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October 23, 2012
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Unfinished canoe found in Alaskan forest
An unfinished Indian canoe, apparently abandoned 500 years ago, has been discovered in a remote section of an Alaska rain forest, according to officials.
The canoe, carved from cedar, was discovered under a thick layer of moss and is surrounded by trees that are several hundred years old, Sealaska Corp., the Alaska Native corporation that owns the land, said in a statement.
The artifact was first spotted last winter by a surveyor checking potential timber-harvest sites, but the discovery was kept confidential until now, the company said.
Its exact site – near the Haida and Tlingit village of Kasaan on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island – was also being kept confidential, Sealaska said.
Preliminary examination shows that ancient hand tools, not modern saws introduced by Europeans, were used to cut the wood and hollow out the canoe, Sealaska officials said.
Based on that, and on the age of the cedar trees that have grown up around the site, experts believe the canoe is roughly 500 years old.
Rosita Worl, an anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, said she knows of only one other canoe found in the rain forest of southeast Alaska. This is a special find, she said on Wednesday.
“This is a pretty ancient one. It probably predates anything we have in museums, so we might be able to look at the dimensions and find out are we making canoes differently today,” she said in an email.
Public announcement of the discovery was delayed until after the snow melted and an archeological and tribal team examined the canoe and the site, Worl said. She said she and others also needed time to ensure it was not a burial site.
The canoe was almost completed but had not yet been steamed, the traditional process that gives wooden watercraft their final shapes.
Worl said she does have a theory as to why the unfinished canoe was abandoned, speculating that disease may have swept through the carver’s village.
“That’s a valuable piece of equipment they left there in the forest, and that’s (a) monumental task to hollow out a canoe with hand tools. Why did they leave it there? Only thing I can think is there was sickness in the village,” she said.
Worl said she hopes a replica will be made so modern canoe-makers will be able to study ancient techniques. Eventually, she said, the tribal government in Kasaan will decide what to do with the canoe and the discovery site.
For now, the canoe remains at the forest site where it was found, and the moss has not yet been removed, Worl said.
Sealaska is a Juneau-based corporation established under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and owned by Alaska Natives of southeast Alaska. The Heritage Institute is an affiliated nonprofit cultural organisation.
From Reuters
Study underway to create the first archive of human evolution at Mungo
A foundational project is currently underway at Lake Mungo (Australia) and those lakes that abound it to document the history of human settlement, past environmental change and landscape evolution that has occurred in this area. This immense undertaking comes after a long hiatus of research being conducted here and hopes to provide the first systematic archive of its archaeological traces.
Documenting the history of human settlement seems like an epic task in any part of the world; in the stark beauty of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, it involves tracing back no less than 45,000 years.
Upon arriving to the now dry lake bed which lies at the heart of Mungo National Park, it is not hard to appreciate the ancient nature of this part of the world – it is one of the oldest places outside of Africa to have been occupied by modern humans.
The site of the world’s oldest known cremation and ritual ochre burial, as well as the longest trail of ancient human footprints, surprisingly little is known about the people who lived here.
Enter La Trobe University’s palaeolithic archaeologist, Dr Nicola Stern, whose Mungo Archaeology Project hopes to redress this shortfall in our collective knowledge.
“There’s an untold story at Mungo; Mungo is famous because of Mungo Lady, Mungo Man; a trail of fossil footprints,” says Dr Stern.
“We know surprisingly little about how people actually lived in this landscape over 45,000 years – and that’s really what I’m trying to document by looking at the archaeological traces in the Mungo lunette.”
The Mungo lunettes are half-moon shaped sand dunes built from ancient layers of the earth’s surface and form the ‘Walls of China’ – a major drawcard for visitors to the World Heritage site that is Mungo National Park.
Containing rich deposits of information, the lunettes have preserved hundreds of rare, snapshot images of Australia’s earliest history and provide a unique record of the ways in which the first settlers may have adapted to the changes to their climate over time.
They form the basis for Dr Stern’a foundational research into this narrative of human evolution.
“It’s the foundation – there’s a lot that we could do if we had already had this information,” she says.
It is not only the scientific community who have longed for this work to be done; elders from the region’s Aboriginal tribal groups are also supportive of the project and are working in collaboration with Dr Stern’s team to monitor it.
“Finding out what’s there, and then monitoring what’s happening to what’s there, is something that the elders tell me they have wanted for a very long period of time.”
