ANT304 Exam 2

Qafzeh Cave

• Israel site

• Rock shelter/cave site

• 28 skeletons (up to 92,000 years old)

• Dated using thermoluminescence

• Middle-Paleolitihic / Mousterian tools

• First excavated in the 1930s

• Early excavations didn’t use grid

• Site bombed during Palestinian Revolution (1936-39)

• Excavations restarted in 1950s, continue through 1970s

Qafzeh Cave Significance

• Oldest known intentional burials of modern human

  • 28 individuals (majority children)

• They cared for the sick and injured

• Double burial of young adult and child

Band

• Smallest unit of human social organization

• Small, kin-based group

• 20 to 50 individuals

• Primary social organization for most of human history

• Associated with nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers

Hunter Gatherer

• Societies which forage for wild food

• Hunting, fishing, gathering plants

• Primary means of subsistence for most of human history

• Associated with nomadic “bands”

Social organization:____ :: Mode of subsistence: _______ ___ _________

Band, Hunting and gathering

Common misconceptions about hunter-gatherers

• “No property”

  • Limited accumulation of property, high residential mobility

• “No hierarchies”

  • Social mechanisms which suppressed hierarchy

• “One with nature”

  • Lower populations, some resources over-exploited

Ethnic group

• A group of people with:

  • Shared territory or land

  • Common descent, or “blood”

  • Common language

  • Community of customs

  • Community of beliefs or religion

  • Self-awareness, self-identity

Culture

• Shared set of beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and material that define a group

• Often intangible, but some tangible

Archaeological culture

• Recurring set of material traits

• Found grouped by region and/or time

Archaeological culture is/is NOT the same as Ethnic Group?

Is NOT

Sunghir, Russia

• 200km east of Moscow

• Quarry site

• Excavated 1957-1977

• 30-34,000 year old remains

• One of the oldest burial sites in Europe

• Multiple kinds of burials

  • In graves, on surface, partial

• Earliest evidence of prestige status?

Achieved status vs. ascribed status

• Status you worked toward vs. status you were born with

• Different statuses resulted in different labor rules, access to knowledge, etc.

Agency

• Individuals act within social systems to navigate and shape their social world

• Ability to make decisions and act independently

Beringia

• The land bridge formed during last glacial maximum

• 18,000 years ago

• Water 120m/400ft below current

Kelp Highway hypothesis

• People arrive to the Americas 16-17,000 (or more?) years ago via the Pacific Ocean

Clovis-First hypothesis

• People arrive to the Americas 13-14,000 years ago via Beringia

• Clovis is a tool

Page-Ladson, USA

• Underwater site

• Human-altered mammoth remains

• Dated to 14,500

• Challenged Clovis-first hypothesis

• Submerged sinkhole

  • Relatively calm pocket with flowing river above

• In bend of rivers

  • Materials accumulate

• Excavated in “steps”

• First investigated from 1983-1997

• 8 stone artifacts associated with butchered mastodon remains from a deposit radiocarbon dated to ~14,400 BP

Palynology

• Study of pollen grains

• Dates artifacts

• Page-ladson had grasses, herbs (seed bearing plant with no woody stem), and pine

Phytolith

• Minute particles of silica in plant cells that survive after the rest of the plant has decomposed

Microbotanicals

• Pollen grains 

• Phytoliths (silica structures from plants)

• Diatoms (silica structure from algae)

• But must be in certain contexts to be specifically tied to people

  • On the cutting edge of blades

  • In the grooves of grinding stones

  • In tartar-built up on teeth

  • In stomach contents

• Collected in specialized sampling procedures

Subsistence Method

• Hunting and gathering

  • Primary means of subsistence for most of human history

Diet

• Differences can indicate inequality

• Can be detected through human remains

Macrobotanicals

• Paleoethnobotany - study of past human-plant interactions through plant remains

• Best cases:

  • Desiccated

  • Waterlogged

  • Mineralized 

  • Carbonized/charred 

• Collected in soil samples

Flotation

• Soil (matrix) sample is placed in water 

• “Light fraction” (carbonized plant remains) float 

• “Heavy fraction” (rocks, heavy soils) sink

Hearth

• Evidence of cooking/processing

Coprolite

• Evidence of consumption

• Aka fossilized feces

Zooarchaeology

• The study of human-animal interactions through animal remains

• Animal remains collected during screening

Faunal Remains

• Animal remains

• Studying animal bones:

  • Identification

  • NISP (number of identified species)

  • MNI (minimum number of individuals

  • Age & sex

  • Meat weight

  • Taphonomy (post-mortem alterations)

• Collected during screening

Osteoarchaeology

• Study of human skeletal remains to reconstruct past lifeways, health, diet, and demographics

Fa-Hien Lena, Sri Lanka

• Reflection of human capacity for adaptation

• By end of Ice Age, people are in arid environments, arctic settings, high-altitude environments, and tropical forests

Neolithic Revolution vs. Neolithic Transitions

• Neolithic Revolution

  • Also known as the Agricultural Revolution

  • Shift to reliance on domesticated plants and animals

  • Began 12,000 years ago

  • Traditionally associated with Middle East/Southwest Asia

  • Coincided with end of the Ice Age

• Archaeologists have had different perspectives through time:

1. Revolution, led to civilization!

2. Revolution, led to pain and struggle!

3. Transition, both good and bad

• Transition = Multiple origins, Long-term processes, Unevenly adopted

Domestication

• Adapting wild plants and animals for human use

• Neolithic Revolution caused a shift to reliance on domesticated plants and animals

