Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Maladict]

Possibly unlooted tomb of an Egyptian high priest found at Saqqara. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46580264

[jimmy olsen]

Very interesting.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/12/05/new-dates-change-history-of-indigenous-iroquois-first-contact-europeans/#.XBxUCKoUkc8

Europeans' First Contact With Iroquois Happened up to 100 Years Later Than Expected

By Roni Dengler | December 5, 2018 5:51 pm 

Scientists excavate the "Mantle" Native American settlement, a key archaeological site in Ontario, Canada. A new set of radio carbon dates questions the historical accounts of when Europeans made first contact with Native Americans. (Credit: Archaeological Services Inc.)

A new study shows the historical dates of key archaeological sites associated with Europeans' first contact with indigenous communities are off by nearly 100 years. The discovery "dramatically rewrites" the history of northeastern North America, researchers report today in the journal Science Advances.

"It will really change how we understand the history ... of this entire period, just before and during early contact with European civilization," Sturt Manning, a paleoclimate scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the new research, said.

Estimating Error

Archaeologists have long used the presence of European artifacts such as glass beads or certain types of metal to establish dates for Iroquois indigenous sites in upstate New York and Ontario, Canada. If a European object was a site, the imported object provided the date of the site. But, if there were no imported objects, archaeologists assumed the site must be from before Europeans arrived there.

"This seemed deeply questionable in terms of logic," Manning said. "It assumes that somehow these items are evenly traded across a vast geographic area...and that all of the relevant indigenous communities wanted to have these items."

But until now there's been little other evidence to go on. In the new study, Manning and colleagues took advantage of a radiocarbon dating technology called accelerated mass spectrometry or AMS. AMS enabled the researchers to directly date wood charcoal and other organic matter from the historic sites.

Historical Shift

The scientists first tested their dating technique at a site in southern Ontario known as Warminster. Historians are reasonably confident about the date of this site thanks to a well-known French explorer named Samuel de Champlain who visited the area in 1615. When the researchers assessed the remains of a wood post at the site, they found it dated from around 1590 to 1620, "so exactly when we thought [Champlain] could have visited," Manning said.

Then the team dated three Iroquois sites that Champlain did not visit. The three locations are in the same drainage along the Rouge River east of Toronto and have little if any European artifacts. Excavators have only found one European object and a fragment of another at the third of the three sites known as Mantle, the largest fully excavated Iroquois site yet.

When Manning and colleagues dated plant material from each of these sites, they found the radiocarbon evidence placed the sites 50 to 100 years later than previous estimates based on the absence of European goods. The Mantle site's historically accepted date is approximately 1500-1550, for example, but the site dates to between 1596 and 1618 according to the radiocarbon estimate. For context, the Jamestown settlement was founded in 1607.

The authors wrote that their finding implies that "Key processes of violent conflict, community coalescence, and the introduction of European goods all happened much later and more rapidly than previously assumed."

"There now needs to be a major effort directed towards testing and dating a whole range of indigenous sites," Manning said.

[viper37]

the magazine article makes a common mistake in transcribing the names in the study (well written).

Iroquois = Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of six nations (Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and post-European contact Tuscarora).

Iroquoians = language and cultural family of North Eastern America, including the Iroquois, Hurons, Petuns, Cherokees and some others.


The Mantle site is a Huron-Wendat archeological site as well as Warminster.  Ontario was Wendat territory.  Iroquois were closer to New England.  It's a pretty significant site for the Wendake community, near Quebec city. (and they have a lovely musuem)  

Hurons were the good guys, gentle, caring indians, allied with the French.
Iroquois were the demonic, barbaric, soulless indians allied with the English.

Or so I've been told.

[Admiral Yi]

Your part of the continent has the best-looking Indians in North America.

[jimmy olsen]

Shanidar continues to deliver!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/new-remains-discovered-site-famous-neanderthal-flower-burial

Shanidar Cave in Iraq once sheltered at least 10 Neanderthals.

