with everything we've lost.

"I want to identify as many populations of these species as possible before they go extinct, because they are all threatened," she said. She's learned about how ancient Americans encountered these plants and how they incorporated them into their lives. But she's also learned about how much the American landscape is still changing.

"I was out from October to November, driving around looking for populations of these plants. Partly it's based on records from botanists going back at least 100 years." Sometimes plants are still growing where they were a century ago, she said, but sometimes they aren't.

"You realize how much the land has changed even in 100 years," Mueller reflected. "There are so few places for native species to grow."

[mongers]

Something for Malthus:

Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

2 February 2018

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Mayan ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.

Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications.

The landscape, near already-known Mayan cities, is thought to have been home to millions more Mayans than other research had previously suggested.

The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten.

Results from the research using "revolutionary" Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China, National Geographic reports.

"The Lidar images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist, told the magazine.
...

Full item here with pictures:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

Bye the way, I couldn't find his archeo thread or the one about his travels in South or Central America, probably a better place to post this in.

Neat stuff!

Here's my Mexico thread: http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,12650.0.html

Damn Photobucket. 

As for the article - it isn't as much of a revelation as claimed - archaeologists have known for a long time that the Maya lands were densely populated (and indeed, overpopulation and environmental degradation often figure prominently in reasons why their civilization declined).

Knowing a thing and seeing the evidence with Lidar are, of course, two different things though - so more a case of confirming with good evidence what was already more or less known, than a new revelation.

Thanks for that Malthus.

For what it's worth there's a UK documentary based on this lidar research airing tonight in the UK - CH4 8:00pm - 'Lost Cities of the Maya: Revealed'

The channel does have a streaming website, but not sure of the setup/login etc. Besides the sort of thing likely to turn up on youtube in a short while.

[jimmy olsen]

Awesome!

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6378/852.full

Europe's first artists were Neandertals

Tim Appenzeller

+ See all authors and affiliations

Science  23 Feb 2018:
Vol. 359, Issue 6378, pp. 852-853
DOI: 10.1126/science.359.6378.852

For once, the fractious scientists who study the Neandertals agree about something: that a study on p. 912 has dropped a bombshell on their field, by presenting the most persuasive case yet that our vanished cousins had the cognitive capacity to create art. Once seen as brute cavemen, Neandertals have gained stature as examples of sophisticated technology and behavior have turned up in their former territory across Europe. But few researchers imagined them engaging in one of the most haunting practices in human prehistory: creating paintings—vehicles for symbolic expression—in the darkness of caves.

Now, archaeologists may have to accept that Neandertals were the original cave artists. A team of dating experts and archaeologists reports that simple creations—the outline of a hand, an array of lines, and a painted cave formation—from three caves in Spain all date to more than 64,800 years ago, at least 20,000 years before modern humans reached Europe. Shells from a fourth Spanish cave, pigment-stained and pierced as if for use as body ornaments, are even older, a team including several of the same researchers reports in a second paper, in Science Advances. Some researchers had already attributed the shells to Neandertals, but the new dates leave little doubt.

The shells amount to only a handful and might have been perforated naturally, causing some researchers to question their significance. Not so the paintings. "Most of my colleagues are going to be stunned," says Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in either study. "People saw cave painting as a major gap between Neandertals and modern humans. This discovery reduces the distance."

Just how much is the question. João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona in Spain, an author of both papers, has spent years pressing the case that Neandertals were the mental equals of modern humans, and he sees the newly dated paintings and shells as full vindication. "I'd like to see the expression on some faces as they read the papers," he says. Hublin, who accepts that Neandertals were cognitively sophisticated but believes their cultural achievements fell short of modern humans', is impatient with what he sees as Zilhão's absolutism. "What is the goal—to say that Neandertals were just like modern humans? That is a very far stretch."

And some researchers, trying to absorb findings that fly in the face of their longtime view of Neandertals, aren't sure what to think. "I find [it] incredibly challenging," says Shannon McPherron of MPI, whose own work has cast doubt on claims that Neandertals buried their dead or made systematic use of fire. The new dates, he says, have "shattered my model of Neandertal behavior."