• Intensive plant use does not equal domestication

Agriculture

• The intensive production of crops and livestock

• Consequences of agriculture for human societies:

  • Increase in

    • Population

    • Sedentism

    • Social inequality

    • Specialization

    • Risk of famine

    • Infectious disease

  • Decline in nutrition

  • New technologies

• Agriculture does not automatically produce hierarchy

Sedentism

• Living/settling somewhere for a long period

• Can precede agriculture

• Tied to emergence of ceramics

Hierarchy

• Not automatically produced by agriculture

Abu Hereyra, Syria

• Tell Abu Hereyra, Syria

• Occupied 11,300-5,850 BCE

• Earliest known farmers

• Excavated in 1972-73 as salvage operation (now under a lake!)

• Pioneers of flotation!

Sannai-Maruyama, Japan

• Occupied 3900-2200 BCE

• Jomon site- earliest pottery in the world!

• Storage pits and above-ground storage

• Large long-houses

• First excavated in 1623!

• Identified again during survey for baseball stadium (1992)

• Settled, large hierarchical society without agriculture

Catalhoyuk, Turkey

• Occupied 7500-5600 BCE

• Tell site - “proto-city”

• First excavated in 1958- early data fabricated?

• Work in 1990s and on embraced digital/progressive methods

• Layers of houses

• Ritual surrounding agriculture

  • Female figurines

  • Domesticated sheep

• Evidence of egalitarianism

  • Men and women buried the same

  • Even distribution of traded goods

• Agriculture but very little hierarchy

Stone tools

• Rock deliberately shaped by humans

• Used to make the oldest and most durable artifacts

Reductive Technology

• Desired form is created by removal of material

• Requires planning

Percussion flaking

• Oldowan (2.6 mya)

• Acheulean (1.7 mya)

• Prepared cores (300 kya)

• Blades (50 kya)

Oldowan (2.6 mya)

• Percussion flaking

• Breaking one rock with another

Acheulean (1.7 mya)

• First tools people were making that’d fit in people’s hands more easily

• Requires more breaking/careful flaking

• Takes more time to produce

Prepared cores (300 kya)

• Gradually breaking pieces off in sequence

• Ready to go/use

Blades (50 kya)

• Flaking off long, thin pieces of rock

Ground/Polished stone (10 kya)

• Ground (versus flaked)

• Gradually wearing surfaces smooth

• Agriculture = more ground stones, axes, increased standardization

Clay

• Used to make the most durable artifacts (after stone)

• Fine grained sediment, moldable when wet, hard when fired or dried

Temper

• Non-plastic material added to clay

Pottery

• Vessels/containers made from clay

Ceramics

• Pottery, figurines, bricks…

We study ceramics the same way we study stone tools, which are

• Type (shape)

• Technology (reduction process)

• Use-wear (wear patterns)

• Sourcing (chemical analysis)

• + residue analysis

Pyrotechnology

• The control of fire

Smelting

• Extracting metal from ore using heat and reducing agents

• Pottery enables smelting

• Both depend on:

  • Temperature control

    • 600 Fahrenheit and up for pottery

    • 1085 and up for metals

  • Insulated firing structure

    • Kilns 

    • Furnaces 

  • Controlled airflow

    • Oxidizing (adding oxygen)

      • Redder 

    • Reducing (removing oxygen)

      • Whiter

Metallurgy

• The production and working of metals

• Typical progression of metallurgy:

  • Cold hammering to smelting to casting

  • Copper (soft metal, widely available) to bronze to iron

    • Softer metals to harder metals

    • From stone tools to these metals

      • Stone tools break (they’re made using reductive tech)

Characterization

• Aka sourcing

• The application of techniques of examination by which characteristic properties of the constituent material of traded goods, and therefore their source or origin, can be identified; e.g. thin-section analysis

Commodity

• Common/easy to obtain

• Practical purpose

• Types of objects that move through exchange

Prestige good

• Rare/labor intensive

• Social/political value

• Types of objects that move through exchange

Exchange

• Transfer or goods, materials, ideas, or services between people (includes many kinds in interactions)

• Anthropologists often analyze exchange using models of reciprocity

  • Generalized reciprocity: sharing without immediate return

  • Balanced reciprocity: exchange of roughly equal value

  • Negative reciprocity: attempting to maximize personal gain

• The broad process

Trade

• Organized exchange across distances

• A specific type of exchange

Interaction Sphere

• Regional network linking societies

• The networks created by those exchanges

Varna (Necropolis), Bulgaria

• 4,600-4,200 BCE

• Burial complex, composed primarily of cenotaphs

• Oldest “large” assemblage of worked gold

• Regional exchange network trading copper, yellow flint, obsidian, Spondylus shell

• Disparities in grave goods suggest increased social hierarchy

• 294 graves - only 62 have gold

• Most graves contain pottery, ground stone tools

• Four graves (1, 4, 36, 43) contain high amounts of gold

• Grave 43 contains over 1,000 gold items (out of a total of about 3,000)

• “Wealthiest grave of the 5th millennium”

• Independent gold workshops

• Copper and gold ore within the region

• Home to several specialized mining & production processes

Which site raises this question?: Does social hierarchy emerge through control of metal production?

Varna (Necropolis), Bulgaria

Tell/Tel

• An artificial mound, often with a flat top and steep sides, formed by the accumulated debris of thousands of years of human habitation