New remains discovered at site of famous Neanderthal 'flower burial'
By Elizabeth CulottaJan. 22, 2019 , 3:45 PM

For tens of thousands of years, the high ceilings, flat earthen floor, and river view of Shanidar Cave have beckoned to ancient humans. The cave, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, once sheltered at least 10 Neanderthals, who were unearthed starting in the 1950s. One skeleton had so many injuries that he likely needed help to survive, and another had been dusted with pollen, suggesting someone had laid flowers at the burial. The rare discovery ushered in a new way of thinking about Neanderthals, who until then had often been considered brutes. "Although the body was archaic, the spirit was modern," excavator Ralph Solecki wrote of Neanderthals, in Science, in 1975. But some scientists doubted the pollen was part of a flower offering, and others questioned whether Neanderthals even buried their dead.

In 2014, researchers headed back to Shanidar to re-excavate, and found additional Neanderthal bones. Then, last fall, they unearthed another Neanderthal with a crushed but complete skull and upper thorax, plus both forearms and hands. From 25 to 28 January, scientists will gather at a workshop at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom to discuss what the new finds suggest about Neanderthal views of death. Science caught up with archaeologist and team co-leader Christopher Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom to learn more.

Q: Why re-excavate?

A: Shanidar has yielded very important and sometimes controversial evidence, but all of the excavation evidence is old. So a key issue is testing Solecki's hypotheses of burial and ritual activity. Our project is led by archaeologists  Graeme Barker, Tim Reynolds, and me. We have been working in the cave since 2014, reassessing the work done by Solecki, dating his layers, and doing all the modern science not available to him.

Q: Why did you want to be part of the excavation?

A: I was motivated by the work of pollen expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan, who recovered clumps of pollen close to one skeleton. She interpreted this as evidence for the placing and burial of flowers around the body. I think her evidence is plausible, but other explanations are also at least equally possible. The new find is adjacent to the "flower burial" body, so we have a unique opportunity to test her observations.

Q: What did you discover?

A: We located fragmentary human bone 2 years ago, but could not excavate—we were at the end of a season, and there were 2 meters of cave sediment containing both archaeology and huge boulders above it. So we covered it and left it. Last summer, we noticed what appeared to be a fresh disturbance nearby, so we made the decision to excavate. We had to lift out one 3-ton boulder without disturbing anything below it, plus several smaller ones. Human bone specialist Emma Pomeroy, who joined the University of Cambridge this month, was the first person to see the skull as she was troweling. She knew pretty quickly what it was. On first seeing the partly exposed skull, my immediate thought was that this was likely the crowning moment of my 40-year career.

The bones of the new skeleton fit together as they would have in life. The lower body and legs would have extended into the block of sediment containing the "flower burial," which also contained partial remains of two other adults, both female, and a fragment of a juvenile. Whether the new find relates to one of these individuals is unclear. Analysis has a long way to go, but we should be able to test the hypothesis of the "flower burial," as well as doing all the great science-based things you can do with a Neanderthal these days!


This crushed Neanderthal skull was unearthed last fall at Shanidar cave in Iraq, right next to the "flower burial" excavated in the 1950s. GRAEME BARKER
Q: How old are the new remains?

A: Solecki thought about 80,000 years, but we await dates from the [University of] Oxford [dating] laboratory. For now, the broad envelope of 60,000 to 90,000 years is about as good as gets.

Q: So, were the skeletons buried intentionally, with ritual, or not?

A: Ritual is almost impossible to prove to everyone's satisfaction. What is clear is that the cluster of bodies at the "flower burial" came to rest in a very restricted area, but not quite at the same geologic level, and therefore likely not quite at the same time. So that might point to some form of intentionality and group memory as Neanderthals returned to the same spot over generations. But I don't want to go beyond that, because most of the analyses are still to be done.