With such an endeavour, Dr Stern has a loyal team of around 20 others working with her and says there will be more to come on board in the future.
“Over time we will be training people and hope that they will pick this up and carry it on into the future – but there is a certain, you know knowledge and expertise that is required to figure out how to tackle a record on this scale.”
From ABC
Earliest Europeans Were Cannibals, Wore Bling
Early humans wore jewelry and likely practiced cannibalism, suggest remains of the earliest known Homo sapiens from southeastern Europe.
The remains, described in PLoS One, date to 32,000 years ago and represent the oldest direct evidence for anatomically modern humans in a well-documented context. The human remains are also the oldest known for our species in Europe to show post-mortem cut marks.
“Our observations indicate a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull,” co-author Stephane Pean, a paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Discovery News. “We demonstrate that this treatment was not for nutritional purposes, according to comparison with game butchery treatment, so it is not a dietary cannibalism.”
Instead, Pean said that he and his colleagues believe that the “observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary disposal.”
The scientists made those assessments after studying human remains and artifacts discovered at a shelter-cave site called Buran-Kaya III in the Ukraine.
Although this is a more complete archaeological setting, the actual first known Homo sapiens from Europe dates to 34,000 years ago from Pestera cu Oase in Romania. Yet another single modern human from Kostenki 1 in Russia dates to 33,000 years ago.
The age of all of these discoveries intriguingly suggests that these first members of our species in Europe may have coexisted with Neanderthals.
“Through our work in progress, some of the expected results could help to better understand the transition period of late Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens settlements in Europe,” Pean said.
While the possible Neanderthal connection remains a mystery, it is more evident that these early anatomically modern humans wore mammoth bling.
Artifacts excavated at the site include five mammoth beads, one engraved plate made out of mammoth ivory and 35 perforated shells. Since no mammoth remains or craft debris were found, it’s likely that the objects were made off-site.
The remains of pointed bone tools and stone projectiles indicate these early Europeans were active hunters with busy associated tool and weapon-making industries.
The discoveries support that the hunter-gatherers “repeatedly settled the rock shelter of Buran-Kaya III as a temporary hunting camp, and they mostly hunted saiga antelopes,” Pean said.
Marcel Otte, a professor of prehistory at the University of Liege, has also excavated at Buran-Kaya III. He told Discovery News that he and his team found evidence for a 30,000-year-old culture at the same site, indicating the region was continuously inhabited for thousands of years after the first modern humans arrived.
Marylene Patou-Mathis, director of the Archaeozoology Unit at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Discovery News that Pean and colleagues’ “paper is very important and I agree with the results, which are absolutely new. I am particularly interested in the traces of cannibalism, which are well demonstrated.”
She is also interested in the possible Neanderthal connections.
Patou-Mathis explained, “The area of Crimea, with the site of Buran Kaya and another site, Siuren, is very important to question the coexistence of two humankinds, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, and two cultures on the same territory.”
Pean and his team are currently involved in another dig at the same site, “so we are expecting new discoveries,” he said.
From Discovery News
New phase of search for Franklin expedition’s lost ships announced
A 160-year-old mystery could be solved this summer as the search resumes to find the doomed ships of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.
The voyage was the demise of Franklin and the 128 men he took to the Canadian Arctic after the Royal Navy ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus he led became trapped in ice, where it is presumed they sank somewhere off Nunavut’s King William Island.
“We are continuing our search for an as yet undiscovered national historic site,” Environment Minister Peter Kent said Thursday in announcing the resumption of the search. “This is the year I hope we will solve one of the great mysteries in the history of Arctic exploration.”
The graves of Terror and Erebus are designated together as Canada’s only national historic site with no known location, as they are considered to be integral to the country’s northern history.
Kent said the resumption of the search will be on Aug. 21, if the weather co-operates.
Kent’s announcement was attended by British High Commissioner Andrew Pocock and Parks Canada officials.
“The search for these historic vessels by Parks Canada does not date from this year or the last couple of years, we’ve been involved since 1997,” Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archeology said. “We’ve been looking for these wrecks for a long time. It’s really a historical quest to (find them).”
In the past 160 years, there have been several attempts to find Terror and Erebus, the first in January 1850 when HMS Investigator and HMS Enterprise set out to locate Franklin.
