Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Three-Volume Set, Volume 1-3

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Professor Deborah M Pearsall The Frederick A Middlebush Chair in Social Sciences Department of Anthropology University of Missouri-Columbia Columbia, MO USA

Professor Deborah M.Pearsall

Deborah M. Pearsall was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA. She grew up in various places in the upper Midwest and graduated from high school in Avon Lake, Ohio. She returned to Michigan for college, where she attended the University of Michigan and majored in Anthropology. It was also at Michigan that she became interested in paleoethnobotany—the study of plant-people interrelationships through archaeology—and studied with Richard I. Ford. After graduation from college, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and began studying with South American archaeologist Donald W. Lathrap. There she became interested in Ecuador, and participated in Lathrap’s excavations at Real Alto, an ancient agricultural village. The study of macroremains and phytoliths from Real Alto became her dissertation research, and she received a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1979. In addition to continuing to work in Ecuador, Deborah has conducted research in Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Hawaii, Guam, and the Midwestern U.S., and has supervised students working in these and other regions. She has taught anthropology and carried out paleoethnobotanical studies at the University of Missouri in Columbia since 1978. She is the author of Paleoethnobotany, A Handbook of Procedures (Academic Press, 2000), Plants and People in Ancient Ecuador: The Ethnobotany of the Jama River Valley (Wadsworth, 2004), The Origins of Agriculture in the Neotropics (coauthor with D. R. Piperno, Academic Press, 1998), and editor of this encyclopedia. She enjoys gardening—especially growing old English roses—and writing, and lives on 80 acres outside Columbia with her husband Mike DeLoughery.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Takeru Akazawa Kochi University of Technology Kochi Japan Pedro Paulo A Funari Department of History Universidad Estadual de Campinas Sao Paulo Brazil Julian Henderson Department of Archaeology University of Nottingham Nottingham UK Augustin F C Holl Department of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI USA Joyce Marcus Museum of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI USA

M Rafique Mughal Department of Archaeology Boston University Boston, MA USA Daniel T Potts Department of Archaeology University of Sydney Sydney, NSW Australia Patty Jo Watson Washington University at St. Louis St. Louis, MO USA Steve Weber Department of Anthropology Washington State University Vancouver, WA USA Zhijun Zhao Institute of Archaeology Beijing China

FOREWORD Archaeology today has become a truly international undertaking, and it has done so by employing what has become a new and universal language. The record of the human past is a material one, recorded in the earth, in the buried remains of vanished civilizations and in the material traces which past communities have left behind. As this book clearly documents, those traces, the carefully excavated settlements and burials of early human groups and their artifacts, which they made and used, can today be made accessible in what we may call the language of archaeology. That language, intelligible in every part of the world, is able to transcend the limitations of written history. For narrative history, as set down in writing, is inevitably confined to the literate civilizations whose very early texts come down to us from just a few locations in the Old World. The universal language of archaeology, however, knows no such bounds. Instead it addresses the human use of material culture wherever human beings have lived. It draws upon a broad range of techniques – from stratigraphic excavation to radiocarbon dating, from aerial photography to molecular biology – which now make it possible to speak of a world archaeology, in which the experiences of every country and people can take their place. This book sets out in a coherent way to make that language clearly and directly intelligible to the reader, so that the basic techniques of archaeology can be understood. It goes on to apply those techniques to the entire human story. Its broad sweep takes us from the emergence of the first humans, initially in Africa, and their early out-of-Africa dispersals, through the whole gamut of human experience, dealing with the rise of farming communities, the dawn of civilizations, the formation of the first cities, and so down to the present, and to the postcolonial era in every part of the world. The good news is that every land, every inhabited area of the earth, does have its archaeology. Each community has a past, which today can be investigated with the use of the now-universal techniques of investigation described here. The scope is vast. The story unfolds here on a continent-by-continent basis. Only in recent decades has it been possible to put together such a survey. For it was radiocarbon dating that opened the way for early developments in every part of the world to be dated. Suddenly the chronology of early Australia or of southern Africa became just as secure and just as available as the comparable chronologies for Europe or for the ancient Near East. The whole scope of human achievement in every part of the world is becoming known through the practice of archaeology. The authors of this survey have produced an up-to-date account not only of the methods which constitute the language of archaeology but also of the principal findings which now allow us to speak of a world archaeology. The authorship of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology reflects the cosmopolitan status of archaeology today. It is truly international, with Chinese scholars writing many of the entries for China, African scholars for Africa. The coverage is, of course, global, covering every continent (including Oceania) and every period. It is also multifacetted, giving insights into the different schools of archaeological thought, which flourish today. It recognizes that philosophical themes (Marxist archaeology; Postprocessual archaeology) must rub shoulders with social topics (Ethnicity, Rise of political complexity), and both of these with issues of contemporary concern (Who owns the past?, Politics of archaeology). These in turn are found side-by-side with some of the key scientific subdisciplines (archaeometry, phytolith analysis, taphonomy), which today provide much of the vocabulary for that universal language of archaeology. The outcome is that this work will be read with profit in every part of the world. It will be as welcome in South America (where the Amazon basin for once achieves necessary coverage) as in Europe, as appropriate in Japan as in Mesoamerica. It reflects well the changing nature of archaeology, with the fast developing range of new research methods and the changing realities of a postcolonial world where the past of every area and region is of interest. Colin Renfrew

INTRODUCTION

Archaeology is a subject that fascinates us. From Egyptian tombs to a frozen Alpine wayfarer, from cities buried under volcanic ash to stone arrowheads turned up by the plow, archaeology is in the news and in our backyards. It is paradoxical that a subject that so easily captures the imagination is so difficult to access. Superficial media treatments and picturebook atlases and site guides on the one hand, jargonheavy scholarly books and narrowly focused articles on the other – there are few ways to learn about the real world of archaeology outside the university classroom or the dig site. The aim of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology is to change this, to make all aspects of archaeology accessible to a broad audience, from educated laypersons and university students eager to learn about the field, to scholars intent on broadening and updating their knowledge of the discipline. No existing work provides the breadth and depth of coverage achieved here. It has been my privilege and pleasure to work with over 260 talented archaeologists from around the globe during this project. In the pages that follow, they will introduce you to archaeology through contributions arranged in an easy-to-use, alphabetical format. From the moment I was invited to undertake this project, I knew that I wanted the Encyclopedia of Archaeology not only to showcase archaeological knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but to convey how archaeologists work, and to illustrate the diversity of issues and theoretical paradigms that drive our research. From this grew an underlying four-part structure for the Encyclopedia of Archaeology: Archaeology as a discipline The practice of archaeology Archaeology at the beginning of the twenty-first century: A world overview Geographical overviews Topics and issues that cross-cut geography Archaeology in the everyday world

The ‘Contents list by subject’, which follows this Introduction, illustrates how individual contributions are grouped conceptually within this framework. Each contribution to ‘Archaeology as a discipline’ places emphasis on the broad approach and subject matter of part of the field of archaeology, and provides historical context when appropriate. Here you will be introduced to schools of thought as distinctive as cognitive and evolutionary archaeology, learn of the historic roots and philosophy of the field, and read overviews of subjects from archaeoastronomy to forensic archaeology to urban archaeology. Contributions to ‘The practice of archaeology’ describe the nuts and bolts of how archaeological research is conducted, and incorporate case studies as illustrations of modern archaeological practice. Topics range from fieldwork, through analysis of artifacts and biological materials, to approaches to interpreting the archaeological record. Among our authors you will find experts and innovators in archaeological methodology. ‘Archaeology at the beginning of the twenty-first century: A world overview’ is a wide-ranging review of our knowledge of the past. Archaeological sites and cultural traditions are placed in regional and temporal context in contributions in the ‘Geographical overviews’ section. Each article is written by an archaeologist with hands-on research experience in the region, and includes maps and illustrations of sites and artifacts. Look up an archaeological site in the index (or use the search function in the online version) and you will be guided to the regional and topical articles that discuss it. Or just browse and learn the latest on the archaeology of East Africa, Micronesia, or the Lesser Antilles. Regions are ordered in the ‘Contents list by subject’ west to east, and north to south, and within regions contributions are ordered chronologically or by subregion, as deemed appropriate.

x Introduction

Contributions to ‘Topics and issues that cross-cut geography’ are in-depth articles on cutting-edge research in archaeology. Case studies, often from more than one region of the world, illustrate each topic. Here you will be introduced to research on subjects as diverse as extinctions of big game, social inequality, and daily life in ancient cities. Contributions on related subjects are grouped in the ‘Contents list by subject’. Finally, ‘Archaeology in the everyday world’ steps back from the approaches, methods, and findings of archaeology to look at archaeology as a profession. In this section are contributions on the ethical and legal aspects of practicing archaeology today, popular culture and archaeology, and archaeology and stakeholder communities.

The Encyclopedia of Archaeology would never have come to fruition without the hard work of the members of the Editorial Board, who assisted in developing the subject list, fine-tuned the geographical overview sections, suggested authors for contributions, and reviewed completed manuscripts. They each have my wholehearted thanks. I also thank the following friends and colleagues for their assistance and advice: Robert A. Benfer, Jr., J. Scott Bentley, Jane C. Biers, Christine Hastorf, Janet Levy, Naomi Miller, Hector Neff, Elizabeth Reitz, Ralph Rowlett, and Peter Warnock. Deborah M. Pearsall

A AFRICA, CENTRAL Contents Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists Great Lakes Area Sudan, Nilotic Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas

Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists Scott MacEachern, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary bantu languages A closely-related group of languages in the Niger–Congo family, now spoken through much of Africa south of the equator. The ‘Bantu expansion’ is the process – still not entirely understood – through which early Bantu languages spread to the east and south from their homeland on the Nigerian–Cameroon border, beginning perhaps 5000 years ago. Lupemban A Middle/Late Pleistocene stone tool industry, found in different areas of sub-Saharan Africa and descended from the Sangoan and eventually the Acheulean traditions. It is characterized by the extensive use of bifacial and core-tools. It is often assumed to be associated with forest environments, where these tools were used for woodworking and other functions. microlithic Stone tool industries characterized by the use of small tools, usually made by carefully breaking stone blades into predetermined shapes or by the production of very small blades. Microliths are defined as being <3 cm in length, and are often used as elements in composite tools. ‘semi-domesticates’ Plants that are not planted by humans and that do not need human assistance to reproduce, but yield products important to the human communities in the area. Because of their importance, people often protect and encourage the growth of semi-domesticates, for example, through weeding of competing species. tazunu Funerary monuments found in the western Central African Republic, first built in the early first millennium BC. They consist of a group of upright standing stones, usually between 1 and 3 m in length, set in an artificial platform that often contains one or more rectangular chambers.

Tshitolian A Holocene stone tool industry of western Central Africa, characterized by a heavy-duty bifacial tool component originating in the Middle/Late Pleistocene Lupemban industry, as well as a variety of different types of arrowheads and microlithic tools.

Archaeologists know less about the prehistory of Central Africa through the last 10 000 years than about any other part of the continent. This is only in part because of the difficulties of working in tropical forest: indeed, some of the least-known areas are in the woodlands along the northeastern fringes of the Congo Basin. More important have been the effects of decades of political instability and an underdeveloped infrastructure that goes back to the colonial period. Over the last decade, however, some parts of Central Africa – especially in the northwest – have yielded a great deal of information on ancient occupations in this period. Moisture levels in Central Africa increased dramatically from the terminal Pleistocene, much drier than the present, to the early Holocene, which would have been generally wetter than today. This corresponded to a great increase in forests over the same period. However, models of a uniform expansion of tropical forest out of Late Pleistocene refugia are oversimplified. There seems to have been a great deal of local diversity in plant associations, as well as significant regional variations in rainfall, temperatures, and seasonality, through this period. Instead of thinking about environmentally determined depopulations and repopulations over Central Africa as a whole, we must imagine human communities adapting to a wide variety of circumstances and resources in different areas and at different times.

2 AFRICA, CENTRAL/Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists

The beginning of the Holocene saw all of Central Africa occupied by foraging communities. Little evidence of these populations is left, aside from their stone tool industries, which show a good deal of continuity from the Late Pleistocene. Not surprisingly, in the center of the continent, these industries are diverse, with stone tool-kits in the northwestern part of Central Africa showing some similarities with adjacent areas of West Africa, eastern industries exhibiting some resemblances to East Africa, and so on. Perhaps most uniquely Central African is the Tshitolian industry, found primarily in the west, in Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo, northwestern Angola, and parts of Gabon. The Tshitolian seems to be derived from the Late Pleistocene Lupemban industry, and shares with the Lupemban an important component of heavy-duty bifacial tools, as well as arrowheads and microlithic tools. In other parts of Central Africa, microlithic industries predominate and the bifacial tools are rare or absent. We know little about the lifeways of these populations, but the available evidence indicates that for the most part they were

Nigeria

broad-spectrum, mobile hunter-gatherers. Late Pleistocene lakeshore sites like Ishango in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, with their extraordinary bone harpoon points and evidence for fishing and hunting, exhibit striking similarities to Holocene sites in similar environments in East Africa, but there is no firm evidence for the persistence of this lacustrine adaptation in Holocene Central Africa (Figure 1). Just after 7000 years ago, significant innovations appeared in the economic and technical adaptations of communities in the northwestern part of the region. On what is now the frontier between southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon, archaeologists working at sites like Shum Laka have found evidence for consumption of nuts from the incense tree (Canarium schweinfurthii), a wild species that would be increasingly exploited by humans over the succeeding millennia, as well as the first evidence for pottery in the region. At the same time, larger bifacial (but not Tshitolian) tools appear among the microlithic stone tools that earlier dominated in this area, as does the first evidence for ground/polished stone tools. In later periods, such tools would be used in horticulture and forest clearance.

Chad Sudan

Shum Laka

Tazunu sites

Central African Republic

Cameroon Bioko Eq. Guinea Pit Sites Gabon

Republic of the Congo Tshitolian

Ishango

Uganda

Rwanda

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Burundi Tanzania

Upemba sites

Angola

Zambia

Figure 1 Some of the sites and traditions mentioned in the text. The extent of archaeological traditions is approximate.

AFRICA, CENTRAL/Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists 3

The Early-/Mid-Holocene appearance of these new cultural elements signals the origins of a very different adaptation to life in Central Africa, one eventually involving increased sedentism, a concentration on particular wild plant foods and increased levels of environmental manipulation. Over the next four millennia, these elements would come to dominate archaeological assemblages in this part of the region, as important ‘semi-domesticates’ such as oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) were added to local economies. This adaptation would culminate in the farming villages of southern Cameroon and Gabon, during the first millennium BC. These sites are characterized by the occurrence of large numbers of deep pits, probably used for storage and garbage disposal; these pits frequently contain pottery, Canarium, and oil palm remains, and also in some cases the remains of domesticated plants and animals, including millet, banana (originally a Southeast Asian domesticate), and sheep/ goats. These pit sites are probably related to sites of a similar period in western Democratic Republic of the Congo. The spread of these communities into Central Africa from the northwestern part of the region is likely associated with the spread of Bantu languages, since the origins of those languages are in the Grassfields region around Shum Laka and the archaeological evidence agrees in general with linguistic evidence for the early expansion of Bantu languages. After the middle of the first millennium AD, few pits are found in sites in this area: the reason for this is unknown, but probably involves changes in settlement patterning during this period. The prehistory of other regions is not as well known through the mid-Holocene, but ground and polished stone axes similar to those found around Shum Laka occur in different parts of Central Africa. In some cases, for example, at Tchissanga and related sites on the coast of Republic of the Congo and in the Central African Republic (CAR), these are found with different kinds of pottery; in other cases, as on the Uelian sites of northern Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Angola and elsewhere, they exist as isolated discoveries, without significant cultural context. In very few cases have these occurrences been dated, but those dates that do exist indicate a Mid-/LateHolocene time period, and these sites are probably evidence of processes of economic intensification similar to those in the northwest – which, indeed, may be their ultimate origin. On the island of Bioko, now part of Equatorial Guinea, the use of stone tools, especially axes, would persist until the nineteenth century. In western CAR, these developments are, by the early first millennium BC, associated with the appearance of the tazunu sites, megalithic sites in which upright standing stones are usually set in low artificial

mounds. These are likely to have been funerary monuments, although not all excavated examples contain inhumations, and a tradition of tazunu construction may have continued in the area until a few centuries ago. The construction of these impressive monuments, and their association with single burials (where any are found), would seem to imply the existence of some degree of social ranking in western Central African Republic through this period (see Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area). The appearance of iron artifacts would eventually transform the economies and even the ideologies of Central African societies, but this did not happen immediately. Indeed, the available archaeological evidence indicates that early iron technologies were incorporated into the already-existing cultural systems discussed above, and that traditional assumptions of an Iron Age, a sudden break with earlier practices, seem to be particularly misleading in this case. The first evidence of iron production (in fact, very frequently the slag by-products of iron smelting and forging) appears on sites in northwestern Central Africa during the first millennium BC. Establishing the precise timing of that appearance is difficult, in part because of difficulties with radiocarbon calibration during the middle of that millennium. However, both a habitation site associated with the tazunu of the CAR and one of the pit sites in southern Cameroon have yielded dates for iron working of about 2600 years ago, and so between the ninth and the sixth centuries BC. This generally agrees with dates on some West African iron-working sites as well, but more work remains to be done on the origins of this technology in subSaharan Africa. Sites with iron from this area, in Gabon and in Republic of the Congo, became more common by the late first millennium BC, and through the ensuing centuries in other areas of Central Africa, until by perhaps AD 800 iron was being used throughout Central Africa (except on Bioko, as noted above, and perhaps by isolated foraging groups elsewhere). Over this same period, the use of stone tools for the most part ceased, presumably replaced by iron. In general, this parallels the introduction of iron into East Africa, although the exact routes by which that introduction took place are unknown. Over the ensuing centuries, as iron technologies became established through the region, we see the development of larger-scale societies, the extension of trade networks and evidence for increasing social complexity in some parts of Central Africa. This is most strikingly demonstrated in the Upemba Depression of southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a remarkable series of high-status grave

4 AFRICA, CENTRAL/Great Lakes Area

sites, dating to between the eighth and eighteenth centuries AD, indicate the processes of social differentiation and ideological development that culminated in the historically known Luba state. There is scattered archaeological evidence for significant trading networks and iron and copper production in western Democratic Republic of the Congo at the same time period, as well. In other areas – the Central African Republic and northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example – the village-level societies that developed in the first millennium BC and early first millennium AD remained the dominant economic and political units into the colonial period. As in much of the rest of Africa, there has been little archaeological investigation of recent centuries, and still less of the period of European contact. Over the last two millennia, archaeological data are increasingly supplemented by data from linguistic and historical research. These sources provide information on social and cultural processes that are not easily approached archaeologically – the details of the expansion of Bantu languages, the developing relations between farmers and foragers (Pygmy/BaTwa) in Central Africa and the interplay between ideology and sociopolitical relations across the region as a whole, for example. Only through such integrated approaches will researchers be able to approach a more complete picture of the Central African past. See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Africa,

Historical Archaeology.

Further Reading Clist B (2005) Des premiers villages aux premiers Europe´ens autour de l’estuaire du Gabon: Quatre mille´naires d’interactions entre l’homme et son milieu. Doctoral thesis, Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles. Cornelissen E (2002) Human responses to changing environments in Central Africa between 40,000 and 12,000 BP. Journal of World Prehistory 16: 197–235. de Maret P (1999) The power of symbols and the symbols of power through time: probing the Luba past. In: McIntosh SK (ed.) Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, pp. 151–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klieman KA (2003) ‘The Pygmies Were Our Compass’. Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 CE. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Lanfranchi R and Clist B (eds.) (1991) Aux origines de l’afrique centrale. Libreville/Paris: Centre Culturel Francaise de Libreville, Se´pia. Lavachery P (2001) The Holocene archaeological sequence of Shum Laka Rock Shelter (Grassfields, Western Cameroon). African Archaeological Review 18: 213–248. Lavachery P, MacEachern S, Bouimon T, et al. (2005) Kome´ to Ebome´: archaeological research for the Chad Export Project, 1999–2003. Journal of African Archaeology 3: 175–193.

Mbida CM, van Neer W, Doutrelepont H, and Vrydaghs L (2000) Evidence for banana cultivation in central and animal husbandry during the first millennium BC in the forest of southern Cameroon. Journal of Archaeological Science 27: 151–162. Vansina J (1990) Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Series. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Zangato E (1999) Socie´te´s Pre´historiques et Me´galithes Dans le Nord-ouest de la Re´publique Centrafricaine. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Great Lakes Area Augustin F C Holl, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary earthwork Any early structure built from a mound or bank of earth, often created as fortification. forager Someone who hunts for food or provisions. iron smelting A process of heating and melting iron ores and concentrates and then separating the desirable molten metals such as copper from other elements. kingdoms Peak periods of development in ancient history.

The Interlacustrine area is flanked on both east and west by important freshwater lakes; Lake Victoria, L. Tanganyika, L. Kivu, and L. Albert. It is stretched over the eastern boundary of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Northern Tanzania, and the western fringe of Kenya. Several important Stone Age sites have been excavated at Matupi cave, Katanda sites of the Semliky valley, as well as Munyama cave in Uganda. Late Stone foragers using microliths were spread out in small groups over this vast area. The arrival of iron-using Bantuspeaking farmers in the first millennium BC triggered significant long-term increase in settlement size and density. The volcanic soils in this highly humid area are fertile, productive, and support some among the highest population density of Africa today. Evidence for iron smelting dating from the first half to the middle of the first millennium BC (900–500 BC) is documented at Gasiza I and Mirami III in Rwanda and the BuHaya region in Northwestern Tanzania. These Urewe farming communities were later joined by livestock herders from the Nile watershed. Bananas and other Southasian species took root and prospered in the fertile Interlacustrine zone. Bananas, one of the Malayo-Polynesia plants, were thought to have

AFRICA, CENTRAL/Sudan, Nilotic 5

reached Africa during the first millennium BC or very beginning of the first millennium AD. Bananas (Musa sp.) phytoliths from a core drilled at Munsa in Uganda and dated to the fourth millennium BC point to an earlier than thought introduction (see Africa, Central: Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists; Sudan, Nilotic). The Great Lakes region and the Savanna-land south of the equatorial rainforest witnessed the development of complex chiefdoms and kingdoms during the second millennium AD. In the Great Lakes region, the development at Ntusi, Munsa, Bigo, Kibiro, Mubende, and other earthworks sites is remarkable. Large-scale cattle husbandry is documented at Ntusi. Kibiro witnessed an impressive intensification in the production of salt from the local brackish springs. An agricultural colonization took place in western Uganda. However, tracing the precise evolutionary trajectory of any of the Great Lakes, past polities is still hampered by the lack of sustained long-term archaeological research and terminological uncertainties. Archaeological survey, and the analyses of the ceramic material collected was used by Robertshaw to develop a model of the development of social complexity. Four areas, Nyantungo in the west, Kibale in the north, Munsa/ Kakumiro in the Northeast, and Kasambya in the southeast, were sampled to document variations in settlement patterns and pottery shapes, design, and decoration. Most of the surveyed sites (>90%) are small homesteads/hamlets measuring less than 1 ha in size. Large sites without earthworks seem to have been positioned at defensive locations. While, with a certain range of variation, earthworks sites may have been part of small and competing polities. After the sixteenth century AD, these rival and competing polities came to be united under the rulership of the Bito dynasty that created the Nyoro kingdom in Western Uganda. Rwanda and Burundi on the western side of the Interlacustrine zone also developed rival but small chiefdoms. In general and all over the Lacustrine zone, iron working was strongly associated with rulership. See also: Africa, Central: Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists; Sudan, Nilotic; Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas.

Further Reading Connah G (1996) Kibiro: The Salt of Bunyoro, Past and Present. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa. Ehret C (1998) An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 BC to AD 400. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Lejju BJ, Robertshaw P, and Taylor D (2006) Africa’s Earliest Bananas? Journal of Archaeological Science 33: 102–113. Reid A (1997) Lacustrine states. In: Vogel JO (ed.) Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa, pp. 501–507. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Robertshaw P (1994) Archaeological survey, ceramic analysis, and state formation in Western Uganda. The African Archaeological Review 12: 105–131. Robertshaw P (2003) Explaining the origins of state in East Africa. In: Vogel (ed.) East African Archaeology: Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders, pp. 149–166. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Schoenbrun DL (1998) A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Sudan, Nilotic Kathleen Nicoll, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Acheulian Designating, or of, a Lower Palaeolithic culture characterized by skillfully made bifacial flint hand axes. artifact Any object manufactured, used, or modified by humans. Common examples include tools, utensils, art, food remains, and other products of human activity. Aterian A stoneworking tradition that is considered an evolved style of the Palaeolithic of North Africa; it includes distinctive tools with shanks (i.e., tangs) for mounting to a handle, and basically worked leaf-shaped points. calcareous Containing calcium carbonate minerals. chert A very fine grained rock formed in ancient ocean sediments. It often has a semi-glassy finish and is usually white, pinkish, brown, gray, or blue-gray in color. It can be shaped into arrowheads by chipping. It has often been called flint, but true flint is found in chalk deposits and is a distinctive blackish color. dispersal The process in which an organism spreads out geographically. flint A hard, brittle microcrystalline form of quartz commonly found in sedimentary limestone or in chalk deposits, or otherwise any kind of stone that can be flaked. lithic Stone tools or projectiles. lithic scatter A spatially discrete, though sometimes extensive, scatter of lithic artifacts recovered from the surface, for example, by fieldwalking, rather than from a particular archaeological context. megalith An arrangement or structure of extremely large stones, possibly aligned. microlith Small tools that may be any of a variety of shapes, and which have been produced from microblades. These are too small to have been used without hafting, some were set edge to edge in a groove in a bone or wood shaft and so served as cutting tools, while others would have been functional as barbs. Neolithic Refers to the first era of village farmers in any region. nomad A member of a group of people who move according to the seasons from place to place in search of food, water, and grazing land.

6 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sudan, Nilotic optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) Quaternary geologic age-dating technique used to determine the depositional age of sediments by considering mineral grains as dosimeters that ‘accumulate’ energy over time as a function of natural environmental radiation. The technique is based on the solid-state properties of mineral grains rather than isotopic decay of constituent elements (like K–Ar or radiocarbon dating). pastoralism The form of agriculture specifically known as animal husbandry; it includes the tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, and sheep. It also contains a mobile element, moving the herds in search of fresh pasturelands and water resources. Pleistocene A geologic period, usually thought of as the most recent Ice Age, which began about 1.8 million years ago and ended with the melting of the large continental glaciers creating the modern climatic pattern about 11 500 years ago. pluvial A term commonly used to refer to a time period characterized by increased precipitation and reduced evaporation, resulting in enhanced moisture conditions. prehistoric The period prior to written records for a given area; note that the absolute date for the prehistoric period varies from place to place. social complexity Refers to patterns in society at levels from the individual to the group, as it relates to various human adaptive systems both comprising and surrounding a society. Complexity can refer to the rituals, culture, and practices of communities, regional systems, or empires. stratified A term that refers to sediments with primary (undisturbed) characteristics, that have been deposited or laid down in successive layers. Often the succession of layers can provide a relative chronological sequence, with the earliest at the bottom and the latest at the top.

Today the central African landscape west of the Nile River is hyperarid, with <10 mm annual rainfall; the modern Saharan region generally lacks sufficient surface water to sustain nomadic pastoralism, and settlement is localized around permanent oases and wells. The prehistoric records discovered in the desert landscape are sparse (Figure 1), and sites are commonly associated with ancient sources of water, including streams, springs, and lakes relict from ‘pluvial’ time periods of enhanced rainfall. Palaeoenvironmental evidence suggests that the region has remained arid with occasional semi-arid periods when the region received around 300 mm annual rainfall, and the Sudano-Sahelian vegetation zone extended northward. The changing climatic conditions and ready availability of water resources were key factors in determining when this marginal region could sustain life and cultural activities. The geoarchaeological record informs the emerging spatial and temporal reconstruction of the alternate aridification and peopling of the Sahara since the Later Pleistocene, the period
250 000– 10 000 years ago.

A Brief History of Explorers and Archaeologists Some of the first artifactual finds from the region called the ‘Western’ or ‘Libyan’ Desert and ‘the

Sudan’ were documented by Ralph A. Bagnold and members of the Long Range Desert Group, a British army unit active during World War II. In the 1930s, excavations on Lake Qarun-Fayum and the Kharga Oases by Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardiner provided the first integrated investigations into the prehistory and palaeoenvironment of the region; ironically these women were not granted membership into the Royal Geographical Society, although their reports have stood the test of time and paved the way for later researchers. Field studies in the 1970s by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition discovered some important stratified sites of Middle Stone Age–Early/Middle Palaeolithic typology, which predate the last phase of glaciation. Aterian artifacts at the site at Bıˆr Tirfawi, for example, are interstratified with calcareous lake beds that likely date to the period 125 000–90 000 years ago. Farther to the north, the Dakhleh Oasis Project has studied the remains of several prehistoric periods (Aterian through Graeco-Roman) since the 1980s. Acheulian hand ax finds older than 300 000 years were documented in the Bıˆr Kiseiba and Selima Sand Sheet regions by Smithsonian Institution researchers conducting fieldwork in the 1990s. Today, various international teams of scientists continue to decipher prehistoric archives from the Gilf Kebir, the defunct former tributaries of the Nile in northern Sudan, the Tibesti and Fezzan, and the Niger and Chad Basin.

The Fossil Record Although the Fayum is famous for its Oligocene fossil ape-like primates such Aegyptopithecus, no hominid fossils have been discovered from the broader region. Isolated Late Pleistocene lithic scatters and workshops exist, but related skeletal remains are extremely rare from Saharan North Africa. One of the most significant finds dating to the Middle Palaeolithic is an early anatomically modern human (H. sapiens sapiens) skeleton discovered along the Nile Valley
250 miles south of Cairo. At Taramsa, an anatomically modern child (aged 8–10 years) was deliberately buried in an open-air chert extraction site, which places the skeleton in direct context with worked tools and the quarry rock. A series of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates from correlative eolian sands suggests an age for the burial between 49 800 and 80 400 years ago, with a mean age of 55 000. As one of the few well-dated sites in the region, Taramsa provides insight regarding origin of modern humans as preserved within the Nilotic region, one of the likely passageways ‘Out of Africa’ as modern humans dispersed from East Africa to Eurasia.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sudan, Nilotic 7

32⬚ Mediterranean Sea

30⬚

Cairo Fayum EGYPT

28⬚

Nile River

Great Sand Sea

Taramsa

26⬚

Kharga Dakhleh Gilf Kebir LIBYA

Bîr Sahara

24⬚ Bîr Tirfawi Kiseiba Nabta

22⬚

Selima Sand Sheet

Gebel Uwien'at

20⬚

SUDAN

CHAD

18⬚

16⬚ Wadi Howar White Nile

map scale

200 km E 24⬚

Blue Nile

after Nicoll, 2001 28⬚

32⬚

Figure 1 Location of key sites mentioned from the northeastern Sahara, an area covering 92 000 000 km, and including the Western Desert of Egypt, northwest Sudan, and the adjacent parts of Libya and Chad, which together are about the size of western Europe.

Geoarchaeological Records from the NE Saharan Region Spatiotemporal patterns of prehistoric occupation suggest changes in the loci where people congregated, possibly as a function of changing water resource availability over time as the environment fluctuated between a habitable savanna and an inhospitable desert. The earliest occupation is associated with the artifacts of the Acheulian tradition of the Lower Paleolithic, and these finds are commonly associated

with groundwater-fed lakes, springs, and streams (wadis) with headwaters at higher elevations in the Plateaux escarpments. The chronology is inferential and not well constrained, but likely spans the period before 500 000 to 300 000 years ago, and is distinct from the Acheulian tradition of the Nile Valley. The archaeological record of the Middle Palaeolithic is better known, and several sites contain in situ living floors and diverse faunal assemblages, which reflect favorable climatic conditions. Much of

8 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sudan, Nilotic

the Middle Palaeolithic chronology is relative, and is based on taxonomic comparisons with diagnostic artifacts defined in units dating from 250 000 to
38 000 BP. The two oldest units, the Mousterian and the Aterian, occur in both the Western Desert and Nile Valley, but the comparative local economic patterns are markedly different. Lithics and faunal remains recovered from valley sites suggest reliance on fishing and Bos hunting. Alternately, in the Western Desert, hunting of large game was preferred over the capture of smaller animals. Large groundwater-supported lakes at Bıˆr Tirfawi and Bıˆr Sahara were favored settlement locales, although other environmental settings also were exploited and reoccupied. Within the Western Desert, the Aterian technocomplex is associated with the latest Pleistocene wet period, which preceded a long hyperarid episode that persisted until the early Holocene. The precise duration of the hyperarid interval remains unconstrained. There is no evidence for local rainfall or spring activity in the region west of the Nile between
40 000 and 11 000 BP, and human activity was confined to the valley, as preserved in Khormusan variants of the latest Middle Palaeolithic and other Late Palaeolithic complexes. The region beyond the Nile Valley was not reoccupied until the onset of suitable climate conditions
12 000 BP, when effective precipitation was enhanced due to the incursion of monsoonal rains from tropical Africa. Occasional rains created seasonal ponds and sustained vegetation that attracted game and people to a region that was otherwise desert. Savanna grasses, trees, and bushes enabled the subsistence of hares, gazelle, and a few small carnivores. Even during the Early Holocene climatic optimum
11 000–5500 cal BP, however, the region remained quite dry and drought prone (see Africa, South: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers). Characteristic tools and microliths, pottery, and ostrich eggshell beads are present at wadis, springs, and small depressions known as pans and playas, places where rainwater ponded after storms. Most of the terminal Paleolithic/Neolithic assemblages are located alongside water features fed solely by rainfall.

Neolithic Pluvials and the Emergence of Social Complexity: Examples from Nabta Playa Evidence across the northeastern Sahara suggests discrete phases of Neolithic activity during the Holocene climatic optimum. The sequence at Nabta Playa

reveals three wet–dry phases bracketed by radiocarbon dates. The accompanying stratigraphic and cultural record reflects critical transitions from foraging to food production strategies involving domestication and animal husbandry, and points toward emerging traditions of social complexity. The first settlements at Nabta Playa date between 11 000–9300 cal years ago, and include herders of domesticated(?) cattle who carried distinctive ceramic vessels decorated with wavy impressed patterns; this pottery is among the oldest known in Africa. In a similar manner to modern West African peoples, the Nabtans may have regarded their cattle as economic units of power, social status and prestige, as well as ‘walking larders’ that supplied milk and blood, rather than meat. Once the playa dried up, people migrated to areas with more water, possibly to the Nile in the east or areas further south (see Africa, West: Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists; Africa, South: Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa). After 9000 years ago, larger settlements were established at Nabta; small huts were arranged in straight lines, and walk-in wells were dug to supply the Nabtan residents with enough water to stay for longer periods. People survived on a number of wild edible plants (sorghum, millets, legumes, tubers, fruits) and small animals, including hares and gazelles. Around 8800 years ago (7800 BP, uncalibrated), pottery was produced locally. Around 8100 years ago, there is evidence for the domestication of larger animals, goats and sheep (see Animal Domestication). Between 8000 and 7000 years ago, Nabta was abandoned during two major droughts. As hyperarid conditions developed, the water table dropped, deflation persisted, and conditions became uninhabitable. The people returning to Nabta after the droughts were a complex society with an enhanced degree of organization and control, possibly centered around some ritualistic belief system associated with livestock. Excavated items supporting this inference include sacrifices of young cows and their burial in clay-lined and roofed chambers covered by stone slabs. Nabtans also constructed 25þ complex building structures with surface and subterranean features, including a shaped stone that could represent the oldest sculpture in Egypt. They also erected megaliths, alignments of large stones, and an astronomical ‘calendar circle’ like Stonehenge that marked the solstice at 6500 BP. Another significant find near Nabta is the first Neolithic cemetery in Egypt. A series of richly furnished graves date to
6400 and 6000 radiocarbon years BP (uncalibrated), and demonstrate patterns of local pastoralists who practiced transhumance during

AMERICAS, NORTH/Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas 9

the later Neolithic period. In this manner, the Nabtan culture once again reflects that Saharan people had affliations with, and profound effects upon, the incipient Egyptian civilization that emerged from the Nile Valley as the region progressively aridified. See also: Africa, North: Nubia; Sahara, Eastern; Africa, South: Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa; Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers; Africa, West: Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists; Animal Domestication.

animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either. Indian Ocean trade Monsoon based trade linking the Indian sub-continent with coastal regions of east Africa and the southern African hinterland. slash-and-burn agriculture The cutting and burning of forests or woodlands to create fields for agriculture or pasture for livestock, or for a variety of other purposes. Zimbabwe Culture Refers to the states and material culture linked with the ancestral Shona speakers between AD 1100 and 1900. Mapungubwe is the earliest Zimbabwe Culture State, followed by Great Zimbabwe, and the Torwa-Changamire and Mutapa states. Drystone walls (known as Dzimbahwes – houses of stone), built using the precise placement method (without mortar) are the best known manifestation of this culture.

Further Reading Burroughs WJ (2005) Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper R and Kro¨pelin S (2006) Climate-controlled Holocene occupation in the Sahara: Motor of Africa’s Evolution. Science 313: 803–807. Midant-Reynes B (1992) The Prehistory of Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell. Nicoll K (2004) Recent environmental change and prehistoric human activity in Egypt and northern Sudan. Quaternary Science Reviews 23: 561–580. Phillipson DW (1998) African Archaeology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rice M (2003) Egypt’s Making. The Origins of Ancient Egypt 5000–2000 BC, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Shaw T, Sinclair P, Andah B, and Okpoko A (eds.) (1995) The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns. London: Routledge. Wendorf FA and Schild RA (1980) Prehistory of the Eastern Sahara. New York: Academic Press.

Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas Innocent Pikirayi, University of Pretoria, Tshwane, South Africa Shadreck Chirikure, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary agro-pastoral A mode of production that combines field culture and husbandry with the use of pasture areas. colonization The act or process of establishing a colony or colonies. Colonization encompasses all large-scale emigrations of an established population to a ‘new’ location, such as immigration, the establishment of expatriate communities, and the use of guest workers. hunter-gatherer society A society whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and

Introduction The Zimbabwe plateau and adjacent regions (Figure 1) form part of the southern African subcontinent, south of the Zambezi, north of the Limpopo Rivers. In physiographic terms, it is part of High Africa, with elevations ranging from 500 to more than 2500 m above sea level. A moist savannah woodland biome dominates the plateau, and gives way to a dry woodland scrub further west, which becomes the Kalahari semidesert. The climate is largely tropical, although the higher escarpments to the east could be described as montane (see Africa, South: Kalahari Margins).

Hunter-Foragers Stone tools attributed to the Oldowan, Acheulian, and post-Acheulian traditions represent evidence of hominid/hominoid hunter-forager activity in southern Africa. Homo sapiens or early modern humans populated this region from the Middle Pleistocene up to about 40 000 years ago. They are associated with the development of abstract forms of human behavior such as the use of ochre, ostrich egg shell containers, and distinctive stone tool technologies. Tool assemblages representative of the Bambata (Stillbay) tradition have prepared cores, rare crescents, bifacial and unifacial points, denticulates, and multifaceted striking platforms. Related traditions include Tshangula and Zombepata in the western and northern parts of the plateau. Similar developments occur in the adjacent Zambezi valley, in the Batoka gorge and the Gwembe Valley. The emergence of modern humans 40 000 years ago witnessed a change toward advanced stoneworking techniques, evidenced by microlithic technologies. Such tools robustly assisted humans to cope with increasingly colder climatic conditions culminating with the Last Glacial Maximum around 18 000 years ago. Also, they were adapted to the complex hunting and gathering practices that developed since then.

10 AFRICA, EAST/Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas

Kadzi

MUTA

Zombepata Mutota

PA ST

Zvongombe

e

llag

t Vi

r Swa

ATE Nhunguza

Zambezi

, Diana s Vow

900 1200

Redcliff

Sawmills

Danamombe

TORWA STATE Gokomere Great Zimbabwe

Bambata

12

00

Khami

INDIAN OCEAN

Tshangula

90

0

MAKGADIKGADI PANS Schroda Mapungubwe 0

200 km Key Middle/late stone age sites

First millennium CE agro-pastoral sites

State capitals

Figure 1 Map of the Zimbabwe plateau showing archaeological sites associated with important cultural developments from the Middle Pleistocene.

An important development during the terminal Pleistocene and continuing into the Holocene relates to hunter-forager artistic and ritual traditions. These are paintings and engravings, found in caves, rock shelters, and open spaces. This ‘art’ is a product of shamanistic rituals and ceremonies connected with healing and rainmaking (Figure 2). Some of this art played a role in instructive teachings during certain ceremonies such as initiation, while other art may have expressed the local cosmological world of myths and symbolism. Some depict intergroup rivalries or conflicts. A majority of the art was authored by San hunter-gatherers, and depicts paintings dominated by the eland, an animal important to their ritual life. Other painting traditions are attributed to herder Khoekhoen and Bantu agro-pastoralists, and these continue into recent historical periods.

Early Herders In the western regions of the plateau and adjoining Kalahari sandveld, sheep, goats, and cattle were known earlier than the permanent settlements associated with the first crop farmers, and have been recovered in some later Holocene forager-hunter contexts. They date 2000–3000 years ago and, given the absence of their wild prototypes, may have been introduced in the region from further north. Events associated with early pastoral societies in the region are attributed to ancestral San and Khoekhoen communities, whose languages are related to those of some hunter-forager groups in eastern Africa. The spread of their language and other aspects of culture are, however, still in dispute. The archaeological horizons of sites with Bambata pottery have no signs of

AFRICA, EAST/Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas 11

Figure 3 Example of pottery made by agro-pastoralist farmers between cal CE 400 and 600. This Happy Rest potsherd was recovered from an extensive village site on the margins of the plateau in the Tswapong Hills of Botswana. Photo: P. Fredrikson.

Figure 2 Late Stone Age rock art from Diana’s Vow, in eastern Zimbabwe. The painting depicts a Shaman in trance. Photo: P. Taruvinga. (National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe).

experimentation like those in northern parts of the continent. Presumably, processes of complex interaction and shifting identities between resident hunterforagers and pastoralists and hunter-herders have formed the archaeological record that we see. The depiction of domestic animals on rock art not only attests to some of these events, but also signifies their importance in early pastoral economies (see Animal Domestication).

Agro-pastoral Communities Settled farmers identified with the speakers of ancestral Bantu languages were established in much of southern Africa, including the Zimbabwe plateau by the early first millennium CE. Their origins lie somewhere in the northern Equatorial rain forests. It remains unclear how they spread over much of the region in a fairly short period of time. The process may have involved ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture whereby after few years, communities would abandon a piece of land due to marginal fertility of the soils, and move on to another. This process is dated from the third century BCE and continues throughout the first and early second millennium CE, attesting

to the expansion and spread of farming activities and iron production in southern Africa. Archaeological sites yielding well-fired, thickbodied ceramics decorated with either grooved or comb-stamped designs identify the expansion and spread of agro-pastoral societies (Figure 3). Most sites exhibit metalworking, the keeping of livestock, and pole-and-daub structures of permanent settlement. This pottery has been recovered from the Lake Victoria interior and coastal regions of eastern Africa, much of central Africa, the northern highveld and the eastern coastal zones of South Africa. This pottery is identical in both structure and design. Archaeologists have ascribed it to traditions or cultures which are further divided into time segments (phases), and geographical areas (facies). On the Zimbabwe plateau, such traditions include Gokomere-Ziwa, Zhizo, Kadzi, and Chinhoyi and they are all associated with early farming and iron-using communities who grew Bambara groundnuts, cucurbits, sorghum, and cow peas. They supplemented these with wild grasses and plant foods, wild animals, and marine resources. Cattle were very important in the sociopolitical and economic organization of these societies. This significance was expressed through a binary-coded settlement system known as the Central Cattle Pattern. Residential units surrounded cattle byres, which were the domain of men. Archaeologists unveiled this settlement pattern at Tabazingwe in western Zimbabwe, Kgaswe on the margins of the Kalahari and Schroda in northern South Africa (see Plant Domestication). From CE 600, these early farmers established large village settlements in the plateau and adjacent areas. Mainly situated along fertile agricultural soils and river basins, village sites covered areas averaging at least 5 ha in extent. Archaeological evidence from sites

12 AFRICA, EAST/Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas

such as Kadzi and Swart Village in northern Zimbabwe, Schroda in the Limpopo Valley, and various sites in the Tswapong Hills of Botswana attest to these villages as hubs of religious, economic, and political activities. Craft specialization was well developed as shown by the ubiquity of concentrated remains of iron- (Figure 4) and ivory-working. This was strongly interwoven with the development of intraregional trade and the integration of the Zimbabwe plateau area into the world system through the Indian Ocean long-distance trade that connected the interior

Figure 4 Multiple fused tuyeres from a possible specialist iron smelting village, Tswapong Hills, Botswana.

of southern Africa with parts of Asia and the Persian Gulf. In this long-distance trade network, local products including ivory and iron were exchanged for exotic goods such as glass beads.

The Development of Social Complexity and the Zimbabwe Culture States During the late first millennium CE, intensive agricultural production and long-distance trade saw the rise of powerful elites who dominated the economy and politics of the region. The interplay of these factors with ideology and ritual led to the establishment of the early states or kingdoms. Mapungubwe, located in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin is but one example. Mapungubwe has dry-stone-walled areas that housed the elite on the hilltop. Ritual objects were used as insignia for political office while prestigious gold objects and glass beads expressed their wealth. Craft specialization was a hallmark of these early kingdoms with metal-working, bead-making, and weaving flourishing. After close to a century of prospering, environmental degradation and shifting trade opportunities occasioned the rise of a more powerful system at Great Zimbabwe some 300 km to the north. After eclipsing Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe controlled long-distance trade with the Indian Ocean

Figure 5 Photograph of the Great Enclosure and Valley enclosures at Great Zimbabwe.

AFRICA, EAST/Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas 13

while the Swahili traders acted as intermediaries in a world system that linked widely separated geographical areas of the world. Local products such as gold, cattle, agricultural produce, and ivory, among others, were exchanged for exotic Persian wares, Chinese blue-on-white porcelain, and glass beads. The power and wealth of the ruling elite was invested in very impressive dry-stone-walled structures, the largest stone structures south of the Egyptian pyramids (Figure 5). Religion was important in the governance of the state and the recovery of skillfully made soapstone birds and ritual objects demonstrates this. The existence of abundant exotic and status goods at Great Zimbabwe when contrasted with the paucity of craft manufacturing evidence adduces that the elites controlled the distribution rather than primary production of goods. Such mechanisms were well supported using tributary modes of production. In a question of history repeating itself, the factors largely responsible for the rise of Great Zimbabwe led toward its demise. A rapidly deteriorating environment and the shifting trade routes led to the emergence of two successor states, the Mutapa in the north and Khami in the southwest by the end of the fifteenth century. The Mutapa state occupied the northern Zimbabwe plateau and adjacent Zambezi valley lowlands. Archaeology and oral history attest to a continuation of Great Zimbabwe influence. Early Mutapa kings had access to large and exploitable quantities of alluvial and hydrothermal gold, which became an important part of the economy of the state. The gold wealth was invested in monumental architecture and former Mutapa capitals – Zvongombe, Mutota, Kasekete, and Nhunguza – were built in the architectural styles of Great Zimbabwe. The predatory activities of merchant capital represented by the Portuguese traders became the Mutapa’s nemesis. The state ceased to be a significant political player by the late eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth century, was clearly just a mere chiefdom, largely subservient to Portuguese whims. Another successor state to Great Zimbabwe developed at Khami in the southwestern plateau area. The Torwa state was built and operated along the lines of Great Zimbabwe with the kings living on elaborate dry-stone-walled terraces and in enclosures.

Long-distance trade was an important part of the state and exotic goods have been recovered there. A civil war and Portuguese meddling sounded the death knell to the state leading to the rise of the Rozvi-Changamire state based at Danangombe in the late seventeenth century. The Rozvi-Changamire state was an important political entity, which at one time played the power broker in the Mutapa state. One of its leaders Changamire Dombo is credited with expelling the Portuguese from the plateau, for their gluttonous and belligerent behavior in the Mutapa state. Like most states that arose on the plateau, civil wars caused by succession disputes gradually weakened the state. Successive groups of Nguni people leaving southeastern Africa hastened the collapse of the state with the Ndebele occupying the vacuum arising from the aftermath. On its part, the Ndebele state was highly militarized to prevent annihilation by numerically superior opponents. Using advanced methods of warfare, they managed to subjugate some groups on the plateau. However, the influx of guns from the Portuguese meant that such groups could resist the Ndebele whose state ended with the colonization by the British South Africa Company in CE 1890. See also: Africa, South: Kalahari Margins; Animal Domestication; Modern Humans, Emergence of; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Beach DN (1994) The Shona and Their Neighbours. Oxford: Blackwell. Huffman TN (1996) Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Pikirayi I (2001) The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline in Southern Zambezian States. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press. Pwiti G (1996) Continuity and Change: An Archaeological Study of Farming Communities in Northern Zimbabwe, AD 500–1700. Studies in African Archaeology 13. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Archaeology, Uppsala University. Walker N (1995) Late Pleistocene and Holocene HuntersGatherers of the Matopos: An Archaeological Study of Change and Continuity in Zimbabwe. Studies in African Archaeology 10. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Archaeology, Uppsala University.

14 AFRICA, EAST/Ethiopia and Eritrea

AFRICA, EAST Contents Ethiopia and Eritrea Foragers Madagascar and Surrounding Islands Swahili Coast The Horn of Africa

Ethiopia and Eritrea Augustin F C Holl, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Aksum A kingdom formed from at least the first century AD in southwestern Ethiopia which developed into an empire including northern Ethiopia, Sudan, and southern Arabia. forager Someone who gathers food or provisions, especially forcibly. Horn of Africa A peninsula of East Africa that juts for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea, and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. Tigray The northern-most of the nine ethnic regions (kililoch) of Ethiopia.

Paleontological and Stone Age research is particularly dynamic in Ethiopia. Major Australopithecus sites are found along the Ethiopian part of the East African Rift Valley, from the Omo Valley in the south to the fossils’ bearing formations of Djibouti in the Northeast. Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands are nonetheless considered as important centers of African plant domestication and agricultural innovation but archaeological research on this and related topics, even if seriously improved during the last two decades, is still lagging behind. Teff (Eragrostis teff ), noog (Guizotia abyssinica), as well as finger millet (Eleusine coracana) are part of the locally domesticated plants grown in association with Near Eastern crops such as wheat, barley, chick pea, lentil, and fava bean. Food-producing societies combining agricultural production with livestock husbandry lived in the lowland and Eritrean plateau as well as Tigray from the Middle Holocene onward. During the first millennium BC, South Arabic culture and influence expanded across the Red Sea and took roots in Ethiopian highland areas of Eritrea and Tigray. Archaeologically, this new situation is indicated by

the sudden appearance of writing, monumental stone architecture, and sculpture. Iron technology may have been part of this new ‘cultural package’ that triggered the sixth to seventh century BC process of urbanization in Highlands Ethiopia. Urban centers emerged at such places as Yeha surrounded by at least 30 other known sites among which the Hawelti–Melazzo complex. Yeha grew out of an earlier mixed farming village and became the main urban center of the Daamat kingdom in the fifth to fourth century BC. It was a relatively small town, 7.5 ha in size, with however spectacular stone monuments, the temple, and the Great Beal Gebri. The former is a massive rectangular building, 18.5 m long, 15 m wide, with preserved plain walls measuring 11 m in height. The latter consists of a series of square-section massive monolithic pillars that may have been part of a cultic complex with some affinities to the Moon Temple at Marib. The Daamat kingdom collapsed during the later part of the first millennium BC but very few is in fact known about the causes and consequences of its demise. Smaller polities emerged. Stelae were used to mark elite burials, and exchanges seem to have been predominantly with the Nile Valley. Aksum was one of these small polities that developed in the area during the later part of the first millennium BC and the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Aksum appears to have been settled in the first century AD. A few centuries later, in the third–fourth century AD, it achieved regional primacy, controlled great amount of wealth, developed a centralized monarchical system, adopted Christianity as state religion, and launched an extensive expansionist policy. As suggested by Phillipson and Anfray, Aksum’s political control extended at several times to regions beyond the modern borders of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Large areas of southern Arabia were ruled from Aksum at intervals between the third and sixth century AD. It is likely that Meroe in the Sudanese Nile Valley was conquered by an Aksumite army under King Ezana, but the nature and consequences of this episode remain poorly understood.

AFRICA, EAST/Foragers 15

The town of Aksum, at the foot of two hills, Beta Giyorgis in the west and May Qoho in the east, was extended in a deep gorge oriented north–south. The surrounding land was rich, water abundant, building stone ubiquitous. The town itself was stretched along approximately one mile west–east with its width along the north–south axis measuring no more than 500 m. Massive architectural complexes have been excavated. Some were storage facilities, elite residences, and religious buildings. Elite and royal burials carved in the bedrock and marked by lavishly sculpted stelae were located in a central position overlooking the rest of the town complex. The largest stelae appear to mark the graves of the kings of Aksum immediately prior to their adoption of Christianity in the midfourth century. These stelae are the most remarkable monuments of the Aksum ‘skyline’. Now fallen and broken, the largest of these, was originally 33 m long, and 520 tons in weight, probably the largest single block of stone which people anywhere, at any time, have attempted to stand on end according to Phillipson (see Africa, East: Foragers; The Horn of Africa). Very early in its history, Aksum became a trade hub linking the Red Sea to the Nile Valley and the Roman world from the north to the rest of the continent. It was visited by merchants from Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and even India. Adulis was its main and only harbor on the Red Sea. The economic growth and expansion of the Romans was one of the key factors for the quick pace of development of Aksum as a thriving economic metropolis. At the peak of its power and influence, the core of the ‘Aksumite civilization’ extended over a territory measuring 300 by 160 km, from 13 /17 latitude north and 38 /40 longitude east, with an access to the Red Sea at Adulis. Aksum kingdom collapsed during the eighth century AD partly because of the success and fast expansion of Islam and its corollary political and economic isolation in a predominantly Muslim world. The overexploitation of local resources, intensive erosion of the deforested land, as well as a short arid spell may have accelerated the depopulation and demise of the Aksumite metropolis in the eighth–ninth century AD. See also: Africa, East: Foragers; Madagascar and

Surrounding Islands; Swahili Coast; The Horn of Africa; Asia, West: Arabian Peninsula; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Anfray F (1990) Les Anciens Ethiopiens: Siecles d’Histoire. Paris: Armand Colin.

Bard KA, Coltorti M, DiBlasi MC, Dramis F, and Fattovitch R (2000) The environmental history of Tigray (northern Ethiopia) in the Middle and Late Holocene: A preliminary outline. African Archaeological Review 17: 65–86. Brandt SA (1984) New perspectives on the origins of food production in Ethiopia. In: Clark JD and Brandt SA (eds.) From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa, pp. 173–205. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brandt SA (1986) The Upper Pleistocene and Early Holocene prehistory of the Horn of Africa. The African Archaeological Review 4: 41–82. Butzer KW (1981) Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia: A geoarchaeological interpretation. American Antiquity 46(3): 471–495. Phillipson D (1998) Ancient Ethiopia: Aksum: Its Antecedents and Successors. London: British Museum Press. Phillipson D (2000) Archaeology at Aksum, Ethiopia, 1993–1997. London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Foragers Sibel Barut Kusimba, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Eburran An East African obsidian industry of the central Rift Valley, Kenya. forager Someone who hunts for food and provisions. hunter-gatherer A member of a people subsisting in the wild on food obtained by hunting and foraging. Later Stone Age The third and final phase of Stone Age technology in sub-Saharan Africa, dating from more than c. 30 000 years ago until historical times in some places. Middle Stone Age The second part of the Stone Age in sub-Saharan Africa, dating from c. 150 000–30 000 years ago and roughly equivalent to the Middle Paleolithic elsewhere in the Old World. Pastoral Neolithic A general term for the pre-Iron Age food-producing societies of East Africa.

Introduction The concept of the forager is derived from ethnographic examples of hunting-and-gathering people. These lifeways are based on the exploitation of wild plant foods and in Africa, ethnographic cases include people from the Botswanan Desert, the San, and also various Central African groups associated with tropical forests. Archaeological hunter-gatherers are different from ethnographic examples, even in the same environments. Because of the diversity of cultures bundled under the hunter-gatherer rubric, rejection of the term ‘hunter-gatherer’ has been suggested. It is possible that our trusted cubby holes

16 AFRICA, EAST/Foragers

for ‘hunter-gatherers’, ‘pastoralists’, or ‘farmers’ misrepresent a prehistoric world frequently less economically specialized than that of the ethnographic present. Nevertheless, few would argue that terms like huntergatherer be rejected. Instead, we can try to appreciate how environment and history have created variability in hunting-and-gathering societies. Three basic time periods of African Foragers will be reviewed in East Africa, including the Middle Stone Age, Later Stone Age, and transition to food production.

Middle Stone Age To some archaeologists, Middle Stone Age (MSA) shows the gradual accumulation of the modern hunter-gatherer repertoire. The repertoire, as far as the MSA is concerned, might include: diversity in the style of lithic artifacts and projectile weapons, backed microliths and composite tools, bone tools and bone points, hunting success, exploitation of fish, and other smaller resources which could represent the beginnings of a broad-spectrum or intensification process in the case of evidence of fishing, land use patterns characterized by a San-like aggregation and dispersal and repeated occupation of rock shelters, cultural use of space and activity areas within sites, increased artifact trade, and the making of beads and use of ochre. These behaviors and artifact types are thought to be related to ways of thinking, including symbolic behavior, innovation, and planning that are ‘modern’, in the sense that they are associated with Homo sapiens. At Blombos Cave on the southern coast of South Africa, MSA levels dating to 77 000 years ago have yielded more than 30 worked bone awls and points and 8000 pieces of worked ochre, two of which are incised with parallel lines as well as beads. However, other sites of the African MSA also show evidence of artifact design and geographic diversity; use of microliths, backed tools, and hafted tools; hunting proficiency; worked bone; fishing, mollusk gathering, and small animal procurement; and use of symbolic artifacts such as beads and ochre. The MSA is characterized by Levallois and other prepared core methods of stone tool manufacture. A common tool type in the East African MSA is the Stillbay point, or points from discoidal core reduction. Important MSA sites include the ones in Northern Tanzania, such as Nasera Rockshelter and Mumba Rockshelter, Mumba Hohle, Olduvai Gorge, and a recent excavation from Loiyangalani near Olduvai Gorge, where bone artifacts and fish bone have been reported. Southwestern Tanzania also has MSA localities reported along the Songwe River. In Kenya, sites have been found in the Kenya Rift Valley, including Prospect Farm and Lukenya Hill, and in

Ethiopia at Porc Epic Cave and Aduma. The East African MSA is rarely found with ostrich eggshell beads, as reported from Mumba and the Loiyangalani site, but is quite often associated with the so-called ‘Kenya Stillbay’ industry which includes small and large points which may be spear points.

Later Stone Age The Later Stone Age (LSA) is marked by the transition from the discoidal and Levallois core reduction methods to leptolithic or small tools. The sequence of LSA lithic industries at Lukenya Hill, Kenya documents the appearance and increasing proportions of time of microlithic tools, also associated with modern human behavior. Other early LSA sites show increasing use of bone tools, the exploitation of fish using specialized technology, and the use of bored stones for plant food gathering. LSA sites also contain early evidence of artifacts related to personal adornment. Often these are blade tools. Lukenya Hill contains at least five early LSA archaeological sites, including GvJm 62, GvJm 46, GvJm 22, and GvJm 16. Analysis of these sites shows that the proportions of microlithic tools and the use of nonlocal obsidian from the Central Rift Valley of Kenya, about 150 km from Lukenya Hill, increase over time. Other important early LSA sites include Enkapune ya Muto, whose assemblages show that ostrich eggshell beads, hafted microliths, and small round steep scrapers similar to those made at GvJm62 were made and used there (see Africa, Central: Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists; Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers). Other significant LSA industries are found in the Eburran Industry of the Central Rift Valley in Kenya. The Eburran Industry represents hunter-gatherers well-adapted to Rift Valley highlands and lake basins in East Africa, who used abundant obsidian to make microlithic tools and hunted a variety of ungulates associated with woodlands and forests. After 3000 BP, many Eburran sites appear to be associated with the origins of food production, in particular the keeping of goats, such as at the site of Enkapune ya Muto. LSA people are also associated with fish exploitation and the making of pottery, as evidenced in the Kansyore midden sites of Lake Victoria.

The Transition to Food Production The problem of the transition from hunting and gathering to food production has been approached by examining how economies changed through diffusion and innovation of domesticated plant and animal species and the interactions of hunters and others who were herders/farmers. Many reviews of the

AFRICA, EAST/Madagascar and Surrounding Islands 17

origins of domesticated plants and animals in Africa have emphasized on the early and indigenous development of food production, the impact of cattleborne disease, patterns of indigenous development and diffusion, the role of arid and unpredictable environment, and the evidence of early domesticated plant foods in Africa. Several scholars have compared the ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers and food producers, both from the perspective of understanding the process of the adoption of food production and understanding hunter-gatherer–food producer interaction. Important cases of food-producer/farmer interaction include that of Eburran and Pastoral Neolithic sites in the Central Rift Valley, that indicates the association of Eburran sites with domestic stock and in lower altitude locations, which presumably reflects interaction with plains pastoralists; the Tsavo case of southeastern Kenya, where hunter-gatherers known as the Waata persisted until the twentieth century by exchanging hunted meat and ivory tusks with Oromo and Wambisha pastoralists; and the case of montane hunter-gatherers variously known as Okiek or ‘Ndorobo’ whose interaction with Maasai and other pastoralists involved exchange of honey and meat for agricultural products and animal secondary products. See also: Africa, Central: Foragers, Farmers, and Metallurgists; Great Lakes Area; Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.

Further Reading Andah B (1993) Identifying early farming traditions of West Africa. In: Shaw T, Sinclair P, Andah B, and Okpoko A (eds.) The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals, and Towns, pp. 240–254. London: Routledge. Bellwood P (2004) The First Farmers: Origins of Agricultural Societies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bollig M (1987) Ethnic relations and spatial mobility in Africa: A review of the peripatetic niche. In: Rao A (ed.) Kolner Ethnologische Mitteilungen Volume 8, The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross-Cultural Perspective, pp. 179–228. Cologne: Bohlau Verlag. Burch ES (1998) The future of hunter-gatherer research. In: Gowdy J (ed.) Limited Wants, unlimited Means: A Reader in HunterGatherer Economics and the Environment, pp. 201–217. Washington, DC: Island Press. Cronk L and Dickson B (2000) Public and hidden transcripts in the East African highlands: A comment on Smith (1998). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20: 113–121. diLernia S and Manzi G (1997) Before Food Production in North Africa. Forli, ABACO. Henshilwood C and Marean C (2003) The origin of modern human behavior: Critique of the models and their test implications. Current Anthropology 44: 627–652.

Kent S (1996) Cultural Diversity among Twentieth Century Foragers: An African Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn S and Stiner M (2001) The antiquity of hunter-gatherers. In: Panter-Brick C, Layton R, and Rowley-Conwy P (eds.) Hunter-Gatherers, An Interdisciplinary Perspective, pp. 99–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schrire C (1980) An inquiry into the evolutionary status and apparent identity of San hunter-gatherers. Human Ecology 8: 9–32.

Madagascar and Surrounding Islands Douglas William Hume, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bantu language Group belonging to the Niger-Congo family. By one estimate, there are 513 languages in the Bantu grouping. Borneo Located at the center of the Malay archipelago and Indonesia. Administratively, this island is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Madagascar Island Nation in the Indian Ocean, off the southeastern coast of Africa. It is home to 5% of the world’s plant and animal species (more than 80% of which are indigenous to Madagascar).

Current archaeological research in Madagascar is concerned with a relatively narrow band of time from approximately 2000 year BP, the generally accepted period of first contact, to the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the advent of historical records and European contact. Although the peopling of Madagascar is arguably a recent event, little is known regarding the early settlements. The lack of archaeological evidence is due to a variety of factors: quick environmental decomposition of sites, sparse use of sites by transient populations, and lack of funding to research the area. Other forms of evidence, such as linguistics, and genetic and ethnological data, are also used to develop the chronology of events during the settlement of Madagascar. Though early arguments postulated that the first Malagasy inhabitants were from one origin, historical, linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence suggests multiregional influences from Southeast Asia, East Africa, South Asia, and the Near East. A hybridization of many

18 AMERICAS, NORTH/Madagascar and Surrounding Islands

influences is therefore probable, in which several waves of settlement/colonization occurred and each group introduced or reintroduced technologies or other cultural traits. Prior to settlement, maritime people, who were exploiting the area’s offshore resources, visited Madagascar and traders used Madagascar for temporary shelter and restocking of supplies. As trading became more important, the camps’ temporal and spatial existence increased over time. This temporary nature of the early settlements contributes to the difficulty in tracing the sequences of events from first settlement to permanent settlements and finally a formation of a distinct Malagasy culture. Linguistically, there has been difficulty in deciphering the origin of the Malagasy language due to movement of people, the number of Malagasy dialects created, and the inability to define a protoMalagasy language. Through comparative linguistics, analysis of loan words, and the phonology, morphology, and vocabulary of the Malagasy language suggest two possible origins: the Barito Valley of Borneo and the Bantu language of Eastern Africa. Genetic analysis shows that both East African and Indonesian gene frequencies are evident within the general population at approximately equal ratios throughout Madagascar. The introduction of the sickle cell gene indicates an infusion of genes from people of central or east Africa, north of Zambezi. The ethnological evidence connecting Madagascar and other cultures such as Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and the Near East that have similar traits is ambiguous. Many similarities are better explained by environmental constraints than by direct linkage with a specific group. There are examples of shared knowledge; for example, growing of millet in dry areas of Madagascar is thought to have been borrowed from East Africa and the growing of rice in wetter areas borrowed from Indonesia. Madagascar has had exposure to a variety of cultural traits, but the existence of a cultural trait does not imply genetic relationships, but may rather result from either direct or indirect trade between two genetically distinct groups. The earliest archaeological evidence of human activity in Madagascar are the four radiocarbon-dated dwarf hippopotamus (Choeropsis madagascariensis) femurs that show human modification. The femurs, found in southern Madagascar (Lamboharana and Ambolisatra), yielded two reliable dates, 1970  60 and 1740  50 years BP. What has been most puzzling in Madagascar’s ecological history is the extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna, such as the dwarf hippopotamus, approximately 2000 years ago. Although a

catastrophic fire event, calamitous drought in southern Madagascar, first-contact overkill, introduction of cattle, and hypervirulent disease have all been blamed for the extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna, it is more likely that the causes worked in synergy: the introduction of exotic and invasive species, climatic changes, and arrival of humans caused these extinctions. Another early archaeological site in Madagascar is Sarodrano, 1490  90 years BP. However, this early date is questionable due to site disturbance and further study of the site is impossible due to its destruction by a cyclone. Other early settlements dated to the ninth–tenth centuries AD include the following: Irodo (Tafianatsirebeka) – a northeastern coast settlement that produced shellfish, farming, and chloro-schistite vessel production and trade; Andransosoa – a southeastern inland cattle pastoralist; and Talaky – a southern coastal fishing village. During this early period (first to tenth century AD), only traces of transient visits have been found, which may be a reflection of the limited areas surveyed along Madagascar’s coast and not a measure of what settlement sites are actually there. After AD 1000, permanent occupation sites along the entire Madagascar coast and one central highland site have yielded evidence of rice agriculture, bovid herding, fishing, iron smelting, and local trading, but no direct link to Southeast Asia, East Africa, South Asia, or the Near East. In addition, it cannot be determined if the economic and technological diversity in evidence from sites of this period is the result of in situ evolution or imported from another area. From the twelfth century AD, the settlements in the west began to grow to significant size and duration. Mahilaka was the first major port in the region; its decline in the fourteenth century AD was followed by settlements developing along the east coast. Cores taken from lakes and bogs from this time have found fluctuating levels of grassy and brushy vegetation along with arboreal pollen, showing a negative correlation. This indicates a variable deforestation by anthropogenic means and therefore a variable human population concentration and rate of environmental modification. By the fourteenth century AD, the archaeological evidence indicates a relatively uniform cultural pattern in the southern region. It is currently unknown what caused this explosion of settlements during this period of history in Madagascar. Settlements during this period were associated in clusters surrounding a central site, which may have been the political and/or social elite. In addition, trade goods originating in South China, Southeast Asia, the Near East, and Europe are evident

AMERICAS, NORTH/Swahili Coast 19

throughout Madagascar by this time, indicating increased external contact. Of the polities that emerged during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries AD, only the Merina of the central highlands of Madagascar has the archaeological evidence to suggest the formation of a state. In particular, a hierarchy of a capital, subsidiary centers, villages, and hamlets along with frontier military sites provides evidence that a state level system was needed for control, because the level of control needed for these sites is more than a loose political unit could manage. During this period, the effects of European trading enabled the earliest written accounts of the Malagasy political situation to be recorded. With the advent of European trading, political power became subject to the control of trade goods and some kingdoms (e.g., the Bara) collapsed while others increased their influence (e.g., the Sakalava). Beginning in the sixteenth century, several groups were heavily involved in trade with the Europeans (mostly French, Dutch, and Arabs). Others (e.g., Tandroy, Karembola, and Mahafaly peoples in southern Madagascar) were not actively involved in trade, yet still received European goods by importing them through their neighbors. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the beginnings of what has been termed the ‘Bara state’ collapsed due to disputes between the sons of the dead ruler and, subsequently, the interior Maroserana ruler, Andriamanely, captured the area and installed his family members as local rulers. The southern kingdoms of Madagascar did not consolidate their power and remained divided from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The result was their lack of political influence on interior and northern groups. Whether groups were in direct trade with the Europeans or received goods through indirect trade, the impact of the goods that the Europeans brought to Madagascar was felt throughout the island. See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Sudan,

Nilotic.

Further Reading Deschamps H (1972) Histoire de Madagascar, 4th edn. Paris: Berger-Levrault. Dewar RE (1984) Extinctions in Madagascar: The loss of the subfossil fauna. In: Martin PS and Klein RG (eds.) Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, pp. 574–593. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Dewar RE and Wright HT (1993) The culture history of Madagascar. Journal of World Prehistory 7: 417–466. Marks S and Cray R (1975) Southern Africa and Madagascar (c.1600–c.1790). In: Gray R (ed.) Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4, p. 384–468. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pearson MP (1997) Close encounters of the worst kind: Malagasy resistance and colonial disasters in southern Madagascar. World Archaeology 28: 393–417. Wright HT and Rakotoarisoa JA (2004) The rise of Malagasy societies: New developments in the archaeology of Madagascar. In: Goodman SM and Benstead JP (eds.) The Natural History of Madagascar, pp. 112–119. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Swahili Coast Adria LaViolette, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary caliphate The Islamic form of government representing the political unity and leadership of the Muslim world. city-state A region controlled exclusively by a city, usually having sovereignty. colonialism The extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled or displaced. urbanism The study of cities – their economic, political, social and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment.

The many towns and hinterland communities of the Eastern African coast share broad cultural commonalities that emerged in the first millennium AD, in what came to be called Swahili civilization. The Swahili coast extended along some 2500 km, from modern Somalia to Mozambique and incorporating Kenya’s Lamu archipelago, Tanzania’s Pemba, Unguja (Zanzibar), and Mafia Islands, the Comoros Archipelago, and northwestern Madagascar. This expanse corresponds with the western edge of the monsoonal wind system, facilitating travel and communication on the coast itself and among ports along the Indian Ocean rim. The pre-Swahili history of the coast is known largely through archaeological research, augmented by rare documents and interpretations drawn from historical linguistics. In the centuries prior to the founding of Swahili settlements, the coast was home to an array of smallerscale societies subsisting on pastoralism and mixed farming and fishing, and who shared archaeological and linguistic connections with interior peoples. The use of Urewe and Kwale ceramics in both areas exemplifies shared lifeways of coastal and interior regions in the Late Stone and Early Iron Ages.

20 AMERICAS, NORTH/Swahili Coast

Archaeological work at pre-/proto-Swahili sites dating to the first centuries AD, such as Unguja Ukuu in Tanzania, provides evidence of relatively small mixed farming settlements, some with impressive trade ties beyond the coast. The first written document pertaining to the coast is a merchants’ guide, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Periplus was written in AD 40 by a Greek sailor, who wrote of trade along the Red Sea, Eastern African, and Indian shores while on a Roman ship. He references places such as Rhapta, the Romans’ southernmost port of trade, thought to have been on the central Tanzanian coast. Rhapta is described as under the authority of the governor of Muza in the southwestern Arabian Peninsula, but subsequent historical and archaeological evidence have not confirmed this depiction. Exported goods listed included ivory and rhino horn from the interior and nautilus and turtle shell from the coast, while imports included metal implements, glass, and some foods. Another, second-century source is Ptolemy’s Geography, a Graeco-Roman compendium containing sailing coordinates for coastal locations. Both documents are consistent with archaeological evidence that some coastal Early Iron Age populations were engaged in trade and social relations with Mediterranean and Indian Ocean societies. The documentary record is then largely silent until the late first millennium, when Arab and other accounts begin. By the sixth to tenth centuries AD, archaeological evidence reveals a distinct coastal Swahili lifeway. Its characteristics included: (1) use of Tana Tradition or Triangular Incised Ware ceramics; (2) technologies such as iron smelting and boat construction; (3) the building of mostly rectangular earth-and-thatch houses; (4) household economy based on millet agriculture, husbandry, and fishing; (5) obtaining imported goods including glazed ceramics, glassware, metal jewelry, and stone and glass beads from the Persian Gulf and beyond; and (6) conversion to Islam from the eighth century onward. Few of these traits are exclusive to the coast but the combination emerged as characteristically coastal, and ultimately Swahili. The settlement of the coast by people with this archaeological signature marks a transition from the previous mosaic of coast and interior groups, although the early Swahili maintained many cultural practices of the pastoral and farming/fishing peoples on the coast and hinterland from whom they were derived. Nearly all known Swahili settlements were on or within 20 km of the coast. Islam grew to great importance in Swahili life. The earliest evidence to date for its practice is from the excavation of an eighth-century timber mosque at Shanga in the Lamu Archipelago. A series of mosques of increasing size and formality were subsequently superimposed. This sequence attests to contacts

between proto- or early Swahili with Muslim traders or missionaries. Earlier understandings of the formation of Swahili society presumed that Arab and Persian immigrants colonized and converted coastal people for the purpose of developing trading opportunities. However, archaeological and linguistic evidence now points convincingly to the African origins of Swahili culture, while still acknowledging that some immigration and an openness to select foreign influences was fundamental to Swahili life. By the ninth century, economic connections between Eastern Africa and the Middle East had grown in scale to include the export of thousands of slaves from the interior. The slaves were transported through coastal centers including Unguja and Pemba to destinations in modern-day Iraq where they labored on drainage projects at the head of the Gulf of Basra. In AD 868, a massive uprising, the Zanj Revolt, weakened the Caliphate based in Basra and led to a downturn in interest in slaves from Swahili sources. The revolt indicates the presence and influence of Africans in Asia at that time, but more research is needed to understand the full texture of this influence. The spiritual transformation of the Swahili coast had sweeping effects, but these were neither uniform nor rapid. Representatives of several Islamic sects gained influence in different areas. Conversion did not eliminate but rather incorporated local spiritual practices. By c. AD 1200, however, all large Swahili settlements and many smaller ones featured stonebuilt mosques as centerpieces of Islamic practice and community organization. The wealth and power of Swahili towns waxed in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, as measured by the scale and number of settlements, material culture, and expanding trade relationships to the interior and along distant Indian Ocean shores. Building in stone became the hallmark of the most elite dwellings and public and ritual structures. In the ninth century, Swahili elites adopted a method of mortared and plastered limestone construction that originated on the Red Sea shores. The resulting architecture – elaborated, multistoried, more permanent than earth and thatch – may have been critical to anchoring relationships of certain Swahili lineages with foreign traders, a practice seen ethnohistorically and which contributed to the prosperity of towns and regions at large. However, earth-and-thatch houses continued to characterize villages, and were even common within the new larger settlements marked by elite stone buildings, called ‘stonetowns’. While stone architecture became the basis of initial reconstructions of Swahili society, contemporary archaeological research is investigating the full range of Swahili houses and public buildings in town and countryside.

AMERICAS, NORTH/The Horn of Africa 21

Many Swahili settlements have been described as urban (even ‘city-states’ or ‘states’) (see Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Urban Archaeology) marked by complex relations between centers and their surrounding regions. These centers differed in their internal class structures and political styles. Coastal regions became more distinct from one another with localized historical trajectories. The shared visual icons of Swahili stonetowns are compelling, but should not overshadow these important differences between regions along the coast. Major stonetowns that have been investigated archaeologically include Shanga, Manda, and Gede in Kenya; Chwaka, Ras Mkumbuu, Tumbatu, and Kilwa in Tanzania; and Mahilaka in Madagascar. Certain towns created epic histories, passed down orally and ultimately formalized as written chronicles, such as those known from Pate and Kilwa. The chronicles, as well as other sources, often discuss sociopolitical relationships: the ties between Swahili and interior peoples, marriage alliances with Indian Ocean families, acts of generosity by local leaders to their populations. Life in the stonetown polities continued but with intensified farming, fishing, craft production, Islamic practice, and long-distance trade. Gold obtained from Zimbabwe Plateau (see Africa, Central: Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas) societies became a leading export from the coast, along with ivory, iron, animal products, and mangrove poles. Imports featured glazed ceramics from East, Southeast, and Southwest Asia; a range of personal items such as beads and other jewelry; cloth; and religious texts. Coins were minted in some of the largest centers. Rock crystal and other stone was worked into beads and traded, and iron and copper alloys were produced locally. From the sixteenth century onward, the effects of European and Arab colonizers became increasingly felt. The Portuguese reached the Swahili coast for the first time in 1498. Their presence in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is known from documentary sources, and architectural remains in Mombasa, Malindi, Kilwa, and on Pemba and Unguja. The construction of Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593 was the most striking presence the Portuguese achieved in this period. They were defeated there in 1697 after a long siege, ending the first phase of their colonialism on the Swahili coast. Portuguese settlement and cultural impact is not well understood at present and future study is warranted. At a regional level, their aggressive intrusions in the Indian Ocean contributed to the long-term decline of Swahili autonomy and power. Sections of the Swahili coast came under attack from Omani Arabs immediately after the Portuguese were defeated, such that from 1498 onward the Swahili

struggled against colonialist incursions of various scales and levels of success. Swahili urban and rural life prevailed, although disruptions in long-distance trade and losses of regional autonomy weakened the strength of the entire coast and its ties to the interior and the Indian Ocean. The Swahili coast was not united under a single political authority until the Omani Sultanate colonized it in the early nineteenth century. See also: Africa, Central: Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Urban Archaeology.

Further Reading Allen J de V (1993) Swahili Origins. London: Heinemann. Chami FA (1994) The Coast of East Africa in the First Millennium AD: A Study of the Iron Working Farming Communities. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis. Chittick HN (1974) Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa. Croucher S (2006) Plantations on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Approach to Complex Identities. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester. Freeman-Grenville GSP (1962) The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First Century to the Early Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon. Garlake PS (1966) The Early Islamic Architecture on the East African Coast. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa. Horton MC (1996) Shanga: The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Settlement on the Coast of East Africa. London: British Institute in Eastern Africa. Horton M and Middleton J (2000) The Swahili. London: Blackwell. Juma A (2004) Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Study of Early Urbanism. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis. Kusimba CM (1999) The Rise and Fall of Swahili States. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.

The Horn of Africa Rahul Oka, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA Chapurukha M Kusimba, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Early Common Era Refers to the period between 100 BC and 100 CE that witnessed a significant increase in interregional and transoceanic trade linking the Indian Ocean world, East and Central Asia, and the Mediterranean and also the rise of stable empires and states in Asia, Southern Europe, and Africa. vertical archipelago effect First described in the Andes but also in the Himalayas and Hawaii; rapidly changing elevations

22 The Horn of Africa within a relatively small lateral area causes highly variable yet circumscribed environment and leads to the development of interdependent and exchanging settlements along the vertical landscape practicing a wide variety of subsistence activities.

The Horn of Africa is a cultural area comprising the modern nations of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Archaeological research over the past century shows an unbroken sequence of human occupation from the Middle Stone Age to the present. It has also been blessed with a unique location: on the crossroads of Asia and Africa, at the mouth of the Red Sea, and offering easy land access between western ports on the Red Sea and the Nile River. Epigraphic evidence from Egypt identifies this region as Punt and an active trading partner of Egypt during the reign of Queen Hapshetsut. Archaeological evidence suggests that the trade links between the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean world (Egypt) as well as Southwest Asia can be traced as far back as 2500 BC. The Horn of Africa boasts greater geographical diversity than any other area in Africa: from the baking plains along the Eritrean and Somali coasts, the largest and highest land plateau, the cooler Ethiopian highlands, the lowland tropical Nile headwaters to the north, and the arid dry lowlands to the northwestern, western, and southwestern regions along the borders with Sudan and Kenya. The wider range of geographic and hence climatic variability creates a ‘vertical archipelago’ effect allowing for a larger variety of sustainable resources and related subsistence activities, and the contemporaneous development of a regional exchange network between settlements. The Somali Coast (that includes the actual ‘horn’ or the jutting coastal plain along the Gulf of Aden and the northwestern Indian Ocean), the Eritrean (and Djiboutian) Coast along the Western Red Sea, and the Ethiopian highlands have thus been interconnected from earliest times and this regional exchange has played a great role in the development of social complexity in the Horn from 800 BC onward. The Horn of Africa is also the region of many ‘firsts’ and ‘onlys’. Important food crops such as teff, ensete, finger millet, nug, and coffee were first domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands and this is the only region in sub-Saharan Africa to use domesticated cattle and the plow for agricultural purposes. ‘Geez’ is one of the three indigenous writing systems in Africa and was developed during the development of the Aksumite polity. This region is also home to a two millennia long development of incipient state formation in sub-Saharan Africa: from Aksum (also

called Axum) (second century BC to ninth century CE), Zagwe (tenth century to fourteenth century CE), Solomonid (fourteenth century to seventeenth century), and Amharic Gondar (seventeenth century to twentieth century). The monarchs of these polities have practiced and hailed themselves as the ‘protectors’ of Christianity from the conversion of King Ezana of Aksum in CE 330, to the Amhara kings of the twentieth century, making the Ethiopian highlands the longest-lived Christian-ruled area in the world. Consequently, much focus of historical research has been on this indigenous adoption of and syncretic processes affecting Christianity, regarding the aforementioned highland states as islands of Christianity pitted against indigenous religions and later against Islamic incursions from the coasts. This paradigm is now being challenged as the positive contributions of traditional African religions and Islam are being acknowledged, as are the impacts of nonChristian peoples of the Horn, including the Somali, the Oromo (formerly called the Galla), the Afar, and the Saho. Recent historical and archaeological work on the antiquity and spread of Islam has underscored the role played by Asian and African Islamic traders and settlers in Red Sea ports, including Adulis, Massawa, the Dahlak Islands on the Eritrean Coast, and Berbera, Zeila, Ras Hafun, and Mogadishu on the Somali Coast. The Dahlak Islands, Adulis, Berbera, and Ras Hafun have been active since the Early Common Era and played a significant role in the rise of Aksum and the latter highland polities. Trade goods recovered in both the coastal ports as well as Aksum (and subsequent states) include products from South Asia (glass beads, coins, cloth), Rome (ceramics, amphorae), Egypt, and even China (iron, porcelains, silk). In return, the highland and coastal ports provided infrastructure for secondary production and regional and transoceanic trade in food grains, animal products such as elephant and hippopotamus tusk ivory (raw, cut, and carved), skins and hides, precious stones, rock crystals, gold, slaves, beeswax, and gum Arabic. Emergent trends and future directions of archaeological research seem to favor this regional approach for understanding social complexity. The rest of this essay will summarize the recent archaeological–historical work along the three zones of the Horn of Africa: (1) the Northern Coast along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (Eritrean, Djiboutian, and northern Somali Coasts); (2) the Southeastern Somali Coast, also known as the Benadir Coast (along the northwestern Indian Ocean); and (3) the Eritrean– Ethiopian highlands. The bulk of archaeological work in the Horn has concentrated on the highlands but

The Horn of Africa 23

there have been a few projects working on the coasts, tied into the larger coastal archaeological projects further south along the East African coast.

Northern Coast The northern coast of the Horn of Africa is characterized by the ports of Adulis, Massawa, Saad-Din, Berbera and Zeila, as well as the Dahlak Islands off the coast of Eritrea. Excavations at these sites have also underscored the importance of the northern coast as the forum for contacts with Southern Arabia as far back as the second millennium BC. Analysis of similarities in material culture as well as evidence on constant interaction suggests an interdependent development of complexity on both sides of the Red Sea, especially in the pre-Aksumite period. The ports of Adulis and Massawa were significant for the external connections of the emerging Aksum polity during the Early Common Era and show evidence of Aksumite and southern Arabian interactions and trade. Artifacts recovered include gold, ivory, and a human skeleton in chains or manacles suggesting the existence of slave trade. The Dahlak Islands were sources of tortoiseshell and ambergris, but also were known pirate bases and hence played an important role in controlling the Red Sea trade until their conquest in the tenth century CE. The ports of Zeila and Saad-Din show intensive merging of agricultural and pastoral activities by providing specialized infrastructure for pastoral exchange and trade as well as being important centers of transoceanic trade. The north coast was regarded as part of the territory controlled by the given highland polity. However, regardless of hinterland influence, these ports were probably semi-autonomous. From the eighth century, Islam started to spread across the Horn but found its strength in the coastal ports of the northern coast. The aforementioned ports as well as new ports such as Aydhab and Suakin (further north) were part of coastal Islamic polities of Shewa, Falasha, Gojjam, and Damot (late ninth century and tenth century) and Ifat (Yifat) (eleventh century CE) are usually seen as engaging in conflict with the highland Christian polities of Zagwe. It is clear from recent analysis that the religious conflict did not significantly affect the trading relationships as the highland states continued to use the aforementioned ports for their commercial and diplomatic activities. Trade continued even during the conflicts between the Ethiopian polity and the emergent Islamic states of Adal and Harar between and through the fourteenth century to sixteenth century CE. The territorial conquest of most of the Horn by Imam Ahmad bin Ibrahim al-Ghazi or Ahmad Gran˜ of Harar between

CE 1529 and 1543 was brought to an end by the arrival and action of the Portuguese acting as coreligionist partners of the Ethiopian state of Gondar. Though the late first and early second millennium periods have undergone historiographic scrutiny, largely through the lens of the Christianity versus Islam conflict, this and the subsequent periods have not been subjected to significant archaeological research, especially in the hinterland.

Benadir Coast Archaeology of the Benadir zone has also been confined to the coastal area and to the large ports. The bulk of this research has concentrated on Ras Hafun and Mogadishu. Presence of South Asian, ‘Mesopotamian’, Roman, Early Sassanian, and Egyptian ceramics suggests that Ras Hafun was active in the Early Common Era trade. However, the main trading port on the Benadir Coast was the city of Mogadishu and the articulated settlements of Brawa, Merca, Warsheikh, and Kismayo. While most of the other ports on the Somali coast have declined, the Mogadishu port cluster is still active and formed the basis for ongoing trade between the hinterland and coast of southern Somalia from the seventeenth century to the present. Unlike the northern coast, there was no hinterland polity associated with the ports on the Benadir coast until the sixteenth century CE. Analysis of imported Persian, Indian, Egyptian, and Chinese trade wares in these ports suggests that Mogadishu, Brawa, and Merca arose between the ninth and tenth centuries within a similar context as the ports further south along the Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Mozambique coasts: The coastal settlements were articulated with hinterland agricultural and pastoral groups. The ports provided forums for exchange of hinterland and overseas products. The elites of Mogadishu and other ports were linked through kinship, blood-brotherhood, and marital alliances with hinterland pastoral and agricultural groups and depended on these for protection. It is not inconceivable that the trade boom and demand for African products c. CE 1500 led to the rise of the Islamic Ajurann Confederacy (CE 1500–1700) and state development among the Somali in the Benadir hinterland. This period is also known for major demographic movements in the Benadir hinterland, including the migration of the Oromo pastoralists and their wars with the Somali to the northeast and the Amhara to the north in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to their southerly migration over the next two centuries. Not only did these migrations precipitate political changes in the Horn of Africa but also central and eastern Africa.

24 The Horn of Africa

Ethiopian–Eritrean Highlands

Summary

The bulk of archaeological excavations in the Horn has focused on the highlands, where the ‘firsts’ and the ‘onlys’ are concentrated, particularly on the site of Aksum–Tigray in the northern Ethiopian–Eritrean highlands. Though the early and mid-twentieth century efforts focused on the stelae, monumental architecture, artwork, and epigraphic research to reconstruct the development of the Aksumite state from the Early Common Era to its demise in the late first millennium CE, recent work has focused on tracing the beginnings of pre-Aksumite settlement. The early development of complexity in the Ethiopian highlands has now been tentatively traced to the early first millennium BC and interactions with the Hadramaut and Southwestern coast of Arabia have now been traced to the second millennium BC. Archaeo-botanical and zoological approaches have also moved away from mere establishment of antiquity to understanding the regional and evolutionary context of plant and animal domestication in the Horn of Africa. In particular, recent work in South Asia dates the African domesticates to 2000 BC. Not only does this suggest the deep antiquity of interconnections between the Horn of Africa and Asia but also the larger transregional context of domestication involving transfer of ideas, products, and technology. Current reconstructions of the demise of Aksum vary from blaming the declining climate conditions from the mid–late first millennium CE to the emergence of Islamic power along the northern coast from the late eighth century, concentrated in the ports of Massawa, Adulis, the Dahlak Islands, and Zeila. The latter argument has also been made for the fall of the subsequent polities of Zagwe, the Solomonids, and Gondar. However, it is clear that there are multiple and path-dependent causes for the decline of the highland polities and these need to be explored further in a regional context. Recent archaeological and historiographic approaches have aimed at understanding the post-Aksum polities beyond just establishing king-lists and reigning periods. The difficulty presented to researchers interested in the latter settlement and political history of the highlands is the shift in settlement organization and political infrastructure. Whether in response to conflicts with Islamic polities such as Adal and Harar and/or pastoral groups such as the Somali and the Oromo, climate, and environmental changes, the elites of Zagwe, Gondar, and the Amhara moved their capitals periodically, making their archaeological signatures ephemeral and difficult to locate.

Apart from being the home of many ‘firsts’ and ‘onlys’ in Africa, the Horn of Africa has also played an important role in the development of global, commercial, and religious processes over the last two millennia. Due to the problems in navigability of the Red Sea north of Aydhab and Suakin, traders seeking routes to the Mediterranean had two choices: make port at Mocha or Jeddah and take the overland routes up the western coast of Arabia or make port at the Eritrean ports and take the shorter overland route to the Nile and sail up the Nile to Alexandria and Aleppo. The continuity of ports and the overland routes in the Horn attest to the significance of the second passage for Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade. Though the religious conflict in the Horn is far more complex than a simple picture of isolated Christian highland versus the traditional hinterlands, the Islamic lowlands, and/or the coast, it is also true that these divisions played a role in the generation of larger conflicts such as the jihad of Imam Ahmad Gran˜ and the Portuguese involvement, as well as the major Oromo and Somali migrations. It could also be argued that the nineteenth-century Mahdist revolt in Sudan was linked to similar and concurrent processes in the Horn of Africa. Current sociopolitical situations are not conducive to archaeological research, especially along the coasts and immediate hinterlands of Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. Even so, future projects (especially those focused on regional approaches and on late first and second millennium developments) will prove immensely significant in understanding the role played by the Horn in the development of African and global modernity. See also: Africa, East: Ethiopia and Eritrea; Foragers; Madagascar and Surrounding Islands; Swahili Coast; Africa, North: Nubia; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Ahmed HS (1996) Exchange, Trade, and the Development of Urbanism in Somalia. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Fattovich R (1990) Remarks on the pre-Aksumite period in northern Ethiopia. Journal of Ethiopian Studies 23: 1–33. Insoll T (2003) The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jama AD (1996) The Origins and Development of Mogadishu AD 1000 to 1850: A Study of the Urban Growth along the Benadir Coast of Southern Somalia. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University.

AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 25 Kapteijns L (2000) Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. In: Levitzion N and Pouwels R (eds.) The History of Islam in Africa, pp. 227–250. Oxford: James Currey. Munro-Hay S (1991) Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Pankhurst R (1998) The Ethiopians. Oxford: Blackwell. Phillipson D (1998) Ancient Ethiopia. London: The British Museum.

Schmidt P (2006) Historical Archaeology in Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Tamrat T (1990) The Horn of Africa: The Solomonids in Ethiopia and the states of the Horn of Africa. In: Ki-Zerbo K and Niane DT (eds.) General History of Africa: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, pp. 169–180. Berkeley, CA: James Currey; Paris: UNESCO.

AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Paul J Lane, University of York, York, UK

Introduction

ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Historical archaeology first emerged as a distinct subfield of the broader discipline in North America during the mid-twentieth century. However, many of the definitions and approaches that now dominate the field are not entirely suited to the African continent. This is partly because in many areas, especially away from the coastal zones, the temporal depth of documentary sources is fairly limited, and a European presence in these areas only dates from the nineteenth century. A key feature of historical archaeology, regardless of which definition is preferred, is that it seeks to integrate and interrogate both strictly archaeological types of sources (such as artifactual, ecofactual, structural, and architectural remains and their contextual, spatial, and temporal associations and characteristics), with other nonarchaeological sources that can be broadly defined as ‘historical’. In this respect, a useful distinction can be made between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ sources. By the former is meant sources produced by outsiders, either as direct observers, or as often in African contexts, transcribers and copiers of verbal accounts provided by others. Thus, examples might include the large number of published first-hand accounts of voyages of discovery and exploration in Africa by different individuals of European origin that begin to appear from c. CE 1500 onward, and especially after 1800; the numerous official documents produced by the different European colonial powers that are now lodged in archives in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere; the records kept by different trading companies, ship captains, and others engaged in commercial activity; personal diaries and letters written by European missionaries, explorers and administrators; and also the various pre-1500 CE descriptions and guides to parts of Africa written in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. By internal sources is meant the range of historical sources produced by, in this case, different African

Glossary Atlantic slave trade The sale and exploitation of African slaves by Europeans that occurred in and around the Atlantic ocean from the 15th century to the 19th century. Most slaves were transported from West Africa and Central Africa, to the New World. colonialism A practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. contract archaeology Archaeological work carried out on behalf of, and paid by, a commercial firm or public body in advance of land development that has the potential to impact on archaeological remains. emporium A trading center. entrepoˆt A port through which exports and imports pass, and thus links a coastal zone with its hinterland. genealogical reckoning A way of establishing a chronology based on the history of the descent of families and which typically assumes that each generation represents between twenty to thirty years, hence, for instance a family tree that names six generations could cover between 120 and 180 years of history. hieroglyphic symbols Hieroglyphic symbols are a form of writing which uses little pictures to represent actions or things. historical archaeology Historical archaeology is a branch of archaeology that concerns itself with ‘historical’ societies, that is, those that had systems of writing. Holocene An epoch of geological time that began 10 000 years ago and is the second and current epoch of the Quaternary period. littoral The stretch of land adjacent to a coast, in other words, a coastal belt. metaphor An implied comparison, normally expressed as a figure of speech, between two things that are not normally treated as if they have anything in common; an extension of this process can lead to the development of a symbol, whereby the comparison is no longer implied and the second term comes to stand for the first, as in a cross being a symbol of Christianity. slavery a social-economic system under which certain persons – known as slaves – are deprived of their personal freedom and compelled to provide their labor or services. writing system A writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.

26 AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

societies. Most obviously, these include the oral traditions and histories, myths, and personal memories that have been transcribed by professional historians and anthropologists. However, there also exist various texts written in the local vernacular for certain parts of the continent, as well as some indigenous writing systems, notably the Vai script developed in what is now Liberia, the Nsibidi script found in Cross River State, Nigeria, and the Barnum hieroglyphs that occur in Cameroon. Just as archaeological sources are subject to a wide range of processes that can affect their formal, spatial, biochemical, and contextual characteristics which may influence the integrity of the scientific information they carry, so too can oral, textual, and documentary sources be subject to a wide range of factors that may introduce different kinds of bias and selectivity (see Historical Archaeology: Methods). For the African continent, both the specific and general value of oral traditions as reliable sources of historical information have been discussed at some length and various methods of source criticism devised. There is also widespread recognition of the need for detailed source criticism when handling documentary and archival sources. In terms of the latter, racial bias is obviously one factor, but many others also came into play. Equally, European perceptions of and attitudes to Africans were by no means uniform, varying between individuals, different nationalities, and different kinds of sources.

Attempts to Verify Classical Texts In common with other parts of the world, much of what might be considered historical archaeology on the African continent has been concerned with the verification of various written historical sources, especially those concerning the pre-modern era. Outside of Egypt and Nubia, where texts written using the hieroglyphic script first emerged in an archaic form perhaps as early as 3400–3200 BCE, the main areas where this has been attempted are Libya and adjacent parts of North Africa, the East African Swahili coast, and Sudanic West Africa. In the former two areas, the primary relevant texts are those written by Greek and Roman authors (although for more recent centuries, Arabic sources are also of value), while for West Africa, the earliest documentary sources derive from the writings of Arabic scholars such as Ibn Batuta and Al Bekri. In all three areas, scholars have tended to give primacy, until recently, to the available written sources, with the result that certain misrepresentations and distortions within these texts assumed the status of historical fact (see Writing Systems). Perhaps the best-known example of this concerns the use by successive generations of archaeologists of

the text known as The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, which probably dates to around CE 40. The Periplus includes a description of a sea voyage along the East African coast from a trading emporium known as Opone just south of the Somali Peninsula, to the ancient town of Rhapta, as well as details of some of the products exported from Africa, that included ivory, ambergris, and slaves. As these were mostly nondurable raw materials for which evidence is unlikely to be preserved in archaeological contexts except under special circumstances, the text provides valuable information about the trade. Understandably, it has been used from an early stage in research on the Swahili coast to supplement the evidence gleaned from archaeology of the wide range of durable products that were being imported. The Periplus contains much less information about the societies that occupied the East African coast, apart from descriptions of various landmarks and other ports that lay along this route. Some of the topographic features of the coast, such as the Lamu archipelago and Mount Kilimanjaro, are readily identifiable from the descriptions, and using these in conjunction with the sailing directions that are also provided, scholars have sought to link some of the known archaeological sites with the various ports and settlements named in the Periplus and the other important early text, Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography (c. CE 150). Few if any of these, including Rhapta, however, have been identified unambiguously. Moreover, the two texts provide conflicting information about the geographical location of several of the places named, making it especially difficult to derive an accurate topography of the East African littoral during the late first millennium BCE to early first millennium CE from these sources alone. Thus, for instance, Pemba or Zanzibar would be the best estimates for the location of the island of Menouthias based on the information given in the Periplus, whereas the coordinates given in the Geography would place this island much further south in the vicinity of Madagascar. This discrepancy, in turn, has a bearing on the possible location of Rhapta. From the description provided in the Periplus, Rhapta lay about 88 miles to the south of Menouthias, which would place it near Bagamoyo or Dar es Salaam in modern Tanzania. Whereas, in the Geography, Rhapta is said to lie far to the north of Menouthias situated on a small island set in a river, which could be a reference to the Lamu archipelago close to the modern border between Kenya and Somalia. In view of such problems, scholars no longer regard the Periplus and Ptolemy’s Geography as detailed guides to site locations, but instead as valuable, but ambiguous, testimony to the existence of long-distance trading links between East Africa and the Mediterranean world in the first few centuries of the Christian Era.

AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 27

Uses of Oral History in African Archaeology One aspect of historical archaeology in sub-Saharan Africa that distinguishes it from comparable work in many other parts of the world, particularly North America and Europe, is the greater integration of oral histories. This is partly because the growth of scholarly study of the oral history and traditions of African societies coincided with a rise in interest in the later Holocene archaeology of the continent, and especially that concerning the origins and spread of food production, metal-working, urbanism, and complex political systems. As part of this intellectual trend, the use of such traditions became a common component of most archaeological surveys, principally as a means of providing an overview of the more recent history of the area under investigation. Moreover, a particular characteristic of a great many oral traditions concerning different African societies is the emphasis placed on migration as the primary driving force of social change. The first generation of Africa’s historians to be trained in the Western academic tradition were thus often keen to see their archaeological counterparts provide material verification that the routes and stopping places described in the oral accounts, were indeed associated with the settlement histories of specific ethnic groups. It is rare however, to find unequivocal confirmation of this kind in the archaeological record, and attempts to link the various oral traditions with specific archaeological sites commonly encounter several difficulties. One region where archaeological investigations were initially guided by oral histories but subsequently generated a complete rethinking of the historical and metaphorical significance of these is the Great Lakes area of East Africa. Here, several important archaeological sites have long been associated in oral traditions with an elite known as the Bacwezi. According to at least one set of traditions, the Bacwezi had been the historical rulers of a large region centered in the lush grasslands of western Uganda, which, by calculating from genealogical data, would appear to have existed sometime during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE. A number of extensive complexes of ditched earthworks, including the sites of Bigo, Munsa, Kibengo, and Kasonko, are known from this area. During the 1950s and the 1960s, various archaeological campaigns were undertaken at some of these in an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of their date and function, and their link with the Bacwezi dynasty. The discovery at Bigo of an enclosure similar in form to that found at some of the later royal capitals in Uganda, and a suite of radiocarbon dates from the

site suggesting occupation between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries CE, led to the conclusion that Bigo was indeed the capital of the pastoral Bacwezi kingdom, and that the other sites were part of the same political system. Reappraisals of these investigations, however, have called into question many of historical interpretations that were used to guide the archaeological excavations, and highlighted some of the more general problems associated with trying to substantiate oral traditions archaeologically. Moreover, the results of more recent field investigations at Munsa and Kibengo indicate that despite some superficial similarities these not only differ from one another but also from Bigo, in terms of their site inventories and material culture traditions. Thus, rather than belonging to a single state, each of these sites probably represents the center of an independent polity that was in competition with its neighbors over resources and control of the local populace. Other scholars have argued that the Bacwezi ‘myth’ must be seen as a symbolically loaded, metaphorical account of trends in the region’s history and changing power relations, rather than as a literal description of actual historical events and relationships. In the Kagera region of northwest Tanzania, for instance, oral traditions link the more recent, immigrant Bahinda ruling dynasty with the Bacwezi, and indicate that the power and authority of the Bahinda clans was generally associated with control over ironworking, rainmaking, and fertility rites. However, genealogical reckoning places the period of Bacwezi rule up to 20–25 generations ago and thus significantly earlier than has been estimated from the Ugandan traditions. Moreover, excavations at Katuruka, the former capital of Rugamore Mahe, one of the Bahinda rulers of the Kiamutwara kingdom during the seventeenth century CE, led to the discovery of iron smelting remains associated with the very beginnings of settled farming in the region and dating to around 500 BCE. Although similar remains of early farming and iron smelting communities were found at many of the other ritually important places within the historical topology of the Bahinda landscape, in other respects there was a lack of direct settlement continuity as evidenced by typological differences between the early farming (or Early Iron Age) ceramics and those associated with the second millennium CE kingdoms. On the basis of this, it has been suggested that whereas the Bacwezi may have been indigenous rulers of smallscale polities during the first millennium CE or possibly earlier, later leaders, unconnected with Bacwezi, subsequently manipulated traditions and appropriated the archaeological remains of the Bacwezi’s evident iron smelting abilities to legitimize their own assumption to power.

28 AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Africa, Europe, and the Age of Exploration Direct and indirect trading contacts between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa have been in existence since at least the first few centuries CE. However, European contacts only intensified from the early part of the fifteenth century. Under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), various Portuguese-led voyages of exploration to the West African coast took place during the 1430s to 1480s, and in 1487–88, Bartolomeau Dias’ vessel arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, staying there briefly before returning to Lisbon. He was followed a decade later by Vasco de Gama, whose fleet of three ships rounded the Cape in 1497, and moved north along the East African seaboard over the coming months, stopping at Mombasa and Malindi, before setting sail across the Indian Ocean. By c. 1530 there were Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch outposts on the Gold Coast, and by 1652 a Dutch colony at the Cape, by which time Danish and Swedish traders were also active along the West African seaboard. Initially, access to Guinea gold was the main objective behind Portuguese activity along the West African coast and this lead rapidly to the establishment of a fortified settlement on the coast of what is now Ghana in 1482, close to a preexisting Akan settlement. Known initially as Castle Sa˜o Jorge da Mina, the fortress and trading post that grew up around it eventually came to be called Elmina (i.e., ‘the mine’, after its proximity to the gold mines inland). It was the first and largest European trading post to be built in the region. It was captured by the Dutch in 1637, and later ceded to the British in 1872, only to be destroyed the following year by a British military force following a dispute with the local inhabitants over its control. The settlement was then abandoned. There is extensive documentation, in a variety of forms, including maps and illustrations as well as written accounts and archival sources, concerning Elmina. These indicate that over time the population of Elmina became increasingly heterogeneous, as Dyula and Mande traders from further north, along with members of different ethnic groups in Elmina’s hinterland, were drawn to the settlement adding to the indigenous Akan population. At times there was also a sizable slave population, drawn from throughout the region, as well as a range of Europeans of different nationalities and a growing mulatto community. As well as attempting to define the spatial extent and the settlement and architectural history of Elmina, archaeological research at the site has focused on tracing the evidence for cultural change and continuity. Somewhat surprisingly, given the economic importance of Elmina, its role as a

trading entrepoˆt and the increasingly diverse origins of its population, local cultural traditions appear to have been more resilient than might have been expected. Ancestral rituals, the use of space in houses, domestic building technologies, and local foodways, all exhibit considerable continuity over almost 400 years of occupation. This is not to deny change – at the time of its destruction, Elmina was a far more urban, cosmopolitan place linked to the wider world through trade and international politics, and home to new social classes of Africans, than had been the case when the Portuguese arrived. The detailed analyses of artifact and building traditions, burial practices and related evidence, nevertheless, do caution against the simple assumption that significant material culture change, and especially the increased presence of goods of foreign manufacture, necessarily equates with culture change.

