Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Malthus]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

It's the running joke among archaeologists, labeling anything not instantly recognizable as religious/ceremonial.

My favorite example: this Roman artifact was clearly used for something, or symbolized something, but no one knows what! Perhaps they are "ceremonial objects" (or perhaps they were used for knitting gloves).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron

(My theory: as a former AD&D player ... these were clearly used to play the Gallo-Roman version of AD&D. 😄)

[Maladict]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

It's the running joke among archaeologists, labeling anything not instantly recognizable as religious/ceremonial.

My favorite example: this Roman artifact was clearly used for something, or symbolized something, but no one knows what! Perhaps they are "ceremonial objects" (or perhaps they were used for knitting gloves).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron

(My theory: as a former AD&D player ... these were clearly used to play the Gallo-Roman version of AD&D. 😄)

Yeah, good one. I wonder if the ancients had fads in the form of useless objects, like we do.

[jimmy olsen]

Sweet

Tripod base of a table with lion heads and paws. Medium: Marble. 1st half of 1st cent. BC, Pompeii, I.6.11.

https://twitter.com/archaeologyart/status/1372684289926692867

[viper37]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

It's the running joke among archaeologists, labeling anything not instantly recognizable as religious/ceremonial.

My favorite example: this Roman artifact was clearly used for something, or symbolized something, but no one knows what! Perhaps they are "ceremonial objects" (or perhaps they were used for knitting gloves).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron

(My theory: as a former AD&D player ... these were clearly used to play the Gallo-Roman version of AD&D. 😄)

One day, an archeologist from the future will find discolored rubik cubes and they will all wonder what was that

[Malthus]

Reminds me of the "Motel of the Mysteries". That's a book about future archeologists uncovering a perfectly preserved motel room from the 20th century, and making plausible sounding but totally wrong interpretations of everything they find inside. 😉

It's the running joke among archaeologists, labeling anything not instantly recognizable as religious/ceremonial.

My favorite example: this Roman artifact was clearly used for something, or symbolized something, but no one knows what! Perhaps they are "ceremonial objects" (or perhaps they were used for knitting gloves).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron

(My theory: as a former AD&D player ... these were clearly used to play the Gallo-Roman version of AD&D. 😄)

One day, an archeologist from the future will find discolored rubik cubes and they will all wonder what was that

"It had ceremonial use". 

The analysis that is never wrong ...

[viper37]

Did Prehistoric women hunt?

This idea goes against a hypothesis, dating back to the 1960s, known as the "Man-The-Hunter model."

For a long time, it was assumed that hunting in prehistoric societies was primarily carried out by men. Now a new study adds to a body of evidence challenging this idea. The research reports the discovery of a female body, buried alongside hunting tools, in the Americas some 9,000 years ago.

The woman, discovered in the Andean highlands, was dubbed Wilamaya Patjxa individual 6, or "WPI6". She was found with her legs in a semi-flexed position, with the collection of stone tools placed carefully next to them. These included projectile points – tools that were likely used to tip lightweight spears thrown with an atlatl(also called a spear thrower). The authors argue that such projectile points were used for hunting large animals.

WPI6 was between 17 and 19 years old at time of death. It was an analysis of substances known as "peptides" in her teeth – which are markers for biological sex - that showed that she was female. There were also large mammal bones in the burial fill, demonstrating the significance of hunting in her society.

Excavations at Wilamaya Patjxa. Randall Haas

The authors of the study, published in Science Advances, also reviewed evidence of other skeletons buried around the same period in the Americas, looking specifically at graves containing similar tools associated with big-game hunting. They found that of the 27 skeletons for which sex could be determined, 41% were likely female.

The authors propose that this may mean that big-game hunting was indeed carried out by both men and women in hunter-gatherer groups at that time in the Americas.
Competing hypotheses

This idea goes against a hypothesis, dating back to the 1960s, known as the "Man-The-Hunter model", which is increasingly being debunked. It suggests that hunting, and especially big game hunting, was primarily, if not exclusively, undertaken by male members of past hunter-gatherer societies.