Q: What's the next step—are you trying to extract DNA from the bones?

A: Yes. We expect that modern techniques ... will allow us to understand better the evolutionary relationships, group territories, and diet of these individuals. We are seeking funding for further work, because we have a whole season's worth of analyses to do, and we are aware of further Neanderthal remains. We'd like more dates and to try to extract DNA from the sediment itself as well.

Q: Is security a concern?

A: The team was at Shanidar in 2014 when the ISIS [Islamic State group] advance got uncomfortably close, and evacuation became necessary. But the Kurdish Peshmerga have a base at Shanidar, and they and reps from the Kurdish regional government's Directorate of Antiquities have looked after us splendidly. Shanidar is an immense source of national pride for the Kurds, because the resistance against Saddam [Hussein] was partly run from there.

Digging at Shanidar is a bit like digging on the Cenotaph in London or the Arlington National Monument in the USA. Thousands of day-trippers visit on a regular basis. We see exuberant dancing, picnics, and wedding parties as well as quiet people with flowers and photos, and many school and college groups. They have been delightful, but at times we have been overwhelmed by the sheer demand to participate in selfies, and we have been concerned that curious visitors might trample on important evidence without realizing. The Antiquities Directorate has erected a stout fence, which helps.

Q: What's the day-to-day work like on-site?

A: Grueling—we have been out there digging hard in the cold during torrential spring rains and in 50⁰C summer heat. Everything has to be carried up from, and down to, base camp, on a flight of more than 240 steps. We have wet-sieved and floated almost every cubic centimeter of cave sediments. As someone who has worked on caves for 35 years, this is by far the most difficult site I have ever worked on! It has become ever clearer to us that Ralph Solecki's achievement was immense and that his—and our—work at Shanidar will offer challenges and insights for many years to come.

[The Brain]

Cool.

[Habbaku]

Your part of the continent has the best-looking Indians in North America.

Cara Gee--Drummer in The Expanse series--is Ojibwe and a real hottie.

[KRonn]

the magazine article makes a common mistake in transcribing the names in the study (well written).

Iroquois = Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of six nations (Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and post-European contact Tuscarora).

Iroquoians = language and cultural family of North Eastern America, including the Iroquois, Hurons, Petuns, Cherokees and some others.


The Mantle site is a Huron-Wendat archeological site as well as Warminster.  Ontario was Wendat territory.  Iroquois were closer to New England.  It's a pretty significant site for the Wendake community, near Quebec city. (and they have a lovely musuem)  

Hurons were the good guys, gentle, caring indians, allied with the French.
Iroquois were the demonic, barbaric, soulless indians allied with the English.

Or so I've been told.

The Iroquois controlled a large territory mainly in New York state and due to their power and influence they had influence over a larger area of other tribes. I read accounts of the Shawnee asking permission of the Iroquois before attacking another tribe, so as not to anger the Iroquois and suffer their wrath. In the early days of the New York colony there was real worry among the Europeans that the Iroquois could destroy their colony. The French and  English developed and kept on good terms with the tribes. The downfall of the Iroquois Confederation hastened when the tribes split on supporting the Brits and the Americans during the Revolution. It fractured the Confederation and angered the victorious American new nation towards the tribes that fought for the Brits, probably causing the Americans to be more hostile towards the weakened tribes.

In Massachusetts there was also a large war between Massachusetts Indians and the colonists in the late 1600s. King Pillip's War. It was one of the most ruinous wars which destroyed the Indians as a power and laid waste to the Mass Bay economy, taking a long time to recover. I've read accounts expressing the sentiment that if the Indians hadn't been so ravaged by European diseases they might have been able to defeat the Massachusetts colony.