Enterprise and Investigator became separated and, in 1851, the latter was locked in ice, much like the ships it was sent to locate. The crew of the Investigator abandoned ship and eventually were rescued by another British vessel after four winters in the Arctic.
In July, there will be a dive to the wreck of Investigator — off Banks Island, N.W.T. — where it finally sank in 1854.
Parks Canada found the vessel last summer using side-scan sonar technology at the bottom of the bay, now a part of Aulavik National Park.
If Erebus and Terror were to be discovered this summer, it would be an achievement for archeology. “It would close one chapter of Canadian history. It would answer the questions that have existed over the centuries, the uncertainty over exactly where (Terror and Erebus) ultimately foundered and sank,” Kent said.
Interest in the vessels is not exclusive to Canada. According to Pocock, there is “genuine historical interest” in the United Kingdom, as well.
“Franklin was a considerable figure in Arctic exploration,” he said. “We’ve been looking for Franklin for 160 years.”
While Pocock said the dive on Investigator would be of interest, the real prize would be finding Franklin’s vessel. “The ships themselves were quite well-known — there are two volcanoes in Antarctica called Erebus and Terror,” Pocock said. The volcanoes were named by British Antarctic explorer Sir John Clark Ross, when he captained the ships in exploration of the frozen south in the early 1840s.
“Their profile and reputation — if that’s the right word — are rather higher than the Investigator.”
Should the three-year search by Parks Canada and the government of Nunavut for Franklin’s fabled expedition comes up short, it will not be considered a failure.
“Every expedition that we do actually helps us to get closer (to finding the wreckage). We see it as a contribution to the effort to find them,” Bernier said.
Even if Terror and Erebus aren’t found, the search would be narrowed further: next time, the team will know where not to look.
Dives on Investigator will take place from July 10 to 25, assuming the weather is favourable.
From The Vancouver Sun
An Archaeological Critique of Watertown, New York – Part 1
In my year long sabbatical from archaeological field work, I’ve resumed work on a handful of projects that have been floating in my head for some time. Two particular projects stand out and both involve the Jefferson County Historical Society, the proverbial HQ of historic preservation in my home town of Watertown, New York. The most fully developed idea I’ve got floating in my head and on my hard drive is a podcast series I hope to introduce within the next few weeks. The second is a community based archaeological project that with enough planning and support could possibly be implemented next summer, here first in Jefferson County and then elsewhere around the United States. I’m incredibly excited about both projects and promise to provide more details as soon as I have things sorted.
In an attempt to gauge the possible level of reception of these projects, I felt it essential to put Watertown through a sort of test. Over the course of a day, I’m going to commit myself to paying particular attention to the presence of archaeology and historic preservation within the city of Watertown. I’ll do my best to avoid veering from the beaten path of my daily routine, but strive to note anything relating to archaeology.
June 29, 2011,
My day almost always starts at 7am. I pack up my laptop and notebook into my canvas ammo bag (purposely reminiscent of the one which Indiana Jones wears) and hop into the truck. My first stop is the Historic Paddock Arcade to work on the website and get some reading in.
The Arcade is one of, if not the, most beautiful building in the city. It is the oldest continually operated shopping mall in the United States and wears the title proudly. The arcade was built by Watertown native Loveland Paddock and designed by architect Otis Wheelock in 1850. Its design was based on similar arcades built during that era in the United States and Europe. Shops occupied the bottom floor, while the upper floors were used for office space. While still an awe inspiring site to this day, the building is a far cry from what it once was. Its beautiful vaulted glass roof was hidden from view in the 1920s by the inclusion steel-and-wire-glass dropped ceiling between its second and third stories. The building was added to the National Registrar of Historic Places 1976.
I grab a cup of coffee from the Paddock Coffee House, which after adding my cream I attempt to Munsell in my mind. My guess is it’s somewhere in the 10yr 3/2 – 3/3 range then take my seat and pick up a copy of the the local read, the Watertown Daily Times. To my surprise there is a page two article with an archaeological focus. “Sunk sub is upright for first time” informs the headline. I dive in to learn that workers handling the H.L. Hunley (the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship) are working feverishly to conserve this 1864 vessel. The word archaeologist is featured once. A second article, “Battlefield boasts historic garden crops” highlights a period-specific garden in nearby Sackets Harbor and its ties to the War of 1812. No mention of archaeology, but there is an emphasis on historical research.
I finish my cup of coffee and head outside.