The hypothesis is based on a few different lines of evidence. Probably most significantly, it considers recent and present-day hunter-gatherer societies to try to understand how those in the deeper past may have been organised.

The stereotypical view of hunter-gatherer groups is that they involve a gendered division of labour, with men hunting and women being more likely to stay nearer home with young children, or fish and forage, though even then there is some variation. For example, among Agta foragers in the Philippines women are primary hunters rather than assistants.

Some present day hunter-gatherers still use atlatls today, and some people also enjoy using atlatls in competitive throwing events, with women and children regularly taking part. Archaeologists studying data from these events suggest that atlatls may well have been equalisers – facilitating hunting by both women and men, possibly because they reduce the importance of body size and strength.

The new study further debunks the hypothesis, adding to a few previous archaeological findings. For example, at the 34,000-year-old site of Sunghir in Russia, archaeologists discovered the burial of two youngsters – one of whom was likely a girl of around nine to 11 years old. Both individuals had physical abnormalities, and were buried with 16 mammoth ivory spears – an incredible offering of what were probably valuable hunting tools.

The Andes Mountains. Picture of the Andes Mountains.

In 2017, a famous burial of a Viking warrior from Sweden, discovered early in the 20th century and long assumed to be male, was discovered to be biologically female. This finding caused a significant and somewhat surprising amount of debate, and points to how our own modern ideas of gender roles can affect interpretations of more recent history too.

It has been argued that distinguishing between "boys jobs and girls jobs", as one former British prime minister put it, could have evolutionary advantages. For example, it can allow pregnant and lactating mothers to stay near to a home base, keeping themselves and youngsters protected from harm. But we are increasingly learning that this model is far too simplistic.

With hunting being a keystone to survival for many highly mobile hunter-gatherer groups, community-wide participation also makes good evolutionary sense. The past, as some say, is a foreign country, and the more evidence we have, the more variable human behaviour looks to have been.

[PDH]

Anthropologists have known women hunted for a long time.  Beyond the societies today where women are the primary hunters with as in the Philippines, net hunting and hunting of small burrowing critters are often hunted by majority women or mixed groups.  Most of the protein eaten came from women hunting. 

The prestige hunting among groups like the San are men, but that is not the majority of protein taken in.  The concept of "Man the Hunter" has been debunked for decades among Anthropologists - hunting does not explain why more complex social groups went from sexually selected roles to sexual hierarchies.

[viper37]

Anthropologists have known women hunted for a long time.  Beyond the societies today where women are the primary hunters with as in the Philippines, net hunting and hunting of small burrowing critters are often hunted by majority women or mixed groups.  Most of the protein eaten came from women hunting. 

The prestige hunting among groups like the San are men, but that is not the majority of protein taken in.  The concept of "Man the Hunter" has been debunked for decades among Anthropologists - hunting does not explain why more complex social groups went from sexually selected roles to sexual hierarchies.

I did not know that.  I knew women were fishing, and sometimes hunting small game, but I always figured that hunting the big mammals, like mammoths, rhinos, elephants, etc, was reserved for the males of the tribes.

Although, when I stop to think about it, it kinda makes sense that in smaller societies younger women would participate equally in the hunt, sort of an all hands on deck situation that involves the entire village.  Hunter-gatherer societies can't have been thousands of people living in the same area.  Do we have an idea of the average size of a particular village?  A few hundred people? Less?

[PDH]

Most hunting is communal in the small-scale groups studied historically.  Net hunting is especially popular, as they can be woven by the whole group and it takes the entire group of about 30 people to successfully bring in game in large numbers.  Some groups, like the above mentioned Philippines group, the women hunt larger game by themselves (and often some men oversee the children).

The important bit to remember of foraging groups is that they don't have rank like we know of it, but rather a situational leadership in which the best at somethings directs (but mostly doesn't order) the others on how to do things.  Rank and privilege seem to arise when societies grow to large numbers and require organization and direction.  Most societies seem to fission after about 30-40 people until some sort of other pressure forced more people to live together.  As long as there was room and food, humans seem to have spent most of our existence in very small scale groups.