[Malthus]

Very interesting.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/12/05/new-dates-change-history-of-indigenous-iroquois-first-contact-europeans/#.XBxUCKoUkc8

Europeans' First Contact With Iroquois Happened up to 100 Years Later Than Expected

By Roni Dengler | December 5, 2018 5:51 pm 

Scientists excavate the "Mantle" Native American settlement, a key archaeological site in Ontario, Canada. A new set of radio carbon dates questions the historical accounts of when Europeans made first contact with Native Americans. (Credit: Archaeological Services Inc.)

A new study shows the historical dates of key archaeological sites associated with Europeans' first contact with indigenous communities are off by nearly 100 years. The discovery "dramatically rewrites" the history of northeastern North America, researchers report today in the journal Science Advances.

"It will really change how we understand the history ... of this entire period, just before and during early contact with European civilization," Sturt Manning, a paleoclimate scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the new research, said.

Estimating Error

Archaeologists have long used the presence of European artifacts such as glass beads or certain types of metal to establish dates for Iroquois indigenous sites in upstate New York and Ontario, Canada. If a European object was a site, the imported object provided the date of the site. But, if there were no imported objects, archaeologists assumed the site must be from before Europeans arrived there.

"This seemed deeply questionable in terms of logic," Manning said. "It assumes that somehow these items are evenly traded across a vast geographic area...and that all of the relevant indigenous communities wanted to have these items."

But until now there's been little other evidence to go on. In the new study, Manning and colleagues took advantage of a radiocarbon dating technology called accelerated mass spectrometry or AMS. AMS enabled the researchers to directly date wood charcoal and other organic matter from the historic sites.

Historical Shift

The scientists first tested their dating technique at a site in southern Ontario known as Warminster. Historians are reasonably confident about the date of this site thanks to a well-known French explorer named Samuel de Champlain who visited the area in 1615. When the researchers assessed the remains of a wood post at the site, they found it dated from around 1590 to 1620, "so exactly when we thought [Champlain] could have visited," Manning said.

Then the team dated three Iroquois sites that Champlain did not visit. The three locations are in the same drainage along the Rouge River east of Toronto and have little if any European artifacts. Excavators have only found one European object and a fragment of another at the third of the three sites known as Mantle, the largest fully excavated Iroquois site yet.

When Manning and colleagues dated plant material from each of these sites, they found the radiocarbon evidence placed the sites 50 to 100 years later than previous estimates based on the absence of European goods. The Mantle site's historically accepted date is approximately 1500-1550, for example, but the site dates to between 1596 and 1618 according to the radiocarbon estimate. For context, the Jamestown settlement was founded in 1607.

The authors wrote that their finding implies that "Key processes of violent conflict, community coalescence, and the introduction of European goods all happened much later and more rapidly than previously assumed."

"There now needs to be a major effort directed towards testing and dating a whole range of indigenous sites," Manning said.

Huh? Mantle, famously, had a European artifact.

In 2012, archaeologists revealed that they had discovered a forged wrought iron axehead of European origin which had been carefully buried in a long-house at the centre of the village site. It is believed that the axe originated from a Basque whaling station in the Strait of Belle Isle (Newfoundland and Labrador), and was traded into the interior of the continent a century before Europeans began to explore the Great Lakes region.[4] "It is the earliest European piece of iron ever found in the North American interior."[5] 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_Site,_Wendat_(Huron)_Ancestral_Village

It may well be that radiocarbon dating puts Mantel as newer than originally thought.

[Caliga]

In Massachusetts there was also a large war between Massachusetts Indians and the colonists in the late 1600s. King Pillip's War. It was one of the most ruinous wars which destroyed the Indians as a power and laid waste to the Mass Bay economy, taking a long time to recover. I've read accounts expressing the sentiment that if the Indians hadn't been so ravaged by European diseases they might have been able to defeat the Massachusetts colony.

The town that garbon and I used to live in was attacked during King Philip's War.  In fact I think most towns in Massachusetts at that time were raided.

[derspiess]

Glad you both survived

[garbon]

Glad you both survived

Thank you kindly, sir.