The front door of the Paddock Arcade opens up onto Public Square. This is the oldest portion of historic Watertown. The city’s first settlers built their homes on the west end of Public Square. My guess is the archaeological remains of those log cabin dwellings were lost long ago when the square became the urban hub it is today. In 1849 a massive fire destroyed most of the square, but it was rebuilt a few years later to include beautiful structures like the Woodruff Hotel. The 1850 rebuild of Public Square featured the inclusion of three islands in the center which still exist, but have been incorporated into one single entity. In the center sits an ornate fountain circa 1960, the third to occupy the spot. In 2002, the fountain was vandalized and nearly destroyed by a drunken moron. The fountain remained in storage for seven years while it was restored and Public Square was redesigned. Today the Square retains most of its former majesty, but the number of vacant store fronts indicates it still has a ways to go.
Interesting, no? You’d think that with nearly every major road in the city funneling traffic towards this historic spot that somewhere among the nearly two hundred year old circus that story would be available. Yet not a single bit of information is available on Public Square regarding its history. There is not a kiosk, an information board, anything that details the vivid history of this centerpiece of the city. In fact, my day has barely brought any archaeology to my attention.
I hang a right out of the Arcade and pass by the grotesque marble additions of the 1960s, before I reach the Paddock mansion, home of the Jefferson County Historical Society. Surely, if archaeology has a presence in the North Country culture, I will find it here.
Check back mid-week for more.
Finding showing human ancestor older than previously thought offers new insights into evolution
Modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus – a finding counter to previous hypotheses of human evolution—new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show. The research, reported in the journal PLoS One, offers new insights into the nature of human evolution, suggesting a different role for Homo erectus than had been previously thought.
The work was conducted by the Solo River Terrace (SoRT) Project, an international group of scientists directed by anthropologists Etty Indriati of Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia and Susan Antón of New York University.
Homo erectus is widely considered a direct human ancestor—it resembles modern humans in many respects, except for its smaller brain and differently shaped skull—and was the first of our ancestors to migrate out of Africa, approximately 1.8 million years ago. Homo erectus went extinct in Africa and much of Asia by about 500,000 years ago, but appeared to have survived in Indonesia until about 35,000 to 50,000 years ago at the site of Ngandong on the Solo River. These late members of Homo erectus would have shared the environment with early members of our own species, Homo sapiens, who arrived in Indonesia by about 40,000 years ago.
The existence of the two species simultaneously has important implications for models about the origins of modern humans. One of the models, the Out of Africa or replacement model, predicts such overlap. However, another, the multiregional model, which posits that modern humans originated as a result of genetic contributions from hominin populations all around the Old World (Africa, Asia, Europe), does not. The late survival of Homo erectus in Indonesia has been used as one line of support for the Out of Africa model.
However, findings by the SoRT Project show that Homo erectus’ time in the region ended before modern humans arrived there. The analyses suggest that Homo erectus was gone by at least 143,000 years ago—and likely by more than 550,000 years ago. This means the demise of Homo erectus occurred long before the arrival of Homo sapiens.
“Thus, Homo erectus probably did not share habitats with modern humans,” said Indriati.
The SoRT Project’s investigations occurred in Ngandong and Jigar, two sites in the “20-meter terrace” of the Solo River, Indonesia. The sediments in the terrace were formed by the flooding of the ancient river, but currently sit above the Solo River because the river has cut downward through time. The terrace has been a rich source for the discovery of Homo erectus and other animal fossils since the 1930s.
As recently as 1996, a research team dated these sites of hominin, or early human, fossils to as young as 35,000-50,000 years old. The analyses used a technique that dates teeth, and thus provided ages for several animals discovered at the sites. However, other scholars suggested the sites included a mixture of older hominins and younger animals, raising questions about the true age of the hominin remains.
The goal of the SoRT team, which included both members of the 1996 group and its critics, was to understand how the sites in the terrace formed, whether there was evidence for mixing of older and younger remains, and just how old the sites were.
Since 2004, team members have conducted analyses of animal remains, geological surveys, trenching, and archaeological excavations. The results from all of these provide no evidence for the mixing of older and younger remains. All the evidence suggests the sites represent just a short time period.
“The postmortem damage to the animal remains is consistent and suggests very little movement of the remains by water,” explained Briana Pobiner, the project’s archaeologist and a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “This means that it is unlikely that very old remains were mixed into younger ones.”