Large animal hunting is spectacular and could lead to feasts, but in reality a group of 30 doesn't need an elephant, a bunch of small gazelle or even hedgehogs do better.

[viper37]

well sure, at 30, and elephant/mammoth might be too much for one feast, but I guess they did bury some of the meat for winter, in some places.  Still, I imagined numbers closer to 100 than a few dozens individuals.  Interesting, thanks!

[viper37]

Not strictly archeology, but an historian posits that the Black Plague could have spread through the world a century earlier than commonly thought, from studying ancient documents.

In times of pandemic, what better than reading about other plagues, he?

Did Black Death rampage across the world more than a century than previously thought?

Scholar Monica Green combined the science of genetics with the study of old texts to reach a new hypothesis about the plague

For over 20 years, I've been telling the same story to students whenever I teach European history. At some point in the 14th century, the bacterium Yersinia pestis somehow moved out of the rodent population in western China and became wildly infectious and lethal to humans. This bacterium caused the Black Death, a plague pandemic that moved from Asia to Europe in just a few decades, wiping out one-third to one-half of all human life wherever it touched. Although the plague pandemic definitely happened, the story I've been teaching about when, where, and the history of the bacterium has apparently been incomplete, at best.

In December, the historian Monica Green published a landmark article, The Four Black Deaths, in the American Historical Review, that rewrites our narrative of this brutal and transformative pandemic. In it, she identifies a "big bang" that created four distinct genetic lineages that spread separately throughout the world and finds concrete evidence that the plague was already spreading from China to central Asia in the 1200s. This discovery pushes the origins of the Black Death back by over a hundred years, meaning that the first wave of the plague was not a decades-long explosion of horror, but a disease that crept across the continents for over a hundred years until it reached a crisis point.

As the world reels beneath the strains of its own global pandemic, the importance of understanding how humans interact with nature both today and throughout the relatively short history of our species becomes more critical. Green tells me that diseases like the plague and arguably SARS-CoV-2 (before it transferred into humans in late 2019 causing Covid-19) are not human diseases, because the organism doesn't rely on human hosts for reproduction (unlike human-adapted malaria or tuberculosis). They are zoonotic, or animal diseases, but humans are still the carriers and transporters of the bacteria from one site to the other, turning an endemic animal disease into a deadly human one.

The Black Death, as Monica Green tells me, is "one of the few things that people learn about the European Middle Ages." For scholars, the fast 14th-century story contained what Green calls a "black hole." When she began her career in the 1980s, we didn't really know "when it happened, how it happened, [or] where it came from!" Now we have a much clearer picture.

"The Black Death and other pre-modern plague outbreaks were something everyone learned about in school, or joked about in a Monty Python-esque way. It wasn't something that most of the general public would have considered particularly relevant to modernity or to their own lives," says Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. But now, "with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, suddenly medieval plagues became relevant to everyone everywhere."

The project that culminated in Green's article unfolded over many years. She says that the first step required paleogenetic analysis of known victims of the plague, including a critical study 2011. Paleogenetics is the study of preserved organic material—really any part of the body or the microbiome, down to the DNA—of long dead organisms. This means that if you can find a body, or preferably a lot of bodies, that you're sure died in the Black Death, you can often access the DNA of the specific disease that killed them and compare it to both modern and other pre-modern strains.

This has paid off in numerous ways. First, as scientists mapped the genome, they first put to rest long lingering doubts about the role Y. pestis played in the Black Death (there was widespread but unsubstantiated speculation that other diseases were at fault). Scientists mapped the genome of the bacterium and began building a dataset that revealed how it had evolved over time. Green was in London in 2012 just as findings on the London plague cemetery came out confirming without a doubt both the identity of the bacterium and the specific genetic lineage of the plague that hit London in June 1348. "The Black Death cemetery in London is special because it was created to accommodate bodies from the Black Death," she says, "and then when [the plague wave] passed, they closed the cemetery. We have the paperwork!"