[jimmy olsen]

Neat

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/neanderthal-spears-threw-pretty-well/581218/

When Modern Men Throw Ancient Weapons

Scientists have shown that Neanderthals' spears weren't half bad, in capable hands.

ED YONG
JAN 25, 2019

On a very cold January morning, in an athletic field in central England, Annemieke Milks watched as six javelin-throwers hurled a pair of wooden spears. Their target was a hay bale, "meant to approximate the kill zone of a large animal, like a horse," says Milks, an archaeologist at University College London. And their spears were replicas of the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found—a set of 300,000-year-old, six-and-a-half-foot sticks found in a mine at Schöningen, Germany.

The athletes managed to throw their replicas over distances of 65 feet. That's a far cry from modern javelin feats—the world record for men, set in 1996, is 323.1 feet. But it's twice what many scientists thought that primitive spears were capable of. It suggests that, contrary to popular belief, early spear-makers—Neanderthals, or perhaps other ancient species like Homo heidelbergensis—could probably have hunted their prey from afar. 

"This experiment convincingly shows that in the hands of skilled users, spears are capable of killing at greater distances than previously thought," says Jayne Wilkins, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town. "This matters because it challenges a long-held idea" about the evolution of human weaponry. 

It's abundantly clear that Neanderthals and other early hominins were capable hunters who made and used spears. But many researchers have argued that such weapons were too heavy and clunky to be thrown quickly or accurately, and could only be thrust into prey from close range. "The general consensus has been that they were limited to ranges of 10 meters," or about 32 feet, Milks says.

According to this view, long-distance kills became possible only when modern humans invented specialized tools like spear-throwers, atlatls, or bows. Those superior weapons gave their bearers—our ancestors—an advantage over other hominin species, allowing them to safely bring down dangerous game that Neanderthals were forced to engage at close quarters. Perhaps that partly explains why the latter went extinct, while modern humans thrived.

But to Milks, this narrative always had a glaring problem. "We don't have good data on how hand-delivered spears performed, so we can't make a valid comparison," she says. "The 10-meter distance was repeated over and over again, but not backed up with much evidence." It came from an influential ethnographic review that considered the spear-throwing skills of many modern populations, but didn't include adept groups such as the Tasmanian and Tiwi peoples of Australia. And it was bolstered by studies and anecdotal reports in which spears were thrown by anthropologists—hardly a decent stand-in for a skilled Neanderthal hunter.

For example, John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University, told me that he regularly takes his students into an athletic field and asks them to throw replica Schöningen spears at him. "If they hit me, I pledge to give them $20," he said. "I've been doing this 'experiment' for 25 years, and I've neither got so much as a scratch on me nor parted with any cash. The spears come sailing in so low and slow I can usually just step sideways out of the way, bat them away with a stick, or if I am feeling really cocky, catch them in midair."

A German sport scientist and javelin-thrower named Hermann Rieder had more success: In a small study, he managed to hit targets from around 16 feet away and suggested that the spears were useful weapons at longer distances. (A Wikipedia entry that cites his study and claims that "athletes could throw replicas up to 70 meters" is almost certainly wrong.)

To get more thorough data, Milks asked Owen O'Donnell, an expert in reconstructing ancient technology, to create the best possible replicas. He made two from spruce—the same wood as in the Schöningen spears. He built them to the same weight—1.67 and 1.76 pounds, respectively. And he finished them with stone tools to give them an authentic texture.

"I've been asked a lot if I threw in my own experiments," Milks says. "But that wouldn't tell us anything, other than that I'm a bad thrower." Instead, she gave the spears to six trained javelin-throwers, whom she filmed with high-speed cameras. The participants hurled the spears both far and fast. It's sometimes said that heavy spears would slow mid-flight and hit their targets with dull thuds. But Milks found that the replicas slowed very little, and landed with a kinetic wallop comparable to projectiles launched by bows or spear-throwing tools.