In addition, clues from the sediments exposed during excavation suggest to the projects’ geoarchaeologists, Rhonda Quinn, Chris Lepre, and Craig Feibel, of Seton Hall, Columbia, and Rutgers universities, that the deposits occurred over a short time period. The teeth found in different excavation layers at Jigar are also all nearly identical in age, supporting the conclusion that mixing across geological periods did not occur.
“Whatever the geological age of the sites is, the hominins, animals, and sediments at Ngandong and Jigar are all the same age,” said project co-leader Susan Antón.
The team applied two different dating techniques to the sites. Like earlier work, they used the techniques—U-series and Electron Spin Resonance, or ESR—that are applied to fossilized teeth. They also used a technique called argon-argon dating that is applied to volcanic minerals in the sediments. All three methods use radioactive decay in different ways to assess age and all yielded robust and methodologically valid results, but the ages were inconsistent with one another.
The argon-argon results yielded highly precise ages of about 550,000 years old on pumices—very light, porous volcanic products found at Ngandong and Jigar.
“Pumices are hard to rework without breaking them, and these ages are quite good, so this suggests that the hominins and fauna are this old as well,” said project geochronologist Carl Swisher of Rutgers University.
By contrast, the oldest of the U-series and ESR ages, which were conducted at Australian National University by Rainer Grün, are just 143,000 years.
The difference in the ages means that one of the systems is providing an age for something other than the formation of the sites and fossils in them. One possibility is that the pumices are, in fact, reworked, or mixed in, from older rocks. The other possibility is that the ESR and U-series ages are dating an event that occurred after the sites were formed, perhaps a change in the way groundwater moved through the sites.
Either way, the ages provide a maximum and a minimum for the sites – and both of these ages are older than the earliest Homo sapiens fossils in Indonesia. Thus, the authors concluded that the idea of a population of Homo erectus surviving until late in time in Indonesia and potentially interacting with Homo sapiens seems to have been disproven.
From PhysOrg
VTT examined the first bottle of 170-year-old beer
Finnish research center VTT has examined one of five bottles of beer salvaged last summer by divers from the wreck of a ship that sank an estimated 170 years ago in the Aland Islands.
The examination yielded a wealth of detail about the beer, even indications of how it was brewed. The research will continue by examining another bottle.
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland was commissioned by the Government of Aland to study the composition of the shipwreck beer and identify the type of yeast used to brew it. The aim of this project was to study what early 19th-century beer was like and whether its production process could be reverse-engineered and the beer replicated.
The study involved an analysis of the physico-chemical properties of the beer and microbiological and DNA analyses of the beer, bottle and cork. In particular, the aim was to isolate any living microbes found.
The bottle contained a liquid that was a beautiful pale golden colour, identified as beer because of the presence of malt sugars, aromatic compounds and hops typical of the beverage.
The beer in the bottle examined has not stood the test of time well, and it was contaminated by salt from sea water.
Dead yeast cells were discovered in the beer, indicating fermentation that took place long ago. Live lactic acid bacteria were found in the beer. Especially in earlier times, lactic acid bacteria were often present in beer fermentation alongside brewing yeast.
It would appear that the contents of the bottle examined by VTT were in a worse condition than those of the bottle that broke during the course of the dive.
The examination will continue with the opening of a second bottle retrieved from the wreck. This may yield new findings. The goal remains the discovery of living yeast cells.
From PhysOrg
Editorial: Project Update
In my year long sabbatical from archaeological field work, I’ve resumed work on a handful of projects that have been floating in my head for some time. Two particular projects stand out and both involve the Jefferson County Historical Society, the proverbial HQ of historic preservation in my home town of Watertown, New York. The most fully developed idea I’ve got floating in my head and on my hard drive is a podcast series I hope to introduce within the next few weeks. The second is a community based archaeological project that with enough planning and support could possibly be implemented next summer, here first in Jefferson County and then elsewhere around the United States. I’m incredibly excited about both projects and promise to provide more details as soon as I have things sorted.
In an attempt to gauge the possible level of reception of these projects, I felt it essential to put Watertown through a sort of test. Over the course of a day, I’m going to commit myself to paying particular attention to the presence of archaeology and historic preservation within the city of Watertown. I’ll do my best to avoid veering from the beaten path of my daily routine, but strive to note anything relating to archaeology.
Check back here mid-week and read my report.