The Impacts of Slavery While there is evidence, such as documented at Elmina, that many African societies and cultures were quite resilient in the face of increasing contact with Europeans, the incorporation of these societies into the Atlantic world system that this brought about did have profound changes. In West Africa, one of the main effects was a change in the orientation of trade routes from the older north–south, trans-Saharan axis to an east–west one with a coastal focus. The transSaharan routes had operated for centuries, and were under direct or indirect control of the Islamic empires of North Africa, and, the steady redirection of trade away from these areas had economic consequences there as well. European demands for raw materials and local produce also encouraged intensification of trading and a consequent commodification of local West African economies. These developments, coupled with an increased importation of firearms stimulated changes in the nature of local political systems. These included the establishment of more centralized kingdoms, such as those of Dahomey and Ashante. Gold was rapidly replaced as the main commodity by slaves – it is estimated that at least 11 million Africans were exported from the continent during the Atlantic slave trade until its abolition, and some scholars put the figures even higher (see Enslavement, Archaeology of). In contrast to the amount of historical research on the Atlantic slave trade, the ‘historical archaeology’ of slavery across the continent has only recently begun to be addressed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the low status of slaves and circumstances behind their presence at a site, archaeological investigations at most of the European trading posts on the West

AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 29

African coast have typically produced only ephemeral material traces of the trade. At Elmina, the most systematically investigated of all such trading posts, and despite considerable documentary evidence concerning Elmina’s position within the system and over 100 000 artifacts recovered from the excavations, the material testimony of slavery amounts to little more than a few items. The excavation of a slave lodge at the early eighteenth century site of Vergelegen, built as the residence for the governor of Cape Town, South Africa, similarly failed to produce much in the way of material evidence that could be linked to the lives of those who had occupied the lodge, other than the burial of a middle-aged slave woman. Although ongoing research at slave collection points such as Gore´e Island, Senegal, is beginning to recover a wider range of material items, it is possible that the main material culture legacy of Africa’s slaves may reside more in the stylistic traditions that developed in the New World, than in actual artifacts recovered from the different places of collection and embarkation on the African coast. Archaeological studies of sixteenth to eighteenth century CE sites in the interior, on the other hand, frequently offer more concrete evidence for the impacts of slavery on local communities. In parts of Togo, for instance, the increased availability of iron products of European manufacture helped precipitate a decline in what had previously been a flourishing and specialized iron-smelting industry practiced on a large scale. Detailed investigations of the shifting trends in material culture production and consumption in the vicinity of Begho and Banda, west-central Ghana, provide some of the clearest indications of the long-term consequences of the growth of trade and West Africa’s incorporation into the Atlantic world system, and its impact on local material culture traditions. Comparisons between sites and stratigraphic levels that date to the periods before the arrival of Europeans, the initial century of contact (albeit indirect), and subsequent centuries have shown that several significant changes took place. At sites such as Namasa, Begho, Nyarko, and Kuulo Kataa, founded (and in some cases also abandoned) prior to the Portuguese arrival at Elmina, differentiated craft production in iron, pottery, and textiles appears to have developed but was not uniformly distributed between different villages. This uneven distribution was offset by regular exchange of local products between villages, and settlements were linked into the trans-Saharan trade networks. By CE 1590, the cultivation of maize and tobacco, both New World crops, had been incorporated into local farming practices, and stimulated the creation of a new class of locally produced ceramic artifact in the form of clay smoking pipes. At this stage, these exhibit

considerable stylistic diversity, and they may well have served as emblems of certain social distinctions. Localized specialization in textile manufacture was beginning to break down, however, with more households engaging in the craft. Imported glass beads had also become more widely available. By the end of the eighteenth century, industrially produced beads and textiles, with highly standardized forms were steadily replacing their local equivalents, and by the end of the nineteenth century the earlier, stylistically diverse tobacco pipes had been replaced by highly uniform imported clay pipes of European manufacture. New aesthetics of taste also emerged, although in many cases they involved a reworking of older practices.

Archaeology of Colonialism Another strand of historical archaeology in Africa encompasses the issues of ‘colonialism’. This has mostly been approached from the perspective of European expansion, especially in South Africa. This is partly due to the greater numbers of trained archaeologists there, who tend to be better resourced than many of their counterparts elsewhere on the continent (outside of North Africa), and the longer established tradition of contract archaeology which, especially in urban areas, provided an important stimulus to the growth of historical archaeology. It is also because compared with other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa has a much longer history of European colonialism, commencing with the establishment of a staging-post in Table Bay by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) under Commander Jan van Riebeeck in 1652. Consequently, not only have more traces of colonialism survived, but also there has been a much longer history of transformation of relations between colonial powers and indigenous inhabitants. Since at least the 1970s, the archaeological traces of Dutch, British, and Afrikaaner colonialism have been the subject of increasingly intensive study from a variety of perspectives. The body of material on the historical archaeology of South Africa and the broader region, consequently, is significantly larger than for elsewhere. Subthemes that have been addressed within the region include the archaeology of impact, the creation of distinctive colonial architectural styles, Christian missions, military encounters, industrialization, and class distinctions. Whereas much early work focused on documenting the archaeological remains of the colonizing powers, more recently, attention has been given to documenting the archaeology of the colonized, and the various ways in which African societies resisted or tried to lessen the impacts of colonial rule. Excavations at Oudepost I, a small VOC outpost situated c. 120 km north of Cape Town on the edge of

30 AFRICA, HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape, for instance, were explicitly designed to measure the degree of impact on local societies on the frontier of the Dutch colony and the variable nature of interaction between colonized and colonizer. The site was occupied from 1669 to 1723, and structural remains comprised a small, irregularly shaped stone fort, a two-roomed rectangular building that probably served as the main dwelling for the fort’s garrison, and a small rectangular structure of indeterminate function, all built of stone. The excavated remains provide insights into the conditions in such outposts, and the diets and material possessions of the soldiers. The composition of the artifact and faunal assemblages and their spatial patterning also raised issues concerning the nature of the interactions between the occupants of the fort and local indigenous populations, and the identity of those indigenes. The high percentage of wild fauna represented in the assemblage, despite the availability of livestock from colonial centers further south, for instance, led the excavators to challenge the archival evidence and suggest that over time the occupants of Oudepost would have had a significant impact on the wild food base of the surrounding indigenous Khoikhoi population. Although Khoikhoi were principally pastoralists, the material culture recovered from the site was more similar to that found on pre-contact Late Stone Age hunter-gatherer sites in the region. To the excavators, this further suggested that the colonial presence ultimately undermined the subsistence strategies of local stock-keeping communities, who had always relied on hunting to supplement their diet especially during droughts and other periods of climatic stress, forcing them to abandon herding and into bondage on white settlements and farms. Comparable studies have demonstrated that the impacts of colonialism were sometimes more muted and that new forms of practice often emerged within African societies that helped to subvert colonial ideologies. There is also evidence to suggest that older material practices often proved more resistant than is implied by the available documentary sources. A good example of the latter is provided by recent work on the nineteenth century Tswana towns of Phalatswe and Ntsweng in Botswana. Specifically, despite the existence of documentary and pictorial sources which would seem to imply widespread changes in daily practice as a consequence of Protestant evangelism, it is evident from the material remains of houses, pots, metal tools, and other items, that at least in these contexts members of the local Tswana polities retained a degree of control over their material world, and were able to accommodate the new religion and direct it toward achieving their own political goals.

Conclusion Historical archaeology as practiced on the African continent is a diverse and varied subfield of the broader discipline. Whereas some favor an emphasis on the integration of oral histories and testimonies with material remains, on the grounds that the former are more authentically indigenous than written texts, others consider that the focus of historical archaeology should be on the consequences of European contact and subsequent colonialism. Between these two poles, there are many other approaches that place greater value on the interpretive possibilities offered by the existence of multiple sources of information about the past for any period, rather than on placing limits on the temporal or conceptual boundaries of the subfield. Others still have observed that the concept of historical archaeology is not only redundant, since all archaeology should be concerned with addressing historical questions, but also serves to reinforce an artificial divide, and the prejudicial baggage that comes with such a distinction, between history and prehistory, which much archaeological practice on the continent seeks to counteract. Rhetoric aside, and whether one uses the appellation ‘historical archaeology’ or not to describe the kind of studies outlined above, two things are abundantly clear. First, recovery and analysis of the archaeological traces of the last 500 years of human activity on the African continent has the potential to provide novel insights into the histories of the continent’s diverse populations, while simultaneously providing an important testament to their successes and failures, their struggles for equity and recognition, and the ways in which they gave meaning to their lives. Some of these insights could perhaps have been gleaned from careful reading of other historical sources, but most could only have been exposed by sustained archaeological research. Without a concept such as ‘historical archaeology’, however defined, to inspire and guide this research it is questionable whether archaeologists would have devoted, and continue to devote, as much attention to these time periods as they clearly deserve. Second, whether investigating the archaeology of the last 500 years or that of earlier time periods, the interpretation of archaeological remains is always enriched when alternative sources are available to interrogate. The challenges archaeologists face are first, how to develop methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are appropriate to each of these different classes of historical information, and second, how to maintain a critical and questioning perspective so as avoid taking too much of that evidence for granted. Many of the studies outlined above indicate how archaeologists have attempted

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to do this, and whether these approaches have stood the test of time or have now been superseded. Whether one considers these types of study as exemplars of historical archaeology, or not, they have clearly made significant contributions to our understanding of the substantive history of different parts of the continent. See also: Africa, West: Villages, Cities, and States; Enslavement, Archaeology of; Historical Archaeology: Methods; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Boone J, Myers E, and Redman C (1990) Archaeological and historical approaches to complex societies: The Islamic states of medieval Morocco. American Anthropologist 92: 630–646.

DeCorse CR (2001) An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900. Washington: Smithsonian Press. DeCorse CR (ed.) (2001) West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Edwards DN (2004) The potential for historical archaeology in the Sudan. Azania 39: 13–33. Hall M (1993) The archaeology of colonial settlement in southern Africa. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 22: 177–200. Pikirayi I (1993) Acta Arkeologica Upsaliensis, Studies in African Archaeology 6: An Archaeological Identity of the Mutapa State: Towards an Historical Archaeology of Northern Zimbabwe. Uppsala. Reid DAM and Lane PJ (eds.) (2004) African Historical Archaeologies. London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Schmidt PR (2006) Historical Archaeology in Africa. London: Altamira Press. Stahl AB (2001) Making History in Banda: Anthropological Vision’s of Africa’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wessler K (ed.) (1998) Historical Archaeology in Nigeria. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

AFRICA, NORTH Contents Egypt, Pharaonic Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic Nubia Sahara, Eastern Sahara, West and Central

Egypt, Pharaonic Thomas Hikade, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Book of the Dead Funerary texts on papyrus or sometimes amulets that were usually placed inside the coffin. The collection of some 200 spells was derived from the earlier Pyramid and Coffin Texts. Called ‘spell for coming forth by day’ by the ancient Egyptians. cartonnage Material made of linen or papyrus mixed with plaster. Cartonnage was most commonly used for mummy masks, coffins, and other funerary equipment. The earliest catonnage mummy masks date to the First Intermediate Period. Coffin Texts Collection of funerary texts written on coffins and introduced during the First Intermediate Period. More than 1000 spells should guarantee survival in the afterlife. Maat Egyptian goddess symbolizing order or connective justice. She is shown as a seated woman with an ostrich feather on her head.

nome Greek term used for Egyptian provinces. Lower Egypt consisted of twenty nomes and Upper Egypt of twenty-two. nomarch Provincial governor of a nome with increasing power and influence from the end of the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom. Pyramid Texts Earliest Egyptian funerary texts that could be found in some royal pyramid chambers and corridors from the Fifth to the Eighth Dynasty. Some scholars have argued that the spells were a description of rituals during the funeral of the king. serdab Arabic word for cellar. It was a chamber inside an Old Kingdom private mastaba-tomb that housed a statue or statues of the deceased but could also be found in the royal mortuary complex of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty. vizier Highest official in the Egyptian administration after the king. The office is first attested in the Second Dynasty.

Introduction In 1798 when Napoleon’s troops landed in Egypt they were accompanied by 167 scientists whose task was to document not only the geography, flora, and fauna of modern-day Egypt but also the remains of Ancient Egypt. With the publication of the

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De´scription de l’E´gypte almost 20 years later, the foundation stone for Egyptology was laid. The expedition by the German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in 1842–46 to Egypt and Nubia yielded further knowledge about Ancient Egypt. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, field work in Egypt was still primarily the search for curiosities and treasures and lacked scientific method. It was not until 1881 when W. M. F. Petrie set out to survey the Great Pyramids at Giza and subsequently excavated dozens of sites throughout Egypt with a clear concept and methodology of excavating that Egyptian archaeology truly began. It is the connection of archaeological material and the evidence from thousands of inscribed objects from Ancient Egypt that makes modern Egyptology such an intriguing subject. Today there are more than 300 foreign missions working in Egypt and many countries even have their own national research centers and institutions in Cairo. Early excavation work often concentrated on cemeteries that were easily accessible as they were often situated in the dry sand of the lower desert or cut into the limestone cliffs along the Nile Valley. Thus, Egyptian archaeology is best known from its burials. Yet, in the last decades more and more settlement archaeology has taken place and our knowledge of the daily lives of Ancient Egyptians has been improved widely.

Old Kingdom (Third–Eighth Dynasty, c. 2686–2160 BC) The Old Kingdom, also called the Pyramid Age, is a continuation of the Early Dynastic Period. It was a time of long, uninterrupted economic prosperity and political stability. The central administration was at the capital at Memphis under a vizier who was the highest official. Upper Egypt, the land south of the capital, and Lower Egypt, the Nile Delta to the north, were divided into ‘nomes’ that were governed by nomarchs who maintained strong ties with the court. The state was able to consolidate its borders in the south and north and maintained long-distance trade with the Levant and Nubia. A redistributive economic system with palaces, temples, royal domains, and mortuary complexes served as centers for collecting, storing, and distributing mainly agrarian produce. The long reign of Pepi II (c. 2278–2184 BC) at the end of the Sixth Dynasty has often been seen as a time of stagnation and decline that ultimately brought down the regime of the central government but other factors such as worsening climatic conditions causing droughts and famine may have contributed to the fragmentation of the centralized regime and the growth of regional power in the hands of the nomarchs.

At the top of Egyptian society stood the divine king. His funerary complex became the focus of royal ideology and ignited large-scale building programs never seen before. More than a dozen pyramids, as stairways to heaven for the deceased king, were built close to the capital in the area of Giza and Saqqara. Royal Tombs

Royal tombs of the Early Dynastic Period were built almost entirely of sundried mud-bricks, wood, and reed with the use of stone limited to the interior of tomb chambers and stelae which were large stone slabs with the kings’ name on them. It was at Saqqara in the Third Dynasty that Egypt’s first monumental stone structure was erected for King Djoser (c. 2667– 2648 BC). His funerary complex, including the Step Pyramid and ceremonial buildings, transformed the organic building materials into their limestone equivalent (Figures 1 and 2). The enclosure wall of the complex measured 544  277 m and was 10.5 m high. The Step Pyramid itself, located to the north of a large courtyard measured 121  109 m and its six steps stood 60 m tall. The pyramid was actually begun as a mastaba, the Arabic word for ‘bench’, which the tomb resembled. It was enlarged twice before it was altered into a four-step pyramid and finally augmented to six steps. Underneath the pyramid lay a shaft (7 m square and 28 m deep) culminating in the burial chamber. Originally made of limestone with stars on the ceiling it was later replaced by a granite chamber. Nothing of the king’s interment was found. Also underground was a system of about 400 rooms and corridors, totaling almost 6 km in length. The whole gigantic royal complex at Saqqara symbolizes the focal point of Egyptian society and culture in the Old Kingdom: the divine king. There were at least two more step pyramids of the Third Dynasty before, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under King Snofru (c. 2613–2589 BC), the final design of a true pyramid was realized. The design of the pyramid complex is very standardized. Each has an axis with an east–west orientation, which underlines the structure’s solar aspect. From the valley temple at the eastern entrance (Figure 3), a causeway leads further to the west and ends in the mortuary temple, situated at the foot of the east side of the pyramid. This temple has several chambers including an inner sanctuary furnished with a stela, which is set directly against the pyramid. Despite this standardized pattern, however, no two pyramids were exactly alike. The interior chambers and ascending and descending passages were always different. Starting in the Fifth Dynasty, the walls of these chambers and corridors could be decorated with the so-called Pyramid Texts, a collection of funerary texts of about 800 spells.

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Figure 1 Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara (Third Dynasty).

Figure 2 Festival court of Djoser complex at Saqqara (Third Dynasty).

The main building material for the pyramid was limestone although granite was also used for the lower casing blocks. In the pyramid temples basalt was also sometimes used for the floors. Separate smaller pyramids were erected for the queens while higher officials, often blood relatives, were buried in the limestone mastaba tombs in the necropolis nearby. Private Tombs

To date, dozens of Old Kingdom cemeteries have been found throughout the country. The major cemeteries for officials, however, were at Saqqara,

Helwan Dahshur, Giza, and at Abusir, where they could remain close to the king in the afterlife also. While the majority of the Egyptian population was buried in simple pits in the desert sands, the wealthier could afford rock-cut tombs or mastaba tombs. An early mastaba tomb comprised a subterranean structure with a shaft, a burial chamber and store rooms (Figure 4). The store rooms disappeared by the Fourth Dynasty. The superstructure was made of mud-brick or stone and its layout became more and more elaborate with the addition of multiple rooms which effectively turned it into a funerary chapel. Scenes of daily life, mostly related to farming, herding, and craftwork, were depicted on the walls of

34 AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic

Pyramid

Satellite pyramid

Pyramid temple

Causeway

Valley temple

Figure 3 Standard pyramid complex of the Old Kingdom.

Shaft Serdab with statue

Chapel with false door

Facade sealed with casing blocks

Burial chamber with sarcophagus

Figure 4 Mastaba tomb of the Old Kingdom.

these rooms, along with representations of the tomb owner, his relatives, and his household members. During the funerary cult the family could bring their offerings to the deceased which they presented on an altar in front of the false door. In a hidden chamber, called a serdab, a statue of the deceased was placed, thus allowing him to accept these offerings symbolically. An offering formula on the wall next to the false door secured the eternal sustenance of the deceased. Sun Temples and Provincial Temples

A special temple, which was built in addition to the pyramids, developed during the Fifth Dynasty. It was a temple dedicated to the sun god Re. It had similar architectural features to the pyramid complexes including a valley temple functioning as a gate or

entrance and a causeway leading to an upper temple which formed the main focal point of the compound: an obelisk-like structure erected of stone blocks rising up on a pedestal. In one case the pedestal was 20 m high and the obelisk 36 m tall. An open space in front of the obelisk contained an altar where offerings were presented. Located on one side of the large courtyard were magazines and rooms that have been interpreted as slaughterhouses. Parts of the upper temple were decorated with royal jubilee scenes and scenes from nature. The whole structure was surrounded by an enclosure wall. Outside the wall a brick-built model of a solar boat for the god was found. Six sun temples are known from texts but only the ones of King Niuserre and Userkaf from the Fifth Dynasty have been found at Abu Gurob, 10 km southwest of Cairo.

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While royal building activities were concentrated around the capital at Memphis, temples in the rest of the country largely comprised sanctuaries which were built and maintained by local communities. Provincial temples followed no specific design and were often of modest size. The Old Kingdom temple on the island of Elephantine opposite modern Aswan, for example, consisted of mud-bricks enclosing a niche between granite boulders and measured only c. 7  7 m.

First Intermediate Period (Ninth–early Eleventh Dynasty; c. 2160–2055 BC) At the end of the Old Kingdom large-scale royal building programs came to a halt. Yet, with the increasing prosperity of the provinces and a rise in population, it became necessary for the provinces to be administered locally rather than from the royal residence at Memphis, and the nomarchs lived and were even buried in their nomes. Ultimately, the central government collapsed and foreign trade seems to have ceased. The Ninth/Tenth Dynasty established a power basis at Herakleopolis some 100 km upstream from the old capital at Memphis. However, these dynasties never controlled the whole country and civil war broke out. In Upper Egypt Ankhtifi, nomarch of the third nome of Upper Egypt, tried to gain control over neighboring territories by force. The fragmentation of the country and violence only ended when one of these regional rulers, Mentuhotep II, defeated all others and united Egypt again. Based on texts the First Intermediate Period has often been seen as a very unstable period with civil war and even cannibalism caused by famine. A different picture emerges from excavations of cemeteries from the First Intermediate Period, however, which indicates a redistribution of wealth as well as cultural innovations. All the archaeological evidence points to an increased effort to prepare tombs of the deceased for the afterlife rather than a decline in tomb-building caused by economic hardship. In general, mastaba tombs and rock-cut tombs had already become larger at the end of the Old Kingdom and this process continued. Tombs contained several chambers for multiple burials. Grave goods took the form of wooden offering bearers, statues, and even whole miniature copies of workshops. The cartonnage mask, a colored mask made from linen and gypsum to cover the head of the mummy, was introduced. Religious texts, the socalled Coffin Texts, were inscribed on the coffins of the elite and stressed the importance of social ties, these mirroring the change in tomb architecture allowing for multiple burials.

Middle Kingdom (later Eleventh–Thirteenth Dynasty; c. 2055–1650 BC) The Middle Kingdom dates from the victory of Mentuhotep II of Thebes over his rivals at Herakleopolis and the re-unification of Egypt. Initially residing in Thebes, the Twelfth Dynasty (c. 1985–1773 BC) moved to a new capital called Amemenhet Itj-tawj, possibly in an area south of the old residence at Memphis, close to the Fayum Oasis. Archaeologists have yet to find and excavate this new capital. Passing on from father to son, the Twelfth Dynasty stayed in power for almost 200 years. The central administration followed in the footsteps of the Old Kingdom with a vizier at the top, a treasury, a ministry for supervising the harvesting and managing of the crops, a ministry for cattle and fields, and a ministry for labor, responsible for the building programs of the state. The king was still the absolute divine ruler but his legitimacy was based on representative theocracy and not on direct rule as in the Old Kingdom. Foreign affairs were dominated by the conquest of Lower Nubia and various raids into the Levant, which brought back Asiatics as slaves. Asiatics also moved voluntarily to the Nile Delta and settled there. Domestically the Twelfth Dynasty is credited with an irrigation program in the Fayum Oasis for new cultivation. Regarding religion, a new concept of the underworld, the kingdom of Osiris, saw the rise of this god. In addition, the concept of Maat (translated often as order or connective justice), a guideline of how Egyptians should live and treat each other, became popular. A wealth of literary texts was composed during the Middle Kingdom, and many of these were later considered classics. The language of these texts, Middle Egyptian, remained in use for sacred texts until the end of the Pharaonic period. All the achievements of the Middle Kingdom made it the ‘classical’ Egyptian age that was revered in later periods. Yet the Middle Kingdom ended in fragmentation when the Thirteenth Dynasty had to give way to pressure from the Hyksos, Asiatic rulers in the eastern Nile Delta, and moved their residence to Thebes in the south. The Mortuary Complex of Mentuhotep II

Under Mentuhotep II a unique mortuary temple was erected in the limestone escarpment of Deir el-Bahri on the west bank at Thebes (Figures 5 and 6). The complex once had a valley temple near the edge of cultivation and from there a causeway more than 1 km long led to a huge court in the west surrounded by a sandstone wall. Inside the courtyard, the discovery of the roots of sycamores and tamarisks in tree pits indicates that an alley once existed here. It was

36 AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic

Figure 5 Mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II at Western Thebes (Eleventh Dynasty).

Bab el-Hosan Upper hall Middle court Central core

Ramp

Alley of trees

Hypostyle hall

Causeway

Amun sanctuary

Lower hall

Figure 6 Mortuary temple of King Mentuhotep II (Eleventh Dynasty).

also in the courtyard that the initial royal tomb, today known as Bab el-Hosan, was found. A ramp at the end of the alley led to a platform topped by a core building and an ambulatory. The core building might have been crowned in different ways. A pyramid (for which there is no archaeological evidence), a mastaba-like structure, or a mound of soil resembling the primeval mound from which the land of Egypt once emerged, are all possible options and would all be in accordance with Egyptian beliefs. A further arrangement of courtyards and a hypostyle hall continued to the west until finally, the sanctuary and the royal tomb itself were cut into the rock escarpment. Foundation deposits in the four corners under the platform and the core building, which consisted of food offerings, ceramic, and wooden models of

people and objects like bread and vessels, as well as mud-bricks with tablets with the royal name on them give an intriguing glimpse into the rituals accompanying the construction of the temple. Middle Kingdom Pyramids

The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty deliberately repeated the Old Kingdom tradition of pyramid building along the desert edge west of the Nile Valley. The new construction method, however, consisted of a mudbrick core with a grid of stone walls. The finish was still done with limestone casing blocks. Although the new construction method was far more economical, it is no indication that the Egyptian kings could not afford solid stone pyramids. Today the limestone casing blocks have been stripped away and the Middle

AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic 37

Figure 7 Pyramid of King Amenemhat III at Hawara (Twelfth Dynasty).

Kingdom pyramids are in a very bad condition with the mud-brick core exposed to the elements (Figure 7). The Settlement of Lahun

About 1200 m east of the pyramid of Senusret II (c. 1877–1870 BC), W. M. F. Petrie discovered the remains of a pyramid town called Lahun. A pyramid town is essentially the settlement that housed the workmen building the pyramid complex along with the officials overseeing the work. Subsequently, it became the home for those responsible for the royal funerary cult. Lahun was a planned town with a rigid grid system. It included an enclosure wall and a wall that divided the settlement in half. One side contained about a dozen large houses with as many as 70 rooms and covering up to 3000 m2. The other side had more than 200 houses, but their maximum size was less than 200 m2. This size disparity clearly reflects the hierarchy in the town, with a few elite individuals living in luxury while the majority lived in modest dwellings. Based on the size of granaries at Lahun, a population of up to 9000 persons has been proposed, but according to a papyri archive found at the site which sometimes lists six persons per household, the population might have been much smaller. Lahun is also important for the discovery of Minoan sherds and Egyptian imitations of Minoan pottery. Nubian Fortresses

In the wake of its aggressive foreign policy in the south, a string of fortifications were built during the Twelfth Dynasty in order to secure trade routes and to protect the border. According to textual evidence,

Egypt built at least 17 military installations starting c. 100 km south of Egypt’s border at Elephantine. Fifteen of these mud-brick built fortresses were excavated during several rescue campaigns. Following the construction of the High Dam at Aswan, the fortresses now lie beneath the waters of Lake Nasser. The forts are all very close to each other, often only 3–10 km away or just lying across the narrow stretch of the Nile. Their proximity to one another made signaling by smoke or beacon quite simple. There were two types of fortresses: first the plain type which had an almost square layout that bordered the Nile on one side. Some of the outer walls, which measured up to 460  215 m and were more than 5 m thick, contained towers with loop holes for archers and were possibly topped by crenellations. Inside these mud-brick walls, a system of ditches and ramparts formed the first line of defense around the citadel, which had storage facilities and housing for the soldiers and officials. The second type of fortress was built on granite formations which could not be easily leveled. Thus, they had not a straightforward rectangular layout but possessed a more irregular shape.

Second Intermediate Period (Fifteenth–Seventeenth Dynasty; c. 1650–1550 BC) During the Thirteenth Dynasty dynastic stability ended and dozens of kings reigned in quick succession. They came from different lineages and some of them were possibly even of Asiatic origin. Royal mortuary cults for the Twelfth Dynasty kings ceased.

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Yet, contacts with the Levant were maintained and more and more Asiatics came to Egypt. When the central government finally fragmented, several rulers emerged with authority over small kingdoms in the Nile Delta. One group of these rulers, the Hyksos (Rulers of Foreign Lands), of the later Fifteenth Dynasty, gained power, conquered Memphis, and established their residence at Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba) in the eastern Nile Delta. The rulers of the Seventeenth Dynasty in Thebes, the successors of the Thirteenth Dynasty, started what they saw as a ‘war of liberation’ against the Hyksos who had sealed an alliance with the Kushite kings of Nubia and had sandwiched Upper Egypt between the two powers. In a series of battles, the Theban rulers were finally able to defeat the Hyksos and the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Ahmose (c. 1550–1525 BC), drove them out of Egypt. The Hyksos Capital at Avaris

Although only limited areas of the Hyksos capital at Avaris have been excavated, they have revealed an occupation that possibly stretches from to the First Intermediate Period to the early Eighteenth Dynasty. The earliest archaeological settlement remains stem, however, from a workmen’s village of the early Twelfth Dynasty. The remains of an enclosure wall that were found to the north led to the assumption that the whole settlement was once surrounded by a mud-brick wall. The settlement was home for more than one thousand people. A hiatus separates this settlement from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty when the site was resettled by Canaanites. The houses had a central wide room typical of a style prevalent in Syria from the fourth millennium BC. Furthermore, there were cemeteries attached directly to the houses, a custom derived from Middle Bronze Age SyroPalestine. Surprisingly, foreign pottery from the Levant makes up only 20% of the assemblage, although burials of males showed that half of them had weapons of Levantine origin and possibly indicate that they were in the service of the Egyptian crown. The layers dating to the Thirteenth Dynasty revealed an Egyptian palace in layout with attached gardens and a cemetery with donkey, goat, and sheep burials. The donkey burials especially are a foreign element in Egypt but are well known during the Middle Bronze Age in the Levant. This evidence clearly shows that the administration of the palace was in the hands of Asiatics. By the middle of the eighteenth century BC the site was partially abandoned, most likely due to an epidemic, before being resettled. Foreign ceramics now made up to 40% of the assemblage and the site increased dramatically, covering an area of 250 ha, three times the size of the contemporary city

of Hazor in modern Israel. International trade flourished in the Hyksos period with imports from the Aegean and the Levant. In the Hyksos period, Avaris also had a huge citadel with vineyards and gardens.

New Kingdom (Eighteenth–Twentieth Dynasty; c. 1550–1069 BC) After the expulsion of the Hyksos the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty set out to form one of the most powerful states in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Internal reforms and a restructuring of the administration and military enabled Egypt to march into and occupy foreign territories where she installed her own administration. Dozens of military campaigns in the Levant are recorded by pharaohs such as Amenophis II and especially Thutmosis III, who ruthlessly exercised his imperialistic policy. The eastern desert of Upper Egypt and increasingly Lower Nubia became the classic gold sources of Egypt. Large-scale expeditions were sent out to mine turquoise and copper in the Sinai Peninsula. The southern border of Egypt was set as far south as Gebel Barkal, a trading and religious center near the fourth cataract. Trade relations were maintained throughout the Mediterranean and pottery from Cyprus, Crete, Mycenae, and the Levant can be found at many sites in Egypt. By the time of the reign of Amenophis III (c. 1390–1352 BC), a prosperous, wealthy, and influential Egypt had reached its first New Kingdom zenith. This period, however, also saw domestic turbulence and turmoil arising from the religious reforms of Akhenaten (c. 1352–1336 BC), the son of Amenophis III, who abandoned the old pantheon and installed the god Aten as the sole god for Egypt. Early in his reign Akhenaten severed all links with the religious capital of Thebes and its principal god Amun by relocating the capital to Akhetaten (Horizon of Aten), modern Tell el-Amarna. Worshipping one god only was a profound disturbance for ordinary Egyptians who had always been used to having direct contact with many gods. Consequently, when Akhenaten died, so also died his religion of the Aten. Under Tutankhamun (c. 1336–1327 BC), the first attempts at a religious restoration of the old cults were launched while during the subsequent Nineteenth Dynasty, there ensued an active persecution of the Aten cult. In the administration many civil officials were replaced by military personnel and the army became the most influential domestic power. Internationally, Egypt was faced with the expansionist Hittite empire and they finally clashed at the Battle of Qadesh where the army of Ramses II met theHittite troops of Muwatalli. Ramses II did not achieve his goal of driving the Hittites out of Qadesh and

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the whole campaign ended in a stalemate that resulted in a peace treaty in the twenty-first regnal year of Ramses II. After this Egypt had a relatively calm and prosperous period until the so-called Sea Peoples caused serious turmoil in the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the thirteenth century BC. First Pharaoh Merenptah (c. 1213–1203 BC) and later Ramses III (c. 1184–1153 BC) had to fight battles against the Sea Peoples on land and at sea in order to secure Egypt’s sovereignty. These international disruptions were too great, however, and combined with internal economic problems Egypt began losing her international power. At the end of the New Kingdom Egypt had to withdraw from the Levant altogether. Tell el-Amarna

The city of Amarna was built on virgin soil and covered an area of about 13  5km (Figure 8). The city was made up of palaces, houses, and temples which had to be built quickly to accommodate the many thousands who were to move there from Thebes. A major royal road running north–south was built and it was flanked by palaces and temples. Some temples like the so-called House of the Sun Disk were up to 750 m long and 230 m wide. They housed hundreds of altars for the offerings to Aten. Palaces were lavishly decorated and spread throughout the city. Private houses were located in the suburbs to the north and south of the Central City. Some larger houses or villas had more than forty rooms covering more than 1000 m2. The standard design was tripartite with two public sections consisting of a vestibule, long hall and central hall. The third section was the private area with bedrooms and bathrooms. Around these villas were clusters of smaller houses. Remarkably, the houses at Amarna differ in size rather than design, and most features were constantly repeated. By no means should Amarna be seen as an organic settlement however, since its standardization was mostly due to the time pressure of building the city. Deir el-Medineh

The workmen’s village of Deir el-Medineh was founded under King Thutmosis I (c. 1504–1492 BC) in order to house the men who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings (Figure 9). It was a state-run community where almost all supplies for daily life were provided by the crown. At its peak the village consisted of some 70 houses alongside the main road and was surrounded by a 6–7 m high enclosure wall. Forty to fifty houses were built outside the compound. An average house had four rooms with an entrance room 40–50 cm below street level. The original houses were complete mud-brick structures without foundations. Later houses had a basement of

stones and sometimes stone walls extending up to 2.5 m in height. The major feature in the entrance area was the mud-brick bench-like structure, possibly a small shrine. The next room had one or two columns and it contained a kind of divan. At the rear were the bedroom, the kitchen, and storage facilities. A staircase also gave access to the roof providing further living space. The inhabitants of Deir el-Medineh were buried in tombs on the hill slope nearby. The tombs had a superstructure with a chapel which was sometimes crowned by a small pyramid and a substructure with a shaft and a burial chamber that was often colorfully decorated. Next to the village around 5000 limestone flakes and broken pottery sherds were found with many inscriptions from the villagers. They consist, among others, of contracts, files of lawsuits, prayers, and school texts. In conjunction with the archaeological evidence and other papyri concerning Deir el-Medineh, the settlement has become the best-known village of the Late Bronze Age. The village was abandoned under Ramses XI (c. 1099–1069 BC) when the Valley of the Kings was also abandoned as the royal burial ground. Luxor and Karnak Temple

During the early New Kingdom building activity was conducted on all major temples such as Karnak and Luxor Temple. Both temples were located in Upper Egypt at Thebes. The temple at Karnak goes back to the time of Sesostris I and was the major cult center for the Theban triad of the gods Amun, Mut, and Khonsu. From the Middle Kingdom until the Thirtieth Dynasty Karnak remained a site under permanent construction as each pharaoh added and extended to this temple called ‘The most select of Places’ (Figure 10). The continuous addition of pylons (tower-like entrance gates), courtyards, columned halls, obelisks, and chapels means that the temple has to be read archaeologically from the inside out with the oldest part not at the front of the first pylon but almost in the middle of the compound. One of the most impressive buildings at Karnak is the Great Hypostyle Hall with 134 papyrus columns rising up to 21 m (Figure 11). The hall was once roofed and illuminated through windows placed high up the wall right under the ceiling. The foundation of the great hypostyle hall goes back to Amenophis III (c. 1390– 1352 BC), but the decoration was initiated under Sety I (c. 1294–1279 BC) and finished under Sety’s son Ramses II (c. 1279–1213 BC). The Great Hall has both raised relief dating to the time of Sety I and sunken reliefs which were generally used on the outside walls to increase the effect of shadow and sunlight. The latter, more economical technique was used during the immense building program of Ramses II.

40 AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic

STELA V TELL EL-AMARNA NORTH CITY

NORTH TOMBS

NORTH PALACE

STELA U

NORTH SUBURB

om

b

T al

y

to

GREAT ATEN TEMPLE

Ro

CENTRAL CITY

GREAT PALACE SMALL ATEN TEMPLE

WORKMENS⬘S VILLAGE MAIN CITY

Nile River

SOUTH TOMBS

Royal Road KOM EL-NANA

MARU-ATEN

STELA N STELA M

0 0

1

2 kms 1 min

Figure 8 Capital of Pharaoh Akhenaten at Tell el-Amarna (Eighteenth Dynasty).

The inner walls were reserved for the depiction of rituals and processions while the outer fac¸ades were decorated with the campaigns of Sety I and Ramses II to Palestine and Syria.

The temples of Karnak and Luxor were linked through a system of roads, each flanked with sphinxes. As with Karnak, Luxor temple was dedicated to Amun or Amun-Ra and dates back to the reign

AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic 41

Niche

Workroom /bedroom

Shrine Street

Kitchen Reception room

Second room Cellar Cellar

M 01

5

10

15

20

Figure 9 Workmen’s village at Deir el-Medineh (New Kingdom).

Figure 10 View over Karnak Temple from east.

42 AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic

of Hatshepsut (c. 1473–1458 BC) (Figure 12). The core at the southern end was built under Amenophis III. Under Akhenaten work was interrupted at Luxor but resumed under Tutankhamun (c. 1336–1327 BC).

The giant pylon was erected by Ramses II and decorated with scenes and texts of the Battle of Qadesh against the Hittites. In the first millennium further additions were made by Shabaka (c. 716–702 BC) who built a kiosk outside the temple, and by Nectanebo I (380–362 BC) who embellished the sphinx alley with hundreds of statues. Under Alexander the Great the worship of the emperor was established here and this tradition was continued until the Roman period, when the temple finally became a military camp from the fourth to sixth century AD. While the cult at Karnak focused on the worship of the gods, Luxor temple focused more on the worship of the king and his relationship with the gods. Later on, several churches were built in Luxor temple and in the thirteenth century AD, the mosque of Abu el-Hagag, which is still in use today, was built in the first courtyard. Western Thebes

Figure 11 Great Hall at Karnak (Nineteenth Dynasty).

On the west bank at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings, the New Kingdom pharaohs established their final resting place. As a point of departure from earlier periods, however, the mortuary cult was separated from the king’s actual burial place. Thus, the mortuary temple of each king, with the classic design of a god’s temple with pylons, courtyards, columned halls and inner sanctuaries, was erected at the edge of the river plain. Although the scenes on the walls of these temples show overwhelmingly rituals and cultic activities, they also commemorated historical events such

Figure 12 Luxor Temple from the south with pylon of Ramses II (left), colonnade of Amenophis III/Tutankhamun (right) and the mosque of Abu al-Hagag (center).

AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic 43

as the Battle of Qadesh of Ramses II and the battle against the Sea Peoples by Ramses III. The tombs consist of a series of descending corridors and chambers cut into the limestone cliff. While earlier tombs have a bent axis, later tombs possess a straight axis echoing the topography of the underworld. The wall decorations show scenes and texts from afterlife books such as the Book of the Dead or the Book of Caverns. Most of the royal mummies were relocated to safer places in the Theban necropolis by the end of the New Kingdom and today many are in the Cairo Museum on display. The most famous tomb in the Valley of the King is that of Tutankhamun. In 1922 it was found largely intact and unplundered and it gives a good insight into the riches that once went into the tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs, especially in view of the fact that this king was a relatively insignificant ruler. In western Thebes thousands of higher and lower officials and priests possessed rock-cut tombs. The standard layout during the Eighteenth Dynasty comprised an open courtyard and possibly a shaft, and it was surrounded by a wall (Figure 13). Inside was a broad hall and a corridor giving the whole a T-shaped form. From here sometimes a sloping passage led to the burial chamber underground. During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties the courtyard often had a pylon and columns while the tomb structure was topped by a pyramid, crowned by a capstone (pyramidion), and attached chapel (Figure 14). A Theban specialty were the so-called funerary cones. They were made of clay and placed on the fac¸ade above the tomb entrance. They were stamped on the top with the name of the tomb owner and his titles. In contrast to Thebes, in the north at Saqqara, tombs of high officials were designed like temples with pylons, courtyards, and columned halls. Scenes of daily life and mortuary rituals characterized the wall decoration at the beginning of the New Kingdom, but over time only religious and mortuary themes tended to prevail.

Third Intermediate Period (c. 1069–664 BC) The Third Intermediate Period comprises the TwentyFirst to Twenty-Fifth Dynasties. The Libyans played a dominating role in the time of the Twenty-First to Twenty-Fourth Dynasties. Their homeland was the Cyrenaica where they originally had an economy based on pastoral nomadism. Major areas of Libyan settlements in Egypt were located between Memphis and Herakleopolis, and in the oases of the Western Desert, but most were situated in the western Delta. While there is no distinct material culture linked to

Frieze of funerary cones

Statue niche

Courtyard

Entrance

Shaft

Courtyard wall

Rock

Figure 13 Early New Kingdom Theban tomb.

Pyramidion

Pyramid chapel

Pyramid

Portico Rock Pylon

Figure 14 Late New Kingdom Theban tomb.

the Libyans in Egypt, their very un-Egyptian names, such as Takelot, Sheshonq, and Osorkon, make it clear that they maintained their ethnic identity. The first king of the Twenty-First Dynasty was Smendes who ruled in the new northern capital at Tanis, while the south was controlled by the High Priest of Amun. Seeing the weakening power and influence of the High Priest in Thebes Sheshonq managed to install his son there and to some degree Egypt was united again under his rule. Subsequently, however, rival dynasties fought for the crown, and in fact the Twenty-Second to Twenty-Fourth Dynasties ruled simultaneously in different parts of the country. Major sites were Tanis, Bubastis, and Sais. Since these Delta sites have been little explored, however, our knowledge is rather poor. The Third Intermediate Period ended with the

44 AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pharaonic

Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, a house of rulers that came from Kush in the South who conquered Egypt and ruled Egypt without rivals from c. 715–656 BC. Tanis

The city is strategically well located in the eastern Nile Delta, just north of the former capital of the Ramesside kings. Many stone blocks were taken from that earlier site to erect the new residence. Even statues and reliefs from the Old and Middle Kingdoms were re-used at Tanis. The new rulers of the Twenty-First Dynasty abandoned the Valley of the Kings and had their tombs built within the sacred precinct of a temple. In general, the idea of lifelong planning for a tomb disappeared and many private and sometimes royal burials were placed in existing New Kingdom tombs or mortuary temples. Nevertheless, the richer burials contained beautifully decorated coffins of the highest quality. When French Egyptologist Pierre Montet started to excavate at Tanis in the 1920s, he was convinced that he had discovered the capital of the Ramesside kings and wanted to find documents and monuments that would confirm the Biblical account of the Exodus. Surprisingly, he came across the royal tombs of the Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Dynasties, which were situated in the large mud-brick enclosure (430  370 m) of the Amun temple. Of the six subterranean tombs, all but the one of the third ruler of the Twenty-First Dynasty, Psusennes I, were robbed. The tombs were built of stone and mud-brick and were of modest size. The tomb of Psusennes contained not only the body of the king but the mummy of his successor, Amenemope, as well as the body of a general. With a golden mask on his face the king was placed in a silver coffin. This in turn was put inside an anthropoid sarcophagus of black granite which itself was placed in a rectangular chest of pink granite. Many precious objects of silver, gold, and lapis lazuli were discovered at Tanis in the spring of 1939. The outbreak of World War II, however, meant that these treasures are less well known than those of Tutankhamun.

Late Period (Twenty-Sixth –Thirtieth Dynasty; 664–332 BC) The rulers of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, with the help of Assyria, drove the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty out of Egypt and reunited the country. Egypt maintained good connections with Assyria and also established trade contacts with the Levant. Egypt also opened up international trade with the Mediterranean world and with such positive economic prospects, many foreigners made their way to Egypt. King Amosis

(570–526 BC) established flourishing contacts with Greek cities such as Delphi, Corinth, and Samos. In 560 BC Egypt even occupied Cyprus, and Amosis made alliances with Babylon and Croesus of Lydia against the Persian Empire. Many Greek mercenaries were employed by the Egyptian pharaoh and were stationed throughout the country. The kings of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty made their capital at Sais in the western Nile Delta. Due to the utilization of ancient mud-bricks as fertilizer on fields today and the proximity of the modern village of Sa el-Hagar, few remains of this capital have survived. Nonetheless, recent archaeological work has traced the beginning of the settlement as far back as the fourth millennium BC. In 525 BC Egypt became a satrapy of the Persian Empire. The Persian king Cambyses was crowned as Pharaoh in Memphis and became first king of the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty. Although Persian troops were garrisoned throughout Egypt, the administration remained in the hands of the Egyptians and in general, Egyptian culture and religion remained intact. King Darius even erected a temple in the el-Kharga Oasis in honor of Egyptian deities. Nevertheless, antiPersian sentiments were growing in Egypt and by 405 BC the Persians were driven out of Egypt. Significant building programs stretching from the Delta to the southern border at Elephantine were not resumed until the reign of the founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty, Nectanebo I (380–362 BC), determined to bring back Egypt’s old glory. Between 360 and 342 BC several attempts by the Persians to re-conquer Egypt failed. In 343 BC, however, the Persians were ultimately successful and they ended the rule of Egyptian pharaohs once and for all. In 332 BC Egypt fell prey to Alexander the Great and between 30 BC and 395 AD Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. See also: Africa, North: Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic; Nubia;

Sahara, Eastern; Sahara, West and Central.

Further Reading Arnold D (2003) The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egyptian Architecture. Princeton: University Press. Baines J and Malek J (2000) Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Phaidon Press. Bard KA (1999) Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. London/New York: Routledge. Bietak M (1996) Avaris, Capital of the Hyksos. London: British Museum Press. Kemp BJ (2006) Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of Ancient Civilization. London/New York: Routledge. Lehner M (1997) The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames and Hudson. Reeves N (1996) The Complete Valley of the Kings. London: Thames and Hudson.

AFRICA, NORTH/Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic 45 Schulz R and Seidel M (eds.) (1998) Egypt: The World of the Pharaohs. Cologne: Ko¨nemann. Shaw I (ed.) (2000) The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw I (2003) Exploring Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic Fekri Hassan, University College London, London, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Maadi-Buto Twelve sites, named after the type site of Maadi in the western Delta. Naqada A district and town about 30 km north of Luxor on the west bank of the Nile in southern Egypt (Upper Egypt), including villages such as Toukh, Khatara, Danfiq and Zawayda. Predynastic Period Traditionally the period between the Early Neolithic and the beginning of the Pharaonic monarchy beginning with King Narmer.

Communities settled along the banks of the Nile from the border with Nubia to the shores of the Mediterranean were brought together 5000 to 4700 years ago to form a single state under the rule of powerful kings, who were later referred to as ‘Pharaohs’. The Egyptian state depended on the agricultural productivity of the Nile Valley and the Delta. Agriculture was introduced in Egypt 2000 years earlier (see Plant Domestication). The earliest food-producing (Neolithic) communities in Egypt were established on the western margin of the Delta at Mermida Beni Salama and around the Faiyum Depression (Figure 1). These sites indicate that wheat and barley were cultivated and that domestic sheep, goat, and cattle were herded. Except for a breed of cattle which was ‘kept’ in the Eastern Sahara around Nabta Playa and Bir Kisseiba, domesticated species of animals and plants were introduced from Southwest Asia. Initially, a small community sheltering in flimsy huts, the inhabitants of Merimda Beni Salama developed into a well-organized community living in a large village with mud huts. Graves were found with the settlements, but grave goods were rare. The repertoire of the last occupation at Merimda which lasted until about 4100 BC included polished dark red/black pottery, bifacial tools, figurines, and other bone, ivory, and shell items. At El-Omari, near Helwan, burials included an individual with a scepter

and valuable grave goods, perhaps indicative of the rise of local paramount chiefs. In Upper Egypt, the earliest food-producing communities are in the Badari region where small encampments, probably of herders, date back to 4400–4200 BC. These sites signal the beginning of the period commonly referred to as the Predynastic. The Badarian Early Predynastic sites contain a variety of brown, red, and occasionally black pottery with a shiny, burnished surface with ripples. This Rippled pottery is produced from very fine untempered Nile silt. The Badarian pottery is a variant of a burnished pottery present in Late Neolithic sites of the Egyptian Sahara. Badarian personal items included hairpins, combs, bracelets, and beads made out of ivory and bone. Palettes were also found. A variety of clay and ivory figurines are also represented in the Badarian. A component of the Badarian is known as the ‘Tasian’ which perhaps represents greater affinities with highly mobile groups that moved between Nubia and the Assyut region via desert routes. South of Badari, in the Nagada region (between Danfiq and Ballas), are numerous Middle and Late Predynastic village settlements and remnants of two towns (North Town and South Town) as well as extensive cemeteries dating from 3800 to 3500 BC. Two archaeological units on the basis of pottery types are identified during that period (Figure 2). The earliest ceramic assemblage zone called Naqada I (or Amratian) is generally characterized by a high frequency of Black-Topped Polished Red and White Cross-Lined pottery. This zone marks the Middle Predynastic dating from 3950 to 3650 BC. It was succeeded by the Late Predynastic Naqada II (also known as the Gerzean), dating from 3650 to 3300 BC, which is characterized by Rough pottery, and marked by the presence of Decorated and Wavy-Handled pots (Figure 3). Naqada I and Nagada II sites extend from Badari to Hierakonpolis. The majority of Predynastic sites in the Nagada region belong to Naqada I. The sites range in size from a few thousand square meters to 3 ha. They represent overlapping occupations of scores of huts in small villages and hamlets in a string along the edge of the former floodplain. Small postholes and the wooden stub of a post suggest flimsy wickerwork around a frame of wooden posts. The abundance of rubble and mud clumps indicates that many dwellings were constructed from local Nile mud and desert surface rubble. The houses contained hearths and storage pits. In some cases graves were dug into the floor of houses. Trash areas were interspersed with domestic dwellings. The houses included animal enclosures as indicated by thick layers of dung. The faunal remains indicate exploitation of cattle, sheep/goats,

46 AMERICAS, NORTH/Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic

Figure 1 Location map of principal Predynastic sites in Egypt.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic 47 Sequence date 80 Nagada IIICD Early dynastic Emergence of unified state ca. 3200 BC Late

72 71

Nagada III A1-A2 Protodynastic Formative stage of unification Late ca. 3300 BC

63 62

Nagada IIcd (Gerzean) Development of regional polities and states 51 Rough

50

43

ca. 3500 BC Decorated

42

Nagada IIab Emergence of petty states ca. 3650 BC

35

Nagada I (Amratian) Wavy handled Formation of provincial polities

34

31 White cross-lined Black polished

30 Black top pottery Polished red

ca. 3895 BC

Figure 2 Changes in the material, form, and decoration of Predynastic–Early Dynastic pottery have been used to generate pottery types and pottery assemblage zones. The absolute chronology of the assemblage zones, Nagada I, II, and III (called after ‘Nagada’, also known as ‘Naqada’ in Upper Egypt), span the period from c. 3950 to c. 3000 BC. This period was characterized by significant political transformations that led c. 3200 BC to the emergence of a unified Egyptian state (please refer to http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk for colored photographs and an excellent introduction to the pottery and other objects found in Predynastic tombs).

and pigs. Hunting was limited. However, fishing and fowling were important. Nagada I and II sites in Upper Egypt reveal pronounced progressive transformation of social organization and increasing complexity (Figure 4). The tombs yielded a rich variety of grave goods including copper objects, flint knives, amulets, stone vessels, pendants, hairpins, combs, and slate palettes. Only a few graves contain large numbers of special goods, and the distribution of grave goods indicates the emergence of tiered social hierarchy by Nagada I. By Nagada II, the elite segregated their burial grounds from those of the commoners. Their graves were larger and well endowed with grave goods (see Social Inequality, Development of). The rise of a local elite was embedded in a religious ideology linked with mortuary rituals as indicated by the standardization of the placement of the dead who were buried in a flexed position with heads to the south facing west. However, there were regional differences in the prevalence of this orientation. The iconography of Nagada II pottery and a variety of

figurines from mud and vegetable substances suggest that the incipient ideology included notions of female– male duality associated with concepts of life, death, and apparently life after death. Centered on grave goods and funerary rituals, the ideological technology of the emerging elite promoted trade within and beyond Egypt for elite mortuary goods. Hierakonpolis in the south was a conduit for trade with Nubia, whereas Maadi and later Buto in the Delta provided trade links with Southwest Asia. During the period when the Nagada I and II pottery types were emerging and spreading in Upper Egypt, communities in the Delta shared a distinct pottery assemblage, referred to as the Maadi–Buto Horizon. By the middle of the Late Predynastic, the pottery types common in Upper Egypt became prominent in the Delta. It is unlikely that this is an indication of a population replacement or a military conquest. It is most probably a result of the adoption by the Delta elite of the funerary ideology and practices of Upper Egypt with its intricate rituals, elaborate burials, and fancy grave goods. This was facilitated by the close

48 AMERICAS, NORTH/Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic

Figure 3 A diagnostic type of pottery (Decorated) that became common in Nagada II (Gerzean). Painted in red over a buff background, the ‘decorations’ show a variety of motifs and themes. Many, as in the case of this pot, show zigzag lines suggestive of water, trees, and boats with many oars and two cabins. These pictorial representations reveal the first steps toward writing and are most probably symbolic of religious beliefs concerning the journey from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Source Petrie WMF (1974) Prehistoric Egypt, London: Aris and Phillips.

Figure 4 Detail from Narmer’s palette (now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo) showing Narmer, the first or second king of a unified Egypt, in a ceremonial procession. The procession is led by standard-bearers who may represent the domains or main allies of the king. The palette has been interpreted in many ways, but is most likely symbolic of the emergence of a powerful king who commands the Delta and Upper Egypt. The palette also shows well-developed hieroglyphic signs as a part of a writing system that emerged 200 years earlier.

trade links between the two main trade centers of Hierakonopolis and Buto and by the use of boats bypassing overland donkey routes. It appears that the Middle Predynastic was a period of incipient state formation on a regional scale, with

at least two prominent states or petty kingdoms namely Hierakonpolis and Nagada in Upper Egypt, and perhaps several town-principalities in the Delta. By about 3300 BC, Hierakonopolis seems to have extended its power over Nagada so that it began to dominate the area north of Nagada from a new stronghold at Abydos, establishing a far more suitable strategic geopolitical position within a shorter distance from Middle Egypt and the Delta than that of Hierakonpolis at the southern border of Egypt. Considering the narrow floodplain at Hierakonpolis and access to a more extensive floodplain north of Abydos, the leaders of Hierakonpolis would have buffered themselves from droughts which appear to have become more prevalent as Nile flood discharge began to diminish c. 3300–3200 BC, coincident with the transition to hyperarid conditions in the Eastern Sahara. It is also likely that the residents of the desert regions surrounding the Nile Valley and the Delta who struggled through the transition from wetter conditions before 6200 to 4100 BC might have been forced to raid the prosperous villages in the Nile Valley and the Delta giving rise to occasional skirmishes. This would have provided the elite with another legitimizing opportunity – the portrayal of the chiefs as ‘warriors’ smiting enemies. This was expressed in the use of the mace-heads as symbols of authority and in the depiction of battle scenes on commemorative ceremonial palettes. There is also the possibility that some of the ferocious desert warriors were integrated within settled agrarian communities. Given the benefits to small communities either for defense or food security against droughts and food shortages, and for the tendency of elites to aggrandize and strengthen their position through bigger tombs, more and more costly grave goods of rare materials and better artisanship, a trend was set for large political entities like the expanding Hierakonpolitan ‘kingdom’ to get bigger by annexing small polities. This perhaps demanded no or little use of force or intimidation since an alliance with a larger power may be conceived as beneficial to small polities. The transition from the level of regional complexity to that of multiregional complexity, extending from Hierakonpolis to Abydos and perhaps beyond, made it imperative to co-opt regional chiefs and rulers within the demonstrative structures of the expanding kingdom thus attenuating the grip of kinship as a social bond among the elite. This also necessitated syncretic religious ideologies that incorporated a pantheon of regional and local deities. Alliances may have also been fostered by inter-regional royal marriages. This may explain the important role of royal wives in the development of the Egyptian state and the role of women in the ideology of kingship.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia 49

Royal wives were perhaps the link between the king and his allies, and their position as mothers of future kings consolidated their role, within religious ideology, as divine mothers. Although the bull might be a more likely religious entity in hunting societies, the cow is perhaps equally important, or even more important, in a herding community. Cow burials were already manifest among cattle keepers of the Eastern Sahara before 5000 BC. Narmer’s palette depicting the king as a bull is surmounted by two large cow heads. During this formative stage of Egyptian kingship, writing was developed within a ritual, royal context and is attested on ivory labels predating Narmer’s palette which carries phonetic signs of his name. Narmer was succeeded by Aha who together with his successors began to lay the foundation of a unified Egyptian state heralding the Dynastic Period. They established an administrative capital at Memphis close to their Delta allies while maintaining Abydos as a religious capital and a royal burial ground. The unification suffered periodic setbacks, especially during the Second Dynasty. By the time Zoser established his reign, he was able to build a monumental steppyramid of unprecedented dimensions as his royal tomb, a clear indication that a mighty Pharaoh ruled

Africa, North/Greek Colonies

over a state society with an elaborate administrative structure. See also: Africa, North: Egypt, Pharaonic; Plant Domestication; Political Complexity, Rise of; Social Inequality, Development of; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Adams B (1988) Predynastic Egypt, Aylesbury: Shire Egyptology 7. Bard K (1999) Predynastic period, overview. In: Bard K (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, pp. 23–30. London: Routledge. Hassan FA (1988) The Predynastic of Egypt. Journal of World Prehistory 2: 135–185. Hassan FA (1999) Epipalaeolithic cultures, overview. In: Bard K (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, pp. 15–16. London: Routledge. Hendrickx S, Friedman RF, Cialowicz KM, and Chlodnicki M (eds.) (2004) Egypt at its Origins. Studies in Memory of Barbara Adams. Brussels: Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta. Peters Publishers. Maisels CK (1999) Early Civilizations of the Old World. London: Routledge. Midant-Reynes B (2002) The Prehistory of Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell. Wenke RJ (1999) Neolithic cultures, overview. In: Bard K (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, pp. 17–22. London: Routledge.

See: Europe, South: Greek Colonies.

Nubia Donatella Usai, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO), Rome, Italy ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary African cattle The ongoing discussion about cattle domestication in Africa envisions the existence of an indigenous species, Bos opisthonomous, froh the domesticated form have originated. alternately pivoting stamp technique Pottery decoration technique realized with a comb impressed into the clay and lifted alternately on the extremities of the edge. Bucrania (sing. Bucranium) From greek boVB (cow) and wrani´on (skull). Pise´ Building material composed mainly of mud or clay not molded in bricks.

The Nubian contribution to the Nile Valley cultural development has been considered, for quite a long time, secondary to that of Upper and Lower Egypt (Figure 1). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, strongly influenced by the size and extent of archaeological remains scattered along the Nile, regarded Nubia, at the southern periphery of the Egyptian world, only as ‘a corridor’ to Africa. This ‘middle-land’ was, in fact, the theater for remarkable cultural changes that preluded to the formation of complex societies and were the precursors of the later urban pharaonic theocracy (see Africa, North: Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic). For a more detailed geographic description of the area a distinction between Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia seems to be appropriate. Egyptian Nubia, or Lower Nubia, encompasses the area from Jebel es

50 AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia

EGYPT Sodmein Cave

Elkab Jebel es Silsila I Cataract

Gilf Kebir Plateau

LOWER NUBIA

Kiseiba Nabta II Cataract

Abka IX

UPPER NUBIA III Cataract Kerma-EI Barga Kawa-R12

SUDAN

IV Cataract

V Cataract

South Dongola Reach

ra

Esh shaheinab

Ghaba kadada

ba

dam VI Cataract

At

uqad

Multaga

M Wadi

Wadi Howar

Kabbashi

Khartoum Hospital Site 10W4 ue Bl le Ni

ile

eN

400 km

Whit

0

Figure 1 Location map of sites mentioned in the text. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Silsila to the frontier between Egypt and Sudan, or the II Cataract, and the Sudanese Nubia, or Upper Nubia, from the II Cataract to the Southern Dongola Reach. It is from the core of this region that new archaeological

data arrive which motivated new thoughts on the overall Nile Valley recent prehistory cultural sequence. The Mesolithic is a key period in the prehistory of man, one when the seeds of the transition from a

AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia 51

hunting-gathering-fishing economy to food production were laid down. Among the archaeological evidence left by Near Eastern Mesolithic communities are the first permanent structural remains, sometimes related to ritual activities, and faunal assemblages bearing the earliest evidence of domesticated species and cereals remains produced by more systematic gathering activities. This evidence may be interpreted as the beginning of a process that will produce a fully Neolithic economy. The Nile Valley was and is still considered to be peripheral to the areas where this process took its first steps but, without denying a possible contribution to the neolithization of Nile Valley coming from Near Eastern regions, it seems that also Mesolithic Nubians were involved in a process of social and economic changes evidenced, apparently, by successful animal domestication. The Mesolithic population, in Nubia as well as in Central Sudan, is made up by hunter-gatherer-fisher communities that were producing pottery vessels some centuries before their appearance in the Near East where a Pottery Neolithic dates to around 6800 BC. The first discovery of Mesolithic pottery in the Sudanese Nile Valley was made by A.J. Arkell at the Mesolithic site of Khartoum Hospital. Two types of decoration, among others, characterize Mesolithic pottery production: incised Wavy Line (Figure 2) and impressed Dotted Wavy Line (Figure 3). During the years of the Nubian Salvage Campaign (1960–1968) a site, Abka IX, with ‘similar’ material was found also in Nubia and radiocarbon dated 8260  400 BP. At the time the date was considered too old and rejected

because of the high range, but recent archaeological discoveries in much more controlled contexts proved its being reliable. It is now accepted that a ceramic Mesolithic culture behind regional character was widespread along the Nile Valley and adjacent areas, from Central Nubia down to Central Sudan and further south, during the VIII–VII millennium BC. Nothing which can firmly be related to this culture has been found, until now, in the Upper and Lower Egyptian Nile Valley, neither in the adjacent deserts and oases. A VII millennium BC site, Elkab, located in the Nile Valley, between Luxor and Aswan, produced a lithic industry with an Epipalaeolithic character, some bone tools but no pottery. The adoption of pottery technology within Sudanese Mesolithic societies has been correlated with an increased sedentary lifestyle. Until recently no evidence, other than the pottery itself, suggested such a reduction in mobility. Most Mesolithic sites along the Nile Valley have been, in fact, deeply affected by postdepositional natural and human disturbances. Nevertheless, very recent and still largely unpublished excavations revealed semi-subterranean huts at El Barga, in the Kerma Basin, at a seasonal Late Mesolithic site near Khartoum (Figure 4) and pise´ walled dwellings at a VII millennium BC Mesolithic settlement along the left bank of White Nile again south of the Sudan capital. Nile river-versus-desert seasonal movements and vice versa were practiced by the Mesolithic huntergatherer-fishers at the beginning of the Early Holocene when, according to palaeoenvironmental data, deserts, to the west and the east of the Nile, became less inhospitable with the formation of many seasonal water pools.

Figure 2 Sample of Early Mesolithic potsherds with typical Wavy Line incised decoration, realized with a Nile catfish spine. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

52 AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia

Figure 3 A fragment of Late Mesolithic pottery decorated with Dotted Wavy line impressed pattern. This decoration is realized with the alternately pivoting stamp technique. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 4 Excavation at a Late Mesolithic prehistoric seasonal camp south of Khartoum. The site, 10-W-4, revealed a series of semisubterranean huts with refusal pits. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The pioneering researches conducted by F. Wendorf at Nabta Playa and Kiseiba Plateau sites in the Western Desert, 100 km to the west of the Nile, at the height of the II Cataract, produced the most interesting, although debatable, data concerning these Mesolithic groups. The structures excavated at these desert sites, and the faunal and palaeobotanical assemblages suggest that strictly scheduled seasonal movements may have provided a semi-sedentary life in a sort of residential mobility congruent with pottery production.

Fishing activity, whose practice is strongly evidenced especially in Mesolithic Central Sudan sites, may also have encouraged a less mobile lifestyle. Demographic growth may also have been responsible for an increased territorial control and, as a consequence, of less mobility. It is important to underline that, as suggested for the Near Eastern Mesolithic societies, this increased sedentary way of life may have favored experimentation in animal domestication, as in the case of the

AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia 53

African cattle. Most reliably these first experiments took place in Nubia at the end of the VIII-beginning of the VII millennium BC. The first evidence for cattle domestication comes from different sites in the Nabta–Kiseiba Western Desert. Few fragments of possibly domesticated cattle recovered at these sites date to the beginning of the VIII millennium BC. Some scholars reject this ancient occurrence, for different reasons, not least the questionable contextual associations. The presence of a few domestic cattle bones at Western Desert sites led the excavators to speak of an Early Neolithic phase, but the overall faunal assemblage is made up of wild species suggesting more caution is necessary. However, evidence of domestic cattle was recently found in Sudanese Nubia, in the Kerma Basin, at the Mesolithic site of El Barga and dated to the VII millennium BC. Domestic sheep and goat appeared in the Nile Valley and in Nubia later on, around the VI millennium BC, as witnessed by sites like Sodmein cave in the Red Sea Mountain, Nabta–Kiseiba, in the Western Desert, and El-Barga, in the Kerma Basin. As it is genetically proved that sheep and goats originate in the Near East, it is probably here that we have to envisage influences from outside the valley. Cattle herding became increasingly important in Nubian societies; hence, pastoralism became the basic subsistence economy of these populations. The emergence of cattle domestication seems limited, up to now, to the Nubian region. No evidence has been produced by sites along the Nile Valley north Chronology

Lower-Upper Nubia

7000 BC 6000 BC

Mesolithic (Western Desert-EI Barga)

6000 BC 5500 BC

Early Neolithic (Western Desert-EI Barga)

5500 BC 5000 BC

?

5000 BC 4500 BC

Middle Neolithic A (Kadruka 13-21, R12)

and south of Nubia. Moreover, no evidence of this kind was produced by the many prehistoric sites located in the desert north and south of the Nabta/ Kiseiba region. Central Sudan societies seem to retain their hunting-gathering-fishing economy until the middle of the V millennium BC. When the first Neolithic groups appear in Central Sudan (see Africa, Central: Sudan, Nilotic), they show a material culture which displays strong similarities with that produced by Nubian groups whose socioeconomic structure had already changed to a pastoral one more than a millennium before. If this picture will be confirmed by future archaeological investigations it will be interesting to work out whether the long-lasting Mesolithic social and economic way of life in Central Sudan has been culturally or environmentally determined. Palaeoenvironmental studies documented a climatic deterioration around the VI millennium BC. It affected firstly the Nubian region and only many centuries later the Central Sudan and may have produced, at the same time, an acceleration in subsistence economy transformation in Nubia as well as favoring the maintenance of the hunter-gatherer-fisher subsistence model of Central Sudan Mesolithic populations. At present the Early Neolithic of Central Sudan seems to correspond to the Middle Neolithic of Nubia (Figure 5). Some of the social and cultural aspects of these V and IV millennium BC Neolithic groups are so similar that there is no wonder that all along the valley there were strong and permanent interrelations. Central Sudan

Mesolithic (Khartoum Hospital, Saggai etc.)

Late Mesolithic (Kabbashi, 10-W-4 etc.)

Early Neolithic (Shaheinab, EI Ghaba, Kadero etc.)

4500 BC 4200 BC

Middle Neolithic B (Kadruka 1, R12, Multaga)

4200 BC 3100 BC

?

Late Neolithic (EI kadada)

3100 BC 2700 BC

Pre-Kerma

?

Figure 5 Nubian and Central Sudan chronological sequence according to new data provided by recent excavations in the region. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

54 AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia

N

G. 110 Figure 6 One of the richest graves excavated at the Middle Neolithic cemetery R12, in Lower Nubia, close to the Egyptian town of Kawa. The body, of an adult male, was covered by 108 objects. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 7 A sample of valuable stone axes recovered at R12 cemetery. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Nubia 55

Figure 8 Tools made from animal bones or containers made from a hippopotamus tooth are very common at Middle Neolithic Nubian cemeteries. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 9 Caliciform beakers are considered ritual containers as they have been found only in cemeteries. They are characteristics of Nubian and Central Sudan Neolithic. ã 2008 Donctella Usai. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Nubia’s Neolithic is known mainly from the excavation of few of the many mound-like burial grounds dotting the Nubian landscape. These cemeteries produce the image of a ranked society with some form of incipient elite. A few graves (Figure 6), in each cemetery, are accompanied by an exceptional number of objects: pots, stone axes, mace-heads, ivory bracelets, necklaces made of semiprecious stone beads, containers made from hippopotamus teeth and bucrania (Figures 7 and 8). The number of bucrania varies according to the individual’s social position, whether achieved or acquired though kin relationship. Red and yellow ochre was often used to cover the body, which sometimes lay on an animal skin. Some graves also contain complete skeletons of an ovicaprine. One pot, in particular, seems to have had a ritual character. It is the caliciform beaker (Figure 9). This container, decorated in different ways, probably according to different regional tastes, is present only in grave contexts.

Many of the Nubian Neolithic settlements, seemingly, were destroyed by erosion or Nile flooding. They appear, in fact, as dense scatters of archaeological material. The lack of structural remains at Neolithic sites, in contrast with the evidence provided by hundreds of burial grounds sometime of very large size, has been considered as attesting the high mobility of these Neolithic herders and their living in rather ephemeral dwellings. However at Kerma, an extensive excavation revealed the structural organization of a Neolithic village, dating to 4500 BC, witnessed by thousands of postholes. While no stratified deposits survived at the site the study of postholes distribution has made possible the reconstruction of the plan of an otherwise lost ancient and complex settlement.

See also: Africa, Central: Sudan, Nilotic; Africa, North: Egypt, Pre-Pharaonic; Sahara, Eastern; Animal Domestication.

56 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sahara, Eastern

Further Reading Arkell AJ (1949) Early Khartoum. London: Oxford University Press. Blench RM and MacDonald K (2000) The Origins and Development of African Livestock: Archaeology, Genetics, Linguistics, and Ethnography. London: University College London Press. Guilane J (ed.) (2003) Aux marges des grands foyers du Ne´olithique. Pe´riphe´ries de´bitrices ou cre´atrices? Paris: Editions Errance. Honegger M (2004) Settlement and cemeteries of the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic at el-Barga (Kerma region). Sudan & Nubia 8: 14–19. Honegger M (2005) Kerma et les de´buts du Ne´olithique Africain. GENAVA LIII. 239–249.

Salvatori S and Usai D (2004) The cemetery R12 and a possible periodisation of the Nubian Neolithic. Sudan and Nubia 8: 33–37. Usai D and Salvatori S (2005) The IsIAO archaeological project in the El Salha area (Omdurman South, Sudan): Results and perspectives. AFRICA LX (3–4): 474–493. Vermeersch PM (1978) Elkab II: Epipale´olithique de la valle´e du Nil e`gyptien. Leuven: University Press. Wendorf F, Schild R, and associates (eds.) (2001) Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Wengrow D (2006) The Archaeology of Early Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Africa, North/Roman Eastern Colonies

See: Asia, West: Roman Eastern Colonies.

Sahara, Eastern

Introduction

Elena A A Garcea, University of Cassino, Cassino, Italy ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Aterian A North African tradition with lithic assemblages, often made with the Levallois technology, consisting of side-scrapers and denticulates, as well as end-scrapers, perforators, and burins. Tanged tools and bifacial foliates are considered as the diagnostic features, but other, more frequent, elements include bulbar basal thinning and bifacial retouching. cultivation Any form of human activity that increases the yield of harvested or exploited plants without domestication. delayed return strategy A long-term system of resource exploitation based on delayed and planned consumption, involving food processing and storage. dotted wavy line pottery Ceramic impressed decoration made with a rocker technique using a toothed comb to produce alternately upwards and downwards fans of dotted curved lines. Middle Stone Age (MSA) A specific African age/stage system, which comprises the Early Stone Age (ESA), the Middle Stone Age (MSA), and the Later Stone Age (LSA). European-based terms such as Middle Paleolithic and Mousterian are often used to describe North African industries, even though they relate to specific cultural units and particular stratigraphic positions that do not apply to Africa. pastoralism The economic subsistence strategy that relies on the exploitation of domestic livestock for food production. It implies raising and moving herds for grazing according to seasonal availability of pasture. Western Desert This is a desert located west of the Nile River that occupies western Egypt and eastern Libya. Its main regions are the Great Sand Sea and several oases, including Siwa, Farafra, Baharia, Dakhleh, and Kharga.

The most thorough and detailed studies on the prehistory of North Africa come from the land included within the present borders of Egypt and northern Sudan. The Eastern Sahara is presently almost uninhabited by people or animals, but it has not always been so. The Nile River and the Sahara Desert have affected each other on both cultural and environmental levels and Eastern Saharan populations have often acted as intermediaries between Central Saharans and Nilotic peoples, often even linking populations and traditions between East and North Africa. The Eastern Sahara covers a surface of more than 2 million square km, which is the same size as western Europe, and is often referred to as the Western Desert, being located west of the Nile River. However, the Eastern Sahara also extends east of the Nile River, reaching the coast of the Red Sea, and to the west it extends to eastern Libya.

Environment and Climate in the Eastern Sahara The main geographic features of the Eastern Sahara are the Great Sand Sea and several oases, the main ones being, from north to south, Siwa, Farafra, Baharia, Dakhleh, and Kharga. The Fayum Oasis, which was formerly a lake, has been another very important water reservoir. Unlike in Lower (northern) Egypt, in Upper (southern) Egypt, the flood plain of the Nile is only a few kilometers wide and the desert extends near the river. The desert is not as flat as one may think: mountains and deep depressions exist in several parts,

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sahara, Eastern 57

including the Gilf Kebir plateau, south of the Great Sand Sea, which has an altitude of about 2000 m. In spite of the elevated areas, no rivers or streams fed by precipitation, drain into or out of the Western Desert. Nevertheless, the oases live, thanks to freshwater provided by the Nile or local groundwater. Important environmental changes affected the Eastern Sahara during the shifts corresponding to the glacial and interglacial stages in continental Europe. Although there were no glaciations in most of North Africa, the environment dramatically changed as the sea level of the Mediterranean withdrew by up to 70 m and precipitation totally disappeared. Consequently, the Sahara became a hyper-arid desert, drier than at present. During the Penultimate Glacial, corresponding to oxygen isotope stage (OIS) 6, dated between about 186 000 and 127 000 years ago, a series of sand sheets, formed by winds, covered the Eastern Sahara. Later, lacustrine and fluvial sediments were recorded at Bir Tarfawi, indicating the occurrence of lake basins and a moist climate during the Last Interglacial of OIS 5, dated to 127 000– 71 000 BP. Furthermore, a significant drainage network was active during various periods of OIS 5 in southwestern Egypt and northwestern Sudan. The following Last Glacial period of OIS 4, dated to 71 000–57 000 BP, witnessed abrupt climatic changes with the formation of sand sheets again, as clearly shown in the Selima region, across the Egyptian– Sudanese border. The remaining part of the Upper Pleistocene featured a harsh environment and dry climate. Although the climate during OIS 3 (57 000– 24 000 BP) improved, it was not as temperate as OIS 5, and OIS 2 (24 000–11 000 BP) was much more arid than at present. Considerable climatic ameliorations occurred only in the Eastern Sahara at the beginning of the Holocene. Groundwater levels started to rise about 9300 years BP and the aquifers rose to levels as much as 25 m higher than today. Freshwater lakes and swamps formed in the lowlands and a fluvial system developed in the uplands, attracting animals and favoring human occupation in many areas of the Eastern Sahara. Rainfall decreased from south to north, forming lacustrine sediments in the south, below 22 N, and playa sediments between 10 and 22 N. Such favorable conditions lasted until about 6000 years ago, when the landscape started to dry up again and, by 3000 BP, the Sahara became the desert we know today.

and the oases in the Western Desert played an essential role by offering water and food resources to the humans who ventured into a landscape that was much drier than their native land. A series of water springs at Kharga Oasis, central-western Egypt, about 150 km west of the Nile, sustained various Middle Stone Age (MSA) human groups using the Levallois technique and producing side-scrapers, Mousterian points, and some denticulates (Figure 1). A later complex was also found at Kharga Oasis, which included tanged tools and bifacial foliates that could be assigned to the Aterian. Tanged pieces were recorded further southeast, at Wadi Dungul, which seems to be the easternmost Aterian site. In fact, the Aterian, which takes its name from the type of site of Bir el Ater, in northeastern Algeria, is a typical late MSA tradition of the Sahara and the Maghreb and does not occur in the Nile Valley. Lithic assemblages are often made with the Levallois technology and comprise typical ‘Middle Paleolithic’ tools, such as side-scrapers and denticulated, as well as ‘Upper Paleolithic’ tools, such as end-scrapers, perforators, and burins. Tanged tools and bifacial foliates were considered as the diagnostic features, but other more frequent elements include bulbar basal thinning and bifacial retouching. At Bir Tarfawi, in southwestern Egypt, between 175 000 and 70 000 years ago, a sequence of five

The Spread of Early Anatomically Modern Humans Anatomically modern humans are found earlier in southern and eastern Africa then in northern Africa, dating to 250 000 years BP or earlier. The Nile Valley

Figure 1 Map of sites cited in the text.

58 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sahara, Eastern

lacustrine events indicated the successive expansions of a lake where people could live and hunt a variety of large animals that are now extinct in the area, including gazelle, warthog, and ostrich, living in a wooded savanna with rainfall of 500 mm per year. They produced a typical MSA industry which included some bifacial foliates that were not significant enough to be assigned to the Aterian. Another MSA site was found at Bir Sahara East, not far from Bir Tarfawi, which revealed a long human occupation, as indicated in a long stratigraphic series. As the age of the earliest level associated with the MSA belongs to the early OIS 6, it is clear that human groups were skilled enough to cope with the severe environmental conditions of the Penultimate Glacial in the Sahara. The age of these populations, their development of MSA technologies, and their abilities to adapt to dry environments and live in open grassland suggest that they were fully modern humans. The technological shift from the production of Acheulean to MSA industries, with a correlated replacement by modern humans, occurred in the late OIS 8 and the cultural progression toward modern behavior took place during the MSA.

The Reoccupation of the Sahara after 10 000 Years Ago The Aterian was the latest Upper Pleistocene cultural entity in the Sahara and the Maghreb, but it did not last until the end of the Pleistocene or the beginning of the Holocene at 10 000 BP. The dated stratigraphic series from Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara East show that no human occupation survived after 70 000 BP in the Eastern Sahara and other dated sites in the Central Sahara confirm that the region became a hyper-arid desert that had to be abandoned for a very long time, until wetter conditions returned. These populations dispersed around the northern and, possibly, southern margins of the Sahara, definitely disappearing around 40 000 BP, but did not go in the direction of the Nile Valley. Smaller groups with different industries were settled in the Maghreb and the North African littoral between 40 000 and 20 000 BP. Later, between 20 000 and 10 000 years ago, the population considerably increased and produced various technocomplexes in the Maghreb, North African Mediterranean coast, as well as the Nile Valley, but still no human resettlement occurred in any place of the Sahara during this period. At the end of the Pleistocene, around 12 000 years ago, the Nile suffered catastrophic inundations that caused a dispersion of Nilotic peoples toward the Eastern Sahara. During the Early Holocene, water was largely available from the Nile and its tributaries and rains were sufficiently frequent to keep permanent playas located in various places of the Western

Desert, from Siwa Oasis to Nabta Playa. Nevertheless, humid and dry phases still alternated throughout the Holocene. Systematic reoccupation of the Eastern Sahara took place after 10 000 years BP, when the first Early Holocene humid phase supported milder conditions. During the Holocene, humid and arid phases continually alternated, displaying eight humid and eight dry phases from the beginning of the Holocene until today at Nabta Playa. It has been suggested that, after every dry episode, the area was completely abandoned, and new people moved back again into the southwestern desert of Egypt at the onset of humid phases. In the area of Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba, the earliest cultural horizon of the Early Holocene is the El Adam variant, which is dated between 9500, or possibly 9800, and 8900 BP. The lithic tool-kit includes a large quantity of backed bladelets, struck from single and opposed platform cores, followed by end-scrapers, perforators, and notches. The microburin technique is frequent. Lower and upper grinding stones and ostrich eggshell containers and beads are common. The subsequent variants are El Kortein, dated from 8800 to 8500 BP, and El Ghorab, dated from 8400 to 8200 BP, the latter corresponding to an important lacustrine episode. Scalene triangles become a dominating aspect of the El Ghorab variant and backed bladelets are still frequent. Grinding stones are common and pottery is present, but is still very rare. This cultural unit has some affinities with the Masara phases at Dakhleh Oasis. The latest Early Holocene variant is El Nabta, dated between 8200 and 7900 BP, which flourished during the maximum humid interphase recorded in the area and dated between 8050 and 7300 BP. Burins dominate in the tool-kit, together with continuously retouched tools, backed bladelets, notches, and denticulates.

The Earliest Cattle Herding The North African aurochs (Bos primigenius ssp. or Bos primigenius mauritanicus) is a wild endemic species that could live in the Maghreb and the Nile Valley, but not in the Sahara. Genetic mtDNA evidence has indicated that the ancestors of African and Eurasian cattle separated at least 22 000 years ago. As the Egyptian cattle is morphologically different from the Eurasian humpless cattle (Bos taurus) and the zebu (Bos indicus), the earliest African domestic cattle could not originate from either Europe or Asia, but was domesticated independently. The Eastern Sahara has provided chronological, paleoecological, and linguistic clues to assert domestication of aurochs in the Western Desert, which

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sahara, Eastern 59

definitely occurred earlier than in the Nile Valley. The earliest domesticated cattle bones are associated with the El Adam variant and are dated from 9500 BP at Nabta Playa, and from 8840 BP at Bir Kiseiba. As these dates are older than those of the earliest cattle in the Near East, they corroborate the independent domestication of cattle in the Eastern Sahara. Second, paleoecological evidence shows that large herbivores, including cattle, could not survive in a wild state in the dry environment and scarce vegetation of the Eastern Sahara without management by herders, who brought their livestock into the desert oases after the summer rains. Third, linguistic arguments show that the Nilo-Saharan language family had root words related to pastoralism and food production in the languages known in the Eastern Sahara and the Sahelian belt. In the Proto-Northern Sudanic language, there are root words referring to cattle pastoralism that go back to 10 000 years ago, and in the ProtoSaharan-Sahelian language, words for pastoralism, as well as cultivation, date from 9000 years ago. Although domestic cattle existed at Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba beginning from the El Adam variant, remains of wild game were more frequent in the archaeological sites, as cattle were rarely killed, whereas wild animals, such as small gazelle, hare, and occasionally large gazelle, were hunted for meat consumption. Cattle could be exploited for milk and blood, which represented almost inexhaustible supplies for proteins. For these reasons, cattle were defined as a ‘walking larder’. Furthermore, they could have another role, not directly related to diet, but to socioeconomic prestige and property, establishing the first social differentiation based on material possessions.

The Earliest Production and Spread of Pottery The earliest pottery in the Eastern Sahara was found at Bir Kiseiba and Nabta Playa, dating to the tenth millennium BP. It first appeared at a few sites of the El Adam variant and showed impressed decorations on the outside surface forming simple impressions and dotted zigzags made with the rocker technique. It has been suggested that pottery was unusual when it was first invented and that its function was not related to ordinary use, but to social status, symbolizing luxury possessions. Pottery became more frequent in the El Nabta variant, dated between 8200 and 7900 BP. This increase in ceramic production has been related to an intensified use by larger groups that occupied the area for longer periods. The ceramic decorative types from El Nabta also include a typical Saharan decoration exhibiting dotted wavy lines. This type of decoration appears in the earliest pottery of the Central

Sahara, also dating from the tenth millennium BP, whereas in the Upper Nile Valley it is present, but appears from the middle of the eighth millennium BP, suggesting that it was introduced there from the Sahara. Its occurrence in the Eastern Sahara at a later period than the earliest pottery, but before the Nile Valley, corroborates a west–east movement of some Saharan traditions, such as dotted wavy line pottery. Further considerations on the distribution and spread of early pottery and the populations who produced it come from the Gilf Kebir and the Great Sand Sea. A potsherd from the Wadi el Akhdar in the Gilf Kebir was dated to 9080 BP, whereas another one from the same site was dated to 6400 BP. Other dates obtained on more reliable materials span from 7700 BP. The earliest pottery in the Great Sand Sea is undecorated and dates to 7200 BP. These two areas are in an intermediate position between the Central Sahara and the Nile Valley. As the ecological conditions in the Gilf Kebir were slightly better than in the surrounding lowland areas, even during the phases of climatic deterioration, they could have encouraged contacts with Central Saharan groups and often acted as a ‘refugium’ for populations coming from the Central Sahara. The location of these areas and their availability of resources contributed to the diffusion of Central Saharan traditions toward the Nile Valley, through the Eastern Sahara.

Caprine Herding The origin of caprine domestication in North Africa is different from that of cattle. Domestic caprines were introduced from the Near East as no wild forms of sheep or goat existed in North Africa. Domestic sheep (Ovis aries) is descendant from the Asiatic mouflon (Ovis orientalis), and domestic goat (Capra hircus) originates from the scimitar-horned Capra aegagrus of western Asia. They were brought into North Africa as domesticates around 7000–6700 years ago. Although some zooarchaeologists question the early chronology of cattle domestication in the Western Desert and consider the first uncontroversial dates for domestic cattle in the Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba area at 7700 BP, caprine herding was still later than cattle herding. Even if we take the later date for cattle domestication, it was still earlier in the Western Desert than in the Nile Valley. The earliest domestic caprines appeared in Mediterranean North Africa between 7000 and 6400 years BP, at Haua Fteah (Cyrenaica, Libya), and in the Fayum at the end of the sixth millennium BP. In the Western Desert, they were dated, at Dakhleh Oasis, from 6900 to 6500 BP, and at Sodmein cave, in the Red Sea hills, between 7000 and 6300 BP.

60 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sahara, Eastern

At Nabta Playa, they appear during the El Ghanam variant, which is dated from 7100 to 6600 BP, although they do not seem to be present from the beginning of this phase. It has been suggested that they were introduced into the Eastern Sahara either directly from the Near East or from coastal North Africa where they arrived from the Levant and from there spread into the Eastern Sahara. Caprines have different herding necessities than cattle: they can survive in drier environments and are better adapted to cope with reduced grazing lands. As a matter of fact, an impoverished environment in the Eastern Sahara is reflected in the significant reduction of living sites dating to the El Ghanam variant and in the increase of dug-out water wells that indicates a lowering of the water table in the region. Herders were forced to develop a highly mobile nomadic settlement pattern, supplementing their diet with the gathering of tubers and fruits. At the same time medium and large size herbivores decreased and gazelle-hunting was reduced and could no longer be the major source of meat.

The Development of Sedentism Several stone-built structures, forming circular huts, were found at Dakhleh Oasis associated with the Masara C cultural unit dated to 8700–8600 BP. They were strategically located on a sandstone ridge that was protected from seasonal floods so that they could be occupied during the wet seasons. The area they occupied was significantly smaller than the territory previously exploited, suggesting a contraction of resources in some selected locations. The Masara C unit has been paralleled with the El Kortein variant at Bir Kiseiba. Furthermore, at both Bir Kiseiba and Nabta Playa, a complex settlement system with habitation structures was developed during the El Nabta variant, dated to 8200–7900 BP. The largest site at Nabta Playa is E-75–6, which yielded about 20 huts, more than 30 storage pits, 3 wells, and numerous hearths. The huts were either oval or round, with shallow basin floors, encircled with postholes. Their shape suggested that they were built with wooden poles tight in the center at the top of the roof, and the walls were covered by reeds, skins, or mats. The huts contained several hearths that were seasonally reused. The chronology of this site indicated that it remained in use for more than 800 years. Sedentism in North Africa was not a form of preadaptation leading to agriculture. It was a typical strategy adopted by foragers, or forerunning pastoralists as in the case of Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba, associated with the exploitation of a broad spectrum

of wild resources. These people continually occupied the same sites for long periods of time in restricted areas with concentrated water and food resources. Sedentary lifestyle favored an increased social organization and the rise of sociopolitical complexity with a delayed-return economy. Such an economic strategy implied the intensification of resource exploitation and scheduled consumption with considerable investments of capital, labor, and skills. It was a particularly efficient subsistence practice for North African populations as it allowed them to cope with irregular precipitations and to manage drier periods of reduced rainfall. Scheduled consumption increased awareness of predictable access to locally available food resources and generated techniques of delayed consumption of seasonally available products with the development of storage facilities. As sedentism with a delayed return strategy grew, local wild resources became unable to sustain the increased needs for set-aside provisions, and North African dwellers had to switch to nomadic pastoralism as the only sustainable form of food production in their environment. In the Eastern Sahara, this happened during the El Ghanam variant, when pastoralism became the predominant subsistence base and was extended to caprine herding.

The Origins of Cultivation and Farming The process leading to agriculture was very slow in the Eastern Sahara and farming, progressing inevitably to plant domestication was not the final goal. At least two important stages of selective cultivation without farming or genetic modification were successfully reached. They represent, respectively, cultivation with small-scale clearance and minimal tillage, and cultivation with larger-scale clearance and systematic tillage. Thus, cultivation is an elaborate form of plant exploitation without domestication. At Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba, a new economy of intensive plant collection came into being, during the El Nabta/El Jerar humid interphase dated from around 8000 to 7300 years BP. During this period, numerous large, bell-shaped storage pits indicated intensive exploitation and preservation of fruits, tubers, and seeds, including large quantities of wild sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and two kinds of millet (Panicum turgidum and Echinochloa colona). In some particularly favorable years, sorghum may have been cultivated with the de´crue, or dry farming, technique. This system requires sowing seeds over flooded land without irrigation, and collecting with a technique that implies cross-pollination, which, unlike self-pollination, prevents the propagation of the genetic changes typical of domestication. Such a

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technique could have required shaking the harvest into baskets, instead of using sickles or removing the entire plant. At Farafra Oasis, a site in the Hidden Valley was located on the shore of an ancient water basin and exhibited numerous habitation structures with hearths containing numerous plant remains, including burnt cereal grains that have suggested independent protoagricultural activities. Three main occupation phases were identified, the earliest being dated between 7670 and 7320 BP, the second around 6750 BP, and the latest at 6190 BP. Grasses include Brachiaria, Cenchrus, Digitaria, Echinochloa, Panicum, and Setaria, belonging to the millet group, and Sorghum, which represents 40.6% of the paleobotanical samples. The high frequency of Sorghum may be due to the large size of its grains, which could have been preferred for their size and better nutritional properties. Furthermore, Sorghum is particularly suitable for this semidesert environment as it can tolerate hot and dry conditions, as well as salty soils. The area with circular structures, stone-lined hearths, and over 180 plant samples, most of them belonging to Sorghum, was dated between 7100 and 6700 BP. As there are no signs of genetic change, it is most likely that the plants were collected by hand and exploited using soft material artifacts, such as wood, whereas stone tools were only used later. Tamerix and Acacia, which were exploited for fuel, could also have been used the manufacturing of wooden implements. Cultivation practices began in the Western Desert at a significantly earlier date than in the Nile Valley. On the other hand, full domestication of sorghum and pearl millet took place in Africa in a still undetermined time, but not before the fourth millennium BP, whereas barley and emmer wheat were not local domesticates, but imported from southwest Asia into the Nile Valley. They are attested to in the Delta and lower Nile Valley from the end of the seventh millennium BP. However, as they required a humid habitat with constant fresh water, which was not available outside the Nile Valley, they were unsuitable for the Eastern Sahara.

Harris DR (1996) Domesticatory relationships of people, plants and animals. In: Ellen R and Fukui K (eds.) Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, pp. 437–463. Oxford: Berg. Hassan FA (ed.) (2002) Droughts, Food and Culture. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Hoelzmann P (2001) A palaeolimnological N–S transect through the Eastern Sahara. In: Gasse F, Battarbee R, and Stickley C (eds.) Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa. An International Conference. Aix-en-Provence: Centre des Congre`s. Lanssen-Erz T, Tegtmeier U, and Kro¨pelin S (eds.) (2002) Tides of the Desert: Contributions to the Archaeology and Environmental History of Africa in Honour of Rudolf Kuper. Ko¨ln: HeinrichBarth-Institut. McDonald MMA (1998) Early African pastoralism: View from Dakhleh Oasis (South Central Egypt). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17: 124–142. Nelson K (2002) Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara, Vol. 2: The Pottery of Nabta Playa. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Stahl AB (ed.) (2005) African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. van der Veen M (ed.) (1999) The Exploitation of Plant Resources in Ancient Africa. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Vermeersch PM, VanPeer P, and Moeyersons J (1996) Neolithic occupation of the Sodmein area, Red Sea Mountains, Egypt. In: Pwiti G and Soper R (eds.) Aspects of African Archaeology. Papers from the 10th Congress of the PanAfrican Association for Prehistory and Related Studies, pp. 411–419. Harare: University of Zimbabwe. Wendorf F and Schild R (1998) Nabta Playa and its role in northeastern African prehistory. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17: 97–123. Wendorf F and Schild R (eds.) (2001) Holocene Settlements of the Egyptian Sahara: The Archaeology of Nabta Playa. Vol. 1. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press. Wendorf F, Schild R, and Close AE (eds.) (1993) Egypt during the Last Interglacial: The Middle Paleolithic of Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara East. New York: Plenum Press.

See also: Animal Domestication; Modern Humans, Emergence of; Plant Domestication.

Glossary

Further Reading Barich BE (1998) People, Water and Grain: The Beginnings of Domestication in the Sahara and the Nile Valley. Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Close AE (ed.) (1984) Cattle-Keepers of the Eastern Sahara: The Neolithic of Bir Kiseiba. Dallas: Southern Methodist University. Garcea EAA (ed.) (2001) Uan Tabu in the Settlement History of the Libyan Sahara. Firenze: All’Insegna del Giglio.

Sahara, West and Central Barbara E Barich, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Rome, Italy ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Aterian Prehistoric culture dating to the middle Palaeolithic (30 000 BC) in the region around the Atlas Mountains, north and west Africa, and Sahara. climatic oscillations Refers to the drastic variation in the Earth’s global climate or in regional climates over time. It describes changes in the variability or average state of the atmosphere over timescales ranging from decades to millions of years. Tenerian culture Saharan Neolithic culture in the Te´ne´re´ Desert and extending from northeastern Niger into western Chad, Africa, dating from 6500 to 4500 BP.

62 AFRICA, SOUTH/Sahara, West and Central

Western and Central Sahara

animal husbandry, which led to the rise of pastoralism; the rock art works that appeared within the mountains of Tassili n’Ajjer, Acacus, Aı¨r, and Tibesti, and, finally, the first copper metallurgy which is found alongside evidence for social complexity. During the Pleistocene the Sahara underwent several phases of aridity alternating with periods of better climatic conditions, which were related to the

The western and central Sahara, which extends from Libya to Mauritania, enclosing the modern countries of Algeria, Niger, and Mali (Figure 1), was at the center of important cultural phenomena that were of fundamental importance to the history of the entire African continent. Among the most important of such phenomena we can mention the early experiments in

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European glacial phenomena. This was mainly due to the fact that during the glaciations, cold intrusions from the Arctic stopped the tropical monsoon from rising above the equator, thereby blocking the mechanism that brought the rains to the Sahara.

The Beginnings of Human Occupation The oldest documented human occupation in the western and central Sahara belongs to the Acheulean industry. Acheulean hand axes from the now dry basin of the ancient Lake Shati, in southern Libya, have been dated to 125 000 BP, and were deposited during a wet phase (corresponding to the oxygen isotopic stage 5 – OIS 5). An arid phase, seen in dune formation, separates the Acheulean occupation from the first traces of the Aterian, a Middle Stone Age industry whose presence in the Sahara has been dated to OIS 4 (70 000–59 000 BP). The Aterian represents an important occupation phase of the Saharan area by communities that hunted large mammals (buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, antelope), as well as carrying out marginal gathering activities, and who made their temporary bases near water sources, such as springs, lakes, and rivers. It is thought that the Aterian was the last documented occupation of the Sahara before a further very severe arid crisis, contemporary with the Wu¨rm glaciation in Europe, and this caused the Aterian hunters to abandon the area, probably in order to push on toward wetter lands, toward the coast, and the tropical regions.

From Hunter-Gatherers to Food-Producers The Wu¨rm glaciation is evident throughout the large extent of the Sahara as a long arid episode, which reached its peak around 20 000 years ago, causing a severe contraction of human occupation, if not a complete abandonment of the area by human groups. In the Sahara, therefore, the beginning of a marked transformation in lifestyle, a prelude to food production activities, coincided with the return of the rains at the end of Pleistocene (12 000–10 000 BP) and with the resettlement of the region. In the transitional phase between the Pleistocene and the Holocene, cultural groups were strongly based on the exploitation of aquatic resources, a life style that the archaeologist Sutton called ‘aqualithic culture’. In Mali a lacustrine phase, between 8500 and 6900 BP, can be seen in the stratigraphic sections of the ancient lakes that lie next to the extensive dunes. Finely stratified sediments, which contain the remains of aquatic fauna, shells, and diatoms (freshwater plants), are clear signs of the presence of permanent lakes in the

past. The huge cemeteries that have been discovered in the Taoudenni region (Hassi el Abiod, Ine Sakane) have permitted notable observations to be made regarding, in particular, palaeoanthropological characteristics. An important cultural sequence is also evident in the mountainous regions of Algeria, where huntergatherer groups left remains of their material culture, in particular a characteristic pottery type, in temporary camps such as Amekni and Ti-n-Hanakaten. Other human settlements in the central Sahara appear in the area of the modern state of Chad, but are only known from surface scatters and ceramics collected by French and German archaeologists. In contrast, in Libya and Niger there are full stratigraphic sequences that allow the transformation of lifestyle to be studied: from a wide range of environmental exploitation strategies (including hunting, gathering, and fishing activities) to an economy that was specialized in pastoralism (cattle, sheep/goat). The Tadrart Acacus Massif in Libya that, along with the Algerian Tassili n’Ajjer, is one of the most important rock art (see Rock Art) complexes in the Sahara, has provided the various phases in this sequence, allowing light to be shed on the initial stages of domestication, which is not always visible in archaeological research. The lower layers (c. 9100 BP) of Ti-n-Torha East, in northern Acacus, show occasional occupation and a wide range of environmental exploitation strategies – with a strong incidence of plant food linked to the first appearance of ceramics (Figure 2). Other sites, such as Uan Afuda and Uan Tabu, show instead a lesser interest in the exploitation of floral resources and, on the other hand, a greater specialization in the exploitation of fauna. For example, Uan Afuda was laid out as a specialized camp for Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) hunting and herding. In the upper layers (8500–8000 BP), Ti-n-Torha East becomes a real proto-village, with a series of hut foundations built against the rock walls of the wadi that was suitable for the needs of a semi-permanent settlement (Figure 3). The composite sequence obtained from the three sites of Ti-n-Torha (East, North, and Two Caves Shelters) covers the entire period from Early to Middle Holocene (Figure 4). On the basis of material culture and archaeozoological evidence, the author suggests an autochthonous transition model (i.e., a local development model, without external influences) from pre-domestication to forms of incipient domestication. The Libyan situation finds notable parallels, stratigraphic and chronological, to the situation seen in Niger. The first discoveries made here, in the Aı¨r region, were by J. Desmond Clark in the 1970s. A full reconstruction of the regional sequence is due to the subsequent research of J. P. Roset who, in the 1980s, made

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Figure 2 Ceramics with impressed decorations from Ti-n-Torha East (Libya). Photo Barbara Barich, unpublished.

Saharan ceramic production in the Early Holocene. The faunal remains found have been attributed to wild animals and even fish, while the abundance of grinding stones is evidence of the importance of plant gathering. Hydrogeological studies in Niger have shown that an initial climatic recovery with the return of the rains, came at the end of the Pleistocene, around 13 000 years ago. It was then followed by a further dry phase in 9500 BP, just at the beginnings of the Holocene sequence. These data give support to the existence in Niger of a Palaeolithic (or Epipalaeolithic) occupation phase, as had been suggested by J. Desmond Clark. Figure 3 The Ti-n-Torha East settlement (Libya). From Barich BE (1998) People, Water and Grain – The Beginnings of Domestication in the Sahara and the Nile Valley. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

known the more-or-less contemporary sites of Temet 1 (9650–9450 BP), Ti-n-Ouaffadene (9360–9080 BP), and Adrar Bous 10 (9220–8840 BP), which are all tied to the lake expansion in the wet phase of the Early Holocene. The lithic complex of these contexts, as seen in Temet 1, continues the Epipalaeolithic tradition which, however, is already associated with pottery. The oldest examples have been found in Tagalagal, in the Bagzanes mountains (Aı¨r) and dated to between 9500 and 9200 BP. The Tagalagal ceramics have a variety of forms and well-developed decoration. Among these the ‘dotted wavy line’ decoration is noteworthy, as it is the most characteristic motif of the

Pastoralists and Saharan Rock Art During the 6000–5000 BP period (cal. 5000–4000 BC) the pastoral culture was widespread throughout the central and western Sahara. The presence of pastoralists was everywhere associated with elaborate rock art works that seem to have had, at least partly, the role of marking sacred places, where particular initiation ceremonies were carried out. In Niger, the sites of Dogomboulo in the Fachi area (7100–6600 BP) and Rocher Toubeau (5650–5500 BP), are the first examples of the Tenerian, a pastoral culture of the Middle Holocene. It is characterized by thick bifacial tools, such as gouges (flaked axes), discs, arrow heads, and polished hand axes. The Tenerian economy included animal husbandry, hunting, and gathering of wild cereals. An almost entire skeleton of a domestic ox

AFRICA, SOUTH/Sahara, West and Central 65

Figure 4 Panoramic view of the Auis and Ti-n-Torha wadis, in northern Acacus. Photo Barbara Barich, unpublished.

(Bos taurus), found in Agorass n’Tast, was dated to 6250–5250 BP. In the same area evidence for gathering of wild plant species has been found, imprints in clay vessels show the presence of Brachiaria and Sorghum. The Tenerian reached its peak around 5000 BP and was particularly widespread along the eastern side of Aı¨r, between Adrar Bous and Areschima.

The Spread of Pastoralism in the Late Holocene There is a clear chronological gap in the distribution of pastoral sites outside those areas discussed so far, both toward the Sahel and in the sub-Saharan regions. On the basis of the available data there is no evidence of domesticated animals (see Animal Domestication) on the northwestern edges of the Sahara, in the area between the Algerian and Moroccan lands of Atlas and Aure`s to the north, and Tanezrouft to the south, along the border between Algeria and Mali. This area seems to have been inhabited by mobile groups who continued in the hunting/fishing/gathering tradition (the culture of Hassi el Abiod). Based on this evidence, it can be stated that the northwestern part of the Sahara did not act as a corridor for the movement of domesticated livestock from the north (Aure`s) toward western Africa. In the Middle Holocene (6000–5000 BP) the greatest concentration of pastoral sites, such as the famous Adrar Bous, is seen along the western side of the Te´ne´re´, and it was probably from here that the Saharan pastoralists spread out toward the south and southwest, reaching the Atlantic coast of the western Sahara at Tintan and Chami, the Adrar des

Ifoghas and Tilemsi Valley in Mali, Azawagh Valley in Niger, pushing on to Dhar Tichitt in Mauretania, Kintampo and Ntereso in Ghana, where they introduced sheep/goats and decorated ceramics, developing new dynamics that led to the first agriculture in the region. Between the mid-fifth and the mid-fourth millennium BP (cal. 3500–2500 BC) Niger (Azawagh, the Aı¨r region, Ighazer-Tigidit, and the Termit Massif) saw the immigration of new groups with an organizational structure, including the presence of elites who built monumental tombs; these pastoral warriors were distinct in their palaeoanthropological profile from the previous population. Since the funerary monuments were primarily intended for males, we can argue that they were created for prestigious figures – leaders – within an aristocratic organization similar to a chiefdom. For the groups in the Agadez region there is evidence, from the third millennium BC, for the first attempts at copper metallurgy, which makes that area one of the oldest metalworking centers in Africa. See also: Africa, North: Sahara, Eastern; Animal Domestication; Rock Art.