Green established herself as the foremost expert in medieval women's healthcare with her work on a medical treatise known as The Trotula. Her careful analysis of manuscript traditions revealed that some of the text was attributable to a southern Italian woman, Trota. Other sections, though, revealed male doctors' attempts to take over the market for women's health. It's a remarkable text that prepared Green for her Black Death project not only by immersing her in the history of medicine, but methodologically as well. Her discipline of philology, the study of the development of texts over time, requires comparing manuscripts to each other, building a stemma, or genealogy of texts, from a parent or original manuscript. She tells me that this is precisely the same skill one needs to read phylogenetic trees of mutating bacteria in order to trace the history of the disease.

Still, placing the Black Death in 13th-century Asia required more than genetic data. Green needed a vector, and she hoped for textual evidence of an outbreak. She is careful to add that, when trying to find a disease in a historical moment, the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Her first step was to focus on a cute little rodent from the Mongolian steppe: the marmot.

Mongols hunted marmots for meat and leather (which was both lightweight and waterproof), and they brought their rodent preferences with them as the soon-to-be conquerors of Asia moved into the Tian Shan mountains around 1216 and conquered a people called the Qara Khitai (themselves refugees from Northern China). There, the Mongols would have encountered marmots who carried the strain of plague that would become the Black Death. Here, the "big bang" theory of bacterial mutation provides key evidence allowing us a new starting point for the Black Death. (To support this theory, her December article contains a 16-page appendix just on marmots!)

The phylogenetic findings were enough for Green to speculate about a 13th-century origin for the plague, but when it came to the mechanism of spread, all she had was conjecture—until she found a description of an outbreak at the end of the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258. Green is quick to note that she has relied on experts in many different languages to do this work, unsurprisingly since it traverses from China to the rock of Gibraltar, and from near the Arctic Circle to sub-Saharan Africa.

No one is expert in all the languages. What Green brought was a synthetic view that drew a narrative out of cutting-edge science and humanistic scholarship and the ability to recognize the significance of what she found when she opened a new translation of the Akhbār-i Moghūlān, or Mongol News. This source was published for the first time in 2009 by the Iranian historian Iraj Afshar, but only translated into English in 2018 as The Mongols in Iran, by George Lane. The medieval Iranian source is something of a jumble, perhaps the surviving notes for a more organized text that didn't survive. Still, the report on the Mongol siege, Green realized, held the key piece of evidence she'd been looking for. As she cites in her article, Mongol News describes pestilence so terrible that the "people of Baghdad could no longer cope with ablutions and burial of the dead, so bodies were thrown into the Tigris River." But even more importantly for Green, Mongol News notes the presence of grain wagons, pounded millet, from the lands of the Qara Khitai.

Suddenly, the pieces fit together. "I've already got my eye on the Tian Shan mountains, where the marmots are," she says, and of course marmot-Mongol interaction could cause plague there, but didn't explain long-distance transmission. "The scenario I'm putting together in my head is some sort of spillover event. Marmots don't hang around people. They're wild animals that will not willingly interact with humans. So the biological scenario I had to come up with is whatever is in the marmots had to be transferred to another kind of rodent."

With the grain supply from Tian Shan linked to plague outbreak in Baghdad, it's easy to conjecture a bacterium moving from marmots to other rodents, those rodents riding along in grain, and the plague vector revealed. "That was my eureka moment," she says.

She had put the correct strain of the bacteria at the right place at the right time so that one infected rodent in a grain wagon train revealed the means of distribution of plague.

[...]

[jimmy olsen]

well sure, at 30, and elephant/mammoth might be too much for one feast, but I guess they did bury some of the meat for winter, in some places.  Still, I imagined numbers closer to 100 than a few dozens individuals.  Interesting, thanks!

From what I've seen, before 40k years ago, groups tended to be even smaller. Like a couple of dozen of Neanderthals, half of them kids, would be a thriving group.

[Syt]

"Watching "The Mummy" With An Actual Egyptologist"

https://youtu.be/VjFFrYEZsAQ

[viper37]

"Watching "The Mummy" With An Actual Egyptologist"

https://youtu.be/VjFFrYEZsAQ

extremely interesting!

[Maladict]

The royal mummies are being paraded through Cairo to the new Egyptian Museum. Should start in about half an hour

edit - trying to find live streams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHuJIj9SfRU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwuduZxFiWg