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June 12^th is the 30^th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones remains the world’s most famous archaeologist.  How many real-life archaeologists are household names?  In honor of Indy‘s birthday, I’m posting a revised excerpt of an essay I wrote for the Society for American Archaeology’s Archaeology for the Public website several years ago (see  this link for the complete version):

In 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark set the tone for virtually every action blockbuster that has been produced since, and it is easily the most well-known fictional film with archaeological content.  Its sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) were also very commercially successful.  Despite the differences I’ve outlined (and there are many more), a large segment of the general public associates archaeology with the now legendary character of Indiana Jones.  When people find out you’re an archaeologist, their first question is often “Is it really like Indiana Jones?”  As a result, Indy gets a lot of criticism from professionals who get tired of explaining that archaeology is rewarding, is often full of adventure and excitement, but it’s not very much like Indiana Jones.  But archaeologists and educators can use the popularity of the Indiana Jones movies to their advantage.  These films, by depicting what archaeology isn’t, provide an entertaining opportunity for teachers and students to make comparisons and discuss what archaeology is.

Many of us, especially children and adolescents, are first exposed to the field of archaeology by viewing fictional adventurers like Indiana Jones.  Personally, I first heard the word archaeology when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid.  While sitting in that darkened theater, I was so impressed by Indy’s intelligence and determination that I resolved to go to the school library and read more about this mysterious thing called archaeology.  Despite my initial disappointment that archaeologists didn’t carry bullwhips, I quickly became fascinated with real archaeology.  That was 30 years ago and I’m still fascinated.  The Indy movies don’t accurately reflect archaeology, but their popularity has the potential to spark public interest in finding out more about archaeology – the facts behind the fiction.  The archaeologists of tomorrow might very well be sitting at home or in class watching Raiders of the Lost Ark today.  In that sense, Indiana Jones is a hero to movie-goers, educators, and archaeologists alike.

So I argued then, and still believe, that Indiana Jones can help popularize real archaeology.  Evidently, the Archaeological Institute of America shares this belief since Harrison Ford is a member of their governing board.  What do you think?  Is Indiana Jones good for archaeology?  Please share your thoughts and memories of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the comments.

- Jay Fancher

By Jay Fancher

Oil transformed Dubai in the 1970s. The city now boasts the world's tallest building, giant malls, and some two million residents, who depend on desalinated seawater and air-conditioning—and thus on cheap energy—to live in the Arabian desert. (Credit: Jens Neumann/Edgar Rodtmann/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, science has a way of deflating human conceits.  Anthropology reveals that humans are special – just not for many of the reasons proposed throughout our history.  Thanks to biology, astronomy, and geology, we now know that:

• Modern humans are one species among many, not the pinnacle of all creation.

• We’re not the center of the universe; our planet orbits a fairly average star.

• We haven’t been around since the beginning of time – far from it.

On a 4.5-billion-year-old planet, with a 3.5-billion-year history of life, anatomically-modern Homo sapiens only go back about 200,000 years.  We’re brand new, a tiny blip on the geologic time scale!  Despite this, a new National Geographic article explores the possibility that the “Anthropocene” may have already begun.  Here is a brief excerpt:

Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man It’s a new name for a new geologic epoch—one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled…Probably the most obvious way humans are altering the planet is by building cities, which are essentially vast stretches of man-made materials—steel, glass, concrete, and brick. But it turns out most cities are not good candidates for long-term preservation, for the simple reason that they’re built on land, and on land the forces of erosion tend to win out over those of sedimentation.

The author of the article, Elizabeth Kolbert, graciously agreed to an interview with Anthropology.net.  The text of our discussion, conducted via e-mail, follows:

Fancher: The greatest strength of anthropology is its all-encompassing view of humanity.  We’re proud of this breadth, frequently describing our work as the study of all people, in all times, and all places.  But, as you state in your article, stratigraphers take an extremely long view – the entire 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.  How can students of the human past benefit from this geological perspective?

Kolbert: I’m not sure I have a good answer for this.  As all anthropologists know, we are a young species.  So human history doesn’t tell us much about earth history.  What is particularly alarming about a lot of recent discoveries in geology is that you have to go way, way back – i.e., tens of millions of years – to find analogues for some of the things we are doing today, like, for example, acidifying the oceans.

Fancher: I was surprised to read that our proudest technological achievements might not be easy to recognize in the geological record.  It’s humbling to think that urban centers will ultimately be as fleeting in the geological record as short-term hunter-gatherer camp sites are in the archaeological record.  Despite our human desire to leave huge, everlasting monuments, is it better not to be noticed in the geological record?

Kolbert: Well, it’s not clear that we will be noticed, because it’s not clear there’s going to be anything around to notice us.  But we will be noticeable.  And certainly from the standpoint of the other organisms on earth, it would be a lot better if our impact were not so obvious.

Fancher: Some issues of scientific classification appear to have little practical relevance.  For example, the debate over whether Pluto qualifies as a planet or not.  In your article, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen concludes that the value of the Anthropocene classification goes far beyond textbook revisions.  Can you elaborate on the meaning of the Anthropocene?

Kolbert: Officially, we live in the Holocene, or “wholly recent” epoch.  The Anthropocene translates basically as the man-made epoch.  It’s an acknowledgment that humans, rather than what are sometimes quaintly called “the great forces of nature,” have become the driving force on the planet.

Fancher: How might recognition of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene influence human behavior?

Kolbert: I end the piece with a quote from Paul Crutzen, the Nobelist who coined the term.  Crutzen says, “What I hope is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”  I think what he means by that is: we are now in the driver’s seat.  Unfortunately, we don’t really know how to operate the vehicle.  So we’d better think about what we’re doing very carefully.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for writing such a thought-provoking article, and for agreeing to this interview.  Enter the Anthropocene – Age of Man is part of National Geographic magazine’s year-long coverage of the global human population reaching 7 billion.

What do you think about the possibility of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene?

Do archaeologists care about the living? Yes, but like all people, we focus on those aspects of a story that are of greatest interest to us. That’s why I have tuned out much of the news coming out of Egypt over the last few weeks. I casually skimmed through articles about the protests, the motivations of the protesters, political ramifications for the region and for me as an American, and even the tragic loss of life. But when Egyptian antiquities were endangered, I began to pay close attention! As a kid, I was inspired by Indiana “It belongs in a museum” Jones. What happens when the museums themselves are threatened? Archaeological materials are one of the many casualties of war and civil unrest, as recently seen in Iraq.

During the Egyptian protests, the Cairo Museum, one of the most significant repositories of artifacts in the world, was raided by looters. Thankfully, it appears that none of the museum’s famed mummies were damaged and, in fact, some protesters defended the museum from looting. Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Antiquities Department, even ridiculed some looters for stealing souvenirs from the museum gift shop while leaving priceless artifacts untouched. It could have been much worse, since the museum’s collections are truly irreplaceable, and their theft would’ve represented a great loss to humanity.

From the perspective of archaeological preservation, it was a relatively happy ending. Wait…was I really more outraged by the prospect of stolen artifacts and ransacked mummies than hundreds of deaths? Maybe 24-hour global news cycles have desensitized me to death tolls and modern human tragedy. Archaeologists, especially, have been accused of insensitivity toward living people (insert your own joke about archaeologists “preferring their informants dead” here). Sometimes this reputation is deserved – long hours poring over bones and stones in laboratories can dull a person’s sociability. But archaeologists are anthropologists and, as the anthropology.net motto says, we go “Beyond bones & stones.” Archaeologists are as focused on people as any other branch of anthropology. We reconstruct past human behavior from material remains, work with living and descendant communities to better understand the past, and do our best to share archaeology with everyone. Ideally, we go into anthropology because we are human beings who care about our fellow human beings, past and present. And, if our priorities sometimes need adjusting, world events remind us to pay attention to living people and dynamic political situations in addition to mummies.

What aspects of the Egyptian protests have been most meaningful to you?

- Jay Fancher

Image by Omar A. via Flickr

I stumbled upon this news piece in The Times regarding archaeology in Saudia Arabia. I wanted to share it with you all because of last week’s discussion of handaxes from the neighboring UAE. The article describes how archaeologists have been using Google Earth to survey for sites and have identified possibly 2,000 or so potential ones in Saudia Arabia. Now using Google Earth to do some armchair archaeology is nothing new really, there are examples from 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

But we all know how strict Saudia Arabia is. One of their many impositions has traditionally been against archaeology — fearing that discoveries may disrupt the foundation of it being a cradle for Islam. From the article,

David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia, used Google Earth satellite maps to pinpoint 1,977 potential archaeological sites, including 1,082 teardrop shaped stone tombs…

…But few archaeologists have been given access to Saudi Arabia, which has long been hostile to the discipline. Hardline clerics in the kingdom fear that it might focus attention on the civilisations which flourished there before the rise of Islam – and thus, in the long term, undermine the state religion.

In 1994, a council of Saudi clerics was reported to have issued an edict asserting that preserving historical sites “could lead to polytheism and idolatry” – both punishable, under the Kingdom’s laws, by death.

This is not surprising to many. What is surprising was this tid bit:

Saudi Arabia’s rulers have, in recent years, allowed archaeologists to excavate some sites, including the spectacular but little-known ruins of Maidan Saleh (Correction its really Mada’in Saleh), a 2,000 old city which marked the southern limits of the powerful Nabataean civilisation.

For the most part, though, access to ancient sites has been severely restricted.

There are a lot of examples where traditions, governments, etc. get in the way of phenomenal discoveries. However, there are few where objection relaxed. I’m hopeful we’ll see more archaeology conducted on the Arabian peninsula, but I’ll think we’ll be seeing more from the more liberal areas like the Emirates.

Related Articles

• Archaeologists Find 1,082 Ancient Tombs in Google Earth [Science] (gawker.com)
• Archaeologists Find 1,082 Ancient Tombs in Google Earth [Science] (gawker.com)
• Google Earth finds Saudi Arabia’s forbidden archaeological secrets (telegraph.co.uk)

Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen has lead a team excavating the Jebel Faya site in the United Arab Emirates, right near the Straits of Hormuz. They’ve found 125,000 year old stone tools that look like early modern human tools from East Africa around the same time. They’ve published their findings in today’s Science, under the title, “The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia.”

The current understanding is what we know as anatomically modern humans (AMH) originated in Africa about 250,000 years ago. The oldest Home sapiens, known as H. sapiens idaltu, was found to be 160,000 years old, found at the Middle Awash site in Ethiopia. Then between 80k-100k years ago, modern humans began appearing in the middle east, as remains from sites like the Qafzeh cave in Israel have yielded. Most agree that AMH stayed in Africa and about 140,000 years ago they began migrating out. There was an exception, a colonization remained or failed in Israel about 100,000 years ago.

One of the hand axes from Jebel Faya, UAE (Photograph courtesy Science/AAAS)

These hand axes, pictured above, show a pattern of flaking distinct from that made by Neandertals and also dissimilar to those by ~100,000 year old Israeli tools. They are two sided and very similar to stone tools seen only in early Africa.

What this means is early humans left Africa 20,000 years earlier than thought. Just how did they do it? 130,000 years ago, there was a window of climate change. They figured this out by using luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools. Luminescence dating is a technique that measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. The data showed that 130,000 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula was relatively more warm which caused more rainfall, turning it into a series of lush habitable land. During this period the southern Red Sea’s levels dropped and was only 2.5 miles or 4 km wide. This offered a brief window of time for humans to easily cross the sea and cross the Peninsula to opposing sites like Jebel Faya.

Does this study tell us that modern humans left Africa, into Arabia and out from there? It is most certainly a possibility. However, these axes could be of an abandoned migration like the site in Israel I’ve mentioned. I say that because no genetic clade, be it from mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, or somatic genome, shows an earlier divergence of modern humans from Africa earlier than 60,000 years ago. At the very minimum a find like this tells us humans left Africa a bit sooner than we thought, but does not really tell us that these were the humans that helped seed the Eurasia.

Armitage, S., Jasim, S., Marks, A., Parker, A., Usik, V., & Uerpmann, H. (2011). The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia Science, 331 (6016), 453-456 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199113

Map of Grape Domestication

I got some archaeobotany for you to start your weekend off right with — a new open access study in PNAS announces a genome wide association of 8,000 years of grape domestication, spanning the Eastern Caucasus to Western Europe. Lead author Sean Myles of Cornell University wrote in the abstract,

“support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. Grape growing and winemaking then expanded westward toward Europe, but the degree to which local wild sylvestris from Western Europe contributed genetically to Western European viniferacultivars remains a contentious issue. Our results … all support a model in which modern Western European cultivars experienced introgression from local wildsylvestris.”

In related wine archaeology, earlier this week, UCLA archaeologist Hans Barnard published the findings of a 6,000 year old uncorked wine barrel in Armenia. The barrel was discovered in the Areni-1 cave near the Iranian border. The results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but you can read a bit more about it here.

Hope you found these two tidbits as interesting as I did. Cheers to a good weekend!

Myles, S., Boyko, A., Owens, C., Brown, P., Grassi, F., Aradhya, M., Prins, B., Reynolds, A., Chia, J., Ware, D., Bustamante, C., & Buckler, E. (2011). Genetic structure and domestication history of the grape Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009363108

Another video to share with you, this time the trailer to Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This is a 3D film shot inside Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France. These are some of the oldest cave paintings known. The film seems to have good reviews on IMDB and is set to be released on March 25th, 2011 in the UK.

What do you think?

Neandertals have long been touted as a species with “hyperarctic” adaptations. Their stout proportions and shortened distal limb segments are often explained to conserve heat. Similarly, the Neandertal cranium is traditionally said to be cold adapted. An article released on December 22^nd in the Journal of Human Evolution challenges these traditional notions, specifically those about Neandertal nasal adaptations.

The Neandertal nasal apparatus has conventionally been cited as cold adapted mainly because of the enlarged sinuses. The authors of this article, among them Chris Stringer, cite evidence that larger sinuses are not in fact typical of cold weather mammalian species.

Through observation of human populations and studies on other mammals, cold weather is more highly correlated with smaller sinuses. That is, animals from more northerly locations typically have smaller sinus cavities. As an example taken from lab studies, rats raised in colder conditions also show smaller sinus cavities.

But are Neandertal sinuses even large, as is typically maintained? The authors of this paper argue that there is nothing large about them. Through examination of Neandertal remains, the sizes of the frontal and maxillary sinuses actually fell within the range of Homo sapiens from temperate climates.

The Forbes’ Quarry Neandertal (left) and H. sapiens skulls. Frontal sinus in purple, maxillary sinus in red. Photo from Rae et al., 2010.

This study is very suggestive that Neandertal nasal anatomy is not due to cold weather adaptation. To be cold weather adapted, the sinuses would be smaller and not larger, as many anthropologists have maintained since the first remains were discovered. Not only are the sinuses not small, they are not large- which speaks to a larger problem. How many other basic assumptions do we take as fact just because they have been around for so long?

If not cold weather, what could have caused the differences in facial anatomy between H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens? The authors of this paper do not offer many answers, but offer a couple of possibilities. Differences in masticatory stress (utilizing teeth as a tool, for example), or genetic drift are two potential reasons discussed.

This paper may be taking another step in overturning traditional understanding of Neandertals as a cold weather species. Generations of anthropologists have passed knowing that Neandertals differed in facial anatomy due to cold weather adaptation, unsubstantiated by data.

Rae, T.C., Koppe, T., Stringer, C.B. (2010).  The Neanderthal face is not cold adapted.  The Journal of Human Evolution. Article in Press.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is a strange organization. I often wonder how it operates, but then I realize I don’t even wanna know because there’s often no real logic to their madness. Take into consideration these cases:

Case 1: About 4 years ago the AAA decided to close access to almost all their journals, directly against the Federal Research Publication Access Act. This spurned a lot of discussion regarding ownership of publication, author’s rights and the AAA’s motivation behind it. Most of us wondered how could the AAA, who didn’t fund the research, produce the data, and write up the analysis, close off the information to the world? Here was a bit of my outcry over the matter, archived by afarensis in June of 2006,

“The hypocrisy that surrounds the AAA when it begged for anthropologists to protest to the US government to not cut funding but their recent resiliency to not give back is outstanding in this matter. I don’t get why the AAA won’t open their eyes and see that this form of publishing helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, like their closed AnthroSource, public libraries and institutions of the people (like universities) can create local copies and repositories of these resources. People, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.”

From this idiocy, a nice project spun off but hasn’t in my opinion been a viable alternative. Unfortunate.

Case 2: Once upon a time the AAA was an organization that scoffed at social media and Web 2.0, specifically blogs. It’s hard to dig up exact references since many links have died… But I do distinctly remember them issuing a statement saying blogs are useless forms of communication, with a little wink wink nod nod to this said blog.

When they redesigned their homepage a couple of years ago, they deployed several blogs. They even sent me emails asking for link exchange. Sure people are allowed to change their minds, but I wondered what’s with the change in heart? Suffice to say, I didn’t add them back.

Case 3: The AAA just had their annual meeting and yes, everyone’s reporting that decided to do away with science. It’s true, Peter Wood of the Chronicle, writes on them actively deciding to nix science out of the Mission Statement. I’ve copied and pasted the presumed edits to the mission statement he provided below the read more link.  Another related decision made is defining the role of AAA, away from ethnography and scientific experiments and observations to anecdotal and subjective journalism… Again without ethnology and ethnography — what is cultural anthropology?

Alice Dreger of Fetishes I Don’t Get, writes on some of the anger she experienced from other scientific anthropologists,

“The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay-actually, even more visceral and stronger than that-albeit not surprise.” The scientists I talked to want to know (as I do) exactly what is the AAA Executive Board’s justification for all this. They are confused about whether they should bother to fight, or just give up and depart the AAA already.”

The Society for Anthropological Sciences, a division of the AAA, objected to these changes, I am sure most do. I don’t understand why this change is being done. In a time and age when we need to strive to objective data to make informed decisions, this organization is moving away from that, and consciously. Why?

Could it because anthropology is largely not considered a science outside of the discipline — so the AAA chooses embrace what most think of us?

Again it is hard to get into the minds of such a dysfunctional organization. They seem to never make the right decision. An analogy that works in my mind is the AAA is to anthropologists as the Clerical Theocracy of the Islamic Republic are to Iranian population. As many governments help make decisions to move forward and advance their society, both the AAA and the mullahs regress their organizations further back in time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I feel somewhat vindicated. Remember the post where I criticized hominin cut marks from over 3 million years ago? Others have also had an eye of suspicion and have published their concerns in PNAS this week.

I was wrong in considering the croc marking differential to the cut marks. But I was not wrong in thinking they author of the original paper made the wrong conclusions. The authors of this new paper raise up an even more logical explanation, and carried out a more thorough analysis. Here’s part of their argument from the abstract,

“The Dikika research group focused its analysis on the morphology of the marks in question but failed to demonstrate, through recovery of similarly marked in situ fossils, the exact provenience of the published fossils, and failed to note occurrences of random striae on the cortices of the published fossils (incurred through incidental movement of the defleshed specimens across and/or within their abrasive encasing sediments). The occurrence of such random striae (sometimes called collectively “trampling” damage) on the two fossils provide the configurational context for rejection of the claimed butchery marks. The earliest best evidence for hominin butchery thus remains at 2.6 to 2.5 Ma, presumably associated with more derived species than A. afarensis.”

Trampling vs. Cut Marks (The image in A is courtesy of R. Blasco and J. Rosell. The images in B, D, and F are modified from McPherron et al.)

Looking back at the comment thread, I got a lot of flak. Aside from being wrong about the croc markings, I won’t deny that my post was inflammatory and incited a lot of the response. But many who know just a bit about the fossil and archaeological record, may find it extraordinary to believe australopithecines were using stone tools to extract food from flesh and bone from ‘indirect’ evidence. Of more concern was the lack of exhaustive exploration into other possibilities.

I remember as an anthropology undergrad one of my professors designed a hands-on experiment for us. If memory serves me correctly, this was for a zooarchaeology class. She acquired some beef bones from the local butcher and gave us stone tools. We were instructed to extract the marrow from the bones. We hammered the afternoon away.

Part of our assignment was to use different techniques and tools. We could cut, saw, abrade, chisel, etc. After the mess was done we compared our extractions from prehistoric samples. This comparative approach allowed use to systematically compare how we modified the bone to how possibly prehistoric individuals modified bone.

The authors of the current PNAS paper did something similar. The hypothesized that trampling could have created similar modifications as seen on the 3.39 million year old Dikika bones. And what did they do? Well they got some bone and experimentally setup some trampling experiments. As one would expect, cut marks would have a \/ shaped incision. Incidentally, the bones from Dikika show a \_/ flat bottom morphology. The authors write,

“Ninety-six percent of experimental trampling grooves display a broad-based, open cross-section with the aforementioned shape, versus just 4% of experimental grooves inflicted by simple (i.e., unmodified) stone flakes used to cut meat from bones. In addition, curvy and sinuous groove trajectories characterize nearly 70% of experimental trampling marks,compared with just 10% of experimental cut marks created with simple flakes (11). Together, these experimental results provide a robust actualistic context to evaluate illustrated marks F, G, H2,and I on DK-55–3 as high-probability trampling damage and not stone tool cut or percussion marks…”

I wonder what happened to good science?

What happened to the scientific method?

Did we not learn how to set up experiments and carry out analysis?

How can a paper make all the way into Nature and not exhaust all the possibilities?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am seriously asking it. I honestly feel that there is something rife in paleoanthropological studies lately. I must sound like a broken record to say yet again, too often are papers published in haste and for fortune and glory… All which compromise the validity & ethical responsibility of the science.

Domínguez-Rodrigo M, Pickering TR, & Bunn HT (2010). Configurational approach to identifying the earliest hominin butchers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21078985