But Steve Churchill, an anthropologist from Duke University, notes that the javelin-throwers only hit their target a quarter of the time, and less so at the farthest distances. He's also unclear as to how many of those "hits" would have been strong enough to, say, penetrate an animal's hide. In his own experience (and he freely admits that he's not a trained thrower), Schöningen replicas wobble a lot and tend to strike targets at glancing angles. They might fly far, in other words, but do they fly true? "This is a very good study," he says, but "I don't see a lot here to convince me that the Schöningen spears were effective long-range weapons."

Milks counters that professional javelin-throwers go for distance, and aren't trained to hit targets. Despite that, some of them clearly got the sense that the heavy spears behave unusually, vibrating along their axis and flexing on impact. The more experienced athletes compensated for this by putting spin on the spears. "That brought home how important it is to use skilled throwers," Milks says. "What I really want to do now is to go to hunter-forager groups and have them show us what these spears are capable of. They use spears from age 6, which is something I can't replicate with javelin athletes."

"There's also a hypothesis that these spears required a lot of training, and a big robust body to use them properly," she adds. Spear-throwers and bows may have given their users an edge not because they launched projectiles farther or faster, but because they could be picked up more easily, by more members of a group. As technology, they weren't inherently superior, just more user-friendly. "That's an idea that's worth going forward with," Milks says. 

This isn't to say that Neanderthals would have always thrown their spears. Last year, the archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser analyzed Neanderthal-inflicted wounds on the fossil remains of two deer; after a whirlwind forensic analysis, she concluded that the animals were killed by spears thrust from below, not thrown from above. Neanderthals, she told me, hunted cattle in their prime, hibernating cave bears, and entire herds of horses or reindeer. "That these very different prey species, living in very different environments, necessitated very high flexibility in hunting tactics is a given," she said.

Indeed, the Schöningen finds attest to that flexibility. Some spears could have been thrown, but others had kinks in them and were tapered only at one end. "That wasn't a throwing spear," Milks says. "It looks like [Neanderthals] had a collection of different technology at that site."

The weapons are only half the story, too. There's also the matter of their wielders, and some researchers have argued that Neanderthals were anatomically incapable of a strong throw. Milks believes that the "evidence for that is quite weak," although she admits that her study of human javelin-throwers says nothing about the throwing arm of Neanderthals.



Despite that, experiments like hers are very welcome, says Katerina Harvati of the University of Tubingen. "It is really essential to understanding the behavior of Neanderthals and other Pleistocene ancestors, and to accurately interpreting archaeological findings such as the extremely rare spears from Schöningen. This study goes a long way to clarifying how those spears may have been used."

Last year, Harvati and her colleagues busted another common misperception about Neanderthals: that they were especially prone to traumatic head injuries, perhaps because of their proclivity for close-range hunts. In fact, they were no more likely to get bonked on the head than contemporaneous humans. "Studies like these," Jayne Wilkins says, "add to a mounting body of evidence against the old-fashioned idea that Neanderthals had only subhuman capacities, employed ineffective technologies, and were continuously struggling for survival."

[KRonn]

In Massachusetts there was also a large war between Massachusetts Indians and the colonists in the late 1600s. King Pillip's War. It was one of the most ruinous wars which destroyed the Indians as a power and laid waste to the Mass Bay economy, taking a long time to recover. I've read accounts expressing the sentiment that if the Indians hadn't been so ravaged by European diseases they might have been able to defeat the Massachusetts colony.

The town that garbon and I used to live in was attacked during King Philip's War.  In fact I think most towns in Massachusetts at that time were raided.

I wouldn't be surprised, because as I said, the war was ruinous for both sides. Check it out sometime in wiki or other stte. A while ago similar discussion came up here and I posted info on the war.

[KRonn]

The war was called King Philip's war. Interestingly, in a town a few towns away from mine, there's a high school named King Phillip Regional High School, serving three surrounding towns.