A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.
I finished reading 'Now Is Gone' by Geoff Livingston while I was enjoying a couple of days holiday in Brittany. On reflecting on the rise of new media, it occurred to me that much of the online commentariate is very much anchored in the here and now. I wonder how well it will perform over time. Time is one thing you get a feeling for in places like Brittany. My friends' stone cottage came complete with a 300 year old stone tower once used by the Knights Templar as a way station for pilgrims. On the coast, you can still see coastal gun emplacements dating back to WWII complete with communication trenches and underground ammunition bunkers. One gun battery was an old Napoleonic emplacement which had simply been reinforced and updated by the Germans - an alternate sense of continuity to the pretty coastal villages and manicured fields. The sense of past informing the present was reinforced by a news snippet I read about the discovery of the body of an Australian soldier from the First World War in Belgium. The long-lost soldier still held his rifle in his hands and is thought to be one of twenty soldiers from the 3rd Division who went missing during the Battle of Messines on June 7th, 1917. I wonder how well the emerging online news and commentary industry will view its links with its own long tail of history?
Archaeologists always appear reluctant to give civilizations credit for trading technology. Until recently, Egypt was thought to have imported its glass from the Near East and reworked it to produce glassware and temple offerings. A team from Cardiff University has reconstructed a 3,000 year old kiln use to manufacture glass at Armana, on the banks of the Nile. The site dates back to the reign of Akhanatum 1352 - 1336 BC. and was part of an industrial complex containing a pottery and facilities for producing blue pigment and faience. Not only were local craftsmen making their own glass, but they were producing a wide range of other products at the same site.
There's a saying that you only find what you look for. Egyptologists have lived up to that by focusing on temples and royal graves. The daily lives of ancient Egyptians have received little attention. This situation wasn't helped by having most of the mounds identifying ancient cities ploughed under or buried under modern cities. Halfway between Aswan and Luxor lies the remains of Tell Edfu. Under the provincial town mound lies 3,000 years of Egyptian stratigraphy. Cities like Tell Edfu mobilised the harvest for the Pharos and archeologists excavating a courtyard there have found the largest grain silos in a town centre. They comprise seven round mud-brick structures 5.5 to 6.5 meters in diameter dating back to the 17th Dynasty (1630 - 1520 BC). Archaeologists also found an earlier mud-brick building with 16 wooden columns - possibly a governor's palace used for administration. It's a far cry from the sexy monumental architecture that powers Egypt's tourism industry.
http://www.cf.ac.uk/news/mediacentre/mediareleases/Dec07/three-thousandyearold-furnace-rebuilt-to-uncover-egyptian-glassmaking-secrets.html http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1402 Image: 1. Reconstructed glass kiln, Cardiff University, 2 & 3. Tell Edfu excavation site, N. Moeller, Tell Edfu Project
One of the images that remain with me to this day was the procession of intricately carved stele celebrating the accomplishments of the Lords of Copan. The stele are to be found at Copan at the end of the Mayan trail just inside the Honduran border with Guatemala.. The ruins are majestic and I don't think I missed a single excavated stone. However, the Lords of Copan have hid one of their greatest treasures, a Rosalila inside one of the great pyramids. The blood red Rosalila was a majestic temple built at the height of the Mayan civilisation around AD 400 - 800. The Rosalila was later concealed inside a larger pyramid and only discovered late last century. There is a replica Rosalila to be seen in the heart of the Copan museum. The reconstructed Rolalila is embellished with a collection of exotic masks and intricate designs. Now a Queensland University of Technology researcher has established that the Mayans covered their temples with over 15 coats of red and white paint and layers stucco before coating it with mica. The Maya temples would have glittered in the bright tropical sunlight. Naturally, being Mayan, nothing was simple. The discovery was a love child of an infrared analysis technique known as FTIR-ATR spectral imaging which had never before been used in an archaeological context. Another example of a wonderful technology at the command of an inventive mind!
http://www.news.qut.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/News.woa/wa/goNewsPage?newsEventID=15353 Image: 1. 18 Rabbit stele, www.ultimatejourney.com, 2. Location map of Copan, Wikipedia, 3. Reconstruction of the Rosalila in the Copan museum, Dr. Jay Hall
Few civilisations spring fully formed from the earth. Most represent either a continuation of existing an civilisation or a reactive break with tradition. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at the iconic Stonehenge. Once thought to be an evocative representation of a single idea, Stonehenge is now seen as either a development of a dominant culture or as a series of evolutionary changes. Approximately 500 metres north of Stonehenge is a feature known as the Cursus. Discovered in 1723 it is 100 metres wide and runs for about a mile. Carbon dating by the University of Manchester of an antler pick used to dig the Circus revealed a sensational date of 3,500 years BC - 500 years older than Stonehenge. It now appears Stonehenge was built within an existing complex of standing monuments, including the Cursus.