Further Reading Aumassip G (2001) L’Algerie des premiers hommes. Paris: Ibis Press. Barich BE (ed.) (1987) British Archaeological Reports, International Series 368: Archaeology and Environment in the Libyan Sahara: The Excavations in the Tadrart Acacus, 1978–1983. Oxford: BAR. Barich BE (1998) People, Water and Grain – The Beginnings of Domestication in the Sahara and the Nile Valley. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

66 AFRICA, SOUTH/Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa Cremaschi M and Di Lernia S (eds.) (1998) Wadi Teshuinat, Palaeoenvironment and Prehistory in South-western Fezzan. Firenze: Edizioni all’Insegna del Giglio. Garcea EAA (ed.) (2001) Uan Tabu in the Settlement History of the Libyan Sahara. AZA Monographs N.2. Firenze: Edizioni all’Insegna del Giglio. Hassan FA (ed.) (2002) Droughts, Food and Culture – Ecological Change and Food Security in Africa’s Later Prehistory. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers.

Holl AFC (2004) Holocene Saharans, An Anthropological Perspective. London, New York: Continuum. Kuper R and Klees F (eds.) (1982) New Light on the Northeast African Past. Koln: Heinrich Barth Institut. Lequellec J-L (1998) Art rupestre et pre`histoire du Sahara. Paris: Editions Payot. Paris F (1996) Les se´pultures du Sahara nige´rien du Ne´olithique a` l’Islamisation (2 vols.). Paris: Orstom. Tillet Th (ed.) (1997) Sahara – Pale´omilieux et Peuplement Pre´historique au Ple´istoce`ne Superieur. Paris: L’Harmattan.

AFRICA, SOUTH Contents Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers Kalahari Margins Late Holocene Foragers Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers

Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa Simon Hall and Shadreck Chirikure, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bantu A large group of related languages spoken over much of sub-Saharan Africa. hunter-gatherer A way of life in which subsistence is based on the hunting of animals and the collection of wild plants rather than settled agriculture. Iron Age The period during which iron was utilized by people from about 3000 years ago, that in Europe, followed the Copper and Bronze Ages. In southern Africa the ‘Iron Age’ was introduced and did not develop from the local Later Stone Age and it was not preceded by a Copper or Bronze Age. Mapungubwe A World Heritage site in northern South Africa at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo Rivers. It was the capital of an ancestral Shona-speaking Kingdom that flourished between AD 1220 and 1290 and which had influence over parts of modern-day eastern Botswana and southern Zimbabwe. mixed farming A form of intensive agriculture consisting of domesticated animal and crop production as food sources where the maintenance of soil fertility results from the use of animal manure as fertilizer.

Introduction Archaeological research into the origins of food production in South Africa was only placed on a systematic footing from the 1960s. Radiocarbon dating that helped establish a well-dated 2000-year ceramic sequence was a significant contribution to this shift. The chronology of Early Farmers refuted a dominant apartheid narrative that asserted a shallow time depth for Bantu-speaking farmers in South Africa. Since the early 1990s the exposure of this suppressed archaeology has become an important part of a new democratic history. Research themes over this period have emphasized refining ceramic culture history sequences, settlement patterns and lifeways, and cognitive archaeology using ethnographic models to understand settlement space and the scale of political power (Figures 1 and 2).

The First Mixed Farmers between AD 400 and 1000 The earliest good evidence for full mixed cereal and livestock farming is dated to between AD 400 and 600. Livestock associated with pottery known as Bambata, however, predates unequivocal agropastoralism by 200–300 years and is known from Southwestern Zimbabwe, Botswana, and northern South Africa. This Bambata Pottery is enigmatic and some suggest

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next to rivers on deep alluvial soils. Where preservation allows, villages comprised a central cattle enclosure associated with metal working and ash dumps surrounded by a domestic, ring of huts and granaries. This was surrounded by a domestic ring of huts and granaries. There has been much debate as to whether this settlement layout can be interpreted through an ethnographic model called the Central Cattle Pattern, derived from late ninteenth- and twentieth-century Nguni-speaking ethnography. Huffman argues that cattle were probably socially and politically a key resource, particularly as a medium for bridewealth, from the inception of the early first millennium AD mixed farming ‘package’. Others have suggested that cattle only developed social importance toward the end of the first millennium. Hunter-gatherers were drawn toward settlements and entered into exchange and barter relationships with Early Farmers. Most farmers were selfsufficient in terms of basic livestock, cereal, ceramic, and metal production, but some settlements were larger and others had dumps associated with central cattle enclosures and which contained the debris of prestige craft work and fragments of ceramic helmet

that it is the start of the Early Farmer sequence while others link it to pioneer pastoralists or huntergatherers. It may be part of a general process that resulted in the appearance of early sheep and pottery in the Cape. Whatever the case, food production did not evolve from the local Later Stone Age. A ‘package’ comprising village life, cattle, sheep, and goats, domesticated crops such as sorghum and millet, pottery, and iron and copper metallurgy was introduced from north of the Limpopo River. This is evident because the ceramics are the southernmost expression of a much wider Early Farmer ceramic style found in central and East Africa called the Chifumbaze Complex. The Chifumbaze Complex is the archaeological expression for the complex southward movement of speakers of Bantu languages. Early farmer settlements are only found in the northern and eastern areas of the country (Figure 1). This distribution falls within the summer rainfall region and reflects the rainfall and temperature tolerances of the primary cereal crops, sorghum, and millet. Farmers sought warm, lower altitude tree, and grassland habitats and built their homesteads

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masks. The ethnographic model infers that these central zones were male activity areas and suggest shallow political hierarchies in which some production and ritual were centralized.

The Rise of Social Complexity between AD 900 and 1300 Between AD 900 and 1000, the junction of the Shashe and Limpopo Rivers saw a significant shift in political hierarchy within the Zhizo phase. A settlement known as Schroda was far larger than contemporary Zhizo settlements in the region and can be identified as the capital of an emerging chiefdom. This correlates with the intensification of trade links with entrepots such as Chibuene and Sofala on the southeast African coast. The Shashe/Limpopo area supported large elephant herds. Ivory and probably gold were exported where they entered complex trade networks with Swahili, Arab, and Indian centers around the Indian Ocean rim. Many of the thousands of glass trade beads at Schroda originated in Indonesia. At AD 1000, a new ancestral Shona-speaking chiefdom entered the Shashe/Limpopo valley, wrested power from Schroda and intensified trade links with the coast (see Political Complexity, Rise of). A new and larger capital was established at K2 and the number of smaller contemporary settlements increased significantly. Increasing political power and wealth was underwritten through the control of exotic trade goods that now included cloth. This is reflected by changes in the organization of the capital, where the central cattle enclosure was moved out of the town and suggests that political power was no longer

based only on cattle. James Denbow has shown that contemporary Toutswe farmers in Eastern Botswana to the west of K2 were also deeply enmeshed in trade relationships. These extended deep into the Kalahari and connected with the Okavango area of North Western Botswana and both pastoralists and hunter-gatherers were involved in commodity production and exchange. Despite this regional trade, however, Toutswe political hierarchies never matched those of the Shashe/Limpopo because access to exotic trade goods was limited. Early in the thirteenth century, K2 was abandoned and the town moved only 1 km away to Mapungubwe Hill (Figure 2). The status of elites found full expression with their occupation on top of the hill, deliberately separated from the commoner section of the town below. The establishment of the Mapungubwe state initiated the Zimbabwe Culture sequence. This represents a class-based system in which ruling elites, as sacred leaders, centralized political and ritual power, particularly rain making. Gold was assimilated into an elite value system and expressed in the thousands of gold beads, gold-plated rhino, bowl, and sceptre found in the royal cemetery on Mapungubwe Hill (Figure 3). The state extended its control into eastern Botswana though the boundaries are not yet fully established. Agricultural production was extensive, and the distribution of commoner homesteads on the edges of the Limpopo indicates that floodplain agriculture was important. The Mapungubwe State collapsed around AD 1300, possibly because of climatic and political factors. The main continuity in the Zimbabwe Culture was north of the Limpopo River with the rise of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of the Zimbabwe State that dominated much of present-day Zimbabwe.

Figure 2 Mapungubwe, the capital of the thirteenth-century Mapungubwe state.

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Figure 3 The gold rhino from the royal cemetery at Mapungubwe.

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Figure 4 Distribution of Later Farmers. Taken from Mitchell P (2002) The Archaeology of Southern Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Later Farming Communities in the Second Millennium AD There is a significant break in the ceramic sequence south of the Limpopo River, dating to the eleventh century AD in present-day Kwazulu-Natal, and in the fourteenth century in the areas just south of the Limpopo River. New ceramic styles and different

settlement preferences mark the appearance of new Bantu-speaking farmers (Figures 4 and 5). The newcomers were ancestral Nguni and Sotho/Tswanaspeakers who initiated the history of the majority of contemporary South Africans. On linguistic and cultural grounds, the origins of these new groups are in East Africa.

70 AFRICA, SOUTH/Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa

Figure 5 The central area of Molokwane, a stone wall western Tswana town dating between the eighteenth century and 1827.

By the fourteenth century, ancestral Sotho/Tswanaspeakers were established in the Limpopo region. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had expanded southwards to the edge of the southern grasslands. In the north, Sotho combined with Shona-speakers who had moved south across the Limpopo River, and by the sixteenth century had intermarried and melded to develop Venda as a language and an identity. Below the escarpment to the east, ancestral Nguni-speakers, known as Blackburn, had first settled the coastal area by the twelfth century AD. From AD 1300 a second phase had developed known as Moor Park. They moved beyond the mixed habitats of the major river valleys and expanded onto the higher grasslands over the escarpment to the west, as well as southwards along the coast to the edge of the viable summer rainfall zone. These Nguni farmers were the first to use dry stone walls to mark homestead boundaries and internal activity areas. Moor Park settlements are frequently found on steep-sided hills that may indicate the defense of agricultural resources in the harsher climatic conditions at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Climatic downturns may also have encouraged dispersals by Nguni-speakers, one at AD 1600 and another at AD 1700, over the escarpment into the western Sotho/Tswana dominated interior. Here they initially resisted Sotho/Tswana-speakers but were soon culturally assimilated. From the sixteeenth-century, Sotho-Tswana speakers had pushed further south across the Vaal River and onto the grassland habitats of the Eastern Free State and by the seventeenth century had reached the climatic and environmental limits of sorghum and millet farming. The use of dry stone walls to delineate settlements was widespread by this time, particularly on the treeless habitats of the southern grasslands. There is a relatively direct historic relationship

between this archaeology and the ethnographic ‘present’, and analogy allows settlement structure to be ‘read’ in some detail. In addition, as Tim Maggs has shown, this period comes within the reach of oral records which attach specific identities to settlement types and individual settlements. Archaeological evidence, including rock art, ethnohistoric records, and linguistic research show that complex interactions between hunter-gatherers and farmers continued well into the nineteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century a process of political centralization gathered momentum among western and eastern Tswana-speakers. The oral records describe considerable tension between competing chiefdoms. The archaeological correlate is the aggregation of homesteads into large towns, some of which were clearly defensive (Figure 5). The first Europeans to visit some of them recorded populations of up to 20 000 people. The factors responsible for political centralization vary between demographic surges, drought, the introduction of maize, and the colonial frontier pushing from the Cape Colony in the south and from the south east African coast. Toward the end of the eighteenthcentury elephant ivory was a major trade item, and competition over ivory, cattle, women, and other resources for local use and trade were intense. The best-known response to colonial pressure came in the early nineteenth century when the Zulu state, under Shaka, rose to power in the east. Colonial historians of early nineteenth-century history blamed Shaka for the mfecane, a period of political instability between the early 1820s and the late 1830s. Revisionist historians see African state formation and increased militarism as a response to colonial pressures of which the Great Trek northwards from the Cape Colony was an inseparable process. With this event, the frontier

AFRICA, SOUTH/Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers 71

started to close and by the end of the nineteenth century South African farmers had all but lost their independence. See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Zimbabwe

Plateau and Surrounding Areas; Africa, South: Kalahari Margins; Political Complexity, Rise of.

Further Reading Hall M (1987) The Changing Past: Farmers Kings and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860. Cape Town: David Philip. Hammond-Tooke WD (1993) The Roots of Black South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Huffman TN (1996) Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Leslie M and Maggs T (eds.) (2000) African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 years ago. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 8. Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society. Mitchell P (2002) The Archaeology of Southern Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers Andrew B Smith, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

animals (cattle, sheep, goats) or traditional African grains (sorghum, millet) to be found in southern Africa, but how these were transferred is still disputed. It used to be thought that the introduction of domestic food products was initially done by immigrant Iron Age farmers into South Africa, but it is now clear that these farmers only arrived about 1800 years ago, and the sheep bones found mostly in cave sites of the Western and Southern Cape predate their arrival by at least 200 years. The Khoekhoen (‘Hottentots’) are known historically as the herders of the Cape, and were some of the earliest sub-Saharan Africans to be met by European travelers in the fifteenth century. Their wealth in cattle made them a focus of attention, as their animals were used to refresh the ships plying the East India trade. Once sheep were excavated from sites at the Cape dating to 2000 years ago, and especially when excavations began at Kasteelberg on the west coast of South Africa, north of Cape Town, and dates of over 1800 years emerged in association with large numbers of sheep bones, it was immediately assumed that the shepherds were ancestors of the historic Khoekhoen. Today, not everyone agrees with this assumption, so there is some debate on the development of pastoral society in South Africa. There are thus two components to the arguments on the origins of food production in southern Africa: (1) how the animals and plants got there, and by whom; (2) what happened once these commodities arrived and spread to the Cape.

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Khoisan Herders Glossary farmer Someone who works on or operates a farm. forager Someone who hunts for food and provisions. herder A worker who lives a semi-nomadic life, caring for various domestic animals. Khoekhoen A general name which the herding people of the Cape used for themselves. Khoisan A collective name that originally referred to the linguistic and biological groupings of aboriginal people of southern Africa. It has now taken on a cultural meaning in the popular literature. Soaqua A name given to hunters by the Khoekhoen of the Cape. The word means ‘people different from ourselves’ and became associated with those without livestock, or people who stole livestock.

The Debate on Early Food Production in Southern Africa The arrival of food producers to southern Africa was the end of a long process of gradual dispersal. The route of domestic animals into the subcontinent had to be from the north, as there are no wild progenitors of the

Khoisan people are the aboriginal inhabitants of southern Africa. Although they must have formed a single genetic population at one time, linguistically there are three distinct groups whose click languages are mutually unintelligible. This suggests separation over a considerable period of time. Recent physical anthropological work by Morris has suggested that there are no Khoisan skeletons to be found north of the Zambezi River, so any involvement of Khoisan people with domestic animals had to take place either along the Zambezi, or the rivers systems to the west, such as the Kavango River. This immediately implies the movement of domestic stock to southern Africa by non-South Africans, either farmers or pastoralists coming most probably from East Africa via a tsetsefree corridor (Figure 1), although movement via Angola from the Congo cannot be ruled out. The reason for this lack of clarity is due to large areas of Central Africa being poorly understood archaeologically, and small groups of migrating pastoral people may leave very little signs of their passing

72 AMERICAS, NORTH/Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers

Ngamuriak

Proposed route of sheep circa 2000 B.P. Distribution of ripple-rim ceramics c. 2000 B.P. Bambata Lowland rain forest

Geduld Falls Rock

Distribution of species of morsitans tsetse

Spoegrivier Kasteelberg Die Krans Boomplaas Witklip Die Kelders Blombos

Figure 1 Possible route of movement of domestic stock in Southern Africa 2000 BP. Taken from Smith AB (2006) Excavations at Kasteelberg and Origins of the Khoekhoen in Western Cape, South Africa.

(see Africa, East: Foragers; Africa, North: Sahara, Eastern; Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers). Support for an East African connection comes from linguistic work by Ehret which indicates that words for ‘ram’, ‘young ram’, and ‘milk ewe’ in Khoe languages came from a putative East Sahelian language that existed in East Africa. Khoe-speaking hunters still live along the Kavango River in the Caprivi, and the river systems of northeastern Botswana south of the Zambezi. This is also the base of the language spoken by the Khoekhoen of the Cape. Thus, it would appear that the Khoekhoe ancestors probably came from the area of the Kavango and Zambezi. The questions is: when did this happen? One scenario would have domestic sheep arriving in Caprivi via pastoralists or agriculturalists from East Africa and transferred to Khoe-speaking hunters who adopted sheep herding, and who spread southwards, eventually reaching the Cape some 2000 years ago. The initial arrivals were small groups who are difficult to see archaeologically, and it is from this population that the early sheep bones and pottery were transferred to hunters who occupied the small rock shelters (Figure 2). Once the herders became established, and their flocks grew, Smith suggests they used Kasteelberg as an aggregation point for harvesting seals, and at the same time used the fat mixed with ochre in ceremonies.

An alternative is suggested by Sadr that the people inhabiting such sites as Spoegrivier Cave, Die Kelders Cave, Blombos Cave, and Kasteelberg ‘G’ open-site were indigenous hunters of the Cape who occupied these sites before and after the introduction of sheep and pottery, and who obtained sheep via internal exchange systems to become independent herders. This scenario would further suggest that the Khoekhoen, as known historically, were later arrivals at the Cape, and who were the people who introduced cattle and lugged pottery.

Southern African Iron Age Farmers The arrival of Iron Age farmers to South Africa brought the widest range of domestic plants and animals. These people have been divided into three groups; (1) the Kwale branch of East African Urewe Tradition; (2) the Nkope branch of the Urewe Tradition; and (3) the Kalundu Tradition from the Congo. They brought with them ceramics whose designs can be traced further north. They also brought an African language, known as Ntu, which is part of the Niger– Congo family, and has its roots in the Cross Rivers area of West Africa. They introduced iron technology which was crucial for making tools to clear fields in the slash-and-burn system used, and for weapons. Huffman believes that the layout of the

AMERICAS, NORTH/Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers 73

Figure 2 Excavated sites at Kasteelberg, Vredenburg Peninsular, Western Cape province, South Africa. Taken form Smith AB (2006) Excavations at Kasteelberg and the origins of the Khoekhoen in the Western Cape, South Africa.

homesteads, which he calls the Central Cattle Pattern, with huts surrounding the cattle kraal, and with burials in the central cattle area, can trace its origins to the earliest arrivals. Not everyone agrees. Lane is skeptical that such a tradition can survive without change for such a long period. Huffman’s system of decorative symbols on ceramics currently has the strongest voice, and adherents would say the system also carries through to the present.

Relations between Hunters and Food Producers Since the evidence indicates that food production was introduced from the north, and that the ancestors of modern Bantu-speaking farmers also came from the north, we can assume at least a partial connection, certainly as far as domestic plants are concerned. The impact of the arrival of Iron Age farmers some 1800 years ago on the aboriginal Khoisan hunting population along the southeast coast of southern Africa may initially have been minimal, as the first farmers needed to adjust to local conditions. This would have been particularly true of the introduction of cattle which Gifford-Gonzalez says needed to deal with epizootic diseases carried by wild animals, such as buffalo and neonate wildebeest, and which are potentially fatal to cattle. By 1500 years ago, the highveld of South Africa was being colonized, and the biological evidence suggests that aboriginal hunters were subsumed into Iron Age populations as African farmers took wives from among the hunters. This resulted in hypergyny (one-way gene flow), since few hunters could have had access to the cattle

needed for bride-wealth payments to obtain farming wives. At the Cape, the historical evidence hints that hunters (called Soaqua) continued to maintain a separate existence to the Khoekhoen, right up to the colonial period in the seventeenth century. This leads to the Dutch perceived separation of ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’, as hunters and herders respectively, with the Khoekhoen being the dominant group. In fact, a description by the governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, in 1685 epitomizes their relationship: ‘‘We find that these Soaquas are just the same as the poor in Europe, each tribe of Hottentots having some of them and employing them to bring news of the approach of a strange tribe. They steal nothing from the kraals of their employers but regularly from other kraals . . . possessing nothing . . . except what they acquire by theft.’’ The historian Elphick challenged this separation, and suggested by the colonial period there was only one group of ‘Hottentots’, and that the Soaqua were Khoekhoen who had lost their stock through theft or disease, and were on the downward part of a cycle of fortune. The separation between Khoekhoen and Bantuspeaking farmers was ecological. The Cape is a winter rainfall area, so was not available to agriculturalists with summer rainfall crops. Iron Age people never spread to the Cape, leaving the southwest and Atlantic coastal areas open for pastoralism, while in the dry interior the hunters held sway until later in the historic period when deep underground water could be tapped using wind-driven pumps. See also: Africa, East: Foragers; Africa, North: Sahara,

Eastern; Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers.

74 AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins

Further Reading Ehret C (1998) An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 BC to AD 400. Oxford: James Currey. Elphick R (1977) Kraal and Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gifford-Gonzalez D (2000) Animal disease challenges to the emergence of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa. African Archaeological Review 17(3): 95–139. Huffman TN (1980) Ceramics, classification and Iron Age entities. African Studies 39: 123–174. Huffman TN (1986) Iron Age settlement patterns and the origins of class distinction in southern Africa. Advances in World Archaeology 5: 291–338. Lane P (1994–95) The use and abuse of ethnography in Iron Age studies of southern Africa. Azania 29/30: 51–64. Morris AG (2002) Isolation and the origin of the Khoisan: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene human evolution at the southern end of Africa. Human Evolution 17(3–4): 231–240. Sadr K (2003) The Neolithic of southern Africa. Journal of African History 44: 195–209. Smith AB (2005) African Herders: Emergence of Pastoral Traditions. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Smith AB (2006) Excavations at Kasteelberg and origins of the Khoekhoen in Western Cape, South Africa. Oxford: BAR International Series 1537.

Kalahari Margins James Denbow, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Okavango–Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. In the north, the Okavango Delta, one of the largest inland deltas in the world, provides a counterpoint to the otherwise flat and thirsty sands of the Kalahari sandveld into which it drains. From the Makgadikgadi salt pans to the Limpopo River, greater physiographic relief prevails on the more fertile soils of the hardveld, which today support over 80% of the region’s population. While the climate of the Kalahari has remained relatively stable over the past two millenniums, the archaeological record indicates that a number of important cultural and economic transformations have occurred, first as domesticated livestock were introduced to supplement forager subsistence strategies and, later, as more sedentary agropastoral communities settled the more productive regions of eastern Botswana and along the margins of the Okavango Delta (Figure 1). By CE 1000 changes in the internal dynamics of subsistence production, enhanced by the establishment of local trade networks that carried game products, metal goods, and other valued objects, led to more regional political formations and the appearance of the first chiefdoms (see Political Complexity, Rise of). Connections with longer-distance trade networks in luxury goods that reached, through intermediaries in the Limpopo valley, eastward to the Indian Ocean accompanied these internal changes, eventually underwriting the more complex political and social formations of the historic period.

ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Foragers to Herder-Foragers: 100 BCE–CE 700 Glossary Great Zimbabwe The name given to the remains of stone, sometimes referred to as the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, of an ancient Southern African city, located at 20
160 S 30
540 E in present-day Zimbabwe which was once the center of a vast empire known as the Munhumutapa Empire (also called Monomotapa or Mwene Mutapa Empire). chiefdom Any community led by an individual known as a chief. Chiefdoms are characterized by pervasive inequality of peoples and centralization of authority. Iron Age The stage in the development of any people where the use of iron implements as tools and weapons is prominent. The Iron Age is the last principal period in the three-age system for classifying prehistoric societies, preceded by the Bronze Age. In sub-Saharan Africa this system must be modified because no Bronze Age comes between the Late Stone Age and the Iron Age. Instead, the Iron Age follows directly from, and in some areas overlaps with, the Late Stone Age.

Introduction This chapter discusses the period between approximately 100 BCE and CE 1700, encompassing those parts of the Kalahari region lying between the

The Appearance of Sheep and Cattle

Beginning around 2000 years ago archaeological data from the Okavango region at sites such as Toteng 1 and Lotshitshi indicate that domesticated cattle and sheep were added in small numbers to the subsistence economy of Late Stone Age (LSA) populations living by hunting, gathering, and, in some cases, fishing. While early dates for herder-foraging in northern Botswana were once viewed with skepticism because of potential problems of association between charcoal samples and the domestic animal bones they were meant to date due to mixing in the loose Kalahari sand, the most recent calibrated AMS (accelerator mass spectroscopy) dates from Toteng, done directly on cattle and sheep bones, place the appearance of both in northern Botswana between 200 BCE and 100 CE. The domesticated animal remains at the site predate levels containing Bambata ceramics by several hundred years, indicating that the economic changes associated with herder-foraging spread independently from pottery making and/or use.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins 75

Serondella Tsodilo Hills

Divuvu and Nqoma

Okavango Delta

Lotshitshi

Toteng Hippo Tooth

Makgadikgadi Pans

Tora Nju

Kaishe Toutswe

Bosutswe Botswana

Kgaswe K2 and Mapungubwe

Losé

Gaborone

0 0

50 100 km 50

100 mi

Administrative districts Geographic features Sandveld/ hardveld boundary Figure 1 Selected archaeological sites in northern and eastern Botswana. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bambata Ware

Calibrated dates for the appearance of Bambata ware at Toteng range between CE 215 and 555, which brackets a date between CE 250 and 530 for a few Bambata ceramics from the Late Stone Age site of Lotshitshi near Maun. A bone apatite date of CE 790–1010 for Bambata ware from the site of Hippo Tooth extends this distribution eastward along the Ngami–Botletli River System to the southern edge of the Makgadikgadi salt pans (Figure 2). Bambata ware has also been collected from the surface of several other, presently undated, sites in the Makgadikgadi where it accompanies LSA materials. Since cattle and sheep are not indigenous to southern Africa, there has been debate about the ultimate source of these domesticates for hunters and gatherers living below the Kunene–Okavango–Zambezi Rivers. Some argue for a source in the earlier pastoral Neolithic of East Africa, while others propose more western origins – either in the Early Iron Age of northern Angola

and the Congo, or perhaps even the Cameroon. Debate also surrounds the nature of the ceramic assemblages classed as Bambata, with some arguing for indigenous production of these ceramics by local hunter-gatherers while others suggest that the ceramics were obtained through trade with Early Iron Age communities, perhaps even as fragments used for ritual purposes or curiosities rather than as functional vessels. Apart from generalized stylistic resemblances to some ceramics from Benfica in western Angola, however, no presently known Iron Age sites north or south of the Okavango–Zambezi Rivers appear to be definitive. Sources for these early wares are unknown. What is certain is that a diversity of hunting, gathering, fishing, and herding adaptations developed along the rivers, deserts, swamps, and other ecological zones in Botswana at the beginning of the Common Era. Precisely how stone-using foragers and herderforagers interfaced and interacted with arriving agropastoral populations after CE 500 is uncertain,

76 AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins

Figure 2 Bambata ceramics recovered from the LSA site of Hippo Tooth. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

but it is likely that a variety of interactive forms developed that ranged from intermarriage and assimilation, to fleeting interaction and trade and perhaps even competitive or antagonistic relationships – especially along the western parts of the Boteti River where the presence of Khoi-speaking herder-foragers appears to have inhibited Iron Age settlement until 400– 500 years ago. During the mid-nineteenth century, historic accounts indicate that some indigenous Khoe populations in this region, such as the Deti, kept large herds of cattle that might have put them in direct competition with Bantu-speaking agropastoralists for grazing and water rights. Further east, along the southern and eastern margins of the Makgadikgadi salt pans,

Early Iron Age settlements such as Kaishe were well established by the tenth or eleventh centuries; ruins at Tora Nju and other locations extend agropastoral settlement, social stratification, and Zimbabwe hegemony into this region during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Early Iron Age Communities on the Eastern Margins of the Kalahari Between CE 600 and 800 settled communities of mixed farmers and herders appeared along the western and southern fringes of the Okavango and Chobe Rivers at sites such as Divuyu and Serondella, the

AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins 77

southeastern margins of the Makgadikgadi at Kaishe, and in the hardveld of eastern and southern Botswana. Studies of cave sediments in the Tsodilo Hills, along with changes in prehistoric site distributions in central and eastern Botswana over the past 2000 years, suggest that climatic conditions were wetter during the last half of the first millennium CE. While agropastoral communities had considerable overlap with indigenous hunters and gatherers in their use of wild plants and animals, water points, firewood, and other natural resources, they also introduced more intensive systems of land use as fields were cleared for sorghum, millet, cow peas, and a variety of other crops. More regulated systems of land rights were also needed to manage growing herds of cattle, goats, and sheep, with their increased labor, grazing, and water demands. Cattle Wealth and Early Chiefdoms in Eastern Botswana: CE 700–1000

Between approximately CE 600 and 800 most settlements were small, mixed farming communities that combined animal husbandry and agriculture with a significant input from game and wild plants. Ceramic styles link these communities culturally to settlements known as Zhizo in Zimbabwe. Local distinctions in ceramic style, however, suggest they were a separate facies known as Taukome. By CE 700 domestic herds were large enough to leave an easily recognizable imprint on village layout in the form of centralized deposits of unburned and vitrified dung, surrounded by houses constructed of pole and a mixture of dung

and mud known as daga. This pattern recurs widely across southern Africa and is known, as the Central Cattle Pattern (CCP). Over the next 500 years, herds continued to prosper and grow, producing dung deposits over 2 m deep and 60 m in diameter in the centers of some villages. These animals provided the economic capital that permitted social and political differentiation between CE 900 and 1100. Increased social stratification based upon differential holdings of cattle and small stock is reflected in regional settlement patterns as large, long-term settlements such as Toutswemogala (Figure 3) and Bosutswe were surrounded by smaller, more ephemeral satellite communities whose locations shifted when fertile land, firewood, and other productive resources were exhausted. In concert with the increasing scale of political centralization and emerging chiefly authority exercised on a regional level, as reflected in these regional changes in settlement structure, ceramic assemblages become more standardized in form and decoration and are known as the Toutswe tradition (see Africa, South: Herders, Farmers, and Metallurgists of South Africa). Trade in Specularite and Social Differentiation in Northwestern Botswana

Social differentiation based upon intensification of commodity production and wealth accumulation was also occurring at the Tsodilo Hills in northwestern Botswana (Figure 4a and 4b) where intensive specularite mining took off between CE 800 and 1100. Control of the specularite mines at Tsodilo enabled

Figure 3 Aerial view of Toutswemogala showing the characteristic Cenchrus-covered midden that commonly developed in association with the animal kraals at deeply stratified Early Iron Age settlements in the eastern Kalahari. A smaller Cenchrus midden can be seen at the base of the hill. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

78 AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins

Divuyu Nqoma

(a)

DIvuyu

1000 m 500 m

0

Nqoma

10 m

20 m

Location of Iron Age sites in the Tsodilo Hills (b) Figure 4 (a) A view of the ‘female’ hill at Tsodilo taken from the top of the ‘male’ hill showing the locations of Divuyu and Nqoma. (b) Topographic map of the Tsodilo Hills showing the locations of Divuyu and Nqoma. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

the Iron Age occupants at Nqoma to procure unparalleled quantities of iron and copper jewelry. Even glass beads, cowry, and conus shells from the east coast reached the site, making it the most distant inland entrepoˆt in eastern and southern Africa to have obtained luxury goods from the Indian Ocean trade in the first millennium (Figure 5). Finds of Nqoma style ceramics in the lower levels of Bosutswe suggest that at least some of these luxury goods were directed westward through emerging Toutswe chiefdoms rather than following routes along the Zambezi River. By

the beginning of the second millennium, however, specularite sources in eastern Botswana may have replaced those of Nqoma, leading to an attenuation of these trans-Kalahari connections. Perhaps in consequence, Nqoma was abandoned as an elite settlement around CE 1100. East Coast Trade and Early Chiefdoms in East-Central Botswana: CE 1000–1200

Glass beads, marine shells, and even chickens imported from the east coast begin to appear in

AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins 79

small numbers after CE 800, but apart from the differential distribution of livestock holdings there is little other material evidence for social stratification other than a tendency for the longer-term elite settlements to be established on rocky hilltops. Whether

Figure 5 An eleventh century ivory copy of a Conus shell bead recovered from the excavations at Nqoma. Nqoma, more than 1500 km from the coast, is the most distant interior settlement so far known to have been able to import luxury items such as glass beads and cowry shells from the Indian Ocean. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

rocky hilltops were chosen for defensive purposes, or for their symbolic associations with power and rainmaking, or a combination of both, is not known. Caches of glass beads and other status goods found at small sites such as Kgaswe indicate that access to luxury goods was not restricted to the elite on hilltop settlements and suggest that status differentiation was more fluid than it was to become later. Although more than 60 Toutswe period burials have been excavated, none has been found with distinctively rich grave goods that would attest to more developed class distinctions, such as those that make their appearance after CE 1200 (Figure 6). The presence of central animal kraals (a term now widely used in southern Africa to denote animal pens or byres) at all sites – from the smallest to the largest – during the Toutswe period contrasts with what is found after CE 1200 when only smaller sites continue to be organized according to the CCP. Kraals disappear from elite centers such as Bosutswe, suggesting that an important change in herd management had occurred, with animals being shifted from high-status locations to smaller, commoner settlements. Whether this was in response to ecological difficulties brought about by overgrazing around large centers, or it represents a symbolic shift associated with the establishment of more rigid social hierarchies and class differentiation, is presently unclear. But there is no doubt that new spatial and

Figure 6 Toutswe burial from Bosutswe. Analysis of the skeletal material from Bosutswe indicates a population with better nutritional health than that from Mapungubwe at the same time period. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

80 AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins

Figure 7 The site of Bosutswe on the eastern edge of the Kalahari. The large mound in the center of the site is formed from the remains of substantial elite houses that date to the period after CE 1200 when most of the commoner Toutswe population was moved off the hilltop. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bosutswe Bronze bangle with glass bead Gold bangle

through the wearing of quantities of glass beads, copper and bronze jewelry, and cloth apparel (Figure 8). Metal production, rainmaking, trade in specularite, and other activities imbued with ritual and economic significance become more centralized at elite centers at this time (see Social Inequality, Development of).

Class Formation: Political and Economic Restructuring after CE 1200

2 cm

Figure 8 The elite at Bosutswe used metal jewelry to index their social status. While they were able to acquire small quantities of gold, they were not powerful enough to compete with the elite at Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe for this commodity. In consequence, they turned to the use of high-tin bronze bangles that, if kept polished, mimicked the appearance of gold. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

material coordinates were mapped onto social distinctions and evidence from Bosutswe indicates that the elite now lived alone on the hilltop, spatially separated from their subordinates (Figure 7). They ate from distinctively decorated ceramics patterned after those from Mapungubwe and known as Lose´ ware, and differentiated themselves in other ways

At the beginning of the thirteenth century a political change occurred as the Bosutswe elite living in the center of the hilltop aligned themselves with the elite at Mapungubwe by adopting new ceramic styles that evoked those of Mapungubwe. They further differentiated themselves from their followers by constructing large, double-walled houses with sunken interiors similar to those found at Mapungubwe. Commoners, on the other hand, continued to use Toutswe ceramics until approximately CE 1300. Remains of burned structures containing Toutswe ceramics on top of Boutswe date this period of transition to around CE 1200 and suggest that force may have been involved in the transformation of the hilltop from a Toutswe village, replete with houses and animal kraals, to the secluded residence of a small number of elite families (Figures 9 and 10). Late thirteenth century dates for Toutswe ceramics at CCP villages in the surrounding area suggest that a more rigid system of class differentiation developed that was similar to that now attested between Leopard’s Kopje and Leokwe peoples in the Limpopo valley.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins 81

Figure 9 Remains of a burned house containing Toutswe ceramics at Bosutswe. The burning, which dates to the thirteenth century, could suggest that the removal of commoner residences from the hilltop after CE 1200 involved the use of force. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

100 W ceramic seriation 0% 10% 20%

Level 1 2 3 4 5, 6, 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14, 15 Class 1e Class 1f Class 1c

Level 1 2 3 4 5, 6, 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14, 15 Class 12

Class 2b

Class 2a

Class 1a

Class 2c

Class 1b

Class 13 Class 9 Class 6 Class 6b Class 5a

Class 3a Class 7 Class 4a 4b Class 11 Class 8 Class 2d Class 2e Class 3b Class 4d

Figure 10 Changes in ceramics over time at Bosutswe. The dramatic change in ceramic classes above level 4 date to the period when elite residences inspired by Mapungubwe were built at Bosutswe. Ceramics of Class 4d originate in the Okavango region and indicate trade westward across the Kalahari. Classes 4a and 4b, on the other hand, belong to the Leopard’s Kopje and Eiland traditions in South Africa and suggest that changes in trade networks from west to east occurred after CE 1000. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

82 AMERICAS, NORTH/Kalahari Margins

Imported glass beads, along with locally made gold, bronze, and copper jewelry, were worn by the new Bosutswe elite as an index of their status. The earliest spindle whorls date from this period and suggest that cotton cloth was worn by the elite as another mark of social distinction. Finds of bronze prills, along with the crucibles used in melting copper and with remains of iron forge bases, further suggest that

Figure 11 Agate disks recovered from a fourteenth century cache of more than 100 at Bosutswe. Such stones may have figured in rainmaking and other rituals. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

the Bosutswe elite had centralized control over metal production and exchange. The high tin content of some of the Bosutswe bronze indicates it was locally produced rather than manufactured from reworked Mapungubwe bronze. Metalworking has a well-known association with the spiritual realm in the ethnographic record and smelters, who were often associated in Central African tradition with kingship, played important roles as spiritual mediators and sometimes diviners. Other evidence suggesting that the Bosutswe elite now controlled spiritual resources include the recovery of a cache of over a hundred thin, snow-white agate disks from the floor of an elite structure in the center of the hilltop along with glass beads, bronze bangles, and the canine teeth from at least four hyena – an animal often associated with the supernatural (Figure 11). Such agate disks would not be out of place in contemporary divination kits or rain-controlling paraphernalia and it is possible they served these functions in the past as well. The period between CE 1300 and 1500 saw the rise and then collapse of Great Zimbabwe to the east. While ruins of Zimbabwe type occur northeast of the Bosutswe region, and even to the west along the margins of the Makgadikgadi pans, none are known in the region running from Bosutswe to Toutswe. Bosutswe and other Lose-affiliated sites appear to have been able to maintain their distinct cultural identity while interacting with Zimbabwe communities from which rolled-rim, graphite burnished wares of Zimbabwe style, along with a lead–tin ingot, and other unusual commodities were obtained.

Figure 12 Remains of a large, circular stonewall located on an island in the Makgadikgadi pans. Local Khoe-speaking populations still leave offerings of coins and other objects at the site. ã 2008 Dr. James Denbow. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Late Holocene Foragers 83

The Forging of Contemporary Identities: the Proto-Historic Period between 1500 and 1700 The impact of the political restructuring that occurred in the Bosutswe region as Great Zimbabwe and then Khami rose to power is presently poorly known. In the Francistown area south of the Shashi River, the presence of Zimbabwe and Khami stonewalled settlements suggests that political and cultural developments there were closely aligned with southwestern Zimbabwe. Related ruins on the southern and eastern edges of the Makgadikgadi pans, however, suggest a more divergent historical trajectory – one that incorporated Khoe-speaking as well as Bantu peoples into a more complex and multiethnic political matrix (Figure 12). Bosutswe continued to be occupied by households using a cruder form of Lose ceramics. But at the end of its occupation around CE 1700, the remains of seven widely spaced stone-walled ellipses were constructed that probably served as household windbreaks – the hilltop was no longer the preserve of an exclusive elite. Similar stone ellipses are found on hilltops far to the west along the southern margins of the Makgadikgadi, but these are yet to be investigated by archaeologists. Their relationship to the cultural sequence at Bosutswe, and to the Zimbabwe and Khami period ruins in this area is also unknown. In addition, walled-off promontories that dominate the eroded headlands of the sandveld– hardveld boundary between Toutswe, Bosutswe, and the Makgadikgadi suggest that some eighteenth century settlements were sited with defense as a consideration. But the political and economic context of such unrest is uncertain, leaving the historical relationship of these ruins to contemporary constructions of social and cultural identity along the margins the Kalahari tantalizingly close, but unresolved. See also: Africa, South: Herders, Farmers, and Metallur-

gists of South Africa; Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers; Animal Domestication; Political Complexity, Rise of; Social Inequality, Development of.

Denbow JR (1990) Congo to Kalahari: Data and hypotheses about the political economy of the western stream of the Early Iron Age. African Archaeological Review 8: 139–176. Denbow JR (2002) Stolen Places: Archaeology and the politics of identity in the later prehistory of the Kalahari. In: Falola T and Jennings C (eds.) Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines, pp. 345–374. Transaction Publishers Rutgers: Summerset. Denbow JR and Thebe PC (2006) Culture and Customs of Botswana. Westport: Greenwood Press. Denbow JR and Wilmsen EN (1986) The advent and course of pastoralism in the Kalahari. Science 234: 1509–1515. Huffman TN (2005) The stylistic origin of Bambata and the spread of mixed farming in southern Africa. Southern African Humanities 17: 57–79. Lane P, Reid A, and Segobye A (1998) Ditswa Mmung: The Archaeology of Botswana. Gaborone: Pula Press and the Botswana Society. Leslie M and Maggs T (eds.) (2000) Goodwin Series, Vol. 8: African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 years Ago. Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society. Miller D (1996) The Tsodilo Jewellery: Metal Work from Northern Botswana. Rondebosch: University of Cape Town Press. Miller D (2001) Metal assemblages from the Greefswald sites, South Africa: K2, Mapungubwe southern terrace, and Mapungubwe hill. South African Archaeological Bulletin 56: 83–103. Robbins LH, Murphy ML, and Campbell AC (1998) Intensive mining of specular hematite in the Kalahari ca. AD 800–1000. Current Anthropology 39: 144–149. Robbins LH, Murphy ML, Brook GA, et al. (2000) Archaeology, palaeoenvironment, and chronology of the Tsodilo Hills White Paintings Rock Shelter, northwest Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Journal of Archaeological Science 27: 1085–1113. Robbins LH, Campbell AC, Murphy ML, Brook GA, Srivastava P, and Badenhorst S (2005) The advent of herding in southern Africa: Early AMS dates on domestic livestock from the Kalahari Desert. Current Anthropology 46: 671–677.

Late Holocene Foragers Judith Sealy, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Further Reading Calabrese JA (2000) Interregional interaction in southern Africa: Zhizo and Leopard’s Kopje relations in northern South Africa, southwestern Zimbabwe, and eastern Botswana, AD 1000 to 1200. African Archaeological Review 17: 183–210. Campbell AC, Denbow JR, and Wilmsen EN (1994) Paintings like engravings: Rock art at Tsodilo. In: Dowson T and LewisWilliams D (eds.) Contested Images: Diversity in Southern African Rock Art Research, pp. 131–158. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

forager Often used synonymously with ‘hunter-gatherer’ (see below). Some authors, following Binford, restrict the term to groups who move frequently to new sources of food or other resources, such as the Kalahari San. Holocene Geological period that extends from the present day back to about 10 000 radiocarbon years, approximately 11 430  130 calendar years BP (between 9560 and 9300 BC). hunter-gatherer Society whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, using foraging and hunting, without significant recourse to the domestication of either.

84 AMERICAS, NORTH/Late Holocene Foragers

Introduction Our knowledge of past foragers in southern Africa is geographically uneven (Figure 1). Most work has been done in coastal areas, where the high visibility of shell middens attracts attention, and where wavecut caves and rock shelters provide attractive sheltered camping sites for ancient and modern people alike. A few such areas have been the subjects of intensive study, but the archaeology of large areas of the subcontinent is known poorly, if at all. Despite efforts to correct this bias, our reconstructions continue to be heavily dependent on long sequence cave sites, where good preservation of organic materials allows for study of a wider range of remains than is the case at most open sites. These problems notwithstanding, the study of foraging people in southern Africa offers special opportunities, due to the preservation of a rich archaeological record and to the continuing existence of Khoisan groups, descended from these Late Holocene populations, who pursued a foraging lifestyle into the second half of the twentieth century.

The Mid-Holocene In mid-Holocene times, between about 8000 and 4000 BP, the arid central parts of South Africa were thinly populated, probably because warmer and likely drier conditions made already marginal environments unattractive. People were, however, living in the

coastal areas of South Africa, in the northern parts of the country, and in Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. Stone artifact assemblages from this time are characterized by very small, highly standardized artifacts, especially tiny scrapers, and in many places, crescent-shaped ‘segments’ that may have been used in arrowheads and/or as general-purpose small cutting tools (Figure 2). The composition of assemblages changed over time (segments were especially timerestricted) but the small size of the artifacts, the relatively high proportion of retouched pieces, and a preference for fine-grained stone raw material was maintained. In the southern Cape, this tradition is called the ‘Wilton’; these assemblages extend into Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, where other names have been used. The similarity of these microlithic artifact assemblages over long distances shows that people subscribed to a shared set of social norms, at least as far as the accepted way to make tools was concerned. ‘Wilton’ artifacts include types very similar to items collected from recent San or ‘Bushmen’, including ostrich eggshell beads and beaded items, ostrich eggshell flasks, and bored stones used as digging stick weights, among others. Archaeologists are confident that the lifestyles of mid-Holocene foragers shared many similarities with those of people who continued to live by hunting and gathering into the twentieth century. Striking parallels have been demonstrated by David Lewis-Williams and others who have drawn

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Figure 1 Map showing major geographical features of South Africa and sites mentioned in the text.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Late Holocene Foragers 85

Mid-Holocene artifact assemblages are not, however, uniform. Lyn Wadley has excavated two approximately contemporary sites in the Magaliesberg, north of Johannesburg. Jubilee Shelter yielded many standardized, formal, microlithic stone artifacts, often made from carefully chosen, fine-grained stone not available in the immediate vicinity of the site. These were found together with bone tools, ostrich eggshell beads and bead-manufacturing debris, and other items. Cave James contained a very different kind of artifact assemblage with informal tools, made mostly from local raw material, suggesting much more ad hoc manufacture. There were few nonlithic artifacts, and much less evidence of craft activities. Wadley has interpreted this difference as the result of seasonal aggregation and dispersal of hunter-gatherer groups, with formal artifact assemblages and formal rules of behavior characteristic of aggregation-phase campsites.

4000 to 2000 BP Figure 2 Microlithic ‘Wilton’ stone artefacts: segments (top) and scrapers (bottom). Scale in mm.

Figure 3 Rock painting from Game Pass Shelter, Drakensberg, showing eland, large cloaked figures and (at top) small running humans.

from beliefs and practices of recent San communities to gain insight into the world views expressed in the complex and often very beautiful rock paintings found in many mountainous areas of southern Africa (Figure 3). Most of these paintings have not, so far, proved amenable to direct dating, but portable cobbles with paintings on them have been recovered from excavations, and can be dated by association with the levels in which they were found. Some are more than 6000 years old. Rock-painting traditions continued into the last few centuries, as images of colonial settlers and soldiers attest.

After about 4000 BP, populations grew substantially, and the interior of South Africa was re-occupied. In areas where detailed studies have been done, notably the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces and the Thukela River Basin of KwaZulu-Natal, we can see that lower-ranked food sources were added to the diet, including freshwater fish and shellfish, and there was greater emphasis on plant foods. Hilary Deacon has suggested that people may have practiced ‘fire-stick farming’ – burning the veld to promote the growth of geophytes, whose starchy corms were an important food item. These are just the type of changes one would expect if there were more people needing to be fed. In at least some areas, growing population density led to competition for resources, the emergence of more settled, territorial lifestyles and, no doubt, restructuring of earlier networks of trade and communication. At the same time, we also see evidence of increasing regional differentiation in artifact-making traditions. At some sites, microlithic tool-kits persisted, while at others, they were replaced by macrolithic assemblages. In a broad sense, this variation is likely to be one facet of the greater social and economic complexity of the last few millennia, but there is still much to explore in the links between material culture, economy, and identity (see Africa, South: Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers; Kalahari Margins). These groups may not have been ‘foragers’ in the strict Binfordian sense. Storage pits, a feature of sites in the southern and Eastern Cape in the last few millennia, point to elements of delayed return strategies. Those pits whose contents are preserved seem

86 AMERICAS, NORTH/Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers

to have been used mainly to store the oil-rich fruits of Pappea capensis. It is unclear just how economically important these were – the fruit is edible, but the oil was also used as a cosmetic, which may have been its main use. In the Eastern Cape, infants and young children who died were sometimes richly endowed with grave goods, especially ostrich eggshell beads. Simon Hall and Johan Binneman have suggested that these items may have been given in gift exchanges, and/or they may indicate a degree of ascribed status. These features hint at emerging complexity among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers in more productive environments. Mid- and Late Holocene hunter-gatherers were physically similar to their recent Khoisan descendants: small, lightly built people at the most gracile end of the range of documented human variation. Why this should be so is something of a mystery. It has been suggested that recent Kalahari foragers were short in stature because populations had had to adapt to scarce resources, but this clearly does not apply to equally small populations in resource-rich areas of the subcontinent; it is, therefore, probably not a major factor in the Kalahari either. People were particularly short between 4000 and 3000 BP, for reasons that are not yet well understood, but are likely to be linked to competition and conflict associated with increasing population density and the drive to intensify production. Examination of Late Holocene human skeletons has yielded remarkably little evidence of disease or trauma. Accidents or falls that resulted in broken bones or other injuries to the skeleton seem to have been rare. There are a few documented cases of interpersonal violence, all of which date to the third millennium before present – perhaps also related to conflicts to do with the re-configuration of society at that time. Overall, emerging reconstructions of Late Holocene hunter-gatherers indicate a dynamic society, with different trajectories in different regions. As in late hunter-gatherer communities in other parts of the world, there is evidence of ‘intensification’; there is no way of knowing whether this might eventually have developed into domestication, if food production had not been imported into the region.

saw the first iron-using agriculturists, who also kept sheep and cattle, move in during the first few centuries AD. Relations between food producers and foragers were complex, with evidence of interaction ranging across the spectrum from cooperation to clientship to conflict. In time, independent foragers were largely excluded from regions settled by farmers, although they continued to live until very recently in less contested areas.

New Ways of Life

Glossary

The foragers’ world was altered forever around 2000 years ago by the importation of food production from further north in Africa. In the western and southernmost parts of Africa, the first domestic sheep appeared around 2000 years ago, and by 1600 BP herding had become an important new way of life. The northern and eastern parts of the subcontinent

Early Holocene The early part of the geological Holocene period that extends from the present day back to approximately 11 430  130 years BP. forager Someone in search for food, in the context of hunter–gatherer interactions. Middle Stone Age (MSA) Period in the development of human technology between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of the Stone Age.

See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Africa, East: Foragers; Africa, South: Interaction of Farmers, Herders, and Foragers; Kalahari Margins; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.

Further Reading Deacon HJ and Deacon J (1999) Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age. Cape Town: David Philip. Hall S (2000) Burial and sequence in the Later Stone Age of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 55: 137–146. Hall S and Binneman J (1987) Later Stone Age burial variability in the Cape: A social interpretation. South African Archaeological Bulletin 42: 140–152. Mitchell P (2002) The Archaeology of Southern Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pfeiffer S (in press) The health of foragers: People of the Later Stone Age, southern Africa. In: Cohen MN and Crane-Kramer G (eds.) Ancient Health. Gainesville: University of Florida. Sealy J (2006) Diet, mobility and settlement pattern among Holocene hunter-gatherers in southernmost Africa. Current Anthropology 47: 569–595.

Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers Colin A Lewis, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

AFRICA, WEST/Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers 87 Late Pleistocene (also known as Upper Pleistocene or the Tarantian). Latter part of the geologic timescale from 1.8 million to 11 550 years BP. Later Stone Age (LSA) Period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age.

Middle Stone Age Parts of southern Africa were occupied by peoples of Middle Stone Age (MSA) cultures during the Birnam Interstadial (35 000 to 24 000 year BP) of the latter part of the Late Pleistocene. Characteristically, the stone tools of the later MSA were triangular and irregular flakes, blades, points, knives, scrapers, and cores, as at Rose Cottage Cave in the Caledon Valley of the Free State, near the Lesotho border (Figures 1 and 2). Comparable tools have been discovered in unconsolidated deposits at Sehonghong in the Senqu (upper Orange River) Valley in Lesotho, in Strathalan Cave B near Maclear in the foothills of the Southern Drakensberg in the Eastern Cape, and elsewhere.

Middle Stone Age/Later Stone Age Transition At Sehonghong, tools that are considered transitional between the MSA and the Later Stone Age (LSA) were discovered in deposits dating between 27 500 and 23 000 year BP (Figure 3). These and all other dates are calibrated radiocarbon dates, the sigma ranges are not shown. At Strathalan Cave B longer and

broader flake-blades were produced ‘toward the end of the MSA’ and date to between 28 250 and 27 250 year BP (Figure 4). Occupation floors excavated at Strathalan Cave B and dated to 33 900 and to between 28 250 and 27 250 year BP, contained patches of packed grass that were presumably used as bedding and were located near hearths, as well as twigs, corm scales, other plant debris, and bone fragments (Figure 5). These remains indicate that the inhabitants ate corms of Watsonia as well as other plant foods, and meat derived from rock hyrax (dassies) and from various antelopes including eland, blesbuck, wildebeest, springbuck, and klipspringer. The MSA dwellers of the area probably used fire to stimulate the production of edible corms and to encourage the growth of new and sweet grass in order to attract game to the area. Fire was also important for warmth at a time of deteriorating climate. Strathalan Cave B was occupied at 25 000 year BP but was abandoned by 24 000 year BP, when extremely cold conditions existed in the adjacent Drakensberg during the Bottelnek Stadial, which began 24 000 year BP but ended before 15 000 year BP. Palaeoclimatic conditions are evidenced at altitudes above 1800 m by rock glacier and gelifluction (head) deposits and, although dated less certainly, by moraines and protalus ramparts. No further evidence of human occupation of the Southern Drakensberg exists until 12 000 year BP, when the Ravenscraig rock shelter, near Barkly East (Figure 1), was occupied. Lesotho and the interior

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Figure 2 Stone tools characteristic of the later Middle Stone Age, from Rose Cottage Cave, Free State, South Africa. 1, flake; 2, 3, point; 4, blade; 5, 6, core reduced piece; 7, point with reduced butt; 8, scraper; 9, knife; 10, spall; 11, adze; 12, core rejuvenation flake; 13, blade. Reproduced from L Wadley (1991) Rose Cottage Cave: Background and a preliminary report on the recent excavations. South African Archaeological Bulletin 46: 125–130, with permission from the South African Archaeological Society.

Figure 4 Long and broad flake blades from Strathalan Cave B, produced ‘toward the end of the MSA’: 1, flake-blade; 2–6, retouched flakes; 7, point. Reproduced from Opperman H (1996) Strathalan Cave B, north-eastern Cape Province, South Africa: Evidence for human behaviour 29,000–26,000 years ago. Quaternary International 33: 45–53, with permission of Elsevier/INQUA.

Figure 3 Formal stone tools of the later MSA, Sehonghong, Lesotho. 1–4, scrapers; 5, flake; 6–9, knives. Reproduced from PJ Mitchell (1994) Understanding the MSA/LSA transition: The pre-20 000 BP assemblages from new excavations at Sehonghong rock shelter, Lesotho. Southern African Field Archaeology 3: 15–25, with permission from the Board of the Trustees of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown.

AFRICA, WEST/Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers 89

of South Africa were apparently unoccupied during the Bottelnek Stadial and earlier part of the succeeding Late Glacial, which lasted from 15 000 until 11 500 year BP.

Areas at lower altitudes and on the coastal side of the Great Escarpment (Drakensberg) were occupied during the Bottelnek Stadial, as at Howison’s Poort near Grahamstown, Nelson Bay Cave near Plettenberg Bay, Melkhoutboom Cave between Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, and Boomplaas near Oudtshoorn.

Howieson’s Poort: A Problem Type-Site

Figure 5 Plant remains on an occupation floor dating to 33 900 year BP, Strathalan Cave B. Photographed and reproduced by permission of H. Opperman.

Excavations in a rock shelter in Howison’s Poort (misspelt Howieson’s in the archaeological literature) revealed the presence of artifacts of both MSA and LSA character (Figures 6 and 7) and the whole artifact assemblage was named the Howieson’s Poort industry. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from excavations at the Howieson’s Poort type-site in 1965 (Figure 8) indicated that the artifacts had accumulated between 23 000 and 10 500 years ago (the calibrated dates are here rounded to the nearest 500 years). These dates were initially considered too young, since artifact

Figure 6 Artifacts of mixed MSA/LSA character from the Howieson’s Poort type-site: (a), obliquely backed blades; (b) retouched unifacial points. Reproduced from Deacon J (1995) An unsolved mystery at the Howieson’s Poort name site. South African Archaeological Bulletin 50: 110–120, by permission of the South African Archaeological Society.

90 AFRICA, WEST/Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers

Later Stone Age Industries

Figure 7 Segments, such as occur both ‘‘in a restricted time slot in the MSA. . .and in the middle Holocene during the LSA’’ (Deacon, 1995): Howieson’s Poort type-site. They were probably mounted onto handles to form cutting tools. Reproduced from Deacon J (1995) An unsolved mystery at the Howieson’s Poort name site. South African Archaeological Bulletin 50: 110–120, by permission of the South African Archaeological Society.

assemblages of similar character at Klasies River Mouth and elsewhere in Africa are thought to center on 70 000 year BP. Geomorphological examination of fluvial sediments in Howieson’s Poort, supported by radiocarbon dating, has shown that flood plain deposition began on the floor of the Poort around 10 750 year BP, as fluvial and associated processes reworked sediments from the valley sides in the Early Holocene. This time period was apparently moister than the preceding Late Glacial and Bottelnek Stadial. The sediments at the Howieson’s Poort type-site have not been reworked into the valley floor deposits, presumably due to their favored location within the rock shelter. The stratigraphic layer within which the artifacts occur (Figure 8, layer 4) is the thickest unit at that site and includes roof spalls such as might have taken place under cold and frosty conditions during the Bottelnek Stadial. There is no geomorphological reason to doubt the radiocarbon dates from the archaeological type-site. The Howieson’s Poort industry, at least at the type-site, may be much younger than was previously believed and possibly form part of the LSA rather than the MSA.

Three LSA industries have been widely recognized in South Africa: Robberg, Oakhurst Complex, and Wilton, the last of which is younger than the Early Holocene. Backed tools, scrapers of various sizes, unretouched microlithic bladelets, and bladelet cores are characteristic of the Robberg industry (Figure 9). This industry was identified at Nelson Bay Cave on the Robberg Peninsula (after which it has been named), near Plettenberg Bay, where it post-dates 22 000 but pre-dates 14 000 year BP. The same industry dates from somewhat before 18 000 but ended before 12 250 year BP at Melkhoutboom and from after 24 000 but before 17 000 year BP at Boomplaas. Artifacts typical of the Robberg have also been found at some sites inland of the Drakensberg, as at Rose Cottage Cave where they pre-date 15 000 year BP. The Robberg industry apparently existed more recently in Lesotho and adjacent upland areas than elsewhere in the subcontinent. Non-stone tools associated with the Robberg include bone and ostrich eggshell beads, tortoise-shell bowls and polished bone points. At Nelson Bay Cave the fauna associated with the Robberg industry was animals typical of opencountry, grassy habitats, including giant buffalo, an equine that may have been a quagga, springbok, and alcelaphine antelopes: blesbok/bontebok, wildebeest, hartebeest, and a giant alcelaphine. They indicate that after 22 000 but before 14 000 year BP there were extensive grasslands on the coastal plateau in the Plettenberg Bay area and not the present climax vegetation type of closed evergreen forest. Virtually no remains of sea mammals occur in Robberg industry levels at Nelson Bay Cave, presumably because sea levels were much lower than at present and the cave was therefore located too far from the coast for them to be exploited by its human inhabitants. The Oakhurst Complex is named after a type-site near Wilderness on the southern Cape coast. End, round, and D-shaped scrapers; duckbill scrapers with parallel sides and outward splay toward their terminus; wide-ranging polished stone tools, and few microliths are typical of the complex (Figure 10). At Ravenscraig, in the Southern Drakensberg, Oakhurst assemblages date from 12 000 year BP but are at least 2000 years older at sites that include Bushman Rock Shelter in Mpumalanga. They have also been reported from the south and west coasts of the subcontinent as well as from the Free State, Lesotho, KwaZuluNatal, and elsewhere. The Albany industry is a regional variant of the complex in coastal and adjacent areas, while the Lockshoek industry is a variant in the Karoo.

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Figure 8 View of excavation into deposits of the Howieson’s Poort type-site, showing the position of radiocarbon-dated charcoal samples with their calibrated dates and laboratory analysis numbers. The stratigraphic layers are also shown as is the compass orientation of the section. Layer 4 contained most artifacts. Layer (5) was ‘sand of decomposed bedrock’. Reproduced from Deacon J (1995) An unsolved mystery at the Howieson’s Poort name site. South African Archaeological Bulletin 50: 110–120, by permission of the South African Archaeological Society, but with calibrated dates.

Figure 9 Distribution and characteristic artifacts of the Robberg industry showing bladelet cores and bladelets (left), large and small scrapers and backed tools. Reproduced with permission from Deacon HJ and Deacon J (1999) Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age. Cape Town: David Philip.

The Albany industry dates from 14 000 to 10 000 year BP at Nelson Bay Cave, 12 250 to 8000 year BP at Melkhoutboom, pre-dates 17 000 but ended

before 7250 year BP at Boomplaas, and existed before 11 250 but ended before 7500 BP at The Havens Cave in the Baviaanskloof, some 50 km inland from the

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Figure 10 Sites at which the Oakhurst Industrial Complex has been dated, with typical artifacts. After Deacon HJ and Deacon J (1999) Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age. Cape Town: David Philip, by permission of HJ and J Deacon, with map after Wadley L (2000) The Early Holocene layers of Rose Cottage Cave, Eastern Free State: Technology, spatial patterns and environment. South African Archaeological Bulletin 55: 18–31, by permission of the South African Archaeological Society.

coast west of Port Elizabeth. The Albany industry has also been reported from many sites in the Grahamstown area and elsewhere. Seals were an important source of food during Albany times at Nelson Bay Cave, indicating that sea level had risen and the sea was near the site by 14 000 year BP after reaching a low of 130 m below that of the present during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Other important sources of meat were rock hyrax, Hippotragus spp., grysbok/ steenbok, bushpig, reedbuck, and Cape buffalo. The last reported occurrences of eland and warthog in deposits at the cave, which are associated with Albany industry levels, and the advent of bushbuck, indicate that open grasslands were being replaced by more bushy vegetation, probably as a result of increasingly wet climatic conditions as the Late Glacial was succeeded by the Early Holocene. An increase in bushy vegetation at this time also occurred on the highlands of the Free State, as near Rose Cottage Cave, possibly due to increasingly moist conditions associated with the extension of the summer rainfall region into the area in the Early Holocene. Shellfish were an important part of the diets of Albany industry foragers at Nelson Bay Cave and elsewhere in coastal areas. During Robberg and Oakhurst Complex times the inhabitants of southern Africa were foragers who may have followed seasonal migratory patterns in order to exploit the available food resources, and who occupied established (but temporary) dwelling sites. They probably lived in family/kin groups that varied in size from season to season. The population of the subcontinent, as judged from the number of

sites at which archaeological evidence has been found, was probably thinly spread and low in numbers. Major environmental changes took place during Robberg and Oakhurst Complex times, as earlier in the Quaternary. The detailed response of the human inhabitants of southern Africa to those changes, during the Late Glacial and the Early Holocene, remains to be established.

Acknowledgments Stephan Woodborne and Marc Pienaar of the Quaternary Dating Research Unit in Pretoria are thanked for calibrating dates for this overview. See also: Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers.

Further Reading Deacon HJ (1976) Where Hunters Gathered. South African Archaeological Society Monograph Series, 1, 229 pp. Cape Town: South African Archaeological Society. Deacon HJ and Deacon J (1999) Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age. Cape Town: David Philip. Deacon J (1995) An unsolved mystery at the Howieson’s Poort name site. South African Archaeological Bulletin 50: 110–120. Inskeep RR (1978) The Peopling of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Klein RG (1972) The Late Quaternary mammalian fauna of Nelson Bay Cave (Cape Province, South Africa): Its implications for megafaunal extinctions and environmental and cultural change. Quaternary Research 2: 135–142. Lewis CA (2005) Late Glacial and Holocene palaeoclimatology of the Drakensberg of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Quaternary International 129: 33–48.

AFRICA, WEST/Early Holocene Foragers 93 Mitchell PJ (1994) Understanding the MSA/LSA transition: The pre20 000 BP assemblages from new excavations at Sehonghong rock shelter, Lesotho. Southern African Field Archaeology 3: 15–25. Opperman H (1996) Strathalan Cave B, north-eastern Cape Province, South Africa: evidence for human behaviour 29,000–26,000 years ago. Quaternary International 33: 45–53. Singer R and Wymer JJ (1982) The Middle Stone Age at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Wadley L (1991) Rose Cottage Cave: Background and a preliminary report on the recent excavations. South African Archaeological Bulletin 46: 125–130. Wadley L (1997) Rose Cottage Cave: Archaeological work 1987 to 1997. South African Journal of Science 93: 439–444. Wadley L (2000) The Early Holocene layers of Rose Cottage Cave, Eastern Free State: technology, spatial patterns and environment. South African Archaeological Bulletin 55: 18–31.

AFRICA, WEST Contents Early Holocene Foragers Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists Villages, Cities, and States

Early Holocene Foragers Joanna Casey, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary terra cotta cigars Flattened, elliptical items made of sandstone or, rarely, clay that are often scored or pecked on one or both sides. They are known only from Kintampo Complex Sites (3000–4000 years ago) in Ghana. Their function has never been determined, but abrasion on many specimens suggests grating or rasping.

The end of the Pleistocene brought dramatic climate change to West Africa. During the last glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere, Africa underwent a period of extreme aridity when the Sahara Desert expanded well beyond its current limits, and savanna and forest zones were compressed toward the coasts. Much of West Africa was unpopulated during this time, but during the early Holocene a humid phase brought plants, animals, and people back to the region. Understanding the Holocene foragers is made difficult by a number of factors. Certainly the archaeological evidence over this vast region is not as complete as one would prefer due to preservation problems and the difficulty of acquiring adequate research coverage. Equally significant is the nature of the data itself. Artifact types such as ceramics, grinding stones, and

ground stone tools that are usually associated with farming communities appear early in sequences, long before there is any evidence for domestic crops. When domestic plants and animals do appear, foraging continues to play an essential role in subsistence activities, and it is often unclear whether we are seeing mixed economies, or the interactions of subsistence specialists. With the return of humidity to the Sahara, there were no major geographical barriers to the movements of people throughout West Africa, yet researchers have tended to specialize in one of three areas: the Sahara, the sahel, or the forests and savannas (see Africa, North: Sahara, West and Central). Although the differences in these areas may be more perceived than real due to a lack of communication among researchers, there is increasing evidence that contact between these regions was infrequent until relatively late in antiquity. The terminal Pleistocene arid episode ended at around 12 000 BP with geological and palynological evidence indicating the appearance of rivers and lakes with their attendant flora and fauna. The earliest evidence for human reoccupation of the Sahara comes from small lithic scatters, characterized by blades and bladelets and sometimes shouldered Ounanian points. Little is known about the people who made the artifacts that are found in the central Sahara, but the resemblance of their artifacts to materials from North Africa suggests that they had a northern origin. At around 9500 years ago, ceramics appear at the sites of Amekni, Ti n Torha, and Tagalagal in the central Sahara (Figure 1). These are the

94 AFRICA, WEST/Early Holocene Foragers

Hoggar

Ti n Torha Uan Afuda Uan Muhugggiag

Amekni Tibesti

Adrar Bous

Air

Dhar Tichitt Tilemsi Valley Ounjougou Kourounkorokale

Yagala Kamabai

Tagalagal

Lake Chad

Rim Maadaga

Rop Dutzen Kongba

Birimi K6

Yengema Kokasu

Agarade Bosumpra

Sopie

Kpone Bingerville

Figure 1 Location of sites mentioned in the text.

Mejiro Iwo Eleru

Sumpa

Shum Laka

Afikpo Map Area

AFRICA, WEST/Early Holocene Foragers 95

earliest known ceramics on the continent, indicating that they developed independent of outside influences. Grinding stones are also in abundance at most sites and suggest an intensive use of wild grains. Faunal evidence from all sites indicates exploitation of local fish and game. Selective hunting techniques were used at Ti n Torha, and the penning of Barbary sheep is documented at Uan Afuda. At around 7500 years ago, a short but intense dry period caused a readjustment in many parts of the Sahara. Parts of the eastern and central Sahara appear to have been briefly abandoned, while in other parts people shifted their settlements with the shrinking shorelines of the lakes. In the central Sahara, people increasingly settled around the permanent water sources from which they exploited both aquatic and terrestrial resources (see Africa, North: Sahara, Eastern; Sahara, West and Central). Sites from this time are characterized by the presence of bone harpoons, numerous fish bones, and ceramics bearing wavy line motifs. Initially, the broad similarity among the sites led researchers to consider it to be one vast culture complex stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea and lasting for 3000 years. Recent research however indicates that the similarities among the sites are very superficial and can largely be attributed to similar subsistence orientations. Variations in the contributions of various plants and animals, and in the raw materials, techniques of manufacture, and styles of lithics and ceramics indicate significant regional differences that have been obscured by the focus on wavy lines and fish. The return of humidity is marked by pastoralists entering the Sahara. The earliest cattle date to 5950–5700 years BP at Adrar Bous and Uan Muhuggiag, but cattle spread rapidly throughout the Sahara and by 4000 years ago were in the Tilemsi Valley and Mema regions of Mali, and as far south as Lake Chad. Over much of the Sahara, the appearance of cattle, sheep, and goats is not accompanied by a significant change in material culture. While this may indicate the adoption of domestic animals by the settled foragers, it is also likely that the foragers and herders developed reciprocal relationships similar to those witnessed today between farmers, fishers, and herders in the inland delta of the Niger River, and among farmers and herders right across West Africa (see Africa, West: Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists). Identifying the sites of mobile pastoralists is notoriously problematic because they leave so few remains, and in West Africa it is complicated by the difficulty of distinguishing early domestic cattle from indigenous West African buffalo (Syncerus caffer). Domestic animals are attested to by the presence of bovid bones in archaeological sites, but at many of

these sites, wild animals continue to play a crucial role in the subsistence economy. South of the Sahara a different scenario prevails. During the terminal Pleistocene dry phase, forests and savannas continued to exist along the coast and probably as far north as 11 . While the area could have been a refuge for people who had abandoned the Sahara, there is little evidence for this. The post-Pleistocene rise in sea levels may have obliterated the evidence for coastal sites, but it is notable that there is little reliable evidence elsewhere for occupation between 20 000 and 13 000 years BP. Shum Laka, in Cameroon, may be an exception. Here cultural deposits go back 30 000 years, and the environment appears to have seen only minor change during the terminal Pleistocene. The earliest Holocene occupations south of the Sahel contain microliths, although it is sometimes difficult to determine whether individual authors are referring to formed, geometric microliths or simply to the small size of the lithic material. Microliths occur at many early sites in Central Africa, starting at around 40 000 BP, and appear at Shum Laka around 30 000 BP, presenting the possibility that the spread of microliths south of the Sahel came from the east. The earliest microlithic sites in West Africa include Bingerville-Highway (Coˆte d’Ivoire), Iwo Eleru (Nigeria), and Rim (Burkina Faso) which date to 13 000–11 000 years ago. Similar assemblages are found at Maadaga (Burkina Faso), Rop, Afikpo, Mejiro Cave, Dutzen Kongba (Nigeria), and Kourounkorokale (Mali). Some of these sites are overlain by microlithic assemblages bearing ceramics and ground stone tools, a trend that appeared throughout sub-Sahelian West Africa around 6000 years ago and continued until the first millennium AD. Shum Laka and Ounjougou (Mali) have early occurrences of this sort, while Iwo Eleru and Bosumpra (Ghana) are slightly later. Other sites from this period include Sopie, Kokasu (Sierra Leone), Yengema, Yagala, Kamabai (Liberia), Sumpa (Cameroun), Agarade Rock Shelter (Togo), and Kpone Shell Midden (Ghana). Nonmicrolithic occurrences with large format flakes, core tools, and prepared core technologies also occur at a small number of sites south of the sahel from the Late Pleistocene through the midHolocene. These sites were thought to be further evidence for central African affinities, but the wide and patchy distribution of these sites, along with their variability, suggests that they relate to specialized heavy-duty activities and adaptation to poor-quality raw material rather than to cultural migrations. At around 4500 years ago, the climate became arid again, and people started to leave the desert. The most dramatic response to the increasing aridity is witnessed at Dhar Tichitt in Mauritania where cattlekeeping people increasingly fortified their settlements

96 AFRICA, WEST/Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists

with stone enclosures and moved closer and closer to the shrinking water sources. Seed impressions on ceramics show an increasing reliance on wild and ultimately domestic millet by 3700 years BP. Some time after 4000 years ago, settlements start to appear in sub-Saharan West Africa. The Kintampo Complex, known only from Ghana, is the earliest of these. Kintampo sites share a material culture characterized by ground stone tools, grinding stones, ceramics bearing comb-stamped decoration, and projectile points styles that resemble those found farther to the north. The fossile directeur of the Kintampo Complex is the ‘terra-cotta cigar’, a flattened elliptical object of unknown function, made from fine-grained sandstone and scored, pecked, and/or abraded on both sides. Individual Kintampo sites have produced fishhooks, beads, and figurines. Reliable subsistence information has been scarce. The best evidence is from K6 Rock Shelter where the assemblage was dominated by wild species with evidence for an increase over time in species that prefer settlements and cleared areas. Much has been made of the domestic animal bones found at some Kintampo sites. While the cattle bones have been dismissed, the bones from one or two domestic caprines have been confirmed at K6. While these bones demonstrate that domestic animals were present during Kintampo, their contribution to the economy is unclear. Domestic millet found at Birimi in northern Ghana indicates that the Kintampo people did cultivate domestic crops, but Kintampo sites are found in diverse ecosystems, some outside of the area in which millet will grow. Furthermore, Kintampo sites are characterized by the presence of tools specific to the extraction of local resources. Both these factors, and the high incidence of wild plant and animal species in Kintampo sites suggest that farming was most likely only a part of a complex subsistence strategy.

Monographs in African Archaeology No. 51; BAR International No. 906. Oxford: Archaeopress. Casey J (2005) Holocene occupations of the forest and savanna. In: Stahl AB (ed.) African Archaeology, pp. 225–248. London: Blackwell. Cornelissen E (2003) On microlithic quartz industries at the end of the Pleistocene in Central Africa: The evidence from Shum Laka (NW Cameroon). The African Archaeological Review 20(1): 1–24. Garcea EAA (2004) An alternative way towards food production: The perspective from the Libyan Sahara. Journal of World Prehistory 18(2): 107–154. Haour AC (2003) One hundred years of archaeology in Niger. Journal of World Prehistory 17(2): 141–179. Huysecom E, Ozainne S, Kaeli F, Ballouche A, Rasse M, and Stokes S (2004) Ounjougou (Mali): A history of holocene settlement at the southern edge of the Sahara. Antiquity 78: 579–593. Lavachery P (2001) The Holocene archaeological sequence of Shum Laka rock shelter (grasslands, western Cameroon). The African Archaeological Review 18(4): 213–247. MacDonald KC (1997) Kourounkorokale revisited: The Pays Mande´ and the West African microlithc technocomplex revisited. The African Archaeological Review 14(3): 161–200. Mohammed-Ali AS and Kabir ARK (2003) The wavy-line and dotted wavy line pottery in the prehistory of the central Nile and the Sahara-sahel belt. The African Archaeological Review 20(1): 25–58. Muzzolini A (1993) The emergence of a food-producing economy in the Sahara. In: Shaw T, Alexander J, and Opoko A (eds.) The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns, pp. 227–239. London: Routledge.

See also: Africa, North: Sahara, Eastern; Sahara, West and Central; Africa, South: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Foragers; Africa, West: Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists; Animal Domestication.

Neolithic A period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. herders Workers who live a semi-nomadic life, caring for various domestic animals, especially in places where these animals wander unfenced pasture lands. cultigens Organisms, particularly cultivated plants, that do not have a wild or uncultivated counterpart. These are species that were domesticated (grown and selected by humankind) from so far back in antiquity, and have undergone such drastic transformation under prehistoric human selection, that the plant ancestry is essentially unknown.

Further Reading Breunig P and Neumann K (2002) From hunters and gatherers to food producers: New archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from the West African sahel. In: Fekri H (ed.) Droughts, Food and Culture: Ecological Change and Food Security in Africa’s Later Prehistory, pp. 123–155. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Casey J (2000) The Kintampo Complex: The Late Holocene on the Gambaga Escarpment, Northern Ghana. Cambridge

Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists Peter Breunig, J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary

West Africa is bounded on the north by the Sahara, on the east by Lake Chad, on the south by the Gulf of Guinea, and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Distinctive vegetation zones running in an east–west

AMERICAS, NORTH/Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists 97

direction are the result of decreasing precipitation from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahara in the north. Between the tropical rain forest along the southern coastline and the Sahara Desert, the vegetation changes from Guinean to Sudanian to Sahelian savanna. This relatively close proximity of rather different environments and their considerable shift during the last millennia most likely influenced the appearance and development of herders and farmers in West Africa. During early Holocene times, vast areas of the Sahara resembled today’s Sahelian vegetation zone. It is in this region that important cultural innovations like the manufacture of pottery and the development of pastoral economy took place. Whether pastoral beginnings go back to the eighth millennium BC, as presumed on the basis of finds from the eastern Sahara, has been questioned. However, its existence in the central and eastern Sahara during the fifth millennium BC is beyond dispute. At this time, domesticated cattle appeared along with ovicaprids. While cattle might have been domesticated autochthonous, domesticated ovicaprids (sheep and goat) are believed to come from the Near East, because the fossil record and modern biogeography both indicate that their wild progenitors never lived in Africa. After a flourishing period, the Saharan livestock herders were affected by the final desiccation of the Sahara caused by the southward shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. As a consequence, herders migrated into the moister southern regions. Archaeological data indicate that they started expanding into West Africa at around 2000 BC. Formerly existing disease barriers like the tsetse belt also shifted further south so that the vast grasslands in West Africa became suitable for pastoral occupation. The migration from the Sahara to West Africa is conclusive for several reasons. First, the dates for the earliest evidence of cattle get younger the more southerly the sites are located. Then, since the earliest domesticated animals have no local counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa, they must have been imported to West Africa. Finally, in some cases, the cultural material from the Sahara and the new homeland further south show similarities. How far farming and the beginning of plant cultivation were part of these migrations is one of the most important questions of sub-Saharan archaeology. With regard to the location of the wild progenitors of the African cultigens and theoretical considerations on the cultural context of initial farming, the southern Sahara is seen as the key area where the most important food crops of sub-Saharan Africa, pearl millet and sorghum, were originally cultivated.

Like anywhere else on earth, the appearance of herders and farmers with their food-producing economy constitutes a fundamental break in the prehistory of West Africa. Its occurrence is considered the prelude to a new era classified as the ‘West African Neolithic’. Herders and farmers are represented differently in the archaeological record. While the pastoral activities of herders are generally less visible, farmers and their sedentary communities usually produce abundant archaeological remains. Contrary to other Neolithic centers in the world, for instance, the Near East, the African evidence indicates a considerable time gap between the appearance of herders and farmers. However, this ‘cattle before crops’ pattern is not very pronounced in West Africa. Here, in most cases, domesticated animals and plants (see Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication) appear almost simultaneously or with only a slight time difference. The early food-producing communities must have met favorable conditions in West Africa, because both herding and farming activities spread very rapidly in manifold ways. One of the areas where comparably intensive research on early herders and farmers has been carried out is the Tichitt–Walata escarpment in Mauritania (Figure 1). The dry-stone architecture and the considerable size of the villages along the escarpment are unique among contemporaneous settlements in West Africa. Not only is it the northernmost food-producing complex in West Africa, but recent investigations have also shown that the area is among the earliest evidence of farming activities, dated to about 1800 BC. Another example for an early agropastoral society is the Kintampo culture in Ghana, located in the forest fringe and woodland savanna zones. The Kintampo people settled in rock shelters or hamlets consisting of huts spread over areas of up to 2 ha. They possessed domesticated animals, in particular sheep/goat and probably cattle, and cultivated pearl millet. In addition, there is evidence for the exploitation of the oil palm and a range of wild resources typical for the environment of the forest fringe and woodland savanna. Whether Kintampo emerged as a result of Saharan migration or represents a case of local intensification is discussed controversially. The floodplains and margins of the Inland Niger Delta constitute another focal point of agropastoral origins in West Africa. This region was home to a variety of cultural groups with different economic adaptations, appearing in the archaeological record during the second and early first millennium BC. One group is known as the Kobadi Neolithic of specialized fishers without domestic livestock or cultigens. Other groups have

98 AMERICAS, NORTH/Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists

Figure 1 West Africa: geographic zones and archaeological areas mentioned in the text.

pastoral components, for example, Ndondi Tossokel, which originated from the Tichitt tradition in Mauritania or Winde´ Koroji. Early food-producing groups can also be found in the Sahelian zone of the Chad Basin in northeast Nigeria. Mobile herders arrived here in the early second millennium BC and became sedentary farmers or agropastoralists as documented by numerous village-like settlements dating from about 1500 BC onwards. In addition to such key areas of early food production, there are regions of marginal significance, where traces of herding cannot be detected by archaeological means or only appeared after the farming economy had established. After a period of prospering development in the second millennium BC, the early herders and farmers apparently were faced with a crisis in the first millennium BC, probably stimulated by another severe drought. In many regions, cultural sequences faded away and gave way to completely new developments. Among the economic innovations of the first millennium BC were new cultigens. While pearl millet was the only cultivated plant before, other important crops such as sorghum, African rice, cowpea, bambara groundnut, and okra as well as agro-forestry activities appeared between 500 BC and AD 500. They formed the basis of a productive Iron Age subsistence system where food security was more predictable than before. During the same period, large settlements, partly fortified, and site-size hierarchies emerged, followed by the development of urban centers, social

stratification, and inter-regional trade during the latter half of the first millennium AD. As a concomitant phenomenon of increasing cultural complexity, craft specialization is supposed to have developed during the first millennium BC (see Craft Specialization). Different concepts of craft specialization are discussed. Some accordant aspects highlight that craft specialization requires an economy able to produce surplus commodities in order to support craftsmen. It also intensifies the inequality among the members of a community, and thus favors the development of rank or class systems. But apart from these theoretical considerations, it is important to identify the existence of craft specialization in the archaeological record. Craft specialization can appear at the household level, as a form of part-time specialization concerning objects of daily use such as pottery, bone tools, mats, and basketry. In West Africa, this form of specialization possibly originated among the early herders and farmers of the second millennium BC, or even earlier in a hunter-gatherer context. A more complex craft specialization beyond the household level appears to have developed only during the first millennium BC. From this period onwards, evidence for concentrations of manufacturing by-products in specific sections of settlements is found. Another important innovation of the first millennium BC is iron metallurgy. While its origin and spread in sub-Saharan Africa is a matter of a longrunning debate, there is no doubt about its technological advancement and the demand for specialists to

AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States 99

conduct iron smelting and processing. Together with early iron metallurgy, art appears as another impressive case of craft specialization. Undoubtedly, the earliest art of West Africa, the expressive terracottas of the Nok culture in central Nigeria, were created by specialists belonging to a stratified society and not by herders and farmers as a result of leisure activities. As a conclusion, the first millennium BC was a period of crises, discontinuities, and innovations with paramount importance for subsequent times. Fundamental economic, technological, and social changes took place and were the basis for developments which led to the formation of civilizations and empires only a few centuries later. See also: Animal Domestication; Craft Specialization; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Breunig P and Neumann K (2002) Continuity or discontinuity? The 1st millennium BC – Crisis in West African prehistory. In: Lenssen-Erz T, Tegttmeir U, Kro¨pelin S, et al. (eds.) Africa Praehistorica 14: Tides of the Desert. Contributions to the Archaeology and Environmental History of Africa in Honour of Rudolph Kuper, pp. 491–505. Ko¨ ln: Heinrich-Barth-Institut. Holl AFC (1998) Livestock husbandry, pastoralisms, and territoriality: The West African record. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17: 143–165. MacDonald KC (1996) The Winde´ Koroji complex: Evidence for the peopling of the eastern Inland Niger Delta (2100–500 BC). Pre´histoire et Anthropologie Me´diterrane´ennes 5: 147–165. Magnavita C, Kahlheber S, and Eichhorn B (2004) The rise of organisational complexity in mid-first millennium BC Chad Basin. Antiquity 78, no. 301, project gallery. http://antiquity.ac. uk/projgall/magnavita/index.html. McIntosh SK (2001) West African Late Stone Age. In: Peregrine PN and Ember M (eds.) Encyclopedia of Prehistory 1, Africa, pp. 323–338. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Munson PJ (1971) The Tichitt Tradition: A Late Prehistoric Occupation of the Southwestern Sahara. PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Neumann K (2005) The romance of farming: Plant cultivation and domestication in Africa. In: Stahl AB (ed.) African Archaeology, pp. 249–275. Malden: Blackwell. Smith AB (1992) Pastoralism in Africa: Origins, Development and Ecology. London: Hurst. Stahl AB (1993) Intensification in the West African Late Stone Age: A view from Central Ghana. In: Shaw T, Sinclair P, Andah B, and Okpoko A (eds.) The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns, pp. 261–273. London: Routledge. Van Neer W (2002) Food security in Western and Central Africa during the Late Holocene: The role of domestic stock keeping, hunting and fishing. In: Hassan FA (ed.) Droughts, Food and Culture: Ecological Change and Food Security in Africa’s Later Prehistory, pp. 251–274. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Watson DJ (2005) Under the rocks: Reconsidering the origin of the Kintampo tradition and the development of food production in the savanna-forest/forest of West Africa. Journal of African Archaeology 3(1): 3–55.

Villages, Cities, and States Susan Keech McIntosh, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary flotation Use of water to separate plant materials from archaeological deposits. Holocene A geological epoch covering the period from the retreat of the ice sheets at the end of the last glacial period between 11 000 and 12 000 years ago to the present. lineage A group tracing descent from a common ancestor.

In West Africa during the later Holocene, villages occupied by multiple family or lineage-based groups appeared, enabled by new subsistence technologies, including agriculture, that increased output and supported a larger number and density of people. Greater sedentism, either seasonally or year round, is reflected by labor investment in durable construction technologies and large quantities of items that are not easily portable, such as grindstones and pottery. Although the development and spread of village life associated with food production has been a source of interest and detailed investigation in the Near East since the 1950s, comparable studies in West Africa involving excavation and recovery of archaeobotanical samples are relatively recent and rare (see Paleoethnobotany). Our understanding of early village life and subsistence in West Africa is therefore fragmentary at present and likely to change significantly as new data become available. This applies equally to the development of cities and states (see Africa, West: Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists). The earliest unambiguously identified villages in West Africa were built between 3500 and 2500 BP (1800–800/400 cal BC) on the 60–100 m high escarpment (dhar) that extends for c. 400 km from Tichitt to Walata and Nema in southeast Mauritania (Figure 1). These settlements had multiple, dry-stone-walled compounds large enough to accommodate several huts or houses, granaries, and livestock (Figure 2). Some of the dhar settlements are extremely large, measuring 30–95 ha, with 200–600 compounds, suggestive of towns or central places in an emergent urban/ political hierarchy (Figure 3).These agropastoralists hunted, herded cattle, sheep and goats, and cultivated pearl millet, a drought-tolerant African cereal that was first domesticated in the Sahel of Mauritania or Niger, according to DNA analysis.

ALGERIA

Atakor

TASS ILI

SAHARA

TEGDAOUST

Senegal

JA

mb

ig

er

ia

Ba

N

GUINEA-BISSAU

ni

JENNEJENO

FUTA JALLON

CHAD Lake Chad

MOUHOUN BEND

HAUSA

BURKINA FASO

LIBERIA

NIGERIA

BIRIMI

SIERRA LEONE

IVORY GHANA COAST Lake Volta

GAJIGANNA ZILUM KURSAKATA GE ME

KANO

Lake Kainji Nig er

NOK

OLD OYO

nue

Be

IFE

MANDARA MOUNTAINS

YORUBA EDO BENIN CITY

Ch ari

ne go Lo

GUINEA

BENIN

Ga

KAWKAW

TOGO

GAMBIA

GHANA

ME MA IN L N A DE IGE ND LT R A

SENEGAL

NIGER BEND

KUMBI SALEH

NIGER

AI R

MALI NEMA

TAKRUR

MSV

LIBYA

R RA AS AD IFOR S E D

MAURITANIA

TICHITT

AC

TROPIC OF CANCER

AC U

100 AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States

CAMEROON Mount Cameroon

2000 m 1000 m 500 m 0m

COUNTRIES SITE

NATURAL FEATURES AND REGIONS Lakes and Rivers EARLY STATE

Figure 1 Sites and regions mentioned in the text.

Figure 2 Dry-stone compound walls at the site of L’ouedi (c. 900 BC) atop the Tichitt escarpment. ã P. Munson.

At the village settlement of Birimi in northern Ghana, pearl millet was also cultivated by 3500– 3000 BP, and was the dominant plant species recovered from flotation samples. Three dozen burnt clay house floors have been mapped in this extensive

site belonging to the Kintampo complex. Further south in central Ghana, Kintampo is also associated with the appearance of villages and subsistence intensification involving oil palm exploitation. In northeastern Nigeria, on the Bama Deltaic soils that once

AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States 101

Figure 3 Plan of walled compounds at Dakhlet el Atrouss, one of the largest villages on the Tichitt escarpment. ã R. Vernet.

bordered Lake Chad, small, ephemeral pastoralist camps occupied between 3500 and 3000 BP were replaced by larger, more sedentary settlement mounds up to 7 ha in extent occupied by agropastoralists who cultivated pearl millet. Several of the mounds have been excavated and over 100 have been surveyed and identified as part of the Gajiganna complex. As the shore of Lake Chad retreated after 3000 BP, settlers moved onto the newly exposed lakeplain in northern Nigeria and Cameroon and southern Chad, and established village settlement mounds (e.g., Kursakata, Mege) with a subsistence economy based on herding, fishing, and millet cultivation. To the northwest, older Gajiganna settlement mounds were abandoned, and larger, fortified villages with extensive storage pits, such as Zilum, were built in the same area (Figures 4 and 5). It seems that with the appearance of iron c. 2500–2200 BP and the addition of new domesticates, such as African rice and fonio, permanent village settlements were established in the Mema and Inland Niger Delta of Mali (Ja, Jenne-jeno), and in the Nok area of Nigeria, where first millennium BC sites with stone walls have recently been found. Village settlements were well established in many areas of West Africa by the first millennium AD. In some of these areas of early village settlement, sites continued to expand and develop center-andhinterland articulated systems of urban character. The Inland Niger Delta and its margins have been the focus of considerable fieldwork on these systems, which frequently involve closely clustered mound sites on the floodplain. At Ja, and in the Me´ma, the development of larger-scale settlement systems is claimed to have occurred in the first millennium BC.

At Jenne-jeno, it seems to date to the mid-first millennium AD (Figure 6). Clustered settlement mounds are not restricted to the Middle Niger; they have also been documented on the Mouhoun Bend in northern Burkina Faso in the first millennium AD. Based on excavations and survey at the mounds of the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex (Figure 7), it has been suggested that the distinct mounds were inhabited contemporaneously by different groups of functionally integrated economic specialists who resisted assimilation into a single town settlement. In this scenario, political power was weakly centralized, a view that is at odds with earlier theories that locate cities exclusively within state systems. The field research necessary to fully evaluate this hypothesis is still in its early stages. The development of new ideas about urban origins in West Africa has occurred at a time of increasing interest by archaeologists in the nature of the premodern city. It is now understood that many earlier ideas about urbanism, such as V. G. Childe’s wellknown trait-list of essential features that included writing and monumental architecture, were developed with reference to Western sequences of historical development and excluded much of sub-Saharan Africa from consideration. Investment in monument building, for example, is now seen to be a common, but not inevitable aspect of early cities. The absence of monumental architecture in large areas of West Africa likely reflects lack of suitable building materials (such as stone) in some areas and the prevalence of extensive, slash-and-burn agricultural systems that required settlement relocation after several decades, thus working against permanent installation of

102 AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States

Figure 4 Magnetic anomalies at Zilum show a ditch and rampart encircling the settlement, plus hundreds of large pits. Courtesy of P. Breunig and C. Magnavita.

Figure 5 Outline in section of a large storage pit at Zilum. ã C. Magnavita.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States 103

Figure 6 Aerial view of the settlement mounds in the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex. Jenne-jeno is in the foreground. The town of Djenne´ is on the upper left. ã R.J. McIntosh.

E

NN

JE

- Ancient sites 0

km 1.0

BANI R .

JENNEJENO

Figure 7 Plan of the settlement mounds of the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex.

populations at one location for long periods. In some areas, the location of the capital city frequently shifted. Ecological constraints linked to a value system that conceived of space as social (rooted in kin groups and genealogical proximity), rather than as a particular physical place, produced some early African urban

configurations that looked quite different than the cities of the West. The vast system of earthen embankments (iya) demarcating settlement boundaries in the YorubaEdo region of Nigeria is a prime example of a very non-Western configuration. Over 16 000 km of

104 AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States

UTE IYA Ikokhan

Ihovbor Oria

Idumwowina Ute Ugbowo

0

1 km

N

Urora

Uselu

Lwogban Aduwawa

Uzama villages

Ohovbe 1

Oregbeni old canoe port

Ogbesan

palace

BENIN CITY

Ikpoba Stream

Ihimwirin Ugbeku

0

5

10 km

Figure 8 Map of earthworks (iya) around Benin City and Ute in southwestern Nigeria. From Darling P (1984) Archaeology and History in Southern Nigeria: The Ancient Linear Earthworks of Benin and Ishan, p. 89. Oxford: BAR, ã P. Darling.

embankments enclosing more than 500 interconnected settlements in a 6500 km2 area have been mapped around Benin City (Figure 8). These systems enclosed villages/towns/capitals and the agricultural lands that supported them. The total vertical height of ramparts, measured from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the bank, generally ranged from 3 to 9 m, and occasionally up to 20! The massive labor inputs required to create them imply that substantial populations were involved. Initial construction is thought to have

begun in the later first millennium AD, and multiple episodes of wall construction have been documented at the early city-state of Ife, which had inner and outer embankments enclosing an area of 20 km2. Neither the chronology, settlement layout, nor the political organization of most of these enclosured settlements has been documented, with the exception of Ife, Old Oyo, and Benin City. At the center of each of these three cities was an extensive palace inhabited by a powerful divine king, with a marketplace opposite.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Villages, Cities, and States 105

In northern Nigeria, fired brick city walls up to 20 km in length surrounded the cities and towns of Hausaland from at least the sixteenth century, but their antiquity has not been investigated archaeologically (see Cities, Ancient, and Daily Life). Historical written and oral sources speak to us of powerful kings, states, and trading empires in the late first/second millennium AD in both savanna and forest. The archaeological research needed to illuminate the early development of these polities and to provide details on the forms of political economy, and the social and religious institutions they incorporated is still in its infancy. Ritual practice involving lifelike brass heads depicting royalty was important at Ife, and clearly involved sophisticated craft specialists attached to the royal families. Ife’s role as a powerful ritual center may have been an important key to its growth and influence. In other areas, such as the early states of Takrur, Ghana, and Kanem, trade may have been the most influential factor. In the first millennium AD and even earlier, copper moved considerable distances from sources in the Sahara and southeastern Nigeria. Salt almost certainly moved long distances as well along trade networks that extended east–west and north–south. Ultimately, as pack camels became widely used in the desert, and with the arrival of the Arabs in North Africa in the seventh century, regular, trans-Saharan trade routes were established. These extended deep into West Africa to the sources of gold, incorporating earlier exchange networks. Trade entrepots and political centers, such as Tegdaoust (probably the site of Audaghust, mentioned by early Arab authors) and Kumbi Saleh (presumed to be the capital of Ghana), developed on the southern margin of the desert, strategically placed to service and to levy taxes on the trade. There is a great deal that we still do not know about the earliest emergence of towns and states in West Africa, including detailed comparative chronologies and contexts, specific historical trajectories, associations between degree of urbanization and specific political forms, and the nature of relations

between towns and their hinterlands as well as among interacting polities. That research is sure to continue to provide some surprises, including significant discoveries in unsuspected areas. Archaeologists have only begun to reconstruct the rich and diverse history of complex societies in West Africa. See also: Africa, West: Early Holocene Foragers; Herders, Farmers, and Crafts Specialists; Cities, Ancient, and Daily Life; Paleoethnobotany.

Further Reading Andah B (2003) Genesis and development of settlements in the Guinea and savanna regions. In: The Development of Urbanism from a Global Perspective, electronically published by Uppsala University. http://www.arkeologie.uu.se/afr/projects/ BOOK/Andah/Andah.htm. Casey J (2005) Holocene occupations of the forest and savanna. In: Stahl AB (ed.) African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction, pp. 225–248. Oxford: Blackwell. Connah G (1980) Three Thousand Years in Africa : Man and His Environment in the Lake Chad Region of Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connah G (2001) African Civilizations, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darling P (1984) Archaeology and History in Southern Nigeria: The Ancient Linear Earthworks of Benin and Ishan. Oxford: BAR. Holl A (1986) Economie et Socie´te´ Ne´olithique du Dhar Tichitt. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Holl A (2002) Land of Houlouf: Genesis of a Chadic Polity, 1900 BC–AD 1800. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Museum. LaViolette A and Fleisher J (2005) The archaeology of sub-Saharan urbanism: Cities and their countrysides. In: Stahl AB (ed.) African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction, pp. 327–352. Oxford: Blackwell. McIntosh RJ (2005) Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh SK (ed.) (1995) Excavations at Jenne´-Jeno, Hambarketolo, and Kaniana (Inland Niger Delta, Mali), the 1981 Season. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ogundiran A (2005) Four millennia of cultural history in Nigeria (ca. 2000 BC–AD 1900). Journal of World Prehistory 19(2): 133–168.

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AGENCY Tamara L Bray, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary habitus Concept originally introduced by Marcel Mauss but later to become closely associated with work of Pierre Bourdieu; can be understood as those aspects of culture that are anchored in the body or daily practices of individuals, groups, societies, and nations, including the totality of learned habits, bodily skills, styles, tastes, and other non-discursive knowledges. modernity Term used to describe the condition of being ‘modern’; typically viewed as the historic period beginning in the nineteenth century associated with the Enlightenment, notions of progress, and the quest to rationally understand, master, and live comfortably in the world that came to dominate western thought and action of this era. new archaeology See ‘processual archaeology’. post-processual archaeology A movement within archaeology developed in the late twentieth century in reaction to perceived sterility of processual archaeology; label indicates both an engagement with postmodernism, its parent theory, as well as emergence from processual archaeology; rather than signifying any new orthodoxy, post-processualism encompasses a diversity of approaches, including structural-symbolic, contextual, feminist, phenomenological, and Marxist archaeologies; while differing in significant ways among themselves, what these different post-processual approaches share is a rejection of the idea of scientific objectivity, recognition of the indeterminacy of archaeological data, and the relevance of one’s standpoint or position with regard to the interpretation of the past. practice theory Seeks to explain the relationship between human action, on the one hand, and the extant system, or structure, on the other, by focusing on how the system shapes practice and how practice changes or reproduces the system. processual (new) archaeology Refers to both a phase and a theoretical orientation in American archaeology that dominated the field in the 1960s and 1970s; emphasized a systemic and adaptive view of culture, the search for general laws to explain human behavior and culture change, a positivist approach to science, and the rigorous use of the scientific method. praxis Understood as a theory of knowledge concerning people’s practical engagement with the world that has Marxist roots. structuration Concept and theory developed by Anthony Giddens in an attempt to reconcile fundamental dichotomies bedeviling the social sciences (e.g., agency vs. structure, subjective vs. objective, and micro vs. macro perspectives); approach focuses not on individual actors or the social totality but rather on social practices ordered across space and time that bridge these realms. structure Refers to a particular and complex organization of relations that both enable and constrain agency and social action. systems theory A trans-disciplinary meta-theory that gained currency in archaeology in the early 1960s; sought to discern rules governing the behavior of complex entities conceptualized holistically as configurations of interacting parts; provided a nomenclature for describing the organization and interdependence of any given configuration of parts connected and joined together by webs of relationships.

Introduction Over the past 20 years, agency has become an important concept in the toolbox of archaeological theory. Understood generally, if rather simplistically, as emphasizing the role of the individual in the creation of social conditions and outcomes, agency theory has had a common-sense appeal to archaeologists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. With the collapse of consensus regarding a unitary approach to the past that has left in the wake of processual archaeology, agency theory became de rigueur in the discipline beginning in the late 1980s. As various scholars have noted, however, the concept of agency has been uncritically adopted by many as ‘good to think with’. As a result, there is considerable ambiguity surrounding the notion of agency as used within archaeology. Generally speaking, ‘agency’ may be understood as an umbrella term for the more subject-centered approaches to archaeological inquiry. The focus in agency theory is on the individual, human action, intentionality, and indeterminacy. While the concept has been fairly malleable in the hands of archaeologists, there are a few common elements within its various constructions that help to define a general sense of the term. These include a recognition of the importance of actions and motivations of agents; the idea that agency must be a socially significant quality of action rather than being simply reducible to action itself; that social life is materially and historically enabled and constrained; and that agency and structure exist in a dialectic relationship. Overall, agency may be understood as a key element in action-oriented social theory that views people as active agents in prehistory.

General History of Concept The significance of the concept of agency for social analysis and theory was most thoroughly explicated by Anthony Giddens. A sociologist by training, Giddens’ work was not aimed at anthropologists, yet his ideas held strong appeal as his account of agency was seen as a way of overcoming various two-headed monsters with which anthropology had wrestled for years. Among these ‘‘central problems’’, to use Giddens’phrase, were the relationships between structure and agency, society and the individual, free will and determinism, and social change versus social reproduction. In his writings, Giddens investigated the concept of agency in relation to structure, action, and power. These terms and notions comprise the core elements of

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a new orientation that began to emerge in anthropology in the 1970s, which came to be labeled ‘practice theory’. The roots of contemporary practice theory can be traced to Marx, his concern with production, and the idea of praxis. The notion of praxis may be understood as a theory of knowledge concerning people’s engagement with the world. In seeking to explain the relationship(s) between human action and systems or structures, e.g., how the system shapes practice and how practice changes or reproduces the system, practice theory provides for an ‘actionoriented’ account of social organization. Within this framework, structure (or the system) is understood as both the medium and the outcome of action. In other words, structure is the unintended outcome of the agent’s bringing about of effects at the same time that it is the medium through which those effects are achieved. As such, structures do not exist at any point in time or space but are always in a process of becoming (rather than being). This process of becoming is what Giddens refers to as ‘structuration’. Power, and the social relations through which it is manifest, are directly related to the agent’s transformative capacity, or her ability to produce form through work upon the world. Power is a necessary implication of the logical connection between human action and transformative capacity. In an insightful analysis of emerging theoretical trends in anthropology written two decades ago, Sherry Ortner identified practice (or praxis or action) as the key symbol of a newly developing disciplinary paradigm. She suggested that the interest in practice theory noted in the early 1980s related to increasing disenchantment with the normative views of culture and societies that had held sway within the discipline for generations. Highlighting the work of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, she outlinedhow the study of practice was not to be viewed as an antagonistic alternative to the study of systems or structures but rather as a necessary complement to such work.

History of Use in Archaeology As with most things theoretical in archaeology, interests in agency first took hold in anthropology and subsequently trickled down. Like many elements of the post-processual program that emerged in archaeology in the 1980s, concern with the role of human agency can be traced directly to dissatisfaction with various tenets of the new archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s. Given the systems-theory framework within which processual archaeology was constructed, its empirical orientation, and its principal concern with long-term processes, there was little room for the individual

or intentionality in archaeological investigations of this period (see Processual Archaeology). In the wake of the various critiques of behavioralism, ecosystems, and cultural evolutionary theory that were subsequently developed, a variety of alternative, post-processual approaches began to coalesce around an explicit concern with individual agents and agency. As a reaction to the functional and deterministic emphases of the new archaeology, agency was initially conceived in opposition to the view of prehistoric peoples as simple pawns in some highly orchestrated game. It took as its starting point the idea that humans are able to monitor the effects of their actions and act in novel and creative ways as opposed to being simple stimulus-response reactors caught up in larger, pre-existing sets of processes and systems. Among the different post-processualists contributing to an interest in agency-oriented questions in archaeology were the structural-symbolic, feminist, and Marxist contingents. Others who followed a more continuous trajectory from processual archaeology to the present and maintain a strong neoevolutionary bent have also embraced the concept of agency. Given the range of interest in the idea of agency as a useful explanatory device, it is little surprise that the concept has developed in so many different directions within the field.