With rare exceptions, cave art could not be directly dated until recently, making it hard to challenge the assumption that the artists were modern humans. For one thing, most cave paintings lack organic residues that can be dated by the radioactive decay of carbon isotopes. But in the early 2000s, scientists devised an alternative dating strategy based on the thin layer of calcite that can form when groundwater seeps down a cave wall and across a painting. The water contains a smattering of uranium atoms that decay into a distinctive isotope of thorium, which accumulates in the calcite over millennia. Grind a few flecks of calcite off a cave painting, measure the ratio of uranium and thorium isotopes, and you can read out the age of the calcite. The underlying painting must be at least that old—and could be much older.

It's not easy, says MPI's Dirk Hoffmann, who was among the first to apply uranium-thorium dating to cave paintings and is the first author of both papers. "The challenge is to find these calcites. You need a wall where you occasionally have a little water coming in that deposits calcite without damaging the painting." Then comes the "nerve-wracking" task of scraping off the calcite without marring the pigment, and the painstaking analysis of a sample of few milligrams. Hoffmann and his colleagues applied the technique to cave art across Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. Most of the dates fell within the European reign of modern humans, which began 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. But in the three cases described in Science, the paintings are far too old to have been made by them.

"To me the biggest question is how good is the dating," says Harold Dibble of the University of Pennsylvania, who has long challenged claims of sophisticated Neandertal behavior. But others see little reason for doubt. Multiple samples from each painting yielded consistent results, and in several cases Hoffmann and his colleagues analyzed scrapings from increasing depths in the calcite layer. The dates grew older as they approached the pigment, adding credibility. "I am confident that the [uranium-thorium] dates are correct," says Rainer Grün, an expert in the technique at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who did not take part in the work.

Zilhão predicts that other cave paintings will prove equally ancient, if not more so. "This is just scratching the surface of an entirely new world." He cites two other finds as evidence of a long Neandertal tradition of art and ritual. One is a pair of corral-shaped structures, the larger one more than 6 meters across, assembled from broken stalagmites and scorched by fire, found by cavers more than 300 meters deep in Bruniquel Cave in France. In 2016, a French-led team reported in Nature that the structures were built some 175,000 years ago—presumably by Neandertals, perhaps for ritual purposes. And then there are the colored shells from Cueva de los Aviones, a sea cave in southern Spain, where Hoffmann's uranium-thorium dating of a calcite crust covering the objects has just yielded an age of more than 115,000 years.

But was this Neandertal artistic creativity equivalent to the art and symbolism practiced by modern humans? At sites across Africa, our direct ancestors were making shell beads and etching abstract designs into egg shells and minerals 80,000 years ago and more. Neandertal achievements were fully comparable, Zilhão insists, and to suggest otherwise implies a double standard.

Hublin disagrees. The startling new dates for the paintings "show that Neandertals had the same potential as modern humans in a number of domains," he acknowledges. But he and others see differences in cognition and culture that even the new research does not erase. And Hublin notes that soon after their arrival in Europe, "modern humans replaced [Neandertals], and there are reasons."

Like the gap between these two kinds of humans, the rift among Neandertal experts has narrowed. But it has not yet closed.

[Valmy]

Didn't we already know that?

[jimmy olsen]

Didn't we already know that?

Lots of new evidence for abstract thinking for Neanderthals has come to light in the last decade and a half, but I don't think cave paintings as been one of them.

[KRonn]

Now, archaeologists may have to accept that Neandertals were the original cave artists. A team of dating experts and archaeologists reports that simple creations—the outline of a hand, an array of lines, and a painted cave formation—from three caves in Spain all date to more than 64,800 years ago, at least 20,000 years before modern humans reached Europe. Shells from a fourth Spanish cave, pigment-stained and pierced as if for use as body ornaments, are even older, a team including several of the same researchers reports in a second paper, in Science Advances. Some researchers had already attributed the shells to Neandertals, but the new dates leave little doubt.

Interesting find. What really intrigues me is why and how the Neanderthals went extinct.

[mongers]

Didn't we already know that?

Lots of new evidence for abstract thinking for Neanderthals has come to light in the last decade and a half, but I don't think cave paintings as been one of them.

I wonder if this forum will be quoted in a similar vane in the far distant future? 

[Malthus]

Didn't we already know that?

Lots of new evidence for abstract thinking for Neanderthals has come to light in the last decade and a half, but I don't think cave paintings as been one of them.

I wonder if this forum will be quoted in a similar vane in the far distant future? 

We are changeable, like a weather vane.

However, are not so vain as to assume greatness, like long-lasting memorable impact, runs in our veins.