Further evidence of the cultural continuity as a driving power behind Stonehenge emerged when University of Sheffield archaeologists radiocarbon dated remains from human cremation burials. The burials tested were excavated in the 1950s but had never been sampled. The dates showed the site around Stonehenge had been in continuous use from 3,000 BC to after the sarsen stones were erected in 2,500 BC. The burials are initially few in number, expanding in later decades. Archaeologists now speculate Stonehenge was erected by ancient chiefs and became the internment site for them and their family. Stonehenge has been a special place for 500 years, remaining vibrant due to the relationship links associated with the site. Continuity saw the site itself remain in use while the manifestation of that usage morphed.
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=3719 http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2008/1024.html Image: Recently discovered antler pick used to dig the Circus, University of Manchester, 2. Excavation site, University of Manchester, 3. Stonehenge, Clint Scholtz
Poor Ferdinand Magellan! You'd think having captained the first circumnavigation of the Earth (1519-22) discovering Guam and reaching The Philippines in the process, he would be forgiven for overshooting Indonesia's Spice islands by a mere 1,500 miles! Now through a combination of computer modeling and historical data, two researchers have fingered El Nino as the invisible hand guiding Magellan's voyage of discovery. The researchers hypothesised Magellan sailed around Cape Horn and into the remnants of an El Nino event. While the drought typically associated with El Nino events may have devastated island food supplies prompting Magellan to sail north, its prevailing northerly winds and current, combined with benign weather made for easy sailing. If correct, this would be the earliest record of an El Nino climate event.
Still on things nautical, a former MIT undergraduate student took time out from her dual majors in nuclear and mechanical engineering to mess about with a replica of the large ocean going rafts which plied the seas between Chile and western Mexico over a thousand years ago. A strong pre-Columbian connection between the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations emerged from analysis of the metallurgy used in producing silver and copper goods, as well as the trade in the prized spondylus shell beads. Now detailed computer analysis of the replica's seaworthiness, handling and cargo capacity demonstrate the feasibility of ancient oceanic trade routes. At 10-30 tons capacity, the rafts could make the six to eight week voyage during the trade wind window (the rafts couldn't sail again the wind). The MIT paper is the first to use advanced marine engineering analysis to identify the design parameters of ancient water craft - quite a stretch from nuclear engineering!
http://news.ncsu.edu/news/2008/05/wmsfitzpatrickmagellan.php http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/raft-tt0319.html Image: 1. Ferdinand Magellan, Wikipedia, 2. Magellan's voyage of discovery, www.oceansatlas.com 2. MIT students aboard the replica raft, Dinna Coveney, MIT, 3. Early 17th Century sketch of native raft, Joris von Spilbergen
Alexander the Great usually scores the public kudos for founding the Egyptian city of Alexandria around 331 BC. However, archaeologists acknowledge the city of Rhakotis was there before Alexander rode into town. Now Jean-Daniel Stanley a geoarchaeologist specialising in Nile delta sedimentation and its impact on subsidence and sea level rise has produced definitive proof that Rhakotis preceded Alexander by 700 years!
Stanley sank a series of core samples into Alexandria harbour in 2001 in an effort to understand how Greek and Roman Alexandria came to be underwater. Those core samples produced some unexpected results. Firstly, up popped igneous rock pebbles. These rocks originated far upriver in Middle and Upper Egyptian quarries and were not brought down by the Nile. Next, pottery fragments dating back to 940 BC surfaced. These were shown to be locally fired and typical of pottery in the region around that time, rather than having been imported. Final confirmation came in the form of rising lead levels in the sediments prior to Alexander's arrival. The Greeks used a lot lead in their cities.
There Stanley had it, radiocarbon dates, pottery shards and increased concentrations of lead - all indicating habitation long before Alexander founded his city! This was the first hard evidence that Rhakotis was more than just a fishing village which had struggled along for centuries.
http://www.si.edu/opa/InsideResearch/articles/V19_Alexandria.html Image: 1. Diver encounters a stone sculpture of the god Hapi while surveying Alexandria's harbour, Smithsonian 2. Preparing to drill a core sample in Alexandria harbour, Juan Daniel Stanley, 3. Artists impression of Alexandria 2,000 years ago, IEASM team in Bernard and Goddio
One of the ironies of the knowledge economy is the continued preference for Western derived knowledge ahead of indigenous knowledge. I first came across biomass charcoal in Charles C. Mann's '1491; new revelations of the Americas before Columbus'. In it, Mann pointed out the compelling evidence supporting Indian occupation of vast reaches of the Amazon basin. Yet for decades, scientists refused to countenance the possibility that Indian culture in the region amounted to more than a few isolated wandering tribes. Now, chemists have shown charcoal derived from heated biomass has a phenomenal impact on soil fertility. Termed "black gold agriculture" it promised to be a revolutionary farming technique that once applied, improves soils for hundreds of years. Today, those Amazon sites still contain some of the riches, most fertile soil in the world. This technique has been employed for over 3,000 years but it seems non-one realized its impact on soil fertility until those same archaeologists Mann quoted stumbled across those ancient plots of land!