Practice and Agency in Archaeology The concepts of practice and agency are closely bound up in the literature and often seem to be used interchangeably. While human agency is necessarily realized through practice, the notion of practice cannot be simply reduced to action because it has a strong element of political and social significance built into its definition. In practice theory, social agents are typically understood as individuals with goals, intentions, and subjectivities who operate within materially and historically given circumstances only partly of their own making. People are assumed to be competent and knowledgeable social actors who may conduct their daily affairs and relations both in strategic and intentional ways, and in routinized, nondiscursive ways. Their actions have both intended and unintended consequences. In the dialectical relationship between the structure within which social actors operate and the consequences of their action, or agency, both structure and agent are continuously and interactively remade. Several key terms are found within the lexicon of practice theory, the most important among these being agent, agency, structures, and structuration. Agents are the active subjects, the individuals, and social collectivities whose actions are typically understood to be purposive, determined, and knowledgeable. Agents enact

108 AGENCY

rather than possess agency and do so in the context of the socially, materially, and historically given structures of daily life. Agency is the dynamic process through which people construct and express their identity, participate in social life, and materially shape their existence. While agency constitutes a form of involvement with the world expressed through the material practices of mindful agents, it is important to note that not all agents possess the same skills, competence, knowledge, awareness, or foresight. Agency is best understood not as a thing but rather as a quality of many things and the relationships among these. The structures within which agents and agency operate are constituted by the principles and resources that orient social conduct, including the cognitive and cultural ordering of the world. The structures that shape human agency are visible only through the effects of that agency as translated into social action. In the mutual interdependence of structure and agency, or what has sometimes been called the duality of structure, the structural properties of a system are seen as both the medium and the outcome of the social practices they organize and orient. The concept of structuration, or the process of a structure’s becoming through the action and agency of knowledgeable actors, describes this recursive relationship and underscores the virtual quality of structures, which do not exist at any point in time or space but rather exhibit tendencies in action. The idea of structuration refers to ‘‘the ongoing production, maintenance, and transformation of societal institutions as well as the material, social, and symbolic conditions within which people exist and through which they reproduce and transform themselves’’ (Dobres 2000: 133). Archaeologists who take practice theory as their analytical framework tend to divide into one of two camps fissuring along the dimension of intentionality. On one side are those who view the intentionality of agents and their actions as the key aspect of agency. Within this school of thought, individuals are typically assumed to act strategically to advance their own interests. The social agents in these scenarios tend to be portrayed as rational actors interested in maximizing some element of their economic, political, or symbolic capital, their motives often taken to be autonomously constructed and universal. An extreme version of this view informs some of the Darwinian and evolutionary ecology approaches that have adopted the concept of agency. At the other end of the spectrum are those who stress the nondiscursive qualities and unintended outcomes of mindful human action as most significant. From this perspective, what agents want or intend is often irrelevant to the real social consequences of

their actions. The most important effect is rather seen to be the unwitting reproduction of the social structures within which agency is enacted. While it is recognized that social agents do often act with explicit intent and goals, it is simultaneously understood that they also often act in routinized, habitual ways in the course of everyday life. Acknowledgement of both kinds of agency in archaeological investigation comes closest to the theoretical concerns and analytical frames developed by Bourdieu and Giddens. As various scholars have noted, the study of agency cannot be separated from a study of structure. Agency only exists in a dialectical relationship to structure. In other words, one cannot talk about the agency of individual social actors without simultaneously taking into account the cultural background of those actors and the cultural structures within which those actors operate. While agency and structure are analytically distinct, they are nevertheless entwined each can be seen as the product of the other when viewed at different points in time. To understand human agency in the past, it is critical that archaeologists engage the mutuality of structure and agency, focusing equally on the antecedent historical conditions – the habitus from which the actor draws, as well as on individual action and intent.

Archaeological Studies Using the Agency Theory In North America, archaeologists have utilized practice theory and the concept of agency in a variety of research contexts ranging from the study of prehistoric technologies to concerns with the emergence of social inequality to the negotiation of social identities. Various recent studies of the Mississippian period and the rise of chiefdoms in the American bottomland, for instance, have made explicit use of agency theory in attempts to explain the transition from egalitarian to hierarchical societies in this region. Archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who emphasizes the mutually enabling and constraining nature of the relationship between practice, agency, and structure in his work at the site of Cahokia, offers a particularly good example. In looking to explain the construction of the enormous mounds that characterize Mississippian centers and the massive amounts of labor they represent, he focused on the interests and agency of different segments of society. He argues that the practices associated with mound building were based in a pre-existing social structure but that as the scale and materiality of these practices changed, so too did the structures within which they were enacted. The end result for the Mississippian peoples was the

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hardening of social differences, the emergence of a hereditary elite, and the creation of a powerful chiefdom – unforeseen consequences of the interplay of agency, practice, and structure. In another archaeological study focused on the politics of identity and resistance, Stephen Silliman explores the role of agency in interpreting indigenous responses to the colonial enterprise in nineteenthcentury California, emphasizing both the agency of the native population and the material practices of everyday life. Archaeological excavations at the Mexican land-grant site of Rancho Petaluma in northern California produced a wealth of both westernmanufactured and traditional native goods that were found in close association with one another across the site. Attending to the large quantities of lithic debris and stone tools recovered, the investigator argued that the continuing reliance on this category of material culture represented a political choice on the part of native residents – one that speaks to processes of contestation and negotiation as well as the agency of native peoples within the changing structures and practices of everyday life. Focusing on the role of lithics as material agents, he concludes that their presence at this historic period site signified a conscious strategy on the part of indigenous workers to activate or solidify precolonial identities and associations.

Critiques of Agency Theory in Archaeology One of the most important critiques of agency theory to date has been the anti-essentialist argument brought to bear by feminist scholars in particular. Most often, the active agents with whom our models of prehistory are populated are conceived as a homogeneous lot having similar basic traits, skills, and goals. Typically, these agents are constructed as essentialized acultural, ahistorical, and atomistic beings with rational, capitalist, cost/benefit analyzing impulses. As Joan Gero notes, though it is not often articulated, it also seems to be commonly assumed that since these individuals have agency by definition, they are gendered male and colored powerful. In answering this critique, some have called for historicizing the notion of agency, identity, and the individual by situating these notions in their own unique culture historical context. A taking to heart of the dialectical relationship within which agency and structure exist would seem to obviate this problem as structures are not uniform across time or cultural space and hence we would not expect agency to be either. As is true for most forms of archaeological interpretation, agency-centered models are also vulnerable

to the projection of our own values onto the past. Such concern has been expressed with regard to the inherent emphasis placed on the autonomy of the individual and individual agency in practice theory. Various scholars have suggested that such an orientation simply mirrors contemporary western society and politics. Similarly, while the issue of having and constructing personal identities is a pervasive theme of modernity, it has not necessarily been so prevalent a concern in other times and places. From an epistemological standpoint, the privileging of agency as the most significant element in theories of social change necessarily grants individuals and their self-interested actions primacy at the expense of other modes of social interaction such as empathy or concordance. In sum, the uncritical application of agency theory in archaeology runs the risk of reproducing, if not naturalizing, the political relations and asymmetries that structure our present lives. Another point of concern revolves around the tendency to conflate agency with the actor and thus assume that evidence of agency is evidence for individuals or subjects in the archaeological record. It has been noted that while agency is a socially significant quality of action, it must be understood as both more and less than mere action. As with gender studies, becoming caught up in the search for individuals risks displacement of what should be the primary objectives of identifying and understanding the contexts, structures and intersubjective dynamics through which agents expressed themselves. The task is not so much to recover agency archaeologically as to recognize that human agency is inherent in the material remains. As Marcia-Anne Dobres has repeatedly pointed out, we do not have to find individuals in order to theorize about processes of agency in prehistory. Many scholars have argued for the central importance of agency in archaeological interpretation and the productive utility of working within this paradigm is attested by numerous recent studies. It should be clear, however, that the study of agency cannot be divorced from the study of the structures, systems, and habitus within which past lives were lived. It is also clear that archaeologists need to generate more nuanced understandings of agents and agency by incorporating concerns with social heterogeneity, gender, and identity into their analytical frameworks. Agency-based theories also need to broaden the concept of the individual beyond the liberal western sense of ‘free agents’ to include a more relational perspective. Agency should not be understood as simply located within bounded human bodies but rather within the wider sets of human relationships that make up the social person.

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Beyond human agency, such a theoretical orientation also holds much promise for furthering our models and understandings of material culture. Given that social agency is not co-terminous with the human body, we may begin to consider how objects, as material extensions of the agency of those who produced them, participate in this system of social relationships. Following Alfred Gell’s pioneering work in this area of investigation, we may begin to think about how personhood is augmented, extended, and distributed among the many objects fashioned and employed in social action. See also: Engendered Archaeology; Evolutionary Archaeology; Philosophy of Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology.

Further Reading Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dobres M-A (2000) Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dobres M-A and Robb J (eds.) (2000) Agency in Archaeology. London: Routledge. Gell A (1998) Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gero J (2000) Troubled travels in agency and feminism. In: Dobres M-A and Robb J (eds.) Agency in Archaeology, pp. 34–39. London: Routledge. Giddens A (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens A (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol.1: Power, Property, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnson M (1989) Conceptions of agency in archaeological interpretation. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8(2): 189–211. Ortner S (1984) Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126–166. Pauketat T (2000) The tragedy of the commoners. In: Dobres M-A and Robb J (eds.) Agency in Archaeology, pp. 113–129. London: Routledge. Saitta D (1994) Agency, class, and archaeological interpretation. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 13(3): 201–227. Silliman S (2001) Agency, practical politics, and the archaeology of culture contact. Journal of Social Archaeology 1(2): 190–209.

AGRICULTURAL FIELDS, IDENTIFICATION AND STUDY M G Elgar, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary anthrosol A soil horizon created by human activities such as cultivation, irrigation, middening or mining. biolipid A hydrocarbon-containing organic compound derived from plants or animals that is relatively stable over time. Analysis of biolipid residues may be used to help identify the original source of decayed plant or animal material. bioturbation The disruption and mixing of soils and sediments by organisms, especially by burrowing or boring (e.g., roots, earthworms), which has the effect of homogenizing the original strata. lynchet A bank of earth commonly formed at the edges of fields from plowing. midden A prehistoric refuse deposit that may contain artifacts as well as organic remains such as plants, bones and shell. plaggen soil A surface anthrosol formed by long-term manuring and mixing of the soil, usually from cultivation. soil micromorphology The study of soil morphology by microscopic methods, usually by studying thin-sections under a polarizing microscope.

Introduction The study of agriculture incorporates natural variables (e.g., climate, geology) with cultural variables (e.g., technology). The off-site emphasis of field systems requires different methodological and theoretical frameworks to the overall study of agriculture. Detailed investigations of fields reveal the practices behind agricultural production and contributes to understanding human agency and long-term human– landscape interactions. These inquiries also place agriculture in its ecological setting revealing relationships between fields, topography, and environmental conditions. For instance, we frequently find terraces in hilly regions, whereas irrigation networks are found in arid lands. Practices of this kind transform natural land into agricultural substrates following culturally defined blueprints. Alterations to the landscape – landscape modifications – are generally enduring and are frequently cumulative in their impacts. These qualities lend regional investigations of fields to questions of agricultural intensification and the long-term maintenance of farming systems.

AGRICULTURAL FIELDS, IDENTIFICATION AND STUDY 111 Table 1 Methods and applications for the study of agricultural fields by scale of analysis Scale

Primary methods

Archaeological features

Human practices

Region/ Landscape

Aerial photography Geographic Information Systems Pedestrian survey Published maps (e.g., political, property, geological, soil) Regional palaeoclimate reconstruction Remote sensing Satellite imagery

Field systems: walls, raised or ridged fields, terraces, lynchets, leveled land Water management: irrigation channels, aqueducts, drainage, water storage features Occasionally: furrows, plow marks

Adaptation to local conditions Degree of landscape modification Extent of bounded land General production capacity Land units where field units visible Water management and catchment area

Garden/Field

Architectural analysis Feature mapping Pedestrian survey

Architectural style Artifact assemblages (e.g., hoe tips) Construction materials Dimensions of field features such as raised platforms or furrows Evidence of reconstruction

Cultural associations Construction techniques and material sources Landscape history (construction, remodeling, abandonment) Planning Tillage methods

Seed bed

Coring and excavation Botanical: pollen, phytoliths, macrobotanicals Dating methods Geoarchaeology: bulk soil analyses (e.g., organic matter, nutrients, particle size, biolipids); soil micromorphology

Exposed soil to reveal: plowzone, amendment and depletion, anthropogenic soils, plow features Botanical remains Buried artifacts, crop, furrow and irrigation features Dates of architectural features Infilling and disruption of irrigation features Soil properties

Climate change Crops Cultural associations Long-term landuse impacts Soil amendment (e.g., burning, fertilization, middening), Soil depletion or overuse Tillage methods

Field system research strategies are scalar and three levels of analysis are considered here: (1) regional/ landscape, (2) garden/field, and (3) the seedbed (Table 1). These strategies are not exhaustive and the primary literature offers additional approaches.

Identifying Field Systems Intensive agriculture frequently involves the construction of landscape architecture such as field walls, terraces or lynchets, raised or ridged field features, and irrigation systems (e.g., canals, aqueducts, wells, water storage features) (Figure 1). These features enclose natural land, aid crop production, and engender land tenure. Field boundaries may appear in political and property maps and, as they are frequently maintained for generations, historical maps may identify archaeological fields in regions with long agricultural histories. Aerial photography and satellite imagery capture landscape architecture where it is still standing or is near the surface and modern vegetation is minimal (Figure 2). Remote sensing (e.g., ground-penetrating radar, magnetrometry) can identify subsurface field systems, particularly buried field walls and irrigation features. Geological and soil maps help evaluate natural resources. The value of these proxy records should be evaluated through reconnaissance and

survey of actual field systems on the ground. Geographical information systems (GISs) are employed to integrate these multiple spatial data sets, speed mapping of landscape architecture, and calculate the cultivated area. Irrigation systems rely on natural rainfall and hydraulic patterns, which should underpin their archaeological investigation. Changing water tables and tectonics may complicate the reconstruction of irrigation systems and need to be addressed in field investigations. Abandoned irrigation features can be excavated to help deduce why they failed (e.g., gradual silting up, catastrophic infill). In a study that critically applies many of the methods highlighted here, Tony Wilkinson (2003) investigated Near Eastern agricultural landscapes and the role of irrigation. Divergent agricultural adaptations were identified in the rain-fed northern uplands and the irrigated fields of southern Mesopotamia. Reflecting the role of agriculture in complex polities, this study provided insight into different configurations of community organization, political inequality, and authority systems. This exemplifies the potential contribution of field system research to central questions in archaeology. The identification of extensive agriculture (i.e., swidden or slash-and-burn) provides a greater challenge to archaeologists. Scarce landscape architecture

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Figure 1 Inca terraces at Moray, Peru.

Figure 2 Aerial photograph of a Later Bronze Age field with plaggen A horizon defined by dark soil mark at Welland Bank Quarry, south Lincolnshire, UK. Copyright Charles A. I. French.

limits the utility of aerial images and maps. Short occupation may leave little trace on the soil. When abandoned, extensive fields may blend into the surrounding uncultivated ecology. In some instances, burning and fertilization alter vegetation and soils aiding in identification. In other instances, rare constructed features within areas of swidden cultivation support the identification of cultivated areas.

Gardens and Fields Pedestrian survey, feature mapping, and assessment of architecture are used to study gardens and fields.

Ideally, a statistically representative number of fields will be selected for study from the total cultivated area. Variations in elevation, topography, architecture, and associations to other archaeological features should be considered in field selection. As in other kinds of architecture, variations in design, construction materials, and quality of field architecture can provide information into such issues as planning, labor, and prestige. The collection of artifact assemblages from fields may shed light on farming implements and cultural associations. The surface vegetation in old fields is another line of evidence as it often differs from adjacent uncultivated land.

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The Seedbed

Crops

In ancient fields, excavation and coring reveal the seedbed (plowzone or A horizon), which may be on the modern surface or buried. Agricultural soils are impacted by soil type, environment, crops, cultivation regime (e.g., intensive or extensive), tools, and cultural traditions. Geoarchaeological techniques are employed to determine the fertility and stability of palaeosols. Common bulk soil analyses include quantification of crop-limiting nutrients (e.g., organic matter, phosphorus, nitrogen), soil particle size, and magnetic susceptibility. Intact soil blocks are analyzed through soil micromorphology (thin section analysis) to reveal preservation conditions by identifying soil structure, the distribution of soil constituents, and bioturbation. Geoarchaeological analyses of fields are best compared to uncultivated lands for accurate assessment of human impacts. Triplicate replication of soil conditions (i.e., collecting samples from three fields with similar physical settings) further controls for variations across agrarian landscapes (Figure 3). When preservation is outstanding, excavation may unearth anthropogenic features such as plow marks and furrows (cf. Figures 2, 4a, and 4b). Differences in soil color, nutrient concentration, and soil particle size are used to identify land-use impacts. Long-term soil management is seen from the development of plaggen soils, dark nutrient-rich anthropogenic soils resulting from repeated applications of fertilizer-like dung (Figure 5). In arid regions, nutrients such as phosphorous may be retained for millennia. In contrast, overuse and erosion are revealed by reduced concentrations of silt, clay, and soil nutrients when field soils are compared to uncultivated controls.

Studies of cultigens often originate in settlements where macrobotanical remains indicate the consumption and use of cultivated plants (see Plant Domestication). In contrast, macrobotanical remains excavated from within fields are only reliable from intact palaeosols because of the potential for modern contamination, augmented by industrial tillage, bioturbation, and organic decay. Pollen and phytoliths may be more stable in fields and can provide in situ confirmation of cultigens when recovered from secure contexts. Phytoliths are preserved under different conditions than pollen and may also reflect different crop species than pollen (see Phytolith Analysis; Pollen Analysis). Regional palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, contemporary agronomic studies, and surface vegetation provide additional insight into ancient cropping regimes. Increasingly, research into cultigens combines several methods with attention to sampling and preservation conditions. Dating

Bioturbation, poor preservation of macrobotanicals, and modern disturbance also impact dating strategies. Dating may be further complicated by the sequential use of fields for different activities (see Dating Methods, Overview). Buried contexts under standing features, such as field walls or aqueducts, may provide secure contexts for recovering datable material. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) is increasingly used to date humic acids in soil (see Luminescence Dating). Surface and excavated artifact collections from gardens and fields provide additional chronological information.

Figure 3 Schematic of triplicate sampling pattern (S ¼ sample collection point). Copyright Chris Stevens.

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Figure 5 Plaggen soil in terraced field (highlands of Yemen). Copyright Charles A. I. French.

Figure 4 Thin sections of soils from ancient fields. (a), Plow marks in well-preserved buried palaeosoil, Welland Bank Quarry, south Lincolnshire, UK. Copyright Charles A. I. French. (b), Bioturbated palaeosoil from a pre-Columbian terrace (Paca, Peru).

Agriculture, Landscape, and Society Field system research reveals the human ingenuity behind food production systems adapted to diverse ecosystems. For instance, tropical adaptations include Asian rice paddies, Mesoamerican chinampas, and raised fields in South America. Each system provides a signature on the landscape. This can be illustrated by rice paddy fields which are made by leveling and walling to pond water, dramatically changing natural topography and soils. In contrast, responses to arid lands, limited by water and soil nutrients, are seen in an array of different technologies. For instance, abandoned grid-like landscape features in Arizona were found through an intensive multidisciplinary study to have produced agricultural crops in a desolate landscape. Cultural and environmental contexts are therefore essential components of field system research. Additional lines of evidence may be found in art, historic documents, and modern correlates. Egyptian

farming methods are recorded in art and hieroglyphs (e.g., collections of the British Museum). The Romans employed centurion field systems and recorded field allocations. Experimental farming with replica tools and old crops provide heuristic models to reconstruct annual yields, labor requirements, and soil responses to different treatments (e.g., the experimental Butser Ancient Farm, United Kingdom). Ethno-archaeological studies with nonindustrial farmers provide further data for reconstructing crop rotation cycles, labor allocation, and natural constraints on farming. Research methods for off-site agricultural landscapes reflect analytical scale, environmental conditions, field architecture, and palaeosol preservation. Ground reconnaissance to verify published data in maps and aerial images provides a baseline for regional studies and also detailed assessments of individual fields. Field system research is multidisciplinary and often requires specialist research methods to provide evidence for specific cultivation practices.

Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Charly French and Chris Stevens for permission to use figures. See also: Dating Methods, Overview; Geoarchaeology; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction, Methods; Phytolith Analysis; Plant Domestication; Pollen Analysis; Soils and Archaeology.

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Further Reading Doolittle WE and James AN (2004) The Safford Valley Grids: Prehistoric Cultivation in the Southern Arizona Desert. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hastorf CA (1993) Agriculture and the Onset of Political Inequality before the Inka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldberg P and Richard IM (2006) Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Miller NF and Gleason KL (1994) The Archaeology of Garden and Field. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Thomas K (ed.) (1990) Soils and early agriculture. World Archaeology 22(1). Wilkinson TJ (2003) Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

AGRICULTURE Contents Biological Impact on Populations Social Consequences

Biological Impact on Populations Patricia M Lambert, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary bioarchaeology The study of the human biological component of the archaeological record. dental attrition The wearing or grinding down of teeth. fertility Birthrate of a population. malocclusion Abnormality in the way the teeth of the upper and lower jaw fit together. morbidity Disease rate, proportion of diseased to healthy in a population. morphology Shape, form. mortality Death rate of a population. occlusal Chewing surface of a tooth. palaeopathology The study of disease in former/ancient times as evidenced in human remains from archaeological contexts. robusticity Expression of relative size and strength of bones or teeth, or of a skeleton more generally, for example, increased robusticity of long bones.

Introduction Questions concerning the biological impacts of the economic transition from foraging to farming have formed a central focus of research in bioarchaeology since the late 1970s. Researchers examining this transition have generally compared diet, health, and workload of mobile/semimobile forager antecedents and later sedentary agriculturalists to identify differences

and therefore changes associated with the adoption of an agricultural mode of subsistence. The groundbreaking volume, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, published in 1984, represents the first major effort to gather together such studies from a number of world regions to address questions concerning the impetus for and biological consequences of agriculture. Much of the research available at that time focused on skeletal samples from the Americas, particularly North America, and these studies still predominate in the literature. However, research efforts over the intervening years have expanded this geographic purview to include different types of agriculture and agricultural transitions in many world regions. As research accumulates, some general trends are emerging in certain aspects of health and workload, but it is also becoming apparent that the ‘transition’ and consequent health impacts were not uniform in all times and places, or even unidirectional. This growing awareness of variability in the agricultural experience has led to an increasing research emphasis on how different environmental and behavioral correlates of agriculture influence the skeletal markers used to reconstruct the different lifeways and health impacts associated with this economic transition.

Osteological Evidence for Dietary Change One of the important challenges of studying the transition from foraging to farming has been documenting the timing and nature of this transition. Traditionally, archaeologists have studied palaeobotanical, faunal, and artifactual evidence to document the types of

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food resources available and presumably consumed by people at a particular locale. Bioarchaeology adds a different dimension to the study of diet and dietary change through the analysis of the biological impacts different subsistence regimes had on the teeth and bones of ancient practitioners (see Osteological Methods; Paleopathology). Dental indicators and bone chemistry are the most important lines of skeletal evidence for diet. These are discussed in greater detail below. Reconstructing Diet from Dental Indicators

Figure 1 Carious lesions in the mandibular molars of a farmer from North Carolina. 100 90 80 % molars with cavities

A number of dental indicators are used to gain insights into the nature of foods consumed. These include dental disease (dental caries, periodontal disease, alveolar abscesses, and antemortem tooth loss), tooth wear, chipping, dental calculus (plaque), and patterns of dental occlusion and associated craniofacial robusticity. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive and indeed are often interrelated. This discussion focuses on worldwide patterns of three indicators that have proven particularly useful for assessing changes in diet: dental disease, dental wear (attrition), and craniofacial morphology. Dental caries is a disease process caused by the bacterial fermentation of dietary carbohydrates, which produces acids that erode tooth enamel (Figure 1). Because caries-causing oral bacteria such as Streptococcus mutans thrive on carbohydrates, dental caries is more prevalent in individuals and populations consuming carbohydrate-rich foods (Figure 2). Such foods tend to be more heavily processed and thus do not have the cleansing properties of greens and other fresh foods that require heavy chewing, which also contributes to dental disease. Cereal food production in particular is a primary factor in declining dental health with the transition to agriculture; grains are valuable cultigens because they store well, but properties such as hard texture and low water content that enhance storage result in the need for hulling, grinding, and/or cooking before consumption. Highly processed foods stick to the teeth and feed the oral bacteria such as S. mutans that adhere to tooth surfaces. Although changes in dental disease with the advent of agriculture are far from uniform, a general trend toward increasing dental caries and antemortem tooth loss is evident in both New and Old World contexts. In the New World, maize is the most important cause of increasing rates of dental disease due its relatively high sugar content, and observed changes in dental health throughout the Americas are often marked when people make the shift from foraging to maize farming. For example, this pattern of declining

Southeast farmers Southwest farmers California fisherpeople

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Figure 2 Comparison of dental caries rates in foragers and farmers.

dental health with agricultural intensification has been documented in northern Chile and coastal Peru in South America, in Mesoamerica, and in various regions of North America including the Southwest, Great Basin, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands. Hence, an increase in dental disease has often been used as a proxy measure of corn consumption and the shift to maize agriculture in New World contexts. In the Old World, the agricultural base was often more diversified, potentially including several grains or legumes and domesticated animals; the consequences to dental health were correspondingly more varied. In the Levant, for example, there is little evidence for increasing prevalence of dental caries at the Neolithic transition, though a considerable decline in

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dental health is evident later in the agricultural sequence. On the other hand, when prehistoric farmers (wheat, rice, barley) of western India made the reverse transition to foraging, there was a substantial reduction in dental caries prevalence, evidence for the cariogenic nature of the agricultural diet there. Overall, dental health decline is more prominent than stasis or improvement in the Old World, but the changes are not uniform or generally as severe as those documented in the New World. It should also be noted that other diets can also result in an increase in dental disease, so it is important to seek corroborating evidence that agricultural products were responsible. For example, on the offshore islands of the Santa Barbara Channel, California, a region where agriculture never took hold prehistorically, early inhabitants had relatively high rates of dental caries that subsequently declined through time. It is uncertain what led to dental disease in this environment, but one possibility is the consumption of sugary roots and tubers, a hypothesis supported by the presence of digging apparatus in archaeological sites of the time. In Portugal, foragers had fairly comparable rates of dental disease relative to later agriculturalists, probably due to the consumption of cariogenic wild foods such as sticky fruits and honey. These cautionary tales illustrate the importance of multiple lines of evidence in reconstructing diet and identifying agriculture from visual examination of teeth. Unlike dental caries, dental wear shows a decline in most world regions with the transition to agriculture. This is because processed foods are softer and require less chewing, which reduces the loss of enamel on the occlusal surfaces of teeth, although use of sandstone mortars and metates for processing grain crops may introduce grit into these staple foods and lead to increased wear. The form of dental wear also tends to differ between foragers and farmers: the worn molars of foragers tend to be flat, whereas those of agriculturalists tend to be angled and often have a cupped appearance attributed to the consumption of softer foods. This change in degree and type of wear is evident at the foraging–farming transition in the southern Levant, for example, although wear rates tend to track the stage of transition and earlier farmers show more comparable wear to foragers than later farmers. Other dental signs of an agricultural diet observed in skeletal series worldwide include a reduction in the size of the jaw and concomitant malocclusion of teeth. Chewing hard-textured foods tends to stimulate growth of the jaw bones, producing jaws that can accommodate the permanent teeth. Soft-textured foods require little chewing, on the other hand, resulting in narrower dental arches, tooth crowding, and

misalignment of teeth. In consequence, facial form tends to change with the transition to agriculture, with agriculturalists having less robust facial features than their forager antecedents. This pattern is evident in the Eastern Woodlands of North America, in the Balkans region of central Europe, in the Nile Valley of Africa, and in the southern Levant region of the Middle East, where a reduction in craniofacial robusticity is evident from the Natufian to Neolithic transition with the adoption of agropastoralism. Bone Chemistry

Studies of bone chemistry have added an important dimension to the study of diet and dietary transitions because they provide an independent line of evidence and document the relative importance of certain types of food for individuals and populations. Stable isotopes of several elements (carbon, nitrogen, strontium), as well as a number of trace elements (e.g., barium, calcium, strontium, zinc), have been used to track changes in diet. These elements are important components of the foods we consume and are incorporated into our bone tissues during normal bone growth and maintenance. The two elements that have proved to be most useful in bone chemistry research on dietary transitions and agricultural origins are carbon and nitrogen. Each element has two stable forms (stable isotopes) that differ in proportion according to types of foods consumed. Carbon-13 (13C) is a very small proportion of the total carbon in foods (12C predominates), but is more abundant in tropical cultigens (C4 plants) such as corn, millet, and sorghum, and in coastal and estuarine sea grasses due to the manner in which carbon is incorporated into the tissues of these plants. Consumers of these foods also have relatively more 13 C in their bone (and dental) tissues than those consuming most other foods (plants that follow the C3 photosynthetic pathway and the animals that consume them). Nitrogen-14 (14N) is the more common form of nitrogen, but 15N is relatively more abundant in marine versus terrestrial food chains and also tends to concentrate up the food chain. When carbon and nitrogen values are used in combination, it is possible to derive more nuanced interpretations of diet and dietary change because it becomes possible to differentiate marine resources such as fish and sea mammal meat from terrestrial plant resources like corn, and thereby identify the role of cultigens in the diet. Stable isotope studies have probably been more important for documenting the agricultural transition in the New World than Old World due to the primary importance of a single, C4 grain crop (maize), and the rarity of domesticated animals that led early Americans to depend more heavily on this storable

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cultigen. For this reason, carbon-13 enrichment can generally be taken to reflect a transition to maize agriculture in most American contexts, except in coastal regions such as those of the Georgia Bight or southern Peru, where nitrogen values are needed to differentiate corn from marine foods. Studies of stable isotopes from several midcontinental regions in North America have also shown, however, that the timing and duration of this economic transition were far from uniform, and these differences are likely important for understanding extant and emerging data on the health consequences of farming in the New World. Peoples of the Old World had a number of important grain crops, most of them C3 plants (e.g., wheat, rye, barley, rice), although millet and sorghum were tropical cultigens important in some regions and time periods. Here, the shift toward enriched carbon-13 values signals either the increasing use of millet and/ or sorghum, or increased emphasis on marine foods. In northern China, for example, 13C values indicate a substantial emphasis on millet (13C enrichment) during the Neolithic that later shifted to rice and wheat (decrease in 13C) and more recently to maize (13C enrichment). A shift in coastal regions of the Old World from enriched to less-enriched carbon-13 values, on the other hand, may signal increased emphasis on C3 cultigens such as wheat, barley, rye, or rice, as has been documented in Neolithic samples from coastal Scandinavia and Greece.

Changes in Patterns of Health and Disease with Agriculture Reconstructing Health from Osteological Indicators

A number of skeletal indicators are used by bioarchaeologists to reconstruct patterns of health and disease associated with agricultural transitions. These include linear enamel hypoplasia, porotic hyperostosis/cribra orbitalia, periosteal lesions, juvenile and adult stature, and mortality patterns. Linear enamel hypoplasia refers to depressed bands that form in tooth enamel when childhood growth is disrupted by nutritional insufficiency, infectious disease, or other significant stressors that interrupt the metabolic process (Figure 3). These dental markers serve as a general indicator of health during infancy and childhood. Porotic hyperostosis refers to porous lesions of the cranial vault and eye orbits (cribra orbitalia) that form in response to iron deficiency anemia, although in recent years palaeopathological research has demonstrated a link between porous cranial lesions and scurvy (Figure 4). These lesions also tend to form in childhood due to dietary deficiencies or blood loss

Figure 3 Enamel hypoplasia in a maxillary canine tooth. Photo credit: Korri D. Turner, Soil Systems, Inc.

Figure 4 Cribra orbitalia.

due to parasites and bacterial infection, and thus provide another but more specific indicator of childhood health experience. Periosteal lesions (Figure 5) are plaques of bone that form on external (cortical) bone surfaces when the connective tissue that covers bone (the periosteum) becomes separated from the cortex due to various biological processes. Although there are numerous conditions that can cause these lesions (e.g., trauma, scurvy, vascular disease), bacterial infection is among the more prominent, and periosteal lesions therefore tend to be viewed (albeit not quite correctly) as a proxy measure of infectious disease experience. In combination, these lesions provide a reasonably good measure of childhood stress levels, particularly when used in a comparative framework. Periosteal lesions can also provide information on the disease and injury experiences of adults. Stature estimates based on long bone measurements and mortality patterns based on age distributions of cemetery samples have also been used to

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Figure 5 Periosteal lesion on the midshaft of a tibia.

assess health status of individuals and populations at economic transitions. People who experience poor nutrition and ill health during the growth years do not achieve their genetic height potential, and adult stature can therefore provide a good measure of cumulative health experience during the growth years. Growth curves for juveniles have also been used to characterize subadult health, but can be difficult to interpret for cemetery samples. This is because the curve is necessarily based on the measurements of children who died at a particular age rather than all the children of that age in the living population, and therefore reflects the stature of the least healthy members of each age group. Ratios of subadults (especially, infants and young children) to adults in cemetery samples can provide information on age-based differences in mortality and offer insights into patterns of morbidity in a population. However, there are a number of challenges to reconstructing mortality profiles from death assemblages that are discussed below. Almost everywhere in both New and Old World contexts, the osteological indicators described above provide a cumulative picture suggesting greater decline than improvement in health with agriculture, although this difference is often most evident in comparisons of foragers and full-scale, sedentary agriculturalists. Health changes associated with the actual transition period are much more variable due to differences in how quickly the transition took place, how much the agricultural diet differed from that of earlier foragers, and the degree to which demographic factors such as sedentism and growth

rate altered with the introduction of agricultural production. The general pattern of health decline observed in many settings has led to the conclusion that disease risk increased with agriculture, and there are certainly reasons to believe this might be so. When people begin to grow their food, they become tethered to a particular place in a way that foragers are not. Sedentism increases disease exposure through accumulation of food refuse and human waste, both sources of parasitic and bacterial infection. These accumulations also attract vermin such as rats, known to carry bubonic plague, hantavirus, typhus, rabies, and other diseases transmissible to humans. In tropical environments, clearing of agricultural fields or construction of irrigation systems can create breeding grounds for mosquitos and the infections such as malaria and West Nile virus they can transmit. Such health problems were apparently created in ancient Bahrain with the transition from nonirrigating to irrigation agriculture. In addition, agricultural populations often rely heavily on storable staple foods such as corn and wheat that do not contain the range of vitamins and minerals available from the mixed diet of most foragers, potentially rendering agriculturalists more susceptible to pathogens as a result of poor nutrition. Food storage itself can also lead to increased problems with gut infection due to spoilage from bacteria and molds. There are, however, also health advantages of an agricultural economy. The production of surplus, storable foods can reduce the impact of lean periods that for foragers may lead to malnutrition and death. This may account for the lack of stature decline, or in some cases even an increase in stature, documented in some regions of the southeastern United States and elsewhere with agriculture. Surplus food can also permit incapacitated members of a society that cannot contribute to subsistence efforts due to sickness, injury, or old age to survive where they might not in a mobile society. In addition, the injured and ill need not be mobile to survive, but can rest and regain strength. Food production also permits shorter birth spacing, resulting in increasing fertility rates and therefore relatively more children each generation. Some researchers question whether the health risks among prehistoric agriculturalists were actually greater than their foraging antecedents, despite osteological evidence suggesting that this was the case. For example, age distributions of agriculturalist samples frequently show a higher ratio of infants and young children to adults, a pattern interpreted to reflect an increase in infant mortality and a decrease in life expectancy at birth. However, it has become clear that, while age distributions can provide a

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good measure of fertility, they are a poor measure of mortality. This is because changes in birthrate have a much greater impact on demographic profiles than changes in death rate. Fortunately, alternative methods have been developed to derive more accurate estimates of fertility and mortality from archaeological cemetery samples. One method designed to eliminate problems associated with the underenumeration of infants and inaccurate estimation of age in older skeletons uses the proportion of individuals over 30 years to the proportion of individuals over >5 years to estimate fertility. Another method uses birth rates calculated from age distributions of skeletal samples and growth rates based on settlement data to estimate fertility and mortality. Estimates based on these revised methods suggest that early American horticulturalists experienced an increase in both fertility and mortality rates relative to contemporaneous foragers. However, similarly high rates appear to have been experienced by both foragers and farmers living in the Americas between about 1500 and 500 years ago (when most groups made the transition to sedentary agriculture), and it has been argued that population growth and high mortality may have been the impetus for agriculture rather than a consequence of it. Increasing morbidity also appears to generally characterize the transition to agriculture, but some scholars have argued that this too is a product of changing patterns of infant survivorship. In foraging societies, it is hypothesized that at-risk infants may not survive infancy due to limiting factors such as the need for greater birth spacing and annually occurring lean periods, and thus be eliminated from the population before developing any skeletal record of ill health. Survivors in these societies are therefore the healthiest born and would be expected to fare better in life. On the other hand, if at-risk infants in agricultural societies survive due to better provisioning and stability, they may nonetheless suffer the consequences of greater frailty. These survivors thus may develop the signs of ill health that osteologists use to reconstruct patterns of health and disease. Agricultural skeletal samples would thus look sicker because they include sickly survivors, whereas foragers would look healthier because susceptible infants died before they could develop these signs. However, although these problems (the osteological paradox) introduce challenges to estimating life expectancy and mortality accurately, skeletal samples nonetheless provide a record of disease experience for those who did survive. In this sense, agriculturalists generally show more signs of ill health and disease than their forager antecedents (or contemporaries), and illness thus appears to have been a more prominent aspect of everyday life in these societies.

Infectious Disease

The skeleton provides only a very limited picture of infectious disease experience with the transition to agriculture. This is because most diseases do not affect the bones and those that do tend to affect them in nonspecific ways. However, what evidence there is suggests that infectious disease generally increased when people made the shift from foraging to farming. We can see this pattern most clearly in the changing prevalence of two chronic infectious diseases that commonly affect the skeleton in distinctive and therefore identifiable ways: treponemal disease and tuberculosis (TB). Treponemal disease, a bacterial infection that affects the bones in some (reports vary from 1 to 50þ%) cases, tends to result in periosteal lesions of the long bones (especially, the tibias; Figure 6) and destructive lesions of the cranial vault (caries sicca) and nasal region. TB, a mycobacterial infection, may stimulate periosteal lesions of visceral (internal) rib surfaces in pulmonary TB and tends to affect the vertebrae, hips, and knees with destructive lesions in the skeletal form of the disease (Figure 7). Though neither disease causes bone lesions in all or even most cases, knowledge of the likelihood of bone lesions in each disease can facilitate a more accurate estimation of morbidity levels in the population. Emerging studies of pathogen DNA will likely enhance our understanding of the impact of these diseases prehistorically. The history and antiquity of treponemal disease is best known from sites in North America, and primarily serves as a disease index in New World contexts. This is because its appearance and prevalence in the Old World to date is less well documented and understood. In North America, evidence for some form of the disease predates the transition to agriculture by several thousand years. However, most evidence derives from population samples postdating AD 1000.

Figure 6 Anterior bowing and disfiguration of the tibias due to chronic periosteal reaction in a case of treponemal disease.

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Figure 7 Destructive lesion of a lumbar vertebra in a probable case of skeletal tuberculosis.

The link in this increasing prevalence appears to be one of increased population density and sedentism, important demographic correlates of both agriculture and infectious disease. The earliest cases of tuberculosis have been found in the Old World at sites in the Mediterranean and North Africa, where the domestication of herd animals such as cattle, a well known carrier of the pathogen, may have brought people into contact with the disease as early as 8000–9000 years ago. Early on, it was probably not crowding and sedentism that led to infection, but rather proximity to animal reservoirs of the disease. In the New World, the earliest, well documented cases of tuberculosis occur in South America, where the initial mode of transmission remains unclear, although domesticated camelids in some Andean regions may later have served as a reservoir for tuberculosis initially introduced by humans. However, the greatest visibility of tuberculosis in the New World is very late in the prehistoric sequence, much of it postdating AD 1000. An opportunistic infection, tuberculosis differentially affects those with compromised health and tends to thrive in crowded living conditions. Its apparent association with agriculture, especially well documented in North America, again may reflect the health risks that tend to occur when people become sedentary, increase in number, and live in closer proximity to one another. Perhaps the most direct evidence for the impact of agriculture on infectious disease rates is the increase in dental caries rates noted above. The health consequences of dental disease are often underestimated due to modern perceptions of its minor impact on overall health relative to other diseases. However, in the absence of modern dental care, dental caries progresses from superficial tooth erosion to invasion of

the dentin, death of the tooth, abscessing, and eventual tooth loss. This process is painful, produces a foul odor, and can be dangerous. The proximity of the teeth to major blood vessels connecting to the heart and brain means that bacteria can more readily be transmitted to these organs than from most other regions of the body. Once dental disease sets in, the pain and fragility of diseased teeth also limits a person’s diet to foods that require less chewing. When the teeth are gone, the diet is further restricted to foods such as gruels that lack essential nutrients and that can act as a medium for bacterial growth. Thus, the increased tooth decay and loss commonly seen in agriculturalist samples, particularly in the Americas, was likely associated with a decline in nutrition that rendered people more susceptible to infectious pathogens. In this way, dental disease likely played an important role in the patterns of morbidity and mortality we see archaeologically with the agricultural transition.

Change in Workload with Agriculture One of the big questions concerning the transition from foraging to farming is how this transition impacted workload: did farming offer a relief from the constant quest for food or did it impose a heavier burden on those now responsible for its production? Answers to these questions lie in the study of the skeletal changes associated with mechanical stresses: degenerative joint disease and structural changes in bone morphology – an area of study known as biomechanics. Degenerative joint disease (osteoarthritis) refers to destructive changes of joint surfaces that primarily occur in response to mechanical stress and physical activity, although other contributing factors such as age, sex, and weight also play a role in the development and severity of joint damage. Biomechanics refers to the application of engineering principles to the study of living tissue; in other words, the functional properties of bone are understood in terms of the same loading modes that affect steel beams and other building materials (e.g., tension, compression, bending, sheer, torsion). These two indices account for the majority of studies focused on changes in workload with agriculture, although there is growing interest in a third method involving study of muscle attachment sites (musculoskeletal markers, or MSMs). Degenerative Joint Disease as an Indicator of Workload and Activity Patterns

Comparative studies of degenerative joint disease are more limited than other types of studies described above, but those available have generally documented a decline in osteoarthritis in both New and Old World settings with the transition to agriculture.

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In western Europe, for example, Mesolithic samples tend to show more osteoarthritis – particularly in the back and upper limbs – than Neolithic samples, suggesting that foragers experienced greater biomechanical stress than later farmers. In North America and particularly in the Southeast, where many of these studies have been conducted, osteoarthritis has been shown to decline in a number of joint surfaces with this economic transition. In Alabama and the Georgia Bight, declines are evident in the bones of the neck and lower back, the elbows, and knee joints. Within the Georgia Bight, the skeletal remains of upland agriculturalists show more osteoarthritis than those of lowland agriculturalists, suggesting that topography influenced workload, and thus the mechanical stresses placed on the joints of agriculturalists living in this region. Several studies from the American Southeast also document a shift to greater sexual dimorphism in the severity and patterning of osteoarthritis with the transition to agriculture, as well as a tendency for males to be more affected than females. These data imply that, although workload or at least mechanical loading of joints may have declined overall, the sexual division of labor became more pronounced with food production. There are exceptions to this pattern of decline in osteoarthritis, however. In Portugal, Mesolithic foragers show few signs of osteoarthritis, whereas several severe cases are present in a sample of Neolithic farmers, particularly in the bones of the neck – perhaps from carrying heavy loads on the head. At the Dickson Mounds site in Illinois, degenerative joint disease (DJD) increased in the vertebras with agricultural intensification in comparison to earlier agriculturalists, indicating that changes in the intensity of production could result in rising prevalence of osteoarthritis. These cases once again illustrate the variability that exists in samples classified as agriculturalists. Biomechanical Measures of Workload and Activity Patterns

Studies of biomechanical properties of long bones provide an independent means of assessing workload and activity patterns, and have often been used in conjunction with patterns of osteoarthritis. Crosssectional geometry is arguably the most accurate method for identifying activity-based changes from bone morphology, although external measurements have also produced useful results. In cross-sectional geometry, cross-sectional data on bone mass and distribution relative to the long axis of a bone are obtained from computed tomography images or actual cross sections of bone. These measurements provide insights into mechanical loading of bones and therefore types and levels of physical activity. Much

of the data currently available derive from studies of North American samples, and indicate that bone mass and distribution differed between prehistoric foragers and farmers, but not always in predictable ways. In Georgia Bight populations, for example, the transition to agriculture was accompanied by a decline in bone strength (and thus, mechanical loading), whereas in northwestern Alabama bone strength increased with agriculture. Emerging research on European populations has documented a decline in bending and torsional strength of femurs and tibias with the Neolithic transition, a pattern consistent with many American agriculturalist samples and one supporting archaeological evidence that mobility declined with the transition to agriculture. Studies of cross-sectional geometry in North American samples also indicate that men and women did not always experience this economic transition equally in terms of workload. Male foragers, for example, tend to have greater torsional strength of the femur midshaft (larger midshaft diameters) than male agriculturalists, whereas females show no consistent difference according to subsistence strategy. These data suggest that the decline in mobility evident with food production is particularly reflective of changes in the activities of men. Women, on the other hand, tend to have structural properties that correlate with ruggedness of the local terrain, supporting the hypothesis that women in both contexts were more tethered to the home base and domestic tasks performed there. The humeri of agriculturalists also show sex differences in structural properties that appear to reflect distinct gender roles. Samples from prehistoric Alabama and Georgia Bight populations generally show a decline in left/right asymmetry with agriculture, but this pattern is particularly evident for females. One likely explanation is an increasing emphasis on two-handed tasks such as maize pounding and grinding that were habitually performed by women. These examples document the variable impacts that the transition to agricultural production could have on different members of the same society. They illustrate another aspect of the complexity that emerges when attempts are made to characterize the biological impacts of agriculture in a broad comparative manner.

Conclusion There is a large and growing body of literature on the biological impacts of economic transitions, although many world regions have yet to be explored in this way. As studies accumulate, it becomes increasingly possible through more inclusive intra- and interregional comparisons to refine our understanding of the causal mechanisms behind observed changes in

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diet, health, and workload. These causal mechanisms are not always the same or as straightforward as originally envisioned, but with a greater knowledge of the variability that characterized the agricultural transition comes a better understanding of how the physical and social environment can influence human biology and a greater appreciation of the human capacity for biocultural adaptation in an ever-changing world. See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Animal Domestication; Health, Healing, and Disease; Paleodemography; Paleopathology; Plant Domestication; Stable Isotope Analysis; Trace Element Analysis.

Further Reading Buikstra JE (1994) Diet and disease in late prehistory. In: Verano JW and Ubelaker DH (eds.) Disease and Demography in the Americas. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cohen MN and Armelagos GJ (eds.) (1984) Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. Orlando: Academic Press.

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Cohen MN and Kramer GC (eds.) (2007) Ancient Health: Skeletal Indicators of Agricultural and Economic Intensification. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Eshed V, Gopher A, and Hershkovitz I (2006) Tooth wear and dental pathology at the advent of agriculture: New evidence from the Levant. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 130: 145–159. Lambert PM (ed.) (2000) Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture: A View from the Southeast. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Larsen CS (1997) Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCaa R (2002) Paleodemography of the Americas: From ancient times to colonialism and beyond. In: Steckel RH and Rose JC (eds.) The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, pp. 94–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powell ML and Cook DC (2005) The Myth of Syphilis: The Natural History of Treponematosis in North America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Roberts CA and Buikstra JE (2003) The Bioarchaeology of Tuberculosis: A Global View on a Reemerging Disease. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Wood JW, Milner GR, Harpending HC, and Weiss KM (1992) The osteological paradox: Problems of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples. Current Anthropology 33: 343–370.

See: Plant Domestication.

Social Consequences Brain D Hayden, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary aggrandizers People who excessively promote their own self-interests over the interests of other community members, thereby attempting to acquire more power, wealth, and privilege than others. chiefdoms Political organizations in which one central authority (the chief) in a dominant community exerts political control over other authorities and communities in a hierarchical fashion. Hereditary social and economic classes typify chiefdoms although they sometimes also occur in transegalitarian societies without political hierarchies. complex hunter-gatherers Societies that generally can extract resources via hunting, fishing, and gathering wild foods in enough abundance to establish higher population densities, greater sedentism, surpluses, private ownership of resources and prestige items, and social and economic inequalities. complexity Fundamentally refers to levels of political and socioeconomic specialization and differentiation that occur

to varying degrees beyond ‘egalitarian’ societies. Typically, the magnitude of socioeconomic inequalities, centralization of political power, and craft specialization indicate levels of complexity. Complexity does not refer to relative elaboration of linguistic, kinship, or artistic products. corporate groups Groups of people (often related) who identify themselves as a social entity persisting over time and who share rights and responsibilities in the control of resources and relationships with other groups, for example, a landowning descent group. egalitarian societies Societies in which basic access to resources and produce is shared and in which no family is subject to hierarchical control from another family, although individuals may exhibit hierarchical relationships in terms of age, sex, marriage rights, or ritual knowledge. heterarchies Sociopolitical organizations in which multiple social groups (often corporate groups) share equally in the exercise of power within a community, in contrast to hierarchical organizations where there is a single center of power that dominates. prestige items Items that function primarily to achieve social or political goals. In contrast to practical items, prestige items often have no practical function and involve excessive costs in their manufacture or procurement. secret societies Voluntary ritual societies that typically involve the most powerful or ambitious members of a community who claim to protect the community’s supernatural

124 AGRICULTURE/Social Consequences interests. Various supernatural secrets are divulged to members as they progress from lower to higher ranks with ever-increasing costs of taking on new ranks. sedentism A relatively permanent year-round residence, in contrast to mobile settlements that move from place to place over the course of a year. More appropriately, one should refer to relative degrees of sedentism or residential mobility. transegalitarian societies Societies that are between true egalitarian societies and the stratified societies characteristic of chiefdoms and states. Transegalitarian societies exhibit private ownership, significant socioeconomic inequalities, although these are often not hereditary, prestige items, and surplus production. These societies can be based on hunting and gathering wild foods, fishing, trading, horticulture, or herding.

Neolithic societies ... must also be defined by their social values based around sedentary existence, the acquisition and storage of produce and goods, close kin groups and descent from ancestors, and a symbolic division of the world into constituent and often opposing parts. (Whittle 1994:136–137)

Even at the time of Alisdair Whittle’s synthesis, there were strong dissenting opinions about the underlying essence of the Neolithic as is clearly evident in the chapters in the same volume that preceded his (see Europe: Neolithic). In these chapters, Stephen Mithen documents the development of sedentism, storage, and cemeteries (therefore the importance of corporate kin groups and ancestors) in the Mesolithic. Similarly, Paul Mellars compares Upper Palaeolithic population densities in southwest France to later agricultural population densities, while Olga Soffer has shown that large-scale storage of food really begins in the Upper Palaeolithic. In addition, Nicholas Cauwe has argued that Neolithic burial practices can be traced back to the Mesolithic and even the Palaeolithic, while Andre´ Leroi-Gourhan long ago established a very strong case for the symbolic division of the Upper Palaeolithic symbolic world into constituent and often opposing parts. Moreover, Whittle’s subsequent claim that Neolithic myths became somehow more complex is difficult to assess, much less substantiate, especially given the complex symbolism that characterized the Upper Palaeolithic in southwestern Europe. I wish to argue that population levels, sedentism, storage, permanent architecture, pronounced socioeconomic inequalities, ancestor worship, corporate social groups, complex myths and symbols all typify complex hunter-gatherers well before the Neolithic. They are not new elements introduced with the Neolithic, and they cannot be used to distinguish or define the Neolithic. A major division persists in the discipline of archaeology between researchers like Whittle (Ian Hodder, Richard Bradley, Julian Thomas),

who view the Neolithic as a fundamental change in cognition that created changes in other domains of culture (notably in the economic, social, and political domains), versus those researchers like Mellars and the author who view the Neolithic as essentially a continuation of complex hunter-gatherer technology, values, practices, and social structures with the eventual addition of more intensified means of production such as domesticated animals and plants which eventually made even more complex types of organization and ideology possible. The question arises that if these social and ideological aspects were well established in the Mesolithic or even the Upper Palaeolithic, how could they represent a ‘new ‘cognitive revolution that could have created the Neolithic? Obviously, how the Neolithic is defined results from the outlook one adopts. From the author’s perspective, the cognitive revolution as a cause for, and core of, the Neolithic has serious shortcomings. The more traditional (and generally accepted) view is that the Neolithic was essentially a technological (domestication) phenomenon that brought about other changes in culture and created the first complex cultures. Yet, as we shall see, this view is not quite accurate either.

Cultivation, Food Production, and Domestication A key issue is determining precisely when ‘cultivation’ and ‘domestication’ actually began. There is considerable uncertainty concerning when both cultivation and domestication began as well as what the economic impact that these practices had during the initial 1000–2000 years after they appeared. As David Harris argued over 15 years ago, the distinction between these two concepts is important. ‘Domestication’ involves some genetic changes from wild forms (e.g., the larger sizes of grains and changes in their dispersal structures). These changes can be readily observed in archaeological botanical remains (see Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication). The archaeological occurrence of domesticated forms clearly implies that some form of cultivation or planting existed as well as the selective use of seeds for planting (or animals for breeding). However, a number of palaeoethnobotanists now suggest that prior to the appearance of domesticated forms, many complex hunter-gatherers were involved in forms of cultivation that did not result in the creation of domesticated forms. That is, complex huntergatherers were tilling the soil and planting crops just as later groups practiced, but without seed selection

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which could result in detectable genetic changes. Similarly, as we shall see later, complex hunter-gatherers frequently raised wild animals for pets or for ritual feasts without breeding them or changing their genetic characteristics. Unfortunately, cultivation or other intensified food production practices are much more difficult to establish for prehistoric communities when there is a lack of indication for domestication. However, clues sometimes do exist such as the occurrence of species at sites outside their normal ranges, the occurrence of weed species typical of cultivated fields, types of sickle gloss that indicate disturbed earth (as in prepared fields), construction of terraces or simple irrigation or drainage features, changes in the species of animals exploited as well as emphasis on certain ages and on males, erosion patterns on animal teeth from bits, settlement pattern shifts to areas of prime farmland, as well as higher population densities and greater sedentism. These characteristics all seem to indicate the likelihood that food production and cultivation, and perhaps animal rearing, may have been taking place for centuries or millennia before the first definite indications of domestication. Nevertheless, the occurrence of domesticated forms has been the defining hallmark of the Neolithic since V. Gordon Childe first proposed this definition in 1953. ‘Food production’ is another term often used in discussing or defining Neolithic societies. It is frequently used as a synonym for ‘domestication’. However, it would probably be more logical to view cultivation (without domesticated forms) as a type of food production as well. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this section, ‘food production’ is used in its more usual sense, as implying the use of domesticated species. Palaeoethnobotanists have increasingly entertained concepts and interpretations of pre-Neolithic cultivation and animal rearing (without any genetic morphological changes in species) documented back to 13 200 BP and even suggested that these practices may extend centuries or milleniums further back in the Near East. Such views correspond well to what is known about cultivation and animal-rearing practices (without domestication) of ethnographic complex hunter-gatherers which can be viewed as similar to the complex hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic in Eurasia. In Japan and Siberia, the Ainu and other complex hunter-gatherers captured bear cubs and raised them for a year before sacrificing and consuming them at their winter bear feasts. Evidence for bears being held in captivity has also emerged from the European Mesolithic, while in the Near East, bulls appear to have been held in captivity before

domestication (presumably for feasts, as in Japan). Similarly, even among simple horticulturalists in the Amazon basin, Warren DeBoer reports that wild peccaries and tapirs are captured, kept, and fattened for feasts. The Lillooet complex hunter-gatherers of the northwest interior captured and kept birds, foxes, marmots, and bears as pets. On the Northwest coast of North America, groups of complex hunter-gatherers constructed terraced gardens in which they grew clover and cinquefoil roots for feasts. The gardens were owned, guarded, and tended using all the techniques of later horticulturalists without resulting, as far as we know, in genetically modified ‘domesticated’ plant varieties. The same techniques were used by complex huntergatherers of the Northwest interior, resulting in larger sizes of roots due largely to the reduction of soil compaction, weeding out of plant competitors, and spacing plants for more optimal growth. No genetic changes have been established as the result of these practices even though the techniques used may go back thousands of years. Similarly, no genetic changes resulted from the capturing and raising of bears in Japan or Siberia, even though these practices probably extend thousands of years back into the prehistory of Asia. But even after the first genetically modified domesticated plants appear in the Near East and the New World, their role in the overall economy of early Neolithic communities appears to be almost inconsequential for the first 1000–2000 years in terms of the proportion of domesticated to wild plant and animal remains. In fact, some of the most widely recognized early ‘Neolithic’ communities in the Near East failed to produce any evidence of domesticated plant or animal use (e.g., Jerf el Ahmar, Asikli, Gobekli, and Nativ Hagdud). Similar patterns occur in the Japanese Jomon.

Complex Hunter-Gatherers Increasingly, it now appears that food production (with domesticates) was only one strategy among many intensification techniques that characterized complex hunter-gatherer and subsequent horticultural subsistence. To understand what social, political, and cultural changes actually took place as the result of food production and domestication, we must first develop a better understanding of the cultures that these developments emerged from. In the Near East, in Japan, and perhaps elsewhere, domestication developed among complex hunters and gatherers, notably the Natufian and Jomon cultures. However,

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the first well-documented complex hunter-gatherers to appear in the archaeological record lived in the periglacial savannahs of Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern Europe, about 35 000 years ago. These were exceptionally rich environments for hunting, unparalleled anywhere in the world for their biomasss and diversity. Upper Palaeolithic technology was well adapted to taking large numbers of animals. While these regions were too cold to support the domestication of plants, some archaeologists like Paul Bahn have argued that horses were probably tamed, bridled, and kept. However, with the disappearance of the southwestern European savannahs after the Ice Age, these savannah cultures collapsed and reverted to more simply organized societies with lower populations and minimal art or prestige items. Some people argue that the Upper Palaeolithic cultures migrated north and developed into the historic Saami reindeer hunters and herders. Elsewhere in the world, complex hunter-gatherers only began to appear with the advent of the Mesolithic, some 10 000–15 000 years ago when new technological developments rendered other environments highly productive. Some of these technological developments included the first systematic forms of fishing (using hooks, nets, and weirs) and the first effective use of grass seeds (procured and processed with grinding stones, sickles, and probably baskets). These and other similar technological developments opened up vast quantities of new resources in some environments, making it possible to establish economic, social, and ritual structures based on the production of dependable surpluses. Some of the most common types of environments where these complex forms of societies developed were riverine or coastal areas in which large quantities of fish could be procured, or areas like the Near East where large quantities of cereal grains could be harvested. The result was a more widespread emergence of complex types of hunter-gatherers than had previously existed (only in periglacial savannahs during the Upper Palaeolithic). These cultures are referred to as ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ to distinguish them from the simpler forms of hunter-gatherers that existed in the Middle and Lower Palaeolithic, and in some cases continued to exist in less productive environments up until contemporary times. Whether food producing or not, archaeological and ethnographic complex hunter-gatherers had a number of resource and social characteristics in common, including: . intensified techniques of food production and usually storage;

. a predictable production of surpluses; . recognition of private ownership of some resources and products (especially stored produce); . pronounced socioeconomic differences within communities (including hereditary elites and slavery, in the more developed cases; see Social Inequality, Development of); . heterarchical sociopolitical structures with inverted social pyramids; and . the rise to prominence of some aggrandizers using an array of strategies including transegalitarian types of feasting, wealth exchanges, use of wealth to obtain marriage partners for elite families (via bride-prices or dowries), investments of wealth in offspring, wealth-based alliances and conflicts, development of prestige items (for social and political transactions), and a wealth-based restriction of access to supernatural powers (often via secret societies). None of these traits appear to any significant degree among simpler hunter-gatherers. In fact, many of these traits are the complete antithesis of simple hunter-gatherer values and practices. Simple huntergatherers eschew any idea of social classes, slavery, economically based hierarchies, private ownership of essential resources, or wealth. Rather, they emphasize communal ownership and unrestricted access to essential food resources, sharing, egalitarian practices, and freedom of movement. Complex hunter-gatherers with the above social and material characteristics appear to have emerged before food production in key areas like the Near East, Japan, and Europe and to have continued their basic form of sociopolitical organizations fundamentally unchanged during the first several thousand years of the Neolithic. In fact, it can be argued that it was the competitive social and political forces in the early complex hunter-gatherer communities that provided the relentless driving force behind increasing surpluses via food production (with or without domesticates). In this respect, it will be especially useful to examine the role of prestige items and feasting in terms of the pressures that they created for intensifying production.

Feasting and Prestige Items How can surplus food production be used to anyone’s benefit? There are a number of possibilities, but two of the most important and recurring ethnographically documented strategies involve using surplus food to create prestige goods and to hold feasts, both of

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which are central features among almost all complex hunter-gatherers. In terms of prestige items, one can use surplus food to ‘pay’ or support other individuals to produce finely crafted items or to travel to distant places to procure exotic materials. Thus, obsidian, shells, beads, and exotic stone materials occur at many complex hunter-gatherer sites, even if they are hundreds of kilometers from the sources of raw materials. Among ethnographic transegalitarian societies, prestige items were used in five important ways, and we may expect that they were used in similar ways among prehistoric complex hunter-gatherers. The functions of prestige items included: 1. as a means to establish debts (due to the essentially reciprocal contracts involved in gift giving and the high investments entailed); 2. as a means of displaying economic and social success; 3. as a means of confirming, validating, or emphasizing the value of important social transactions (especially marriages, alliances, the taking of important positions, and peacemaking); 4. as a means to convert surplus food into other desirable materials (wealth) or relationships; and 5. as a substitute for human life (payments for brides or as compensations for injuries or deaths in lieu of revenge killings or the reciprocal transfer of children in marriages). The traditional models of cultural complexity and technological advances (as reflected in the opening quotation of this article) consider features such as sedentism, monumental architecture, pottery, metal use, calendars, record-keeping, slavery, and various forms of wealth as the result of the domestication of plants, animals, and agriculture. However, it is evident from both ethnographic and archaeological remains that all of these features actually occur first among complex hunter-gatherers and are related to the development of the kinds of prestige economies discussed above. Thus, most of the major technological and social changes usually considered as resulting from domestication are clearly not the result of domestication but stem from much more fundamental transformations that begin in complex hunter-gatherer societies and also continue into agricultural societies, becoming even more developed in the most productive agricultural contexts. Because of the advantages conferred by prestige items for the five purposes mentioned above, there should have been significant pressures within complex hunter-gatherer societies to increase food production

in order to produce or acquire prestige items on an ever-increasing scale. Once surplus production became the basis for acquiring mates, military allies, and decision-making power, people must have begun to compete in order to see who could produce the most surpluses. And this appears to be a new cultural phenomenon beginning with the appearance of complex hunter-gatherers. However, aside from increasing surpluses in order to produce more prestige items, an even more effective way of using surplus food was in feasts. In fact, the most valued foods used in feasts can be considered prestige items. It is no coincidence that the usual context in which almost all types of prestige items were displayed was in feasts, often as gifts creating debts. Feasts were used for a wide variety of purposes, including all of the purposes prestige items were used for (see Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects). Above all, feasts constituted extremely effective means of converting surplus food production into other desired materials or relationships (whether debts or alliances). The ability of individuals to marry and reproduce, survive hostile attacks, and defend their own interests in the community depended, to a large degree, on the successful cultivation of support networks within and between communities. The production of surpluses for feasting was the most important means of creating these networks, and it is not surprising that considerable competition among support groups (usually loosely kin-based) and communities characterized a great deal of feasting. People tried to outdo competing groups in terms of the size and lavishness of feasts in order to obtain the best marriage partners, the most wealth, the most influence in decisions or disputes in villages, and the best military assistance. There are repeated references in the ethnographic literature of complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists to the effect that the most powerful forces that intensified production were not periodic food shortages, but the social and political competition between factions and communities over desirable marriages, alliances, and decisionmaking roles. Because surplus production and the control of the most productive resource sites (whether fishing sites, patches of fertile land, or hunting locations) conferred so many advantages for people in complex huntergatherer societies, it is to be expected that these sites would have been owned or controlled by the most ambitious families and that these rights would have been passed down from generation to generation. In this context, ancestor worship and the establishment

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of corporate kin groups would be very advantageous. Not surprisingly, ownership of resource sites and the importance of ancestors characterize most ethnographic complex hunter-gatherers, whether on the Northwest coast or elsewhere. Thus, the type of religious, social, and mythological structures that are often thought to characterize food-producing Neolithic societies (strongly centered on ancestor worship and corporate kin totems) occur among complex hunter-gatherers and probably appeared well before domestication. In sum, complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists share many important basic characteristics. While it is not possible to discuss all of these in detail in this short section, some of the most salient features include similar or overlapping population densities, settlement sizes, levels of sedentism, technologies, use of prestige items, types of feasts, socioeconomic inequalities, secret societies, human sacrifice and slavery, ancestor worship, corporate kinship groups, cemeteries, and a heterarchical type of sociopolitical organization. The only aspects that seem to distinguish simple horticultural societies from complex hunter-gatherers are the techniques that they use to intensify production: some groups include cultivation and domestication among the array of intensification techniques used, others such as fishing or reindeer-herding societies do not. Thus, at a general level, we may refer to both complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists as a single type of society. The term ‘transegalitarian societies’ is used herein. Transegalitarian societies exhibit the characteristics listed as well as the previously discussed features of prestige items. Most pastoral nomad societies also fit the characteristics of transegalitarian societies, although their economic base is different from both complex hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists.

The Real Consequences of Food Production If most of the social and technological changes typically viewed as the outcome of food production and domestication really began earlier in Mesolithic or complex hunter-gatherer contexts, then what were the real consequences of food production and domestication? It could be argued that for the first millenium or two after the appearance of domestication, there are not any fundamental changes. At most, there may be some intensification of production (with initial domesticated forms) and elaboration of social, ritual, political, and technological trends

begun in Mesolithic types of societies as well as shifts in settlement patterns to take advantage of the best food-producing areas. However, over the long term, it was possible to gradually modify and increase the productivity of plants and animals through genetic manipulation and labor investment (weeding, tilling, watering, fertilizing, mulching). In this fashion, food production using domesticates eventually provided the potential of expanding the resource base in an elastic fashion (almost without ultimate upper limits) that other forms of intensified collection of wild foods did not. Certainly, fishing and the production of nonfood prestige items could not be modified in this fashion. Thus, the immediate social consequences of food production (using domesticates, especially for occasional feasts) may not have changed the basic way of life from that of complex hunter-gatherers to any significant extent. However, ultimately, with refinements in the genetic productivity of crops, food production made it possible to support denser populations, larger communities, greater surpluses, and more complex sociopolitical systems.

The Near Eastern Example More archaeological and biological research devoted to the study of early domestication has been conducted in the Near East than anywhere else in the world (see Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant). Although far from complete, the sequences and conditions pertaining to initial domestication in the Near East are the best that are currently available. Thus, it is worth examining the archaeology of this area to illustrate some of the points presented in the preceding section. While there are a few indications of special burials and prestige items in the Upper Paleolithic sites of the Near East, it is not until the Mesolithic Natufian cultures that very clear indications of complex hunter-gatherers emerge in the area. The Natufian culture emerged about 13 000 years ago and lasted until 10 500 years ago. It exhibited a wide range of complex hunter-gatherer characteristics, including: . settlements in unusually rich environments encompassing ‘‘endless vistas’’ of ‘‘vast supplies’’ with 250 riparian and other plant food species, and ‘‘meat in whatever amounts were needed’’ (Hillman 2000, 366, 370–371, 384; Moore et al., 2000, 480); . relatively high population densities; . large settlements of several hundred people; . permanent architecture and indications of high levels of sedentism;

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. many prestige objects including shells, carved basalt objects, obsidian, raptor bird wings and claws, and other exotic stone materials (some transported over hundreds of kilometers); . corporate kin groups and burial areas; . heterarchical organization; . socioeconomic inequalities; and . elaborate feasting. Settlements in the ‘core’ Natufian area constitute some of the best examples of transegalitarian hunter-gatherers that have been archaeologically documented. It is especially significant that there are good indications of relatively large-scale feasting by corporate kin groups (especially in funeral contexts), and considerable sociopolitical competition, all before any significant occurrence of domestication. On the other hand, several authors have argued that cultivation (without domestication) and the ownership of prime cultivation plots probably characterized these Natufian communities. The Natufian cultures develop into Pre-Pottery Neolithic A cultures with more substantial plastered architecture but no perceptible change in practical technological tools. Unfortunately, there are no plant remains from this period to assess the status of domestication in these societies. In the succeeding (and derivative) early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) sites (from 10 500 to 8500 years ago), domestication is clearly attested in many sites. However, domesticates were of only very minor significance in most of these early PPNB sites and appear to be completely absent from some of them (Gobekli, Jerf el-Ahmar, Asikli, Nativ Hagdud). By the end of the PPNB, domesticated goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle appear at many sites. Clearly they were being kept, herded, and bred by this time, and we might expect that the raising of wild animals (arguably for feasting) predated their domestication by several centuries, if not more. The change in settlement patterns, at or before this time, to site locations associated with fertile soils suitable for growing crops is a strong indication that some cultivation was taking place and that the products were of considerable importance, at least in terms of their values if not in terms of the quantities of food produced. The basic PPNB economy appears to have been similar to earlier complex hunter-gatherer subsistence regimes, emphasizing intensified techniques for collecting plants, including, in some cases, their cultivation. These aspects are consonant with interpretations mentioned previously concerning surplus production and the role of feasting, prestige economies, and competition between aggrandizers or corporate kin groups.

By the end of the PPNB, there was a veritable explosion of sites together with a major increase in the importance of domesticated plant forms in the subsistence economy. I suggest that genetic selection of the previous centuries and millenniums culminated at this time in new varieties that were much more productive than their wild counterparts. As a result, growing domesticated crops could finally compete with (or outcompete) the gathering of wild foods in terms of returns for effort invested. Thus, domesticates began to be grown as the major staples, since they provided the greatest return, whereas previously they were more labor intensive to produce and thus used only for special occasions like feasts. The increased productivity of domesticated varieties eventually provided a decisive turning point in making possible larger political organizations and more complex societies. The major forces of change had been established in the Mesolithic, and the development of genetically modified cultivation and breeding varieties whose productivity could be ever increased, provided the means to catapult social and political complexity to new levels. With each increase in social and political complexity, a concomitant but geometrical increase in surplus production was required to fund the ever-augmenting needs of the political apparatus which continued to be based on feasting, prestige items, and status. At first, few important changes occurred in the Near East, even after the adoption of domesticates which probably only provided marginally better returns than wild resources. At this time, the pottery-using Hassunan culture (5800–5000 BC) emerged in the north Mesopotamian Plain in the Baghdad region. Evidence for domestication comes from the charred remains of several basic plants which may have become staples such as barley, einkorn and emmer wheat, linseed, as well as goats and sheep (probably always used for feasts). Hassunan settlements were restricted to areas where dry farming could be practiced, although some evidence of very simple irrigation occurs at a few sites. As with the preceding PPNB and Natufian cultures, there were significant prestige objects. At Hassunan sites, these included jewelry of turquoise and shells, the earliest true seals, and quantities of obsidian. However, there were no pronounced differences in house sizes or grave goods in the communities or any significant monumental architecture such as fortifications or large temples. All these characteristics fit the models of transegalitarian horticultural societies at their simple or intermediate levels (despot or reciprocator forms) with no fixed leadership, monumental architecture, or entrenched stable economic inequalities. In terms

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of general levels of complexity and organization, they might be compared to traditional communities in New Guinea or the Amazon. The following Halaf culture (5000–4300 BC) provides a number of significant indications of increasing complexity, albeit still in the realm of transegalitarian types of cultures, perhaps at the more complex, entrepreneur level. The subsistence base does not seem to change dramatically, although one might expect some genetic improvements in crop yields over time. What clearly does change is the quantity and diversity of prestige items as well as the appearance of monumental architecture. The prestige items take the form of increased amounts of jewelry, obsidian, seals, stone bowls, as well as the appearance of native copper jewelry, and fine pottery manufactured by full-time specialists. Monumental architecture occurs in the form of rock-cut fortification ditches and apparent ritual structures (tholloi) up to 6 m in diameter. Fortifications might be expected to reflect an increase in conflict and competition due to the increased production of surpluses, wealth items, trade, and the advantages to be gleaned from controlling such commodities. However, it was not until the succeeding Ubaid period (4300–3500 BC) that the first good indications of socially and politically stratified societies appeared in favorable locations, especially where this culture spread into the south. Wherever water could be brought to the soils of the southern plains, the land was transformed into the most productive among any in Western Asia. These areas are composed of fertile silts laid down by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, much in the way that the Nile annually deposited fertile silts in its lower reaches. In lower Mesopotamia, when combined with irrigation technology and crops capable of high yields, unparalleled surpluses could be produced. These conditions produced chiefdoms that rapidly developed into the first civilizations of the Old World, the Sumerians. Indications of chiefdoms can be detected during the Ubaid period in terms of the enhanced prestige items (including the first true smelted copper items with axes as well as jewelry), substantial use of irrigation (although still at a basic technological level), much more significant monumental standing architecture (at Tepe Gawra, 20 buildings surround a central sanctuary and courtyard 20 m on a side), rich burials for some families in plastered tombs, numerous seals, and sites up to 25 ac in size. In neighboring Khuzistan, separate clusters of sites occur, each containing a somewhat larger central site indicating the existence of separate polities (each displaying a political hierarchy such as typifies chiefdoms). This is a pattern that became much more

pronounced at the end of the period and became much more elaborated in the Sumerian period with the formation of city-states. With the move into the very productive niche of the lower floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, surpluses based on domesticated food production rapidly escalated and cultural changes occurred so fast that that some scholars even question whether a chiefdom phase of development really preceded state formation in Mesopotamia. In the author’s opinion, this is an extreme and unwarranted interpretation of the archaeological record. Whether one wishes to term the aggrandizers who were pushing their selfinterested proposals for changes, ‘big men’, ‘great men’, ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘chiefs’, or some other epithets, is irrelevant to the argument that it was these individuals who were responsible for creating the cultural changes that emerged before, during, and after food production based on domesticates. These individuals created the strategies that took advantage of surplus production and created the intense pressures for ever more intensified surplus production. It seems clear that over the millenniums, food production based on domestication did eventually create a much more productive subsistence base than food production based on wild species could ever achieve. When combined with favorable environments and technology, domesticates made it possible to produce food surpluses on a scale unprecedented among complex hunter-gatherers. These food surpluses in turn could be used to produce ever more prestige goods, sponsor ever more lavish feasts, and support ever greater political complexity. The upshot was the creation of the first state-level polities: the Sumerian city-states that Samuel Noah Kramer has likened so eloquently to contemporary industrial societies. While it may be true that Sumerian states provide our first glimpse of modern types of societies replete with high degrees of social and economic complexity, specialization, writing, law codes, commerce, and social ills, at a more basic level, the values and practices that laid the foundation for these kinds of features really appeared first among complex huntergatherers. It was domestication that permitted the full development of the potential of this new type of culture. However, the basic logic of private ownership, surplus production, investment, and use of prestige goods, has not changed since complex hunter-gatherers first pioneered these developments. As we emerge today from the industrial period and enter a new nuclear/cybernetic period, we have yet to realize the full potential of the type of cultural and ecological system that began with complex huntergatherers. The forms of surplus energy that we

AGRICULTURE/Social Consequences 131

now use have expanded from food production to combustible fuels, wind, water, solar, and nuclear fuels, but the fundamental strategy of producing surplus energy and devising strategies to convert that energy into desirable commodities and relationships has not changed. Today, it is impossible for growth and change to continue at the present pace. Our cultures must create a more stable equilibrium in the coming centuries. Exactly what form culture will take at that future time is difficult to predict, but it will ultimately owe its existence to the expanded production of surplus energy that domestication initially made possible. The increase in the level of complexity beyond transegalitarian communities is the real legacy of food production and domestication. It opened a Pandora’s box of productive potential that continuously stretched the system established by complex hunter-gatherers to ever more complex limits. We are still expanding that same basic system and its limits in our own society. It is worth reflecting on the pervasive role prestige goods play in our own social system today and how this system will develop in the foreseeable future. The author’s argument here is that in the last 30 000 years, especially the last 10 000 years, we have created a new type of ecological system without parallel in the natural world around us. There is no other species that can readily convert available surplus production into other survival and reproductive benefits. Other species may be able to adapt genetically in order to convert extra resources into bodily appendages or displays that confer selective advantages, but none can convert extra resources to benefit themselves in an immediate fashion. Only humans can do this. See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers; Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Mesolithic Cultures; Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Akkad; Europe: Neolithic; Europe, Northern and Western: Mesolithic Cultures; Food and Feasting, Social and

Political Aspects; Paleoethnobotany; Plant Domestication; Social Inequality, Development of.

Further Reading Deur D (2002) Rethinking precolonial plant cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. The Professional Geographer 54: 140–157. Deur D (ed.) (2005) Keeping It Living. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hayden B (1995) Pathways to power. In: Price T and Feinman G (eds.) Foundations of Social Inequality, pp. 15–86. New York: Plenum. Hayden B (1998) Practical and prestige technologies. Journal of Archoeological Method and Theory 5: 1–55. Hayden B (2001) Richman, poorman, beggarman, chief: The dynamics of social inequality. In: Feinman G and Price T (eds.) Archaeology at the Millenium, pp. 231–272. New York: Kluwer/ Plenum. Hayden B (2004) Sociopolitical organization in the Natufian: A view from the Northwest. In: Delage C (ed.) BAR International Series: The Last Hunter-Gatherers in the Near East, pp. 263–308. Oxford: Archaeopress. Hayden B (2007) Une societe hierarchique ou egalitaire? In: Beaure S de (ed.) La vie quotidienne au Paleolithique Superieure, pp. 197–208. Paris: Editions CNRS. Hillman G (2000) The plant food economy of Abu Hureyra 1 and 2. In: Moore A, Hillman G, and Legge A (eds.) Village on the Euphrates, pp. 327–398. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore A, Hillman G, and Legge A (2000) The significance of Abu Hureyra. In: Moore A, Hillman G, and Legge A (eds.) Village on the Euphrates, pp. 475–526. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacock S (1998) Putting Down Roots: The Emergence of Wild Plant Food Production on the Canadian Plateau. PhD Dissertation, University of Victoria. Peacock S (2002) Perusing the pits: The evidence for prehistoric geophyte processing on the Canadian Plateau. In: Mason S and Hather J (eds.) The Hunter-Gatherer Archaeobotany, pp. 45–63. London: Institute of Archaeology. Pringle H (1998) The slow birth of agriculture. Science 282: 1446–1450. Whittle A (1994) The first farmers. In: Cunliffe B (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe, pp. 136–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willcox G (1998) Archeobotanical evidence for the beginnings of agriculture in southwest Asia. In: Damania A, et al. (eds.) The Origins of Agriculture and Crop Domestication, pp. 25–38. Aleppo, Syria: ICARDA.

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AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN Contents The Greater Antilles and Bahamas The Lesser Antilles

The Greater Antilles and Bahamas Mary Jane Berman, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary anthropomorphism The attributing of human attributes to non-human beings or inanimate objects. archipelago A chain of islands. colonization The establishment of permanent settlements in a new area, a special form of migration in which migrant groups settle in previously uninhabited locales. hallucinogen A psychoactive substance that induces altered consciousness and sensory experiences. lipidary The cutting, shaping, polishing, and finishing of materials such as stone, mineral, and gemstones to produce functional or decorative items. migration The movement of people from one locale to another. rain shadow Dry region on the surface of the earth that is leeward or behind of a mountain with respect to the prevailing wind direction. raptorial Any of numerous carnivorous birds that hunt and kill other animals. shaman A religious practitioner who possesses the power to communicate with supernatural forces on behalf of individuals or groups to heal or malign them. zoomorphism The attributing of animal attributes to humans or inanimate objects.

Introduction Geography

Located in the northern Caribbean basin, the Greater Antilles (Figure 1) consists of the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The Bahamas archipelago consists of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos, BWI. Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, the Caribbean’s largest, oldest, most geologically complex, and most physiographically and environmentally diverse islands, are characterized by topographically varied landforms created by

metamorphic, volcanic, and sedimentary activity. In contrast, the Bahama archipelago is made up of a series of low-lying carbonate islands composed of Pleistocene and Holocene eolianite ridges and swales formed by sedimentary processes. Climatically, the area is characterized as the subtropics. The greatest amounts of precipitation fall June–November, coinciding with the hurricane season. Dry seasons occur February–March and in May. Precipitation varies greatly. More precipitation falls on the islands’ higher elevations and the northern and eastern sides; the southern and western sides, and the mountains’ leeward side receive less precipitation (rain shadow effect). In Hispaniola the mean rainfall varies between 1000 and 5000 mm, whereas in the Bahama archipelago mean rainfall ranges from 350 to 1250 mm. There is little annual change in mean air temperature. Diversity in vegetation is attributed to latitude, elevation, rainfall amounts and seasonality, topography, and edaphic conditions. There are 13 life zones ranging from tropical desert scrub to subtropical rainforest; the dry forest life zones dominate. Marine (beach, intertidal, reef, deep-water) environments support shellfish, fish, marine mammals, and turtles. Estuaries serve as marine fauna nursery grounds. Terrestrial environments support mammals, reptiles, invertebrates, and amphibians. Birds inhabit a variety of habitats. Time–Space Systematics

Caribbean archaeologists use different schemes to name, classify, and systematize the temporal, spatial, and cultural relationships of the prehistoric people they study. The most widely used system was conceived by Irving Rouse who created it to chart the migratory routes and culture histories of the people who colonized the Caribbean. In his system, prehistory is divided into periods; each period is characterized by archaeological cultures defined by lithic or ceramic assemblages grouped on the basis of shared traits (see Time and History, Divisions). In an assemblage, the most inclusive cultural unit is the series (designated by -oid), which is divided into a subseries (designated by -an). The minimal unit is the style, which represents a local expression of a subseries. The style is typically named for the first site in which it was

AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas 133 Florida Atlantic Ocean

N

Gulf of Mexico San Salvador Middle Caicos Grand Turk Cuba Hispaniola Belize

Jamaica

MESOAMERICA

Puerto Rico

Caribbean Sea

Trinidad

Venezuela 0

400 km

SOUTH AMERICA

Figure 1 Map of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas archipelago. Courtesy of Perry L. Gnivecki.

found and described. Critics believe the system simplifies and obfuscates the range and sources of cultural variation present in the archaeological record. Cuban archaeologists use an evolutionary scheme based on stages consistent with Marxist cultural materialism (see Marxist Archaeology). Chanlatte Baik has developed a system for Puerto Rico, while Dominican archaeologists employ one based on local sequences.

Period I: Peopling of the Caribbean Throughout prehistory, the peopling of the Caribbean was due to multiple migrations from more than one place and by people of varying ethnic and linguistic affiliations. The earliest evidence of human occupation of the Caribbean, which dates to 5500 BC, comes from the Banwari Trace site in southwestern Trinidad. These people, who entered the Antilles from mainland South America, are known as the Ortoiroid culture. They practiced what archaeologists call an Archaic subsistence economy characterized by fishing and gathering. They manufactured and used groundstone, shell, and flaked stone tools, and lived in small mobile or semi-sedentary communities. By 2500 BC, the Ortoiroid had made their way through the Lesser Antilles, bypassing some islands (see Americas, Caribbean: The Lesser Antilles) to Puerto Rico. At 4200 BC or thereabouts, Cuba was the first island of the Greater Antilles to be settled. The

colonizers, who are known as the Casimiroid peoples, settled in Cuba and then migrated to Hispaniola. These first settlers probably came from Belize in Central America, since there are similarities between stone tools found there and in Cuba that date to this time period. A computer simulation that employed wind and water currents and other variables important to maritime travel suggests though that these people may have come directly from South America. The Casimiroid people made tools that include large macroblades, core tools, scrapers, burins, and awls, anvils, and hammerstones. Their perishable technology, which likely constituted most of their material culture, has not been recovered. They lived in open-air sites and rock shelters and many of their sites appear to be workshops where they made stone tools. In Cuba, people occupied the coast and inland river valleys; rock shelter and open-air sites have been found in the Seboruco and Levisa River Valleys. The Levisa Rock Shelter (3190 BC) is one of the best studied sites from this time period. Sites on Hispaniola include the Vignier III site (3630 BC) in Haiti and the Barrera-Morda´n (2610–2165 BC), Casimira, Honduras del Oeste, and Tavera sites in the Dominican Republic. The Maruca and Angostura sites in Puerto Rico indicate that the island was settled around 4000–5000 BC. We know little about the subsistence practices of these people, other than they hunted terrestrial

134 AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas

species such as hutı´as (a Capromyid rodent), iguanas, and snakes. Although the people also collected shellfish, it did not constitute a large part of the diet and there is no evidence for fishing. In Cuba, overpredation resulted in the extinction of the giant sloth. Sites dating to this time period or attributed to this culture have not been found in Jamaica, or the Bahamas. By around 2000 BC to about 200 BC, the descendants of these people engaged in fishing, shellfish collecting, and plant gathering, and manufactured groundstone tools. Like their predecessors, they, too, lived in open-air sites and rock shelters. They probably also managed or tended fruit trees. Inter-island variation in material culture, settlement patterns, and dietary choices emerged. Such differences can be attributed to a combination of local cultural, environmental, and functional factors. In Cuba, sites dating to this time period are located along the coast and in the interior. These people manufactured distinctive Strombus gigas shell artifacts, including gouges, cups, and hammers; groundstone artifacts such as unique polished stone balls (spheroliths) and groundstone daggers, which served as burial accompaniments; polished ovoid stones, corazones, which have not been reported elsewhere in the Caribbean (Figure 2); stone rings, wooden objects, and pendants. They made blade tools, which

Figure 2 Heartstones (corazones). Cuba. Stone. 12.5 cm (white), 12.3 cm (yellow). Collection of the Montane´ Anthropological Museum, University of Havana. Photograph by Kristine Edle Olsen.

were smaller and of poorer technical quality than those from the earlier period and flake tools eventually replaced them. Microlith tools have been found at a few sites. Complex, abstract, highly imaginative, geometric pictographs occur at the Punta del Este caves located on the Isla de la Juventud. Other important sites include Cayo Redondo and Cueva Funche (2050 BC); later occupations of the Levisa rockshelter, and burial sites from caves and open-air sites such as Cueva de El Purial (1110 BC) and Canı´mar Abajo (2750 BC). In western Cuba, people practicing an Archaic economy were not supplanted by later ceramic-making groups as they were elsewhere on the island; these communities persisted until the fifteenth century or later. Sites in Haiti (2660 BC– AD 240) and the Dominican Republic (2030 BC–AD 145) are located in river valleys and coastal areas. Here the people hunted sloths, manatees, crocodiles, sea turtles, and whales, and collected shellfish. They made large stemmed spearheads, backed blades, and end scrapers, which they used to hunt these animals. It is believed that they are responsible for the local extinction of the sloth. They also made and used a wide array of groundstone tools including conical pestles, single- and double-bitted axes, rectangular hammer grinders, balls, hook-, fan-, and pegshaped objects, metates, mortars, incised bowls, and body adornments such as beads, and pendants. The people gathered or casually cultivated plants and fruit trees. Dried Zamia sp. leaves, Clusea rosea seeds, palm nuts, and maize pollen have been identified from sites in the Dominican Republic. There is considerable regional diversity in the material culture from Puerto Rico during this time period and it resembles both Casimiroid and Ortoiroid cultural traditions. Some archaeologists have attributed this variation to the presence of culturally distinct peoples, differences in site function, or varying raw material properties and availability. The people were mobile fisher-foragers who lived in small, open-air sites or rock shelters. A few larger communities may have been semi-sedentary. Settlements are located in coastal settings adjacent to mangrove swamps. The people engaged in low-level or casual root, seed, and tree crop cultivation and management. Food remains such as avocado and yellow sapote have been found at the Marı´a de la Cruz site. At Maruca and Puerto Ferro, starch grain analysis of groundstone artifacts has revealed evidence for domesticated maize, manioc, beans, sweet potato, and yautı´a (cocoyam). There is support from the Maisabel site that these people burned the landscape to create horticultural plots or regenerate natural areas with wild plants. Animal foods included shallowwater mollusks, marine fish, land crabs, and minor amounts of reptiles, turtles, and birds. The diet varied

AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas 135

by locale. Terrestrial resources seem to have been favored at rock shelter sites such as Cueva Tembladera and Cueva Gemelos, while the occupants of coastal, open-air sites such as Maruca and Cayo Cofresı´ emphasized foods from marine or littoral sources. The people manufactured flake tools and groundstone tools that included small mortars, and conical manos, which are highly diagnostic of this time period. Use-modified stone tools include edge grinders, manos, and discoid nutting stones. At Maruca, some of the chert used to make the flaked stone tools has been sourced to Long Island (Antigua) (see Americas, Caribbean: The Lesser Antilles) and there is evidence from other sites of stone materials from other islands. The people also made tools from Strombus gigas such as celts, gouges, and picks that resembled those from Cuba. They also manufactured shell and bone points, net weights, and carved and drilled shell ornaments. Sites in eastern Cuba [e.g., Caimanes III (AD 200), Belliza], eastern Dominican Republic [Punta Cana (340 BC–AD 830), Honduras del Oeste and el Barrio (230 BC–AD 420), and el Caimito (305 BC–AD 120)], and throughout Puerto Rico contain low densities of plain, small, low-fired ceramics that are globular and boat-shaped in form. Undecorated and decorated sherds (with incisions and punctation, mirroring designs found on stone bowls and wooden objects) have been found. It has been argued that people from the Middle Orinoco, coastal Columbia, or elsewhere in northern Latin America introduced pottery to these islands. Another argument claims that these people adopted ceramics from the Cedrosan Saladoid peoples who settled eastern Dominican Republic (see below). Some archaeologists propose that these people ‘borrowed’ and incorporated ceramic technology from neighboring societies or other areas in the circum-Caribbean. It has also been suggested that ceramics evolved independently of external causes.

Period II: Early Ceramic Age Around 500 BC, new groups of people entered the Caribbean from the Orinoco and other river basins of Venezuela and Guiana. These ceramic-making and -using, full-time sedentary horticulturalists are known as the Saladoid. It is believed these people came from the Lower Orinoco, then went to Trinidad and ultimately made their way to the Greater Antilles, establishing sites in the Lesser Antilles along the way. In the Greater Antilles, evidence for Saladoid peoples can be found in Puerto Rico and at least one site in eastern Hispaniola. It appears that the Saladoid peoples bypassed the Windward Islands and moved directly to the Leeward Islands, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. By 300–250 BC, they had settled Puerto

Rico. Chanlatte Baik suggests that a separate group migrated directly to Puerto Rico from another portion of the Orinoco River Valley around this time. According to Rouse, there are at least two Saladoid groups or subseries: the Cedrosan and Huecan Saladoid. The Huecan is believed to be a variant of the Cedrosan Saladoid that diverged from the Saladoid somewhere in the Orinoco region. Chanlatte Baik and others regard the Huecan materials as a separate and unrelated cultural phenomenon that consists of the La Hueca complex dating to 200 BC and AD 200. In Puerto Rico, Cedrosan Saladoid components are present at the Hacienda Grande, Maisabel, Paso del Indio, and Tibes sites, among others. Huecan materials are found exclusively at the Sorce´ site (Vieques Island) and Punta Candelero (on mainland Puerto Rico within view of Sorce´). In the Lesser Antilles, Huecan and Cedrosan Saladoid assemblages cooccur in the same deposits, but in Puerto Rico they are spatially separate. At the Sorce´ site, Saladoid materials overlay the Huecan materials. The relationship between the Cedrosan Saladoid and the La Hueca complex is poorly understood; neither is found elsewhere in the Greater Antilles nor the Bahamas. Cedrosan Saladoid ceramics are characterized by elaborate painted designs in white-on-red (WOR), white-on-red with orange slip, black paint, and negative-painted designs, in a variety of vessel shapes. These are considered to be the finest example of Caribbean ceramics (Figures 3 and 4). Vessels often had modeled and incised zoomorphic adornos and strap and loop handles. Cedrosan Saladoid potters also produced zone-incised cross-hatched (ZIC) wares. In contrast, the Huecan Saladoid ceramic assemblages lack painted wares and are characterized by ZIC pottery and modeled handles (Figure 5). In some examples, the incisions were filled with white or red paint. A variety of flaked and groundstone artifacts unique to the La Hueca complex have been found exclusively in Huecan deposits and flaked stone and groundstone manufacturing techniques differed between Cedrosan and La Hueca peoples. While both Cedrosan Saladoid and La Hueca complex people produced carved stone figurines made from nonlocal materials, bird-head pendants (Figure 6) resembling raptorial birds (condors, king vultures, or combinations of these species) have only been found at Punta Candelero, where they were manufactured, and at Sorce´, which is thought to have served as the port-of-trade. The unique flake tool and lapidary traditions lend further proof of the distinctiveness of the Cedrosan and La Hueca complex peoples and to the possibility of separate origins. During this period, three-pointed stone, shell, and coral artifacts known as zemı´s, a designation describing spiritually-imbued objects

136 AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas

Figure 3 Saladoid (WOR) bowl. Puerto Rico. Ceramic. Height: 7.7; width: 15.2 cm. Centro de Investigaciones Arqueolo´gicas, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Figure 6 Bird-beak pendant. La Hueca Culture. Puerto Rico. Jadeite and serpentine. Height: 5.1; width: 4.1 cm. Centro de Investigaciones Arqueolo´gicas, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Figure 4 Saladoid (polychrome) bell-shaped vessel. Puerto Rico. Ceramic. Height:15.2; width: 27.9 cm. Centro de Investigaciones Arqueolo´gicas, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Figure 5 Huecan-Huecoid zone-incised cross-hatched (ZIC) tabular-shaped rim handle sherds. Puerto Rico. Ceramic. Centro de Investigaciones Arqueolo´gicas, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

associated with the later Chican Ostionoid and Taı´no cultures, appeared, suggesting the onset of zemı´ worship. Snuffing vessels, believed to have been used to ingest hallucinogens, have been found, too. Cedrosan Saladoid sites were located on coastal plains and in interior alluvial valleys. Sites consisted of a central plaza surrounded by multiple domestic structures, believed to house extended families. It is believed that Saladoid society was egalitarian. Burial groupings located in the plazas are thought to represent lineal descent groups. The two known Huecan sites are smaller than their Cedrosan Saladoid counterparts and are also inferred to have been organized along egalitarian lines. The Sorce´ site is made up of seven small mounds arranged in a horseshoe pattern. Little perishable technology has been recovered, although archaeologists infer that the people used gourds as containers, made cordage and netting, wove baskets, and manufactured wood canoes, paddles, and other items. Polished and groundstone axes and adzes were made from fine-grained materials, including various kinds of greenstone. Axes and adzes were also manufactured from Strombus shells. During this period, three-pointed stone, shell, and coral artifacts known as zemı´s, a designation describing spiritually-imbued objects associated with the later Chican

AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas 137

Ostionoid and Taı´no cultures, appeared, suggesting the onset of zemı´ worship. Snuffing vessels, believed to have been used to ingest hallucinogens, have been found, too. Archaeobotanical remains indicate that the Cedrosan Saladoid and Huecan peoples practiced arboriculture and cultivated or collected herbaceous plants and seed crops such as Panicum grasses (see Paleoethnobotany). The cultivation of root crops, such as manioc, has been inferred from ceramic objects believed to be griddles. Manioc was believed to have been brought to the Antilles by Saladoid peoples from South America; we now know that it was grown by earlier peoples practicing on Archaic subsistence economy. The diet consisted further of hutı´a, fish, turtles, shellfish, iguanid lizards, and land crabs. Marine mammals may have contributed to the diet. The hutı´a, which is found at both Cedrosan and Huecan sites, represents an imported species. The dietary remains from Vieques also include remains of the spiny rat and a possible peccary, which represents a South American import, as well as a variety of aquatic and terrestrial species of birds. The Saladoid persisted for almost 1000 years in Puerto Rico. Rouse believes that the Casimiroid of Hispaniola created a frontier that prevented the Saladoid from expanding westward. Evidence for Saladoid intrusion exists in the eastern Dominican Republic (c. AD 240) There are no Saladoid sites in Cuba, the Bahamas, or Jamaica.

Period III: Population Expansion and New Ceramic Traditions Around AD 600, changes in ceramic and lithic assemblages occurred on Puerto Rico. Rouse attributes these to the Ostionoid series that emerged from the Saladoid series. In contrast, Chanlatte Baik and others argue that the Ostionoid resulted from the interaction of the Huecan and Cedrosan Saladoid peoples with Archaic populations; others believe the Ostionoid represents a separate migration from South America; another recent argument places the origins of the Ostionoid among the Archaic cultures of Hispaniola. By the end of the seventh century, the Ostionoid culture had expanded westward to the Dominican Republic; by the eighth century, it had spread to Grand Turk, BWI; and by the mid-ninth century, it was present in Jamaica and central Cuba. In Puerto Rico, Ostionoid culture is known from the Punta Ostiones, Maisabel, Tibes, and Bronce sites, among others, and from Paso del Indio, Puerto Rico’s deepest, best-stratified site. The Coralie site (Grand Turk), thought to be an Ostionoid colony or outpost, was occupied and reoccupied by people from AD 700–1100.

The earlier occupation represents an early, if not the first, peopling of the Bahama archipelago. Archaeobotanical evidence indicates that Ostionoid peoples harvested wild plants, tended or managed fruit trees, and cultivated root-tuber crops. For many years, it was argued that a dietary shift took place between the Saladoid and Ostionoid periods whereby terrestrial resources (Saladoid) were supplanted by marine resources (Ostionoid). This is also known as the crab-shell dichotomy. While zooarchaeological and carbon isotope evidence is contradictory, it is generally agreed that where such subsistence change is observed, local factors are responsible and that marine resources contributed significantly throughout both periods. Guinea pigs, recovered from several sites, including Tibes, represent a faunal import from South America. Terracing and raised fields (montones) are found during this time period in Puerto Rico. People established settlements in new areas; in some regions, residences decreased in size, suggesting that they were occupied by nuclear families. On the eastern side of Puerto Rico, there is evidence of centralized settlement patterns. Civic-ceremonial and ballcourt sites, mostly in the southeastern part of the island, appear. There is also an increase in the number and size of zemı´s. Architectural settlement and artifact changes are believed to relate to the emergence of institutionalized social hierarchy. Tibes (Figure 7) is the oldest civic-ceremonial and possibly the first prehistoric political center in the Caribbean. Located in south-central Puerto Rico, it contains nine ballcourts, three dance plazas, causeways, and residences believed to have been occupied by emerging elites. Anadenanthera sp. wood and seeds of evening primrose (Oenothera sp.), a mild narcotic, were both found dating to the ceremonial occupation. Anadenanthera sp. is one of the possible sources of cojoba, the primary hallucinogenic substance used by the Taı´no to induce visions. This is the earliest archaeological evidence of the plant in the Caribbean. Ostionoid pottery consists of red-slipped boatshaped, straight-sided, and open vessels that often contain loop handles, sigmoid applique´s, and simple modeled head lugs (Figure 8). Red paint and black smudging on vessel exteriors is sometimes present. New kinds of flaked stone tools and different methods of tool production also differentiate the Ostionoid from the Saladoid. The people also made stone and shell artifacts with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images. Sometime during the AD 600s, another pottery subseries, the Meillacan Ostionoid, emerged in the Cibao Valley of northern Hispaniola and is believed to represent an in situ development from the Ostionoid.

138 AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas

Figure 7 (a) Central section of the southern stone row of the main plaza of Tibes (Structure 6). Ball Court 2 is visible in the background. Puerto Rico. Photograph courtesy of L. Antonio Curet. (b) Ball Court 1 of Tibes facing east. Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of L. Antonio Curet.

Figure 8 Ostionan Ostionoid boat-shaped vessel with strap handles. Puerto Rico. Ceramic. Height: 41; width: 32; thickness: 21.1 cm. Museo de Historia, Antropologı´a y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Contrasting views suggest, though, that the Meillacan diffused from the Guyana Highlands, that it emerged centuries earlier from the Punta Cana tradition of eastern Dominican Republic (see below), and that it is unrelated to the Ostionoid series. The Meillacan and Ostionan cultures overlapped temporally in the Turks and Caicos and elsewhere; moreover, Ostionan pottery has been found in association with Meillacan sherds at sites in Hispaniola, suggesting that the latter did not necessarily supplant the former. Meillacan pottery is thin, hard, and unpainted. Decorations include modeling, punctuation (Figure 9), zoned incision, and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic applique´ figures located on the shoulder or rims of hemispheric and boat-shaped vessels. Some argue

AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas 139

Figure 9 Meillacan Ostionoid sherd with punctation. Illustration courtesy of Mary Jane Berman.

that Meillacan ceramic decoration drew upon Courian Casimiroid stone work designs; such an argument lends support that the Meillacan were direct descendants of Archaic cultures, with no links to the Ostionoid or represents the merging of Archaic and Ostionoid cultures. Meillacan ceramics or local versions with Meillacan designs appear almost contemporaneously in the ninth century in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, eastern and central Cuba, and the central Bahamas. A combination of exploration, colonization, and high levels of interisland interaction (trade, exchange) is likely responsible for the extensive spread of the Meillacan style. The earliest evidence of Palmetto ware, a locally made Bahamian pottery with Ostionan and Meillacan traits, signifies the appearance of a distinct Lucayan culture at AD 700–900 at the Three Dog and Dune #2, Pigeon Creek sites on San Salvador Island. Ceramic assemblages from northern and eastern Cuba exhibit both Meillacan and Ostionan traits, as does the White Marl pottery of Jamaica. Meillacan peoples and people influenced by Meillacan culture practiced root crop and seed horticulture in home gardens and mounded fields, tended or managed fruit trees, gathered wild plants, and fished and collected shellfish from marine and estuarine waters. Starch grain analysis on chert microliths from the Three Dog site has revealed evidence of maize, chili peppers, and several root and tuber crops, suggesting that the peoples who settled the central Bahamas brought these plants with them from their homelands in Hispaniola and Cuba (see Starch Grain Analysis). Sites in the Bahamas, Cuba, and Jamaica are small, reflecting the activities of horticultural-fishing groups. Meillacan outposts, including specialized shell bead production sites, were established on Middle Caicos and Grand Turk, BWI. The Meillacan culture did not penetrate Puerto Rico.

Figure 10 Chican Ostionoid bowl. Dominican Republic. Ceramic. Height: 14; width: 20.6; thickness: 18.7 cm. Collection of El Museo del Barrio, gift of Brian and Florence Mahony. El Museo del Barrio, New York City (PC92.1.4). Photograph by Bruce Schwarz.

Around AD 800, a new pottery, Chican Ostionoid, emerged in the southeastern Dominican Republic. By AD 1200, this ceramic style and its regional variants became widespread in Hispaniola (except for the southwestern peninsula), Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Turks, and Caicos, and ultimately eastern Cuba, which the Chican peoples settled in (approximately) AD 1450. It has been argued recently that Chican pottery, like Meillacan pottery (see above) can also be traced to Punta Cana pottery due to resemblances in decorative characteristics. According to this argument, the Meillacan and Chican traditions are unrelated to the Ostionoid and should be referred to by their own series (rather than subseries) names (Meillacoid, Chicoid).

Period IV, AD 1200–1500 By AD 1200, Taı´no culture on Hispaniola was fully established; most of the characteristics observed by the Spanish, who arrived three centuries later, emerged during this period. Both Chican Ostionoid and Meillacan pottery and their local variants persisted into the fifteenth century in northern Hispaniola, central Cuba, Jamaica, and the central and northern Bahamas (which was settled by this time). Chican pottery is characterized by constricted open, boat-shaped, or constricted bottle-shaped vessels with carved or broad-lined curvilinear incisions sometimes in line and dot patterns (Figure 10). After AD 1200, pottery became more elaborate. Modeled-incised lugs depicted zemı´s, animals, gods, and caciques wearing ear spools and elaborate headdresses adorned the sides of vessels. At numerous sites in Hispaniola, Meillacan and Chican ceramics are found in the same strata.

140 AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas

Basketry-impressed Palmetto ware, which appears after AD 1100 in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, reflects complex Lucayan basketry traditions (Figure 11). Throughout Hispaniola, Cuba, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, there was an increase in the number, type, and size of settlements. Except for western Cuba where a foraging subsistence economy was practiced, people grew manioc (the staple crop), maize, gourds/ squashes, varieties of peppers, tobacco, sweet potato, papaya, avocados, peanuts, yautı´a and other roots and tubers, engaged in arboriculture, and collected wild plants. Terraced fields are reported from Puerto Rico; irrigation was practiced in parts of Hispaniola. In the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, fields were created in low-lying interdune areas. During this time, fish and shellfish dominated the meat portion of the diet, with minor contributions from iguana, hutı´a, and other animals. By the late fifteenth century, the Greater Antilles, Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos consisted of many linguistic and ethnic groups that interacted with one another through trade, exchange, marriage, and political alliances. Although culturally diverse, the people who lived here are known collectively as the Taı´no, meaning ‘good’ or ‘noble’ in classic Taı´no. The Indians of Hispaniola used this term when speaking to the Spanish in order to differentiate themselves from other groups. At the onset of Spanish entry into the Americas, the people of the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos spoke at least three languages (classic Taı´no, Ciboney Taı´no, and Macorı´s) and two dialects, Ciguayo and Guanahatabey. Hispaniola was organized into five large and several smaller stratified chiefdoms or cacicazgos made up of: caciques (paramount ruler-chiefs) and their immediate families; nitainos, believed to be nobles, who assisted the caciques; and naborias or laborers. The behiques (shamans), who served as advisors and healers, were considered nitainos. A cacicazago consisted of 70–100 villages made up of several thousand people. Inheritance was matrilineal; residence patterns

may have been avunculocal. Caciques were invested with religious and political power, controlling economic, craft, and artistic labor, production, and distribution. Puerto Rico, eastern Cuba, and Jamaica were divided into smaller-sized, less politically complex polities, but more and bigger ballcourts were constructed during this time in Puerto Rico suggesting some form of social restructuring from the previous period. The Turks and Caicos and Bahamas may have been organized into small, less stratified cacicazagos. Hunting-gathering populations (Guanahatabeys) lived in western Cuba and southwestern Hispaniola. The Taı´no cosmological system consisted of a pantheon of deities such as Yu´cahau, the god of cassava, Attabeira, the fertility goddess, and 12 lesser deities. Zemı´s were ancestor-gods and/or shamanic spirithelpers who possessed spiritual, political, and/or healing powers. They were made from stone, shell, bone, coral, wood, ceramic, woven cotton, and other materials and resembled a combination of human, animal, and supernatural creatures drawn from a pantheon of spirits and ancestors (Figure 12). The objects often differed in material, style, and decorative treatment from island to island. Zemı´ were often depicted in rock art. The ingestion of hallucinogens such as cojoba was an integral part of spiritual life facilitated by the use of elaborate paraphernalia including inhalers, vomiting sticks, snuff tables, and spoons. Shamans (behiques) and shaman-caciques served as the expert translators of these experiences and were sometimes depicted in their altered states (Figure 13). The Taı´no and their Chican Ostionoid predecessors of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola played a ballgame on leveled courts or plazas (bateyes). Differences in shape, appearance, size, and number reflect interisland political and cultural differences. For example, there are fewer ballcourts on Hispaniola, but they are larger than those found on the other islands. Two teams made up of about 20–30 players vied with

Figure 11 Mold and cast of Lucayan basketry-impressed pottery. San Salvador, Bahamas. Photograph courtesy of Mary Jane Berman.

Figure 12 Three-pointer zemı´ with shell inlay. Puerto Rico. Stone. Height: 20.0; width: 8.3; thickness: 7.9 cm. Museo de Historia, Antropologı´a y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas 141

Figure 13 (a) Zemı´ of Deminan Caracarakol effigy jar (frontal view). Dominican Republic. Ceramic. (b) Zemı´ of Deminan Caracarakol effigy jar (back view). Dominican Republic. Ceramic. Height: 40.5 cm. Collected by Theodoor de Booy. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (05/3753). Photograph by David Heald.

one another to send the ball toward its goal. Hands and feet were not allowed to come into contact with the ball, nor was it permitted to touch the ground. The ball was made from rubber and other materials. In Puerto Rico, ballgame participants wore elaborately decorated stone artifacts known as stone collars and elbow stones on their waists and arms that helped keep the ball afloat (Figure 14). The competitions helped to resolve social tensions, serving also as occasions for feasting, trading, and alliance creation. Women-only teams were known to play. In recreating Chican mythology and ancestral genealogies, the petroglyph-zemı´s lining the Caguana (Puerto Rico) ball court, served as visual reminders of history and social organization. Low stools (duhos), which conveyed caciques’ and behiques’ position, wealth, prestige, authority, and power were used during ceremonies and other special occasions, including ballgames (Figure 15). They also served as gifts and elite burial accompaniments and caciques and behiques sat on them during the ingestion of cojoba. It is believed that the caciques sat on the stools with curved backs, while the behiques sat on ones that lacked backs.

The Taı´no also expressed themselves in music and dance. Ceremonies (areytos) signaling battles, marriages, and deaths of important personages and other significant events took place in the central plaza of the cacique’s village, which was larger than the surrounding ones. The arrival of Columbus and the Spanish in 1492 brought devastation and upheaval. The earliest evidence of Spanish presence in the Americas, known from glass beads, European ceramics, and a variety of metal objects, comes from the Long Bay site on San Salvador, Bahamas. After visiting several Bahamian islands and eastern Cuba, Columbus left a garrison of men at En Bas Saline in northern Hispaniola in December 1492. Upon his return in December 1493, there was no sign of them. A few weeks later, he established a settlement to the east at La Isabela. Within a few short years, other settlements and a chain of forts were built. Initially the two groups exchanged gold and food for European trinkets, but Spanish abuses soon triggered Indian resistance that was matched in 1494–95 by brutal Spanish reprisals, resulting in the eventual, near-universal enslavement of the Taı´no. Then, in 1495–97, the Spanish

142 AMERICAS, CARIBBEAN/The Greater Antilles and Bahamas

Figure 14 Collar with decorated panel. Puerto Rico. Stone. Height: 9.5; width: 21.1 cm. Museo de Historia, Antropologı´a Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

warfare, and relocation, severely decimated the population. The Spanish conquered Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509), and Cuba (1510), establishing the encomienda system. Indian women married Spanish men or served as their concubines. Indian plant foods were incorporated into the European diet. On each of the large islands, unknown numbers of Indians fled to the mountainous interior, where they established maroon communities. With the exception of these groups, by the mid-sixteenth century or earlier, the Taı´no and the Lucayans had virtually disappeared as cultural entities. Their biological and cultural heritage survive today in the people of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico; many aspects of diet, medicinal knowledge, crafts, spiritual beliefs, and vocabulary draw on Taı´no culture. By 1511, Africans were systematically imported to replace the Indians as slave labor. The beginning of contemporary Caribbean culture, drawing on Amerindian, African, and European beliefs, practices, and lifeways was established. See also: Americas, Caribbean: The Lesser Antilles; Animal Domestication; Marxist Archaeology; Paleoethnobotany; Plant Domestication; Starch Grain Analysis; Time and History, Divisions.

Figure 15 High-backed wooden duho. Puerto Rico. Wood. Height: 38.0; width: 20.3. Museo de Historia, Antropologia Y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

commanded that tribute (gold, cotton, food, labor), organized and negotiated through the caciques, be paid them every 3 months. The system was unsuccessful. In 1497, repartimiento, a system of forced Indian labor, was instituted, whereby the Crown gave land to the Spanish to be used for farming and ranching. Indians were assigned to Spaniards for whom they worked and received education in Christianity and ‘civilization’. In 1503, the encomienda system was established on Hispaniola; Indians paid tribute, worked in the mines for 4–6 months, and returned to their villages for the rest of the year (demora). The intentional and accidental import of Old World animals (cows, pigs, rats, mice) and plants (e.g., wheat, sugarcane, weeds) and deforestation due to the establishment of settlements and forts all contributed to major ecological changes. Within two decades, diseases (e.g., measles, smallpox, influenza), for which the aboriginal populations lacked immunities, physical abuse, overwork, food shortages, malnutrition,

Further Reading Bercht F, Brodsky E, Farmer JA, and Taylor D (1997) Taı´no, PreColumbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean. New York: The Monacelli Press. Curet LA (2005) Caribbean Paleodemography: Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Dacal Moure R and Rivero de la Calle M (1984) Arqueologı´a aborigen de Cuba. La Habana: Editorial Gente Nueva. Granberry J and Vescelius GS (2004) Languages of the PreColumbian Antilles. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Keegan WF (2000) West Indian archaeology 3. Ceramic Age. Journal of Archaeological Research 8(2): 135–167. Newsom LA and Wing ES (2004) On Land and Sea: Native American Uses of Biological Resources in the West Indies. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Paga´n Jimenez J, Rodrı´guez M, Chanlatte Baik LA, and Narganes Storde YM (2005) La temprana introduccio´n y uso de algunas plantas dome´sticas, silvestres, y cultivos en Las Antillas precolombinas. Dia´logo Antropolo´gico 3(10): 7–33. Rouse I (1992) The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Siegel PE (ed.) (2005) Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Wilson SM (1990) Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.

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The Lesser Antilles Corinne L Hofmann, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary cross hatching Fine line incision in a cross-hatched pattern. caliviny Buff or black painted circular motifs on a plain or red slipped surface, in use throughout the entire Troumassoid sequence in the southern Lesser Antilles, notably on St. Vincent, where more than 20 sites have been documented yielding Caliviny pottery. This pottery has also been found on St. Lucia, Martinique, the Grenadines, and Barbados. Cayo Late Ceramic Age pottery style on Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Guadeloupe with affiliations to the Koriabo complex of the Guianas, itself a member of the Koriaban subseries of the Polychrome Tradition of Amazonia. head lugs Modeled zoomorphic or anthropomorphic representations, added to vessel as handles or lugs when both were in a plastic or leather-hard state. Huecan Saladoid subseries Pottery style identified in Puerto Rico, Vieques, and the northern Lesser Antilles as far south as Marie-Galante. The origin of this Early Ceramic Age style, the so-called Huecan problem, has been debated since its first discovery. Some scholars view it as a separate Huecoid series, resulting from an independent migration from the South American mainland, others as Huecan Saladoid, a separate subseries that developed independently out of the Saladoid series. Recently, also affiliation to Central America has been suggested. incision Linear or curvilinear grooves applied to the vessel surface once the clay was leather-hard. Kalinago Island Carib of colonial times who refer to the Guianas as their original homeland. Cayo pottery has been correlated to the Island Carib. Maloca Large communal house known from Tropical Lowland peoples of South America. The ‘maloca’ accommodates a wide range of activities such as living, sleeping, food preparation, working, storing, meeting, dancing, and worshipping. modeled applique Pre-modeled clay sometimes of a geometric shape attached to the vessel, when both were in a plastic or leather hard condition. Ortoiroid Series that extends from the coastal zone of Venezuela and the Guianas through the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico during the Archaic Age. The toolkit consists of ground stone and shell tools as well as flint. Series Cultural complexes or ceramic styles that developed from a common ancestor. A subseries is a spatial and/or temporal division of a series.

Introduction Archipelagic Environment

The Lesser Antillean archipelago separates the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, forming a series of stepping-stone islands between South America and

the Greater Antilles (Figure 1). The Lesser Antilles include Trinidad, the Windward (Tobago to Dominica) and Leeward Islands (Guadeloupe to Saba), and the Virgin Islands. Most islands are intervisible; there are only two wider straits of sea, the Grenada passage and the Anegada passage, both c.150 km wide (see Americas, Caribbean: The Greater Antilles and Bahamas). Natural Island Setting

The arc comprises volcanic and limestone islands situated on the margin of the Caribbean Plate. The inner arc, from Marie-Galante northward after outer arc, encompasses geologically younger islands consisting of active and recently extinct volcanoes. The geologically older islands of the outer arc are made up of marine sediments overlaying the volcanic foundation. This divergence affects the ecological and climatological characteristics of the islands. Trinidad and Tobago sit on the continental shelf and their terrestrial flora and fauna reflect this South American mainland allegiance. The many islets located near the main islands play an important role in the exploitation of natural resources. Communicating Communities: Mobility and Exchange in the Lesser Antillean Archipelago between 6000 BC and AD 1492

The discontinuous distribution of subsistence resources and great variability in the availability of raw materials are the driving forces behind the highly mobile nature and diversified procurement strategies of the Archaic Age groups and the establishment and maintenance of the intensive insular contact networks during the Ceramic Age. The favorable position of the Lesser Antilles between the mainland and the Greater Antilles stimulated exploratory voyages and migration processes, linked two major centers of cultural development and encouraged the establishment of interconnecting exchange networks. Both regions were of great importance for the sociocultural development of the Lesser Antilles throughout the preColumbian era (Figure 2). Mobility patterns and material distributions evidence that the archipelagic interaction networks evolved through time as a result of the shifting and expansion of group territories, fission and fusion of local groups, and the increasing complexity of sociopolitical organization. This complicated web of social relationships also involved the sharing of myths, tales, songs, dances, and ritual knowledge.

144 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles

Dominican Republic

Puerto Rico

Virgin Islands Anguilla St. Martin

St. Barths

Vieques St. Croix

Saba St. Eustatius St. Kitts

Barbuda Nevis

Antigua Guadeloupe La Désirade Marie-Galante

Les Saintes Dominica

Martinique

St. Lucia Barbados St. Vincent

Aruba Curaçao

Grenadines Bonaire Grenada

Los Roques

Margarita

Tobago Paria Trinidad

Orinoco Delta Venezuela

Or

o inoc

0

100

200

300 km Guyana

Figure 1 Map of the Lesser Antilles.

Archaic Age (6000 BC–500 BC) Early Occupation by Seasonal Hunter-FisherCollectors

Archaic Age groups came into Trinidad from northern South America by 6000 BC and by around 2500 BC various islands of the Lesser Antilles had seen human occupation. Archaic Age sites are to be

found from Trinidad to the Virgin Islands. Antigua was the most densely occupied island, likely due to the presence of major flint sources. Lifeways and Settlement

Early island dwellers were well adapted to the varied environmental conditions and differential distribution

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles 145

Northern South America Orinoco

Coastal Guyana

Trinidad

Antilles Windward islands

Leeward islands

Virgin islands

Puerto Rico

2000 Cariban and Arawakan speaking peoples 1500

Koriabo Macapaima Arauquinoid

1000

Mon Repos

Mayoid

Bontour

Island Carib Cayo Suazan Troumassoid Anse Trabaud

Morne Cybèle Freeman's Bay Mamoran Mamora Bay Troumassoid Mill Reef

Troumassan Paquemar Troumassoid Espérance

Chican Ostionoid Magens BayEsperanza, Capá Salt River II Santa Elena Modified Ostiones Elenan/Ostionan Magens Bay- Ostionoid Salt River I Monserrate

500

cal AD 0 cal BC

Palo Seco

Barrancoid Los Barrancos

Coral Bay-Longford

Diamant

Cuevas

Cedrosan Saladoid Indian Creek

Cedros Vivé Barrancas

Ostiones

Erin

Guarguapo

Mabaruma

Prosperity

Hacienda Grande/La Hueca

Morel/Hope Estate

500

1000 Ortoiroid

Casimiroid

Ronquinan Saladoid 2000

Colonial period

3000 Ortoiroid 4000

Neoindian epoch/Ceramic Age Mesoindian epoch/Archaic Age

6000 10 000

Paleo-Indian epoch/Lithic Age

Figure 2 Chronological chart of Archaic and Ceramic Ages covering northern South America, Lesser Antilles, and Puerto Rico (after Rouse 1992).

of resources throughout the archipelago. On the coast they relied heavily on reef fish and shellfish exploitation while in inland locations they foraged crabs and birds in combination with plant gathering or managing. The combination of flint, groundstone, and shell artifacts at sites of this period has been defined as the Ortoiroid series (Figure 3). The apparent co-evality of the Archaic populations and the earliest Ceramic Age settlers indicate possibilities for transfer of information and knowledge between these groups. Resource Mobility

The Archaic Age hunter-fisher-collectors moved around the islands adapting to a subsistence and settlement system living semi-permanently and alternately in coastal and inland settings. They adopted an annual mobility cycle encompassing multiple islands, each representing a unique resource patch

within the environmentally heterogeneous region (Figure 4). Communities relied upon seasonality markers as animal cycles, the succession of xeric, moderately humid and wet seasons, and hurricanes to structure their activities through time and across place.

Early Ceramic Age (400 BC–AD 600/800) Intensification of Island Occupation by Horticultural Sedentary Groups

By 400 BC Puerto Rico and the northern Lesser Antilles saw the appearance of two Ceramic subseries, Huecan and Cedrosan, of the Saladoid series, a pottery tradition originating in South America. The remaining Lesser Antilles beyond Trinidad were only occupied from AD 200 on and the continuous influx of local groups from the mainland totally transformed the natural and cultural landscape

146 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles

Figure 3 Ortoiroid toolkit.

March

September

December

June Figure 4 Yearly Archaic archipelagic resource and mobility cycle in the northern Lesser Antilles.

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles 147

Early Ceram mic Age

Morel

Golden Rock

Late Ceram mic Age

Anse à la Gourde

Kelbey's Ridge II

?

Figure 5 House structures and burial practices between 400 BC and AD 1500 in the Lesser Antilles.

of the islands. By AD 350/400 all the islands had seen occupancy and sites increased considerably in number and size. Lifeways and Settlement

Communities lived in more or less permanent settlements in diverse ecological settings, people taking on a broad-spectrum subsistence economy consisting of a combination of horticulture, hunting, fishing, and food collecting. Excavations at Golden Rock, St. Eustatius, revealed house plans of various shapes and sizes, including a large 19 m2 roundhouse, which recalls Amazonian ‘malocas’ for extended families (Figure 5). Human and dog burials were located outside the houses (Figure 6). Grave inventories comprise beads and amulets of quartz, amethyst and greenstone, conch shells, and ceramic vessels.

Figure 6 Morel dog burial.

Huecan and Cedrosan Saladoid ceramics are characterized by a large variety of vessel shapes including hemispherical, bell-, boat-, and kidney-shaped bowls, occasionally provided with D-shaped handles and

148 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles

Figure 7 Huecan and Cedrosan Saladoid ceramics (not to scale).

highly decorated with curvilinear incising, zonedincised crosshatching (ZIC), white-on-red painting (WOR), and modeled-incised head lugs representing a mainland faunal imagery. A so-called ‘Saladoid veneer’ masks the underlying heterogeneity of pottery styles, evidencing the complicated nature and diverse origin of the series (Figure 7). Social Organization and Establishment of Regional and Local Contact Networks

Saladoid society was egalitarian; communities participated in ceremonial activities on a household level. Exotic items, semi-precious raw materials, and mainland iconography reflect the existence of regional networks linking South America to the Lesser Antilles. Local networks for the distribution of raw materials existing from the onset of occupation gained importance over time. Such interaction networks spreading Antiguan flint and St. Martin greenstone were present in the northern Lesser Antilles from the heydays of island occupation.

Late Ceramic Age (AD 600/800–AD 1492) Consolidation of Independent Local Polities

Over time, the stabilized conditions afforded by island adaptation and increased population density resulted in the formation of more localized microregions, acting independently with respect to resource procurement and social matters. Local ceramic styles developed but still evidence the enduring influence of the mainland in the southern Lesser Antilles. Those in the northern Lesser Antilles show affiliations to the Greater Antilles, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Lifeways and Settlement

Site structure at Anse a` la Gourde, Guadeloupe, shows a doughnut-shaped midden encircling a habitation area and a ‘plaza’ with houses of various shapes between 5 and 12 m in diameter (Figure 8). The deceased were buried within the residential space and under the house floors indicating a shift from

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles 149

N 0 Atlantic Ocean Midden area Ivlidden

Midden area Vacant area Habitation area

Midden area Contourline, 0.5 m interval Contourline, 2.5 m interval

Anse à la Gourde, Troumassoid settlement

Figure 8 Settlement structure at the site Anse a` la Gourde, Guadeloupe (AD 1000–1350).

Figure 9 Postholes and human burials under house floor at Anse a` la Gourde.

25 m

150 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles

Figure 10 Late Ceramic Age pottery in the Leeward Islands.

earlier practices. Burials reflect varied mortuary practices, internal differentiation, and personalized treatment (Figure 9). In the Leeward Islands red-painted ceramics with incised and modeled applique´s of the Mamoran Troumassoid subseries replaced the bicolor and polychrome painting of the Cedrosan Saladoid. Ceramics affiliated to the Chican Ostionoid subseries of the Greater Antilles, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands also characterized the complexes in the Leewards around AD 1200. Ceramic decoration included incised designs and anthropo-zoomorphic modeling on nonpainted surfaces (Figure 10). In the Windward Islands, the Saladoid ceramics were replaced by the Troumassan and subsequent Suazan Troumassoid subseries. White-on-red painting was replaced by monochrome red-painted ceramics with incised motifs and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic modeling. Caliviny-painted scrolls accompanied the Troumassoid sequence between Grenada and St. Lucia. The Suazan Troumassoid subseries,

distributed from Tobago to Guadeloupe, was long regarded as the crudest pottery in the Antilles, but also comprises a finer ware. In a final stage these islands witnessed the appearance of Cayo and other ceramic styles related to the mainland. Trinidad remained under continual influence of coastal Venezuela with the advent of the Arauquinoid series. Its final ceramic style, Mayoid, may have originated in the Guianas (Figure 11). Social Organization and Exchange Relationships

Long-distance exchange diminished over time; lapidary items decreased in number and were replaced by objects made of local rock types. The level of sociopolitical integration oscillated between both extremes in the range of tribal organization. A number of sociopolitical polities were established encompassing several settlements or islands. One of these polities was formed around the island of Anguilla. Interisland

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles 151

Figure 11 Late Ceramic Age pottery in the Windward Islands.

trade and exchange networks existed in which lithic materials, ceramics, and ceremonial paraphernalia circulated between the islands but also between the Lesser and the Greater Antilles. On the southern Lesser Antilles similar networks existed with South America. At the end of pre-Columbian occupation there was a pan-regional interaction sphere in which exotic items circulated between elites of the Greater Antilles and both South and Central America in which the northern and southern Lesser Antilles operated jointly (Figure 12).

Epilogue The Demise of the Native Population of the Lesser Antilles

After European colonization, diseases and slavery rapidly decimated the native population of the Lesser Antilles. Nonetheless, missionary accounts from the mid-seventeenth century still attest to a sizeable

indigenous population on several islands of the southern Lesser Antilles. Ties with the mainland were secured until colonial times with the intrusion of the ‘Kalinago’ or so-called ‘Island Caribs’ historically documented but archaeologically only tenuously attested, who held the assertion to have conquered the islands out of the Guianas. Various chroniclers note intensive inter-island interactions, as well as long-distance voyages undertaken by Carib from the mainland to Dominica and vice versa. Carib live to this day on Dominica and several other islands of the southern Lesser Antilles (Figure 13).

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge Arie Boomert and Alistair Bright for their useful comments and linguistic improvement of the text. Alistair Bright has provided some of the photographs of the ceramics and made the scheme in Figure 3. Medy Oberendorff made the drawings of Figures 1 and 4.

152 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/The Lesser Antilles

Figure 12 Ceremonial paraphernalia (coral face, shell mask, lithic threepointer, diorite and quartz beads, and bone snuff inhaler).

Figure 13 Carib Territory, Dominica.

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya 153 See also: Americas, Caribbean: The Greater Antilles and Bahamas.

Further Reading Boomert A (2000) Trinidad, Tobago and the Lower Orinoco Interaction Sphere. An Archaeological/Ethnohistorical Study. PhD Disseration, University of Leiden. Heerhugowaard: Plantijn Casparie. Crock JG (2000) Interisland interaction and development of chiefdoms in the Eastern Caribbean. PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Drewett P (2000) Prehistoric Settlements in the Caribbean: Fieldwork in Barbados, Tortola and the Cayman Islands. For the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. London: Archaeotype Publications.

Delpuech A and Hofman CL (eds.) (2004) Late Ceramic Age Societies in the Eastern Caribbean. BAR International Series 1273. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Hofman CL, Bright AJ, Boomert A, and Knippenberg S (2007) ‘Island rhythms: The web of social relationships and interaction networks in the Lesser Antillean archipelago between 400 BC and AD 1492’. Latin American Antiquity (in press). Keegan WF (2000) West Indian archaeology 3. Ceramic Age. Journal of Archaeological Research 8(supplement 2): 135–167. Knippenberg S (2006) Stone artefact production and exchange among the Northern Lesser Antilles. PhD dissertation, Leiden University. Righter EC (ed.) (2002) The Tutu Archaeological Village Site: A Multi-Disciplinary Case Study in Human Adaptation. London: Routledge. Rouse IB (1992) The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Wilson SM (ed.) (1997) The Indigenous People of the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

AMERICAS, CENTRAL Contents Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya Early Cultures of Middle America Historical Archaeology in Mexico Lower Central America Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica The Olmec and Their Contemporaries

Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya Anabel Ford, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary agroforestry A collective name for land-use systems and practices where woody perennials are deliberately integrated with crops and/or animals on the same land management unit. anthropogenic Caused by human activity. chert A variety of silica that contains microcrystalline quartz, often called flint. cultivar A cultured variety of plant. ecological diversity A variety of biological communities or ecosystems in a given area. hieroglyphics A system of ancient writing using a combination of logographic, syllabic, and pictographic elements. Milpa A multicrop planting system based on maize, beans and squash on the same plot-turns into a treasure hunt.

obsidian A volcanic glass and fine raw materials for the chipping of stone tools. polyculture An agricultural system where different crops are planted at the same time in the same space. prismatic blade A long, narrow, specialized lithic flake with parallel margins that may derive from a polyhedral blade core, often triangular in cross section with several facets or flake scars on the one surface. smallholder A farmer who lives on and works cultivating a small portion of the lands. stelae A stone slab with an inscription or design which was used as a monument.

Introduction Mesoamerica in the Classic period was a time of great political and economic development from the Mexican Highlands in the north to the Maya lowlands in the south (Figure 1). There were wide regional interactions among the elite leadership and extended trade relationships all within the context of an essentially agrarian Stone Age economy. Major centers of power emerged around the region,

154 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya

Chichen Itza

Tajin Teotihuacan

MESOAMERICA

Monte Alban

Tikal

N

0

250

El Pilar

Kaminalijuyu

500

Kilometers

Figure 1 Mesoamerican with major sites indicated. Courtesy of the Anabel Ford.

including Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, Monte Alban in the Oaxaca Valley, and Tikal in the Maya lowlands. This overview focuses on Maya civilization, situating it within a framework of the overall developments of the Classic period. Mesoamerica was a world without animal husbandry, without metals for agriculture, and without roads for commerce. Without all these attributes, often deemed essential for the development of complex societies, the ancient Mesoamericans thrived. What they did have – an intimate knowledge of landscape, a dynamic management of water, a fabulous repertoire of cultivars – provided a substantial foundation for organization and growth. This is the story of Classic Mesoamerica. Our knowledge of Classic Mesoamerica has been enriched over the past decades by research addressing some of the more complex and subtle components: the social, political, and economic aspects of the cultures. Importantly, while early on only the most glamorous aspects of culture were investigated, current research has brought in fieldwork and interpretations of rural as well as urban sectors. While there is still much focus on the development of centers and the elite process of the evolution of civilization, our understanding of Mesoamerican societies has become

Table 1 Major centers of Classic Mesoamerica Region

Culture

Time period

Main center

Central Mexico Oaxaca Gulf Coast Volcanic Highlands Maya Lowlands

Teotihuacan Zapotec Huastec Maya

AD 100–600 AD 200–750 AD 800–1200 AD 400–700

Teotihuacan Monte Alban Tajin Kamilnaljuyu

Maya

AD 250–900

Tikal

more balanced when compared to the initial focus on only the sensational and monumental. Nonetheless, the basic definitions and characteristics of Mesoamerican cultures rely heavily on the elite and ceremonial characteristics relegating the adaptive characteristics to a lesser role. Classic period Mesoamerica emerged in the first millennium of our current era (Table 1) within a complex and heterogeneous ecological landscape from contemporary central Mexico, down through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras embracing the arid highland plateaus of Mexico and Oaxaca, the dramatic volcanic highlands of Guatemala, and the lowlands of the Gulf Coast, the Pacific, and the Yucatan. Within this diverse setting, all below the Tropic of Cancer, major archaeological civilizations

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya 155

evolved to become large population centers and regional economic powers with far-flung exchange relationships across the Mesoamerican landscape. In the Classic period, political and economic institutions of the region reached a level of complexity that incorporated all the basic qualities of civilization: centralized administration, major public works, sumptuary rules, military readiness, occupational specialization, and political intrigue. The region embraces considerable environmental diversity. The Valley of Mexico and the large Valley of Oaxaca dominate the core of Mesoamerica. These areas are characterized by temperate climate. The valleys are flanked by mountains and punctuated by active volcanoes that played an important role in the prehistory of the region. Tropical lowlands typify the Gulf Coast plains of Veracruz and extend to the Yucatan Peninsula in the south. The Maya lowlands are situated on limestone bedrock dominated by tropical forests. The area includes the greater Yucatan, the adjoining Pete´n of Guatemala and Belize as well as the Caribbean zone of Honduras. The Pacific volcanic highlands complete the complex setting presenting an agriculturally fertile and seismically active geography. Mesoamerica is well known for the cultures that arose in this dynamic context, each taking advantage of facets of their locale to build their regional presence. The Classic period is traditionally linked to the Maya long count as it appeared and was read on ancient Maya stelae. It was in the Maya area that the full development and use of writing and mathematics was honed to a level that is understood now to reveal political relations, alliance building, intercenter genealogies, and standard styles. Other areas of Mesoamerica clearly used stylistically similar iconographic representations to make historic statements,

but were cursive and with subtle meanings. They were broad icons that were used across space and time. The mat, for example, signified the throne and it is recognized before the time of the Maya, used throughout the Classic period, and it was understood throughout Mesoamerica. Developmentally, the Classic period is most esteemed for its elite traditions that hold stylistic sway across the varied landscape. The Classic was a time of spectacular investments of art and architecture and, while each area has distinctive means of rendering these features, they all display exuberance in stone work, painting, mosaics, ceramics, and most particularly in the monumental architectural undertakings of temples, plazas, and palaces. The region shares one important additional foundation, the subsistence system known as milpa with the important cultivar, maize. From the Mexican Plateau to the Maya Lowlands, maize formed a fundamental part of the Mesoamerican diet. Recognized at the time of Spanish invasion as the staple, grain yields per hectare in the Valley of Mexico were greater than that known in Europe at the same time (Figure 2). The Mesoamerican subsistence strategy, called the ‘high-performance milpa’, is an agroforestry polyculture based on the triad of maize–beans–squash intercropped with other edibles and a myriad of useful herbs and shrubs. Proficiently developed as cultivated fields within a context of managed regeneration, the system imitated the natural ecological cycle, whether it was in the arid highlands or the humid lowlands. These adaptations resulted in an astonishing array of approaches, many without any visible land modifications and largely dependent on rainfall, and all providing support for developing the hierarchical societies found among the Classic period civilizations.

Figure 2 Contemporary mano and metate for grinding corn from the Pete´n, Guatemala. Courtesy of Anabel Ford.

156 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya

Characterization of the Mesoamerican Classic While the foundation of Mesoamerican civilization is based on agriculture; art, architecture, and exotic exchange goods form the great constellation of attributes used to identify Classic Mesoamerica in general and it is the rendering of details that is used to distinguish the main areas.

Figure 3 Plazas flanked by palaces and temples such as this one at El Pilar. Courtesy of BRASS/El Pilar Program.

Art is one of the most identifiable aspects of Mesoamerican traditions. So wonderfully resplendent are the portable art objects that they have become the focus of intense collection, degrading the archaeological contexts of the ancient pieces. The archaeological source of objects is universally from regal settings: tombs and caches, dedications of temples and buildings, and in other royal sectors. The awesome polychrome vases, the delicately carved jade, the remarkable polished pendants, and other crafted stone, shell, and coral items and adornments make up the glamor of the elite assemblages. When recovered in careful excavations, these artifacts provide vital information from personal histories to general standards. When removed from the archaeological context and collected as art, the objects lose their inherent cultural value and lack all the critical contextual data that could have garnered. The public architectural form of Mesoamerica employs the basic platform to compose pyramidal structures, terraces, patios, and buildings arranged around plazas (Figure 3). This tradition dates back before the Classic period and holds for all the major areas of the region, the theme playing out in major and minor constructions as well as residential forms. A longstanding tradition was to construct a new edifice over an old one, at once honoring the ancient place and constructing a current statement. The construction layers are reminiscent of an onion, earlier phases capped by later ones with the ultimate result of something higher and wider than the last (Figure 4). The components of Mesoamerican public architecture relied on local materials, represent major construction projects, and include dedicatory offerings within

LC: Late Classic period EC: Early Classic period LPC: Late Preclassic period MPC: Middle Preclassic period 2 Building episodes

245 m 244 m 243 m 2 LC 1 4C 3 EC 5

4

6

4 LPC

6 LPC

7 MPC 8 MPC

Bedrock 9 MPC

1m

5

10

15

20

25 m

Figure 4 Multiple superimposed layers of construction typical of Mesoamerican public architecture. This example is from El Pilar. Courtesy of BRASS/El Pilar Program.

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya 157

the buildings. The constructions typically consisted of open and paved plazas, pyramid temples with rising platform terraces, multi-roomed buildings or palaces with internal rooms, and monolithic

Figure 5 Stela and altar of Twin Pyramid complex at Tikal.

sculptures, stelae and altars commemorating important events (Figure 5). Outer surfaces were usually plastered and painted. Red was a dominant color, and multicolored iconographic representations could adorn the surfaces harking to the ideological and political importance of the building. Major displays of control and power are embedded in public architectural presentations. The overall footprint of the Mesoamerican center and the height of the structures within the center played significant roles as an ostentatious demonstration of power and are a rough reflection of population control. Centers like Teotihuacan, in the northern Valley of Mexico, could not be missed on the landscape where the main public monuments sprawled over more than 900 ha (hectares), dominating every view and commanding the area (Figure 6). This contrasts with the Zapotec center in Oaxaca, Monte Alban, covering 200 ha, yet situated visibly high on a striking hilltop dominating the three arms of the valley (Figure 7). The prominences of the public features of highlands civilizations are distinct from the lowland Maya area. Tikal, covering about 150 ha, is large by any standard, but the landscape does not emphasize the size in the same way as the centers of the highlands. Long-distance trade and exchange is another important feature of Classic period Mesoamerica. It is recognized most prominently for minerals that are procured from specific highland sources and found at distant locations in special ceremonial contexts. Materials include obsidian, jade, pyrite, hematite, and other stones polished for masks, mirrors, plaques, scepters, pendants, mosaics, and beads. Shells and corals from the sea also circulated and appear as garment decoration and as necklaces, belts, and other adornments. All these products were restricted to elite use and ritual disposal. They are recovered in tombs and recognized in paintings and carvings. From the ancient artistic representations, many perishable items, primarily derived from lowland tropical resources, were also exchanged and circu-

Figure 6 Teotihuaca´n in the Valley of Mexico. Photograph by Macduff Everton 04328.

158 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya

Figure 7 Monte Alban overlooking the Valley of Oaxaca. Photograph by Macduff Everton 04228 m.

Figure 8 Obsidian prismatic blade core and blades. Courtesy of BRASS/El Pilar Program.

lated among the elite: feathers, pelts, incense, honey, and cacao. Obsidian, a volcanic glass, is one of the most widely distributed items, and occurs in the form of prismatic blades (Figure 8). Artifacts of obsidian have been recovered farther than a 1000 km from the volcanic sources. This is most evident with the green Pachuca obsidian mined outside of Teotihuacan and recovered at Maya centers such as Tikal and El Pilar. Other sources from the Mexican Volcanic Belt (e.g., Orizaba, Otumba, and Ucarea), and the Central American Volcanic Axis (e.g., Chayal, Ixtepeque, and San Martin Jilotepeque) are well known from a variety of archaeological contexts. For example, the distinctive Pachuca as well as the Otumba obsidians have been recovered in dedicatory deposits at Tikal, even though the majority of the obsidians were from

the nearer sources of Guatemala, such as Chayal. Intriguingly, special caches and burials at major centers in the Maya area, such as Tikal’s splendid Burial 116 enshrined in Temple 1, were strewn with obsidian waste flakes as the final cap of the offering. Jade, jadeite, and greenstone were an especially prized resource revered by the elite and used in many regal and ritual contexts. Jade is highly restricted and rarely recovered outside of ceremonial contexts. Jade carvings come in many forms – human figures, delicate ear spools, composite belts, elaborately carved pectorals, mosaics for masks, as well as beads for necklaces and clothing adornment. Many jade objects maintained their value across time and space. Objects were curated long after their production and Preclassic Olmec ‘antiques’ have been recovered from later Classic sites or at distances as far

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya 159

south as Costa Rica. The best-documented jade sources are from the Montagua Valley of Guatemala.

Cultural Regions Founded on Stone Age Technologies The magnificent Mesoamerican achievements attributed to the Classic period are all developed in the context of Neolithic Stone Age technologies, without draft animals, metal tools, and the plow, so familiar to Indo-European civilizations. This may appear to be a great disadvantage, but it was not. Maintaining animals is an additional production burden for farm families, and without that burden, the Mesoamerican farmers were able to focus entirely on their landscape. The domesticated plants from Mesoamerica include a shrub that produces chocolate or cacao and the orchid that produces vanilla. More plants in today’s markets have their origin in Mesoamerica than Europe, and maize is now a fundamental staple all over the world. The strength of the Mesoamerican agricultural strategy was founded on maize polyculture, relying on an intimate knowledge of the immediate habitat for subsistence. Working the landscape with both intensive infield home gardens and extensive outfield high-performance milpas shaped this subsistence system. The dynamics of the Mesoamerican subsistence system utilized a rotational sequence for maintaining production. The system employs cutting and burning used as an environmental management tool at the outset. Then selecting, planting, and growing native plants, managing volunteer plants and cultivars to promote a managed regeneration dependent on the indigenous ecosystem. The high population levels of the Classic period correlate with an intensive agricultural and natural resource management scheme that was integrated into the subsistence system. This is a system still found today among traditional farmers. It relies on the smallholder farming strategy of investing knowledge and skill to increase the productivity of scarce fertile land versus the large-scale strategies of investing in capital improvements to increase the productivity of scarce labor. The result is a complex managed field design with domesticated crops and managed tree growth on fields once the maize crop cycle was complete. The intensification of this essential system took on varied forms depending on the region and resources. Teotihuacan evolved a system in part employing irrigation of the arid plateau on which it is situated. Similarly, the Zapotec of highland Oaxaca relied on investments in flood water irrigation. In contrast, the humid lowlands of the Maya relied principally on

rainfall agriculture with few land modifications such as at the great population center of Tikal. There are notable exceptions where either steep slopes required terracing or perennial swamps justified draining. The Classic Maya

The Maya area, unlike the highland valleys in Mexico, is spread out across the tropical ridge lands and hills of lowlands, today a forested landscape rarely higher that 300 msl. Local topography of the absorbent limestone bedrock creates well-drained ridges interspersed with perched lakes and wetland depressions. Rain falls mainly between June and December and varies annually from 3000–4000 mm in the south to less than 500 mm in the northwest Yucatan. Drinking water during the dry season is scarce as there is little rain. The ancient Maya constructed reservoirs, or aguadas, to accommodate their dry season drinking water needs. The Classic period has traditionally been hinged to the stone carving of the Maya calendar. The majority of the Classic period stelae have carved hieroglyphs and appear to commemorate marriages, alliances, meetings, and wars and could be viewed as the official history. The nature of this official history is fast being revealed with the combined research of linguistics, art, and archaeology. Once thought only to commemorate the worship of time, we now know that important political information is canonized on these stelae. The source of strife, the importance of coalitions, and the ritual of marriage highlight the reported regal relationships. Fractious and fragile, information on the stelae underscore the impact of the distant relationships, where centers were dispersed and the independence readily exerted in the absence of a strong capital as with Teotihuacan or Monte Alban. Farming settlements are distributed across the Maya area, clustering in the best agricultural zones of the well-drained upland ridges and hills that are unevenly dispersed across the lowlands. Centers are situated in prominent extensions of well-drained uplands, and the greater the extents, the higher settlement density, and the larger the centers (Figure 9). Nohmul, with 15 ha of public architecture, is one of the largest centers in Northern Belize. Settlement density is around 79 structures per sq km and the uplands cover only 15% of the local zone. The large center of El Pilar, located north of the Belize River, covers about 60 ha, has an average of 160 structures per sq. km distributed within the surrounding uplands that represent 39% of the zone. In contrast, Tikal, among the largest centers of the Classic period Maya covering more than 150 ha, supports up to

160 AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya

200 structures per sq km found predominantly in uplands that make up 49% of the local zone. Farmers were attracted to the good soils of the uplands and that was where the centers grew. The Maya cultivated the forest as garden with maize polyculture and orchards with important fruit and hardwood tress as well as palms, managing cultivated fields in an orchestrated system of regeneration. Traditional Maya farmers today, drawing on their legacy, have one of the most diverse domestic systems on the planet. Signatures of their former gardens abound in the feral forest of today where 90% of the dominant plants of the forest are useful to people: avocado, allspice, vanilla, mahogany, cedar to name a few. This was created by millennia of accumulated knowledge and skill in the forest. The economic landscape of the central Maya Lowlands 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 North Belize

Belize River

Central Patén

Settlement density (km2) Ridge lands (%) Center size (in hectares) Figure 9 Economic landscape of the central Maya Lowlands BRASS/El Pilar Program.

Many perishable elite materials such as colorful feathers for headdresses, resins for incense and gum, pelts for adornment, honey for sweetener, as well as cacao as a medium of exchange were produced in the lowlands. Most of these resources that would have balanced the trade between the highlands and lowlands could only dependably thrive in forested habitat. Consequently, the vitality of the Mesoamerican trade and exchange system, as well as Maya subsistence, depended on the management of the Maya forest as a garden. The Maya lowlands are known for many centers, but Tikal was the largest by far (Figure 10). Tikal established its dominance in the Classic period around AD 250. By AD 600, the center held considerable sway over most of the southern lowlands. As Tikal was growing early on, the center embraced Mexican Teotihuacan themes that were prominently displayed on stelae and in architecture, yet these appear, like those of Zapotec of Monte Alban, to be translated into the local vernacular. Despite its evident influences, Tikal was subject to checks by neighbors, such as Uaxactu´n, Caracol, Naranjo, and Calakmul vying for power. The growing interpretations of the hieroglyphic record attest to the delicate balance of power and alliance that was the charge of Classic Maya rulers. Texts carved in stone on stelae suggest tenuous coalitions punctuated by startling acrimony twisting and turning political events. These official texts were only one aspect of the story. The juggling of power noted in the readings of the stelae of major centers can be seen in the lower-order settlements as well. Major centers have conspicuous temples and monuments to demonstrate their control of labor. Not so for the community level elite; it was their community production that would link them to the hierarchy. The culmination of the Classic period Maya dates to around AD 900–1000. This is called the Classic Maya Collapse and is known for the abandonment of building and maintenance of the major centers, such as Tikal and El Pilar. It is said that the collapse

Figure 10 Tikal and the Pete´n Rainforest. Photograph by Macduff Everton 04505 m.

AMERICAS, CENTRAL/Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya 161

was based on poor resource management and that today we are witnessing the repeat of those errors. Pollen and sediment data from lake cores south of Tikal have been interpreted as supporting this proposition. Yet today, the dominant plants of the Maya forest are replete with economic uses. Such a coincidence cannot be by chance. It is difficult to imagine that the Maya civilization, after having developed over more than 2000 years in Maya forest and supporting substantial populations, could have turned around to destroy it in only 100 years. New data demonstrate that the Maya adaptation was innovative and that the biodiversity of the Maya forest today is entirely anthropogenic. The Maya Collapse represented a major change in Maya cultural traditions, but this did not occur all at one time or uniformly across the area. It has been assumed that the population underwent a major decline, but what is more likely is that the society transformed. There is no doubt that the maintenance of the major architecture and the support of the regal ritual traditions so elaborated in the Classic Period were indeed jettisoned, but there is no evidence that the populations disappeared. Major centers flourished north of the Tikal area after AD 1000. These include many of the major centers of the Yucatan, such as Chichen Itza´, Uxmal, Sayil, and Becan. Far from disappearing, the Maya were present when the Spanish invaded Mesoamerica in the 1500s. Today, vital communities of Maya exist, impacted, as with all traditional communities, by the great changes wrought by globalization. Among them, traditional Maya farmers manage hundreds of plants in their own forest gardens and their knowledge of the forest demonstrates that it abounds with useful plants. Given these facts, it is obvious that the forest was not destroyed.

Classic Mesoamerican Traditions We have begun to unravel the remarkable prehistory of Mesoamerica. The diversity of the geography and the common themes of the region demonstrate its importance in the history of civilization. Early interpretations about the ancient Mesoamericans are constantly being challenged and refined with new data and perspectives. Once it was thought the Maya were peaceful while the central Mexicans were bellicose. The discovery of the graphic murals of Bonampak in 1945 squelched that idea forever. Teotihuacan was thought to have no writing systems, yet recent research has proposed that the large murals revealed on pyramid and platform facades are actually iconic glyphs. Writing systems

were thought to have been confined to the Maya; however, now earlier systems are known. Once the Mesoamerican environment, and especially the tropical Maya lowlands, were thought to have been stable so that any changes would have necessarily been caused by humans. Today, with new palaeoclimatic studies, it is clear that there has been significant climatic change and that the prehistoric cultural innovations and adaptations were more likely a response to, not the cause of, these changes. In addition, ever more precise laboratory methods have provided greater access to radiocarbon dating for settings that initially were thought to be impossible. These are but a few of the new developments that promise to challenge our current interpretations and bring more interdisciplinary thinking to the understanding of Mesoamerican prehistory. See also: Americas, Central: Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica; The Olmec and their Contemporaries; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Political Complexity, Rise of; Social Inequality, Development of.

Further Reading Blanton R, Kowalewski S, Feinman GM, and Finsten LM (1981) Ancient Mesoamerica: A Comparison of Three Regions. London: Cambridge University Press. Bray F (1994) Agriculture for developing nations. Scientific American 271(1): 18–25. Campbell DG, Ford A, Lowell KS, et al. (2006) The feral forests of the eastern Pete´n. In: Erickson C and Balee´ W (eds.) Time and Complexity in the Neotropical Lowlands. New York: Columbia University Press. Fedick S (2003) In search of the Maya forest. In: Slater C (ed.) Search of the Rain Forest, pp. 133–164. Durham: Duke University Press. Fedick SL and Ford A (1990) The prehistoric agricultural landscape of the central maya lowlands: An examination of local variability in a regional context. World Archaeology 22(1): 18–33. Macri MJ and Ford A (1997) The Language of Maya Hieroglyphs. San Francisco, CA: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute. Martin S and Grube N (1995) Maya superstates: How a few powerful kingdoms vied for control of the Maya lowlands during the Classic period (A.D. 300–900). Archaeology 48(6): 41–46. Netting RM (1977) Maya subsistence: Mythologies, analogies, possibilities. In: Adams REW (ed.) Origins of Maya Civilization, pp. 299–333. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Sabloff JA and Andrews PA (1981) Handbook of Middle American Indians: Archaeology. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Voorhies B (1982) An ecological model of the early Maya of the central lowlands. In: Flannery KV (ed.) Maya Subsistence: Studies in Memory of Dennis Edward Puleston, pp. 65–95. New York: Academic Press. Warman A (2003) Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Wilken GC (1987) Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

162 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America

Early Cultures of Middle America Robert N Zeitlin, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary atlatl A Nahuatl (Aztec) word describing a compound throwing weapon consisting of a shaft with a hook at one end into which a spear or dart is inserted. The shaft acts as an extension of the hunter’s arm, providing much greater force and velocity to the thrown dart. Use of the atlatl in the New World extends back at least 12 000 years, when it enabled Native Americans to more effectively hunt large Ice Age animals. Much later the Aztecs found it more effective than the bow and arrow in penetrating the metal armor of the Spanish conquistadors. maize Commonly referred to as ‘corn’ or more properly Indian Corn, maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) was first domesticated in Middle America and then spread throughout much of the Americas where it became a staple pre-Columbian food. Because there is no known wild form of maize its origin has been a matter of long-standing inquiry. Although several theories have been offered, it is most widely believed that the progenitor of maize was an annual race of teosinte (Z. mays ssp. Parviglumis), a wild grass native to the Balsas River drainage of southern Mexico. However, the specific process of genetic mutations that produced what we know as the maize cob is still disputed by botanists. Under one reconstruction the teosinte tassel spike, the plant’s male reproductive organ, evolved into the maize ear; another claims that the maize ear developed directly from the teosinte ear. The earliest known archaeological remains of domesticated maize cobs, dated 6250 BP, were found at Guila´ Naquitz Cave in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. mano and metate A paired tool set used throughout Middle America to grind maize and other seeds. The mano (‘hand’ in Spanish) is a coarse-grained cylindrical or rounded stone which is rubbed back and forth on the metate, a stone slab or basin on which the seeds are placed. Manos and metates are first found with Early Archaic archaeological remains when seeds and other plant foods became a more important dietary component; they continue to be familiar household implements in rural Middle America. Middle America Refers to the areas of Mexico, upper Central America, and the neighboring islands. The term encompasses and is often used coterminously with the culture area of temporally varying boundaries known as Mesoamerica, the locus of pre-Columbian high civilization, bordered on one side by the semi-nomadic hunting and gathering societies of northern Mexico and on the other by the chiefdoms of lower Central America. mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) Unlike most DNA which is located in the cell nucleus, mtDNA is located in the mitochondria (organelles in complex cells that convert food molecules into energy). In mammals mtDNA is inherited only from the mother and mutations are passed from mother to child. Because of its high mutation rate mtDNA can be employed to trace matrilineage over many generations. Research has revealed that mtDNA of Native Americans falls into four lineages called A, B, C, and D as well as a residual X lineage also found in some European populations. Another mutation occurring in Native

American as well as Southeast Asian, Melanesian, and Polynesian populations has suggested that between 6000–12 000 years ago people migrated across the Pacific or up the east coast of Asia into the Americas. phytolith Rigid deposits in many plants resulting from absorption of groundwater containing dissolved minerals. The most useful for archaeology are opal phytoliths, consisting of silica deposited between or within the plant cell walls and often preserved as mineralized copies of the cell long after the plant dies. Consequently they can serve to identify plant species when all other parts have decayed. Pleistocene The geologic epoch, commonly referred to as the last Ice Age, extending from approximately 1.65 million to 10 000 years ago. It precedes the current Holocene epoch. Four major cycles of global glaciation occurred during the Pleistocene, within each of which there were numerous minor advances (stadials) and retreats (interstadials). At its maximums, glacial ice in North America extended as far south as the 40th parallel and sea levels were lowered worldwide by more than 100 m. stable isotope analysis Differing quantities of isotopes are incorporated in animal tissue from the foods consumed over a lifetime. Consequently, measuring the ratios of the stable isotopes of carbon (13C and 12C) and nitrogen (15N and 14N) in preserved bone collagen and dentin can provide insight into the diets of ancient peoples. For example, the photosynthetic pathway in tropical grasses such as maize (referred to as the C4 pathway) differs from that of trees and shrubs (the C3 pathway), the latter of which discriminates against 13C. The resulting differences in 13C/12C ratios between C4 and C3 foods consumed by the Archaic period inhabitants of Middle America and incorporated in their bones and teeth have been used to estimate the date at which maize became a dietary staple. Similarly, 15N/14N ratios have served to identify diets with a primarily marine versus terrestrial food component.

Introduction When, how, and why the first native people arrived in Middle America and the story of their transformation from itinerant hunters and wild food gatherers to the architects of imposing states and empires are subjects that intrigue archaeologists and the lay public alike. Beyond questions about initial entry, some of the most interesting, albeit baffling, issues involve the early periods of the area’s prehistory, when the idea of farming originated as a subsistence alternative to hunting and gathering and when permanent villages, with the social and political arrangements that living within them entailed, began to dot a landscape that had previously hosted only temporary encampments. Definitive answers to these questions are still elusive, but recent archaeological research is beginning to provide insight into the patterns and processes of development.

Dating and Chronology Methods and Conventions

Essential to understanding the pre-Columbian evolution of Middle American culture and society is the construction of a reliable chronology. To do so

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depends on accurate age determinations, and while a number of methods are available to archaeologists, radiocarbon (14C) dating stands out as the technique most widely applied whenever organic materials are available for analysis. Unfortunately the accuracy of this method is affected by temporal variations in cosmic radiation and radioactive atmospheric carbon, resulting in dates that can be hundreds of years more recent in time than their actual calendar equivalents. Calibration formulae have been developed, but until recently they were not applied to published dates. Moreover, calibration for the earliest periods of Middle American prehistory is still imprecise. Consequently, even today some published dates are calibrated while others are not. To avoid confusion, in this article uncalibrated dates will be differentiated by use of the lower case suffix, bc or bp (before present) while calendar dates will be denoted by upper case BC or BP Where no other indication is given, terms such as ‘years ago’ used in the text refer to uncalibrated dates. In addition to calibration errors, older methods of 14 C determination, because of their sample size requirement, could not directly date small plant, bone, or other organic fragments but instead relied on the stratigraphic association of these materials with larger quantities of datable carbonized substances, such as charcoal from cooking areas. The inability to date materials directly led to significant errors where the archaeological specimens had been vertically displaced by animal burrowing, human activity, or other forms of soil disturbance. Accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS), a newer radiocarbon dating technique, has solved the problem by enabling very small organic samples – seeds and even pollen, for example – to be directly dated. Many archaeological specimens have been re-analyzed by AMS technology, sometimes resulting in significantly altered dates.

Paleoindian subperiod begins, and may extend 35 000 years back in time, or even earlier. The Paleoindian period ends and the Archaic, subdivided into Early, Middle, and Late subperiods, begins somewhere between 9000 and 7000 bc, at the onset of the Holocene, the epoch following the last major glacial advance. During this interval worldwide temperatures at times averaged up to 2  C. warmer than today, the glaciers that shrouded the higher latitudes of North America retreated to the sub-Arctic, seawater levels rose dramatically and, in Middle America, generally drier conditions prevailed. Profound changes in plant and animal life also occurred, perhaps the most conspicuous being the disappearance of many species of Ice Age megafauna, a phenomenon that had begun toward the end of the Paleoindian period and ended around 7000 bc with the extinction of the indigenous American horse. Although the evidence for any kind of causal relationship is ambiguous, loss of these large animals occurred at a time when the inhabitants of Middle America were abandoning their nomadic hunting and wild-food gathering way of life for an agriculturebased subsistence economy, with most people eventually residing in permanent settlements. By 2300 bc pottery was being manufactured in Middle America, which by definition marks the end of the Preceramic era and its final Archaic period. Some archaeologists, however, prefer to extend the Archaic to 1500 bc or later, by which time agriculture provided the bulk of food and the previously nomadic hunter-gatherers had settled in permanent villages. The variance in dates delineating the Paleoindian and Archaic periods, while having the appearance of imprecision, denotes ranges of years extending over centuries, rather than discrete points in time. As an example, there is no single date pinpointing when agriculture was adopted.

Periodization

Archaeologists refer to the years from the time of earliest human presence in the Americas to the development of fully sedentary, agricultural societies as the Lithic or Preceramic era, based on the fact that a stone tool technology dominated and pottery had not yet been invented. This era is commonly divided into two chronological periods, known as the Paleoindian and Archaic (Figure 1). The Paleoindian period, divided into Early and Late subperiods, commences toward the end of the last Ice Age, with the first evidence of human habitation. The beginning date of the Early Paleoindian subperiod is a matter of ongoing controversy, but is now generally agreed to have occurred earlier than 12 500 calendar years ago, when the Late

The Path to Middle America Answers to questions about how, why, and from where Middle America was initially populated require the overall colonization of the New World to be considered. An Asian source of emigration is strongly indicated by biological relationships between its inhabitants and Native Americans. One line of evidence shows that both ancient and modern Northeast Asians and Native Americans, including those living in Middle America, share a number of unique nonmetric dental characteristics, including shovel-shaped incisors, single-rooted upper first premolars, and threerooted lower first molars, all indicative of a common genetic origin.

164 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America Date

Period

Typical Events

Formative/Preclassic

Settled village life throughout Mesoamerica

Late Archaic

Pottery appears Collecting subsistence strategy Maize pollen in Tabasco

Middle Archaic

Maize pollen in lowland Belize Maize cobs at Tehuacán Maize phytoliths at Chantuto Earliest maize at Guilá Naquitz

Early Archaic

Manos and metates Domesticated bottle gourd Domesticated squash Avocado cultivation Foraging subsistence economy Holocene epoch

Late Paleoindian

Extinction of Pleistocene megafauna Carved Tequixquiac camelid sacrum Tepexpan human burial Clovis and fishtail Points Iztapan mammoth kill sites Mobile microbands Ice free corridor through Alaska

Early Paleoindian

Peñon III woman Earliest migrations to America Bering Land Bridge Pleistocene epoch

2000 bc

3000 bc

5000 bc

7000/9000 bc

10 500 bc 12 500 years bp

35 000 years bp …or earlier Figure 1 Chronological table for the Paleoindian and Archaic periods.

A few archaeologists argue for a European source of pre-Columbian immigration, based on perceived technological similarities between stone implements of the Solutrean tradition of southern France and Iberia and those of the Clovis toolmakers, variants of whose distinctive fluted lanceolate projectile points are found throughout North and Central America. Other shared traits include a custom of pebble decoration and burial of lithic artifacts in red ocher filled caches. This hypothesis drew fleeting support from the notoriously misinterpreted characterization of an ancient human skull from Kennewick, Washington, 14C dated 7300– 7600 BC, as morphologically ‘Caucasoid-like’, similar to some European populations. Although migrations by boat dating back 50 000 years or more are known for places such as Australia and Melanesia, the 5000 km of stormy ocean separating the European and American continents would have been daunting, even if a route

along the North Atlantic ice rim that then connected Ireland and the Grand Banks had been taken. Another difficulty with a hypothesis of direct European origin stems from the fact that the Solutrean tradition ended some 16 500 years ago, over 4000 years prior to the appearance of Clovis points. Proponents of the European origin hypothesis have recently proposed that preClovis American sites such as Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill bridge this gap. New radiocarbon dates on bone samples from four skulls that had languished for years in a collection housed at the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology have added to this controversy. The oldest, dubbed ‘Pen˜on Woman III’, was shown to be 12 700calendar years old. Particularly interesting is that, like the Kennewick Man, these ancient skulls are dolichocephalic (long and narrow headed) in contrast to the typically brachycephalic (short and wide) Native

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American crania. Their resemblance to native Southeast Asian, Polynesian, Australian, and Japanese populations has led some scholars to speculate that the skulls indicate a discrete wave of immigration into the New World following the Pacific coast and islands, a movement that also would have entailed the use of watercraft. Ongoing studies of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), nuclear DNA, and Y-chromosomes may eventually help to resolve these questions. MtDNA analyses consistently reveal genetic relationships between modern Native American, Asian, and Siberian peoples. One study, however, has isolated a lineage of mtDNA in modern Native Americans not found in ancient individuals of Asian origin. Named ‘X’, it occurs in Europeans but also shows a partial relationship to Mongolian lineages. Overall, the current data favor an Asian versus European origin of New World peoples, either as a single wave of migration or, strengthened by estimates of mtDNA mutation rates, a series of separate migrations beginning as early as 40 000 years ago. Discounting the dubious likelihood of oceangoing voyages directly across the Pacific, the entryway for Asian migrants into the Americas would almost certainly have been through the narrow Bering Strait from Siberia into Alaska. During the final Wisconsin stage of the Pleistocene, c. 70 000 to 10 000 years ago, worldwide climate was much colder than today for long stretches of time. Ocean levels were lowered by as much as 150 m during these frigid intervals, as surface water became locked up in glacial ice. At those times the beds of the shallow Bering and Chukchi seas were exposed, resulting in a 1500 km wide ‘land bridge’, known to geologists as Beringia, connecting Siberia to Alaska. The verdant tundra that developed in this broad area offered an attractive habitat for herds of large, cold-adapted herbivores as well as for the hunter-gatherers that exploited them and, in so doing, wandered unwittingly to its Alaskan border. Once on the Alaskan mainland it is not clearly understood how and over what routes the early migrants moved onto the rest of the continent. This dilemma stems partly from the difficulty in recovering archaeological evidence in the inhospitable Alaskan environment and partly from the fact that, with rising sea levels, confirmation of human habitation along what was the Ice Age coast now lies deeply submerged. Until recently it was believed that the main route south was by way of an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, following the Yukon and McKenzie river basins (Figure 2). But recent geological evidence indicating that this area was probably glaciated until about 12 000 years ago casts doubt on this hypothesis. Furthermore, for centuries afterwards the succeeding wetlands may not have supported enough

food resources to sustain the wandering Paleoindian hunter-gatherers. An alternative hypothesis, which posits a maritime route into the Americas, is gaining increasing attention as archaeologists evaluate the abundant subsistence potential of the fish, sea mammals, shellfish, and birds along the Pacific coast. A littoral ‘highway’ is envisioned that may have become ice-free long before interior regions. Tantalizing evidence in support of this hypothesis includes human femora, radiocarbon dated 12 960 years BP recovered on Santa Rosa Island, located over 60 km off the coast of Southern California, along with chipped stone artifacts and marine shells found at Daisy Cave on the adjacent San Miguel Island, dated c. 12 000 BP. Further south, on the Peruvian coast, stone tools, hearths, and associated marine fauna are reported from Quebrada Jaguay and Quebrada Tacahuay, two prehistoric fishing camps with radiocarbon dates in the range of 12 500 to 12 700 calendar years ago. Proponents of the coastal migration hypothesis recognize that early migrants would have had difficulty traversing the rugged Pacific littoral entirely on foot, and posit the use of boats. Although there is no direct archaeological evidence of watercraft in the Americas for this early period, certainly they would have been required to reach the Santa Rosa and San Miguel Island sites. Linguistic theory lends another line of support to the maritime hypothesis, inasmuch as the high diversity of mutually unintelligible aboriginal languages along the Pacific coast of North and Central America suggests a lengthy process of divergence from an ancestral tongue. It is altogether possible that the early immigrants to the New World made use of a coastal route and somewhat later in time, after the Yukon-McKenzie River corridor became free of ice and wetlands, an inland pathway.

The First Paleoindian Migrations While we will never know the precise day the first hunter-gatherer set foot in the Americas, the idea of initial entry by 30 000 to 40 000 years ago is considered possible by some archaeologists. One serious impediment to verification is the fact that the earliest human skeletal remains so far recovered from New World archaeological sites are no more than 13 000 calendar years old. Given the paucity of skeletal evidence the dating of earliest migration relies primarily on artifactual material. Until recently the oldest such evidence fully endorsed by the archaeological community was a widespread distribution of North American sites associated with the Clovis projectile point technology, the earliest of which date

166 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America

SIBERIA

Chukchi Sea

GR

Beringia

EE

NL

Alaska

D

ime l a ntic Marit Route

r orrido ie C enz cK illeran Cord eet h Ice S

ifi c

astal Route Co

Pa c

AN

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Laurentide Ice Sheet

At

Bering Sea

Kennewick Meadowcroft Cactus Hill

Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Clovis

l sta oa P a c ifi c C

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rat Mig

Quebrada Jaguay Quebrada Tacahuay

ion Route

N

0 0

1000 mi

Monte Verde

1000 km

Tierra del Fuego

Pleistocene Migration Routes Archaeological site Migration Route

Figure 2 Map of possible Pleistocene migration routes.

c.11 000–12 000 years bp. Named after the locale in New Mexico where in 1932 it was first identified, the bifacially flaked, lanceolate-shaped Clovis point is distinguished by a flute or channel at its base, probably used to facilitate fastening to the tip of a thrusting spear or atlatl (spear thrower) dart. The longstanding claim by ‘Clovis first’ proponents that it was the New World mother culture has been quashed by the recent dating of archaeological sites with unequivocal evidence of earlier human occupation. In addition to the early coastal habitation

noted above, prominent among the pre-Clovis sites is Monte Verde, located about 20 km inland from the Pacific Ocean in southern Chile. Settlement at Monte Verde by 13 000 14C years bp (11 500–10 500 BC) is well documented, with wood, bone, ivory, cordage, and simple stone artifacts, along with food remains and the vestiges of timber structures, all recovered in good archaeological context from waterlogged deposits that inhibited organic decay. Lower stratigraphic levels of the Monte Verde excavations, provisionally assigned a date of 33 000 years bp, are still

AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America 167

under investigation. At the far end of the age spectrum, but treated with a degree of skepticism by most archaeologists, is the Topper site in South Carolina, where artifact-bearing sediments are claimed to be at least 50 000 years old.

The Earliest Archaeological Sites in Middle America Paleoindian sites in Middle America dating to the earliest time of occupation are scarce, hindered by the fact that population density was low, residence was transitory, and material possessions minimal (Figure 3). Perhaps equally significant, the small number of known sites may be attributed to the relative lack of attention paid to Middle America’s Early Paleoindian prehistory, given the allure of the area’s more spectacular later periods. One of the best known, though still controversial, Early Paleoindian occupations is located in highland Mexico, near the present-day city of Puebla, where a cluster of what appears to have been transient hunting camps was discovered adjacent to the Valsequillo Reservoir. Excavations at five of the sites, which the investigators designated Hueyatlaco, Tecacaxco, El Mirador, El Horno, and Cualapan, resulted in the

recovery of numerous stone tools alongside the fossilized remains of various large, Ice Age animals, including mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, four-horned antelopes, saber-tooth tigers, and dire wolves. The Hueyatlaco excavations exposed ten stratigraphic layers of alluvial deposits ranging in age from modern times back to the Pleistocene. Below the top stratum of recent debris were two levels of deposit, the upper of which contained a bifacially flaked stemmed projectile point along with a variety of percussion- and pressure-flaked cutting, piercing, and scraping implements, reflecting a well-developed lithic technology. In association with these implements were abundant bone remains of Pleistocene megafauna. The lowest artifact bearing ‘unit’ at Hueyatlaco, along with equivalent levels at other Valsequillo sites, revealed a cruder tool-making technology in which fragments were simply smashed off one side of a stone flake to produce a sharp edge that was then marginally retouched by pressure-flaking into an implement of desired form. Along with these tools were the remains of mastodon, camel, horse, and other animals. At the adjacent El Horno site, similar stone tools, some showing signs of use, were found alongside a butchered mastodon. The simple, unifacially flaked

SIE RR

S IE

San Isidro, Calsada

Middle America Paleoindian Sites

RR

AM

Tamaulipas

AD

AM

Highland areas (Altitude over 1000 meters)

AD

RE

Site

IEN

D CI OC

OR

RE Rancho la Amapola

TA L

EN

Gulf of Mexico

TA

L

Plateau of Mexico

Tequixquiac Tepexpan, Ixtapan

Loltún Cave

Yucatán Peninsula

Tlapacoya Valsequillo

MEXICO

August Pine Ridge

Tehuacán

SI E

RR

AM

AD

Cueva Blanca

RE

D EL

SUR

Caribbean Sea

Ladyville

Isthmus of Tehuantepec

PACIFIC OCEAN

Actun Halal

BELIZE

GUATEMALA Quiche Basin

HONDURAS

La Esperanza El Bosque

EL SALVADOR N 0 0

300 mi 300 km

Figure 3 Map of Middle American Paleoindian sites mentioned in the text.

168 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America

stone implements, along with the absence of spear or projectile points, are thought by some archaeologists to be part of an early lithic tradition, with roots extending as far back as 40 000 years in time, antecedent to the production of bifacially flaked tools. Questions arise as to how mastodons, mammoths, and other formidably large animals could have been hunted without projectile or spear points, given the simple stone tools found in the lower levels of the Valsequillo excavations. One explanation is that the early inhabitants and their contemporaries elsewhere in Middle America were foragers whose principal diet consisted of smaller animals and plant foods, the remains of which were not preserved as they were at Monte Verde. Only when a mastodon or mammoth had been handicapped by sickness, injury, or other impediment would it have been pursued. Alternatively, it is possible that the excavations at Valsequillo failed to recover existing evidence of points, or that they had been produced from bone, wood or other perishable materials. A series of five radiocarbon dates were obtained from fossilized freshwater mollusks recovered from a stream-eroded gully adjoining the Valsequillo Reservoir. The dates, in stratigraphic sequence, span the period from approximately 35 000 years bp at the lowest level to 9150  500 years BP near the surface of the gully. Midway down the stratigraphic profile, a shell sample in direct association with a flake scraper was dated to 21 850  850 years bp, which the investigators proposed as representative of the site’s time of occupation. In 1962–66, when the Valsequillo project took place, pre-Clovis sites were typically greeted with disbelief. Although that is no longer so, the Valsequillo dates are still considered problematical by many archaeologists on grounds that the shell used for radiocarbon dating is an unreliable medium, and the integrity of the streambed stratigraphy is problematical. A project underway at the Mexican National Institute of Archaeology (INAH) and the National Museum of Anthropology proposes to validate these dates. Other dates from the Valsequillo excavations obtained through an experimental tephra hydration assay of volcanic pumice, from fission track analysis of obsidian, and from uranium series analysis of bone, range from 245 000 to 600 000 years BP and are universally rejected, as they would connote the implausible existence of a New World population antecedent to the evolution of modern Homo sapiens. In 2005 a British geoarchaeological team working under the shadow of the Toloquilla Volcano, in the vicinity of Valsequillo, announced the discovery of what they claimed to be a large cluster of fossilized human footprints imprinted in volcanic tuff

(concretized volcanic ash) at an abandoned quarry. Optically Stimulated Luminescence, a technique that calculates when sediment grains were last exposed to heat or light, was used to date what appeared to be burnt clay fragments within the Cerro Toloquilla tuff, leading to assertions that the footprints were more than 40 000 years old. Later, samples of the tuff were taken to the Berkeley Geochronology Center where they were dated at 1.3 million years BP by 40Argon/39Argon and Palaeomagnetic techniques, which would make the ‘Toloquilla footprints’ – if that is really what they are – impossibly ancient. Another questionable Early Paleoindian occupation in Middle America is the El Bosque site, in Nicaragua, near the southernmost periphery of Middle America. Excavations uncovered crudely flaked stone tools along with mastodon, giant sloth, and horse remains. Radiocarbon dates extend from 18 100 to over 35 000 years in the past. One of the lithic implements has been classified a primitive ‘chopper’, a simple bifacial implement type some prehistorians profess to be characteristic of the earliest tradition of New World toolmaking, preceding in time the unifacially flaked tools found in the lower stratigraphic levels at Valsequillo. Doubts have been expressed about the early dates for the site and even whether the lithic finds are actual artifacts. A more probable Early Paleoindian occupation is reported at Tlapacoya, located near Lake Chalco in highland Central Mexico. Eight seasons of interdisciplinary fieldwork at the site from 1965–73 produced a large number of stone tools, animal bones, and plant remains, some recovered in or around what appear to be ancient hearths. From a suite of radiocarbon determinations, a sample from a circular hearth dated 21 700  500 years bp was selected as an indication of the age of the site. Two other cooking areas, replete with the remains of stone tools and animal bones, many from now extinct Pleistocene mammals, suggest a series of temporary campsites along the ancient lakeshore. Many of the artifacts from the earliest dated locality were crudely made flakes and blades similar in form to those from the lowest Hueyatlaco excavation levels. Several bifacially flaked obsidian implements were also found in association with the animal bones and hearths. Remarkably, the nearest source of obsidian is located more than 50 km from the site, indicating that the Tlapacoya hunter-gatherers either ranged widely or had established exchange relationships with adjacent groups. However, the more sophisticated obsidian flaking technique used to produce the implements, atypical of Early Paleoindian toolmaking, raises reservations about their association with the early radiocarbon dates.

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Also in Central Mexico, the Rancho La Amapola site in San Luı´s Potosı´ was, at the time of its occupation, situated in an area resplendent with lakes, marshes, streams, and springs, making it an attractive habitat for humans and other animals. Several seasons of excavation between 1977 and 1980 produced remains of mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wolf, short-faced bear, glyptodon, giant sloth, and other now-extinct megafauna, but only three definite artifacts: a point carved from a horse tibia, a limestone hammerstone, and a discoidal chalcedony scraper. A charcoal sample from what was believed to be a cooking area was dated at 31 850  600 years bp; another radiocarbon determination from the stratigraphic level in which the scraper was found produced a date of 33 300  2700–1800 years bp. In the lowlands of Middle America, only two sites, both in caves on the Yucatan Peninsula, offer insights into possible Early Paleoindian occupation. Neither have the confirmation of radiocarbon dating. Loltu´n Cave, in the Puuc Hills of northern Mexico, is dated solely by the association of crude stone and bone tools with the remains of mastodon and other Pleistocene age animals in the lowest stratigraphic levels of excavations. Projectile points are lacking. Upper strata have evidence of occupation by pottery-making peoples. Analysis of the stone tools and their faunal association has led to speculation that occupation may extend back in time as early as 40 000 years. Actun Halal Cave in western Belize also relies on the association of stone tools with the remains of extinct megafauna for its Early Paleoindian assignment. Among the lithic artifacts associated with the fragmentary remains of horse, spectacled bear, and peccary are a crude, bifacially flaked cobble, possibly a chopper, and a discoidal-flaked core. The core, however, is reported to be similar to artifacts found in fluted biface assemblages elsewhere in Middle and North America, which would suggest that the site may actually date to the Late Paleoindian period.

lifeways of the people that made them can only be inferred from sites further north in the United States. The dozen or so Clovis finds from highland regions of Middle America area are distributed geographically from Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Durango in northern Mexico, to San Luı´s Potosı´, Quere´taro, Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Oaxaca in the Mexican central and southern highlands, down to Guatemala and Costa Rica. In the lowlands only three Clovis finds have been reported, all from Belize. Two are from Ladyville, north of Belize City, and the other was found near August Pine Ridge (Figure 4). As noted above, the Actun Halal Cave site might also date to this period. Another diagnostic Late Paleoindian artifact, contemporaneous and morphologically akin to Clovis, are the so-called Fishtail projectile points. Also fluted, they are distinguished from Clovis points by a characteristic stemmed base. Their origin appears to have been in South America, where they were first encountered at Fell’s Cave in the Tierra del Fuego region of Chile. Four are currently known from Belize, all surface finds, where they have been provisionally dated c. 9000–7000 years bc, based on their resemblance to better known examples at Madden Lake in Panama and the Quiche´ Basin of Guatemala (Figure 5). The August Pine Ridge Clovis point exhibits a degree of fishtail-like basal narrowing, suggesting that southern Middle America may have been the meeting point of the two traditions. Although no faunal remains have been associated with the Belize points, the open savanna environment where some of the specimens were found would have provided an appealing habitat for large, grazing animals. At the Fell’s Cave

The Late Paleoindian Period A hallmark artifact of the Late Paleoindian period is the Clovis point. So effective for hunting was this implement that its design proliferated among Paleoindian peoples throughout much of North and Middle America. For the first time a tool was available to confidently confront the large animals that had previously been an attractive but elusive and often dangerous source of food. In Middle America scattered Clovis points have been recovered from both highland and lowland regions, although all are isolated surface finds. Lacking context, their use, age, and the

0

1

2

cm Figure 4 Fluted Clovis point from August Pine Ridge, Belize. Courtesy of Fred Valdez, Jr., drawn by Dee Turman.

170 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America

site, radiocarbon dated 9050 and 8770 years bc, Fishtail points were recovered in association with the remains of horse, mylodon, and other now-extinct Pleistocene animals. Appearing somewhat later in time than Clovis and Fishtail points are a variety of large, unfluted lanceolate-shaped projectile points and knives, many of them dazzling in their technological refinement.

0

They are best known from the North American Southwest and Plains under such type names as Angostura, Dalton, Plainview, and Scottsbluff, but variants extend into other areas, including Middle America. At the La Calsada Rockshelter in the highland Mexico state of Nuevo Leo´n, similar tools have been radiocarbon dated to the beginning years of the Late Paleoindian period. While still associated with the hunting of Ice Age megafauna, these implements are increasingly found at sites with bison, antelope and other modern prey, reflecting the changing composition of animals on the post-Pleistocene landscape during the final millennia of the Late Paleoindian period. Also exemplifying this complex in Middle America are the Santa Isabel Iztapan finds, where the dismembered skeletons of two mammoths were discovered along the shores of ancient Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. Spear points comparable to Lerma, Scottsbluff, and Angostura types were found near the animals, along with an assortment of chert and obsidian knives and other butchering tools that were probably responsible for the many cut marks found on the fossil bones (Figure 6). As at the earlier Tlapacoya site, the fact that the obsidian and chert from which many of the tools were manufactured were procured from sources many kilometers away indicates the mobility of these hunters or their participation in an early network of exchange with other bands. The location of the kill site suggests that the

5 cm

Figure 5 Fishtail point from the Lowe Ranch Site (BAAR 35E), Belize. Reproduced with permission of the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA.

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Figure 6 Projectile/spear points found in association with the Santa Isabel Iztapan mammoths. a. Scottsbluff point; b. Lerma point; c. Angostura point.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America 171

animals were driven into or had attempted to escape along the swampy shore of the lake and were butchered on the spot. In the North American Southwest and Plains regions the recovery of many large animal bones in Late Paleoindian period archaeological sites suggested that a ‘big game hunting tradition’ had evolved, a tradition that was ultimately shown to be inapplicable to Middle America. The initial negative evidence was provided by the Tehuaca´n Archaeological-Botanical Project, a ground-breaking interdisciplinary study based in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico. The ambitious objective of the project was to reconstruct in a single place – the Tehuaca´n Valley – a complete sequence of social and cultural development, from the time of earliest human settlement to the beginning of urban civilization. Excavations at Tehuaca´n revealed that the earliest human occupants of the valley, between 12 000 and 9000 years ago, manufactured a variety of bifacially flaked stone tools, including Lerma- and Plainviewlike projectile points. Judging from the association of these implements with the remains of animals such as horse and antelope, it was apparent that big game hunting had indeed been practiced by these early settlers. But notably, analysis of the many bones recovered from birds, gophers, jackrabbits, rats, and turtles revealed that smaller animals actually constituted the bulk of the diet for the Tehuaca´n inhabitants. Recovered from an early stratigraphic zone in the valley’s Coxcatla´n Cave, for example, were nearly 400 jackrabbit bones, including in a one square meter unit, the feet of over 40 animals that had been slaughtered in a single session. The tendency of jackrabbits to congregate suggested that they were hunted in communal drives, involving people from several otherwise independent bands. However, as the environment changed during the Holocene, social species of animals, such as jackrabbits and pronghorn antelopes, appear to have been supplanted by more solitary types, such as cottontail rabbits and white-tailed deer, a population shift that would have entailed the abandonment of communal hunting for the stalking of single animals by individuals or small groups of hunters. Along with the fauna, the recovery in the Tehuaca´n Valley of food remains from wild plants such as avocado, agave, and opuntia further indicates a much broader spectrum of subsistence than that implied by a ‘big game hunting’ model. Subsequent archaeological excavations at Cueva Blanca, several hundred kilometers further south in the Oaxaca Valley, corroborate the Tehuaca´n reconstruction. Overall the Late Paleoindian mode of subsistence in highland Middle America appears to have involved generalized

foraging, with small game constituting the bulk of the diet, supplemented by the occasional larger animal and the seasonal availability of wild food plants. Population density is estimated to have been very low, clustered into small, mobile ‘microbands’ consisting of four to eight related individuals. Mostly independent, several bands may have temporarily joined each year for hunting and perhaps social activities. The need to not overexploit the limited wild food carrying capacity of the habitat in places such as the Tehuaca´n and Oaxaca valleys would have induced the small bands to remain dispersed for most of the year. Another of the defining attributes of the Late Pleistocene period is the dramatic disappearance of over 32 genera of large Ice Age animals, among them the mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, tapir, ground sloth, dire wolf, saber-tooth tiger, and glyptodont. Since prior environmental fluctuations during earlier phases of the Ice Age had not resulted in similar extinctions, the growth of human population and the attendant development of more efficient hunting techniques have been proposed as the principal causal factor. Support for this Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis is strongest on the North American Plains where there is archaeological evidence of a shift in hunting strategy from the stalking of solitary prey to the often wasteful slaughter of entire animal herds in a single episode. Critics of the hypothesis respond that many of the species that became extinct were not hunted and some that were, such as the modern bison, did not perish. Evidence from the Tehuaca´n ArchaeologicalBotanical Project indicates that at least for Middle America predation of Pleistocene megafauna was not intense enough to have accounted for their extermination. Overall, the explanation for the extinctions may lie in a combination of climatically induced environmental change and more intensive hunting.

The Origins of Middle American Art and Ideology The delicate pressure flaking that produced the superbly made lanceolate projectile points and knives of the Late Paleolithic reveals a degree of attention to manufacture that far exceeded purely functional requirements. Archaeologists do not know whether the diversity and refinement of the implement types resulting from this extra effort is accounted for by an aspiration for greater creativity and beauty or by a more utilitarian need, such as a desire by indigenous groups to differentiate themselves through a distinguishing ‘signature’ as they became more territorially bounded. Whatever the case, to the extent it can be called art, the effort was applied to practical implements.

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Figure 7 The Tequixquiac carved camelid sacrum.

The earliest known example in Middle America – and indeed one of the oldest in the New World – of what would be a purely aesthetic work, is a carved camelid sacrum, fashioned in the shape of what appears to be the head of a peccary or canid (Figure 7). The object was discovered in 1870 at Tequixquiac, in the Central Mexican state of Hidalgo, deeply buried in a thick layer of Late Pleistocene sediments known as the Upper Becerra formation. For many years the carving’s antiquity was questioned, but subsequent investigation at the Tequixquiac site revealed its association with Late Paleoindian stone and bone tools and the remains of camel, ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, and other Ice Age animals. Also found in the Upper Becerra deposits, adjacent to Lake Texcoco at a location less than two kilometers away from the ‘Iztapan mammoth’ finds, was a female skeleton, buried in a face-down, flexed position. Because it was felt that the pit in which the skeleton was placed might be intrusive from a more recent stratigraphic level, the antiquity of the burial, like that of the carved camelid sacrum, was questioned. Subsequent fluorine and nitrogen analyses of bone samples tended to verify the contemporaneity of the Tepexpan skeleton with the nearby mammoths but more recent radiocarbon analysis indicates that the bones may be only 2000 years old. If the earlier date is correct Tepexpan Woman would be the earliest example of an intentional human burial, suggesting that by the Late Paleoindian period belief in an afterlife was part of Middle American ideology.

The Archaic Period in General The long Archaic period, beginning sometime after 9000 bc, can be divided into Early, Middle, and Late subperiods (see Figure 1). Comparable to the Old

World Mesolithic, it was a time of profound transformation, culminating in the appearance of permanent settlements supported by a subsistence economy primarily based on agriculture. In Middle America domesticated animals – and only the turkey, Muscovy duck, dog, and honeybee can be included in this category – never figured significantly in the PreColumbian diet. Maize, beans, and squash, three of the early plant domesticates, became Middle America’s staple foods, although by the sixteenth century, when the Spanish arrived, over forty other cultivated species were being consumed. In Middle America’s highlands the first steps toward agriculture can be traced to the Early Archaic, when wild plants appear to have become an increasingly important component of the diet. At this time populations settled into more defined territories, replacing a mobile lifeway with scheduled rounds of shorter moves to take advantage of the seasonal availability of locally available plants and animals. By the Late Archaic, in some highland regions, particularly where resources were sparse, ‘foraging’ of this kind gave way to a ‘collecting’ strategy, where small task groups made transient forays to specific food sources, leaving the main community behind in more permanent settlements. Food collecting strategies may have developed in lowland regions as well, although there is not yet enough evidence to be certain. The practice of food collecting promoted cultivation when non-local plants were brought back to the settlement where they could be watered, weeded, and better protected from predators. In addition, accidentally dropped seeds from wild food plants would have sprouted in the disturbed soils around the camp. From there it was only a short step to creating domesticates by selecting seeds, cuttings, and issue from the most productive cultigens. The resulting domesticated plants (see Plant Domestication) addressed human needs, but often at the cost of their ability to survive in the wild. Once agriculture was fully embraced, it permitted (some prehistorians would argue that it required) those of its practitioners who were not already doing so to forego their mobile lifeway. Contrasted to subsistence dependent on a finite supply of wild plants and animals, the intensifiable nature of horticulture allowed for the support of densely populated villages and, eventually, for the large towns and cities that appeared in later periods. The Archaic transformation in Middle America was not uniform, but varied in timing and possibly in process from region to region. Like the previous Paleoindian period, most of what we currently know about it derives from investigations in highland regions where the more arid environment is more

AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America 173

conducive to preservation. Practical difficulties of research in the hot, often wet and densely forested, lowlands of Middle America are exacerbated by the three-meter post-Pleistocene rise in sea level that has inundated early coastal sites; by higher groundwater levels and encroaching wetlands that frustrate excavation; by stream and river erosion that has destroyed some sites while deeply burying others under alluvial sediment; and by a paucity of cave sites where archaeological remains tend to be better preserved (Figure 8). Only in the last few decades has this unbalanced perspective begun to be rectified, often through sophisticated collection and analytical techniques. Even so, almost nothing is known about the lowland Early Archaic, particularly in the more interior tropical forest regions, although from evidence of Paleoindian occupation it could be inferred that at least some of these places were inhabited. The emerging picture from the better known lowland Middle and Late Archaic suggests that the path its inhabitants took to a horticulture-based economy was, with the possible exception of tropical domesticates such as manioc, conditioned by earlier developments in the highlands.

SIE

To fully appreciate the changes that occurred during the Archaic, it is instructive to first examine their earliest manifestation on Middle America’s northeastern periphery. There, at Frightful Cave, Fat Burro Cave, and Nopal Shelter in Coahuila and Calzada Rockshelter in Nuevo Leo´n, a Mexican extension of the North American Desert Culture has been found. Beginning as early as 9000 bc, these caves, and undoubtedly many others in this harshly rugged area, were occupied seasonally by small bands of mobile foragers who left behind a bountiful array of artifacts. Utilitarian items included small, percussion flaked projectile points for attachment to darts propelled by wooden atlatls, along with stone scrapers, choppers, hammerstones, fiber cordage, sandals, baskets, mats, fire drills, and tongs. Hinting of a rich ceremonial life were scarifiers for bloodletting or tattooing, musical rasps, ornamental shell beads, and hallucinogenic plants. Food remains, some recovered from grass-lined storage pits, indicate a diet heavily dependent on wild plants, supplemented by meat from small and medium sized animals of modern species. Cobblestone manos (grinding stones) along with fragments from flat milling bases for

Middle America Archaic Sites

Coahuila Cave Sites Calsada

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Highland areas (Altitude over 1000 meters)

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The Early Archaic

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San Andres

Tehuacán

Middle Balsas Basin

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Santa Luisa Zohapilco

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Loltún Cave

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Figure 8 Map of Middle American Archaic sites mentioned in the text.

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more efficient processing of seeds and other plant parts were used for the first time by people who retained a nonagricultural subsistence regime but who showed an increasing interest in plant foods. Further south, in the Sierra de Tamaulipas, the lowest, ‘Infiernillo phase’ excavation levels at several cave sites dated c. 7000–6000 bc reveal an Early Archaic artifact inventory similar to that of the Desert Culture, including a food complex that relied primarily on wild plants such as runner beans, agave, and opuntia. A critically important distinction was that by the end of the Archaic period, at around 2400 BC, maize (Zea mays) was being cultivated. The discovery, first published in 1958, but with a now corrected sequence of dates, stimulated a still ongoing search throughout Middle America for earlier places of plant domestication. A number have been found, among them the Santa Marta Rockshelter and Aguacatenango II–III in Chiapas, Mexico, some surface surveyed locations in Guatemala’s Quiche´ Basin, and a series of habitation sites near La Esperanza, Honduras. However, to this day, much of what has been learned since the Tamaulipas project has been a product of investigations in just three highland regions: the Tehuaca´n Valley, the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Basin of Mexico. From the Tehuaca´n Valley, information about the Archaic derives from the Tehuaca´n Archaeological– Botanical Project, previously noted for its Paleoindian period research. Several hundred cave and open-air archaeological sites were surveyed, nine of which were chosen for excavation. Along with the many artifacts, copious food remains were recovered, including both macrobotanical specimens and human coprolites (fossilized feces). Based on their stratigraphic position and the typology of artifacts, the materials were originally assigned to one or another of three sequential Archaic phases, El Riego (7000– 5000 bc), Coxcatla´n (5000–3400 bc), and Abejas (3400–2000 bc), mirroring the division of the Archaic into Early, Middle, and Late subperiods. Although the specific dates assigned the excavated materials and their cultural implications have been extensively amended since the 1960s when the project took place, the general sequence of developments is still widely used to model the transition from hunting and gathering to horticulture in highland Middle America. The earliest Archaic food plants recovered from the Tehuaca´n excavations consisted exclusively of wild species such as foxtail millet, mesquite, and acacia, from which seeds and pods were harvested; pochote, which has edible roots and seeds; maguey leaves and hearts, collected for roasting; and chupandilla, cosahuico, ciruela,and opuntia (prickly pear), desired for their fruit. Along with the appearance of manos and metates – the grinding stones and basins that were

to become the ubiquitous plant processing tools in Middle America – the food remains indicated the increasing importance of plants in the diet of the Tehuaca´n foragers (Figure 9). By 7000 BC, the first tentative step toward plant domestication at Tehuaca´n was taken in the form of attention the Valley’s Archaic foragers paid to avocados (Persea americana). Because these trees required regular watering, they appear to have been transplanted to locations where they could be better tended, a procedure amounting to simple cultivation. By 5960 BC, toward the end of the Early Archaic period, morphologically domesticated squash (Cucurbita pepo) was being cultivated in the Valley; by 5200 BC there is evidence for the domesticated bottle gourd (Lageneria siceraria); and somewhat later, chile peppers (Capsicum frutescens). Some tiny fossilized maize cobs from the Tehuaca´n caves were also determined to be domesticates, as it was observed that they were unable to disperse their tightly attached seed grains without human assistance. The survival of this maladaptive morphology could only have been the product of purposeful selection for a set of genetic traits that made the plant more attractive for harvesting and consumption, but which had the effect of preventing its reproduction in the wild. Charcoal from the archaeological strata in Coxcatla´n Cave from which the primitivelooking cobs were recovered was radiocarbon dated

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cm Figure 9 Archaic period oblong mano fragment (above) and metate-milling stone from Tehuaca´n.

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Figure 10 Maize cob remains from Tehuaca´n. From left to right: Middle Archaic Coxcatla´n phase; Late Archaic Abejas phase; Late Formative/Early Classic; last two on the right date to the Postclassic period. Photograph courtesy of the R.S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA.

c. 5500 BC and until recently that terminal Early Archaic date was accepted as marking the initial domestication of maize in Middle America (Figure 10). Recent analysis of bottle gourd samples from the same level at the cave verified their domestication at a date just a few hundred years later. However, subsequent direct AMS determinations on maize cobs from the Valley’s San Marcos and Coxcatla´n caves, produced a suite of revised dates, none earlier than 3555 BC, well into the Middle Archaic. Consequently, most archaeologists now reject the original 5500 BC date, attributing it to post-depositional intrusion of the cobs into earlier stratigraphic levels of Coxcatla´n cave. Excavations at Guila´ Naquitz and Cueva Blanca, two cave sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, have greatly augmented the Tehuaca´n archaeological record. At Guila´ Naquitz (Figure 11), nine AMS determinations on seeds and fruit stems of squash (C. pepo) indicate that a domesticated variety was being cultivated by 8000 BC, over 2000 years prior to the Tehuaca´n specimen,

making it Middle America’s earliest dated domesticated plant. Domesticated bottle gourds (L. siceraria) followed shortly thereafter at 7970 BC Nevertheless, the more than 20 000 plant specimens recovered at the site reflect an Early Archaic diet consisting mainly of wild plants. Acorns appear to have been most important, but runner beans, maguey, seeds and pods of mesquite, prickly pear cactus leaves and fruit, pin˜on and susi nuts, hackberries, and onions were also among the wild plants eaten (Figure 12). In addition, faunal remains show that deer, cottontail rabbits, mud turtles, collared peccary, raccoons, and a variety of birds were hunted by the small family bands that occasionally occupied the cave during fall seasons. Flaked stone tools, classified as belonging to the Early Archaic Naquitz phase in the Oaxaca Valley, show little standardization. Among them are crude blades, notched flakes, and denticulate scrapers, typically produced from locally available chert (Figure 13). Metates and manos for processing plant foods were made from local ignimbrite and stream-borne cobbles.

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Figure 11 Guila´ Naquitz Cave. A person is standing in front of the cave entrance. Photo courtesy of Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Figure 12 Wild plant food remains from Guila´ Naquitz Cave. a–b: acorns; c–f: pin˜on nuts; g–i: West Indian cherry seeds; j–m: yak susi hulls; n: mesquite seeds; o: hackberry seeds; p: prickly pear cactus fruit; q: wild onion bulb; r–s: chewed agave fiber quids. Photograph courtesy of Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

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Figure 13 Early Archaic period stone tools from the Oaxaca Valley. a: notched flake; b: denticulate scraper; c: crude blade. Redrawn from K.V. Flannery (ed.), Guila´ Naquitz. Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Figure 14 Net bag fragment from Guila´ Naquitz. Photograph courtesy of Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Knotted netting fragments, cordage, coiled basketry, fire drills, a drill hearth, and some roasting sticks round out a typical Early Archaic artifact assemblage (Figure 14). The Middle and Late Archaic in the Highlands

The Middle and Late Archaic were times of growing reliance on horticulture among the highland populations of Middle America. At Tehuaca´n, coyol palms and sapote trees, like avocados, alien to the region, were brought into the Valley and domesticated. Other domesticated plants were two additional varieties of squash (C. moschata and mixta), bottle gourds, common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), and, as indicated

above, maize. By the Late Archaic, tepary beans (P. acutifolius) and jack beans (Canavalia ensiformis) were added to the list. Toward the end of the Archaic, maize, initially a primitive grass of marginal food value, had evolved into a nutritious and storable grain staple. In the Oaxaca Valley increasing residential permanence is inferred from Gheo-Shih, a Middle Archaic open air camp where occupation has been dated c. 8600 years BP Excavation at the 1.5 ha site revealed an unusual architectural feature interpreted as a ‘dance ground’, similar to those found among historic period Great Basin hunter-gatherer bands. The feature consists of two parallel rows of boulders, twenty meters in length, bounding a seven meter-wide space that had been kept clean of the projectile points, grinding stones, scrapers, pebble ornaments, and other lithic remnants of occupation found elsewhere at the site. Gheo-Shih appears to have been an encampment where several family microbands, totaling 25–30 individuals, congregated for ceremonies and other social activities during the rainy season, when food supplies were ample. Still lacking was a food source adequate to enable year-round residence. That the occupants of the Oaxaca Valley had begun to experiment by the Middle Archaic with the cultivation of maize has been confirmed by a series of direct AMS dates on some primitive-looking but domesticated cobs from excavations at Guila´ Naquitz Cave (Figure 15). The dates, averaging 6250 calendar years ago (approximately 4250 BC), are the earliest currently recognized for domesticated maize, predating by as much as 800 calendar years the oldest Tehuaca´n specimens. The absence of wild maize in

178 AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America

Figure 15 The two oldest maize cobs in the New World, from excavations at Guila´ Naquitz Cave, dated c 6250 calendar years ago. The lower cob is approximately 2.5 cm long. Photo courtesy of Dolores Piperno, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

deeper excavation levels at the site has led to the conclusion that the initial place of maize domestication lay outside the Oaxaca Valley. Currently favored is the region around the middle Balsas River Basin, in the states of Guerrero and Michoaca´n, where DNA and isozyme studies point to a local variety of teosinte (Z. mays ssp. parviglumis), a wild annual grass with naturally disarticulating grains, as the probable ancestor of domesticated maize. Indications of a continuing movement toward residential permanence in the Oaxaca Valley appear at the Late Archaic Cueva Blanca site, near present-day Mitla. From artifacts and faunal remains it appears that the seasonal inhabitants of the rockshelter were all-male deer hunters. Whereas the previous foraging lifeway had entailed an annual cycle of movement requiring entire bands to travel from one seasonally available food source to another, a ‘collecting’ strategy is inferred from the Cueva Blanca remains. Under this strategy, deer hunters, as well as other small task groups, made transient forays from a semi-permanent base to specific locations of food and other resources, camping temporarily at places like Cueva Blanca. An alternative path to highland sedentism that circumvents the transitional collecting strategy was theoretically possible in regions of rich, locally available resources. Zohapilco, in the highlands of Central Mexico not far from the Paleoindian Tlapacoya encampments, may exemplify this alternative. Its setting on the shore of Lake Chalco, surrounded by abundant wild plant and animal populations, is thought to have enabled Zohapilco’s Middle Archaic inhabitants to remain in one location throughout the year. The limited archaeological excavation, consisting of a single long trench, failed to expose evidence

of permanent structures, so the actual nature of occupation remains to be verified. Excavation strata, dated 5059–4250 bc, revealed pollen and seeds from wild plants such as teosinte, amaranth, portulaca, goosefoot, tomatillo, and squash, along with the bones of fish, waterfowl, deer, rabbits, turtles, snakes, and the amphibian axolot. With the exception of dogs, there is no evidence of domestication. The associated lithic assemblage included obsidian projectile points and flakes, large bifaces, macroblades, notched flakes, scrapers, mullers, and metates. Not until the Late Archaic do domesticates appear at Zohapilco, in the forms of maize, amaranth, tomatillo, pumpkin, chile pepper, and chayote. Elsewhere in the highlands of Middle America there is no indication at present of permanent, year-round villages until the beginning of the Formative/Preclassic period. The Lowland Middle and Late Archaic

Future archaeological investigation will be required to determine whether the lack of evidence for Early Archaic occupation in the lowlands of Middle America is simply a failure of discovery or, less likely, whether those regions had been abandoned by their previous Paleoindian inhabitants, only to be resettled thousands of years later. Although this remains an open question, research in coastal and near coastal regions is at least beginning to cast light on the subsequent Middle and Late years of the Archaic. During that time plant domestication and farming spread throughout much of the area and, at the end of the period, permanent villages were established. Whether lowland village life arose without the support of horticulture, as some scholars have argued, or was tied to a developmental sequence that ran from

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foraging to collecting, and finally to horticulture, as exemplified by the Valley of Oaxaca, is another debated question. A sedimentary core drawn from a small freshwater lake at San Andre´s, near the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, was aimed, in part, at addressing this issue. Pollen in the core sediment indicating the appearance of domesticated maize along with forest clearance, presumably for agriculture, was initially dated c. 5000 bc The C14 dates were obtained from fossil clams, which appeared at the same level in the core as the maize pollen and were therefore assumed to be contemporaneous with it. This would have put the development of agriculture long before any known permanent settlement in Middle America. Doubt about the date was cast by the subsequent AMS analysis of another sedimentary core from the adjacent Veracruz coastal plain. In this sample the maize pollen itself was analyzed, producing a date c. 2500 BC, 2500 years more recent than the Veracruz determination and over 1700 years later than the highland Oaxaca domesticated maize cobs. The discrepancy in the two Gulf Coast dates has been attributed to soil bioturbation in the Tabasco core, resulting in a flawed association between the clams and maize pollen. The Veracruz date is corroborated by another pollen sequence from the nearby Tuxtlas region. Together these dates support the hypothesis that maize was initially domesticated in the Balsas Basin, then diffused to a number of highland regions, and only later spread to the lowlands. The small number of archaeological sites currently providing evidence of early plant domestication, however, makes any model of diffusion very provisional. A lowland site whose inhabitants appear to have lacked an early interest in horticulture is located on the northern Veracruz coast. At Santa Luisa, where occupation seems to have been comprised of multiple deltaic island encampments, the resource rich coastal habitat apparently was the source of subsistence. Plant remains are missing from the Middle-Late Archaic Palo Hueco phase, dated 4000–2400 bc, nor were there any of the grinding implements commonly used for plant processing. Scatters of fire-cracked cobbles are thought to have been used in cooking the oysters, fish, land crabs, and small mammals whose remains were found in abundance. Obsidian nodules, obtained from a geological source several hundred kilometers away in Quere´taro, along with locally available sandstone, served to produce crude blades, flakes, and bifaces, probably used in food preparation. The evidence of Middle Archaic obsidian procurement at Santa Luisa is an indication that long-distance contacts had been established with the highlands.

Although the concentration of nearby resources and density of food remains at Santa Luisa led the site’s investigator to describe it as a ‘permanent village’, it is equally likely that occupation was only seasonal, by foragers making their annual food gathering rounds, and later as either base or satellite camps for people engaged in a system of food collecting. If the latter, it remains to be determined if and when more inland sites within the system engaged in horticulture. Further insight into the relationship between lowland horticulture and settlement might be drawn from a more comprehensively studied cluster of Middle and Late Archaic sites on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico. The inhabitants of these sites, known as the Chantuto people, were probably collectors who exploited the lagoon estuarine environment from inland base camps. Six of the sites consisted of massive shellmounds, and at Cerro de las Conchas, the earliest of them, a series of radiocarbon dates brackets occupation between 7500 and 5300 calendar years ago (c. 5500–2300 BC), squarely within the Middle Archaic. Excavation indicated that the site consisted of accumulated refuse from consumption of the marsh clams (Polymesoda radiata) that grew in abundance in the lagoon estuarine environment. Aside from the voluminous burned and unburned clamshells, the limited cultural remains were comprised of waterworn cobbles, believed to have been heated by the Chantuto inhabitants to boil or steam clams, along with ark shells (Anadara spp.) that served as multipurpose cutting and scraping tools. No evidence of plant use was found dating to the site’s Middle Archaic occupation. Tlacuachera, the largest of the Chantuto shellmound sites, was dated to the Late Archaic, although occupation may have begun earlier, as excavations never reached the bottom levels of debris. The mound consisted mainly of layer upon layer of burned and unburned shells, the litter from years of clam consumption. Excavation within one of the bedded layers uncovered a clay floor, estimated to have measured 24 by 48 m, with a thickness of 10–20 cm. The labor investment in transporting the large quantity of clay to the site would have been substantial. Nevertheless, the untrampled clamshells suggest that the encampment was not occupied for extended periods of time. A pattern of postholes on the floor marks the location of two oval-shaped structures that may have served as temporary shelters. Although no supporting evidence was found, the investigator proposed that another activity at the site might have been the drying of shrimp, a practice common along the coast today.

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3 cm

Figure 16 Late Archaic/Early Formative lithic artifacts from Pulltrouser Swamp, Belize. a: Lowe/Pedernales-like projectile point, C14 dated 2210 BC; b: constricted/sole-shaped uniface, C14 dated 1275 BC Drawings courtesy of Mary D. Pohl, Department of Anthropology, Florida State University.

Phytoliths from plants indicating forest clearance as well as from maize were dated c. 3500 BC at Tlacuachera. With regard to maize, stable-carbonisotope analysis of bone samples from two human skeletons buried in the clay floor stratum suggests that by 2000 BC it was making a substantial contribution to the Chantuto diet. From the lowest cultural level at Vuelta Limo´n, another Chantuto site located some 20 km inland, phytolith analysis broadens the evidence for a gradual Late Archaic adoption of maize farming in the region. Several hundred kilometers southeast, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, near Sipacate, fossil maize pollen from a sediment core echos the Chantuto findings. Other Late Archaic sites have been identified on the Pacific coast northwest of the Chantuto region at Puerto Marquez, Guerrero and San Blas, Nayarit; a number of shellmound sites in Sinaloa and Sonora may also date to this period. On the opposite coast of Middle America, an effort to reconstruct a comprehensive picture of cultural change, from Paleoindian hunting and gathering through the introduction of agriculture and settled village life, was initiated in 1980 by the Belize Archaic Archaeological Reconnaissance. The BAAR project was envisioned as a companion to the Tehuaca´n Archaeological–Botanical Project under the premise that lowland and highland cultural developments would have followed similar paths. During four field seasons, about 150 possible preceramic sites were recorded, several of which were selected for excavation. With few samples recovered for radiocarbon analysis, a provisional chronology of developments, spanning the years from 9000 to 2000 BC, was constructed by cross-dating projectile points and other lithic artifacts with better known equivalents from other regions. Subsequent investigation at other sites in the Belize region, primarily through the Colha Project, has shown a number of the BAAR artifact assignments

to be erroneous. Lowe projectile points and adze-like constricted unifaces, for example, originally employed to identify the Early Archaic, are now known to have been produced much later in time, with specimens radiocarbon dated at 2210 BC and 1275 BC, respectively (Figure 16). Consequently, there remains a long gap in knowledge about cultural developments in the Belizian lowlands, extending from the end of the Paleoindian period until the final centuries of the Middle Archaic. The known sequence of development in Belize resumes around 3400 BC, when remains of domesticated maize and manioc (Manihot esculenta) are found in the northwestern part of the country at the Blue Creek site, corresponding in age to the earliest Chantuto evidence. Additional radiocarbon dates from Kob Swamp, adjacent to the Hondo River, reveal maize and manioc there at about the same time. At Cobweb Swamp, near the archaeological site of Colha, manioc pollen is reported c. 2500 BC. There is also evidence throughout the region of deforestation, probably to clear land for agricultural use.