Speaking of underestimating indigenous knowledge, Reuters published a report showing the Aztecs had an arithmetic system far more complex than they had previously credited with. The researchers reviewed hundreds of drawings on two manuscripts dating back to 1540 and 1544. The Aztecs knew how to add, subtract, multiple and divide and used them to calculate land sizes - mainly for assessing taxation! Researchers have known about the Aztecs ability to calculate since 1980, they just couldn't work out how they did it!
PS. April also saw the discovery of the oldest known gold artifacts in the Americas. Jiskairumoko in the Lake Titicaca region of the Peruvian Andes dates back 5,400 years. The necklace comprises nine hammered gold and ten smaller green beads and a turquoise bead in the centre. It was found in a 4,000 year old burial, beating the previous oldest ornament by 600 years. A simple village, Jiskairumoko had no gold or turquoise deposits, so someone either went for quite a hike to bring back the materials or traded for the necklace. Either way, given that simple hunter gatherers were not supposed to be sufficiently sophisticated to produce surpluses for trading or have the leisure time to craft ornaments, Jiskairumoko represents an exception to the subsistence theory.
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=223&content_id=WPCP_008760&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1#P89_7345 http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0347586520080403?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews http://uanews.org/node/19071 Image: 1. Raw materials in producing biochar, Mingxin Guo, 2. Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelplco, Mexico City, Henry Romero, 3. Jiskairumok necklace, Mark Aldenderfer
One of the aspects I like most about Dubai is working with multiple futures, unhampered by the dead hand of past practice. Once a mode of understanding is entrenched, its a bugger to shift, so Dubai's openness is a delight. Surprisingly, institutions we expect to be the most open often prove to be the most closed. Academia is notorious for its attachment to pet theories - even faced with compelling new evidence. I've been engrossed by the debate swirling around the Clovis people of North America (named after the 1932 archaeological dig in Clovis, New Mexico) for years. Clovis artifacts appear in the archaeology around 13,500 BC, disappearing roughly 10,500 years ago. Noted for their finely fluted stone spear points, the Clovis people are thought to have crossed the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age and spread out from Alaska to Mexico. Along the way, Clovis people triggered the mega fauna extinctions in North America at the end of the Pleistocene, either through over-hunting or by eliminating a "keystone species" (mammoths or mastodons), triggering an environmental collapse and waves of extinction.
One species Clovis caught flack for was the extinction of the flightless Californian sea duck (Chendytes lawi). After radiocarbon dating bones from 14 offshore islands and 12 mainland sites in California, University of Oregon archaeologists released a "Not Guilty" verdict, showing the noble Chendytes lawi waddled on 7,500 years after Clovis people first hunted them. So much for the 'Pleistocene over-kill' theory!
http://pmr.uoregon.edu/science-and-innovation/uo-research-news/research-news-2008/march-2008/clovis-age-overkill-didnt-take-out-californias-sea-duck/ Image: 1. Chendytes lawi, Stanton F. Fink, Wikipedia, 2. Chendytes lawi, Archaeology Division, California Department of Parks and Recreation
We're often called upon to assess organizational cultures. All too often however, our view depends on our point of observation. Its a matter of perspective. For years, the popular view of archaeology centers on mysterious objects from our past being wrenched from the soil. Putting those individual finds in context is harder than its looks. Think about the challenge of piecing together an understanding of our major cities 2000 year hence. Even in Egypt, surely one of the worlds most excavated regions; whole cities lurk underground, waiting to be uncovered. Archaeologists have been experimenting with alternative approaches to perspective. The Regional Settlement Pattern Survey involves walking the landscape systematically looking for traces of past occupation. Applied effectively, it holds out the prospect of an integrated view of drifts in patterns of settlement over the centuries. Piloted in Shandong province, China, the methodology led to a significant shift in how the Yellow Valley culture developed. Maybe we all need to do more 'walking the fields' when it comes to understanding organizational culture.
PS. China lovers and supporters of contact theory will be intrigued by a report from the University of Haifa on the discovery of Chinese pottery in Acre the gateway for European pilgrims to the Holy Land.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/fm-ias030308.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uoh-eoc030408.php Image: 1. Scientists walk through tea fields in southeast Shandong, The Field Museum, 2. A pit dating to the Western Zhou period 1046-771BC 3. Objects being recovered dating to the Longshan period 2600-1900BC 4. Pottery from Acre, Howard Smithline, Israel Antiquities Authority