From Nomadic Hunting and Gathering to Village Based Farming Societies: Toward Explaining the Processes of Development Despite the current paucity of data, some tentative generalizations can be made about cultural developments in the periods immediately following the first Paleoindian arrivals in Middle America. What is securely known is that a subsistence economy initially founded on hunting and wild plant gathering evolved by the end of the Archaic period into a dependency on agriculture, just as a pattern of group mobility was supplanted by residence rooted in permanent villages. As agricultural productivity approached a threshold where it could provide a relatively reliable, storable, and intensifiable source of food, it enabled the small

AMERICAS, NORTH/Early Cultures of Middle America 181

bands of loosely affiliated families to coalesce into larger, more permanent entities and, early in the Formative/Preclassic period, into chiefdoms, some incorporating hundreds of people in villages and towns, interacting within a hierarchical social and political system where one’s status was ascribed at birth rather than by personal achievement. While present archaeological knowledge is inadequate to provide definitive answers to questions about the cultural and environmental processes that drove these developments, a number of hypotheses are worth examining. To begin with it must be understood that horticulture, more labor-intensive than hunting and wild-food gathering in most Middle American regions of the time would have afforded no purely economic advantage to its practitioners unless something happened to undermine theestablished equilibrium between population and habitat. Although the number of Middle America’s inhabitants had indeed increased by the Middle Archaic to the point where group mobility was commonly replaced by a loose territorialism, there is little evidence that population pressure played a direct role in the adoption of agriculture. On the contrary, while there was feedback between the growth of population and agriculture, rapid population increase did not occur until much later, after agriculture had become well established, and then for other reasons. Nor do post-Pleistocene vegetation alterations, animal extinctions, and climatic change, despite transforming the habitat, seem to have been sufficient in themselves to turn Middle America’s inhabitants into farmers. A broader utilization of available wild resources would have been a far more effective response. Alternatively, a desire to better cope with year-toyear inconsistency in plant food availability due to drought and other natural events, particularly in marginal post-Pleistocene habitats, has been proposed as having encouraged experimentation with plant cultivation. That the first such experiments apparently occurred in low productivity thorn-scrub-cactus habitats of highland Middle America supports this hypothesis. Somewhat later, on the Pacific Coast, periods of reduced rainfall are cited as having intensified the shift to a horticultural mode of subsistence. As indicated above, the initial step toward domestication may have occurred unintentionally when early collectors brought wild food to their campsites, in the process inadvertently scattering seeds or plants in the disturbed soils where they tended to flourish. From that point, recognizing the advantage of relocating and nurturing desirable species would have been fairly obvious. The appearance of avocados and other non-local plants in the Early Archaic Tehuaca´n Valley exemplifies this rudimentary stage

of plant cultivation. Intentional selection of seeds, cuttings and offspring from plants with economically beneficial traits would have been the next step toward domestication. The process of maize domestication is of particular interest to paleobotanists and archaeologists as it is believed to have involved a series of fortuitous genetic mutations that transformed a wild grass of marginal economic value into Middle America’s premier food plant. Although the details continue to be argued, the most widely accepted reconstruction holds that a subspecies of teosinte (Z. mays subsp. parviglumis), a plant with small seed heads, each loosely holding no more than 12 kernels, was the progenitor of the modern maize plant, with its several hundred kernels tightly attached to a cob. Lacking a cob, the ancestral teosinte was designed to shatter its seeds which, encased in tough glumes (fruitcases), were able to survive the digestive tracts of consuming animals and, once deposited in the soil, self-propagate. By selecting for the characteristics that produced soft glumes and multiple large, tightly attached kernels, Archaic period horticulturalists fashioned a nutritious, bountiful food plant (Z. mays subsp. mays), easy to harvest, store and digest, but by definition a consummate domesticate, unable to reproduce on its own. Regional time differences in the appearance of maize horticulture in Middle America raise questions about whether the processes of adoption were the same in resource-rich localities as has been outlined for more patchy highland environments. From the small number of archaeological sites with dated evidence of domesticated maize one can at least begin to speculate about the pattern of diffusion. In the highlands the earliest known appearance of domesticated maize is in the Oaxaca Valley at 4250 BC; evidence is found further to the northwest c. 3555 BC at Tehuaca´n, and by 2400 BC in Tamaulipas. By 3500–3400 BC maize is reported at a number of coastal lowland locations, from Blue Creek on the Caribbean to the Chantuto sites on the Pacific, although not until 2500 BC on the Gulf Coast. It’s delayed appearance at places such as highland Zohapilco and on the Gulf Coast seems anomalous, but might be attributed to the reliable year-round abundance of wild food if not gaps in research. By 2000 BC, at the end of the Late Archaic, maize horticulture is widespread throughout most of Middle America. The appearance of maize in Pacific and Caribbean coastal sites raises questions about a longstanding hypothesis that in such well-endowed habitats the initiation of settled village life would not have depended on an agricultural economy. Under this premise it is appealing to consider another pathway

182 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico

to agriculture. In one version of the process, leaders of complex hunter-gatherer societies are deemed to have initially adopted agriculture not to fulfill subsistence needs but to produce food surpluses for the purpose of sponsoring feasts and other forms of conspicuous consumption. Through these displays ambitious leaders would have gained prestige, followers, allies, and authority. In an extension of this model, exchange of prestige goods with highland peoples, illustrated by the widespread presence of highly valued highland obsidian in Archaic period coastal sites and the concomitant ornamental marine seashell found in the highlands, would have brought maize seed along with other high-status goods to the coast where they were redistributed by status-hungry leaders to individuals within and beyond their community. The precocious appearance of chiefdom societies, religious complexity, and architectural sophistication in the ensuing Early Formative period along Middle America’s Pacific lowlands lends support to this hypothetical reconstruction. Once adopted on the coast, agriculture would have spread to lowland localities further inland where it provided the subsistence basis for later Olmec and Maya societies. More research will be needed to determine whether this model is valid for the lowlands and perhaps other regions of Middle America. See also: Americas, Central: Classic Period of Meso-

america, the Maya; Lower Central America; Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica; The Olmec and their Contemporaries; Extinctions of Big Game; New World, Peopling of; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Bonnichsen R and Turnmire KL (eds.) (1999) Ice Age Peoples of North America: Environments, Origins, and Adaptations of the First Americans. Corvallis, Oregon: Center for the Study of the First Americans. Oregon State University Press. Doebley J (2004) The genetics of maize evolution. Annual Review of Genetics 38: 37–59. Jablonski NG (ed.) (2002) The First Americans. The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World. San Francisco, CA: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, No. 27. Lohse JC, et al. (2006) Preceramic occupations in Belize: Updating the Paleoindian and Archaic record. Latin American Antiquity 17(2): 209–226. MacNeish RS (1981) Tehuaca´n’s accomplishments. In: Sabloff JA (ed.) Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 1. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Marcus J and Flannery KV (1996) Zapotec Civilization. How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. London, England: Thames and Judson Ltd. Meltzer DJ (2003) Peopling of North America. Development in Quaternary Science, vol. 1, pp. 539–563.

Pearsall DM (1995) Domestication and agriculture in the New World tropics. In: Price TD and Gegauer AB (eds.) Last Hunters – First Farmers, pp. 157–192. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press. Pohl MP, et al. (1996) Early agriculture in the Maya Lowlands. Latin American Antiquity 7(4): 355–372. Smith BD (2005) Reassessing Coxcatlan Cave and the early history of domesticated plants in Mesoamerica. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United State of America 102: 9438–9445. Straus LG, Meltzer DJ, and Goebel T (2005) Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean-Clovis ‘connection’. World Archaeology 37(4): 507–532. Voorhies B (2004) Coastal Collectors in the Holocene. The Chantuto People of Southwest Mexico. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida. Zeitlin RN and Zeitlin JF (2000) The Paleoindian and Archaic cultures of Mesoamerica. In: Adams REW and MacLeod MJ (eds.) The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. II, Mesoamerica, Part 1, pp. 45–121. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Historical Archaeology in Mexico Thomas H Charlton, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Patricia Fournier, Escuela Nacional de Antropologı´a, Mexico City, Mexico ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary audiencia Spanish imperial administrative unit for political, judicial, and fiscal ends. capilla (English, chapel). Usually associated with a church complex or with a section of a community. Casa de Cultura Regional museum of archaeology, history, and contemporary art and handicrafts. Ciudadela (English, citadel). Large building in Mexico City built in the late eighteenth century to house a state monopoly on tobacco. Later used for other activities. Classic period period from CE 300 to 900; subdivided into Early (c. CE 300–600), and Late (c. CE 600–900). Colonial period Culture period from c. CE 1521 to 1820. Precise starting date varies from region to region. May be subdivided into Early (c. CE 1521–1620), Middle (c. CE 1621–1720), and Late (c. CE 1721–1820). convent (Spanish, convento). Meaning varies by context. Residential section of a church or Mission complex housing male regular or secular clergy. Also refers to the complex in which cloistered nuns live (nunnery). hacienda Large and often ostentatious rural residential estate associated with animal husbandry and agricultural activities. Generally, late appearance in central Mexico but may be earlier in northern regions. Independence period Also known as Republican period. Culture period from CE 1821 to the present. indios principales Indigenous community leaders.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico 183 palaces Large, luxurious elite residential structures of the Colonial period and the nineteenth century, particularly in the Historic Center of Mexico City, are often referred to as palaces even though they had no direct governmental functions. Postclassic period Preconquest indigenous culture period from c. CE 900 to c. CE 1519–1520. presidios Fortified sites usually in the northern borderlands, most dating from the eighteenth century. ranch (Spanish, rancho). Small rural residential complex associated with animal husbandry and agricultural activities. Occurs in all three Colonial periods and during the Independence period where small ranches were associated with large haciendas.

Introduction For background on the history of historical archaeology in Mexico, three articles are useful starting points. One of these, by Patricia Fournier and Ferna´ndo Miranda, published in 1992, presents a general overview of the development of historical archaeology in Mexico until the early 1990s, emphasizing its relationship with the conservation of Colonial and Republican period monumental buildings, as well as salvage projects. The second (by Elsa Herna´ndez Pons), published in 1998, in the memoir edited by Enrique Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Susana Go´mez Serafı´n, presents a well-thought-out statement of the

development and current (pre-1998) status of Mexican historical archaeology. A third article by Araceli Peralta, also in the Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Go´mez Serafı´n edited memoir, presents a geographically and typologically organized summary of some studies in historical archaeology in the Basin of Mexico. Religious, civil (secular), and production (industrial, ranching, and farming) archaeological site categories are included in the Peralta paper. In our treatment of Mexican historical archaeology, we expand on the format in this paper by including studies from outside the basin, and by elaborating on the categories used. We have included six tables with this article, organizing by area and identifying by topic the papers included in the abovementioned memoir. These papers probably present the best current cross-section of approaches and topics under active consideration in Mexican historical archaeology. Of the total papers published in the Memoir of the First National Congress on Historical Archaeology, eighteen are on investigations in Mexico City (Table 1); ten on investigations in the Basin of Mexico and adjacent areas in the central plateau (Table 2); eight on investigations in the highlands of Oaxaca

Table 1 Studies in Mexico City Reference

Area

Theme

Ban˜os Ramos (1998)

Mexico City, Historic Center

Flores and Pe´rez Rivas (1998) Fournier (1998)

Mexico City, Tlatelolco Mexico City, the Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco Mexico City, the Templo Mayor Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City, Historic Center

Salvage archaeology and historical study of the old Convento de la Concepcio´n Documentary sources and maps related to Tlatelolco Interpretations of the ceramics recovered from the two sites

Fournier and Charlton (1998) Garcı´a Samper (1998) Gonza´lez Leyva (1998) Herna´ndez Pons, Nieto, and Feria (1998) Lo´pez Palacios (1998) Nieto (1998) Peralta (1998) Pe´rez Rivas and Flores (1998) Pe´rez and Corona (1998)

Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City and the adjacent Basin of Mexico Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City, Historic Center

Sala and Santaella 1998 Salas (1998) Santa Cruz and Moreno (1998)

Mexico City, Historic Center Mexico City Mexico City, Historic Center

Temple (1998)

Mexico City, Historic Center

Tovar (1998)

Mexico City, Historic Center

Zapata 1998

Mexico City, Tlalpan

Majolica chronology Historical study of the iconography of a church Documentary studies of the architecture of a chapel Excavations in the old Convento de Betlemitas Chronology of glazed candeleros Analysis of hooded figurines recovered from various sites Archaeological and documentary studies of religious and industrial public structures Documentary study and salvage exploration of urban zones Salvage archaeology in the Biblioteca de Finanzas Pu´blicas in the National Palace Excavations in the old Convento de San Jero´nimo Historical and archaeological study of an industrial structure Historical and archaeological study of the old Convento de Santo Domingo Study of lebrillos recovered in salvage excavations and in the Metro Study of historic documents related to a guild in the Convento de Santo Domingo Connections between archaeology and history with a proposal for investigation in the parish of Tlalpan

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

184 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico Table 2 Studies in the Basin of Mexico and adjacent Central Highlands Reference

Area

Theme

Alvarez Santiago (1998) Brambila and Avilez (1998)

Puebla, Puebla Jilotepec, Hidalgo

Cedilla Ortega (1998)

Puebla, Puebla

Cedillo Vargas (1998)

Tepozotlan, State of Mexico Otumba, State of Mexico

Urban and industrial studies related to urban renewal Historical and architectural studies of religious and secular structures of the sixteenth century Salvage archaeology and historical studies related to religious and industrial structures Hydraulic construction in religious structures

Charlton and Otis Charlton (1998) Contreras (1998) Co´rdova (1998) Martı´nez Magan˜a (1998) Oviedo (1998) Pastrana and Fournier (1998)

San Francisco Tlaxcala, Tlaxcala Huejotzingo, Puebla Huichapan, Hidalgo Pachuca and Real del Monte Sierra de las Navajas, Hidalgo

Historical and archaeological studies of the sixteenth century Historical and architectural studies related to salvage archaeology in an old convent Historical and archaeological studies of the convent group of Huejotzingo Historical and archaeological studies of a religious architectural group Industrial archaeology of mining Exploitation of obsidian during the Colonial period

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

Table 3 Studies in Oaxaca and Veracruz Reference

Area

Theme

Alvarez Franklin (1998) Ferna´ndez and Go´mez (1998b)

Cuilapan, Oaxaca Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Ferna´ndez and Go´mez (1998c)

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Ferna´ndez and Go´mez (1998d)

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Go´mez and Ferna´ndez (1998a)

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Go´mez and Ferna´ndez (1998b)

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Herrera (1998)

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

Matadamas (1998)

Teotitla´n del Valle, Tlacolula, Oaxaca Co´rdoba, Veracruz

Historical studies of a ruined religious building complex Archaeological studies in the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Archaeological studies of the hydraulic works in the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Studies of lime production in the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Studies of local majolica recovered from the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Studies of the ceramics recovered from the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Studies of the botanical remains recovered from the old Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n Archaeological salvage of the historical architecture, with preColumbian and historical archaeology Salvage archaeology and historical documents

Miranda and Becerril (1998)

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

and one on the highlands of Veracruz (Table 3); six refer to investigations in the northern and western areas of Mexico (Table 4); six lack a specific geographical association, with one being on nautical archaeology, three being analyses of documents (historiography and/or interdisciplinary), one an ethnohistoric study of Spanish–indigenous interaction, and one a brief history of historical archaeology in Mexico (Table 5), and finally three papers deal with research in the Maya area and one in the State of Tabasco (Table 6). Strictly speaking, archaeological scholars investigating the Late Postclassic civilizations of the central (Aztec) and southern (Zapotec, Mixtec) Mexican

highlands or the Classic and Postclassic Maya civilization in eastern Mesoamerica (Yucatan Peninsula and the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala extending into parts of Honduras and all of El Salvador, as well as the Belize lowlands) can be said to be conducting historical archaeological research, insofar as they use available relevant textual documentary sources in conjunction with traditional archaeological materials. Indeed, some of the earliest historical archaeology carried out by Mexican scholars was a by-product of research into the Templo Mayor in Mexico City. Noguera’s research in the 1930s perceptively identified and described some of the diagnostic ceramics for the Colonial period but the main

AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico 185 Table 4 Studies in north and west Mexico Reference

Area

Theme

Arciniega (1998) Brown (1998) Crespo and Cervantes (1998) Mendoza (1998)

San Blas, Nayarit El Carrizal (northern border) The states of Quere´taro and Guanajuato Guanajuato, Guanajuato

Moguel and Carballal (1998) Valencia (1998)

Culiaca´n, Sinaloa Aquascalientes, Aguascalientes

Historical and archaeological studies of urban structure Historical and archaeological studies of the Spanish expansion Studies of historical religious structures and documents related to otomı´ families Historical architecture and interventions for the conservation of religious structures Salvage archaeology in various areas in and near Culiaca´n Salvage archaeology and historical studies

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

Table 5 Studies in Veracruz related to underwater archaeology, historiography, the history of historical archaeology, and ethnohistory Reference

Area

Theme

Luna (1998) Spores (1998) Herna´ndez Aranda (1998) Corona (1998) Herna´ndez Pons (1998) Martı´nez Torres (1998)

Coastal waters

Underwater archaeology and documentary studies of the colonial period Historiography, guide to the documents Historiography, use of documents Historiography, use of documents Short history of historical archaeology Ethnohistory; the monks and the natives based on the use of indigenous plants

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

Table 6 Studies in Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Tabasco Reference

Area

Theme

Lee Whiting (1998)

Chiapas and Guatemala Chicomuselo, Chiapas Quecchula, Chiapas Chetumal, Quintana Roo Tabasco

Documentary and archaeological studies along the Camino Real

De la Cruz and Lee Whiting (1998) Navarrete (1998) Corte´s de Brasdefer (1998) Ledesma (1998)

Archaeological studies of a foundry Historical and archaeological studies of the church of Quecchula Historical and archaeological studies in Oxtankah Historical studies of the Franciscan foundations in the Sierra Tabasquen˜o

In Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia.

orientation of the study was on the Aztec Late Postclassic main temple buildings. In this paper, however, we restrict the practice of historical archaeology to the period of initial European contact and conquest (c. 1519–21) continuing through the Colonial period (to 1820) and the period of Independence (1821–present), within the borders of Mexico today.

Historical Archaeology in Mexico: An Overview

origin, from sites occupied during the Colonial and Independence periods and found within the modern boundaries of Mexico. The problem orientations of investigations into these data generally include one or more of the following: (1) a study of the variable contact period interaction situations between indigenous and intrusive cultures, (2) a study of subsequent continuities and changes within both the indigenous and the intrusive European cultural traditions, and (3) a study of the emergence of new cultural and ethnic traditions, throughout the Colonial and Independence periods.

Subject Matter

Research Trends and Disciplinary Origins

The subject matter of historical archaeology in Mexico includes archaeological remains and relevant historical documents, both indigenous and European in

There are many different research approaches within postconquest historical archaeological investigations practiced in Mexico today. Such a diversity of

186 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico

approaches is common in the current worldwide burgeoning field of historical archaeology and reflects, according to K. Kelly in 2005, a dynamic and a recently emerging field, in Latin America in general, and for this article, in Mexico specifically. In Mexico, the field of historical archaeology has multiple origins, domestic and foreign, and multiple disciplinary backgrounds. As we suggest later on, the majority of foreign influences come from North American archaeology. As practiced, Mexican historical archaeology contains varying proportions of the disciplines of history, ethnohistory, cultural and historical geography, archaeology, and anthropological archaeology in the mix. The amount of each in any investigation depends upon (1) the time period addressed, (2) the cultural functions and structures under investigation, and (3) the disciplinary backgrounds and institutional affiliations of the investigators. As a result, Mexican historical archaeology is not a monolithic structure in origin, practice, or theory. There is considerable variation between the investigations carried out within the borders of the national state and we may speak of ‘‘many historical archaeologies’’ (with apologies to Leslie Byrd Simpson). Since the late 1970s, Mexican scholars have increasingly reflected on the relevance of historical archaeology for increasing our level of knowledge of the past by combining, in various ways, archaeology and history, and by increasing protection of Mexico’s cultural heritage. Such reflections form part of their search to validate and integrate this still-evolving field of research. Some considerations have focused on the terminology or nomenclature to be used to denote the field. Names suggested within these discussions include archaeohistory, the archaeology of capitalism, colonial archaeology, historical archaeology, world systems archaeology, and industrial archaeology (see Industrial Archaeology), all reflecting aspects of a multi-faceted Mexican historical archaeology which takes into consideration the significant political and economic changes in a worldwide setting following CE 1492. Despite this ‘war of words’ over the designation of a recent development in Mexican archaeology in general, it is generally understood that what is practiced as historical archaeology in non-Mexican settings is what is practiced in Mexico today. Historical archaeology in Mexico is a discipline which makes use of both archaeological and historic data studying the material remains of any postcontact historical period. This is possible whenever there is a documentary record providing additional information about the materials and contexts recovered in archaeological investigations. Historical archaeology in general, and in Mexico in particular, studies the

materials related to European cultural expansion throughout the world beginning in the fifteenth century and ending with industrialization or the present day, depending on local conditions. As so defined, historical archaeology can make important contributions to contemporary anthropology by examining the processes of European expansion, exploration, and colonization as well as those of culture contact and imperialism. These processes form a basis for one of the most dynamic periods in world history, reflected both in documents and material culture, recovered by archaeological investigations (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline). Discussions have also addressed the relationships of Mexican historical archaeology to current archaeological theoretical perspectives ranging from historical particularism, to culture history, processual (new archaeology) (see Processual Archaeology), postprocessual (see Postprocessual Archaeology), and Marxist archaeology (see Marxist Archaeology), alone or in various combinations. In some projects, theoretical positions have included critical theory and Iberoamerican social archaeology. In addition, there have also been debates about legal issues related to the national patrimony as well as more mundane, but relevant, topics such as artifact taxonomic systems. Historical Archaeology Institutional Contexts – INAH

As noted above, investigations in Mexico are varied in part because of their many different institutional contexts. Today the major institutional context includes, as mandated by law in 1972, the Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia (INAH), whose relevant dependencies in Mexico City and in the regional state offices are obligated to carry out archaeological salvage and rescue operations, not only for preconquest remains but also for those of the Colonial and post-Independence periods whenever archaeological deposits and structures would be adversely affected by contemporary activities. Examples of such activities include Mexico City’s still ongoing Metro construction, along with, there and elsewhere, the maintenance and construction of roads, sewer and water systems, dams, reservoirs, canals, and water supply systems. Also included are architectural restoration projects, building expansion, and building demolition. Site reports from such operations in salvage and rescue historical archaeology in Mexico, although not widely distributed, provide valuable information on associated artifacts and architecture, and on laboratory and technical analyses of the materials recovered. Initially, the results of such research were

AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico 187

not always fully published. However, there are now increasing numbers of books and articles presenting the results of research, thus enriching the record for Mexico and for Hispanic America as well. At times, many of these data have been used to examine general theoretical questions of culture contact and acculturation along with the construction of Colonial and Independence period social systems, identities, and meanings. Such questions would be addressed by both documentary records and archaeological material correlates. Historical Archaeology Institutional Contexts – Academic Settings Domestic and Foreign

Although academic historical archaeology in Mexico does include the salvage and rescue of historical archaeological materials, more frequently archaeologists from academic settings try to combine such salvage and rescue operations with problem-based research projects tied to a variety of theoretical perspectives on social and cultural dynamics and evolution. In general, these would be related to studies of those processes leading to the modern world and to capitalism. In Mexico, the rise of national systems and national identities as well as the appearance of new social and ethnic identities would characterize these studies. Formal academic training in historical archaeology in Mexico is relatively rare. Undergraduate courses in historical archaeology have occasionally been offered at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, and at the University of the Americas in Cholula, Puebla. The Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi will include historical archaeology as part of the bachelor’s program. However, there is only one graduate program in historical archaeology at the National School of Anthropology and History. There are very few active full-time professional historical archaeologists in Mexico, most being Prehispanic archaeologists who have extended their interest through chance or design into the historic periods. Regional Cultural and Administrative Variability in Time and Space

Further differentiation in the subject matter of Mexican historical archaeology is introduced by the great degree of Prehispanic regional cultural variability within Mesoamerica between various state systems such as the Maya, the Zapotec, the Aztec, and the Tarascans. In the immediately adjacent culture areas to the north such as the Greater Southwest, the peninsula of Lower California, and northeastern Mexico, there were many non-state-level cultures ranging from hunting and gathering nomadic people to sedentary agrarian villages.

The Spanish empire governed these areas, from Panama to what is now the Southwest United States, through three audiencias (Guatemala, Mexico, and Guadalajara) with political, judicial, and fiscal powers. Although they overlap, the borders of Mesoamerica, with complex state systems, the Greater Southwest with village agriculturalists, and the peninsula of Lower California and northeast Mexico with hunters and gatherers, do not coincide completely with those of the audiencias or of Mexico today. Communities may have participated in several larger cultural, political, and economic systems during their existence. Beyond the variations present in indigenous cultures and imperial administrative structures, additional complexity was provided by the different regional origins of Spanish settlers from the Iberian Peninsula. Many of these regional cultural variations and their impact on Hispanic America have been discussed in detail by George Foster in his 1960 monograph on culture and conquest. In addition, there was extreme variability in the kind of church institutions introduced initially for Christian conversion and subsequently maintained for the spiritual care of the indigenous people as well as Spanish settlers. Variations occurred in the order of regular clergy present and the nature of the transition to secular clergy in some areas. Additional regional and local differences in Mexico were brought about by demographic decline due to disease, the acquisition of land and the introduction of Spanish-owned ranchos and haciendas, and the exploitation of metal ores and petroleum resources. The impact of these too would vary according to the time period and political situation in the imperial center of Spain, and during the Independence period, in Mexico City, capital of the new republic.

Themes of Historical Archaeological Investigations in Mexico Recent urban expansion and economic development have severely impacted the physical remains of Mexico’s past, both Prehispanic and postconquest. Given the almost five centuries of Colonial and Independence period construction in Mexico, major population increases during the twentieth century associated with urban renovation, expansion, and industrialization, along with an underlying pervasive concern for the preservation and rehabilitation of the cultural heritage of Mexico, it should not be surprising that historical archaeology has come of age in Mexico during the last half of the twentieth century. These processes are especially true for all areas within the orbit of Mexico City, but also increasingly relevant for provincial cities and small towns in the countryside, also undergoing similar population and

188 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico

economic growth. In one sense, historical archaeology is most abundant in urban settings where most of the religious, secular, and private buildings occur. Much recent historical archaeology has accompanied, in various guises, the saving, restoration, refurbishing, and recycling of imperiled buildings, some religious, some governmental, some industrial, and some private residences (the latter when especially luxurious and occupied by members of Mexico’s colonial elite, being referred to as palaces). In many cases, such structures are located in the older sections of cities in Mexico, such as the Historic Center (Centro Histo´rico) of Mexico City. Religious Institutions through Their Buildings

Of all the themes of historical archaeology in Mexico, a shared, widespread interest in the preservation and investigation of religious buildings from the very beginnings of Mexico through the nineteenth century is the greatest unifier of the practitioners of historical archaeology today. Mexico is the legal owner of all religious buildings in the country, and they are everywhere, throughout the country, in various stages of use and disintegration. They range in time from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century. These buildings are a legacy of anticlericalism which can be seen in the expulsion of the Jesuits and the appropriation of their possessions, through the Liberal Reforms of the nineteenth century, the socialist revolution of the early twentieth century, and the subsequent closing of the churches. The recognition in the twentieth century that many of these monumental structures could be refurbished and used to attract tourists marks the beginning of an official positive interest in those buildings. Although archaeology is usually carried out at such sites, frequently the archaeological part of the investigations has been subordinated to the architectural rehabilitation of the structures. Missions, their convents, and indigenous residential areas Early interest in missions and their associated convents was expressed by American scholars after the acquisition of substantial areas of Mexico by the United States in the nineteenth century. Such interest continues today as demonstrated by the three volumes edited by D. H. Thomas. Archaeological investigations were in part stimulated by cultural geographers under the tutelage of Carl Sauer in the Southwestern US and in northern Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Elizabeth Graham in her 1998 article on mission archaeology has detailed many of these studies, including the Maya areas in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, along with those borderlands from California to Florida once under

Spanish and later, in places, Mexican control before being ceded to the United States. Studies of missions often emphasize first-contact and conversion contexts because of the importance of the Church in converting the indigenous peoples. As first-contact contexts, these are linked with those historical and archaeological studies interested in contact within a broader cultural framework. Research on a sixteenth century town church and associated residential convent in central Mexico by Charlton in 1969 and published in 1973 deals essentially with the same topic. In central Mexico, when many towns were abandoned at the end of the sixteenth century due to depopulation as a result of introduced epidemic diseases, the churches and residential complexes were also abandoned. Since these missed out on later Colonial and Independence period modifications such as towers and facade updates in eighteenth century style, they preserve the structure of the church when it had a major conversion mission-like function. Examples of continuing studies of mission sites and artifacts occur in northwestern and northern Mexico at Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. Similar studies of mission sites have been carried out in the Mexican state of Durango, the peninsula of Baja California, and in the American state of New Mexico. Many mission studies have been part of current consolidation of standing buildings related to efforts to increase tourism in Mexico. There are some additional studies in D. H. Thomas’ edited volume I for these regions, and in volume III for the Maya area in Mexico and Central America. Ledesma in 1998 reported on research and consolidation at a mission site in the Sierra de Tabasco founded in 1537 but occupied sporadically until 1709 when it was permanently abandoned (Table 6). Carlos Navarrete investigated another similar site in Chiapas in the 1960s, while Ferna´ndo Corte´s de Brasdefer investigated Oxtankah, a mission site in Quintana Roo. It should be remembered that mission archaeology is in part evidence of the initial spread of Spanish culture in Mexico (and areas to the south and north now outside of Mexico’s borders). Such missions are generally later in time in the northern and southern areas than those churches that began as missions in central Mexico. Today, such sixteenth century mission churches or chapels, when they have survived, are usually treated as parish churches rather than as missions (see Table 4). Mexico City convents (nunneries) Since the 1970s, Mexico City has been the locale of major conservation projects that included as part of the research the architectural history of the affected buildings as well as information about the different archaeological materials recovered, mostly human burials and, in

AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico 189

some cases, ceramics and other artifacts. As noted previously, we have summarized in six tables the Mexican archaeological and historical investigations published in a memoir on Mexican historical archaeology, edited by Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Go´mez Serafı´n in 1998. The studies have dealt with numerous convents (nunneries) including that of San Jero´nimo, home of the famous seventeenth century nun, Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz. Fournier carried out studies of the European and oriental tradeware and published these in 1990. Other examples of nunneries studied in Mexico City include La Concepcio´n (see Table 1) and the Colegio de San Joaquı´n of the Carmelite Order. Mexico City convents (monasteries) Monasteries have also recently been studied in Mexico City. The Convento de Betlemitas was founded in the final third of the eighteenth century and entrusted to the Order of Nuestra Sen˜ora de Bethlem whose main charges were the care of ill but convalescing patients and the education of children from poor families. Architectural restoration of the extant structures was combined with extensive archaeological excavations. The remaining architecture of Santo Domingo, a Dominican foundation, has also been investigated through archaeology and documents (Table 1). Convents (monasteries and nunneries): Investigations in other regions of Mexico Outside of Mexico City (see Tables 2 and 3), but still in the Basin of Mexico, studies of hydraulic works were carried out at the Jesuit monastery complex of Tepozotla´n. Outside of the Basin of Mexico, but still in the Central Highlands, there have been similar recent studies at the monasteries of San Francisco, Tlaxcala, and Huejotzingo, Puebla, in the high plateau of Mexico, directly east of the Basin of Mexico. In the city of Puebla, archaeological excavations were carried out exposing the remains of the sixteenth century Convento de San Francisco as well as at the Convento (Nunnery) de San Jero´nimo. We may also include here rescue archaeology described by Mendoza Garcı´a in the city of Guanajuato in architectural studies accompanied by archaeology at the Templo de San Diego. To the south, in the City of Oaxaca, major restoration and investigation were conducted at the Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n. The Casa del Artesano in Huichapan, Hidalgo, to the north, is another provincial example of archaeological research during the refurbishing of part of the complex for a Casa de Cultura. Mexico City churches Mexico City has had numerous historic preservation projects which included

the architectural histories of church structures and information from the associated archaeological materials, including burials and ceramics and other artifacts. These are mostly stand-alone churches but often have convent-like residences attached to them. Herna´ndez Pons has noted that archaeological research located the first cathedral of Mexico City, the Capilla de Necatitla´n, as well as complementing engineering work during attempts to stabilize the present cathedral. Other churches of note in Mexico City are Santa Teresa La Antigua, La Santa Cruz y Soledad de Nuestra Sen˜ora, San Juan de Dios, the parish (in Xochimilco) of San Bernardino de Sena, and the Jesuit chapel of San Pedro and San Pablo. Herna´ndez Pons et al. list many others (Table 1). Although not a church, the Palacio de la Inquisicio´n did carry out church-related business and has also been investigated archaeologically. Churches and chapels in other regions of Mexico These include churches in many different areas (see Tables 3 and 4). In San Luis Potosı´, there have been minor archaeological operations at the Chapel of Aranzazu. Alvarez Franklin describes the search for documentation on a now-ruined church in Cuilapan, Oaxaca. Also in Oaxaca, Matadamas carried out salvage archaeology at a Prehispanic mound behind, and possibly extending under, a sixteenth century church in Teotitla´n del Valle. Crespo and Cervantes have carried out an ethnoarchaeological and documentary study on household oratorios among Otomı´ families in Quere´taro and Guanajuato. Secular Institutions through Their Buildings

The structures mentioned here include Colonial and Independence period governmental structures, hospitals, private residences (often referred to as palaces), presidios, and monuments. There is uneven archaeological treatment of these structures with heavy emphasis being placed upon those in Mexico City, and much less on similar structures in other areas. As is the case for religious structures, the historical archaeology carried out is usually associated with major restoration and maintenance of these structures and is always in a secondary role to the restoration and architectural history. Secular structures: Governmental, medical, and residential Mexico City These include the Palacio Nacional, on the east side of the Zo´calo near the Metropolitan Cathedral. This site was a center of governmental power before and during the Colonial and Independence periods. The Castillo de Chapultepec has served as a fortified hilltop, a military school, and

190 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico

the residence of Maximilian and Carlota before becoming a present-day museum. Other structures examined archaeologically are the Hospital Real de los Naturales and the Hospital del Amor de Dios, which at the end of the Colonial period was converted into the Fine Arts Academia de San Carlos. Residences studied include La Casa del Marque´s del Apartado. Research by Eduardo Matos Moctezumas in the Centro Histo´rico of Mexico City has extended to include excavations to provide information on the urban character of the city as well as to identify many houses whose occupants are known. Monuments archaeologically investigated in Mexico City (see Table 1) include that of the Molino del Rey, erected to commemorate the Mexican heroes of the war with the United States in 1847. Secular structures: Urban archaeology Outside Mexico City We have included here a study of the evolution of a town plan in San Blas, Nayarit, described by Arciniega, and the circular town plan of Culiaca´n, Sinaloa, reported by Moguel and Carballal. The archaeology undertaken by INAH in the city of Aguascalientes as part of a modern urban project designed to develop an underpass system for traffic and reported by Valencia also falls into the category of urban salvage or rescue archaeology, some of which did more than merely define areas of previous occupations based on test pits. In the city of Guanajuato, excavations were conducted around the Teatro Juarez (1873–94) preparatory to carrying out restoration plans. Research was also carried out in the Palacio de Corte´s in Cuernavaca during the restoration of the building. In Me´rida, the Casa Montejo has been investigated and restored. Presidios in the northern borderland and the northwest of Mexico have been focal points of archaeological investigation, often emanating from across the United States–Mexico border, similar to the impulse for the study of religious buildings, especially missions, and as we shall note, ceramics. Not only were northern presidios studied archaeologically but so were some nineteenth and twentieth century forts in Puebla and Veracruz (see Table 4). Secular structures: The archaeology of industry Industrial archaeology as part of historical archaeology is taking its first few steps in Mexico (see Tables 1–3 and 5). More historians than archaeologists have shown an interest in Mexican industrial development. In part, this is due to the absence of legal protection and required archaeological investigations at sites from the late nineteenth and the twentieth century unless they are in a historic district or are important time-markers on their own.

Some recent research incorporating studies of industrial sites have been published in the Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Go´mez Serafı´n edited volume. Salas carried out investigations at the tobacco factory of the Ciudadela in Mexico City on the foundations of the late eighteenth century structure. Archaeological research in the city of Puebla by Alvarez Santiago encountered the foundations of textile factories first established there in 1884. Mining, a major Colonial and Independence period activity, has been studied by Oviedo Ga´mez at Pachuca and Real del Monte in the northeast Basin of Mexico. Another industrial site, Molino de Papel in the southeast of the Basin of Mexico, is mentioned by Peralta. The production of lime and ceramics at the Convento de Santo Domingo de Guzma´n should be considered an industrial site, albeit of a much smaller scale than the nonhousehold industries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same is true for the production of Colonial period obsidian scrapers (probably for cattle hides) at the famed Cerro de las Navajas obsidian mines used in the Prehispanic period, as related by Pastrana and Fournier. Although greater than household production, the level of scraper production is not in the same league as that of nineteenth and twentieth century industrial production. In northwest and northern Mexico, mining facilities including towns have been surveyed in the Pima–Opata region of Sonora as well as in Chihuahua, Durango, and the state of New Mexico. In the state of Chiapas, De la Cruz and Lee (Table 6) have reported on the archaeology of a foundry. Secular structures: The archaeology of ranching and farming Ranches and haciendas Ranches and haciendas in rural areas are the physical manifestation of a system which ensured that land and labor were available for food production for the cities. The buildings were the residences and working areas of Spaniards or members of the Indian elite. These buildings today, where they are extant, belong to individuals or to towns. Although the land was nationalized after the 1910–20 revolution, the buildings were, for the most part, not taken over by the government, being included in a small parcel of land left with the former owners. They differ from religious buildings in another way; the system they represent was and is detested by the local village farmers who had to work in the system because of land shortages. There is great regional variability in the scale and timing of such buildings. Of interest are the ranches and haciendas where the laborers were housed instead of commuting daily to their work. The owners

AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in Mexico 191

of these enterprises had taken control of land either by renting it through compliant indios principales or by purchasing it outright. Although we have a good sequence of such ranches and haciendas in the northeastern Basin of Mexico, we lack excavation of a single structure at any one time. At the moment, Harold Juli is conducting excavations at a nineteenth century hacienda in Puebla. Underwater archaeology The underwater or nautical archaeology of Colonial period sites has become a valuable adjunct to terrestrial historical archaeology because of the ability to date with some certainty the ships being excavated. This is important because of the good associations between the dated shipwreck and the artifacts, including ceramics, found on board as Marken has noted in 1994. The main proponent of these studies has been Pilar Luna Erreguerena. She includes a brief overview of Mexican underwater archaeology in a paper in the Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Go´mez Serafı´n edited volume with an example of the search for the 1631 fleet. Later, in 2001, she co-edited a volume of papers on underwater archaeology. Regional Projects

These types of projects, surveys, and excavations undertaken by Mexican and American archaeological teams, working individually or in collaboration, in central and northern Mexico as well as in the Maya lowlands and other regions, are usually derived from avowedly scientific research agendas, based on a variety of theoretical frameworks. Such projects include those directed by Fournier in the Mezquital Valley and Charlton in the Teotihuacan Valley. Rani Alexander carried out similar research in the Yucatan as did R. B. Brown and Fournier in Chihuahua, and Janine Gasco in the Soconusco. The basic point of these projects is to recover archaeological materials from indigenous sites at the time of contact and beyond, in some cases up to the time the project was carried out. This means dealing with the reaction of the indigenous people to the new economic, social, and political order brought by the Spanish conquerors. The key to understanding these developments are the settlement patterns which include the native communities and the introduction of ranches and haciendas as a means whereby the Spaniards, and the Mexican elite after Independence, appropriated labor and land at the expense of the indigenous people. At times, missions, forts, and road systems are important as well. Artifact Analyses

One of the trends leading to historical archaeology in Mexico was an interest by collectors, and then by

archaeologists, in gaining a solid ceramic chronology, especially from majolicas. This led such scholars as John Goggin to carry out excavations in the 1940s in Mexico at various historic sites, usually church and convent complexes. Studies of majolicas continue today with the use of neutron activation analyses. Studies of all kinds of materials, such as ceramics including figurines, obsidian, and metal tools, are represented in the Ferna´ndez Da´vila and Go´mez Serafı´n edited volume (Tables 1–3). Osteological Studies of Burials

Human skeletal remains have been located in Colonial period cemeteries in both rural and urban contexts. Descriptive osteological analyses have been carried out defining the age structure and health status of the deceased. Added to these studies have been analyses for lead poisoning and dietary data through isotopic analyses (see Stable Isotope Analysis).

Conclusions Mexican historical archaeology is alive and well. Although it is necessary to combine two disciplines in innovative ways to develop research questions and to interpret data recovered, this does not seem to be an impediment in its growth. The growth of Mexican historical archaeology is tightly linked to salvage archaeology when buildings or urban streetscapes are being modified. Such a link will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. At the same time, archaeologists are increasingly recognizing that the inclusion of a postconquest component in regional studies will enlarge upon the written word alone in understanding how today is linked to the past. See also: Africa, Historical Archaeology; Americas,

North: Historical Archaeology in the United States; Americas, South: Historical Archaeology; Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; Methods; Industrial Archaeology; Marxist Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Stable Isotope Analysis; Underwater Archaeology; Urban Archaeology.

Further Reading Andrews AP (2006) Historical Archaeology in the Maya Area: A Working Bibliography. http://faculty.ncf.edu/andrews/ research/habib.htm accessed Feb 2007. Charlton TH (1973) Post-Conquest Developments in the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico, AD 1400–1969, Part I, Excavations. Report

192 AMERICAS, NORTH/Lower Central America No. 5, Office of the State Archaeologist. Iowa City: Office of the State Archaeologist. Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.) (1998) Primer congreso nacional de arqueologı´a histo´rica, memoria. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia. Foster GM (1960) Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 27: Culture and Conquest, America’s Spanish Heritage. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. Fournier P (1990) Evidencias arqueolo´gicas de la importacio´n de cera´mica en Me´xico, con base en los materiales del exconvento de San Jero´mino. Coleccio´n Cientı´fica 213. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia. Fournier P and Miranda F (1992) Historic sites archaeology in Mexico. Historical Archaeology 26: 75–83. Graham E (1998) Mission archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 25–62. Herna´ndez Pons E (1998) Arqueologı´a histo´rica en Me´xico: Antecedentes y Propuestas. In: Ferna´ndez Da´vila E and Go´mez Serafı´n S (eds.). pp. 1–26. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia. Kelly KG (2005) Historical archaeology. In: Maschner HDG and Chippindale C (eds.) Handbook of Archaeological Methods vol. II, pp. 1108–1137. New York: AltaMira Press. Luna P and Roffiel R (coordinators) (2001) Memorias del congreso cientı´fico de arqueologı´a subacua´tica ICOMOS. Coleccio´n Cientı´fica 435. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia. Marken MW (1994) Pottery from Spanish Shipwrecks 1500–1800. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Noguera E (1934) Estudio de la cera´mica encontrada donde estaba el Templo Mayor de Me´xico. Anales del Museo Nacional de Arqueologı´a, Historia y Etnografı´a 1, 5th Epoca, pp. 267–282. Mexico: Talleres Gra´ficos de la Nacio´n. Thomas DH (ed.) (1989–1991) Columbian Consequences (3 vols.). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lower Central America Anthony Ranere, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Holocene A geologic time period from c. 10 000 BC to the present when the climate approximated to that witnessed today. Intermediate Area An archaeological culture area that includes Lower Central America and northwestern South America; so named because it sits between the Mesoamerica and Peru culture areas. Late Pleistocene A geologic time period from c. 16 000 to 10 000 BC at the end of the last glaciation when mean annual temperatures were c. 5–8 C below modern values. swidden A form of agriculture where forest patches are cleared, burned, and planted for a short time period (2–5 years is common) and abandoned when crop yields drop; also known as shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn cultivation. terrane A geological unit that has been transported from a distant location and then accreted onto the edge of another plate during subduction.

Introduction Central America (CA) is normally considered to encompass all countries south of Mexico and north of Colombia – that is, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. While this is a convenient definition in terms of modern political boundaries, it does not serve us well in looking at the region’s prehistory. During the Late Pleistocene, Early Holocene, and Middle Holocene (c. 15 000–3000 BC) (all dates mentioned in this article are calibrated unless specifically identified as 14C dates) an argument could be made that a discussion of Central American prehistory should encompass an area extending from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the southern end of the Panama Isthmus and perhaps beyond. During the Late Holocene (3000 BC to present), the cultural trajectories in the northern and southern portions of CA diverged into the widely recognized ‘Mesoamerican’ cultural pattern and a less well-defined ‘Intermediate Area’ cultural pattern. These patterns, of course, extended both north and south of CA. The boundary between these two areas initially falls in western Honduras but late in prehistory, the southern boundary could be extended along the Pacific Coast as far south as the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica. In this overview, the territory from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the Panama–Colombian border will be under review for the early portion of Central American prehistory. Once the division between Mesoamerican and Intermediate Area cultures becomes clear, this review will focus on the southern part of CA or what is often referred to as Lower Central America (Figure 1).

The Landscape Central America has only been a terrestrial bridge between the North and South American continents for about 2.5 million years. Previously, much of CA was a narrow peninsula at the southern end of North America and earlier in the Miocene, an island arc that existed in the area where eastern Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama are today. The geology of CA owes many of its features to its placement in the region where there are a number of geological plate boundaries. The subduction of one plate under another has led to uplifting and folding of the crust to form highlands and the volcanic arc that gives much of CA its distinctive character. The sliding of one plate by another along the Motagua Fault in Guatemala and Honduras results in frequent earthquakes, some of them quite massive. Earthquakes are also common along the volcanic arc in CA where the Cocos Plate is diving down below the Caribbean Plate.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Lower Central America 193

Lower Central America

Northem Central America

Figure 1 This digital image of Central America shows both landscape topography and ocean bathymetry. Northern Central America falls within the Mesoamerican cultural area while Lower Central America falls within the Intermediate cultural area. Reproduced with permission from NASA. Image can be found at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov.

N

Volcanic rocks Marine sedimentary basins

Nicaragua

Old subduction zones Exotic terranes

Nicoya Trench

30

60

mi

Volcanoes

Costa Rica

0

South America

Panama Osa

COCOS RIDGE

Burica Coiba Trench Panama Transform Fault

Azuero

Figure 2 A geologic map of Lower Central America that shows the location of exotic terranes and part of the Panama transform fault that separates the Cocos and Nazca plates. From Coates AG (1997) The forging of Central America. In: Coates AG (ed.) Central America: A Natural and Cultural History, pp. 1–37. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reproduced with permission.

Plate movements have also carried exotic terranes (a geological unit that has been transported from a distant location and then accreted onto the edge of another plate during subduction) into this area between the North American and South American plates adding to the diversity of geological formations in CA. Some of these terranes, like the Maya Terrane, which extends from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

to the Motagua Fault, and the Chortis Terrane, which extends south from the Maya Terrane into central Nicaragua, are large and make up significant portions of CA. Other terranes, like those that form the core of the Pacific Coast peninsulas of Nicoya, Osa, Burica, and Azuero in CR and Panama, are much smaller additions to the Central American landscape (Figure 2).

194 AMERICAS, NORTH/Lower Central America

The closing of the seaway between the Caribbean and the Pacific 2.5 million years ago led to what is know as the Great American Faunal Interchange in which the faunas of North and South America that had been isolated for millions of years were suddenly provided the opportunity to expand into new territory and did so in quite dramatic ways. North and South American floras, equally isolated, also intermingled for the first time in millions of years. The emergence of the Central American Isthmus had equally dramatic effects on the character of the oceans on either side of the isthmus and the life forms that each supported. The initiation of strong glacial cycles shortly after the closure of the Central America seaway (and perhaps triggered by this closing) also affected the character of the region. Sea levels varied as much as 180 m and, at times of maximum glaciation, exposed the continental shelf and greatly increased the land area of CA. The geologically recent uplifting of oceanic crust and repeated volcano activity have created the highland core of the Panama–Costa Rica corridor. The relatively low ranges east of the Panama Canal give way to increasingly high mountains moving west into the Talamancan Range of western Panama and Costa Rica where numerous peaks exceed 3000 m in elevation. In Panama, coastal lowlands tend to be more extensive on the Pacific side of the isthmus than on the Caribbean side, while the situation is reversed in Costa Rica. Extensive lowlands along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua extend across the isthmus to the Pacific Coast in the Nicaraguan depression that holds the large lakes of Managua and Nicaragua. The continental divide dips to only 45 m above sea level (asl) in this region, even lower than the 180 m asl is found where the Panama Canal is now located. North of the Nicaraguan depression, the interior of CA consists of highlands whose cores are ancient uplifted deposits of the Chortis and Maya terranes with more recent additions resulting from the volcanic eruptions that formed the southern portion of the highlands bordering the narrow Pacific coastal plain. The highlands end at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a lowland depression where the continental divide dips below 250 m. The great limestone platform that forms the lowlands of the Peten, Belize, and the Yucatan peninsula was raised above sea level at the end of the Cretaceous by the collision between the Maya and Chortis terranes. The susceptibility of limestone to dissolution by water has produced the distinctive karst topography of this vast lowland region with its cenotes, vast underground caverns, and dearth of surface water. The diversity of landscapes from coastal lowlands to mountainous interiors of diverse geological substrates

support an equally diverse biota. CA, as described by Spanish chroniclers in the sixteenth century, was a mosaic of forests, savannas, and agricultural fields; a landscape that had been modified by humans over the course of thousands of years. In the absence of human interference, the current climate of CA would support a range of vegetation formations from tropical rain forests and various seasonal forest formations to savannas and thorn scrub formations. All of CA lies between 7
130 at the Panama–Colombia border to 21
360 at the northern tip of the Yucatan peninsula, firmly within the tropics. Seasonal variation in temperatures is modest; over the course of a year, average monthly temperatures vary only by 1–6
C. Mean annual temperatures vary from 20–27
C as one moves upwards from the lower elevations of tierra caliente (hot lands – up to 1000 m in elevation) to 15–19
C in the midelevations of tierra templada (temperate lands – from 1000 to 2000 m asl) to below 15
C at the highest elevations of tierra fria (above 2000 m asl). Rainfall amount and distribution are highly variable across the Central American landscape, with some areas receiving upwards of 5000 mm annual rainfall evenly distributed throughout the year, and others receiving less than 1000 mm annually concentrated in a 6–7-month wet season. Rainfall tends to be higher and more evenly distributed throughout the year in Caribbean watersheds. Pacific watersheds tend to have lesser amounts of rain that is more seasonally distributed. During the months from December through April, the northeast trade winds blowing out of the Bermuda–Azores highpressure cell sweep over the warm Caribbean and bring moisture-laden air to the region. As these warm, moisture-laden winds are forced upward by mountain slopes, they cool and drop their moisture on the Caribbean side of the Central American Isthmus. As the air mass warms on its descent down the leeward side of the mountains, it has no excess moisture to yield as rain and, as a consequence, much of the Pacific side of Central America has a 4–6month dry season when little rain falls. Differences in bedrock geology, soils, elevation, rainfall, vegetation, and oceans have resulted in landscapes with highly diverse resources and equally diverse adaptations that human populations have made to them over time.

History of Archaeology Early attention to archaeological remains in Central America focused on the architecture and statuary of the region’s ancient cities and towns and on the handsomely crafted gold, shell, semiprecious stone, and

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elaborate ceramics that often accompanied the burials of important people. Early researchers writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made contributions that can still be profitably consulted. Works by Walter Lehmann (all of CA), Carl Hartman (Costa Rica), E. G. Squier (Nicaragua and Honduras), Carl Bovallius (Nicaragua), J. F. Bransford (Nicaragua and Costa Rica), Earl Flint (Nicaragua and Costa Rica), Anastacio Alfaro (Costa Rica), William H. Holmes (Panama), and Sigvald Linne (Panama) fall within this category. A focus on chronology with an emphasis on ceramics characterized much of the archaeological research in CA during the first twothirds of the twentieth century and beyond. Over the course of his long career, Samuel Lothrop wrote major monographs on ceramic sequences in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, but is perhaps best known for his two-volume report on excavations at the Sitio Conte cemetery in Panama. Other researchers contributed to building regional chronologies in CA: among them are Doris Stone (Honduras, Costa Rica), Wolfgang Haberland (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama), Claude Baudez (Honduras, Costa Rica), Michael Coe (Costa Rica), Stanley Boggs (El Salvador), and Matthew Stirling (Costa Rica, Panama). This work focused almost exclusively on the last 2000 years of prehistory when populations were living in permanent settlements with agriculturebased subsistence economies that generated highly visible refuse and often above-ground architectural features. The excavation of the Monagrillo site in Panama, reported by Gordon Willey and Charles McGimsey, extended the age of pottery production in Central Pacific Panama back an additional 2500 years, to 3000 BC. Charles McGimsey’s excavation of the nearby Cerro Mangote (6810  110 BP (c. cal 5700 BC)) was the first stratified Preceramic site excavated in CA. The transformation in archaeological approaches that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s was reflected in a host of new orientations for archaeological projects undertaken in Lower Central America by a cohort of then young archaeologists, many of whom are still active in the field. Settlement patterns, the use of animal and plant resources, exchange systems, the first colonizers, the origins of agriculture, and the evolution of social complexity are just some of the topics that came under investigation. Our current knowledge of Central American prehistory, as outlined in the following sections, owes a great deal to the research of Richard Cooke, Francisco Corrales, Robert Drolet, Pat Hansell, Paul Healy, John Hoopes, Fred Lange, Olga Linares, Dolores Piperno, Anthony Ranere, Michael Snarskis, and Payson Sheets, among others.

Early Human Occupations Central America landscapes have changed in many important ways since the first human groups entered the region during the last major glaciation (Figure 3). Temperatures were c. 5–6
C lower than they are today and rainfall was reduced by perhaps 30–40%. The massive glaciers in the world’s polar regions held enough water to lower sea levels over 100 m and expose the continental shelf, which for parts of CA, added significant areas of dry land, particularly along the Pacific site of Panama and the Caribbean side of Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Reconstruction of Late Pleistocene vegetation at coring localities in Panama (La Yeguada, El Valle, Monte Oscuro, and Gatun Lake), Costa Rica (La Chonta), and the Peten region of Guatemala (Lakes Salpeten and Quexil) indicates that areas now receiving in excess of c. 2000 mm of rainfall annually would have been forested during the last glacial stage, whereas areas with annual rainfall below c. 2000 mm were likely to have had open savanna or low scrub vegetation. These more open formations would have been located on the Yucatan Peninsula, including the Peten and Belize, along the Pacific coastal plain from El Salvador to northwestern Costa Rica, and the Pacific coastal plain along Panama Bay. Still in all, large areas on the Pacific side of CA receive over 2000 mm of rain annually, including an area stretching from central Costa Rica to Central Panama and the area near the Colombian border. Most of the Atlantic watershed of CA receives well over 2000 mm of rain annually. While it seems clear that the late glacial landscape of CA contained more extensive open habitats than at any time during the Holocene (that is, until massive forest clearing for cultivation was underway), it was still a largely forested landscape. The Late Pleistocene landscape in CA was populated by at least 15 genera of large herbivores that did not survive to see the Holocene. These include the mastodon-like gomphotheres (Cuvieronius tropicus and Haplomastodon), mammoth (Mammuthus), megalonychid and megatheriid giant ground sloths, including the huge Eremotherium, glyptodonts (Glyptodontidae), giant armadillos (Pampatherium and Chlamytherium), a horse (Equus (Amerhippus)), the rhinoceros-like Toxodon, the camel-sized Macrauchenia, Paleolama, giant capybara (Neochoerus), flat-headed peccary (Platygonus), and bear (Arctodus). Included in this list are browsers, grazers, and omnivores adapted to a range of forest, forest edge, and open thorn scrub/savanna environments. While none of these taxa has been found in association with human artifacts in CA (bone was not preserved in the sites excavated to date with Late Pleistocene cultural

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Figure 3 A map showing the reconstructed vegetation of Central America during the Late Pleistocene and the coring localities that provided the information for this reconstruction. The location of major Paleoindian localities are also indicated. Adapted from Ranere AJ and RG Cooke (2003) Late Glacial and Early Holocene occupation of Central American tropical forests. In: Mercader J (ed.) Under the Canopy. The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests, pp. 219–248. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Reproduced with permission.

deposits), some have been found in archaeological sites of northern South America (see Americas, South: Northern South America). At the site of Tibito´ in the Bogata Basin, Cuvieronius, Haplomastodon, and Equus (Amerhippus), as well as extant fox (Cerdocyon) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus), were associated with human activities 14C dated to 11 740  110 BP (11 638 BC). Haplomastodon was found in association with an El Jobo lanceolate point at Taima-Taima, Venezuela, dated c. cal 13 400 BC. The same layer as the mastodon and El Jobo point also yielded glyptodont, mylontid sloth, horse, bear, and felid remains. Elsewhere in Venezuela (at the site of El Vano), El Jobo points have also been found in direct association with the giant ground sloth Eremotherium rusconii. We can say very little about the nature and timing of the earliest migrants into and through the Central American Isthmus; those who were ancestral to the groups documented further south in sites like Monte Verde in Chile, Taima-Taima in Venezuela, and Tibito´ in Colombia, among others. There are no firm archaeological sites that reflect the presence in CA of any groups older than the Paleoindian Clovis populations.

Diagnostic Paleoindian fluted points of the Clovis and Fluted Fish-tail types have only been found in two stratified sites in CA that have reported radiocarbon dates, Los Tapiales in the Guatemalan Highlands and Cueva de los Vampiros in the Pacific coastal plain of Panama. Los Tapiales is an open-air site located at an elevation of 3150 m in what is currently an alpine meadow. 14C dates of 11 170  200 BP (c. cal 11 200 BC) and 8810  110 BP (c. cal 7960 BC) bracket deposits from which 100 tools and nearly 1500 flakes were recovered, including a fluted point base and a channel flake. The excavators, Ruth Gruhn and Alan Bryan, view the occupation as short term and believe that the 14C date of 10 710 þ 170 BP (c. cal 10 700 BC) is the best estimate of its age. At Vampiros, cave deposits bracketed between 14C dates of 11 550  140 BP (c. cal 11 460 BC) and 8970  40 BP (c. cal 8150 BC) contained the blade portion of a Fluted Fish-tail point and overshot thinning flakes characteristic of Clovis-reduction techniques (but not Fish-tail-reduction techniques). Similarly aged deposits have been excavated at three other Central American sites; La Piedra de Coyote (14C dates of 10 650  1350 BP (10 250 BC) and 10 020  260 BP (9680 BC)), located in the Guatemalan Highlands

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near Los Tapiales, Aguadulce Shelter (14C dates of 10 725  80 BP (c. cal 10 825 BC), 10 675  95 BP (c. cal 10 785 BC) and 10 529  284 BP (c. cal 10 490 BC)), located in the coastal plain of Central Pacific Panama near Vampiros, and Corona Shelter (14C date of 10 440  650 BP (c. cal 10 115 BC)), located in the foothills of Central Pacific Panama. Although no clearly diagnostic tools were recovered, all three sites yielded bifacial thinning flakes consistent with those produced in manufacturing fluted points. Although undated, a number of Clovis and Fluted Fish-tail points have been found in Central America, some as part of surface site assemblages and some as isolated finds. The site of Turrialba (also known as Finca Guardiria), at 10 ha in area, is by far the largest Paleoindian site known for CA. It is located at an altitude of c. 700 m on terraces of the Reventazo´n River in the Atlantic watershed of Costa Rica. The region receives 4000 mm of rain annually and would be covered in evergreen forest if not for human intervention. The entire site area has been cultivated and all of the over 28 000 flakes and tools have been recovered from the surface or the plow zone. Large numbers of fluted Clovis points were recovered, as well as bifacial preforms and other tools often found with other fluted point assemblages, that is, snubnosed keeled scrapers, end-scrapers with lateral spurs, burins, and large blades. Another important Clovis site is the La Mula West workshop, Central Pacific Panama, where erosion has left workshop debris and the rare finished tools exposed on the ground surface or buried in reworked deposits. Over 80 biface fragments were recovered from the site, including 12 basal fragments that had been either fluted or basally thinned. Spurred end-scrapers, burins, gravers, and blades were recovered at La Mula West as well. The only near-complete specimen recovered would be lost in a collection of early North American Clovis points. The lithic reduction sequence reconstructed on the basis of the broken bifaces and manufacturing debris, including a number of overshot flakes and hundreds of thinning flakes, is nearly identical to the sequence reported for North American Clovis workshops. Although there is no direct date for the La Mula West assemblage, 15 years before its discovery, an isolated hearth 14 C dated to 11 300  250 BP (c. cal 11 215 BC) was found eroding out of sediments near the site. This seems an appropriate age for an assemblage that shares the same lithic reduction sequence and projectile point form as the early Clovis assemblages in North America (Figure 4). Two additional sites in Panama have yielded bifaces and workshop debris that can be assigned to the Paleoindian period. One, the Neito quarry/

workshop, is located in the Azuero Peninsula west of La Mula West and contains the same translucent chalcedony material preferred by the La Mula West Clovis flintknappers and evidence of similar reduction techniques. The second site, the Westend workshop, is located in the Chagres River drainage near the Panama Canal on the shores of an island in Lago Alajuela (Madden), an artificial lake that stores water to supply the operation of the Panama Canal locks. At low water, workshop debris covering an area c. 1 ha in size is exposed on the eroded surface. Although thousands of thinning flakes are present (most with small, heavily ground platforms) only two preforms and no finished points were recovered. However, elsewhere on eroded shorelines of Lago Alajuela, six Fish-tail points and one ‘waisted’ Clovis point have been picked up. The preponderance of Fish-tail points in the lake basin and the absence of overshot flakes in the Westend assemblage indicate that Fish-tail points and not Clovis points were the desired end product. Additional isolated fluted points of both Clovis and Fish-tail varieties have been found in a number of different contexts in CA, including the Belize Lowlands, Guatemala Highlands, both the lowlands and highlands of Costa Rica, and the foothills and coastal plain of Pacific Panama. While Paleoindian sites and isolated finds are relatively few in number, they are found in a wide range of geographic and ecological settings. Paleoindian lithic remains have been found above the Late Pleistocene tree line (Los Tapiales and Piedra de Coyotes) in highland Guatemala, in montane closed-canopy forests elsewhere in Guatemala (Guatemala and Ocozocoautla valleys) and Costa Rica (Turrialba and the Arenal region), in lowland closed-canopy forests (Lago Alajuela in the Chagres Basin), and in open savanna/thorn scrub lowlands (Belize, northwest Costa Rica, and Central Pacific Panama). Paleoindian groups were clearly able to move about through the entire range of geographic and environmental settings found in CA during the Late Pleistocene. This ability may have more to do with an emphasis on hunting rather than on gathering by these populations; Clovis and Fish-tail points are, after all, hunting weapons and no specialized plantprocessing tools have been found at Paleoindian sites. Hunting techniques are relatively easy to transfer from one environment to another and meat eating is not a hazardous undertaking. On the other hand, learning what plants can be safely consumed in newly encountered environments, or learning how to render the plants safe for human consumption can be a timeconsuming process. The picture that is emerging of CA Paleoindians is one of small mobile groups moving though a range of environments in pursuit

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(i) Figure 4 Artifacts from the Clovis workshop of La Mula West, Panama: a and b, point preforms broken in manufacture; c–f, overshot flakes, a characteristic feature of Clovis point manufacture where the opposite side of the preform is removed in the thinning process; g–i, late-stage fluted preforms broken in the manufacturing process.

of game but perhaps tethered to high-quality sources of stone for manufacturing their skillfully made projectile points.

Archaic Hunter–Gatherers and the Introduction of Agriculture Palaeoenvironmental records from lake cores in both northern and southern regions of CA document the changing landscapes resulting from the warmer and moister climate that marked the Late Pleistocene/ Early Holocene transition. Mean annual temperatures increased 5–6
C while annual rainfall increased 30–40%. As a result, forests expanded into previously open habitats in many parts of CA and

plant species moved 600–900 m higher in elevation (Figure 5). At least 15 genera of megafauna that once roamed through CA were now extinct, including the mastodont-like gomphotheres (Cuvieronius tropicus and Haplomastodon), mammoth (Mammuthus), megalonychid and megatheriid giant ground sloths, including the huge Eremotherium, glyptodonts (Glyptodontidae), giant armadillos (Pampatherium and Chlamytherium), a horse (Equus (Amerhippus)), and, perhaps, the rhinoceros-like Toxodon, the camel-sized Macrauchenia, Paleolama, giant capybara (Neochoerus), flat-headed peccary (Platygonus), and bear (Arctodus). The cultural response to this changing landscape was a gradual increase in the importance of plant

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foods in the diet. Emphasis is on ‘gradual’ here since tool assemblages during the period from 10 000 to 6000 BC were still dominated by bifacial projectile points and other tools important in hunting and butchering activities. Archaic sites are found in the same regions that have yielded Palaeo-Indian sites, but in larger numbers. In a probabilistic survey of seven 500 m-wide transects covering a total distance of 74.5 km in the Santa Maria Valley of Central Pacific Panama, 16 Archaic components have been identified compared to seven Palaeo-Iindian components. Although more impressionistic, this same pattern appears to hold elsewhere in CA. The overall population of CA remains small during the Early Holocene and hunting remains important, to judge by the lithic assemblages. Faunal remains are generally not preserved in these sites, but at the Santa Marta Rockshelter, Chiapas, at the northern boundary of CA, white-tailed deer, red deer (or mazama), peccary, tapir, squirrel, agouti, and armadillo were recovered in layers with 14C dates of 7320  300 BP (c. cal 6180 BC) and 6910  310 BP (c. cal 5795 BC). Nonetheless, there are clear signs of an increased emphasis on plant foods by the middle of this period

in the form of specialized plant-processing tools, palaeobotanical evidence for forest clearing, and microfossil remains of both wild and domesticated plants. The initial cultivation and domestication of plants was early and remarkably widespread in tropical America. Archaeologists, palaeobotanists, and molecular biologists are still trying to determine the time, place, and ancestral species for many of the crops brought under domestication in the Americas. We do know, however, that this process was underway both in north and south of CA by the ninth millennium BC and that a number of these crops were being cultivated in CA shortly thereafter. Our earliest evidence of agricultural activities in the form of actual plant remains comes from the Aguadulce, Carabali, and Ladrones shelters as well as from other sites in Central Pacific Panama. Microfossil remains of several domesticates including maize (pollen, phytoliths, starch grains), squash (phytoliths), arrowroot (phytoliths, starch grains), leren (phytoliths, starch grains), manioc (starch grains), and bottle gourd (phytoliths) have been recovered in multiple contexts dating from the sixth and seventh

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Figure 6 Maize (Zea mays) starch grains from Gran Cocle´ sites: a, Rio Cobre; b and c, Cueva de los Ladrones; d, Aguadulce Shelter; e and f, Zapotal. Scale bars ¼ 10 mm. From Dickau R (2005) Resource Use, Crop dispersals, and the Transition to Agriculture in Prehistoric Panama: Evidence from Starch Grains and Macroremains. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Temple University, Philadelphia. Reproduced with permission.

millennium BC (Figure 6). A 16 700-year long record from the Yeguada Lake core preserves a record of vegetation disturbance by human populations beginning around 11 000 BC in changes in pollen, phytolith, and charcoal flux. Gradual increases in the amount of forest burning reflected in the Yeguada sequence from c. 11 000 to 6000 BC, with a noticeable jump in charcoal influx around 7600 BC, is consistent with the archaeological survey and excavation data that indicate modest increases in the population density over this time period in the region and early cultivation of at least one domesticate (arrowroot) by 7600 BC. The escalation of burning likely represents the use of small kitchen or house gardens in a still primarily forested landscape. A major increase in charcoal along with secondary forest and open-terrain taxa in the pollen and phytolith records at 6000 BC identifies the initiation of intensive slash-and-burn agriculture

in the area. Yeguada Lake is located at 650 m asl in the Santa Maria River watershed, the setting for a probabilistic archaeological survey that identified a twofold increase in sites during the Early Preceramic time period (9600–6000 BC) relative to the previous Palaeo-Indian Period and a nearly eightfold increase in sites (from 16 to 124) between the Late Preceramic Period (6000–3900 BC) and the previous Early Preceramic Period. A second core from Monte Oscuro on the Pacific coastal plain also gave clear indication of extensive forest clearance for swidden agriculture. Maize phytoliths from the Monte Oscuro core at 6000 BC and maize pollen from the Yeguada core at 5630 BC complements the microfossil records of maize and other early domesticates from archaeological sites in the region. Excavated sites and lake core sequences that extend back into the Middle and Early Holocene (i.e., before c. 4000 BC) are not common in CA. Rockshelter excavations in western Panama have sequences going back only to 5500–6000 BC. However, they do provide evidence of plant cultivation in the way of starch grains for many of the same plants identified from Central Panama. Lake core sequences in eastern Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Tabasco, Mexico all show that forest clearance and swidden agriculture was widespread in CA by 2000 BC or earlier. A shift away from complete reliance on terrestrial resources to the use of coastal resources is first recorded at around 6000 BC at opposite ends of the region. The site of Cerro Mangote, located on the Pacific shores of Central Panama, contained abundant remains of fish, mollusks, and crabs as well as mangrove-associated species of birds and raccoons. Maize starch grains recovered from Cerro Mangote tools indicate that like other Central Panama sites, farming was part of the subsistence package. Moreover, marine shell and faunal remains from marine and estuarine species are found in a number of coastal plain and foothill sites up to 40 km inland during this 6000–3900 BC Late Preceramic period. This evidence, plus the fact that Cerro Mangote appears to have been seasonally occupied in the Late Dry Season/Early Wet season, points to a settlement system of seasonal transhumance for the region during the Late Preceramic. On the Pacific coast of Chiapas, the earliest Chantuto phase shell middens date to 5500 BC. Because the early Chantuto phase sites were primarily shellfish-collecting stations, with some additional exploitation of coastal lagoon/estuary system resources to be sure, they too probably represent groups who are farming away from the coastline in Chiapas; maize phytoliths dating to 3500 BC were recovered from one of the Chantuto middens.

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There is a major shift in technology as Central American populations turn to a greater reliance on plant species, both cultivated and collected, after 6000 BC. In many parts of CA, best documented in Panama and the Pacific coastal zone of Chiapas, bifacial flaking disappears from the technological repertoire of these populations to be replaced by industries characterized by random reduction of cores to produce flakes that are used with little or no modification. Bipolar reduction is used when the raw material consists of small pebbles. Various kinds of handstones and bases also appear in assemblages as early as 7000 BC in Panama and perhaps as early in Chiapas to judge from the assemblages recovered from the Santa Marta Rockshelter. The dominant tools in Panama are edge ground cobbles and associated cobble/boulder bases, tool types that are also widespread at this time in parts of northern South America. The archaeological record for CA becomes very much richer with the introduction of ceramics into the material culture of its inhabitants. In part, this is simply a consequence of the ease with which ceramic sites can be located compared to earlier sites that only preserve stone tools. However, in part this richness reflects the increasingly sedentary communities and productive economies based on agriculture that subsidized a range of activities and interactions beyond those dictated by subsistence requirements. This is not to say that the introduction of ceramics is everywhere associated with major sociocultural changes in societies. The earliest pottery yet documented in CA,

the 3900–1250 BC Monagrillo pottery type from Central Panama, is found associated with the same lithic assemblages in use during the earlier Late Preceramic period. Indeed, many of these Late Preceramic sites continue to be occupied during the Early Ceramic. Sites do tend to be larger, and are found in larger numbers in the Caribbean watershed, but the pattern of seasonally occupied settlements, swidden agriculture, and the exploitation of a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic resources carries over from earlier times with little change (Figure 7). The timing of the appearance of pottery in CA is quite variable, as is the character of the pottery. Monagrillo pottery is rather poorly constructed: lowfired pottery made of local clays in limited shapes with infrequent incised and red-painted decorations. It cannot be definitively linked with any of the earlier pottery types from South America. In contrast, the early Tronadora pottery complex found from Central Costa Rica to the Pacific coastal region of Nicaragua, partially contemporary with Monagrillo ceramics at c. 2500–1250 BC, looks like it has evolved from some as-yet-unidentified predecessor. Contemporary or near-contemporary ceramic complexes (La Montan˜a, Chapparo´n, Los Suen˜os, Curre´) are documented from other regions in Costa Rica (Figure 8). Yet the first appearance of pottery moving north from this region gets younger. The Bara complex found along the Pacific coast of Guatemala dates from 1600 BP, and complexes in the highlands of Guatemala and along the Atlantic watershed are younger still. Interaction

Figure 7 Aerial photograph of Monagrillo, the type site for the earliest pottery in Central America. The site is on a peninsula currently extending into a salt flat, but when the site was occupied (c. 3500–1200 BC) the peninsula was surrounded by water.

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Figure 8 Sherds from early ceramic complexes in Costa Rica: a–n, La Montan˜a; o–z, Chaparro´n. Photo Maritza Gutie´rrez. From Snarskis MJ (1981) The archaeology of Costa Rica. In: Benson E (ed.) Between Continents/Between Seas: Pre-Columbian Art of Costa Rica, pp. 15–84. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

among groups throughout CA and beyond was clearly a long-standing and ongoing process. The adoption and passing on of South American domesticated plants to Mexico and Mexican domesticates to South America is an easily documentable consequence of this interaction. One senses, however, that while Central American communities appreciated the utility of pottery, they chose to manufacture pots to their own standards. Moreover, given the variation in timing for the first appearance of pottery in adjacent areas – Central Panama adopted pottery by 3900 BC, western Panama not until 650 BC – not all groups were immediately convinced of its utility.

Settling Down Widespread permanent settlements in CA were not established until after groups had been growing crops for several thousand years. Productive agricultural systems capable of supporting permanent villages are found throughout the region dating back to between 4500 and 2500 years ago. By this time, the alignment of the northern sector with Mexico above the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and that of the southern sector with northern South America, give meaning to the concepts of ‘Mesoamerica’ and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the ‘Intermediate Area.’ In the area now

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designated Mesoamerica, the development of stratified societies first into chiefdoms (see Americas, Central: The Olmec and their Contemporaries) and later into ancient states (see Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya) occurred relatively rapidly. In contrast, settled village agriculture did not lead immediately to stratified societies in Lower Central America; indeed, in some regions like the western Costa Rican Highlands and the lowlands along the Atlantic coasts of Nicaragua and eastern Panama, the egalitarian nature of these agricultural societies continued right up until contact. Stratified societies or chiefdoms did evolve in a number of Lower Central American regions from Central Honduras through Atlantic Costa Rica to Central Pacific Panama, but this emergence did not follow fast on the heels of the appearance of large permanent settlements. The different cultural trajectories witnessed between the northern and southern sectors of CA almost certainly had their roots in the Late Preceramic Period (c. 6000–3900 BC). Genetic and linguistic divergence among modern Chibchan-speaking populations in Lower Central America both point to a time depth of c. 7000 years for the initial isolation of populations and languages. The cultural boundary between Gran Cocle´ (Central Panama) and Gran Chiriquı´ (western Panama/eastern Costa Rica) is clearly identifiable in the archaeological record by 5500 BC (Figure 9). The emergence of large sedentary agricultural villages is the most obvious indication that a major threshold had been crossed in CA. Other indications include the introduction of well-made ceramics, differential treatment of the dead (specialized cemeteries for social elites situated apart from the villages), the appearance of craft specialization, and the initiation of regular intra- and inter-regional exchange. The explosion of craft specialization and the production of luxury goods has no precedent in Late Preceramic/ Early Ceramic periods even in places like Gran Cocle´ where a number of such sites have been recorded and excavated. Specialization is not limited to esoteric goods like shell ornaments and various object and adornments of semiprecious stone. Utilitarian objects like polished stone celts, metates, manos, and chipped stone stemmed points and blades also appear to be in the hands of specialists. Even so, most scholars see this first period of permanent settlement as representing egalitarian tribal societies where status was achieved, much like the ‘Big Man’ societies of highland New Guinea, rather than ascribed or inherited as would be the case for chiefdoms. While most researchers working in Lower Central America see continuity in the cultural sequences and presumably in the populations responsible for them, there are clear influences from both Mesoamerica

and South America where craft specializations have longer histories. In some cases, prestige goods recovered from Lower Central America can be traced to neighboring regions. Such is the case for obsidian blades and other tools recovered in Northeast Honduras and the Greater Nicoya region of Pacific Nicaragua, and some of the jade objects recovered from sites in Costa Rica. The use of spiny oyster (Spondylus) shell as the raw material of choice for prestige goods along the Pacific coast of Panama was likely inspired by a similar but earlier use of Spondylus along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru. Some of the gold pieces recovered from Panama and Costa Rica may have been fabricated in Colombia, although it now seems clear that most of the gold objects found in Lower Central America were manufactured there.

The Emergence of Hierarchical Societies Full-blown chiefdoms, similar in most details to those described by the early sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, make their appearance over much of Lower Central America during the first millennium AD, a judgment based on a wide range of archaeological evidence. Estimated sizes of a chiefly territory based on either ethnohistoric or archaeological data range from 60 to 300 km2 and estimated populations from 1000 to 10 000 persons. Chiefs and the chiefly elite lived in large villages or towns inhabited by upwards of 2000 persons. A number of features distinguished chiefly centers from other settlements in addition to size. While these distinguishing features varied from place to place, they include specialized residences for the chiefs and chiefly elites, often built on raised platforms, monumental stone statuary, and accumulation of wealth in the form of prestige goods. Nowhere is the wealth accumulated by the elite in Lower Central America more visible than at the famous Sitio Conte cemetery in Gran Cocle´ first excavated in the 1930s by Samuel Lothrop. The cemetery was in use over the 200-year period between AD 750 and 950. The personages buried here are predominantly adult males including all the central figures. The amount of funerary ceramics, gold, worked semiprecious stone, jewelry, the accompanying skeletons of numerous males and females (sacrificed captives and concubines?) – all point to the accumulation of luxury items in quantity as markers of high social status. Grave 74, excavated by J. Alden Mason, contained the following items: 3496 beads, 188 ear rods, 91 stone and gold ear rods, 45 gold appendages for ear rods, 87 bells, 29 medallions (repousse´ disks with geometric designs), 17 chisels, 13 plaques (repousse´ disks with figurative designs), 4 cuffs, 2 pendants, 23 overlays for bone, resin, and ivory objects,

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Figure 9 A map showing the approximate boundaries between the subregions of Lower Central America. The base map is from the Houghton Mifflin website http://www.eduplace.com/ss/maps/pdf/cent_amer_pol.pdf

6 wristlets or anklets, 30 miscellaneous overlays, 4 nose ornaments, 2 nose clips or ear-rings, 1 bar, and a copper bell. Sitio Conte along with the contemporary ceremonial center El Can˜o just across the river, with its monolithic columns, paved causeway, and earthen burial mounds, represents an elite precinct without parallel in Gran Cocle´. It is the uniqueness of the Sitio Conte/El Can˜o complex that has led Cooke to propose the emergence of a larger social group than the chiefdom. The central place that wealth accumulation held as a marker of elite status in Gran Cocle´ can be seen in

cemeteries associated with other chiefly centers of the region. Grave goods in these cemeteries include many of the same items recovered at Sitio Conte´ albeit on a more modest scale. Most of these cemeteries have been looted and the associated grave goods widely dispersed in both private collections and museums. An exception is the cemetery at Cerro Juan Diaz along the east coast of the Azuero peninsula, a site that served at various times during the last 2000 years before contact as a major settlement and ceremonial center as well as a cemetery. Although badly looted, archaeological fieldwork carried out over a 10-year

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(f) (e) Figure 10 Late Preceramic polychrome vessels from Gran Cocle´, Panama: a–e, Macaracas style vessels from the site of Cerro Juan Dı´az; f, Montijo Transitional Style vessel from Las Huacas cemetery. From Cooke RG, Sa´nchez HLA, and Udagawa K (2000) Contextualized goldwork from ‘Gran Cocle´’, Panama. In: McEwan C (ed.) Pre-Columbian Gold, pp. 154–176. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

period has resulted in proper chronological placement for luxury items like gold, semiprecious stone, and shell as well as ceramics and more utilitarian objects (Figures 10 and 11). Elsewhere in Lower Central America, large stone sculptures are a hallmark of chiefly centers. At the western Panama highland site of Barriles, the hierarchical character of the society is embodied in the sculpture of a man wearing a conical hat, a gold pendant suspended from his neck, and a human trophy head in each hand seated on the shoulders of another man, perhaps a captive (Figures 12 and 13). Other monumental stone sculptures from Barriles include large (2 m long) legged metates adorned with human heads and large barrel-shaped forms that gave the site its name. Barriles also contained a 30  50 m raised platform paved with stone slabs and boulders, paved causeways and petroglyphs. Further west in this Gran Chiriquı´ region, large sites with ceremonial precincts first appear around AD 400–600, as was the case with the Barriles site in the highlands of western Panama. These sites contain mounds, carved stone barrels, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic statues, and ceramic figurines wearing conical hats similar to those recovered in western

Panama. A unique addition to the ceremonial furniture are symmetrical stone spheres ranging up to 2.5 m in diameter and 15 tons in weight. The large ceremonial center of Rivas and associated Panteo´n de la Reina ridge-top cemetery in the Rio General watershed yielded evidence that indicated the presence of some sort of social network or alliance that incorporated multiple chiefdoms. Rivas was initially a habitation site, but sometime after AD 1000 it was transformed into a ceremonial center whose apparent use was in mortuary ritual culminating in the burial of elite personages in graves dug into the ridge that rose above the Rivas site. The uniqueness of this ceremonial center–cemetery complex recalls the Sitio Conte–El Can˜o ceremonial–cemetery complex in Gran Cocle´ (Figure 14). In the Central Highlands and Atlantic watershed regions of Costa Rica, evidences of social stratification are found in a number of burial sites dated between AD 300 and 700. The cemetery El Tres de Gua´cimo, tentatively dated between AD 400 and 500, contained at least 25 elite burials marked by low stone mounds along with another 100 or more additional graves. These elite burials contained a large number of jade objects, gold ornaments, tubular beads, mace heads,

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Figure 11 Gold objects from Gran Cocle´, Panama: a, from El Can˜o excavations; b–d, from Tomb 2 at Mira Flores; e, from El Cafetal; f, from Tomb 47 at Las Huacas; g–i, from El Can˜o; j–m, from Cerro Juan Dı´az, Operation 3. From Cooke RG, Sa´nchez HLA, and Udagawa K (2000) Contextualized goldwork from ‘Gran Cocle´’, Panama. In: McEwan C (ed.) Pre-Columbian Gold, pp. 154–176. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

slate mirror backs, ceramics, and over 60 metates. The gold objects in this site suggest ties to Gran Cocle´ and northern Colombia, and the jade objects to Mesoamerica. Other cemeteries in this region have yielded reworked Olmec jades and Maya artifacts like slate mirror backs, some with hieroglyphic inscriptions. After AD 1000 a number of large villages with mounds and other architectural features are found in the Atlantic watershed. The largest site, Guayabo, was 1 km2 in size and contained over 50 mounds (many of them stone lined), paved causeways, stone statues, and an underground water system. The cobble-lined circular mounds, paved causeways,

and stairs of these Costa Rican sites recalls similar architectural features of the Tairona sites of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia and serves to reinforce the shared cultural features among groups stretching from Costa Rica south into Colombia (Figure 15). Northwest Costa Rica and the Pacific lake districts of Nicaragua form the archaeological region of Gran Nicoya. This area is sometimes considered part of Mesoamerica and, in fact, three groups speaking Mesoamerican languages, the Chorotega, Nicarao, and Subtiaba were in residence in Gran Nicoya when the Spanish arrived. The timing of the arrival

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for these groups is not entirely clear, but they were in the area long enough to adopt many of the local traditions. Nonetheless, until the arrival of these Mesoamerican groups, perhaps as late as the fourteenth century, the cultural patterns in Gran Nicoya seem very much a part of the Lower Central America/ Intermediate Area sphere. As was the case in some other Lower Central American areas, the strongest evidence for the emergence of hierarchical societies comes from large elite cemeteries. Las Huacas, located on the Nicoya Peninsula and first excavated by

Hartman at the turn of the twentieth century, contained graves with jade pendants, mace heads, and large numbers of metates dating to the period of AD 300–500. Although the details of the grave associations have long been lost, Las Huacas has been interpreted as a specialized cemetery for the elite from several settlements and perhaps more than one polity. In northeastern Honduras, at the northern boundary of Lower Central America, social complexity is most clearly seen in villages with large-scale public architecture. Located on a terrace above the Talgua River, the Talgua Village site, dated between AD 600 and 900, contained 80 house mounds, the largest reaching 2.5 m in height. Some of the mounds were faced with cobbles, recalling the pattern seen in the Atlantic watershed of Costa Rica. An unusual feature of this site was the discovery of a plaza covering at least 1000 m2 constructed of river cobbles to a depth of 2 m. The Altas de Subirana site in the Culmı´ Valley contains house mounds, stone causeways, paved plazas, and stone monoliths, all features that predated AD 600. Unlike the rest of Honduras, there is little evidence of Maya influence in this northeast region at the time large village sites make their first appearance. This is equally true of later centers like the Rio Claro site, dated between AD 1000 and 1400. The site included over 50 mounds constructed of clay and faced with boulders in an area of 8.5 ha. Some of the long low mounds held long houses up to 50 m in length. The site had a central mound 7 m in height with two opposing boulder ramps overlooking the larger of two plazas at the site. The elaborately carved large-legged metates, stone sculptures, and pottery of Northeast Honduras all suggest southern rather than Mayan/Mesoamerican influences.

Summary Figure 12 Stone sculpture from Barriles, Panama of one man wearing a conical hat and holding two trophy heads sitting on the shoulders of another. From Stone DZ (1972) Pre-Columbian Man Finds Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The results of archaeological, linguistic, and genetic research to date in Lower Central America point to cultural continua over much of the area from a

Figure 13 A large ceremonial metate with human trophy heads carved around the perimeter of the sculpture. From Stone DZ (1972) Pre-Columbian Man Finds Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Figure 14 A plan view of a portion of the Rivas site, Gran Chiriquı´, Costa Rica showing the use of boulders on the edges of house mounds, plazas, and other enclosures. Adapted from Quilter J (2004) Cobble Circles and Standing Stones: Archaeology at the Rivas Site, Costa Rica. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 15 A plan view of the Guayabo de Turrialba site showing cobble-faced house mounds, cobble-delineated enclosures, paved causeways, and artificial watercourses. From Fonseca ZO (1981) Guayabo de Turrialba and its significance. In: Benson E (ed.) Between Continents/Between Seas: Pre-Columbian Art of Costa Rica, pp. 104–111. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Reproduced with permission.

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common source, presumably the Paleoindian Clovis culture that once existed throughout the area over 12 000 years ago. The increase in population, decrease in mobility, increased reliance on local plant resources, and the addition of cultivation to the subsistence base all fostered divergent cultural trajectories in different subregions of CA. The archaeological cultures of Gran Cocle´ and Gran Chiriquı´, for example, are clearly differentiated by at least 6000 BC. By the sixteenth century, Gran Cocle´ and Gran Chiriquı´ and all other Lower Central American subregions held numerous autonomous polities, oftentimes speaking mutually unintelligible languages, yet they remained valid cultural areas. This suggests that groups within each subregion interacted with each other to a greater extent than with groups in neighboring subregions. Nonetheless, Central American populations embraced new technologies from outside the region, including agriculture, ceramics, metallurgy, shell and lapidary arts, while preserving their cultural traditions. See also: Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Early Cultures of Middle America; Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica; The Olmec and their Contemporaries; Americas, South: Northern South America; Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction in the Lowland Neotropics; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Coates AG (ed.) (1997) Central America: A Natural and Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cooke RG (2005) Prehistory of native Americans on the Central American Land Bridge: Colonization, dispersal, and divergence. Journal of Archaeological Research 13(2): 129–187. Hoopes JW (2005) The emergence of social complexity in the Chibchan World of Southern Central American and Northern Colombia, AD 300–600. Journal of Archaeological Research 13(1): 1–47. Lange FW (ed.) (1992) Wealth and Hierarchy in the Intermediate Area. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Lange FW (ed.) (1996) Paths to Central American Prehistory. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press. Lange FW and Stone DZ (eds.) (1984) The Archaeology of Lower Central America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Linares OF and Ranere AJ (eds.) (1980) Adaptive Radiations in Prehistoric Panama. Peabody Museum Monographs, 5. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Piperno DR and Pearsall DM (1998) The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics. San Diego: Academic Press. Ranere AJ and Cooke RG (2003) Late Glacial and Early Holocene Occupation of Central American Tropical Forests. In: Mercader J (ed.) Under the Canopy. The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests, pp. 219–248. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sheets PD and McKee BR (eds.) (1994) Archaeology, Volcanism, and Remote Sensing in the Arenal Region, Costa Rica. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica Susan Toby Evans, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary altepetl Pronounced ahlTAYpeht, a Nahuatl (Aztec) word meaning ‘water-hill’ which signified the city-state in the Aztec empire. animatism A belief that inanimate things (objects, landscape features, natural phenomena) are imbued with a living spirit. This concept was fundamental to the belief systems of the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica. Aztec Empire The polity forged by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (which later became Mexico City) and its allies. At its height, at the time of the European intrusion into Mexico in AD 1519, it drew wealth from city-states from much of the area covered by modern Mexico. calpulli A land-holding social unit in Aztec society of Postclassic Mesoamerica. Each calpulli consisted of families with shared rights to farmland, and a local civic-ceremonial focus consisting of an administrative headquarters (usually the palace of the local lord) where policy matters would be discussed and tribute accumulated, a shrine, a ‘young men’s house’ (telpochcalli) to coordinate training for military and public service. Mesoamerica An archaeological culture area consisting of much of the extent of modern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. It is one of the six areas in the world where civilization and state-level political organization arose independently. Quetzalcoatl Pronounced KETZahlCOHaht, a Nahuatl (Aztec) word meaning ‘feathered serpent’ and referring to an important deity in Mesoamerica from the Olmec culture of the Formative period through the Late Postclassic period. Quetzalcoatl was a bringer of life to humankind, and patron of the fine arts. Templo Mayor The Great Temple of the Aztecs in their main capital, Tenochtitlan. Recent excavations have revealed seven construction stages, and these remains and associated buildings form an archaeological park in the heart of Mexico City.

Mesoamerican Culture History The Postclassic period (AD 900–1521) in Mesoamerican culture history is the final pre-Columbian era in a long sequence that extends back to the first humans in the geographical region we know as ‘Middle America’. Middle America comprises the modern countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. Middle America’s northern boundary is defined by the arid reaches of northern Mexico and its southern boundary is the junction of Panama with South America. ‘Mesoamerica’ is a culture area, and it lies completely within Middle America, and consists of most of modern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.

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Mesoamerica is defined by the widespread presence of a set of shared traits, but perhaps the most important of these was the cultivation of maize (corn) as a staple crop. The cultural limits of Mesoamerica are the same as the cultivation limits of maize over consistently large areas. The high caloric and protein value of maize permitted the development of large and dense population aggregates, farming villages, and, eventually, diverse and sophisticated cities. Crop surpluses supported the growth of nonfarming specialists, artisans who created material goods, and administrators who organized the economic, political, and spiritual sectors of society. Mesoamerica’s culture history began before maize was cultivated, with the nomadic hunters of the Palaeoindian period. By the end of the succeeding Archaic period, mobile hunter-foragers were experimenting with cultivation of progenitors of domesticated maize. The next period, the Formative, is initiated by the establishment of farming villages with maize cultivation. By AD 1000, the Olmec culture had established societal and artistic complexity in Mesoamerica, and by the close of the Formative period, in the third century AD, Mesoamerica’s first true cities were rising. The next period, the Classic, was first defined by the sequence of dates in the native calendar of the Maya culture. The dates were carved onto standing monuments (stelae) that extolled the accomplishments of Maya kings, and this practice was thought to begin at around AD 300 and continue until AD 900. Although the definition of this ‘Classic’ period was based on limited information, subsequent archaeological research found that it was a time of cultural accomplishment all over Mesoamerica. Not only were there Maya kingdoms, but, in the Central Highlands of Mexico during the Early Classic period, the great city of Teotihuacan was in its prime, as was the city of Monte Alba´n in the Oaxaca Valley (see Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya). By the Late Classic period, these legendary places were losing power, and political importance was shifting to other centers, such as El Tajı´n in the lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico and Xochicalco in the Central Highlands. By AD 900, the great Maya ceremonial centers were being abandoned. The Postclassic period was thus first defined in contrast to the presumed idyllic cultures of the Classic, and Postclassic traits such as militarism and mercantilism were thought to represent a kind of cultural degeneration. We now know that peoples of the Classic period were enthusiastically and frequently engaged in hostilities and in trade, so these traits seem to be long-term trends in Mesoamerican culture history, and not specific to the Postclassic

period. Most scholars use AD 900 as the point at which the Postclassic period begins, and use AD 1521 as the end date, because in that year the dominant political confederation, the Aztec Empire, was defeated by combined forces of the armies of native societies antagonistic to the Aztecs, and the Spaniards led by Herna´n Corte´s.

Phases of the Postclassic Period This span of time of over 600 years encompassed three distinct phases. The Early Postclassic, AD 900– 1200, was the era during which the great cities of Tula and Chiche´n Itza´ dominated the cultural landscape, both apparently strongly influenced by the cult of the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl in Nahuatl, the Aztec language), which spread over Mesoamerica. During the Middle Postclassic, AD 1200–1430, citystages flourished in many regions, and in some areas, such as Michoaca´n and the Central Highlands of Mexico, ambitious rulers began to consolidate these small polities into larger confederations. The Late Postclassic, AD 1430–1521, saw these aggregates grow to empires known, respectively, as the Tarascan empire (ruled from the city of Tzintzuntzan in Mexico’s Michoaca´n region), and the Aztec empire (ruled principally from the city of Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City). A large part of the territory of what is now modern Mexico came under the sway of one or the other of these major capitals, and the rest of Mesoamerica interacted with them through trade or war. The Late Postclassic period is sometimes called the Aztec period because Aztec culture dominates our view of this time. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was conquered in 1521 but remained the most important city in Colonial period New Spain (as Mexico was then called), and remained the capital, its present name (Mexico City) being derived from the name of the dominant Aztec group, the Mexica (pron. maySHEEkah). Furthermore, Aztec history and customs were amply documented, which is not true of other Late Postclassic cultures. We have eyewitness accounts by the Spanish conquistadores themselves (Hernan Corte´s’s letters, Bernal Dı´az del Castillo’s accounts), and later accounts by Spanish clergy and laymen interested in Aztec culture (e.g., by Fray Diego Dura´n, Fray Bernardino de Sahagu´n, Alonso de Zorita). Most books in the native style were destroyed as promoting heresy against the Catholic religion of the Spaniards, but a few were saved as oddities or were copied, providing another important source of information, and are widely available today

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in facsimile editions (e.g., Codex Borgia, Codex Mendoza, Codex Telleriano-Remensis). Members of Aztec noble families also wrote histories in this Early Colonial period (Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxo´chitl’s Obras Histo´ricas; the Annals of Cuauhtitlan). Because information about Aztec culture dominates the repertoire of sources, scholars tend to use it often to interpret the customs and history of other cultures in Mesoamerica, those of the Postclassic, and those much earlier. This practice is sometimes necessary because of the difficulty of interpreting the material culture record recovered by archaeology, in cases where no written documentation exists. Thus, for many reasons, the once-mighty Aztecs have cast a long shadow over Mesoamerican culture history. Their empire flourished a mere 90 years, however, which puts into perspective the importance of understanding other cultures of the 600-year-long Postclassic period. Early Postclassic Period, AD 900–1200

In the Early Postclassic period, Mesoamerica’s Classic period regionalism was overcome by shared cultural trends that spread quickly over vast areas. This process is exemplified by the emergence of two dominant sites: Tula in the Central Highlands of Mexico and Chiche´n Itza´ in the lowland Yucata´n peninsula. The sites are nearly at the same latitude, but 1000 mi apart. They share an architectural style which is characteristic of Tula’s locale, the Central Highlands of Mexico, but it is far from clear that Chiche´n Itza´ was built under Toltec influence. In fact, some scholars argue that Chiche´n predates Tula, but because we do not have the same kind of chronometric dates from both sites, the issue cannot, at this time, be resolved. Tula In Tula’s period of greatness, AD 900–1150, the site covered nearly 16 km2 (c. 6.4 mi2) and had a population estimated at 60 000. The city had been constructed on a new grid that obliterated an earlier and much smaller settlement. Its ceremonial center echoed certain features of Teotihuacan, but the architecture was innovative in its use of massive blocky pyramids, colonnaded buildings, and huge sculptures. Pyramid B is topped by enormous figures, males in battle gear, and also by columns with attributes of important Postclassic deities such as Tezcatlipoca, the all-powerful trickster god, and Quetzalcoatl (‘quetzal-bird serpent’ or ‘feathered serpent’), bringer of life and patron of fine craft work and important aspects of knowledge, such as keeping the books of history and divination. Other deities known from Tula who are important throughout the Postclassic period are Tlaloc (the storm god), Xipe

Totec (flayed skin god who represented agricultural renewal), Tlazolteotl (the wise old woman to whom confessions were made), and Xochiquetzal, a goddess who oversaw human sexuality and textile arts. The importance of ritual human sacrifice is stressed in bas relief sculpture depictions, and by the free-standing ‘chacmool’ form, a reclining figure used as a sacrificial altar. Tula’s size and grandeur was probably based on a combination of militarism and trade. Trade routes ran to the West Mexico and north as far as the Puebloan cultures of what is now the United States Southwest. Those cultures flourished at the same time as did Tula, and show traits such as the use of the ball court and certain trade goods that indicate contact with Mexican cultures, but do not show that the Toltecs of Tula had an empire that inspired the development of Puebloan cultures. The Toltecs carried distinctive trade goods by which we can track their contacts, direct or indirect, with areas to the south and east. One item diagnostic of Toltec trading patterns, and also found in later cultures, was the wheeled ceramic figurine, typically depicting a dog or other animal, its feet pierced to accept front and rear axles that bore wheels. These figurines have been called toys, but they almost certainly served a sacred rather than an entertainment function. Mesoamericans revered any object or phenomenon that seemed to possess a lifelike vitality, because they believed that the world around them was animated by spiritual forces, and anything that moved had this energy. The use of the wheel in Mesoamerica was never extended to practical applications, as it was in the Old World. For one thing, there were no domestic animals large enough to pull a conveyance like a cart (all goods were carried in packs by human porters, or, where possible, in canoes), and so there was no springboard for the inventive design of gears and machinery, as happened in the Old World. Another item diagnostic of Toltec trade was Plumbate ware, with a distinctive glossy deep gray finish. It was produced along the Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala, but was found at both Tula and Chiche´n Itza´, as well as at countless other sites contacted by Tula in the Early Postclassic period. A further stimulant to trade was the development, in West Mexico, of metalworking. This was apparently a set of techniques first introduced from South America by sea contacts along the Pacific Coast. In the first stage of Mesoamerican metalworking (AD 600/800–1200), copper was smelted and poured into casts. Simple forms were further worked by hammering, and more complicated forms were cast using

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the lost-wax technique. The most popular items produced by the lost-wax method were bells, small spherical tinkling devices that were worn in groups in the costumes of lords, deity impersonators, and long-distance traders. Metal’s ability to produce sound was one of its most important features in Mesoamerican culture. Another was its reflective brilliance, and in the second stage of metalworking (AD 1200– 1521), gold and silver were used to produce a range of decorative devices. Alloys of several metals were developed. Thus, Mesoamerica can be said to have achieved a ‘Bronze Age’ technology, but it was seldom used to produce utilitarian objects, in contrast to the metalworking traditions of the Old World. Metal objects were widely traded, and while Toltec merchants may have strongly influenced the flow of trade in western and northern Mexico, trade along the lowlands edging the Gulf of Mexico was in the hands of Maya ethnic groups variously known as the Chontal, Putu´n, and Itza´. These traders took goods along the coast around the Yucata´n peninsula and also into the interior. In 1502, on his fourth voyage to the New World, off the east coast of Yucata´n, Christopher Columbus saw a canoe at least 15 m (c. 50 ft) long, with 25 oarsmen plus the traders and their families, and goods including woven cotton mantles, obsidian blades, copper ax forms (thin sheets of copper used as currency), and cacao beans to be processed into chocolate. Thus the goods included tropical lowland products (cotton, cacao) and those from the highlands far to the west (obsidian, copper), indicating that these traders were handling a wide variety of goods from all over Mesoamerica. Chiche´n Itza´ This other great center of the Early Postclassic was a Maya site colonized by the ethnic Itza´ group in the ninth century AD. Its name means ‘mouth of the well of the Itza´’ and the well probably refers to the great Sacred Cenote (sinkhole), or Well of Sacrifice, 24 m (c. 80 ft) in diameter, with its water level an equal distance below the ground surface. Into this well were thrown all manner of precious materials such as carved jades, copper bells, and carved wooden items, and also human sacrifices, but forensic methods are powerless to determine whether or not the skeletal remains are those of beautiful virgins, as popular legends report. Chiche´n Itza´’s architecture reflects two distinct traditions, Maya and Central Mexican, and in some cases a fusion of the two, such as in the Caracol, a circular structure with features permitting tracking of astronomical events. Other buildings are more clearly in the Central Mexican style, and these huge structures dominate the area extending south from the

Sacred Cenote. The Castillo is a 23 m (c. 75 ft) high four-sided stepped pyramid decorated with feathered serpent motifs. The Temple of the Warriors and its associated buildings are of the same style as Tula’s Pyramid B complex, and show the same use of columns on top of the pyramid, and colonnaded halls at its base. Surviving murals at the Temple of the Warriors show battle scenes, and also canoes in use that are of the same type as the one Columbus saw. The Great Ball Court at Chiche´n Itza´ is Mesoamerica’s largest, 146 m (c. 479 ft) long and 37 m (121 ft) wide, and it is one of 13 at the site. The ball game was played all over Mesoamerica, and the action was somewhat like that of soccer: teams or solo players moved a rubber ball around a court, trying to score goals. Europeans would not know about rubber-ball-centered sporting events until the sixteenth century, when an Aztec team toured Europe, but in Mesoamerica this ancient tradition dates back to at least 1500 BC, the time of the earliest known formal ball court (Paso de la Amada, in Chiapas, Mexico). Countless games were probably played on any cleared field, however. We know from Late Postclassic sources that teams and equipment had become formalized and that gambling on the outcome was common. It should be noted that in Mesoamerica the ritual component of these games was essential, and that the rubber ball was an expression of vitality that was critical to this spiritual aspect. Mesoamericans believed in animatism: objects, landscape features, and natural phenomena that are regarded as passive or inanimate to the Western mind were regarded as having sacred living spirit, and the rubber ball, with its capacity to move would be regarded as sharing in the animatism that enlivened the world, and which must be revered. Elsewhere in the Early Postclassic Chiche´n Itza´ is thought to have gone into decline at about the same time as did Tula, in the latter part of the twelfth century AD. The Itza´ established a new center at a Yucata´n site called Mayapan, which had a smaller and shabbier copy of the Castillo pyramid. Mayapan’s wall enclosed a closely packed area of mostly residential buildings, covering 4.2 km2 (1.7 mi2), with a population that may have numbered 12 000. Members of the Itza´ group also pushed into the Guatemala Highlands, establishing sites among groups such as the Quiche´ Maya. Toltecized groups also pushed into southern Mesoamerica, establishing Nahuatl-speaking enclaves as far south as El Salvador. Cholula was located in the Puebla Valley in the eastern Central Highlands of Mexico, and had a long history before becoming a major capital in the

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Postclassic. Its Postclassic identity was shaped by the arrival of migrants from the north, who defaced its Great Pyramid, though it remained, by volume, the largest structure in the pre-Columbian New World. The major ceremonial focus at Cholula became the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl (demolished after European intrusion), marking the city as the pre-eminent center for worship of the feathered serpent god, and drawing pilgrims to the site. The migrations that brought adherents of the cult of Quetzalcoatl to Cholula were part of what seem to have been widespread population displacements. Ethnohistorical accounts written down in the native tradition, but after the European intrusion, said that Cholula’s established ethnic groups were displaced by migrants from the northwest. These migration accounts figure in the ethnic histories of many groups in the Postclassic, and some scholars believe that such migrations were exaggerated in order to glorify the courage and hardiness of tribal ancestors. However, overwhelming archaeological evidence indicates that there were many significant shifts in cultural patterns all over Mesoamerica, ranging from ceramic styles and mortuary practices to agricultural techniques and layouts of residences. Furthermore, some languages became widespread over many areas, and these include Nahuatl and its close variants, and also Mayan, which became important along the eastern gulf lowlands which border the Central Highlands of Mexico. These changes are typical effects of migrations. Many migration accounts dealing with the Central Highlands cite a place of origin called Aztla´n, whose heart was a cave called Chicomoztoc. In Mesoamerica, caves were regarded as sacred apertures of the living earth, perfectly suitable for the origin point of revered progenitors. In fact, Cholula, which is geographically placed between Tula and the gulf lowlands, seems to have been influenced from both directions, and also by its proximity to the increasingly important city-states of the Mixteca, whose territory extended from the southwestern Puebla plain down into the Valley of Oaxaca and to the Pacific coast. These Mixtec regions were never strongly unified; their political system was based on the independence of small cities, each ruling its surrounding hinterland, the rulers related to each other through generations of marriage alliance, and all claiming divine descent. The Mixtecs kept track of genealogical matters through their painted books (see, for example, the Codex Borgia), and the masterful cartoon-like style of their illustrated writing system became a kind of symbolic shared script over the Central Highlands in the Postclassic period. The association between Mixtec towns and Cholula was close,

and Cholula became an important center of ceramics in this style, which became known as ‘Mixteca-Puebla style’. Middle Postclassic Period, AD 1200–1430

This stretch of over 200 years marks a transition between the proliferation of small states focused upon modest cities, and the beginning of the Aztec Empire, centered upon the Basin of Mexico in the Central Highlands of Mexico, and Tarascan Empire, based in the Michoaca´n region of western Mexico. These were to become two huge and complex states that transformed the territories they conquered, and influenced many others beyond their reach. ‘Aztec’ is a modern word, a shorthand term developed by scholars to refer to the Nahuatl-speaking ethnic groups who saw themselves as descended from migrants from Aztla´n. Thus, there were ‘Aztecs’ all over the Central Highlands of Mexico by AD 1200, but the Aztec Empire of the Late Postclassic was in great part the work of one of these groups, the Mexica, mentioned above. Specifically, the most powerful segment of the Mexica was the group called the Tenochca, who founded the city of Tenochtitlan in about AD 1325, and since that time their city has grown from a modest temple pyramid surrounded by a few huts to the largest metropolis in the Americas, Mexico City. But in AD 1200, the Mexica was just one of many ethnic groups that had moved, over many years, from a homeland that had become inhospitable. Their migration accounts describe many stops where they settled and worked for a while, and Tula in its prime was among them. After these stops of several years each, they would move on, finally reaching the Basin of Mexico, where, unfortunately, other groups before them had claimed all the arable land. So they camped on a barren abandoned lava flow and lived off the lizards that flourished there. In time their toughness and their willingness to serve existing city-states as mercenary soldiers impressed their neighbors, and they were given permission to settle in other more comfortable locales, but in each case their aggressiveness frightened their hosts into rescinding hospitality. Finally, they occupied a swampy island in the Basin of Mexico’s central lake and there established Tenochtitlan. By about AD 1376, they had permission to establish their own noble dynasty; their first ruler, Acamapichtli, was descended from a union between a Mexica and a noble from Culhuacan, a basin town that claimed a line of descent from the rulers of Tula. For about 50 years, the ennobled Mexica flourished on their island, establishing closer ties with other noble lineages in the basin and serving as highly

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regarded mercenaries for the Tepanecs, the most powerful ethnic group in the basin. The Tepanec confederation was comprised of sets of local citystates, the Mexica among them. But tensions arose between the Tepanecs and the Mexica, and the latter joined forces with other disaffected client states and overthrew Tepanec authority in about AD 1430, taking over the confederation that would become the core of the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs are among the most familiar of preColumbian cultures; the Tarascans are not. In part, this is because the Aztecs controlled much of the area first encountered by the Spaniards in AD 1519, the gulf lowlands. Their influence was very widespread, and their language, Nahuatl, had become a lingua franca over a large area. However, while the Aztec empire expanded in many directions, in the late fifteenth century it was blocked, one valley west of their heartland, the Basin of Mexico, by the eastern outposts of the Tarascan domain, whose history during the Middle Postclassic bears parallels with that of the Mexica. The Tarascan core area, Michoaca´n, was an ethnically mixed region, and the Tarascans established themselves near Lake Pa´tzcuaro in the Early Postclassic. The founder of the Late Postclassic dynastic line, Tarı´acuri, unified the core region around Pa´tzcuaro in the early fourteenth century. The Tarascan language, Pure´pecha, is something of an isolate, resembling no other Mesoamerican language. However, the Tarascans shared in many typically Mesoamerican traits: a solar vague year (365 rather than the modern 365.25 day solar year); a calendar of 18 months of 20 days each, plus 5 extra days at the end; the veneration of caves, mountains, and springs; veneration of serpents and butterflies; the importance of human sacrifice, and autosacrifice (self-infliction of penitential wounds); and the ball game. Another trait that they shared with the Aztecs, to the east, was the practice of forging tribute empires out of city-state confederations. Late Postclassic Period, AD 1430–1521

In the Early and Middle Postclassic periods, over much of Mesoamerica, the dominant political format was the city-state. In the Nahuatl language the term was alte´petl, ‘water-hill’, conveying the geographic ideal of a town’s location, on a hill near water. In a larger sense, the alte´petl concept was similar to the Classical Greek polis in that it encompassed an independent political unit consisting of a central community and the hinterland it governed. Each such city-state was basically self-sustaining, though exploitation of local resources would encourage specialization in craft production and trade. In the

alte´petl, tributes from local farmers sustained the central town’s governing elite, including the hereditary nobles who ran the government and markets, and the priests who ran the temples and schools. These tributes were the profit from the local political system, and any ambitious ruler could see that if several city-states could be joined into a confederation, part of their tribute profit would be channeled up to the city-state heading the confederation. In the Basin of Mexico, this is what the Tepanecs had done, and the Late Postclassic begins when this confederation was taken over, after the ‘Tepanec War’, by the Mexica of Tenochtitlan and their close allies, the Acolhua of Texcoco (another city in the Basin of Mexico) and Tepanec separatists, the three ethnic groups forming a ‘Triple Alliance’ that would forge an empire. Social structure and ownership of resources One important transformation of traditional culture occurred among the Mexica at the time of the Tepanec War, and this was the institution of private ownership of farmland by individual nobles. As the Mexica rulers told the story much after the fact, the commoners were reluctant to fight the Tepanec War, so the lords promised that if the effort was unsuccessful, they would henceforth serve the commoners. However, if the war was successful, the commoners would relinquish their rights to conquered lands. This alleged pact highlights an important turning point: the spoils of war, the lands of Tepanec commoners, were not distributed among the Mexica commoners as had been the custom, but seem to have become a kind of private property of individual Aztec lords. Prior to this, and in common with many ancient civilizations, land and other property were held by corporate groups (such as the Aztec commoners’ calpulli land-holding groups), or land would be held by a temple dedicated to a god, or by the government, to be used by rulers and lords to support the costs of office. But in the case of the spoils of the Tepanec War, land became a commodity for an individual’s use and choice of disposition: it could be conveyed as an inheritance, or gambled away on a ball game or board game (patolli). Of course, the lands confiscated after the Tepanec War advantaged the elites, not the commoners, but the arrangement also insured that Tenochtitlan’s character would be firmly urban, because its resident commoners did not have the opportunity to establish farms on the mainland, but stayed in their island city. The commoners in Aztec society constituted the vast majority of the population, by far the most numerous social class. There was considerable variation in affluence and privilege within this class, with

AMERICAS, NORTH/Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica 215

most commoners working at farming and artisanry; they would tend the fields assigned to them in their calpulli rural village, and each household would produce the simple goods required for day-to-day life (wooden and stone tools, textiles). Some households would specialize in the production of items like ceramic vessels or votive figurines, and trade these in local and city markets, where other goods and specialty imported items could be obtained. Some farmers, such as those whose lands were confiscated by victorious nobles in war, became reduced in status to the level of tenant farmers. A few commoners were as wealthy and powerful as nobles. In fact, some commoners who distinguished themselves in warfare were awarded noble status with its privileges, which included the rents from farms worked by tenant farmers, the right to wear certain insignia and garments, and the right to attend the daily gathering of nobles in the main courtyard of the local palace. Other important commoners were the long-distance traders, the pochteca, who not only moved valuable goods (jaguar skins, jade, precious metals, and fine textiles) over great distances, but also served as spies when the Triple Alliance lords wanted to expand the empire into some unpenetrated part of Mesoamerica. Native histories recount several instances of pochteca merchants being killed in the line of duty, upon which the Aztec empire’s armies would march to the scene and annex the territory, sometimes sending the local population back up to Tenochtitlan to carry the loot and end their lives as human sacrifices. Aztec society also encompassed slaves, people who were owned by others and were servants, but there was no class of slaves; these were individuals who had been reduced to this status through criminal activity or plain bad luck. If their families could afford it, their freedom could be purchased. If not, they risked being purchased to serve as a human sacrifice (see Social Inequality, Development of). During the Late Postclassic period’s first 89 years, from 1430 to the arrival of Corte´s in 1519, the Mexica and their allies would expand the original confederation of a few city-states into an empire drawing tribute from dozens of regions extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast. They would also expand the political structure of the citystate, first into the simple amalgamation of city-states into confederations, and then, as the organization grew and became more complicated, the Mexica streamlined it so that the political empire of the Aztecs was a vast profit-making enterprise, its provinces ruled by tame local lords or Mexica military governors, overseen by accountants and bureaucrats, and kept intact by fear of Mexica reprisals.

Customs of Aztec warfare, for example, dictated that vanquished warriors be captured alive so that they could be sacrificed to the gods. Human sacrifice was ostensibly a means of repaying the gods for the gift of life to humankind, but it was also an important means of maintaining respect for the power of the Aztec empire to inflict pain. The major venues for human sacrifice in the Late Postclassic period were the temple pyramids in each city. One of the largest was Tenochtitlan’s Great Temple (Templo Mayor). The temple itself has recently been excavated and is now visible in Mexico City, and its seven episodes of building, starting in the early fourteenth century, were occasions for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The major expansion that was dedicated in 1487 probably brought the temple-pyramid’s height close to 100 ft (c. 30 m), with two temples topping the pyramid, dedicated to Tlaloc and to Huitzilopochtli, the Mexica patron deity of war. The dedication ceremony is said by one source to have involved over 80 000 victims, though others put the number at 20 000, which is far more likely, given the logistics of guarding, feeding, and sacrificing such a large number of people. The victims would have been war captives and other unfortunates sent by allies as human tribute, and also civilians from towns that resisted incorporation into the empire. Watching from pavilions in the area surrounding the temple were rulers from citystates both allied and hostile. The latter would have been brought to the city under cover, to avoiding alerting the commoners who fought the wars that there was collusion between rulers. While the ostensible motive for the ceremony was spiritual, to honor the gods, the political message was clear: the fate of those who resisted the Aztec Empire was death, sacrifice to Aztec gods. The spectacular size of this 1487 ceremony and the pomp associated with it would have made it the largest celebration in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, yet like many displays of political propaganda from all of human history, this one’s glitter and gore hid an uneven conquest record and an uncertain future. The emperor at the time was Ahuitzotl, who vigorously pushed out the boundaries of the Aztec empire. He was also responsible for the last great construction effort to beautify Tenochtitlan. The lake-bound city was subject to periodic flooding, and after extensive damage by one during his reign, Ahuitzotl rebuilt it, taking care to include gardens and plantings among the temple complexes and palaces. By AD 1519, when the Spaniards arrived, the city held about 125 000 people, twice the size of contemporaneous cities in Spain.

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The emperor who succeeded Ahuitzotl was Motecuzoma the Younger (aka ‘Montezuma’), who reigned from 1502 until 1520. In 1519, when Corte´s and his company arrived, they were lodged in the second greatest palace in Tenochtitlan. They had Motecuzoma live with them as a protected hostage, and although many Tenochca and Texcocans wanted to rise up against the Spaniards and kill them, Motecuzoma’s fatalism and compromised position made action difficult. The Spaniards and Motecuzoma and his courtiers lived together for six months and their shared pastimes consisted of feasting, gambling, hunting, and being entertained by courtesans; these were patterns of courtly life that were familiar in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica and Renaissance Europe. The eyewitness accounts that the Spaniards wrote of life among the Aztecs emphasize the many familiar aspects of this civilization. The Iberian Peninsula had just undergone a long series of battles to drive Moslem populations back to Morocco in northwestern Africa, and the conquistadors often likened the Aztecs to the ‘Moors’, as they called Moroccan Moslems. The palace architecture was similar, as was the practice of polygyny (‘many wives’ for one husband), and the general social order, with its large group of farmer-artisans supporting a much smaller and wealthy group of bureaucrats and scribes, merchants, luxury artisans, and nobles. But for all these societal parallels, the Spaniards possessed certain advantages in the battle of one great civilization against another. One obvious advantage the Europeans had was metal and simple machinery, including guns. This suite of technologically sophisticated devices and implements was probably of less importance than the diseases they brought to a people with no resistance to them. Smallpox and measles raced ahead of invading armies, destroying and demoralizing the natives. The Spaniards also brought horses, much larger than any Middle American mammal, and fierce war dogs. They also fought battles differently; the Aztecs fought to take captives, not to kill, and grouped whole cadres of soldiers under the direction of standard bearers. The Spaniards killed Aztec standard bearers and as many soldiers as they could, thus removing Aztec officers, who were also nobles. The conquest of the Aztec empire was finalized with the fall of Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1521, after a siege lasting 3 months which destroyed much of the city. Corte´s successfully lobbied to make the Aztec capital the site of the new capital of the Spanish colony, New Spain, and the Spaniards organized their newly conquered vassals into work parties to build the city. The organization of the Aztec empire was, however, left largely in place, a workable means

of drawing taxes from a huge conquered population that persisted at least until the end of the sixteenth century. Elsewhere in Mesoamerica, the Spaniards continued the conquest, with the fall of the Tarascan empire in 1530. Some areas, however, resisted conquest. Deep in Yucata´n, the last remnant of the Itza´ remained independent at their capital of Tayasal until 1697. In time, however, all of Mesoamerica became Spanish provinces, and the concerted efforts toward conversion to Christianity, eradication of ancient cultures, and isolation of New Spain from contacts with nations other than Spain worked toward making the ancient cultures there a shadowy presence. See also: Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Early Cultures of Middle America; Lower Central America; The Olmec and their Contemporaries.

Further Reading Berdan FF, Blanton RE, Boone EH, Hodge MG, Smith ME, and Umberger E (1996) Aztec Imperial Strategies. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Codex Borgia (1993) (c. 1500) The Codex Borgia. Dı´az G and Rodgers A, restorers, Byland BE, intro- and commentary. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Codex Mendoza (1992) (c. 1541–42) Codex Mendoza. Volume 3: A facsimile reproduction of Berdan FF and Anawalt PR (eds.) Codex Mendoza. Berkeley: University of California Press. Codex Telleriano-Remensis (1995) (1563) Codex TellerianoRemensis, Manuscrit Mexicain 385, Bibliothe`que Nationale of Paris. Facsimile reproduction, Part I of Codex TellerianoRemensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, by Keber EQ, pp. 1–104. Austin: University of Texas Press. Corte´s H (1986) (1519–26) Letters from Mexico. Pagden A (trans. and ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. de Landa FD (1978) (1566) Yucata´n before and after the Conquest. Translated with notes by Gates W (orig. 1937) New York: Dover. de Sahagu´n FB (1569) (1950–82) General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex). Anderson A and Dibble C (transl.), 13 vols. Santa Fe, NM: The School of American Research and the University of Utah. de Zorita A (1994) (1566–70) Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico: The Brief and Summary Relations of the Lords of New Spain. Keen B (trans. and intro.) Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Dı´az del Castillo B (1956) (1560s) The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Garcia G (ed.), Maudslay AP (trans.), Leonard IA, intro. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy. Dura´n FD (1994) (1581) The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated, annotated, and introduced by Heyden D. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Evans ST (2004) Ancient Mexico and Central America: Archaeology and Culture History. London: Thames and Hudson. Pollard HP (1993) Tarı´acuri’s Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith ME and Berdan FF (eds.) (2003) The Postclassic Mesoamerican World. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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The Olmec and Their Contemporaries Mary DeLand Pohl and Christopher von Nagy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary complex (ceramics) A term used to denote a recurring pattern of association of pottery vessel types, decoration, pot color, or technical attributes found within a region. Pottery complexes are demarcated both temporally and spatially. Early Formative period A period in Mesoamerican history marked by sedentism, social ranking, and inter-regional trade networks that culminate in the Early Horizon. Epi-Olmec During the Late Formative period, after the abandonment of the influential center of La Venta c. 400 BC, Soke populations both continued earlier Olmec traditions and exhibited cultural variability at sites such as Tres Zapotes and El Marquesillo in southern Veracruz. Formative period (Mesoamerica) Generally the first two millenniums of settled life in Mesoamerica, the second and first millennium BC, when villages, towns, and, later, cities and other features of Mesoamerican cultural and political-economic life begin to appear. The initial blush of sedentism is associated with mixed economies in many areas of Mesoamerica with maize playing a variable part. By the second half of the first millennium BC, however, the agrarian economy was focused on the traditional dependence on maize and lysine-producing beans. horizon Distinctive cultural traits such as art styles and architectural plans appear over a wide area. The Olmec horizon style occurs from West Mexico to El Salvador. Archaeologists recognize an Early Horizon primarily influenced by San Lorenzo and a Late Horizon primarily influenced by La Venta. interfluve A region, generally of elevated terrain, between two drainage systems. isotopic data Several isotope systems preserved in human osteological material are of relevance to archaeology. Plant and marine metabolic processes are characterized by isotopic fractionation, that is the discrimination of one kind of isotope or element over another. Isotopic variants of carbon (12C and 13C), nitrogen (14N and 15N), and strontium substitution for calcium are example systems. In some environments, the degree of dependence on maize, a xeric tropical grass, on marine resources, and the general tropic level of the population may be tracked. logograph A component of a writing system that represents a phonetic word as a single graphical sign. Middle Formative period A period in Mesoamerican history marked by the formation of small to medium-scaled, rank-based societies with polity centers marked by an emerging architectural tradition characterized by the creation of plazas, platform structures, and pyramids. The cultural foundations of Mesoamerican political economies, including concepts of kingship, the calendar, writing, among others, develop during this period if not earlier. palaeodistributary A senescent distributary channel of a river delta often still visible on the surface to some degree demonstrating various stages of infilling and lateral erosion by younger distributaries. Deeper palaeochannels may be completely buried. Ancient levees associated with palaeochannels are often associated with older settlement systems.

palaeolevee An ancient levee associated with a buried or partially infilled palaeodistributary. quincunx An arrangement of five dots within a square or rectangle such that the four apexes of the quadrangle are each associated with a dot and the remaining dot is positioned in the center equidistant from the apex points. settlement hierarchy Archaeologists deduce modes of sociocultural integration by examining patterns of settlement on the landscape. A hierarchy of site types exhibiting at least three tiers (e.g., primate center, regional center, farming village) marks a state-level society.

Introduction Shortly before the Spanish Conquest, Aztec priests buried an ancient Olmec carving as an offering in their paramount temple, the Templo Mayor, at the heart of their capital Tenochtitlan in central Mexico. This small greenstone figure, a 2000-year-old object originally from distant Gulf Coast lands, symbolizes the fundamental place that the Olmecs held in Mesoamerican culture. It represents the crystallization of a constellation of cultural traits that first appeared in the Formative period and were to continue as the foundation of indigenous culture in Mesoamerica as late as Aztec times. These cultural traits were tangible signs of significant social changes that took place in Formative Mesoamerica. This was the time of a transition in social structure that led to the emergence of rulers who centralized power and institutionalized social hierarchy. Traditionally, scholars have considered the Olmec to have represented an advanced chiefdom type of society. Nevertheless, evidence emerging for multi-tiered settlement patterns, imposing palace structures, and gifting relationships with elites in distant lands strongly suggests that the Olmec had a state-level society. Here we trace the emergence of core Mesoamerican social structure and cultural traits and examine the role of the Olmec in shaping their development. We focus on the Olmec sites of the Mexican Gulf Coast region. There is disagreement over the role played by the Olmec polities of southern Veracruz and western Tabasco during the roughly thousand year-long period during which the Mesoamerican (see Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica) cultural framework of rulership, gift economics, trade, gaming, religiosity, literacy, and historical praxis emerged. Over the course of the twentieth century, one group of scholars came to favor a ‘mother culture’ model giving the Olmec preeminence in the formation of Mesoamerican cultural patterns. Another group of scholars has favored a more decentralized vision of inter-regional cultural hybridization whereby emerging polities across the central core of Mesoamerica mutually contributed to, and participated in, the discourse

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Olmec archaeology began in earnest with the work of Mathew Stirling. Stirling began in the Gulf Coast Olmec region in 1938 with the intention of investigating major sites, including Tres Zapotes in Veracruz. Later work at Tres Zapotes was undertaken by Christopher Pool. Philip Arnold and Susan Gillespie, among others, have worked at a variety of Early and Middle Formative Olmec sites within the Tuxtlas Mountains. San Lorenzo became the focus of an intensive project during the late 1960s under the direction of Yale University’s Michael Coe and Richard Diehl. Coe and Diehl were the first to develop a well-researched ceramic chronology tied to radiocarbon dates. Ann Cyphers and her coworkers undertook later work at San Lorenzo. Stacy Symmonds, Carl Wendt, and others have conducted systematic research in the Coatzacoalcos basin adjacent to San Lorenzo. The nearby ritual shrine site, El Manatı´, with its sequence of spring-focused caches of ceremonial celts and wooden busts, was excavated by Ponciano Ortı´z Caballos and Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez. Following Frans Blom’s initial visit to La Venta in Tabasco, Stirling excavated the site and was followed by Heizer, Drucker, and the Mexican archaeologist Pin˜a Chan. More recently, work at La Venta was renewed by Rebecca Gonza´lez Lauck and coworkers. William Rust documented a network of settlement beyond the polity core, possibly similar in organization to that documented by Cyphers and colleagues around San Lorenzo. Work at several sites subsidiary to La Venta by archaeologists, including Mark Raab at Isla Alor and Mary Pohl and Kevin Pope at San

of creation of statecraft and its attendant systems of rituality and symbol. The most important of the Olmec contemporaries are the sites of Coapexco, Tlapacoya, and Tlatilco in the in the Basin of Mexico, Chiapa de Corzo, San Isidro, and Libertad in Chiapas, Chalcatzingo in Morelos, Teopantecuanitla´n in Guerrero, La Blanca in west Guatemala, and Chalchuapa in El Salvador. The investigations are the work of archaeologists such as Grove, Gillespie, Cyphers, Niederberger, Tolstoy, Paradis, Martı´nez Donjua´n, Love, and Clark and other New World Archaeological Foundation archaeologists.

Background of Olmec Studies Scholars recognize that the Olmec were a key factor in the foundation of Mesoamerican culture, but there is disagreement about what the term Olmec refers to and who the Olmec were. Historically, the term Olmec has signified a particular art style, a constellation of cultural traits, the materialization of an emergent rituality associated with developing Mesoamerican political economies, and a regional archaeological culture that developed within the Gulf coastal lowlands of the Mexican state of Veracruz and adjacent Tabasco during the centuries between roughly 1500 and 400 BC (Figure 1). The first recognition of the distinctive complex of art associated with the archaeological Olmec is attributed to Jose´ Melgar who published an account of a colossal carved head at Tres Zapotes in 1871.

22⬚N

20⬚N Chalcatzingo

18⬚N

Tres Zapotes

La Venta San Lorenzo

Juxtlahuaca

16⬚N

Pijijiapan Mazatan 14⬚N Chalchuapa 500 km

12⬚N 104⬚W

100⬚W

96⬚W

92⬚W

88⬚W

84⬚W

80⬚W CvN

Figure 1 Map of the Olmec region within Mesoamerica showing important sites mentioned in the text. The three major Olmec sites, San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes are shown with 50 km radius circles, approximations of possible zones of primary economic interaction. La Venta acquired resources, boulders and cobbles for grinding stones, larger stone for sculpture and architectural elements, and volcanic ash for pottery temper, from as far or further afield than the 50 km circle shown here. Both San Lorenzo and La Venta acquired raw materials for sculpture from the Tuxtla Mountains. Secondary and tertiary centers associated with each Olmec capital are well contained within these circles.

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Andre´s, has provided detailed ceramic, palynological, and subsistence history for the La Venta region. Further east, following initial work by Edward Sisson, Christopher von Nagy undertook a systematic survey of the Plan Chontalpa region documenting a network of ancient Olmec settlement along a series of ancient distributary channels. Significantly, these projects have provided robust palaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and palynological data on subsistence systems. Historical linguists such as Terrence Kaufman have determined that speakers of the Mixe-Soke language group, specifically the Soke, are the probable descendents of the ancient Olmec.

Olmec Political Economies The Olmec represent the culmination of milleniums of lowland Mesoamerican cultural development that resulted in a burst of sociopolitical change during the course of the second millennium BC, reaching an apogee during the Early Horizon period that saw San Lorenzo’s dominance and participation in the foundations for later Mesoamerican political and economic systems during the Middle and into the Late Formative periods. During the roughly 1600 years represented by these developments, the societies of the southern Gulf lowland region of Veracruz and the adjacent Tabasco Coastal Plain underwent fundamental economic and cultural transformations that saw the rise of a mixed agrarian economy in the rich, seasonally flooded lowlands of the region, followed later by shifts toward the classic Mesoamerican maize-based subsistence economy, the emergence of complex social and political-economic networks reflected in archaeological settlement hierarchies, the differentiation of society into a ranked and

occupationally differentiated population, the emergence of kingship, political rituality, and the development of the foundations of writing. A diverse subsistence base, consisting of wild plant and tree use, a range of domesticated species, wild mammal, reptile, and fish species, as well as coastal shellfish, constituted a rich, cyclic resource base that provided a calorie and protein base that allowed for the florescence of complex culture in the region. Within the exceptionally rich region of the riverine and deltaic lowlands (Figure 2), this resource base fueled the emergence of complex networks of communities ranging from small hamlets located along natural levees, larger villages and village clusters, some with evidence of community structures, to towns and polity capitals such as San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes. Though the complexity of the San Lorenzo region appears unmatched during the Early Horizon, later developments in the Olmec region are part of the developing mosaic of Mesoamerica and demonstrate multifaceted linkages with other regions. Stylistic links, commodity and gift exchanges, and outright expansions out from the Olmec Gulf Coast lowlands suggest a complex picture of interrelationships and rivalries. Chronology of the Olmec Heartland

In general terms, the chronology of the Olmec can be divided into the Initial Formative, Early Formative, Middle Formative, corresponding to the Olmec proper, and the Late Formative, characterized by a series of Epi-Olmec societies that continued to experiment and innovate. Archaeological evidence for very early populations is largely absent, either buried under meters of alluvium, laterally eroded by meandering channels, or lying unremarked and potentially deflated

Figure 2 Modern canoe in a palaeodistributary of the Grijalva River delta. Photograph by Christopher von Nagy.

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in upland areas where erosion may have dominated long-term landscape processes. The earliest evidence for a ceramic-using population corresponds with the Ojochi or Pellicer ceramic complexes of the Coatzacoalos river basin, El Manatı´, and the western Grijalva delta in Tabasco (see Table 1 and Figure 3). This pottery tradition demonstrates significant stylistic links to southern Chiapas paralleling the linguistic suggestion of a northern immigrant group of Sokean speakers. Cultural patterns, such as ritual beverage consumption, are an important aspect of the pottery tradition from this early period through to the beginning of the post-La Venta Epi-Olmec period. The apogee of San Lorenzo and the Coatzacoalcos River region coincides with the last part of the Early Formative period and, due to the widespread appearance of Olmec iconography on pottery and other artifacts, is sometimes termed the Early Horizon. Early

Formative populations are present but poorly understood in the area of Tres Zapotes and are present in low density in the Tuxtlas. Like the Coatzacoalcos floodplain, the western Grijalva delta has a substantial Early Formative occupation to the east of La Venta. The Middle Formative period marks a population expansion into new areas, such as Laguna de los Cerros, the fringe of the Grijalva delta where La Venta is located, but a general collapse in the Coatzacoalcos lowlands. Dense populations are documented along a number of distributary channels in the Grijalva delta. The Middle Formative Olmec region is marked by several ceramic horizons, which like the Early Horizon complexes, document connections ranging from coastal Chiapas to the south, the Usumacinta region to the east, and Central Mexico to the west. In the east, an increasingly evident Maya presence is noted at the end of the Olmec period. This

Table 1 Overview chronology of the Olmec Complex 1500–1250 BC 1775–1500 cal BC

Pre-Early Horizon complexes Figure 3 column A Early Ojochi complex pottery around San Lorenzo and Pellicer complex pottery in Tabasco mark the beginning of the documented ceramic traditions of the Olmec region. Bottles, simple to slightly complex bowls, simple dishes, plain and red slipped vessels dominate collections at this point. Tecomates are very common. Reduplication of botanical forms – squash and gourds – is an important aspect of this tradition. Rimmed vessels similar to Oco´s examples from southern Chiapas are common. Increasingly common use of differential firing of, in particular, bottles for ritual beverage consumption.

1250–900 BC 1450–1005 cal BC

Early Horizon complexes Figure 3 column B Early Horizon phase pottery from the Olmec area manifests a series of changes linked to the formation of an extensive horizon marked by distinctive gouge-incised and ‘Olmec’ iconography and curvilinear, often pars pro toto references to elements of the broader emergent Early Formative signary. Drop in the frequencies of bottles indicating important changes in the social use of fancy pottery. Dishes with flared sides, outcurved dishes, plain and striated tecomates, and rim bolstering manufactured of white-clear through, black clear through, white-slipped, and differentially-fired pottery are typical elements of assemblages. Some areas of interior Chiapas, such as the Grijalva corridor at the now flooded site of San Isidro demonstrate strong similarities to coastal pottery traditions.

900–400 BC 1005–400 cal BC

Middle Horizon complexes Figure 3 columns C, D, and E Ceramically, the Middle Formative can be divided into successive complexes. Initial Middle Formative complexes are characterized by flared bowls and dishes, some with massively everted rims, and commonly decorated with variations on the ‘double-line break’ motif, plain smaller tecomates, and larger cooking tecomates, later ollas, are common forms (column C). Perhaps as early as 700 BC a ceramic shift occurs with the appearance of composite silhouette dishes with flared walls and a variety of other novel forms (column D). A wide range of forms was produced, including flared wall serving dishes and plates linked to public feasting and rituality. Sometime around 500 BC shifts in bowl and plate design occur with the introduction of saddle-rimmed bowls (column E), wide-rimmed, flared-wall dishes, and changes in surface decoration. Repeated, close stylistic similarities to coastal Chiapan pottery.

400–BC 400–cal BC

Epi-Olmec complexes The failure of La Venta around 400 BC marks the end of the thousand year period generally understood as ‘Olmec.’ Sites such as Tres Zapotes continued as major focal points of population. Innovations in the Late Formative or Epi-Olmec period such as the development of a fully developed writing system occurred during this period. At Tres Zapotes and other sites around the Tuxtlas there is an essential continuity in the types and forms produced. In Tabasco, the collapse of La Venta coincides with the spread of Maya ceramics into western Tabasco.

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

Figure 3 Ceramics of the Olmec region. (a) Pre-Early Horizon bottles and contemporary forms. (b) Early Horizon gouge-incised and selected contemporary forms. (c) Selected Early Middle Formative forms associated with Early La Venta and neighboring sites. (d) Middle Formative forms associated with the apogee of La Venta. (e) Middle Formative forms associated with the terminal Formative occupation at La Venta with design similarities to Tuxtla and Tres Zapotes forms. Redrawn from von Nagy 2003 and (vessel B3) Coe MD and Diehl RA (1980) In: The Land of the Olmec. The People of the River. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.

phenomenon is also evidenced in the Isthmus focus of Epi-Olmec societies such as Tres Zapotes and the society that produced the La Mojarra stela, lasting until the arrival of increasingly strong Central Mexican influence ultimately tied to Teotihuacan. Calendar dates for Olmec ceramic phases and complexes are based on an increasingly large and reasonably well-contextualized set of radiocarbon assays, including samples from well-delineated middens in bell-shaped or larger pits or on palaeobotanical remains using accelerator dating. Nonetheless, many dates still derive from charcoal recovered in fill and less ideal contexts. Early Olmec dates calibrate well, but Middle Formative date calibration presents a particular and yet unresolved challenge due to changes in the production of upper atmosphere 14C. Dates in the range of roughly 800–400 BC (c. 1005–400 cal BC) are exceptionally difficult to use. Calibrated probability ranges allow for errors of a hundred years or more. A date in the uncalibrated range of 750–400 BC has a high probability of falling within any portion of this range. Due to this problem, phase and complex boundaries should remain tentative. Olmec Subsistence Strategies and Food Ritual

Olmec foodways comprised a varied diet. Patterns of consumption of maize, sunflower, and manioc as well as wild foods such as squash and nuts of the corozo plam established in the Archaic period by c. 5000 BC underwent elaboration during the Early and Middle Formative periods after 1500 BC. Domesticated beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) were added to the menu. Domesticated dog (Canis familiaris) was the single most important source of meat (10% of the vertebrate

remains) at San Lorenzo in the Early Formative period. Early Formative Olmec also focused on aquatic resources, particularly snook (Centropomus or robalo), an estuarine fish that would have been available near San Lorenzo during the rainy season floods, and mud turtles (the closely related species Claudius, Kinosternon, and Staurotypus). Larger terrestrial mammals such as deer were scarce. A shift in the Middle Formative period set the course for dietary preferences characteristic of later Mesoamerican cultures (Figure 4). Data available for the La Venta client site of San Andre´s show a new focus on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), especially in deposits that represent remains of feasting. This shift might have had ritual symbolic significance in terms of an Olmec predator/prey or victor/ vanquished ideology with deer representing the prey. Later elites, such as the Maya, would copy this hallmark of the Olmec diet. Maize was a significant element of the diet as well as the iconography and early glyphs though its position was more restrained than seen in later Mesoamerican cultures. San Andre´s excavations uncovered maize cobs radiocarbon dated to the seventh century BC, and maize starch grains and residues have been detected on grinding stones from Middle Formative feasting contexts at the site. Nevertheless, carbon isotope data from human bone found in the same feasting refuse indicates that maize made up only about 50% of the diet. The Classic period Maya, by comparison, ate a diet of up to 90% maize. Maize and sunflower consumption may have been a marker of Olmec ethnic identity. Some present-day Nahuatl-speakers believe that consumption of maize

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Figure 4 Formative period botanical remains from San Andre´s, Tabasco. (a) Maize (Zea mays); (b) Chile pepper (Capsicum annuum); (c) sunflower achene (Helianthus annuus); (d) calabasa silvestre (Cionosicyos macrantha). Identifications and photographs by David Lentz.

is a way of taking in the energy of the sun, and past sunflower seed consumption might have had similar connotations. Unequivocal representations of maize and sunflower are unexpectedly rare in Olmec iconography as well as in well-preserved archaeological deposits, however. One iconographic example of maize is an engraving on a royal scepter that shows maize poking out of the belly of a composite crocodilian animal, and the same element appears transformed into a glyph on a serpentine block from Cascajal that is inscribed with early writing. Actual remains of Olmec offerings yielded a different emphasis, namely the abundance of the natural land. Botanical remains that Ponciano Ortiz and Marı´a del Carmen Rodrı´guez recovered from the sacred spring at El Manatı´ included offerings of local wild vegetation (leaves, fruit pits, nuts) rather than cultigens.

The Settled Landscape Mesoamerica is a geographically diverse region in which a mosaic of early polities and regional populations participated in inter-regional connections manifested by the exchange of goods and spread of representational systems and political-economic structures embodied in the appearance of Early Horizon style and later Middle Formative, motifs, icons, and design conceptualizations. These early polities and centers of population are frequently associated

with riverine floodplains, valley floors, and other landscape zones of relatively high natural productivity and fertile soils that could support the emergent agricultural economy. In lowland coastal Mesoamerica, Early Formative sedentary populations are often associated with swamp and estuary environments where resource availability was relatively high. In Chiapas along the Pacific Coast, for instance, archaeological settlement, macrobotanical, ground stone, iconographic, and isotopic evidence indicate that the rise of sedentism and the formation of small polities were associated with these high productivity ecozones. Only later during the Middle Formative period did the subsistence economy begin to assume its classic Mesoamerican form. Current research in the Olmec region strongly supports the implications of this historical model. The Olmec inhabited a diverse and enormously productive natural landscape, a mosaic of landforms, soil types, and risk factors comprising seasonally flooded, subsiding deltaic and river floodplain lowlands, generally lateritic rolling coastal plain interfluve and upland, and the volcanic highlands of the Tuxtla Mountains. A diversity of resources and challenges characterize the region. Current settlement data demonstrate that during the Early Formative period most of the region’s population was probably concentrated along river corridors where the combination of rich, annually renewed soils, migratory birds, floodplain and delta-inhabiting mammals, and, importantly, seasonally and annually available fisheries resources made these ideal locations for a population pursuing a mixed economy based on a variety of crops, fisheries, and other resources. Later, during the Middle Formative period, population appears to have expanded onto adjacent upland areas. A series of major rivers disgorges waters from highland and coastal plain watersheds across the Gulf Coastal plain. North to south these rivers include the Papaloapan, the San Juan, the Coatzacoalcos, the Uspanapa, the Tonala´, the Grijalva, and far to the east beyond Olmec territory, the Usumacinta. In Veracruz, rivers cut through a rolling terrain of laterized uplands forming interfluve-demarcated river floodplains with complex riverine depositional features that, towards the coast, are of late Holocene date and correlate with the stabilization of sea-level rise. The Tabasco Coastal plain is a vast low lying deltaic plain composed primarily of Late Holocene deposits of the Grijalva and Usumacinta rivers, along with a series of smaller rivers such as the Tonala´. Documented Olmec settlements are present within the western portion of this delta in a region of surfaceexposed, relatively undisturbed palaeodistributaries of the Grijalva delta of second through first millennium BC dates. Fragments of settlement systems that

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escaped later erosion through active channel meandering document Olmec settlement configurations at various points in time. Conspicuous by its absence is a robust sample of Olmec households. Little is known about the density of houses on or off of welldocumented sites in the many small ‘tells’, or accretions of settlement, of the Coatzacoalcos floodplain and Tabasco Coastal Plain. San Lorenzo and the Coatzacoalcos Floodplain

The major polity capital of San Lorenzo is embedded in a landscape composed of Holocene floodplain features, in particular, palaeochannels with attendant meanders, cut-offs, and other typical river floodplain landforms. Archaeologist Stacy Symonds conducted extensive survey of the sustaining area of San Lorenzo, documenting surviving components of the settlement system. Settled localities include the San Lorenzo plateau and points along the boundaries of the floodplain, as well as numerous locations along levees. Many hamlets were raised above nominal flood stage either through accretion of the house lot or hamlet mound or through the deliberate construction of raised flood platforms, palafitos in local parlance. By the apogee of San Lorenzo, a three- to four-tiered settlement hierarchy evolved in the area. Sculpture is associated with the primate center, as well as with second-tier settlements, such as Loma del Zapote. San Lorenzo spreads some 500 ha across the plateau with a central core of dense occupation approximately 300 ha in area. Within this core were palaces such as the Red Palace and ritual areas. Loma del Zapote may have encompassed an area of as much as 400 ha. Work around San Lorenzo has revealed some data on Olmec households. Ann Cyphers’ work on the main plateau documented the development of terracing associated with Olmec domestic architecture. Within the hinterland, individual houselot locations associated with artificial platforms on palaeolevees were common in some areas. These small artificial or accretional mounds range from 18–40 m across and probably represent the accumulated deposits of single successive households. Unfortunately, little is known about the structure of Olmec houselots and households in these lowlands. Augering and excavation of a handful of houselots suggests that a central house structure may have been surrounded by a cleared lot of up to 50 m in width. Large, shallow excavated hearths are a feature, perhaps common, of such households. La Venta and the Tabasco Coastal Plain

La Venta is embedded in a dynamic deltaic environment constructed over the course of Late Holocene

following the deceleration and stabilization of sealevel rise. Cyclically deposited delta distribution channels, upland margins, salt-dome rises, and estuary flanks served as focal points of settlement. In Tabasco, the dominant site form is a low tell, locally known as an isla, comprised of successive midden, house floor, house collapse, and platform deposits. A three to four tier settlement system around La Venta focused on the Barı´ and Blasillo palaeodistributaries. San Andre´s is one of the larger sites in this system. The presence of sugar and other extensive cultivation to the east of La Venta in the Plan Chontalpa area allowed for a detailed study of tell density and distribution along a single major distibutary channel. Archaeologist Christopher von Nagy demonstrated a high density of slightly clustered tells along this channel. These tells range in height from tens of centimeters to meters above the crest of channel levees. A significant proportion of occupations is shown to be embedded in the matrix of the levee and are invisible in surface survey, however. Buried sites are common, as are zones were channel activity that postdates the formation of sites has largely obliterated traces of occupation. Data from San Andre´s, near La Venta, suggest that houses may have been placed on low earthen foundations as high as several tens of centimeters. They may also have had floors raised slightly over the exterior. Shallow, excavated hearths are present in the floors at this site. Also present at San Andre´s are a series of deep, large pits. These may have been used for storage, although some evidence suggests their use for the creation of high temperature fires. Large pits similar to those at San Andre´s are also present at La Venta. Small pavements of extensively reburned sherds are also a feature at San Andre´s. Tuxtlas Settlement

Settlement in the Tuxtlas paints a different picture from that associated with major lowland polities. Here, a settlement hierarchy was lacking until the Late Formative period. Amber VanDerwarker has shown that the nature of the broad-based subsistence system was a significant factor in the lack of development of hierarchy in the Tuxtlas. Hierarchy developed in conjunction with emergence of a strongly maize-focused subsistence economy and after recovery from a series of Early and Late Formative volcanic eruptions that devastated the region.

The Ritual Landscape The Olmec were the first in Mesoamerica to institutionalize kingship with elites closing rank at the top of a hierarchical social order. Olmec material culture,

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including ceremonial offerings of precious imported materials, large-scale urban architecture, and monumental sculpture, provides a road map to that fundamental social process, demonstrating the stages by which it evolved. A sacred landscape formed the platform upon which early kings founded their authority. The juxtaposition of an area of high ground with a water source characterized this landscape, which the Aztecs were later to call Water Mountain. It represented the place of creation, the source of life, or the navel of the world, the moral locus of royal power. In the Gulf Coast region, worship at hills associated with springs have been traced back to the early third millennium at El Manatı´, according to Ortiz Caballos and del Carmen Rodrı´guez, coincident with the spread of agricultural communities and the evolution of crops such as maize. By the Early Formative period (1600–1200 BC) offerings of highly polished celts of exotic greenstone, some oriented to the cardinal directions, had been deposited together with rubber balls in the spring, which symbolized the point of entry into other worlds. Emergent kings co-opted this sacred template at San Lorenzo (San Lorenzo Phase, 1150–900 BC), commandeering what was then a high island plateau strategically located in the middle of a Coatzacoalcos River tributary according to data produced by Michael Coe, Richard Diehl, and Ann Cyphers. The heart of the ritual center was a royal processional way aligned along the north–south axis of the plateau. Lining this processional way were at least 10 colossal stone heads representing portraits of past and present rulers. Sarcophagus-shaped thrones linked living kings directly with their ancestors, who are visible from cave-like openings in the stone. The founding of Middle Formative centers marks a departure from the glorification of individual rulers and their royal bloodlines and the new objective of creating a heavenly place notes John Clark. As kings consolidated political power in the Middle Formative period (900–400 BC), they used the force of mimesis or mimicry to capture the ritual power of a sacred landscape. These Late Phase Olmec centers featured the ambitious construction of huge pyramids replicating the primordial sacred mountain. La Venta’s elites built atop a prominent salt dome that already dominated a now-extinct riverine environment. The pyramid is 30 m (98 ft) high and has a volume of about 100 000 sq. m (130 800 sq. yd). Carolyn Tate notes that the salt dome, now carrying its human-made mountain, was aligned to three real mountains arrayed in a triangular configuration to the south. The number three, expressed everywhere in the world (for example in majestic mountains, the celestial star cluster

of Orion’s Belt, down to the humble stones of the domestic hearth) was itself a magical entity that infused the Olmec world-view. La Venta’s plan accessed all three levels of the Olmec universe. The pyramid touched the heavens. Serpentine mosaic pavements in the form of the quincunx, comprising the four directions and the center, as well as mirror-studded, cruciform caches of celts symbolizing the world tree, represented the surface of the earth. Huge pits filled with many layers of massive serpentine blocks represented seas deep within the earth according to Kent Reilly. La Venta Olmec innovated with stone stelae carved with images of deities and royal narrative scenes, which they inserted into the earthly plane. Sacred directionality and verticality encoded within the architecture of La Venta is reduplicated in incised and carved scenes throughout the Olmec world on larger sculpture and smaller ceremonial items such as greenstone celts. Following the sacred water-mountain template, Olmec royal ceremonial plans included constructed water features to symbolize access to the earth’s fertility. Drains made of imported basalt must have had ritual as well as utilitarian uses, judging from associated sculpture. A San Lorenzo drain system went through a stone deity figure and led to a boulder carved into a basin in the shape of a huge duck. La Venta sculptors chose a more explicit image of fertility, fashioning a large basin in the form of a woman’s vulva. Olmec ceremonial precincts were alive with color. Traces of plaster and paint on one of the San Lorenzo stone heads and in the mouth of a Teopantecuanitlan deity together with the presence of an uncarved stela excavated by Rebecca Gonza´lez Lauck at La Venta indicate that artisans painted their stone monuments. San Lorenzo’s stone sculptures were arranged in ensembles and set in a huge plaza paved with red sand and yellow gravel. La Venta’s color scheme was stunning. Brown soil shot through with thousands of tiny bits of greenstone shimmered. Blue-green serpentine pavements were filled with clays and sands in olive green, blue, yellow, black, gray, pink, cinnamon, and purple hues, all imbued with symbolic meaning. Many of these offerings were buried soon after their construction and were invisible to ritual celebrants. Red paired with its contrasting color green was a dominant color combination. Red cinnabar covered jadeite offerings, and the whole site was covered in a cap of red clay in its final construction phase. La Venta’s cosmic character derived from its celestial orientation. The hallmark Olmec site orientation to 8 west-of-north, its significance still obscure, was an ancient alignment that appeared early and persisted through the Olmec period. Olmec kings chose to found a ceremonial center on La Venta’s salt dome

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because its long axis is oriented to this sacred principle. The line that ran through the center of La Venta’s ceremonial precinct also matches this orientation and points directly to the central mountain of the cluster of three south of the center. The mountain is visible from the top of the pyramid. The central bars of each of La Venta’s mosaic pavements further parallels this alignment, and the four elements of the quincunxes are positioned at the intercardinal points where the sun rises and sets at the solstices. Olmec ceremonial centers also had a strong orientation to the sun as the principal animating force of nature. Most importantly the elevated ground, the plateau at San Lorenzo and the salt dome at La Venta for example, would catch the first rays of the sun at sunrise. The Enclosure at the heart of Early Formative (1000–800 BC) Teopantecuanitla´n featured Olmec-style monumental sculptures positioned so that the shadows cast by two of them passed through the center as the sun rose and set on the spring equinox. Loma del Zapote, located on the river below the San Lorenzo summit, featured sculptures of a kneeling humans facing the rising and setting sun. Backs of colossal carved heads at San Lorenzo itself are angled so that the king’s portraits faced upwards towards the sky. The present-day Mije term for the annual time periods and stations in the calendar, wi:npeht, means ‘eye rising’, perhaps explaining the orientation of the sculptures’ eyes. A key new solar feature of great significance in the La Venta cosmic city (Complex D) was an E-Group configuration that was designed to track movements of the sun. A long platform and a radial structure were arranged opposite each other on the east and west sides of a plaza. Standing on the radial platform looking east, an observer could track the solstices at either end of the long structure and the equinoxes in the center. This architectural arrangement was widely copied at Soke sites along the Grijalva such as Chiapa de Corzo and at Maya sites in the Mirador Basin in northern Guatemala, according to John Clark. The E-Group is central to Classic Maya site planning, including to the site of Uaxactun, where the construction was first identified in the area archaeologists designated as Group E. The Olmec kings posed as shamans dressed up as the sharp-eyed harpy eagles, allies of the storm and sun gods, a conceit that embodied the rulers’ insight into unseen forces of fecundity. The Olmec eagle-king painted sitting on a sarcophagus throne over the entrance to Oxtotitla´n cave has huge eyes. Olmec elites may have enhanced their vision with psychotropic substances that produced ecstatic trance. The snuffing trays were likely greenstone ‘spoons’ with a central depression, scored or incised with a figure in

flight, a common vision associated with ingestion of drugs, or topped with the crenellated eyebrow of the harpy eagle, another reference to supernatural vision. A San Lorenzo sculpture (Loma del Zapote Monument 11) shows male figure wearing such a ‘spoon’ suspended from his neck, ready for use. The ballgame, so central to all Mesoamerican cultures, mimicked the sun’s cosmic cycle into and out of the Underworld. Olmec kings politicized the ballgame, adding human sacrifice, probably including war captives. A San Lorenzo carving depicts a jaguar mauling a probable ballplayer, and La Venta Stela 2 shows the king with a harpy eagle on his back attacking rival players with animal guises, one the whitetailed deer. These carvings support the idea suggested above that Olmec kings had adopted a theory of history expressed as the relationship of the victor to the vanquished (or predator/prey) known for the later Maya. Blood needed to be drawn to ensure plenty of lifegiving water as well as sun. Children and infants were sacrificed during the Early Formative San Lorenzo phase at the El Manatı´ spring and in the Middle Formative period in the pillared enclosure in the sacred compound at La Venta (Monument 7, Tomb A). Human remains were placed as offerings under monuments at San Lorenzo. La Venta’s Altar 4 shows an eagle-clad king holding a captive tied to a rope, and human bones occurred in feasting refuse at its client site San Andre´s. Kings performed autosacrifice to draw their own blood on behalf of the community as well, judging from real and jadeite effigy stingray spines deposited in caches in La Venta’s sacred precinct. Pilgrimage to sacred hotspots was a core attribute of Olmec ritual life. At the height of San Lorenzo’s power, pilgrims traveled to El Manatı´ springs to deposit sacred insignia of kingship such as wooden busts of male and female ancestors accompanied by precious jadeite jewelry and scepters, one with a shark’s tooth and a bird effigy at either end. A finely carved dark greenstone footprint effigy captures the essence of the journey. La Venta’s sacred spot was probably Rı´o Pesquero, the now-destroyed Veracruz site from which many gorgeous jadeite objects have come. The jadeite representations of the king from Rı´o Pesquero constitute a radical departure from the ancestral wooden busts or even the royal colossal heads of the Early Formative period. The Rı´o Pesquero engravings show the king as a divine being. One celt shows him as the embodiment of the world tree in the center of the quincunx holding the harpy eagle as a ceremonial bar. Caves as well as springs were pilgrimage destinations to enhance the king’s divine status. Both natural features provided portals to other worlds and access to supernatural power and abundance as well as

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B

Monument 13

E

A

Celts from cache

Tombs A, B, and E

Structure A-2 Basalt column fence

Adobe platform Mottled sandy clay fill Mosaic pavement

Necropolis Complex A

Serpentine block offering Tomb C

Figure 5 Perspective view of Complex A, La Venta. After Drucker P (1952) La Venta, Tabasco: A Study of Olmec Ceramics and Art. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, figures 10, 14, 19, 20, 22, 47, and 61.

sacred, life-giving water. Murals in Juxtlahuaca and Oxtotitla´n caves in Guerrero preserve a record of Olmec painting traditions in the service of pilgrimage and ritual. A male striding figure is an iconic image in Formative Mesoamerican art; it occurs on early stelae with evidence for writing and the calendar at sites such as La Venta and Takalik Abaj, for example. Middle Formative La Venta elites expanded the pilgrimage phenomenon, notes John Clark, installing royal Olmec images all along routes of travel as well as in remote locations. Along the ancient east–west intercoastal Pacific overland route with access by river to the Grijalva Basin, they carved the rock face at Pijijiapan with the image of a ruler flanked by two women in front of a cave entrance for instance. An example of a remote location is a sculpture of an eagle-helmeted ruler raising a four-segmented pole representing the world tree way at the top of San Martı´n Pajapan volcano in the Tuxtla Mountains. The image of the ruler duplicates that of one (Monument 44) found at the Stirling Acropolis, the royal palace at La Venta, establishing the mountain top as the king’s royal domain. La Venta’s rulers understood that enactment of ceremonies on sacred stages kept the universe in play and

kept them in power as divine kings (Figure 5). They likely designed La Venta’s sacred landscape to draw pilgrims to worship at the ceremonial center itself. Many participated in the animation of the world. The feet of pilgrims wore down a pavement at the center of La Venta’s ceremonial precinct. Music, drinking, and feasting were core elements of the action. La Venta Offering 3 contained miniature greenstone flutes along with beads in the shape of brewing pots. At San Andre´s, the La Venta client site 5 km to the northeast of the ceremonial center, feasting refuse contained large platters, drinking cups, and brewing jars. La Venta’s Altar 7 (Figure 6) brings the oracular element from the caves to the ceremonial precinct. The central image is a huge duck-billed head projecting form a cave niche. To the duck’s right is a figure with bubble-like speech signs floating up to a sacred crossed band sign in a cartouche, a glyph-like element probably referring to portals to the gods. The condition of the altar and the associated imagery suggest night ceremonies. On the back of the altar, nocturnal kinkajou and owl figures join the diurnal harpy eagle. The surface of the altar was flaked off as though by strong heat, perhaps from torches staked

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Figure 6 La Venta Altar 7. Most altars have a seated figure in the niche. This altar is unique because it has a masked colossal head with a duck’s beak mask in the niche. The use of such masks may have been linked to oracular speech in the context of ritual or dance. The bucal mask is compared to a pottery waterfowl beak from the nearby site, San Andre´s. Line component after Follensbee (2000: figure 105).

nearby. Numerous grooves over the top of the altar suggest that the celebration involved the ritual sharpening of axes. Olmec kings built their palaces within the ceremonial precincts. Ann Cyphers has excavated the impressive Red Palace at San Lorenzo, a substantial construction with its platform substructure, red floors, and basalt roof support, steps, and drain. The Stirling Acropolis is believed to have been the residence of La Venta’s paramount elites, but it remains unexcavated. The difference between the Red Palace and the Stirling Acropolis was that the Red Palace was a royal residence while the Stirling Acropolis, surrounded by the pyramid, E-Group, and the ballcourt, was a sacred one. The colossal heads have captured archaeologists’ attention as the portraits of male Olmec rulers. The figures’ helmets have been thought to denote male ballplayers. La Venta figurines and sculpture demonstrate that women as well as men wore helmet-style headgear, however, and one must recognize that some of the colossal heads may represent royal women as well as men, suggests Billie Follensbee. There is a good possibility that the Olmec may have been bilateral, as were most pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies. Several images portray a male ruler flanked by one or two women. The Pijijiapan relief, La Venta Stela 5, and La Venta Offering 4 are examples. The older women may represent the founding lineage. A tumpline carried by the woman on Stela 5 makes multilayered reference to her as both a nurturing bearer of food as well as the sacred relics that ‘planted’ La Venta as a sacred center. This description of Olmec ritual precincts underlines the thematic commonalities among sites but demonstrates how Mesoamerica’s first kings advanced their

status from royal to divine through their architectural and iconographic programs. Olmec elites played on basic human psychological instincts such as desire for communion with higher powers, altruism towards the community, and attraction to memorable events in a world that is essentially unmemorable. Anyone who has witnessed the pull of the present-day regional, now Christian pilgrimage to Tila, La Venta’s successor, can attest to the compelling, even coercive, power that such phenomena exert. Olmec kings used monumental constructions to advertise their power and monopolize labor and material resources, thereby preventing contenders from mounting any serious challenge to their authority. Competition played a part in driving the evolution of royal power. The Early and especially the Middle Formative periods saw the growth of royal pilgrimage centers competing with San Lorenzo and La Venta. Teopantecuanitlan and Chalcatzingo offered access to alternative versions of sacred landscape, caves and the water-mountain topography. The evidence for captives and sacrificial victims in the context of feasting and the ball game suggests that physical coercion, warfare, and raiding were a factor in the political landscape. In this regard, the Olmec differed from their contemporaries in Oaxaca, where warfare played a significantly more overt role in state formation. The Oaxaca pattern of physical coercion was to become the dominant one in Mesoamerica culminating in the Aztec state. Writing and the Calendar

Olmec elites developed writing in connection with their ritual practices, including the celebration of calendrical cycles. Mesoamerican people devoted enormous effort to developing and observing calendrical events, which focused on divination and prophecy. Olmec religious

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Figure 7 San Andre´s roller stamp. Date indicative signs are compared to the Epi-Olmec Long Count initial series glyph from Stela C at Tres Zapotes. San Andre´s is a subsidiary elite site of the Olmec polity capital, La Venta, located some 5 km from the center. Redrawn after Pohl, et al. 2002.

art is filled with iconographic messages. The evolution of writing involved the conversion of these images to language messages whereby the reader gets the writer’s precise message through representations of words, syllables, or consonants and vowels of a language. Writing was an important tool of early kings because it allowed them to capture and transmit the power of a message in a manner similar to their ability to capture the power of the sacred landscape by reproducing it (Figure 7). The representation of walking provides a good example of the process. The Early Formative greenstone carving of a footprint from El Manatı´ is essentially a proto-glyph. The image conveys the action, and the medium conveys its sacredness. The footprint sign then appears transformed into a written verb accompanying a striding figure on Middle Formative Monument 13 from La Venta. Early iconographic and writing technology relied heavily on the roller stamp, which acted as a small printing press. The inked stamp would leave its mark when rolled across the human body, cloth, or bark paper. A Middle Formative greenstone mask from Rı´o Pesquero demonstrates how the living human body was a prime medium for the transmission of written messages, which were also considered to have a life of their own. The fact that most early writing was probably applied to skin and other perishable materials accounts for the scarcity of evidence for its existence. Another early illustration of the evolution of writing occurs on an Early Formative roller stamp from Tlatilco in the Basin of Mexico dating to c. 1100 BC. The stamp shows a possible early Venus glyph aside a canonic Olmec-style head, all aligned with the quincunx and an early version of the flowershaped k’in glyph, a logograph denoting the word for ‘sun’ or ‘day’. Through iconographic image and written word, the roller stamp conveys the message of the sacred center of the world in connection with calendrical ritual. The stamp’s message summarizes the essence of Olmec religious culture.

Data from San Andre´s are significant given the fragility of evidence for Formative period writing and the shaky context of most early finds. San Andre´s has yielded firmly dated evidence for writing on a roller stamp and on greenstone plaques that formed jewelry, perhaps an earspool. The artifacts occurred in the context of ritual feasting refuse that could be dated through both radiocarbon assay and pottery chronology to c. 650 BC. One greenstone plaque features the royal double merlon motif inside a cartouche signifying its status as a written word. These glyphs are logographs, signs that represent words or concepts. The writing demonstrates that the Olmec had the 260-day divinatory almanac, which they were probably instrumental in developing and disseminating throughout Mesoamerica. This sacred calendar was comprised of a sequence of 13 numbers and 20 named days, whose permutations took 260 days to cycle through. The San Andre´s roller stamp shows the glyph for the day sign three ajaw. In addition to the San Andre´s find in a feasting deposit, calendrical notations have also been reported from other special contexts, Oxtotitla´n cave and Teopantecuanitla´n, where one of the monoliths in the ceremonial Enclosure bears a flower and two bars, possibly a very early record of the 10-Flower day sign. The Olmec used one or more logographs to advertise special messages and events in public contexts, and they also wrote longer texts, perhaps for more esoteric purposes. The Cascajal serpentine block, 26 cm by 21 cm, found in a quarry north of San Lorenzo and El Manatı´, contains strings of glyphs that in some cases demonstrate patterned structure. Many of the pictograph-like glyphs represent objects of ritual significance, such as the maize cob, flaming bundle of faggots, ‘spoon’, and throne. The fact that the block had a concave face suggests that its text was erased and re-inscribed, perhaps many times. The block probably dates to the end of the Early Formative period or the Middle Formative period.

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Early Mesoamerican writing is characterized by variability in form. Many glyphs are idiosyncratic and evidently went extinct. Others such as the calendrically-oriented ajaw and k’in glyphs persisted and were adopted by other groups such as the Maya, who went on to develop Mesoamerican writing and the calendar most fully. Local, Regional, and Extra-regional Exchange through Trade and Gifting

Olmec social, political, and religious structure demanded that energy be focused on importing substantial amounts of material into this stoneless, Gulf Coast floodplain habitat. Tons of basalt came to San Lorenzo, by river raft and overland, from the Tuxtla Mountains some 60 km to the northwest where remains of stone working have been found at Cerro Cintepec volcano. Stone masons carved high-quality, finegrained porphyritic basalt into royal sculptures while coarser stone went for utilitarian technologies such as maize-grinding tools known as manos and metates. La Venta’s elites expanded on San Lorenzo’s stone sources. To the north, the island of Roca Partida in the Bay of Campeche provided naturally formed basalt columns for the sacred enclosures in Complex A. Most of the stone sources for monuments and offerings came from the south, however. Cerro Zempoaltepec provided schists, andesites, and diorites for sculptures. Olmec elites were the first to designate greenstones (jadeite, serpentine, schist, gneiss, green quartz) as the standard of sacred preciousness symbolizing the life force in water and vegetation in Mesoamerica. The standard evolved over time according to Olaf Jaime’s study of over 1000 artifacts from El Manatı´ (1600 BC), El Macayal (1200–1000 BC), La Merced (1000–600 BC), and La Venta (1000–400 BC). The Olmec used distinctive blue-green, black, and dark green jadeite and serpentine in the Early Formative period (1600–1200 BC). Sources for these stones occurred at a distance of up to 1000 km from the Gulf Coast region in eastern Guatemala’s Motagua Valley, especially the Tambor River area. Craft workers carved beads, celts, and representations of animals out of this extremely hard stone, transforming them into sacred objects of power through their labor. In Middle Formative times (1000–400 BC), as Olmec elites at La Venta engaged in conspicuous consumption by constructing earthen mounds accompanied by massive serpentine offerings and caches, the dark greenstones gave way to serpentine and yellow-green jadeite. The Middle Formative sources were closer, that is, the Oaxaca-Puebla area (Cuicatlan, Sierra de Juarez, Tehuitzingo), perhaps influenced by rise of competing polities and balkanization of

frontiers Jaime suggests. Quality of stone working declined significantly in many cases. Many of the greenstone artifacts were deposited in an unfinished state. William Rust uncovered evidence of serpentine working areas in Complex E, to the northeast of La Venta’s sacred Complex A. Olmec elites at La Venta monopolized the most desirable yellow-green stone, leaving their client supporters to make do as best they could in the face of poor supply lines. Allison Perrett’s study of greenstone from the subsidiary site of San Ande´s showed that the material was unexpectedly abundant but was inferior in color and texture, exhibiting a blue-green hue compared with La Venta. Evidence for serpentine debitage at San Ande´s, though scarce, demonstrates that the material was worked locally, however. Complex networks of long-distance trade and exchange define Formative period Gulf Coast urban societies. Obsidian and ceramics provide the best opportunity to gauge the extent of these connections because the material is plentiful, many sources are known, and scientists can trace the sources accurately. The data indicate that the Olmec drew on diverse resources from a broad geographical area and probably used social alliances to facilitate these supply lines. Sharp-edged obsidian was in high demand in Mesoamerica, and trade in prismatic obsidian blades is closely associated with the emergence of elites. The obsidian data, which are based on systems of visual identification assisted by neutron activation analysis, demonstrate that the Olmec drew on a surprising number of sources though only a few dominated. Robert Cobean showed that the obsidian from the Early Formative San Lorenzo phase at San Lorenzo came predominantly from Guadalupe Victoria, Puebla, in Central Mexico, which at c. 300 km to the northeast was the closest source to the site. Other obsidian came from El Chayal, Guatemala, perhaps with participation of inhabitants of Kaminaljuyu´. The probable route for the El Chayal obsidian was along the Soconusco coast and over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The La Venta obsidian data indicate major changes in obsidian production and procurement in the Middle Formative period. As many as nine sources were represented at La Venta. Travis Doering reports that the dominant sources changed to Paredo´n in Central Mexico and to San Martı´n Jilotepeque in Guatemala, each more than 500 km from La Venta in opposite directions and not the closest available. Obsidian may have moved from Central Mexico south via the trade center of El Viejo´n on the Veracruz coast. The Guatemalan obsidian indicates a change in route along the Motagua river to western Guatemala and then down the Grijalva river via the trading site

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of San Isidro to the Gulf Coast. Whereas obsidian blades had previously been manufactured near the quarry sites, now macrocores were traded and manufactured into blades in elite-controlled workshop areas such as at La Venta Complex D. The La Venta site had high quantities of the golden-green Pachuca obsidian from Central Mexico, confirming the fact that it was a highly prized commodity. There is strong circumstantial evidence of elite involvement in obsidian manufacture and distribution at La Venta. A spent obsidian core incised with the sacred insignia of a harpy eagle was placed in a royal offering (Tomb C) in the most holy precinct of Complex A. Moreover, the obsidian from the subsidiary site of San Andre´s, 5 km northeast of the paramount center, came from the same sources as those at La Venta. The San Andre´s obsidian showed no evidence of local manufacture, and it was a scarce commodity, occurring primarily in the ritual feasting context. Inhabitants of San Andre´s completely utilized what obsidian they were able to obtain from La Venta using bipolar flaking techniques. Recent neutron activation analysis by Jeffrey Blomster of carved white ware fine paste ceramics and source clays from San Lorenzo and six other regions in Mesoamerica indicates the presence of long-distance trade in ceramics extending from the Olmec region to the Highlands. In this study, fine paste Early Horizon ceramics were demonstrated to be both of local manufacture and imported from the San Lorenzo region. The implications of this study place Early Formative San Lorenzo in a paramount position vis a` vis the social interaction, gifting and trade systems that underpinned the formation of the Early Horizon beginnings of Mesoamerica. There are clues to the social impact of this geographically extensive, labor-intensive economic activity, for example, in the formation of alliances along trade routes. The enactment of social relations typically involved gifting of pottery in Mesoamerica, and the neutron activation data tracing the movement of pots out of the Gulf Coast heartland are tangible testimony to alliance corridors. Middle Formative Grivalva sites with strong Olmec influence provide hints that these alliances might have involved marriage between royal Olmec women and local lords. For example, New World Archaeological Foundation excavations at Chiapa de Corzo uncovered the burial of a woman, possibly an imported

Americas Migrations

royal female lineage founder, accompanied by La Venta-style pottery. Ephemeral pieces of evidence from sites such as this in the Grijalva drainage provide hints of complex social relationships generated by Olmec trade and exchange.

The Olmec in Mesoamerican History The Olmec are significant because they show the evolution of complex society in Mesoamerica. The urban centers, multi-tiered settlement systems, monumental constructions, craft production, and elaborate trade and exchange systems document the fact that the Olmec were developing the state. A comparison between San Lorenzo and La Venta reveals how Olmec kings advanced their status from royal to divine, as they redesigned their centers as cosmic cities, expanded their settlements, and widened their trade networks. The dynamic of competing pilgrimage centers was a key factor in centralization of power, one that was eventually to feed warfare on and offstage in the Late Formative and especially the Classic periods. Later Mesoamerican rulers, particularly the Soke and the Maya, were to model themselves on the Olmec by copying their architectural plans, including pyramids, stelae, altars, and E Groups, adopting their writing systems, and mining their sites for jadeite paraphernalia with which to purchase holiness. See also: Americas, Central: Classic Period of Mesoamerica, the Maya; Postclassic Cultures of Mesoamerica; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Benson EP and de la Fuente B (1996) Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Clark JE and Pye ME (2000) Olmec Art and Archaeology in Mesoamerica. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Coe MD and Diehl RA (1980) In the Land of the Olmec. The People of the River. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press. Diehl R (2004) The Olmecs. America’s First Civilization. New York: Thames and Hudson. Drucker P (1952) La Venta, Tabasco: A Study of Olmec Ceramics and Art. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Grove D (1970) The Olmec Paintings of Oxtotitlan Cave, Guerrero, Mexico. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Grove D (ed.) (1987) Ancient Chalcatzingo. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pool C (2007) Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. New York: Cambridge University Press.

See: New World, Peopling of.

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AMERICAS, NORTH Contents American Southwest, Four Corners Region Arctic and Circumpolar Regions California and the Sierra Nevada Eastern Woodlands Great Basin Historical Archaeology in the United States Plains Plantation Archaeology Rocky Mountains Sub-arctic

American Southwest, Four Corners Region Paul F Reed, Center for Desert Archaeology, Bloomfield, NM, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Archaic period Archaeologically defined period of human occupation in Four Corners region, from 5500–600 BC. Chaco Canyon Ancient center of Puebloan society and culture in northwest New Mexico, which reached its peak from AD 1050–1100. Clovis culture (also Llano culture) A prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 11 000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. Dine´tah Ancestral homeland of Navajo people, located in northwest New Mexico. Dine´tah phase Earliest period of Navajo residence in Four Corners region, from AD 1450–1630. Folsom complex An early archaeological complex of North America characterized by a distinct leaf-shaped projectile point called a Folsom point. Four Corners The survey point at the intersection of the four US states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona and the high desert plateau region surrounding that point in the southwestern United States. Gobernador phase Period of Navajo occupation in Four Corners region from AD 1630–1755. Palaeo-Indian period Earliest archaeological period of human occupation in the Four Corners Region, from ca. 10 000–5500 BC.

In this article, we will explore the lives of ancient peoples in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest from about 10 000 BC until AD 1755. This region is illustrated in Figure 1. We will do this in a logical fashion – by starting with the beginning of

human occupation (which archaeologists describe as the Palaeo-Indian period) and ending with the latest archaeological period of occupation (by the Navajo people). We will discuss the archaeological findings and lifeways of four cultural groups or periods over this 12 000-year span of human occupation: PalaeoIndian groups, Archaic groups, ancient Puebloan people, and the Dine´ or Navajo tribe. The first two groups – Palaeo-Indian and Archaic – are not discrete ethnic or cultural groups. Rather, archaeologists use Palaeo-Indian and Archaic to refer to discrete periods of time in the early history of North America. Because of the great antiquity of Palaeo-Indian and Archaic sites and the sparse nature of their archaeological remains (consisting primarily of worked stone tools and lithic chipping debris), it is difficult to identify discrete ethnic or cultural groups in these periods. Acknowledging that we cannot specify ethnic groups for these early periods, we will nevertheless discuss these periods in a similar fashion to the later sociocultural and ethnic groups (the ancient Puebloans and the Navajos) in this article.

Palaeo-Indian Period (10 000–5500 BC) The Palaeo-Indian period (c. 10 000–5500 BC) represents the first conclusive evidence of human occupation in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. In comparison to other areas of the West and Southwest (e.g., the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico or Colorado’s Western slope), the Four Corners region has seen little in the way of Palaeo-Indian research. Although PalaeoIndian sites have been found throughout the region, very few have been excavated. Thus, the general discussion of Palaeo-Indian lifeways and archaeology that follows is based largely on evidence from surrounding regions of North America.

232 AMERICAS, NORTH/American Southwest, Four Corners Region

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The Palaeo-Indian period is characterized as a time when the ancient inhabitants depended primarily on hunting of large game animals. During this time, archaeologists believe that the dominant subsistence strategy involved hunting a limited number of large mammals – what archaeologists describe as megafauna including mammoths, mastodon, giant sloths, and ancient bison. This is not to say that plants were not gathered and eaten – they were. Nevertheless, residential sites were located primarily in areas on the migration routes of the megafauna. Gathering and

use of plant materials occurred as a secondary activity in these locales. Thus, the majority of Palaeo-Indian sites represent areas where large mammals were killed and butchered. These sites contain large spear points and other tools are found in association with the butchered bones of large mammals. Four complexes or temporal phases have been defined for the Southwest Palaeo-Indian people: Clovis (10 000–9000 BC), Folsom (9000–8000 BC), Plano (8000–7000 BC), and Cody (7000–6000 BC). Figure 2 illustrates Clovis period stone tools. General

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Figure 2 Photograph of Clovis period tools, including distinctive fluted spear points. Photograph by Jonathan Mabry.

changes in adaptation and stone tool kits occurred during the transition from one phase to the next. Distinctive projectile point styles are used to separate these phases. In general, the Clovis complex is marked by the hunting of large and currently extinct megafauna (e.g., mammoth, mastodon). The Folsom complex continued the tradition of big game hunting except that large and now-extinct bison was the usual prey. During the Plano phase, a continuation of Folsom traits continued. In fact, some researchers believe that the Plano complex is not temporally separate from the Folsom. The Cody complex is viewed as a time when hunting essentially modern bison comprised the primary subsistence pattern. Some Palaeo-Indian sites are known from across the Four Corners region, including southeast Utah and southwest Colorado. Similarly, a few Clovis and Folsom projectile points have been reported from northeast Arizona: near the Hopi villages and in the Cow Springs–White Mesa area. The San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico also has several documented Palaeo-Indian sites.

Archaic Period (5500–600 BC) Many archaeologists understand that the succeeding Archaic period (5500–600 BC) in the Four Corners region developed out of the existing Palaeo-Indian adaptation. However, archaeologist Cynthia IrwinWilliams suggested that the Palaeo-Indian occupants abandoned the region when bison herds could no longer be supported and migrated east. In this view, Archaic people of the northern Southwest were immigrants to the area. In another view, archaeologist Jesse Jennings suggested that the Archaic period dates back to 8000 BC in some areas and that

Archaic folks were contemporaneous with the PalaeoIndians. At this point, sufficient evidence does not exist to prove or refute any of these alternatives. IrwinWilliams’s Archaic sequence is presented below, as it is most specific to the Four Corners region. In addition, other Archaic sequences have been proposed, most notably Alan Schroedl’s for the northern Colorado Plateau, which is briefly discussed below. In general, the Archaic period is characterized by the replacement of the previous big-game hunting adaptation with a subsistence (food gathering) strategy focused on a mixed utilization of a large variety of plants (wild grasses, seeds, nuts, fruits, roots, or tubers) and animals (including deer, elk, antelope, bison, rabbits, and a variety of rodents). Plant resources were particularly important and a seasonal pattern of exploitation, with groups moving frequently, is inferred. In 1973, archaeologist Cynthia Irwin-Williams developed a cultural sequence for the Archaic occupation of the northern American Southwest based on her work in the Arroyo Cuervo area of northwest New Mexico (Table 1). The sequence is called the Oshara tradition and has five phases (periods of time): Jay phase (5500–4800 BC), Bajada phase (4800–3200 BC), San Jose phase (3200–1800 BC), Armijo phase (1800– 800 BC), and En Medio phase (800 BC–AD 400). Figure 3 illustrates the changes in projectile points and other stone tools through the phases defined as part of the Oshara tradition. During the Jay phase (5500–4800 BC), people located their habitation sites predominantly at or around canyon or drainage heads. These sites were generally small and seemed to represent a full range of activities: hunting, plant gathering, and stone tool manufacture. A wide variety of stone tools have been found on Jay sites, including well-made projectile

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points. According to Irwin-Williams, ground stone was absent. However, more recent research in the Four Corners area has documented the presence of ground stone artifacts on Jay phase sites. The basic Table 1 Cynthia Irwin-Williams’s 1973 Oshara Tradition Phase

Dates

Jay Bajada San Jose Armijo En Modio

5500–4800 BC 4800–3200 BC 3200–1800 BC 1800–800 BC 800 BC–AD 400

Jay adaptation appears to have involved a mix of both hunting and plant gathering activities. Numerous Jay phase sites are known in the Four Corners region. As envisioned by Irwin-Williams, the following Bajada phase (4800–3200 BC) represents continuous development from the preceding Jay phase. Regional population increased, as indicated by an increase in the number of occupied sites. Sites used by people in the Bajada phase seemed to show task-specific organization; that is, groups of people went on short-term trips from home base camps to gather plants, find suitable raw material for stone tools, hunt, or undertake other activities. Cobble and rock ovens and Material culture

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Figure 3 Chart showing changes in Oshara Tradition phases. From Irwin-Williams C (1973) The Oshara Tradition: Origins of Anasazi Culture. Contributions in Anthropology 5(3). Portales: Eastern New Mexico University, figure 7, with permission.

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roasting pits made their first appearance during this phase and stone tools were more refined, perhaps suggesting a better adaptation to the plants and animals used as food resources. Bajada phase sites are known from across the Four Corners region. During the San Jose phase (3200–1800 BC), dramatic changes occurred in relation to earlier phases. The number and size of sites, and, thus, people on the landscape, increased dramatically. Larger, more specialized activity sites with numerous fire pit or hearths and underground ovens were used for the first time during the San Juan phase. The tool assemblage was diversified with the appearance of large chopper tools, pounders, and basic grinding stones (i.e., shallow basin metates and one-hand manos). Quite a few San Jose phase projectile points (mounted on darts and throw with an atlatl) were serrated (with jagged edges), suggesting that a sharp cutting edge was important. Figure 4 illustrates the use of the atlatl in the ancient Southwest. Overall, the distribution of sites and tools suggests that a mixed subsistence strategy was practiced, using both plant and animal foods. Resource exploitation became more systematic, intensive, and inclusive. Numerous San Jose phase sites have been found in the Four Corners region. During the subsequent Armijo phase (1800– 800 BC), a critical change in subsistence occurred that was to influence the later course of Archaic and Early Puebloan development across the region: the introduction of maize or corn agriculture. Corn represented a

Figure 4 Figure illustrating use of the atlatl to throw darts. From Fagan, B. (1991) Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent. London: Thames and Hudson, with permission.

dependable, seasonal resource that provided sufficient food for large numbers of people, and that also had the potential to provide a surplus. Interestingly, although corn was introduced to the Four Corners region by at least 1200 BC (and probably earlier), the basic Archaic period subsistence pattern did not change dramatically (see Puebloan section below for a more thorough discussion of maize agriculture). Habitation sites during the Armijo phase were very large and the number and density of sites documented indicates substantial population growth across the region. Tools increased in variety and number and ground stone became common. An elaboration of ceremonial items is also apparent. Most important, perhaps, is that a pattern of seasonal aggregation first appeared during the Armijo phase. Groups of people who were normally dispersed across the landscape through the winter months began to aggregate into larger settlements in the summer. Although practiced, maize agriculture was not critical to the subsistence pattern during this phase. In relative terms, Armijo phase sites occur frequently in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, and across the Four Corners region. Although the succeeding En Medio phase (800 BC– AD 400) was included in Irwin-Williams’s Oshara tradition, many Southwest archaeologists believe that the latter portion of the phase (c. 600/400 BC– AD 400) represents the Basketmaker II occupation of the Early Puebloans (see discussion below). IrwinWilliams believed that the people of the Oshara tradition evolved into the Early Puebloans but she never identified the precise period for this transformation. During the early portion of the phase (800–100 BC), agriculture became increasingly important and population continued to grow. Use of ground stone tools (basin-shaped metates and onehand manos) increased proportionately with increasing dependence on agriculture. Also, the presence of a strong seasonal, annual cycle of movement is clear by this time, as groups moved across the landscape to find and exploit different resources (e.g., gathering pin˜on nuts at higher elevations in the fall and harvesting grasses at lower elevations in the late spring). En Medio phase sites are common across the Four Corners region. In 1976, Alan Schroedl developed a cultural sequence for the Archaic period on the Colorado Plateau that differed significantly from Irwin-Williams’s formulation. Schroedl’s sequence has four phases: Black Knoll (6300–4200 BC), Castle Valley (4200– 2500 BC), Green River (2500–1300 BC), and Dirty Devil (1300 BC–AD 500). The phases are differentiated based on diagnostic projectile points and perceived changes in population. The Black Knoll phase

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is characterized by Pinto and Northern Side-notched points. During the latter part of the phase (5000– 4200 BC), Schroedl postulated a dramatic increase in population, as evidenced by an increase in the density of artifacts on sites. The subsequent Castle Valley phase saw the widespread occurrence of Rocker, Sudden, and Hawken Side-notched points early in the period. Schroedl suggested that the population increased after 3000 BC, following a slight decrease earlier in the phase. During the latter portion of the phase, Humboldt and McKean projectile points became common. The third phase is the Green River, which is characterized first by San Rafael Side-notched points, and later by Gypsum projectile points. Finally, the Dirty Devil phase witnessed the continuation of Green River point styles. Schroedl postulated a low population during this final phase. Schroedl’s sequence was built largely upon data from several cave sites in southern Utah and northern Arizona: Danger Cave, Hogup Cave, Sudden Shelter, and Cowboy Cave. Before discussing the ancient Puebloan sequence, a perspective on the Archaic is offered here that differs considerably from both Irwin-Williams and Schroedl. In 1986, archaeologists Mike and Claudia Berry undertook a critical review of the Archaic period in the American Southwest. They made several important points: (1) most of the Archaic models currently used in the Southwest are deficient in one way or another, (2) models currently used are of little utility in understanding change through time, (3) models currently used are not supported by the chronological evidence, and (4) the premise of in situ cultural development is simply not supported by the data. Berry and Berry did not undertake a comprehensive review of Irwin-Williams’s sequence because very little of the relevant data had been published. Berry and Berry were skeptical that the Oshara tradition data would support Irwin Williams’s concept of in situ, gradual evolution from Jay phase hunter-gatherers to Later Puebloan agriculturalists. With regard to the northern Colorado Plateau Archaic sequence, Berry and Berry noted that a plot of absolute chronological dates produced a pattern that is more indicative of intermittent occupation than gradual increase in occupational intensity through time. Specifically, they highlighted a 1000-year gap in the occupation of the Colorado Plateau from 4000 to 3000 BC. Schroedl also evidently observed this gap but nevertheless chose to define a phase (Castle Valley) to fill the gap. This is a clear example of what Berry and Berry called phase-stacking to achieve the illusion of continuity. Another discontinuity is present in Schroedl’s Dirty Devil phase, from 1000 BC to AD 1. Berry and Berry suggested that Schroedl ignored this gap to allow for continuity.

As an alternative to models of gradual evolution and in situ development for the Archaic period, Berry and Berry offered a punctuated (or intermittent) model. They argued that the Southwest is essentially an arid and inhospitable environment that invited exploration by Archaic hunter-gatherers only during specific periods of increased effective moisture and proportionately greater biotic productivity. Thus, to believe that any area in the Southwest was continuously occupied throughout the period is incorrect. Rather, Archaic groups came and went as conditions allowed. In this view, Archaic peoples are seen as adapting to local environments and making small adjustments in their use of various stone tools and in their seasonal migrations. Also inherent in this view is the belief that, at certain times, large portions of the Southwest were simply not hospitable to human groups. Thus, temporary abandonment of many areas across the Southwest is to be expected. Berry and Berry constructed a basic summary of the Archaic era using period designations only as organizational devices. Period I, dated from 8000 to 3000 BC, is characterized by sparse population of the entire Southwest. The period is correlated with a general time of decreased moisture, the Altithermal, which limited the productivity of the area. Culturally, the groups that occupied the area are unknown. The culmination of the period was a widespread abandonment from 4000 to 3000 BC. Period II, dating from 3000 to 1000 BC, saw an intensive occupation across the Southwest. A reversal of effective moisture levels occurred and resource productivity was high. Unprecedented levels of cultural activity were achieved during this period. Period III lasted from 1000 BC to AD 500. Berry and Berry characterized this period as post-Archaic because of the introduction of maize agriculture. Although agriculture did not have an immediate impact, it set into motion a cycle that completely revolutionized the Archaic way of life and set the stage for Formative (Puebloan) developments. Nevertheless, hunting-gathering continued to be of considerable importance during this period, as well as later in the Puebloan period. In what is perhaps the most significant deviation from conventional southwestern wisdom, Berry and Berry posited a major influx of people during this period, as represented by stylistically diverse projectile points. They suggested that the inception of maize agriculture probably represents an influx of people from some external (and unknown) source area. This suggestion is in sharp contrast to the model of continuous in situ development that has been postulated for the Archaic to Puebloan transition by other Southwestern archaeologists.

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The work of Berry and Berry is important, as it adds a new perspective on the Archaic period and encourages archaeologists to examine their data and their preconceived notions of the archaeological record. In a general sense, their work parallels that of other Southwest archaeologists who have expressed dissatisfaction with traditional and gradualistic interpretations of the archaeological record. Given the incomplete nature of the Archaic database, however, alternative interpretations are clearly possible. The gaps that Berry and Berry have identified may represent actual abandonments or discontinuities, or they may merely reflect the differential nature of the data. Similarly, the inception of agriculture is not necessarily attributable to the influx of new people. Indeed, some archaeologists postulate that hunter-gatherers took to agriculture to maintain their lifestyle and remain foragers. Phil Geib’s recent summary of the radiocarbon record for the central Colorado Plateau evaluated both the traditional view of Archaic occupancy of the area and Berry and Berry’s punctuated model. Geib plotted more than 130 radiocarbon dates from 64 sites and weighted the raw data to produce a bar graph. Geib considered the influence of different factors (including preservation and sampling factors) on the distribution of dates, concluding that although preservation was not a significant factor, sampling bias in the form of lower visibility of certain sites may be responsible for some of the patterning seen in the chronology. Biases aside, Geib’s analysis did not identify the gaps in the record observed by Berry and Berry. The Middle Archaic gap, identified by Berry and Berry between 6000 and 5000 BP is not evident in the record for the central portion of the plateau. The decrease in radiocarbon-dated sites does reflect, in Geib’s view, a change in settlement pattern and lower population density but does not constitute a complete abandonment of the plateau, as suggested by Berry and Berry. A second occupation hiatus described by Berry and Berry, and interpreted as another complete abandonment of the area, occurred between 3000 and 2500 BP. During this period, the number of radiocarbon dates dips but some sites are still occupied. In sum, Geib’s work provided support for a model of long-term continuity in Archaic occupation of the central Colorado Plateau and he saw no evidence to support the idea that the Archaic period as a sequence of major population abandonments and intrusions on a pan-regional scale (as proposed by Berry and Berry). Nevertheless, he did not discount the importance of migration as a factor influencing changes during the Archaic period, and Geib acknowledged that more data are needed, particularly for the Middle Archaic.

Ancient Pueblo (Anasazi) Cultural Sequence The arguments of Berry and Berry notwithstanding, many Southwest archaeologists support the position that the Early Puebloan people developed from Oshara tradition and other Late Archaic groups who practiced incipient agriculture across the northern Southwest. Although local temporal sequences have been developed for a number of areas, the generalized Pecos Classification (developed by A. V. Kidder in 1927) is still used by most archaeologists to provide regional consistency and for reference (Table 2). The first period defined for the ancient Puebloans is Basketmaker II, which, as discussed above, overlaps the latter portion of the En Medio phase as defined by Cynthia Irwin-Williams. Basketmaker II Period (600 BC–AD 500)

The Basketmaker II period is dated between 600 BC and AD 500 in different parts of the northern Southwest. Basketmaker II, as currently defined at maximum, then, is as long as the remainder of the ancient Puebloan sequence. Basketmaker II is a critical stage in Puebloan development because it was during this time that the use of cultigens became a significant part of subsistence. The spread of agriculture, in turn, led to a more sedentary lifestyle. General traits of the period include construction and use of small pit houses, large storage cists, shallow grinding slabs, corner and side-notched dart points, the atlatl, one-hand manos, and cradleboard burials. The importance of agriculture, along with the initial use of ceramic containers, is what separates the Puebloans during the Basketmaker II period from earlier and contemporary Archaic populations. Figure 5 illustrates Early Pueblo corn agriculture with use of a digging stick. Various models relating to the adoption of agriculture among the Puebloans have been proposed, many of which have overlapping elements. From an evolutionary point of view, the adoption of agriculture may be seen as providing a selective advantage for the Puebloans that the gathering of wild plant foods did Table 2 A. V. Kidder’s 1927 Pecos Classification. Modified for the Four Corners region of the American Southwest Period

Dates

Basketmaker II Basketmaker III Pueblo I Pueblo II Pueblo III Pueblo IV and V

600 BC–AD 500 AD 500–750 AD 750–900 AD 900–1150 AD 1150–1300 Post AD 1300

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Figure 5 Depiction of early Puebloan corn agriculture using a digging stick. Salmon Ruins Museum collection.

not. In the absence of strong selective pressure, explaining why the use of cultigens would have become important is difficult. The most important selective advantage of cultigens is their dependability and predictability as contrasted with natural plants. Thus, initial use of cultigens probably relates to their seasonal predictability in given areas. It has also been suggested that hunter-gatherers who could most easily fit the demands of cultivation into their seasonal rounds would be most likely to practice agriculture. There are, of course, other parameters involved in the adoption of agriculture, but for the present discussion, understanding that the predictability of cultigens was a key factor is sufficient. In any case, there is good evidence that the Early Puebloans in certain areas (e.g., Cedar Mesa, Utah and Black Mesa, Arizona) were largely dependent on maize agriculture by the Early Basketmaker II period. Recent work has broadened our understanding of the Late Basketmaker II period, and the transition to Basketmaker III and Pueblo I. Using data from a project on the Rainbow Plateau of Arizona, Phil Geib and Kimberly Spurr identified perhaps the earliest use of pottery in the northern Southwest at AD 200. They also found good evidence of the transition between Basketmaker II and III between AD 200 and 450, filling a gap that Mike Berry and other archaeologists had identified. Geib and Spurr identified maize-dependent groups during the Basketmaker II interval. Other findings were related to turkey domestication and early use (by about AD 200) of the bow and arrow. Perhaps the most important contribution Geib and Spurr made is the understanding that

the transition from Basketmaker II to III was not a smooth, coordinated process. The traits they discussed – initial manufacture of pottery, dependence on maize agriculture, use of the bow and arrow, turkey husbandry, and the introduction of beans into the Puebloan diet – were not linked together as a suite and were not all introduced at the same time. Rather, these traits developed at different rates on the Rainbow Plateau and across the northern Southwest. Studying early pottery production, Lori Reed, Dean Wilson, and Kelley Hays-Gilpin contributed significantly to a new understanding of the Late Basketmaker II and Early Basketmaker III interval. Although archaeologists have observed brown ware pottery at Puebloan sites for at least 40 years, Reed and her colleagues were among the first to address the brown ware problem regionally. Archaeologists in the Southwest are accustomed to a simple dichotomy in pottery: brown is Mogollon and gray is Puebloan. In reality, a Puebloan brown ware tradition underlies the gray in most areas. This research documented the widespread occurrence of Puebloan brown ware and proposed combining many types previously split out, offering a few combined types that bring coherence to our understanding of brown ware pottery across the region. A large Basketmaker II population is inferred for Black Mesa, Arizona; a dramatic increase from Archaic times is apparent. By 600 BC, a firm commitment had been made to agriculture on Black Mesa. Basketmaker II settlements across the Southwest generally occur on terraces above major drainages and have been documented throughout the greater San

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Juan Basin and across the Four Corners region. These sites date in the interval from 800 BC to AD 400 and most contain maize. Lithic tool kits at these Early Basketmaker sites are indicative of an Early Puebloan adaptation, with debitage, cores, and tools showing use of local raw materials. The use of stone raw materials and the core reduction strategies reflect a more constricted range of movement in the region relative to earlier Archaic people, with fast, efficient reduction of locally available stone raw materials to produce usable tools. Basketmaker III Period (AD 500–750)

Recent work suggests that the Basketmaker III (AD 500–750) period was different than portrayed in conventional southwestern wisdom. Perhaps because of the contrast in A. V. Kidder’s original 1927 Pecos Classification (Basketmaker vs. Pueblo), southwestern archaeologists have viewed both Basketmaker periods (II and III) as transitional between the huntinggathering cultures of the Archaic period and the agricultural Puebloans, beginning in Pueblo I. In contrast, some Basketmaker II sites represent the remains of groups dependent on agriculture. Furthermore, by Basketmaker III, sedentary agricultural populations were living across the region. Such adaptations have been documented in the Mesa Verde, Colorado, area, in the La Plata Valley, New Mexico, on Cedar Mesa, Utah, and at several locales along the eastern and western slopes of the Chuska Mountains, among other areas. This revised view of Basketmaker III, with fully sedentary populations dependent on maize agriculture, is supported by recent stone tool and lithic studies, studies of pottery production and technology, and the latest rock art research. Figure 6 shows two Early Pueblo corn granaries in a rock shelter in southeastern Utah.

Basketmaker III remains in many areas of the northern Southwest apparently represent in situ continuity from Basketmaker II. Important characteristics of this period across the Southwest include large, formal pit houses, the introduction and use of the bow and arrow, two-hand manos and trough metates, gray ware and early red and unslipped white ware ceramics, and an increasing dependence on agriculture. Long, linear blocks of adobe rooms are associated with Late Basketmaker III sites. Figure 7 illustrates the floor of an abandoned Basketmaker III pithouse. Basketmaker III sites are relatively common on southern Black Mesa and in the Low Mountain area of Arizona, but are apparently absent from northern Black Mesa. In the San Juan Basin, Basketmaker III sites are relatively common and are scattered throughout the area. Pueblo I Period (AD 750–900)

The Pueblo I period (AD 750–900) in the Southwest is generally characterized by the extensive use of surface rooms and pueblos, constructed mostly of masonry or jacal. Kivas of various sizes where religious ceremonies were presumably held became common during this period. The widespread production and use of both neckbanded gray ware and early black-on-white painted ceramics is also a defining trait of the period. Agricultural production continued to be of importance for Puebloan subsistence. Areas with significant Pueblo I populations include Mesa Verde, Dolores area, the upper La Plata River Valley, and Chaco Canyon. In the Western Pueblo area, Pueblo I is viewed as an elaboration of patterns established during the preceding period. This period apparently represents a time of

Figure 6 Photograph of early Pueblo granaries in a rock shelter in southeastern Utah. Photograph by author.

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Figure 7 Early Puebloan (Basketmaker III period) pithouse at Cove, Arizona. Photograph by author.

continued low population density in the Glen Canyon area. Site frequencies are low, much as they are in areas further to the north and east. It is possible, of course, that many Pueblo I sites are obscured by the more obtrusive Pueblo II deposits and simply have not been identified. In the San Juan Basin, Pueblo I sites, although not as common as those of earlier or later periods, are present in moderate numbers; because of this, little population change is inferred for the Four Corners region during this period. Pueblo II Period (AD 900–1150)

The period from AD 900 to 1150, described as the Pueblo II period, is thought by many archaeologists to represent the apogee of ancient Puebloan cultural development. This view is due largely to the impressive remains found in Chaco Canyon (centrally located in the San Juan Basin, southeast of our Four Corners region) and the system that evolved around it. However, Pueblo II represents the time of greatest population dispersal across the entire Southwest, and much of this activity was clearly beyond the Chacoan realm. Across the Southwest, Pueblo II is a period of dramatic increase in site frequency and population. Salient traits of the period are multiple-room masonry structures with associated kivas and formalized middens, numerous black-on-white, red, orange, polychrome, and corrugated ceramics, extensive exchange networks and the development of alliances, sophisticated agricultural practices, and large complex sites. Figure 8 shows a Gallup black-on-white ceramic bowl. This basic pattern is apparent in the Western Puebloan area of northeast Arizona and southeast

Figure 8 Photograph of Gallup black-on-white ceramic bowl, distinctive of the Pueblo II period. Photograph by Lori Stephens Reed.

Utah. The majority of sites in lower Glen Canyon date to this period, indicating an intensive occupation. Site location in the canyons and valleys was apparently linked to the presence of alluvium and arable land. These lowland sites appear to be relatively limited functionally. Highland sites, in contrast, exhibit more evidence of a broad range of functions and activities, and appear to have been occupied yearround. Puebloan settlement on Black Mesa peaked during this period and then declined; the area was effectively abandoned by Late Pueblo II.

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Chacoan Society during the Pueblo II Period Ancient Puebloan society in Chaco Canyon at its peak (AD 1050–1100) was characterized by a number of traits that set it apart from previous, contemporary, and subsequent Puebloan communities and sites. First, Chacoan structures, known as great houses, were built in a monumental style (with three or four stories typical) similar (but unrelated) to the European Medieval castles of the same period in the Old World. Pueblo Bonito is the largest and grandest of all the great houses (Figure 9). Chacoan great houses are distinct from the majority of Puebloan structures of earlier and later periods because of their symmetrical construction and massive architecture described as core-veneer. The massive walls (up to a meter thick) consisted of a

rubble, dirt, or masonry core with inner and outer veneers of carefully selected, shaped sandstone slabs (Figure 10). The imposing size and height of these structures, and other factors, support the idea that the great houses were landscape monuments (in addition to having other functions). As monuments, the great houses were intended to impress and awe local residents, as well as outsiders. One of the more compelling aspects of the Chacoan landscape was the network of roads that were constructed between about AD 1050 and 1100. Perhaps 400 miles of roads have been detected using aerial photography and many segments have been ‘groundtruthed’, – confirmed by a field inspection. Typically, the roadways are very wide (up to 9 m or about 30 ft)

Figure 9 Photograph of Pueblo Bonito (Chaco Canyon) in 1921, prior to major excavations by Neil Judd and the National Geographic Society. Salmon Ruins Museum collection.

Figure 10 Photograph of fine Chacoan masonry in wall of Tower Kiva (built at AD 1090) at Salmon Pueblo. Photograph by author.

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across, and run straight across huge expanses of territory, climbing steep mesas and descending directly into canyons. Moving beyond the confines of Chaco Canyon proper, we see that the flourishing society centered at Chaco was quite far-flung (Figure 11). Archaeologists are literally finding new Chacoan-affiliated sites, outliers, every few years in increasingly remote areas. Nevertheless, at the present time, perhaps 150 Chaco outliers dating between AD 1050 and 1125 are known. As a group, these sites are similar to those found in Chaco, but are generally smaller in size, have fewer rooms, fewer kivas, many do not meet Chacoan standards for architecture, and most are surrounded

by clusters of smaller sites (villages, smaller pueblos, and nonresidential, farming, and other special-use areas). Notable exceptions include the ancient Aztec and Salmon communities in the Middle San Juan region, both of which were as large and well constructed as any great house in Chaco Canyon. Figure 12 is an historic photograph of Salmon Pueblo, taken by Timothy O’Sullivan in 1874. In extent, Chacoan outliers are found across four modern American states. Chimney Rock Pueblo lies several miles west of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and represents the northeastern outpost of Chacoan settlements. Guadalupe Pueblo lies far to the south of Chimney Rock in New Mexico, in the southeastern portion

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Figure 12 Historic photograph of Salmon Pueblo in 1874, taken by photographer Timothy O’Sullivan of the Wheeler Expedition. Note the photographer posing in the middle of frame. Salmon Ruins Museum collection.

of the Chacoan world. Moving across New Mexico to the northwest, the Cottonwood Falls great house in southeast Utah lies near the northwest edge of Chacoan influence. Lastly, Wupatki in northeast Arizona is the westernmost example of a site that shows evidence of Chacoan contact and influence. This far-flung area was larger than New England, and illustrates the vast spread of Chacoan material culture (things like architecture and pottery) and religious-ceremonial influence in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Although they share traits in common with each other, and with great houses in Chaco Canyon, almost every outlier identified thus far has unique characteristics. Thus, understanding the relationship between Chaco Canyon and outlying sites of Chacoan age and affiliation is one of the challenges for Puebloan archaeologists. In fact, the very word itself – outlier – implies a relationship between a center (Chaco Canyon) and a site outside the center (an outlier) that was probably highly variable from site to site. In recent years, Chacoan archaeologists have begun to question these relationships and concentrate more of their research on the outlying sites. This new work has led some to question the existence of an integrated Chacoan ‘system’. In place of an integrated, centrally controlled society, some archaeologists have proposed that the Chacoan world is better described as a confederation of largely independent political entities. Outside Chaco Canyon itself, and an area referred to as the Chaco Core, this is the view adopted here: that the larger Chacoan system was a loose confederation of affiliated but mostly independent Puebloan villages that looked to Chaco Canyon as a religious-ceremonial and economic center.

Pueblo III Period (AD 1150–1300)

The Pueblo III period (AD 1150–1300) across the northern Southwest is characterized by aggregation, continued production of black-on-white and corrugated ceramics, an increase in the production of polychrome ceramics, continued importance of agriculture, and perhaps minor population decreases throughout the period. During Pueblo III times, most of the Colorado Plateau saw the culmination and termination of its Puebloan occupation. Early in the period, a continuation of the earlier Pueblo II adaptation is apparent. Later, after AD 1250, several new patterns emerged. Population was consolidated and aggregated into fewer and larger sites, and the total number of sites decreased. Defensible locations were occupied in the Kayenta region and elsewhere, and there are indications that warfare was ongoing. Figure 13 shows Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. The collapse of the Chacoan system occurred in Early Pueblo III, by AD 1150. Later in the period (c. AD 1200), many sites experienced a resurgence in population. In the Middle San Juan region, Aztec Ruins and Salmon Ruins reached their peaks in the mid1200s as local and regional population boomed. The greater Mesa Verde region also reached its zenith during the Late Pueblo III period, by AD 1260. Finally, many other former Chacoan sites, including Chaco Canyon itself, were revitalized with new populations and growth in the mid-late-1200s. The end of the Pueblo III period is marked by widespread abandonment of most areas across the Colorado Plateau (for habitation purposes) and concentration of population into a few areas (e.g., the Hopi mesas and Little

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Figure 13 Photograph of large defensible Pueblo III site of Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Salmon Ruins Museum collection.

Colorado areas in Arizona, the area around Zuni, New Mexico, and the many pueblos located along the Rio Grande and its tributaries in New Mexico). Pueblo IV and V (post-AD 1300)

During the Later Pueblo IV and V periods, Western Puebloan groups aggregated in a few locations – Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and the Little Colorado River area. The Eastern Pueblo area received many of the people emigrating from the Four Corners region, and large villages grew along the Rio Grande and its tributaries. Little or no evidence of Pueblo IV or V occupation is present in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Although wandering groups of Puebloans probably made limited use of the area, no permanent occupation of the area occurred until Navajo groups arrived in the AD 1400s.

Navajo Cultural Sequence At the present time, archaeological discussion of Early Navajo remains in the San Juan Basin and adjacent areas is complicated by the absence of a current, accurate model for the arrival of Athabascan peoples (Navajo and various Apachean groups) in the Southwest. Nevertheless, early tree-ring dates derived from recent excavations at Early Navajo locales in the upper San Juan area make it clear that older models placing the Navajos in the Southwest after the time of Spanish contact, after AD 1540, must be revised. Recent work by archaeologist John Torres-Nez (among others) suggests that Early Navajo

folks entered the northern Southwest in the AD 1400s and took a migration route (from the north) along the western slope of the Rocky Mountains through the modern state of Colorado (see Americas, North: Rocky Mountains).

Dine´tah Phase The earliest period of Navajo occupation in the San Juan drainage area is termed the Dine´tah phase, defined as the period during which the Navajo settled in the Southwest. Although extensive work in the Navajo Reservoir District (Dine´tah area) was conducted during the 1950s and 1960s, no indisputable evidence of Navajo occupation prior to AD 1700 was uncovered. Thus, in the final report, archaeologist Frank Eddy chose not to use the Dine´tah phase, instead identifying the period from AD 1550 to 1700 as Indeterminate Navajo. Nevertheless, more recent research has confirmed the original definition of the Dine´tah phase, and extended its beginning. Briefly sketched, the Navajo occupation of the upper San Juan area began between AD 1400 and 1500. This topic remains a controversial one, although most Early Navajo researchers now agree that the Navajo were present in northwestern New Mexico by AD 1500. Our view is that the Navajo probably entered the northern reaches of Dine´tah early in the fifteenth century, but were not established before the late AD 1400s. Site LA 55979, a Navajo habitation located in Dine´tah that is tree-ring dated to AD 1541, certainly supports this interpretation.

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Figure 14 Photograph of early Navajo Gobernador phase forked-pole hogan, Redrock Valley, Arizona, with Prayer Rock in the background. Photograph by author.

Dine´tah phase sites (between AD 1450 and 1630), are characterized by brush structures, forked-pole hogans, light ceramic and lithic artifact scatters, and hearths. Dine´tah structures often contain east- or southeast-facing doorways and frequently have associated ash piles to the east or southeast, similar to modern Navajo structures and homestead layouts. Although the Navajo of the Dine´tah phase were assumed by Navajo Reservoir Project archaeologists to have been nonagricultural hunter-gatherers who lived in highly mobile bands, recent research indicates that at least some Dine´tah phase groups were practicing agriculture and were perhaps as agriculturally dependent as were later Gobernador phase populations. Of particular significance is that the earliest, best-dated Dine´tah phase site (LA 55979) contains abundant evidence of corn, including burned cobs, and some evidence of beans, which indicates that maize, at least, and perhaps beans, were grown by the inhabitants. Contact with other groups, such as the Eastern and Western Pueblos, began during the Early Dine´tah phase and continued on a limited basis into the Gobernador phase. During the 1500s and early 1600s, the Spanish were apparently uninterested in the more mobile inhabitants of the Dine´tah region. Spanish attention was focused on the sedentary Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande. Navajo–Puebloan interaction and exchange in the Early Dine´tah phase has been demonstrated by the presence of Jemez Black-on-white and Jeddito Yellow Ware ceramics on several dated sites. Other materials such as Pedernal chert from the Jemez-Abiquiu District, obsidian from the Jemez Mountains and the Flagstaff, Arizona area, and copper pigments from the Ojo Caliente

District have been recovered from Dine´tah phase sites. These raw materials were undoubtedly obtained through trade networks or by means of procurement expeditions. As suggested by Reed and Reed the social contact and exchange relationships established between the Navajo and Puebloan groups during the Dine´tah phase provided a means for Puebloan people to seek refuge with the Navajo during the Pueblo Revolt (AD 1680) and Spanish Reconquests (AD 1692 and 1696). Figure 14 shows an Early Navajo forked-pole hogan in northeastern Arizona.

Gobernador Phase The Gobernador phase (AD 1630 and 1755) was originally defined as a period of extensive Puebloan influence manifested by the influx of Pueblo refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquest. This phase is evidenced by the presence of high numbers of northern Rio Grande and Hopi ceramics, the manufacture of Gobernador Polychrome ceramics (which resemble Puebloan ceramic styles), the construction of defensive structures or pueblitos (which resemble Puebloan architecture), and the appearance of Puebloan-style masked dancers and kachina-like figures in Navajo rock art. This evidence of Puebloan influence is augmented by historical documentation of increased Navajo–Puebloan political interaction and trade and by the presence of Puebloan groups among the Navajo following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Beginning in the early 1600s, Navajos began producing a polychrome ceramic now known as Gobernador Polychrome (in addition to their characteristic utility ware, Dine´tah Gray). The occurrence of this polychrome ceramic at Navajo sites is considered one of

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the primary temporal markers for the Gobernador phase. The similarity of Gobernador Polychrome to contemporary Puebloan polychrome vessels (e.g., Rio Grande Glaze Ware, Tewa Polychrome, and Sikyatki Polychrome) prompted early researchers to suggest that it was produced by Pueblo refugees. Considering that Gobernador Polychrome occurs at sites dating at least 50 years prior to the Pueblo Revolt, it is unlikely that it was initially produced by Pueblo refugees. The multistylistic character of Gobernador Polychrome, incorporating design styles, design layouts, and color patterning present on both Eastern and Western Pueblo pottery, further supports Navajo production and innovation. Given the social ties that probably existed between the Navajo and Pueblo and the fact that Navajo tradition acknowledges intermarriage between the two cultural groups, we recognize the potential influence resulting from a Puebloan potter marrying into a Navajo family. Nevertheless, Gobernador Polychrome ultimately represents a Navajo ceramic type produced over a period of approximately 150 years in the Dine´tah region. Along with defensive pueblitos, Gobernador phase sites exhibit a wide range of variability in habitation types. Dwellings may include any combination of forked-stick hogans, masonry-walled pueblitos, lean-tos, and ramadas. The range of site complexity for habitations is difficult to specify, but pueblito sites range from 1 to 35 rooms and may have as many as eight associated hogans. A great variety of traded ceramics is found at habitation sites, as well as at associated limited activity, non-habitation sites. These ceramics include Rio Grande Glaze Ware, Rio Grande Biscuit Ware, Jemez Black-on-white, Tewa polychromes, and Eastern Keres, Zuni, and Hopi wares. Obsidian from the Abiquiu and Jemez areas is also present.

Evidence of imported ceramics (e.g., Rio Grande Glaze Ware and Biscuit Ware, Jemez Black-on-white, Tewa Polychrome) and lithic raw materials (e.g., obsidian from the Abiquiu and Jemez, New Mexico areas) is more abundant during the Gobernador phase than during the Dine´tah phase; this has been attributed both to exchange and to the presence of Pueblo refugees at Navajo pueblito sites. Gobernador phase sites contain ceramics produced by both Eastern and Western Pueblo groups. However, no archaeological data beyond the presence of trade ware ceramics and Puebloan-like architecture demonstrates that the pueblito sites were built or occupied by Pueblo refugees. The only data that support this inference are from historic Spanish documents. Figure 15 shows an Early Navajo pueblito site from the early eighteenth century. Many researchers of Navajo archaeology and culture have focused on the acculturative processes operating during the Gobernador phase and the changes that took place in Navajo population and culture. James Hester and Joel Shiner discussing their work on Gobernador phase sites in the Navajo Reservoir in the 1960s, explained Navajo acceptance of Puebloan traits as a fusion of Puebloan and Navajo characteristics that changed Navajo culture forever. Ethnologists Bailey and Bailey echoed this theme, suggesting that Gobernador phase Navajo were biological and cultural hybrids, neither Athabascan nor Puebloan, but a product of both. As discussed above, there is little evidence to support the largescale, permanent presence of Puebloans among the Navajo that would have been necessary to constitute a site unit intrusion and a truly hybridized culture. By contrast, we, and other researchers, explain the presence of Puebloan pottery and architecture, and the resultant influences on Navajo culture, largely as

Figure 15 Photograph of early Navajo site, Frances Canyon pueblito, northwest New Mexico. Photograph by author.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 247

a result of interaction and diffusion, along with ‘migration’ of small numbers of Puebloans who became part of Navajo groups. The origin of at least two Navajo clans is attributed to Puebloan refugees – the Black Sheep clan (with refugees from San Felipe) and the Coyote Pass clan (with individuals from Jemez). Such an interpretation accords well with the hypothesis presented here and, again, does not provide support for a complete transformation of Navajo culture and hybridization with Puebloan culture. Rather, Navajo culture incorporated Puebloan people, ideas, and certain customs, but remained essentially Athabascan. The entire concept and definition of the Gobernador phase is undergoing revision. Archaeologists Reed and Reed have discussed the evidence indicating that the manufacture of Gobernador Polychrome began as early as the 1630s in some areas, more than 60 years prior to the purported beginning of the Gobernador phase. Ron Towner’s work on the dendrochronology of the area suggested that most of the pueblito sites were not constructed until the 1720s, more than 30 years after the main exodus of Puebloan people from the Rio Grande area is assumed to have occurred. Thus, it is probably a misnomer to describe these sites as ‘refugee’ phenomena. In addition, a study of pueblito location and visibility has suggested that the pueblito system was largely a defensive response to Ute raiding that is ethnohistorically documented to have increased in scale and intensity after 1720. The suggestion that the construction of the pueblitos was a response to Ute pressure is not, however, new. Roy Carlson made such a suggestion in 1965 while reporting on Earl Morris’s work from the 1920s. In sum, recent work has changed our understanding of the Early Navajo Gobernador phase and the cultural evolution and history of the Navajo people. See also: Americas, North: California and the Sierra Nevada; Great Basin; Plains; Rocky Mountains.

Further Reading Cordell LS (1997) Archaeology of the Southwest. San Diego: Academic Press. Dykeman DD (ed.) (in press) Navajo Lifeways. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Frison GC (1991) Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, 2nd edn. San Diego: Academic Press. Hogan P (1989) Dine´tah: A Reevaluation of the Pre-Revolt Navajo Occupation in Northwestern New Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Research 45(1): 53–66. Irwin-Williams C (1973) The Oshara Tradition: Origins of Anasazi Culture. Contributions in Anthropology 5(3). Portales: Eastern New Mexico University.

Judge WJ (1973) The Paleo-Indian Occupation of the Central Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Matson RG (1991) The Origins of Southwestern Agriculture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pitblado B (1994) Paleoindian Presence in Southwest Colorado. Southwestern Lore 60(4): 1–20. Reed PF (ed.) (2000) Foundations of Anasazi Culture: The Basketmaker-Pueblo Transition. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reed PF (2004) The Puebloan Society of Chaco Canyon. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Towner RH (1993) Defending the Dine´tah: Pueblitos in the Ancestral Navajo Homeland. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Towner RH (ed.) (1996) The Archaeology of Navajo Origins. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Varien M and Wilshusen RH (eds.) (2002) Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Vierra BJ (ed.) (1994) Archaic Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in the American Southwest. Portales: Eastern New Mexico University.

Arctic and Circumpolar Regions William W Fitzhugh, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary biface A stone tool formed by removing flakes from both faces or sides. burin A tool flaked into a chisel point for inscribing or grooving bone, wood, leather, stone or antler. colonization Colonization occurs whenever any one or more species populates a new areas. Colonization encompasses all large-scale emigrations of an established population to a ‘new’ location, such as immigration, the establishment of expatriate communities, and the use of guest workers. ethnography The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures. Eskimo/Inuit The indigenous people of the Arctic, from eastern Siberia to Greenland. lithic analysis The analysis of stone tools and other chipped stone artifacts using basic scientific techniques to determine source of the raw material and function of stone tools. permafrost Soil or rock that remains below 0  C throughout the year, and forms when the ground cools sufficiently in winter to produce a frozen layer that persists throughout the following summer. potlatch An elaborate ritual of redistribution and gift-giving practiced by the peoples of the Northwest coast. ungulate Mammals with hoofs, in the Arctic this includes the Siberian staiga antelope, musk-ox, and caribou and reindeer (reindeer are domesticated caribou).

248 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

Introduction In 1576, when Martin Frobisher landed on Baffin Island in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, he was welcomed by a hail of arrows from Inuit. (The term ‘Inuit’ is used in this article to refer to the current native residents of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland and their immediate ancestors, formerly called ‘Eskimos’. Eskimo is a term of uncertain origin but probably derives from a northern Algonquian Indian group which later came to be applied to Labrador Inuit and by extension to all native peoples of the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. The term ‘Eskimo’ remains in use to refer collectively to prehistoric peoples and cultures of the North American Arctic and as a term referring to all native groups, including Sugpiak, Yup’ik, Siberian Yupik, Inuit, and Kalladlit (Greenlanders) where no other term exists.) Their physical features, reinforced bows, iron tools, and copper ornaments encouraged the Cathay Company’s search for a northwest passage to the Orient (Figure 1). Frobisher’s discovery of an Asian population living successfully in an Arctic environment raised questions

that intrigued Europeans of the time, and historians and anthropologists ever since. Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? How long have they lived in the Arctic? And how did they manage to survive – even flourish – in one of Earth’s most hostile environments? During the past century, anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered some answers. Some have come from the Inuit themselves; however, most come from archaeological finds in frozen Arctic soils. From these remains we have learned how Arctic peoples adapted to and occupied the harshest regions on Earth for thousands of years, making unique contributions to society through such inventions as the kayak, insulated clothing, snow goggles, toggling harpoons, etc. Studies of northern peoples also have led to better understanding of human origins and history. Paradoxically, Eskimos – one of the last people to be drawn into contact with Western society – retained traditions established by humans adapting to Arctic conditions during the last Ice Age. Consequently, Eskimos, northern Indians, and Siberians are our

Figure 1 Martin Frobisher’s encounter with Inuit near Kodlunarn Island, outer Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, in 1576. Drawn by John White. (British Museum Library).

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 249

only ethnographic analogs for interpreting human life in the Upper Palaeolithic, when Arctic environments extended far south of their modern boundaries and covered most of Europe and Central Asia. Much of human history in Eurasia during the past 70 000 years was lived under arctic and subarctic conditions, and this experience became a prerequisite for entering the Americas via Bering Strait. Not only were America’s first peoples arctic-adapted, but the residue of their experience and that of subsequent Beringian immigrants is part of the cultural and biological heritage of all New World peoples, past and present. This article summarizes the history of arctic cultures and modern research themes in the North American sector of the circumpolar region. Survival in Arctic regions requires special technological, social, economic, and spiritual systems. In the following sections, we consider how these conditions have been met to sustain humans and their cultures over thousands of years. Geographic coverage conforms primarily to the tundra, but includes some subarctic coastal regions in Alaska and Labrador occupied by Eskimo peoples (Figures 2 and 3).

The Arctic Environment To the uninitiated, the Arctic is a vast expanse of featureless tundra, mountains, or sea ice that seems at first

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glance inimical to human life. Yet, within this sea of uniformity is a surprising diversity of landforms, geography, biota, marine conditions, and climates. The region itself is huge. Ranging from 51 N in southern Labrador to 83 N in North Greenland, Arctic tundra and shrub tundra encompass mountains, plains, deserts, and bogs, and host a diverse biota of land and sea mammals, avifauna, invertebrates, fish, and – not least – a plague of insect pests. These resources are not distributed evenly, spatially or seasonally. While humans can easily starve in winter on the interior barrens, the nearby coast may be alive with food resources. Some areas devoid of life for months erupt into a cornucopia of food during a brief season of abundance each year, while others are permanent ecological hot spots (see Seasonality of Site Occupation). In addition to seasonality, weather – always the Arctic wild card – has a huge impact on animals and their availability to hunters. Although Arctic regions are less diverse than temperate and tropical regions, some species are present in great concentration. Subarctic and Arctic marine zones have more diverse food chains and greater number of species than northern forest and Arctic tundra regions, and therefore have greater ecological and cultural stability, while the latter have simple food chains, low species diversity, and frequent disruptions from fire and winter icing, and their boom-andbust population cycles make human life precarious.

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250 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

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To survive under these conditions, Arctic peoples developed variants of four major ethnographic adaptation types: (1) specialized adaptations to caribou hunting on the northern interior (Nunamiut and Caribou Inuit); (2) specialized adaptations to coastal and marine resources (Aleut, St. Lawrence Island Yupik); (3) generalist adaptations involving dual economies with winter hunting on the interior and summer hunting and fishing on the coast (Inupiat Eskimos, Central Inuit); or (4) herding of domestic reindeer, a technology not practiced in North America but prevalent in Eurasia. Resource-rich areas like the Bering and Chukchi Seas, Foxe Basin–Hudson Strait, and Davis Strait– Labrador Sea have supported human populations on a long-term basis and fostered some of the highest levels of Arctic cultural development. River outlets where fish, seals, and white whales congregate also have high population potential. Other areas, including much of the Canadian High Arctic and northern Greenland, have few resources and little or episodic settlement history. Over-hunting by humans – either by itself or superimposed on natural animal or climatic cycles that resulted in freezing of polynias (ice-free zones) or icing of ungulate foraging grounds – has been a frequent cause of human extinction or abandonment in High Arctic regions. Similar catastrophes occurred in Alaska due to severe storms, volcanism, earthquakes, and tidal waves. Resource variation that results in ecological ‘patchiness’ has led archaeologists to use ecological and

biogeographical concepts like ‘hot spots’, ‘core areas’, ‘peripheries’, and ‘voids’ to help interpret Arctic culture history. In general, long-term settlement and continuity occurs in areas where animal resources are more predictable and abundant. In contrast, resource-poor or unstable regions tend to have episodic settlement history and less cultural and demographic continuity. For these reasons, human communities in the Arctic tend to be widely spaced and have low populations, except in the most productive resource zones. Early contact population sizes closely follow scaling factors determined by resource abundance and predictability, and these gradients also determined limits on cultural complexity and sociopolitical development. Extremely high population levels, complex art, social hierarchies, warfare, and presence of craft specialists found among Northwest Coast and Pacific Eskimo cultures are more weakly expressed north of the Aleutians in Alaska and are even less well-developed in the Central Canadian Arctic and Greenland. However, these patterns are only general tendencies; variation in technology, social conditions, human response, leadership, and a host of other conditions intersect ecological constraints (see Cultural Ecology). Instances of artistic florescence have occurred in the midst of economic and social privation, as seen during a period of starvation at Ammassalik in East Greenland in the late 1800s, or the blossoming of Late Dorset art during a period of climatic change and cultural upheaval c. AD 1000–1300.

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 251

Western Arctic: Alaska

Palaeo-Alaskans

The North American Arctic (including Greenland) was the last large continental area except Antarctica to be occupied by humans (Figure 4). Considering that Arctic-adapted humans migrated from Asia into Alaska c. 20 000–15 000 BP across the grassy Arctic tundra of the Bering Land Bridge, it is remarkable that the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and northern Labrador remained uninhabited until 4200 BP. (Unless otherwise stated, dates given as ‘BP’ or ‘years ago’ are in uncalibrated radiocarbon years; ‘AD’ or ‘BC’ dates indicate calendar or calibrated radiocarbon years. In general, dates are given as BP except for the last thousand years, when calendar dates areused to facilitate comparison with historical records.) Similarly, while Palaeo-Indian archaeological sites are abundant south of the retreating ice sheets 11 000 years ago, the Eastern Arctic was not colonized until well after the disappearance of glacial ice and establishment of modern conditions 5000– 6000 years ago. This delay in occupation is mirrored in much earlier times by the east-sloping trend in Eurasian Arctic colonization: 40 000–60 000 years ago in Western Siberia, 35 000–28 000 in the Lena and Yana River basins, 15 000–13 000 in Alaska, and 4200 in Greenland.

Following the initial peopling of Alaska from Siberia, probably between 15 000 and 13 000 BP, a variety of complexes appear in central and southern Alaska between 11 000 and 7000 BP. Although having different names (Beringian, Denali, Palaeo-Arctic, PalaeoIndian, Nenana, Late Tundra) and slightly different meanings, these complexes or traditions (whose organic assemblages are rarely preserved) share small microblades, various biface styles, and burins, slotted bone points, and a variety of unifacial scrapers and knives. Complications of dating, small sample size, and classification history make it difficult to extract cultural information from these assemblages, and some have suggested they may all be seasonal, functional, refuse, or chaıˆne-ope´ratoire variants of a single cultural tradition. All of these groups descend generally from Late Dyuktai Palaeolithic and Early Sumnagin Mesolithic traditions of Siberian big game hunters and lived in mobile camps primarily in forested regions. These assemblages form the basis for later interior Alaskan and Northwest Canadian traditions that continue using bone points armed with microblade insets and include bifaces that begin to be broadly side or corner notched. Known as Northern Archaic in Alaska and Northwest Microblade in the

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252 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

Yukon, their sites are found at interior lake, river, and forest locations where large game and fishing provided resources for peoples whose lives were probably similar to ethnographic Athapaskans. The major exceptions to this pattern are the Anangula and Akmak sites, from radically different settings. Akmak, a northern interior riverine site probably dating about 9500 BP, has a large core, blade, and burin assemblage similar to Anagula but also has a microcore industry, large bifaces, and disk scrapers. Anangula, by contrast, is a marine-oriented site in the Eastern Aleutians dating c. 8000 BP whose setting required a sea mammal economy supplemented by coastal foraging; its unifacial technology based exclusively on a macrocore and blade industry may be a local version of Siberian Mesolithic industry (see Maritime Archaeology). Anangula and other early sites along the Pacific coast of Alaska and northern Northwest Coast were occupied by core and blade-using people who exploited a wide range of coastal and marine resources, probably using barbed harpoons. Anangula is larger and was occupied for a longer period than contemporary interior sites, and by 8000 BP its people used oil lamps and lived in large multiseason coastal base camps similar to those of most other ethnographic North Pacific peoples. Further, this implies a strong distinction between coastal and interior peoples in adaptation and settlement patterns, a feature which has also continued, culturally, linguistically, and to some extent biologically, until the present. It also suggests that maritime-adapted coastal communities, now inundated, must have been present along the Pacific coasts of Alaska at even earlier dates. Clovis-like fluted points are found occasionally in northern and western Alaska and northwesternCanada where they are thought to date to 11 000– 9000 years ago; however, their context and associations are poorly understood, and most archaeologists consider them a late northern variant of classic Clovis culture.

model’ that links development of cultural complexity to economic intensification in a predictable, highproductivity marine resource zone. Laughlin also tackled the Eskimo origin problem from the perspective of Aleut cultural geography. Whereas Collins and Jenness had emphasized the Bering Strait and its Siberian connection as the nexus for Eskimo origins, Laughlin proposed Aleuts descended from early maritime peoples of the southern coast of the Bering Land Bridge who retreated to the Alaska Peninsula and from there colonized the Aleutian Chain. The Anangula blade site was a crucial link in his argument and became the foundation for his belief in the movement of proto-Eskimo populations north along the Bering Sea coast, thereby founding the Eskimo maritime cultural tradition that later spread to Chukotka, Canada, and Greenland. Laughlin’s Eskimo theory, now discounted in favor of a Siberian–Beringian origin, was developed before much was known about the prehistory of the Aleutians or mainland southwest Alaska (Figures 5 and 6). Recent work in both areas reveals a 9000 year history of occupation by a succession of increasingly specialized sea-mammal-hunting societies whose

Aleutian Islands and Pacific Coast

The idea of long-term cultural continuity in the Aleutian Islands was vigorously promoted initially by William S. Laughlin, who not only envisioned 10 000 years of continuity in maritime technological development and subsistence technology but also saw persistence in religious ritual, human biology, and language. Laughlin’s ‘Aleut survival’ model based on gradual culture change, limited population influx, isolation from Asia, and slow cultural diffusion from the Alaska mainland has proven a convincing application of biogeographic theory to Arctic prehistory. Today, these ideas are expressed in terms of a ‘maritime stability

Figure 5 Aleutian barbed harpoon for hunting whales with aconite poison, c. AD 1000 (23.6 cm; SI-NMNH A395958, 395999).

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 253

Figure 6 Ivory figures with Asiatic facial features, seal effigy crest, hair topknots, and marked limb joints. Found at Port Moller, Alaska, but of unknown age and function (SI-NMNH A492418, 6, 7, left to right).

Figure 7 ‘‘Natives of Oonalaschka, and Their Habitations,’’ by John Webber, artist on Captain James Cook’s expedition to the North Pacific in 1778 (courtesy of Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, SI-NMNH).

peoples lived in large central-place villages (Figures 7 and 8). Developing out of an Anangula base with the addition of a ground slate (in Kodiak), biface industries (in the Aleutians), and use of atlatl/spear thrower-propelled harpoon darts and nontoggling harpoons by at least 7000 BP, these early maritime cultures soon displayed signs of social hierarchy,

political complexity, and artistic traditions comparable to Northwest Coast cultures. These features are strongly expressed in the Margaret Bay and Kachemak phases in which dwellings and settlement size increase together with signs of warfare and ritual (perhaps cannibalistic) treatment of human remains, probably slaves, are evident. The last thousand years display increasing

254 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions Radiocarbon years BP

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Palaeo-Arctic (presumed across entire region) Figure 8 Culture history of southwest Alaska. LIA stands for Little Ice Age.

population growth, multifamily dwellings, chiefly hierarchy, and other results of social, economic, and political intensification later documented by European explorers and Russian traders and missionaries. Growing success in maritime adaptation is documented by progressive expansion of settlement westward, requiring increasingly longer water passages from the Alaska Peninsula, reaching Umnak and Fox Islands by 8000 BP, Amchitka and Rat Islands by 4500 BP, and Near Islands by 2500 BP. The existence of distinct archaeological traditions in the Aleutians, Kodiak, Bering Sea, and Northwest Coast suggests that the divisions seen today in ethnicity, language, and human biology are rooted thousands of years in the past. Rough conformity with environmental zones affirms the influence of geography on origins and maintenance of cultural traditions in this region. At the same time, migration, diffusion, and other types of culture contact occur across these boundaries. Similarities in harpoons, spear-throwers, graphic styles, wooden bowl and ladle forms, house

types, kayaks, ceremonial hats, labrets, and other personal ornaments indicate cultural borrowing was widespread across porous, shifting Indian–Aleut– Eskimo borders, driven by institutional warfare, slave-taking, potlatch ceremonialism, trade in exotic materials, craft and art specialization (see Interpretive Art and Archaeology; Craft Specialization; Figure 9). Language borrowing and genetic mixing is also documented. More distant influences like slat armor, fortified village and refuge sites, and sinew-backed bows reached this region from Siberia and Bering Strait. Throughout this sequence, continuity and gradual elaboration of cultural forms are dominant features of the southern Eskimo–Aleut tradition. Despite mixing on its southern border with Indians, the Kodiak and Aleutian traditions remained Eskimo/Aleut in general type and were subject to periodic influences from the Bering Sea. Following introduction of microblades with the earliest Asian settlers, the next major intrusion occurred shortly after 4000 years ago when Arctic Small Tool tradition

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 255

(ASTt) peoples appeared on the Alaskan Peninsula and in Cook Inlet from the north. Although not penetrating Kodiak Island, its influence reached the Eastern Aleutians. This Siberian Neolithic-related tradition, including a tool kit based on microblades and delicate collaterally flaked bifacial arrowpoints, knives, and bipoints, as well as burins, arrived in Alaska so

suddenly that it almost certainly reflects the movement of Siberian people into Alaska. Known as Western ASTt in Alaska, its expansion into southwest Alaska comes with cooling climate and a southward expansion of sea ice to the Alaska Peninsula, and lasted until c. 3300 BP, coincident with a major phase of volcanism, after which it amalgamated with the pre-existing Aleutian and Sugpiak traditions of the Pacific coast. Western Alaska

Figure 9 Funerary mask from the Unga Island whaler’s burial cave in the Shumagin Islands, collected by William Healy Dall in the early 1870s (NMNH A13002).

Siberian ASTt people appeared a few hundred years earlier, c. 4500 BP, in Norton Sound, carrying the first bows and arrows to appear in Western North America (Figure 10). Known here as the Denbigh Flint Complex, the new armament helped them spread rapidly, exploiting caribou and salmon. At least initially, marine mammal hunting was not an ASTt specialty; however, sealing, including sea-ice hunting (which is suggested at a few sites), may also have been practiced and became common by Choris times. The largely aceramic Western Arctic Small Tool tradition (Figure 11) establishes the basis for the ceramic Norton Tradition and its Old Whaling, Ipiutak, and Norton/Near Ipiutak phases until the onset of Western Thule tradition about AD 1000. Norton lithics display evolved Denbigh styles with delicate arrowpoints and harpoon endblades, skin scrapers, and ground burin-like tools; decorated Asian-derived ceramic vessels also appear for the first time, suggesting longer periods of coastal settlement, sufficient firewood, and sea mammal hunting. Toggling harpoons, darts, and antler arrowheads are present, and

Figure 10 Arctic Small Tool tradition artifacts from the Cape Denbigh, Seward Peninsula, Alaska (University of Alaska Museum).

256 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions Alaska Northern Kotzebue-Barrow

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Figure 12 Old Bering Sea harpoon counterweight or ‘winged object’, depicting semi-human spirit-controller (SI-NMNH).

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Figure 11 Prehistory of Western Alaska.

lip labrets – another Asian introduction – appear. Large coastal and interior settlement sites with cemeteries are found for the first time, and a growing seasonal specialization on sea mammal hunting begins to rival the importance of caribou. Toward the end of this period, c. 1500 BP, Ipiutak village and cemetery sites at Point Hope exhibit an elaborate burial cult with strong links to Siberian shamanism and masking, and artistic elaboration of tools, implements, and ritual objects bearing images of fantastic creatures. Not least, forged iron traded from Siberia makes its first appearance in America in the form of tiny slivers used for engraving tools. This seemingly small technological change accelerated the development of one of the world’s greatest native art traditions and may have contributed to the Thule movement into Canada. Beginning about 2000 BP, concurrent with Late Norton tradition sites on the Alaska mainland, a highly specialized maritime hunting tradition known as Thule or Northern Maritime began to emerge at sites on St. Lawrence and Punuk Islands and along the shores around Bering Strait, appearing first in Chukotka. After developing for nearly 1000 years, about AD 1000, it suddenly spread east into Canada and Greenland where it is known as Eastern Thule. The origin of Eskimo culture is most closely linked to the Western Thule tradition and its ASTt predecessors. The early phases of this tradition display implements with highly decorative fine-line engraving depicting

beastly helping spirits, animal spirit masters, and semi-human transformational spirit beings to aid the hunt and protect the hunter from harm (Figure 12). Similar tattooed designs have been found on frozen human bodies dating to the Okvik/Old Bering Sea cultures that initiate this tradition. Ivory engraving was initially done with stone tools at Okvik sites, but in later OBS, Punuk, Ipiutak, and Thule phases forged Siberian iron was universal. Deep middens and large sod house villages signify large populations and a flourishing economy based on the huge migrating herds of walrus that pass annually through Bering Strait. However, whaling harpoons and float gear in OBS sites indicate that shortly after 2000 BP, people began to hunt large whales, and by Punuk times (c. 1500–1000 BP) whaling had become the economic mainstay for many communities, enabling population growth and clan-based sociopolitical development. Punuk also brought an increase in warfare, signaled by the appearance of Asian bone slat armor, sinew-backed bows, execution burials, fortified sites, and other trappings of conflict (Figure 13). Punuk’s successor, Western Thule, become increasingly enmeshed in a growing cycle of trans-Beringian trade, raiding, and warfare fueled by pressure from Cossacks in Western Chukotka and, after 1750, by direct ship-based Russian and European trade to coastal native groups (see Ships and Seafaring). Beginning about 2000 years ago, another economic revolution took place. While North Pacific and Beringian peoples were learning to hunt large marine

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mammals, peoples of the Siberian interior began herding reindeer and using dog- or reindeer-drawn sleds. More than just a novel technology, reindeer herding and animal-powered sleds transformed Siberian peoples from hunters to herders and reverberated throughout every aspect of their lives (see Animal Domestication). Freed from precarious lives as hunters, sled traction enabled people to travel long distances in both winter and summer, and by the sixteenth century Chukchi herders had become skilled warriors and traders who successfully resisted the incursions of Russian Cossacks, with whom they fought as well

Figure 13 Armor vest of bone slats and walrus hide from nineteenth century Bering Strait Eskimo. Slat armor first appears about 2000 years ago in Chukotka Old Bering Sea sites (SI-NMNH CL-596).

as traded. Chukchi became powerful middlemen, exchanging Russian and Chinese iron, tobacco, tea, beads, and other goods with Bering Strait Eskimos in return for Alaskan furs, jade, hides, and ivory. Despite its rapid spread throughout northern Eurasia, probably from a South Siberian origin about 2000 years ago, reindeer herding never crossed Bering Strait until the 1890s, when it was introduced in a government experiment to alleviate Eskimo starvation resulting from the near extermination of whales and walrus by American vessels. While these developments were taking place, Northwest Alaskan Eskimos were experiencing more centralized leadership and social control that came with manning whaling crews and dealing with Siberian traders and warriors. One result was that hunting art and ceremony lost its artistically based spiritual value in the communities north of Norton Sound and began a slow decline, until by historic times it survived mainly in southwest Alaska and the Aleutians (Figure 14). South of Bering Strait, the coast was too shallow for large whales, and Thule and Siberian influence was diminished, although warfare became prevalent here also in the late prehistoric period. Somewhat isolated in the resource-rich Yukon–Kuskokwim delta, Bering Sea Central Yup’ik Eskimos fished and hunted seals and walrus, and by historic times had the highest density of any Eskimo population in the Arctic. Living in permanent villages, they maintained a complex ceremonial life, created world-class art comparable to Pacific Eskimos and Northwest Coast Indians (Figure 15), and continued to produce elaborately decorated hunting implements styled in an evolved form of Old Bering Sea art that shows little influence from Punuk or Western Thule culture. Unfortunately, there

Figure 14 Toggling harpoon heads from Ipiutak, Punuk, Old Bering Sea, and Late Punuk cultures (left to right) illustrating decline in decoration of hunting implements in Western Alaska Eskimo cultures between AD 500 and 1000, coincident with the advent of whaling (SI-NMNH A346914l , A346907, A353767; Univ. of Alaska UA85–150–1261).

258 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

Figure 15 Yup’ik Bering Sea Eskimo tunghak festival mask from Lower Yukon River depicting the spirit-controller of game who lived in the moon. Collected in 1879 by Edward Nelson (SI-NMNH 33118).

is almost no archaeological record of the intervening 1500 years in this deeply sedimented, permafrost delta region.

Eastern Arctic: Canada and Greenland The appearance of Punuk whalers in Bering Strait set the stage for the second major cultural wave to wash out of Alaska into the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, disrupting and eventually replacing the Palaeo-Eskimo tradition that had migrated from Alaska 3000 years earlier (Figure 16). Set against the cultural and environmental diversity of Alaska, the Eastern Arctic sequence of Pre-Dorset, Dorset, and Thule cultures appears unilineal and deceptively simple. The Eastern Arctic also exhibits considerable regionalism and cultural diversity, with periods of parallelism in Canada and Greenland and a varied history of European contact. Its independence from Alaska, relative lack of engagement with subarctic Indian cultures, and long periods of cultural stability are its most distinctive features. Excepting the Thule revolution, its prehistory is dominated by a gradualist approach to change, perhaps a cultural response to tightly constrained environmental conditions. Unlike Alaska, where forest cover, submergence, volcanism, earthquakes, tidal waves, and coastal erosion have hindered site discovery, geology and botany in the Eastern Arctic have been friendlier to the archaeologist. Postglacial isostatic uplift has preserved sites associated with former shorelines; absence of shrub and forest cover facilitates site discovery; and limestone bedrock, permafrost, and low

summer temperatures have preserved organic remains throughout much of the region. Culturally and environmentally, the Eastern Arctic is a very different world from the trans-Beringian and Pacific Alaska region. The coast from Barrow to the Mackenzie River, although having abundant caribou, is poor in coastal shelter and marine mammal resources and has long been known as a population void and a cultural and linguistic boundary. Alaskan cultures rarely penetrated further east, and Eastern Arctic cultures rarely influenced Alaska. Once across this threshold, a new ecological ‘basin of attraction’ opens, drawing people eastward. The Mackenzie Delta offers rich fish and beluga resources, and the Canadian Arctic coasts and islands have herds of musk-ox and caribou. The Arctic islands and mainland both have char and other fish. Seals are widely available but lack concentration except in Foxe Basin, Hudson Strait, and the Davis Strait and Labrador Sea coasts, where harp seals, walrus, and sea birds also are abundant. Beluga are present in river mouths and along the southern Arctic coasts, whereas narwhal frequent High Arctic waters. Large whales – bowheads and Greenland right whales – frequent the larger island passages and Davis Strait– Labrador Sea regions, while humpbacks have a subarctic Atlantic range. All of these resources are subject to fluctuations and periodic collapse from factors such as changes in climate, ocean temperature, and sea ice distribution; closing and opening of ice-free polynias; icing of caribou and musk-ox pasture; and forest and tundra fires, predation, and other disruptions. Lacking the insurance policy of Alaska’s large fish runs, Eastern

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2500 Key: Neo-Eskimo (Inuit) Culture Palaeo-Eskimo Culture Greenlandic Norse Figure 16 Culture classification of North Alaska and Eastern Arctic prehistory.

Arctic peoples had to solve subsistence problems with their wits and their feet. Wide-ranging transport, interregional social and economic networks for informationsharing, dispersed demographic structure, flexible social organization, adaptable technologies, intimate knowledge of environmental conditions, and other cultural practices were prerequisites for survival. In the Western Arctic, these characteristics were often overshadowed by trade, politics, and military issues. For human exploitation, this ecological structure created a patchwork of local environments ranging from core or focal resource zones with relatively longterm sustainability, to resource-poor zones where human survival was possible only for short periods or under favorable conditions. This characteristic is best exemplified in Greenland, where Christian Vibe demonstrated correlations between animal population levels, climate, and drift ice cycles, with profound implications for cultural history. Similar models have helped explain episodic, short-term occupations of High Arctic Canada and Greenland, where occupation sequences correlate with warm climate, open polynias, and presence of driftwood and musk-ox or caribou. In these locations, a small pioneering group may exploit local ‘resource capital’ for a few generations during a warm period, only to face an eventual crisis from unsustainable hunting practices, colder climates, or changed ocean currents.

Eastern Palaeo-Eskimo Tradition

About 4200 BP, small bands of ASTt hunters expanding east from northern Alaska colonized Canada’s Arctic Islands, northern Hudson Bay, Greenland, and northern Labrador. Known in three regional variants, Early Pre-Dorset in the central Arctic, Independence I in the High Arctic (Figure 17), and Saqqaq in West Greenland, they hunted caribou and musk-ox with spears and bows and arrows and took sea mammals with small barbed male-socket and open-socket harpoons. Climatic conditions were warm, and driftwood from Siberia and Alaska was widely available. Winter and summer dwellings were simply tents bisected with axial pavements with central fireplaces for roasting and cooking with boiling stones. During the late Early Palaeo-Eskimo period, soapstone oil lamps and slab box boiling stone hearths begin to appear (Figure 18). In addition to harpoons and leisters, stone tools were flaked from colorful cherts and agates and had ritual and aesthetic as well as functional qualities. Over the roughly 1500 year tenure of the Early Palaeo-Eskimo tradition, tool styles changed gradually: serrated edges gave way to straight edges and facial grinding on burins and bifaces increased, and in West Greenland Saqqaq became a dominant feature of lithic technology. Toward the end of this period, Early PalaeoEskimo culture evolved into a new complex known

260 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

Figure 17 Independence I culture artifacts from Peary Land (courtesy of Smithsonian HNAI 1984/Arctic, vol. 5, p. 530, fig. 2).

in northern Greenland as Independence II and in Labrador and Newfoundland as Groswater; it is also sometimes known as Transitional Palaeo-Eskimo (c. 2800–1800 BP). Continuities in axial house form and tools link this phase with Pre-Dorset and Independence I cultures, with whom it also shared subsistence and settlement systems based on winter land hunting and summer coastal hunting of seals and walrus. Soapstone lamps became more common; box hearths were rare; and in Newfoundland a burst of spectacular artistry developed in the manufacture of delicate bifacial points. A remarkable feature of the period is its ‘horizon-style’ distribution. Nearly identical architecture and tool styles occurred throughout the Eastern Arctic; lithic materials and

other commodities were traded great distances; and territorial boundaries reached southern Hudson Bay, southern Labrador, Newfoundland, and eastern Quebec, where it lasted as an outlier until 1800 BP. The centuries after 2500 BP in northern Hudson Bay gave rise to the first phase of the Late Palaeo-Eskimo Dorset culture. With continuity from late Early Palaeo-Eskimo technology and housing, Early Dorset produced several innovations, including improvements in harpoon technology, ground burin-like gravers, tip-fluted points, and introduction of rectangular soapstone cooling vessels. While axial architecture continues, shallow semi-subterranean houses appear for the first time, and their seaward location indicates winter hunting of seals and walrus at the off-shore

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Figure 18 Late Pre-Dorset axial pavement house with box hearth and central oil lamp hearth at Nukasusutok-2 site near Nain, Labrador.

ice edge. Concurrently, hunting of land game declines and a growing economic focus on maritime resources begins, coincident with the onset of the coldest period in the Holocene. Middle Dorset (2200–1200 BP) appears earliest in the Central Arctic core area and replaces or transforms Early Dorset in Labrador about 1800 BP, lasting until c. 1400 BP. Except in Newfoundland, where a regional Groswater-influenced variant develops, Middle Dorset technology changes are largely stylistic. Winter sod houses become larger, deeper, and sometimes have shallow entrance passageways (Figure 19). Intensification of sea mammal hunting from fall to spring from sina-oriented land-based villages reaches its peak, producing thick middens filled with the bones of seals, walrus, ducks, divers, and sea birds, sometimes caribou. Middle Dorset middens often contain ritual objects like masks, effigies, bone shaman’s teeth, and art pieces carved from soapstone, ivory, antler, and sometimes wood, as well as complex multi-ply cordage made from musk-ox hair. During this period, Dorset sites shift southward, disappearing from High Arctic Canada and northern

Greenland, and large village sites like Port au Choix develop in western Newfoundland near winter harp seal-hunting grounds. Late Dorset (1300–700 BP) brings warmer climate that induced a resurgence of Dorset people back to the High Arctic islands and western Victoria Island, probably by population expansion from Central Arctic and Baffin core areas, and initiated changes in housing and settlement patterns. In Labrador, Middle Dorset sod dwellings are replaced by large fall tent camps with axial pavements having two or three hearths, and lithic tools document stylistic change from Middle Dorset implements. Abandonment of winter-long dwelling sites suggests people had developed a more specialized adaptation to winter ice hunting and were living in snow-house dwellings at the ice edge. As a result, Late Dorset middens are thin and often lack organics due to absence of permafrost. Where preservation occurs, especially in the Central Arctic, Late Dorset exhibits an explosion of animal carvings, human figurines (Figure 20), amulets, human-face mask petroglyphs, shamans’ paraphernalia, and ornaments, in addition to finely crafted boxes,

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Figure 19 Plan of Middle Dorset winter house at Koliktalik, near Nain, Labrador.

containers, harpoons, and other implements. This period also exhibits a striking new settlement type: large summer gathering sites containing multifamily ‘longhouses’ with rock walls and internal hearth alcoves, or sometimes just wall-less open-air hearth rows (Figure 21). Scores of longhouses, interpreted as seasonal gathering sites to affirm social solidarity, facilitate trade and spouse exchange, and conduct religious ceremonies, have been found throughout Dorset territory, absent only in Labrador, where this phase is missing until after 900 BP due to Indian occupation of the coast. Late Dorset people also began to obtain meteoric iron from the Cape York meteor fall in Greenland for use as knife and harpoon blades, and occasional pieces of smelted Norse copper and iron. Ronald Nash once described the Palaeo-Eskimo tradition as a tightly constrained system. This is an

apt description for a culture that adapted to harsh environmental pressures by fine-tuning its program rather than exploring new approaches, technologies, or subsistence strategies. Palaeo-Eskimos were highly traditional people whose house architecture, tool types and styles, and general way of life changed little over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Some of their customs were strangely maladaptive, like the disappearance of the bow and arrow and the twist drill, both present in Early Palaeo-Eskimo culture. What did change was a gradual shift from a land- to a marinedominated economy, from surface tents to sod houses, and, in Late Dorset, introduction of snow-house dwellings. Dorset people also developed an increasingly integrated social network involving trade and ritual exchange, and more elaborate shamanistic art evolved. Dorset people seem not to have interacted with Indians,

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 263

even when they occupied southern Labrador, Newfoundland, and Quebec territories where Indian groups were close neighbors. Other than possible Choris influence in the Early Dorset Lagoon Complex in the Western Canadian Arctic, there is little evidence of interactions to the west and marginal contact with the Norse. Pre-Dorset and Dorset people seem to have lived in a self-circumscribed world, interacting only with each other and their spirits. That they did so successfully for 3000 years is a remarkable achievement

for a network of small societies inhabiting a vast region linked only by tenuous threads of social contact and economic exchange. Archaeologists have sought to explain both continuities and discontinuities in Palaeo-Eskimo cultural sequences with the aid of ecological and biogeographic models. Although research and debate continue, archaeological evidence supports the general validity of a biocultural ‘core area’ and ‘core pulsation’ models in Eastern Arctic prehistory. Long-term cultural continuity and evolutionary development is most evident in the resource-rich Central Arctic corridor from Igloolik to the Atlantic coast, while discontinuous sequences and voids are documented in peripheral regions, including Greenland. Secondarily, the causes of culture change in the northern peripheries is usually absence or depletion of resources due to climate change or unsustainable hunting, whereas abandonment and repopulation of extended southern peripheries like Labrador and Newfoundland is a function of interethnic (Indian) competition. Eastern Neo-Eskimo Tradition

Figure 20 Middle Dorset soapstone figurine from Shuldham Island, Saglek, Labrador (The Rooms/Newfoundland Museum).

Sometime after 1000 BP, the archaic spiritual prism through which Dorset people viewed their world shattered. The sudden arrival of groups of Alaskan whale-hunters may not have been catastrophic initially, because the Alaskans were few and their settlements were confined to the northernmost waterways of the Central Arctic. Successful bowhead hunts provided huge stores of meat, oil, and dog food, making it unlikely that Early Thule people competed directly with Dorset hunters at first. However, the appearance of outsiders with sinew-backed bows, large umiaks, sleds drawn by teams of wolf-like dogs, capable of taking large whales, and having different beliefs and spirits and a more competitive style of interaction

Figure 21 Late Dorset longhouse foundation, Ellesmere Island (photograph by Peter Schledermann).

264 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

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Figure 22 Neo-Eskimo traditional house types from West Greenland: (a) Classic Thule; (b) eighteenth-century Communal house; (c) developed Thule.

honed by the more intense Alaskan social scene must have sent shock waves through Dorset society. First identified by Therkel Mathiassen at village sites in the Thule District of northwest Greenland, Mathiassen later found Thule sites throughout the Central Canadian Arctic (Figure 22). Later, after sites with similar tools and house types were found in Alaska, the Thule designation was applied to the entire group, subdivided into Western Thule and Eastern Thule. With the discovery of Western Arctic harpoon heads and pottery in the earliest Thule villages in Canada and Northwest Greenland, Bering Strait was quickly identified as the original NeoEskimo homeland. Later studies in Barrow showed the Birnirk culture, c. eighth to tenth century, to be the most likely parent for the eastward Thule migration, which was then thought to have taken place between AD 900 and 1000. Re-analysis of radiocarbon dates by David Morrison and Robert McGhee have refined earlier views of the Thule migration. Rather than being a massive influx, evidence now suggests movements by one or more small Alaskan founding groups over a century or more beginning about AD 1200. The earliest Thule culture sites in Canada and Greenland date to 1300 and probably originated, not from Birnirk sites at Barrow, but from Punuk sites in Bering Strait. McGhee and Allen McCartney had earlier suggested that the Thule movement was initiated by climatic warming that opened leads in the formerly ice-bound Canadian Arctic islands, allowing Pacific bowhead whale migrations and their Thule pursuers to move east. Biologists have documented genetic exchange between the Pacific and Atlantic stocks dating to this period; but proof that Punuk whalers moved east only to access new whaling opportunities is circumstantial. While this remains a likely scenario, the Thule movement may have resulted from a desire by Alaskan whalers to

replace expensive Siberian iron with a cheaper commodity from the Cape York meteor fall in northwest Greenland, or from reports of Norse trade. This revision has required rethinking the muchdebated Dorset–Thule transition, which posited a two-stage model: avoidance and acculturation. The first stage explained the absence of Dorset–Thule contact from AD 1000 to AD 1300 as the result of mutual avoidance, Dorset extinction, or complete Dorset assimilation by Thule people. After AD 1300, the appearance of Dorset Parallel harpoon heads, snow-knives, soapstone lamps and pots, and other Dorset tool types in ‘modified’ or ‘developed’ Thule sites suggested a second phase of contact dominated by acculturation. Inuit oral traditions speak about contacts with ‘Tunit’, a large, clumsy people who first inhabited the country and hunted walrus and built large stone structures. These stories are often thought to describe Dorset longhouses; but they may as likely be late Thule survivors, whose sites were constructed with large rocks. This issue has been connected with the ancestry of the Sallirmiut (Sadlermiut), an Inuit people of northern Hudson Bay who some believe was a Thule-acculturated Dorset group. At present, the best evidence for Thule–Dorset chronological overlap comes from East Hudson Bay, Ungava, and Labrador, where Dorset sites continued until AD 1400–50. The later Thule migration dates shorten the period of Dorset–Thule overlap to little more than a century, providing a better explanation for the limited evidence of contact and exchange. It also helps explain why Norse did not encounter Thule people in West Greenland until c. 1350 (Figure 23). In both Canada and Greenland, a case can be made for Dorset elements persisting in Thule and later Inuit societies in what Gullv calls the ‘parallel tradition’ – the persistence of ancestral Alaskan and Dorset harpoon head styles and other

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Figure 23 Culture distributions in the Eastern Arctic between AD 900 and 1500.

elements from Early Thule to the modern day. (This characteristic of dual styles has been described in other archaeological instances as a ‘co-tradition’.) First European Arrivals: The Norse

Unlike Europe, nineteenth-century North America never experienced a period of romantic nationalism celebrating the historical origins of its people, language, and culture in the 1830–70s. (However, emergence of the ‘mound-builder’ myth that began in this period responded to a romantic recreation of a lost Pre-Columbia Indian culture.) At that time still a nation of immigrants, there was little conception of a distinct ‘Canadian’ or ‘American’ identity. Nevertheless, immigrant groups searched for ways to reconnect with their former European homelands, and for

Scandinavian immigrants this meant discovering Vikings in America. (Although the term ‘Viking’ is often used interchangeably with ‘Norse’, the former properly refers to marauding, non-Christian Scandinavian warrior-farmers of the eighth to tenth centuries in Europe, who were known in their Nordic homelands as Danes, Norwegians, or Swedes. Those who settled in Iceland and Greenland and visited North America (Vinland) in the tenth to thirteenth centuries are more properly known as Norse, who by this time were Christianized and rarely went ‘a-Viking’. Nevertheless, popular usage of ‘Viking’ continues in North America even though it is culturally and chronologically incorrect; see . By the 1840s, the Icelandic Vinland sagas had been translated into English and Norse sites were

266 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

thought to exist in New England; in 1893, a replica Viking ship crossed the Atlantic and visited the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and in 1898 the Kensington ‘rune stone’ was found in Minnesota by Swedish immigrant farmer Olaf Ohman. Although discounted by archaeologists and linguists, the Kensington Rune Stone continues to find support among Scandinavian–American avocational scholars. So far, the only verified Viking site west of Greenland is at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. Arguably occupied by Leif Erikson and subsequently by Thorfin Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid around the year 1000, the site was used as a staging location or ‘gateway’ for exploring the region Norse called ‘Vinland,’ notably, Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Although saga accounts describe both friendly and hostile relations with ‘skraelings’, the only archaeological evidence of Native American contact at L’Anse aux Meadows is a Late Dorset soapstone lamp found in the site’s smithy. A Norwegian coin dating to the reign of Norwegian King Olaf Kyrre (AD 1065–1080), minted seven decades after the Vinland voyages, found at the Goddard site on the coast of Maine is the only authentic Norse artifact south of Newfoundland. By contrast, excavations at Dorset and Thule sites in Arctic Canada and Greenland have produced scores of Norse materials and implements, most dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These pieces include artifacts made from Norse copper and iron, a figurine depicting a Norseman wearing a long tunic (Figure 24), bronze bowl fragments, a bronze trade balance arm, cordage spun from sheep wool, and from a single site on Ellesmere Island across from Thule, Greenland, a trove of Norse goods including woven wool sailcloth, a carpenter’s plane, iron rivets, pieces of chain mail, and other objects that Thule Inuit probably scavenged from a wrecked Norse expedition. The wide distribution of these finds (Figure 25) suggests a pattern of Norse contacts with Late Dorset and Early Thule people between AD 1250 and 1350, when Norse were seeking ivory for European trade. These contacts ceased when the Norse Western Settlement was abandoned around 1350, when the Little Ice Age began to set in, reducing farm and wool production, restricting navigation and trade with Europe, and bringing seals and Inuit hunters south into Norse territories. By 1450, the last remaining Norse holding, the Eastern Settlement, was abandoned and taken by Inuit, and Greenland disappeared from European history for 300 years. Until recently, studies of Norse Greenland had a strong medievalist and historical orientation. New findings based on anthropological, interdisciplinary, and international approaches have turned past theories

Figure 24 Eskimo carving of a European in a long tunic found in a fourteenth-century Thule house in southern Baffin Island (Photograph by Peter Harholdt, NMNH CMC Je-Dq-7: 325*).

like Norse demise from Inuit–Norse hostility, Inuit absorption, miscegenation, or migration to the New World on their heads. Greenland Norse were Christian farmers, not pagan Vikings, and in their heyday (c. AD 1000–1300) developed a society that flourished on the outer fringe of Europe, raising scores of churches and delivering wool, ivory, falcons, narwhal tusks, polar bears, and other Arctic commodities to European markets, churches, and courts. Their expansion across the North Atlantic took place in AD 800–1000 during a warm climatic period that made even Greenland suitable for Nordic animal husbandry. Discovering Southwest Greenland unoccupied, Erik the Red established two settlements in 985 and within 15 years his son Leif embarked on his Vinland explorations. When this venture failed due to its distance from Greenland and resistance from Native Americans, the Norse turned to building their Greenland colony into a thriving Christian

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Figure 25 Distribution of Norse artifacts found in Dorset and Thule sites in the Eastern Arctic. An Indian arrowhead from the Newfoundland–Labrador region was found in the Sandnes Viking graveyard in Greenland. Not shown is the Goddard site, in Maine, which produced a Norwegian penny in a Late Woodland Indian context.

society with a peak population of 3000–5000. Although there were no further attempts to colonize Vinland, ships from Greenland and Iceland traveled to Markland (Labrador) periodically for timber, fur, hides, and other products – trading or losing a Norwegian penny to Natives in the process – and some voyages must have been made to Baffin, Ellesmere, and the Thule District to account for Norse finds in Dorset and Thule sites in these regions. As the warm climate turned cooler in the 1300s, life became more difficult and the northernmost Norse farms began to be abandoned. Western voyages to Canada ceased and the Norse implemented new agricultural practices and supplemented their diet with marine resources. The appearance of sea ice, seals, and walrus soon brought Thule people south into the Norse districts, and while Norse and Inuit interacted, as they had earlier in the Disko-Upernavik walrus hunting grounds the Norse called the nordrsetur, they did not adopt Inuit technology or dress, and until the very end of the Eastern Settlement, remained European and Christian, maintained their churches, and imported the latest in European clothing fashion.

But by this time the Norse and their animal numbers had grown too large to be sustained under the deteriorating climatic regime. Their decline and eventual disappearance resulted from production losses, isolation from Iceland and Europe, and unwillingness to adopt an Inuit-style hunting way of life. Outside their colonies, Norse presence did not transform the cultures or lives of Dorset or Thule or Indian groups. Other than introducing highly sought-after new materials – copper, bronze, and iron for refashioning into their own cultural types; colored woven cloth and beads for use as accents in adornment and clothing styles; hardwoods for certain tools, and possibly stave construction for buckets and pails – Norse impact on Inuit material culture was minimal. Even the Norse-influenced Inussuk (Inugsuk) culture of West Greenland (c. AD 1400–1600) that utilized artifacts (spoons, shears, buckets, bodkins) traded or scavenged from abandoned Norse sites remained squarely in the Thule tradition. More important than artifact imports was Inuit recognition that Europeans could supply novel and useful raw materials. The military danger was minimal for

268 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

well-armed Thule people; however, Dorset were severely disadvantaged by their lack of bows, dogs, and large boats. Like Dorset–Thule and Norse–Thule contact studies, Norse interactions with Dorset culture have become a topic of recent study. Patricia Sutherland has begun exploring the possibility that fabric weaving, European wood and wood-working techniques, metal, carved images of Europeans, and twisted cordage found in Dorset sites result from exchange or contact with Norse. While Norse materials are found with some regularity in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Dorset sites and have been attributed to both direct and indirect contact, the idea that Dorset adopted Norse technologies like fabric weaving and wood-craft skills remains unproven. Historic Period

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, major culture changes were underway throughout much of the Eastern Arctic. The Norse colonies were in final decline; an Inussuk Thule variant was forming in West Greenland; and Thule people in the Central Arctic were finding it difficult to hunt whales as the Arctic passages became choked by ice. Loss of whale products needed for dog food and winter survival required a subsistence shift toward winter breathing-hole sealing and snow-house settlements on the ice. The new summer land-based and winter ice-hunting pattern remained the basis for Inuit life in the Central Arctic until the twentieth century. Elsewhere, in Baffin, Labrador, and Greenland, Thule people continued to hunt whales in the more open Atlantic waters but changed radically in other ways as a result of European engagement. In the mid1500s, as Thule culture expanded south along the Labrador coast, displacing Dorset and Innu (Indian) groups, they became attracted by European activities in southern Labrador and Newfoundland. Sixteenthcentury Basque records tell of Inuit raids and sporadic encounters that mark the earliest instance of Inuit engagement with modern Europeans in the Eastern Arctic, 200 years before post-Norse European contact began in Greenland and 300 years before Europeans began to regularly visit the Central Arctic or Alaska. Nevertheless, in West Greenland, Baffin, and Labrador, the Thule whaling economy persisted into the eighteenth century (Figure 26), when these societies entered a period of reorganization stimulated by European contact, despite Little Ice Age conditions. By this time, Eastern Inuit were involved in a flourishing trade in baleen, whale oil, walrus ivory, and sea mammal hides with Dutch and other European vessels operating in the Davis Strait–Labrador Sea region. The introduction, first, of metal tools and wooden

boats and, later, of a widening array of European products resulted in major changes in economy, settlement patterns, housing forms, and social and, eventually, religious life. Inuit communities increased in number and size, and despite demographic reversals from epidemics, achieved population peaks during the late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Indian Cultures in Labrador

While Palaeo-Eskimo and Neo-Eskimo groups have lived along Labrador’s tundra coast for the past 4000 years, their occupancy of this Arctic/Subarctic transition zone represents only a part of the geographic and chronological scope of this Arctic transition region (Figure 27). With the exception of the Torngat Mountain range of northern Labrador which was a glacial refugia during the late glacial period, the entire region was covered with glacial ice at the end of the Pleistocene. When ice retreated into the interior, Indian groups moved north into the ice-free coastal zone of southern Labrador by 9000 years ago and by 7000 BP had reached northern Labrador and discovered the Ramah Bay quarries, whose unlimited supplies of distinctive, high-quality chert made it the favored stone tool material for almost all later Labrador cultures. The early Indian cultures dating to 9000–3500 BP are known as the Labrador Maritime Archaic tradition. Allied with a closely related tradition reaching south to Maine, these were a seafaring people who developed a complex maritime-based culture at the edge of the Arctic. Even without Arctic adaptations such as oil lamps and skin boats, they were successful hunters of land and sea mammals and developed toggling harpoons, made large wood boats, and displayed elaborate artistic and ceremonial traditions, including rock mound burials and in later times cemeteries containing red ocher graves furnished with large deposits of tools and ornaments of potlatch proportions. Ceremonial intensification in mortuary traditions was paralleled by developments in settlement patterns from single-family dwellings to large kin-based longhouses accommodating 25–30 family units and long-distance trade in Ramah chert, copper, and other exotic materials. About 4200 BP, their world was shaken when Palaeo-Eskimos arrived in northern Labrador from the Central Arctic, moving into the central coast and displacing Maritime Archaic peoples who had been using the north coast Ramah chert quarries for two millennia. Despite this setback, Late Maritime Archaic people reached an accommodation with Pre-Dorset people and for 500 years maintained a summer settlement enclave in the midst of Pre-Dorset territory where they hunted caribou and quarried Ramah chert, which they used and traded to others

AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions 269

Figure 26 Greenland Inuit whaling in Greenland from 1925 reprint of Hans Egede’s Description of Greenland, 1741 (courtesy of Joseph F. Cullman 3rd LIbrary of Natural History, SI-NMNH).

far to the south in one of the most remarkable trade distributions of any material known in prehistoric America. After 3500 BP, the Maritime Archaic disappeared from Labrador and was replaced by a succession of Dorset, Inuit, and Indian cultures ancestral to the region’s modern Innu peoples. When temperatures were warm, these Indian cultures expanded to the coastal tree limit in northern Labrador and utilized Ramah chert; during cooler periods (2800–1500 BP) the Labrador coasts were taken over by southward expanding Dorset Palaeo-Eskimo groups, and Indian groups retreated into forested regions. After 1300 BP, proto-Innu peoples moved onto the coast again, and Dorset people withdrew from Newfoundland and Central Labrador, initiating a long period of Indian occupancy and Ramah chert use that continued until Thule whale-hunters moved south and replaced them throughout the coast after AD 1400.

The culture and environmental history now available makes Labrador a model region for studies of long-term culture and environmental interactions at the Arctic/Subarctic border. In many instances, climate and environmental change appear to have stimulated shifts in Indian and Eskimo boundaries and culture areas. The growth of Maritime Archaic complexity between 9000 and 3500 BP during a period of warm, stable climate contrasts strongly with the succeeding 3000 years of cooler conditions in which a succession of Indian cultures experienced many technological, stylistic, and settlement shifts. Most territorial changes in this Indian–Eskimo territorial ‘see-saw’ resulted from periodic Eskimo expansions during which Indians lost access to the resource-rich coastal zone and were confined to the interior and its unpredictable caribou economy. At other times, Indian groups took over coastal regions and forced Eskimos to retreat into Arctic regions of Labrador.

270 AMERICAS, NORTH/Arctic and Circumpolar Regions

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Figure 27 Culture history of Labrador demonstrating tundraforest zone history and shifting boundaries of Eskimo and Subarctic Indian cultures (after Fitzhugh 2002, p. 129).

Less clear is why later Indian cultures exhibit 300–400-year cycles of culture change – perhaps from resource instability, ethnic conflict, and repopulation from different cultures to the south. One thing is certain: many of the changes seen in the culture history of the Arctic have been strongly influenced by environmental and climatic change. (See http://forces. si.edu for a presentation accompanying the Smithsonian’s exhibition, Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely, illustrating interactions between climate, environment, animals, and human cultures and activities in the Arctic over the past 15 000 years.)

Conclusion: North America and the Circumpolar Arctic This entry is not complete without reference to the rest of the Arctic world. Ultimately, all native peoples of the Americas have Asian origins, but as the foregoing discussion has documented, Alaskan cultures have a long history of direct and indirect contacts

with Asia. All of Alaska’s earliest cultures with the exception of fluted points have Siberian antecedents. Asian-derived Mesolithic microblade traditions dominated Alaska’s mid-Holocene cultures, and Alaska’s cultural development after 4000 BP exhibits many instances of Asian contacts, influences, and population movements. Unlike other areas of the Americas, its Arctic peoples and cultures have participated in circumpolar Eurasian Arctic and Far East cultural history for thousands of years, and owe more to these influences than to other Native North American cultures. Arctic peoples in Eurasia as well as in the Americas have been dynamic and highly resourceful. They developed new technologies, pioneered new territories, and found ways to broaden or intensify their resource base by adding specialized strategies for exploiting climatically harsh but ecologically productive Arctic seas. Proceeding from terrestrial hunters to generalized coastal foragers, to hunters of seals, sea lions, walrus, and eventually highly specialized hunters of large whales – and in Eurasia, herders of domesticated reindeer – Arctic peoples not only learned to support larger, more permanent communities, but they also expanded contacts with neighbors and other cultures, and in Alaska, Chukotka, and Scandinavia developed complex social and political systems, engaged in regional warfare, and interacted with their southern neighbors. Even though the Eastern Arctic had harsher climate and fewer resources and opportunities, its cultures survived for 4500 years, produced world-class art, and successfully engaged Europeans for 1000 years, and it is they through their contacts with Martin Frobisher and later explorers and scientists who gave us the concept, ‘Eskimo’. See also: Americas, North: Sub-arctic; Animal Domesti-

cation; Craft Specialization; Cultural Ecology; Interpretive Art and Archaeology; Maritime Archaeology; New World, Peopling of; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Seasonality of Site Occupation; Ships and Seafaring.

Further Reading Crowell AL, Steffian AF, and Pullar GL (eds.) (2001) Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Damas D (ed.) (1984) Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 5: Arctic. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Dumond DE (1987) The Eskimos and Aleuts, rev. edn. London: Thames and Hudson. Dumond DE (ed.) (2001) University of Oregon Anthropological Papers, Vol. 58: Archaeology in the Aleut Zone of Alaska: Some Recent Research. Eugene: University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Fitzhugh WW (2002) Yamal to Greenland: Global connections in circumpolar archaeology. In: Cunliffe B, Davies W, and Renfrew C

AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada 271 (eds.) Archaeology: the Widening Debate, pp. 91–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzhugh WW and Ward E (eds.) (2000) Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Giddings JL and Anderson DD (2006) National Park Service Publications in Archaeology, No. 20: Beach Ridge Archaeology of Cape Krusenstern. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior. Gilberg R and Gullv HC (eds.) (1996) Ethnographic Series 18: Fifty Years of Arctic Research: Anthropological Studies from Greenland to Siberia. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark. Grnnow B (ed.) (1998) The Paleo-Eskimo cultures of Greenland: New Perspectives in Greenlandic Archaeology. Copenhagen: Danish Polar Center. Gullv HC (1997) Meddelelser om Gronland. Man and Society 23: From Middle Ages to Colonial Times. Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Studies of the Thule Culture in South West Greenland 1300–1800 AD. Copenhagen: Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland. Gullv HC (ed.) (2003) Greenland Prehistory (in Danish). Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Maxwell M (ed.) (1976) Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology 31: Eastern Arctic Prehistory: Paleoeskimo Problems. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Maxwell M (1985) Prehistory of the Eastern Arctic. Orlando: Academic Press. McGhee R (1996) Ancient People of the Arctic. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Schledermann P (1996) Komatik Series 5: Voices in Stone. A Personal Journey into the Arctic Past. Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary.

Relevant Websites http://forces.si.edu – Forces of Change, Smithsonian National Musuem of Natural History. http://www.mnh.si.edu/ – Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

California and the Sierra Nevada Michael R Walsh, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Bison antiquus Extinct Pleistocene ancestor of the American buffalo, Bison bison. California pattern Hunting and gathering lifestyle fundamentally dependent on the acorn as a food staple. logistical strategy Settlement system that features a permanent or semipermanent residential village which serves as a home base from which seasonal resource collecting excursions are carried out.

metate Stone slab with a coarse, flat-to-slightly concave surface used for grinding and pulverizing seeds and other plant products. Stationary compliment to the ‘mano’. Word of Uto-Aztecan origin. mano Hand-held stone used to grind seeds and other edible plant materials. Compliment to the ‘metate’. Word derived from Spanish ‘hand’. protoagriculture Purposeful manipulation of wild plants to increase their productivity. Includes culling, watering, pruning, and intentionally burning tracts of land to promote new growth. site furniture Artifacts purposefully left at selected site locations in anticipation of future use during scheduled return visits. Typically heavy or cumbersome tools. Firmly suggests habitual seasonal movements within a defined territory. tomol Ocean-going canoe of the Chumash, southern California. Permitted deep-sea fishing and long-range trade, and was thus a significant source of wealth and prestige for its owner. Word derived from Chumash language.

Humans have been in all parts of modern California since at least the end of the Pleistocene Era, 10 000 to 14 000 years ago. Extinctions and other factors brought to an end the Ice Age focus on hunting of large game animals, and for the next 6000 years or more hunter-gatherers in California diversified their ways of life in adaptation to increasingly variable local environmental conditions. Regional cultural and technological adaptations were so successful that steady population growth was essentially universal, and population growth encouraged inventive measures to increase environmental productivity. Without the practical option of agriculture, many of California’s huntergatherers turned to the acorn 3000 to 4000 years ago. Until that time the acorn was little-used in California, perhaps as a ‘starvation food’, but regional population growth eventually warranted the complex leaching process needed to render the acorn edible. Thus began what archaeologists refer to as the ‘California Pattern’. This way of life is unified by the economic significance of the acorn, but is expressed in regional cultural histories and local adaptations so varied that California has become a premier location for studying hunter-gatherer diversity not just through time, but also over space. Geographic divisions of the sort shown in Figure 1 have a tendency to lump general culture histories, although it must be emphasized that significant intra-regional variability characterizes the prehistory of California.

Ice Age Hunters All Pleistocene Californians are known as PalaeoIndians, with a benchmark provided essentially by the appearance of the Clovis spear point: PalaeoIndian sites are either Clovis sites or pre-Clovis sites. Pre-Clovis sites are assumed to be greater than 10 000–14 000 years old, and are inevitably the

272 AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada

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Figure 1 Regional divisions and selected California localities in California.

subject of heated controversy. Nowhere is the controversy more apparent than at Calico, perhaps the most famous archaeological site in California. Located in the Mojave Desert, the Calico Site (Figure 1) has revealed deeply buried sediments yielding thermoluminescence and uranium/thorium dates of 135 000 and 200 000 BP, respectively, among the oldest dates ever proposed for occupation of the New World. Despite their apparent extravagance, it is not the dates themselves that are at issue. The controversy revolves around whether more than 20 000 stones recovered

from these mid-Pleistocene strata are indeed tools manufactured by humans. The overwhelming consensus among professional archaeologists today is that they are not, but instead are ‘geofacts’, rocks that were cracked and faceted by natural processes. An assemblage of undisputed stone tools has been recovered from Calico, but from substantially later deposits near the site’s surface. Most archaeologists today believe that Pre-Clovis discoveries will eventually be made in California, but almost certainly not at the Calico Site.

AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada 273

Less nebulous is California’s Clovis Period (c. 14 000–10 000 BP) but there is still room for controversy. Most of the evidence for Clovis comes from the shores of long-dead lakes, suggesting a distinctive lacustrine focus on the hunting of large game animals. However, archaeologists recognize that a dramatic rise in sea level over the last 10 000 years may have obscured an untold number of ancient sites along the Pacific coast, and that historical disturbances (mining, agriculture) and natural processes of erosion may have concealed or destroyed ancient sites in Valley and Foothill contexts. So it is perhaps the lack of data, or rather a bias in the data that has led to the characterization of a technologically and economically unified Ice Age in California. Moreover, problems plague many or most of the 400 Clovis points confirmed statewide. This is because the majority of Clovis points have been isolated finds, lacking in additional archaeological associations, or surface finds lacking stratigraphic context. More vexing still, the majority of Clovis points from California have been recovered by private collectors, and many points have come to the attention of archaeologists only some years after their initial collection. Perhaps the most significant region for the study of Clovis people in California is at Tulare Lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley (Figure 1). An overwhelming majority of the Clovis points discovered in California have come from the shores and near vicinity of this extinct, ancient lake. In addition, a wide variety of stone tools have been recovered, especially scraping tools and tools presumed to be used for working wood and bone. Extinct mammal species abound, including Colombian mammoth, sloth, and Bison antiquus. In combination, Tulare Lake has a remarkable potential for study of Clovis hunting, tool manufacture and use, typology, and raw material selection. Unfortunately, nearly all of the Clovis materials at and around Tulare Lake have been churned and displaced by twentieth-century agricultural practices, and a wide majority of Clovis artifacts – including all of the points – were collected privately. To date, reports of extinct fauna in association with Clovis remains are anecdotal at best, and extensive, intact Clovis deposits have yet to be investigated by professional archaeologists from start to finish. Still, no place in California holds the promise of Tulare Lake for further understanding of Clovis people in California. Two additional regions have yielded multiple Clovis finds: 20 fluted points have been recovered from the Borax Lake region of the North Coast Range and 15 have been reported from the shores of China Lake in the northern Mojave Desert (Figure 1). Although these finds have a better record of controlled recovery

than is the rule at Tulare Lake, many are from surface contexts. These lakes also reveal Pleistocene fauna but, as at Tulare Lake, none is unambiguously associated with Clovis artifacts. So far, the ancient shores of Tulare, Borax, and China Lakes have provided by far the best window to the Clovis Period, but the view is far from clear at this time.

Early Holocene Diversification At the close of the Pleistocene, warmer temperatures and decreased precipitation led to desiccation of ancient lakes and widespread extinction of megafauna. This begins the Early Holocene epoch, in which native Californians diversified their lifestyle in accordance with minor differences in local environmental conditions. While archaeological assemblages suggest continued emphasis on hunting of large modern mammals, diet diversified to include increasing amounts of regionally distinctive plant foods, smaller mammals, and small amounts of freshwater and marine shellfish. Increased numbers of sites, as well as discovery of limited-use sites, suggest a highly mobile lifestyle, probably of small family groups foraging far and wide over the course of the year, rarely returning to the same location twice. Among the best known of these Early Holocene cultures are the San Diegito who plied the coastal regions, hills, valleys and deserts of southern California between about 7000–8000 and 10 000 BP. Large, coarse stone knives and projectile points suggest continued emphasis on large mammals such as deer; but bone assemblages from San Diegito sites suggest greatly increased hunting of small mammals, especially rabbits. Additional crude stone implements include drills and engraving tools, perhaps used to work bone or wood. Although bone tools are not characteristic of San Diegito sites until the later stages of the era, wooden objects are not expected to preserve, and may have been present throughout the time frame. The potential for wooden tools, as well as a wide variety of heavy scraping and chopping tools, hints at increased levels of plant exploitation, or something more than focused butchering of game. By the end of the San Diegito Period, grinding implements of stone (manos, metates) appeared, suggesting expansion of the diet to include hard seeds; bone awls indicate basket-making, a craft probably designed to assist in gathering plant foods; and the San Diegito expanded their diet to include small quantities of marine shellfish. In all, the San Diegito entered the time frame as focused hunters of large game and exited as generalized hunter-gatherers. The expansion of habitat and dietary breadth was probably encouraged by,

274 AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada

and in turn permissive of, steady population growth despite what was, from the Clovis perspective at least, a deteriorated environment. Synonyms for the San Diegito time frame include the statewide designations Early Holocene, Early Archaic, and the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition; the Lake Mojave Tradition of the deserts; Buena Vista of the Central Valley; and the Borax Lake (Post) Pattern of northern California.

Middle Holocene Elaboration and Innovation Where Early Holocene cultures entered new ecological niches, the Middle Holocene (c. 4000–7000 BP) developed elaborate and innovative strategies and technologies designed to more fully exploit those niches. The Middle Holocene lifestyle gradually came to revolve around gathered plant foods. In most regions, hunting of small mammals surpassed deer and other remaining large mammal species in importance. It is also during this timeframe that evidence is found for the first concerted efforts to methodically exploit the Pacific littoral, especially for shellfish. But particularly noteworthy is that, by the end of the phase, the acorn began to be exploited, around 4000 BP. The general time frame 4000–7000 BP is here designated as the Milling Stone Horizon, and represents a time when California’s ‘hunter-gatherers’ first became ‘gatherer-hunters’. As the designation implies, Milling Stone sites are dominated by large grinding slabs, basin metates, manos, and significant numbers of hammerstones, choppers and large ‘scraper-planes’, all of which are known ethnographically as plantprocessing tools. Significantly, projectile points and other flaked stone tools greatly diminished in frequency. In coastal regions, shellfish were gathered in great quantities, while parts inland increasingly saw rabbits and other small mammal species supplant deer as the usual target species. Emphasis was on gathering (plants, shellfish) while taking of game appears to have been largely opportunistic. But the Milling Stone is characterized by more than a general shift in subsistence resources: it witnessed significant changes in social and economic organization. Milling Stone sites suggest increased size of the basic social group. Whereas Early Holocene assemblages suggest at most two or three families in brief residence, and often just a single family group, traveling groups of the Middle Holocene Milling Stone may have numbered 5–10 families or more (20–50 people). In addition, Milling Stone gatherer-hunters appear to have returned time and again to preferred locations, leaving behind at each campsite entire tool kits, or ‘site furniture’. Formal cemeteries with multiple interments

first appeared during the Milling Stone and further suggest repetitive and anticipated reoccupation of habitual territories. These sites also record the first significant amounts of ‘nonutilitarian’ items, including shell and bone beads, shell and stone pendants and perforated ‘cog-stones’. Cog stones, also called ‘donut stones’ in view of their size and appearance, often feature the toothed circumference of a gear, and rival the metate as the ‘type artifact’ of the Milling Stone south of Santa Barbara County. Their function is enigmatic, although many archaeologists suspect they are weights for digging sticks or, in delicate examples, symbolic representations of digging stick weights. That a ‘digging stick weight’ should become emblematic of a culture clearly demonstrates the primacy of the collecting strategy in the Milling Stone economy. Evidence from the central Pacific coast (Figure 1) further suggests the primacy of plant gathering, which may have been so important that gender-based division of labor disappeared. In particular, there appear to be no clear gender distinctions in the nature of grave goods or other aspects of human interment. Stereotypical gender divisions may have become obscured in the face of the primacy of plant collection and the diminished role of hunting in the diet. The statewide pattern of the Milling Stone emphasis on gathering of plant foods is truly violated only in the desert regions of the state, but only in the sense that Milling Stones never outnumber presumptive hunting gear. The timeframe in the desert is referred to as the Pinto Period, named for the Pinto Basin in the eastern Mojave Desert where it was first defined. Nevertheless, Pinto people shared changes in overall organization with their Milling Stone contemporaries, including repetitive site visitation within habitual territories, increased size of the traveling group, and increased reliance on small mammals and plant foods. Regional synonyms for the Milling Stone include the state-wide designations Middle Holocene and the Middle Archaic Period, the Early Milling Stone and the Encinitas Tradition of southern California in general, the Pauma Culture of inland San Diego County, the La Jolla Period of coastal San Diego and Orange Counties, the Topanga Culture of Los Angeles County, the Oak Grove Period of Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, the Borax Lake Pattern of the North Coast Range and, as noted, the Pinto Period in the deserts.

Late Holocene Intensification The success of the Milling Stone adaptation is measured by steady population growth which, despite the technological mastery of plant and other

AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada 275

collectable foods, eventually outran productivity. In order to maintain the status quo, gatherer-hunters investigated alternative resources to supplement the diet. One of these alternatives was the acorn, and the Milling Stone lifestyle came to an end. But certain changes and innovations effected during the Milling Stone carried over, and indeed in greatly increased scale. These changes included developments in social and political organization represented by increased size of the traveling group, as well as in scheduled reoccupation of preferred localities and notions of territoriality. The adoption of the acorn as a food staple was by no means a statewide simultaneous ‘event’. In certain regions, the shift to an emphasis on acorns coincided directly with the advent of the Late Holocene Period, c. 3500–4000 BP. In other regions, the Milling Stone strategy prevailed for another thousand years or more. This argues strongly that the development was driven by population growth. Population thresholds were met at differing times in different places. Only then were the labor-intensive requirements of an acorn economy adopted. Once adopted, however, the acorn economy had dramatic effects on social structure, settlement and mobility patterns, and political organization. As a cumulative effect, intensified resource acquisition both permitted and encouraged continued population growth, necessitating still more intensified labors, including reinvigorated hunting and, where possible, extensive use of littoral resources, especially shellfish. Because the acorn ripens in the fall, acorn dependence required wholesale change in the nature of scheduling, and Californians became more fully organized along logistical principles. The notion of the ‘home base’ grew into one of the ‘home village’ that transcended generations, and villages were placed ‘logistically’ at locations within reasonable distance to many different resource-collecting locales. Collecting expeditions forayed from villages to these various resource ‘patches’ in their season, an efficient strategy that allowed surplus to be gathered and stored for use during the lean winter months. The logistical strategy thus placed a high value on prime collecting localities, many at some distance from the home village, and encouraged further the previously introduced concept of territory. It is during this time frame that archaeologists begin to see assemblages that are clearly attributable to specific ethnographic groups, suggesting that territories carved out in the beginning of the Late Holocene were maintained for numerous generations. Among the first Californians to show the logistical strategy and to exploit the acorn were the Windmiller of the Sacramento River Delta (Figure 1). Windmiller People (named for a site located on

the Windmiller farm) first appeared around 4500 BP, but their peak occupation of the Sacramento Delta appears to have been between 2500–4000 BP. The Windmiller are primarily known from excavations of large cemeteries, which were placed on high ground above the Delta flood levels. Although the focus on grave goods may bias the data somewhat, the Windmiller interred their dead with quantities of everyday items in addition to nonutilitarian artifacts, which has provided a wealth of information about their overall material culture. Windmiller material culture suggests a distinct divergence from the Milling Stone emphasis on hard seeds and other plant foods as well as from the strategy of continual mobility. Large quantities of projectile points as well as a wealth of faunal remains (deer, elk, pronghorn, rabbits) suggest a re-emergence of hunting as a significant occupation. Additionally, tridentform bone spears, shell and bone fishhooks, and baked-clay ‘netsinkers’ suggest three distinct methods for obtaining salmon and other fish from the Delta. In combination, seasonality in selected animal and fish species suggest that the Windmiller wintered in the Delta, and summered in the Sierra foothills. But more significantly, certain Windmiller sites show numbers of crude stone mortars and cobble pestles, ‘type artifacts’ for an acorn-based economy. Since the Delta region is practically devoid of oak trees, it is clear that the Windmiller practiced logistical forays for Central Valley and Sierra foothill acorns in the fall, as a supplement to winter fishing in the Delta and summer hunting in the Sierra Nevada. Windmiller divergence from Milling Stone patterns was more than merely dietary. Windmiller grave lots show huge quantities of ornaments and other nonutilitarian items. Among the latter are enigmatic ‘charmstones’, polished cigar-shaped objects of finegrained stone such as alabaster, marble, or schist. Although their function is far from clear, charmstones were apparently highly treasured, and are typically found in only the most opulent grave lots. These and similar ‘wealth items’ such as steatite pipes, stone and bone beads, and shell pendants tend to be concentrated in male graves, suggesting gender-based status differentiation, which may reflect the reemergence of hunting as a significant pursuit. However, occasional discoveries of women, children, and even infants with immense quantities of grave goods suggests ascribed, or inherited status, a clear and further divergence from the more egalitarian Milling Stone. Windmiller burials are occasionally observed with ‘nightstick’ fractures to the forearms, skull fractures, and points embedded in bone. This evidence for interpersonal violence may be a corollary to the logistical strategy, which may have occasioned a heightened

276 AMERICAS, NORTH/California and the Sierra Nevada

sense of territoriality and defense of property or stores. A further corollary of the logistical strategy is purposeful acquisition of surplus for storage, which often results in an unequal distribution of food and other items, and which may in turn translate to ‘wealth’. Inequalities in wealth may account for dramatic differences observed among individuals in the abundance of associated grave goods. In short, Windmiller graves suggest there were ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. While by no means inevitable, both heightened territoriality and the concept of ‘wealth’ may be viewed as a consequence of the shift to an intensive, logistically organized acorn-based economy. The Windmiller Culture provides a provocative example of the shifting economy in California and its consequences. Although not always precisely contemporary, regional synonyms for the development of the logistical, acorn-based economy, with frequent local variations, include the state-wide designation Early Pacific Period; the Campbell Tradition of coastal southern California; the University Village Complex, the West Berkeley Facies, and the Early Bay Pattern of the San Francisco Bay area; the Early Horizon of central California; The Martis Complex of the high Sierra Nevada; the Middle and Upper Archaic of the north coast; and the Gypsum Period of the deserts.

Late Holocene Specialization and Complexity The final prehistoric period is here labeled the ‘specialization and complexity’ phase. This development was extremely variable across the state, in both timing and in the degree to which it was expressed. With the notable exception of the desert regions, the spread of the acorn economy was completed during this timeframe, and most groups saw continued population increase. In all cases California’s natives continued to hone their technologies in order to increase the efficiency of resource extraction within a given territory. Among the most significant developments was the practice of actively managing resources to improve productivity. Sometimes referred to as ‘protoagriculture’, resources were manipulated by selective culling, pruning, and even watering of wild plants. One common form of resource manipulation took the form of wholesale burning of entire tracts of land, setting into motion natural forces of ‘ecological succession’ that produces a bounty of new shoots, greens, and seeds. With increased overall productivity came increased yields for storage, which fostered continued population growth. This phase also witnessed manufacture of local goods for the specific purpose of interregional exchange. As territories became more and more stringently protected, control

over the distribution of prized but highly localized resources such as obsidian or salt was possible, and could be turned to local advantage as trade items. The second facet of this phase – complexity – is considerably less widespread statewide, but far more pervasive than previous generations of anthropologists have considered. In selected cases – notably in coastal areas – disparities among individuals in the distribution of surplus resources, as well as in access to monopolized goods and crafts were put to the task of creating a true society of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Using surplus to personal advantage is one road to the rise of chiefly society, a level of political complexity that is uncommon among hunter-gatherers, yet characteristic of selected regions of California. The earliest evidence for highly complex political organization in California is found in the San Francisco Bay area, where great mounds of shell, bone, charcoal, artifacts and human remains have intrigued archaeologists since the early twentieth century. University Village near Stanford University, and the West Berkeley and Emeryville mounds on the eastern Bay shore (Figure 1), along with over 100 smaller mounds have revealed literally tons of archaeological remains. The contents of these mounds have contributed to an understanding of San Francisco Bay area material culture that is perhaps unparalleled in California. Only recently, however, have archaeologists begun to explore the sociopolitical implications of the mounds themselves. Many archaeologists now believe that the shell mounds were not simply accumulated, but were purposefully built. One line of evidence for this notion is that the mounds are not in fact simply undifferentiated piles of debris, but instead contain intact features including residential architecture, sweathouses, and hearths. Ceremonial activities are indicated by cemetery areas, as well as purposeful caches of nonutilitarian items such as charmstones, whistles, pipes, and obsidian knives. Ritual interments of mammals, such as bears, and large birds, including condors are found, and reflect some form of ceremonialism. Finally, there are stratigraphic indications that soil was purposefully deposited as fill to expand the sizes of the mounds. The mounds thus appear to be mixtures of living and ceremonial space, not mere piles of trash but landmarks along the Bay, visible for miles around as sociopolitical landmarks. The timeframe c. 2500–1000 BP was the Golden Age for shell mounds in the San Francisco Bay area. During this time mounds were occupied year-round, and logistically organized expeditions ranged inland for acorns and game and to the Bay waters for shellfish, fish, and sea mammals. Burial evidence suggests that violence peaked at this time, perhaps reflecting

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the importance of territorial claims. Elaborate grave treatment accorded a few individuals suggests dramatic status and/or wealth distinctions. Population size steadily increased along with increased political complexity, until the scale of resource acquisition that fostered the lifestyle could no longer be maintained. For instance, there is firm evidence for human over-predation on shellfish species, land mammals, and sea mammals until existing human populations were forced to disperse, leaving the mounds behind. Many people moved inland, where foothills surrounding the Bay saw a distinct rise in regional population size. Those that remained broke into smaller groups, coming down to us as the Costanoan-Ohlone, an ethnographic group that, in the historic era, had no sociological or political analogs to the complex political systems represented by the mounds of San Francisco Bay. Although people survived, the prehistoric system evidenced by the San Francisco Bay mounds simply collapsed when high population densities could no longer be maintained. At about the same time that the Bay area culture was undergoing population dispersal, the coast along Santa Barbara, Ventura, and northern Los Angeles Counties began to show distinctive signs of increasing political and social complexity. Over the next 700 years – until the time of European contact – the ancestors of the Chumash developed intricate social, ceremonial, economic, and political networks that are unparalleled among hunter-gatherers anywhere in the world. The ancestral Chumash shared with their Bay area counterparts an exceedingly productive natural environment, combining rich inland resources – acorns and other plant resources, plentiful game – with a bountiful littoral zone teeming with shellfish, fish, and sea mammals. Where the San Francisco Bay area saw skyrocketing population numbers lead to overpredation and resource depletion, however, the ancestral Chumash found a technological solution that opened several previously untapped (or little-used) ecological niches. The Chumash designed and built perhaps the most sophisticated watercraft found in North America, and from these they accessed the resources not only of the open sea, but of the largely untapped Channel Islands as well. Where the San Francisco Bay area saw greatly intensified resource acquisition during the Golden Age of mounds, Chumash resource acquisition became not just more intensive, but more extensive as well. The larger ramifications of the canoe on Chumash society can hardly be overstated. The Chumash canoe (or tomol) was made of redwood planks retrieved as driftwood, held together with sinew and dowels and

caulked with tar and pitch, reaching lengths of 7 m or more. Canoes were exceedingly difficult and timeconsuming to manufacture, and essentially required the full-time efforts of expert engineers and apprentice laborers. The tomol-makers developed their own hereditary guild, passing down specialized tools and painstaking techniques from one generation to the next: a social class. The extensive effort necessary to tomol manufacture required a form of patronage in order to free the specialists from daily resource collection activities, and only the wealthiest individuals could wield the surplus necessary to commission a canoe. In the end, canoe owners were rewarded with valuables obtained in exchange with the Channel Islands as well as high-prestige open-sea resources such as swordfish, tuna, and dolphin. Canoe owners thus turned wealth into prestige, and in turn into still more wealth. Where newly gotten wealth is turned to still more sponsored labor, the cycle is selfperpetuating, and an elite class is born. At the time of European contact, Chumash society featured specialized classes of craftsmen engaged not only in manufacture of the tomol, but also in manufacture of special stone tools (microdrills), stone bowls, and a host of ‘nonutilitarian’ items. Among the latter were beads which came to serve as a standardized form of currency, an extremely rare development among hunter-gatherers. Although the archaeological record is largely silent on the subject, it is logical to assume that specialists may have dominated other facets of Chumash society, such as hunting, fishing, and perhaps canoe navigation. Not only responsible for sponsoring manufacture of specialists’ goods, tomol owners were responsible for distribution of goods across the Channel as well as up and down the coast, giving canoe owners enormous control over the growth and development of Chumash society. Eventually, the Chumash came to be organized around hereditary chiefs who held sway at the village as well as regional levels, a form of political organization that is truly anomalous among hunter-gatherers. Much of the wealth and prestige that eventually spiraled into hereditary power is probably attributable to control over the tomol. It is fascinating but ultimately futile to speculate about the political and social developments that were truncated by the arrival of the Spanish in 1769. But in addition to the Chumash, several Native California groups were beginning to turn surplus into wealth, and wealth into power during the general time frame from AD 1000 to historic contact. These groups included the Gabrieleno, or Tong-va of the Los Angeles coast and basin, the Yokuts of the southern Central Valley and southern Sierra foothills, the Pomo of the North Coast Ranges, and the salmon-fishers of

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the northwestern state, including the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok. In each case, a wealthy natural environment and specialized technology, combined with a focus on resources that could be stored, promoted both population growth and inequality in the distribution of surplus.

economic intensification, and technological specialization. But this generality masks a tremendous amount of cultural diversity, as economic systems and technological adaptations were distinctively tailored to local conditions. It is important to recognize that the trends presented above are accurate in their sequencing but highly variable in their timing as well as their expression. Not all of the developments presented above were simultaneous across the state; nor did all of the developments presented above take place in equal intensity everywhere in the state. For

Summary At the broadest level, the entire prehistory of California is one of steady population growth,

OREGON Tolowa Karok Shasta

Yurok

North

KlamathModoc

Hupa

Achomawi

Chimariko Wiyot Bear River Mattole Lassik Sinkyone Wailaki

Wintu

Atsugewi Yana

Nomlaki

Yahi

Yuki

Kato

Maidu Pomo

NEVADA

Patwin

N SI BA

Interior Miwok

T EA

R

G

Wappo

E

C

N VI

O

PR

Coast Miwok

Panamint Shoshone

Costanoan/Ohlone Yokuts

Tubatulabal

Esselen Salinan

Kawaiisu Vanyume PACIFIC OCEAN

Kitanemuk

Chumash

Chemehuevi

Alliklik Serrano

Cahuilla

0 0

100 Kilometers 100 Miles

Figure 2 California Native cultural/linguistic groupings in the historic era.

Juaneño Cupeño

Kumeyaay MEXICO

ARIZONA

Luiseño Gabrielino

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instance, Milling Stone foragers in the North Coast Range and in the southern Sierra foothills continued to hunt to a degree unknown or impossible in southern California; Central Valley Californians such as the Windmiller began to exploit the acorn hundreds of years earlier than their northern California counterparts, and perhaps thousands of years earlier than those in the southern reaches of the state; and desert hunter-gatherers almost certainly never developed the sorts of wealth distinctions inferred for the San Francisco Bay or the Santa Barbara coast. Regional variations, both large and small, in the nature of resources, of resource timing and productivity, and in local population dynamics have resulted in a range of cultural variability that is unmatched for any California-sized region in the New World (Figure 2). It is this staggering degree of cultural variability, noted in the ethnographic era and demonstrated by linguistic variability, that has thwarted archaeologists’ century-long effort to generate a state-wide chronology and a common culture-historical nomenclature. Despite recognition of a common California Pattern, in the end California’s Native populations defy all but the broadest of generalities.

Epilog At the time of European contact in 1769, California was more densely populated than any region of comparable size anywhere in North America. Most anthropologists agree that at least 310 000 people lived in the state, with credible estimates ranging to as many as 710 000 people. It took at least 10 000 years of steady growth to reach this number. Less than 150 years after the Spanish arrived, in 1911, a starving and exhausted Yahi Indian named Ishi wandered into a northern California town looking for food. At the time he was heralded as the Last Wild Indian in California. Disease and other privations visited by Spanish missionaries, Mexican ranchers, and American gold miners had taken a terrible toll on Native Californians. But Ishi was not the last Indian in California. An energetic Native American community exists today and appears to be strengthening as elders are encouraging young Indians to learn the native language and lore, reinvigorating pride in ancestry and curiosity about tribal history. It cannot be said that a century or more of cultural decimation has not left its mark on Native Californians. But Native Californians have shown themselves to be a highly resilient people, weathering and drawing strength from every challenge that has arisen since the Ice Age. See also: Americas, North: Great Basin; Rocky Mountains; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.

Further Reading Arnold JE, Walsh MR, and Hollimon SE (2004) The archaeology of California. Journal of Archaeological Research 12: 1–73. Chartkoff JL and Chartkoff KK (1984) The Archaeology of California. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Erlandson JM and Colten RH (eds.) (1991) Hunter-gatherers of Early Holocene Coastal California. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology. Erlandson JM and Glassow MA (eds.) (1997) Archaeology of the California Coast during the Middle Holocene. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology. Erlandson JM and Jones TL (eds.) (2002) Catalysts to Complexity: Late Holocene Societies of the California Coast. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Fagan B (2003) Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Moratto MJ (1984) California Archaeology. (Reprinted with a new Introduction by Coyote Press, Salinas, CA. 2004.) Orlando: Academic Press. (Reprinted with a new Introduction by Coyote Press, Salinas, CA. 2004.)

Eastern Woodlands Timothy R Pauketat, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary adze A hafted wood-shaping tool used to, among other things, hollow out dugouts. American Bottom A 120-km-long expanse of floodplain wherein sits the Cahokia site, between present-day St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Archaic In eastern North America, the Early Holocene period during which food collectors settled into regional landscapes, residing at least part of the year in base camps, and, later in the period, built the first mounded centers (c. 8000–500 BC). band A social and economic group of hunter-gatherers who tend to be united by kinship and marriage ties. base camp A semi-permanent or seasonally reoccupied settlement of hunter-gatherers from which smaller groups of hunters or collectors organize more focused forays. biface A chipped-stone tool with opposing flat sides and one or more sharp cutting edge. chiefdom A small centralized society with a government based on hereditary chiefs whose power is believed legitimate by most of the population. confederacy A loose political alliance of formerly autonomous societies lacking a strong central government. corporate kin group People related by blood who identify with each other and share in work activities. geoglyph A nonportable symbolic motif of monumental proportions, such as an effigy mound. gorget A two-holed ornament worn suspended around the neck or sown onto a garment. Mississippian A cultural complex and time period denoted by historically contingent territorial and hierarchical societies,

280 AMERICAS, NORTH/Eastern Woodlands maize agriculture, monumentality, and readily identifiable political–religious imagery (AD 1050–1500s). monumental architecture Any construction of earth, wood, or stone built for public or religious – not domestic – reasons. mortuary center A place that owes its cultural significance to its use in interring the dead. Palaeo-Indian In North America, the Late Pleistocene period during which Clovis-making people hunted big game and filled up the continent (c. 10 200–10 000 BP). proto-state An urban or urbanizing centralized society characterized by a division of labor, cultural pluralism, and a complex central government. sedentism The condition of living in single permanent settlements for an entire year, year after year. shaman A religious specialist or medicine man or woman able to communicate with the spirit world. tumuli Elevated earthen constructions. Woodland A period of time, usually subdivided into early, middle, and late subunits, following the Archaic in eastern North America that saw the widespread adoption of pottery technology, the domestication of native cultigens, the efflorescence of Hopewellian mortuary cults, and, later, the adoption of the bow and arrow and maize agriculture (c. 500 BC–AD 1050/1500s (depends on location)).

Introduction Centuries after the early eleventh century Norse settlement of L’Anse Aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, Jacques Cartier’s wooden ship sailed up the St. Lawrence River. It was 1535, and Cartier’s men encountered a thousand sedentary horticulturists living at Hochelaga, a large Iroquoian longhouse village within present-day Montreal, Quebec. To the north, between these horticulturalists and the Arctic Inuit (who would chase off the Norse settlers) were bands of Montagnais-Naskapi hunter-gatherers who traded with, and kept their distance from, the French. To the east and south, from Prince Edward Island to New England, were territorial Algonquian-speakers – Micmacs, Pasamaquoddy, Penobscots, and Abenakis – who did things differently and would later form a confederacy administered by elected district leaders and war captains. Playing the European powers off against each other, the Iroquois also confederated and waged war on their neighbors to achieve dominance and control over the burgeoning fur trade. The reach of their war parties stretched hundreds of kilometers, as their later attacks on the westward-migrating Miami in the Illinois country attest. Twenty-two years before Cartier’s arrival at Hochelaga, ocean-going Spaniards led by Ponce de Leon had discovered peninsular Florida. Afterward, and given the successes of Pizarro in Peru and Cortes in Mexico, the Spanish began to colonize the coastal Southeast in the 1520s. This was, in turn, followed in 1539 by a major entrada into the heart of the Southeast, led by veteran conquistador Hernando de Soto.

Southeastern North America would never be the same. De Soto and later representatives of New Spain brought disease, missionaries, ranching, and slave traders that drained the interior southeast of its native life. Mississippian polities collapsed, their remnant populations migrating to other locations. Some, such as the Timucuans of peninsular Florida, were completely eradicated. In the succeeding two centuries, accommodation and resistance to the colonial powers, now including France and Britain, took the form of political reconsolidations or confederations, relocations, reassertions of ‘traditional’ identities, and infrequent violent rebellions.

The First Americans Of course, the emplacement of Europeans in North America was not the first colonization of the continent. The first Americans were probably a disparate lot of immigrants arriving during the Ice Age (or Pleistocene epoch) in the eastern Woodlands by way of western North America. Before that, most believe, the original immigrants had arrived in boats from Asia. An ancient European Palaeolithic origin for some of them remains a possibility, in part because one of the earliest ‘Palaeo-Indian’ settlements in North America is in Virginia. Actually, various archaeologists now believe that these earliest human colonists arrived before the Palaeo-Indian period, more than 16 000 years ago; their remains were found deeply buried in places such as Meadowcroft Rockshelter in western Pennsylvania (and other New World sites; see Figure 1). Because they were first, they were few in number and their sparse populations make their remains, for all archaeological intents and purposes, virtually invisible. If correct, then the Palaeo-Indians, those people who made the well-known ‘Clovis’ projectile points at c. 10 200–10 000 years BP, were not the first Americans (Figure 2). Instead, Clovis culture represents ‘the beginning of the archaeological visible portion’ of the ‘peopling’ of eastern North America. In the eastern Woodlands, their readily identifiable ‘fluted’ projectile points (specially thinned at their bases for hafting) come in a variety of sizes and have been found in direct or suggestive association with the remains of caribou, elk, bison, and mastodon, among other extinct animals from sites as distant as the sinkholes of Florida to the glacial fronts in New York, Ontario, and southern Michigan. Whether the Pleistocene megafauna were driven extinct by the Palaeo-Indians remains an open question, but there is regional settlement evidence that these huntergatherers did not merely radiate across a virgin landscape, killing megafauna as they went. Instead, the

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Figure 1 Select archaeological sites in eastern North America.

Palaeo-Indians ranged hundreds of kilometers within identifiable territories. Some ‘bands’, for instance, traveled annually between base camps and outlying ‘retooling’ sites – places where they made new chipped-stone bifaces – in Illinois and Indiana or Ohio, Michigan, and southern Ontario. While archaeologists will continue to debate the peopling of the continent until incontrovertible evidence is found, they have paid less attention to an equally significant research question highly relevant to today’s warming world: the relationship of the late Palaeo-Indian people to the beginning of the warmer Holocene (at c. 9000 BC), with its rising sea levels and

disappearing megafauna. Inland, there are various regional manifestations of the Late Palaeo or earliest Early Archaic peoples, one of which is the midcontinental Dalton culture. Large Dalton period base camps probably sported a series of surface dwellings that housed a number of families. In Arkansas, archaeologists observe that the Dalton people abutted their Plains ‘Plano-period’ contemporaries who made fluted Folsom points. Unlike their Clovis culture precursors, the Dalton people and other Early Archaic folks ranged far less widely. In addition, for the first time, the ancient people made and used numerous groundstone and

282 AMERICAS, NORTH/Eastern Woodlands

Figure 2 Clovis point (length c. 10 cm).

woodworking tools, notably including Dalton adzes, probably indicating the increased reliance on local plant foods and the construction of dugout canoes, respectively. There were also formal cemeteries, although the best-known Early Archaic cemeteries are not in Arkansas. They are in coastal Florida, where bodies were staked to the bottom of ‘charnel ponds’ or bogs of the drowned seacoast. Buried with the dead at sites such as Windover were items of clothing, atl-atls (spearthrowers), beads, engraved bird-bone tubes, and other bone tools, projectile points, and assorted wooden objects.

Archaic Developments While population densities probably varied widely across the eastern Woodlands, dramatic social changes were underway by the sixth millennium BC, changes that justify the identification of a Middle Archaic period. Undoubtedly, these social changes were related to a nearly two-millennium-long dry and warm period – the Hypsithermal. Some have posited that, for certain regions, the climatic regime necessitated concentrations in lower well-watered locations. For other regions, the correlation is less certain. What is clear, however, is that base camps grew larger and more permanent in many areas. In Kentucky and Tennessee, clear evidence of interpersonal violence, such as scalping marks, appears during the Middle Archaic period. At Koster, along the Illinois River, the first permanent housing also dates to the Middle Archaic period, as do low burial mounds on the bluff above (also

known as the Elizabeth site). Under those mounds were group burials of men and women presumed to have been members of important corporate kin groups. Something similar is seen at sites in southern Illinois, and along the Green and Tennessee Rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee, where burials of single bodies interred with sex-specific objects (including, here or there, a shaman buried with unusual bundles of objects) were interred in formal cemeteries. In the mid-South, the Middle (and Late) Archaic burial mounds were sometimes built of mollusk shells. These and other Middle Archaic mounds are most common from Florida westward across the Gulf Coast. Some, as at Tick Island in Florida, are formal layered burial mounds consisting of layers of burials alternating with mollusk shell midden. They were, in short, the first true monumental architecture. The earliest dated earthen mound complex is found in southern Louisiana, at Monte Sano, and dates to 5000 BC, or the beginning of the Middle Archaic period. Ten other related Middle Archaic mound sites are known in northern Louisiana, the largest being Watson Brake, dated to 3600 BC. The site’s 11 earthen tumuli vary in height, one reaching 7.5 m. These were built around an oval 370
260 m2 plaza, the construction and experience of which may have instantiated social inequalities within and between corporate groups. All 11 sites might have been pieces of a larger planned regional complex, the construction of which ended by 2500 BC, well before the next significant monumental construction in Louisiana, called Poverty Point. The most enigmatic of Archaic places, Poverty Point appears to have been a planned ‘reinvention’ of the earlier Middle Archaic tradition. Built between 1600 and 800 BC, it was a huge earthen complex covering 5 km2 and composed of 750 000 m3 of mounded earth. The site’s semicircular central plaza is surrounded by concentric rings of loaf-shaped mounds, probably used to elevate houses. Behind its amphitheater-like loaf mound and plaza core is a looming 20-m-high bird-effigy mound. Other mounds mark key points in the distance. Poverty Point was, in short, the first sedentary town site in the eastern Woodlands. The refuse of the many hundreds of sedentary residents at this complex includes the debris from manufacturing a variety of bodily ornaments, tools, fetishes, and fired clay ‘Poverty Point objects’. The latter were superheated and used to cook food indirectly, perhaps in large central gatherings. Incised on some of these objects, carved into ornaments, or etched onto steatite bowls are representations of upper-world birds, underworld monsters, and the plants, animals, and spiders’ webs that existed between these worlds.

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Along with the craft objects, these appear to have been made on-site for use on-site. Some ended up in outlying regions. However, it is possible that pilgrims visiting this anomalous central place dispersed the Poverty Point objects by carrying them back to their own homelands. Other Late Archaic sites near Poverty Point appear to replicate the great center, albeit at smaller scales. Perhaps these were small-scale pilgrimage centers in the Poverty Point mould and, if so, Poverty Point and its outliers could have had profound historical impacts on the entire mid-South. Minimally, the people of Poverty Point appear to have acquired exotic materials from across the mid-continent and South, from Texas and Indiana to Alabama. A few Poverty Point objects turn up at sites as far north as southern Illinois. Numerous cultural complexes that date to the Late Archaic period (c. 2000–500 BC) also feature evidence of long-distance exchange – from the Benton sphere in Mississippi to New York’s Lamoka culture and the St. Lawrence Basin’s Maritime Archaic. The exchanged goods – from groundstone ax-heads to projectile points and atl-atl weights – often assume ‘hypertrophic’ (larger-than-life) or exaggerated proportions. Hence, researchers reason that these objects were more than ordinary tools with practical use values. The exchanged objects were meant to be conspicuous, seen as well as used. This is the period of the Old Copper culture, Great Lakes region people who made and traded copper tools, some hypertrophic. Perhaps such expansive exchange networks, if not the socially complex relations that each exchanged item objectified, were simple functions of the larger numbers of people living at sometimes large ‘base camps’ around the eastern Woodlands (see Exchange Systems). Possibly, group territories and ethnic boundaries segmented the eastern Woodlands, with groups producing styles and hypertrophic goods that projected the veneer of traditional continuity. Perhaps increased populations and territorialization, in turn, encouraged people to tend wild plants in portions of the Midwest and midSouth (or vice versa). Squash cultivation is known to date from 5000 BC, while other starchy and oily seeded plants – chenopodium, amaranth, sunflower – were brought under cultivation by the second or third millennium BC (see Plant Domestication). There are also some indications of another sort of social change near the end of the Late Archaic period in some portions of the mid-continent: fewer or smaller base camps and more or larger mortuary centers. Pottery appeared first at about 2500 BC at Stallings Island, South Carolina, although it took a millennium for the technology to be adopted across the South’s Coastal Plain, finally picked up by Midwesterners

after 1000 BC. Perhaps this was because, initially, ceramic pots here or, earlier, in the Coastal Plain were not ideal cooking containers. Many were not used over open fires, as often presumed, but might have served in social gatherings or feasts. In the North, the sociality of pot making and using might have been related to mortuary gatherings. At this time, low mounds were increasingly used to bury human remains, some bedecked with stone pendants or gorgets, some interred with caches of skillfully chipped bifaces, and some sprinkled with red pigment. Archaeologists have named certain regional manifestations of these burial cultures Red Ocher, Glacial Kame, and Meadowood. In the South, the Tchula period people succeeded Poverty Point’s grandeur with, at best, modest mound centers populated by few people who ate, as best we can tell, few of the cultigens known elsewhere from eastern North America, save squash.

Woodland Gatherings These subcontinent-wide developments have in the past been identified as the Early Woodland period (500–150 BC), owing in part to the settlement evidence and in part to the appearance of pottery. But there is considerable diversity of cultural practices until the subsequent Middle Woodland period (150 BC–AD 400), when a transregional horizon, sometimes called the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, was established across the Midwest, down the Mississippi River valley, and up the St. Lawrence (where it is called Point Peninsula). The nomenclature remains vaguely informative, as the period seems to have been defined by a heightened traveling of people to far-off places, if not also, especially around the Great Lakes, the establishment of distant marriage alliances. In Illinois, the common occurrence of ephemeral Middle Woodland sites along remote interior corridors might signal the existence of overland trails (Figure 3). There was an economic basis to this cultural expansion. Midwestern horticultural practices had, by the Early Woodland period, resulted in the domestication of a suite of starchy and oily seeded crops, identified as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. The intensification of horticultural production is clearly evident in present-day Illinois, where Woodland people also innovated small chipped-stone hoe blades. The human populations in certain portions of the Midwest reached a new maximum, particularly in the Illinois River valley. There, the Havana tradition people lived in hamlets around special mortuary sites where the socially prominent were buried in log crypts that were, after some period of time, mounded

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Figure 3 Middle Woodland conical mound, Illinois.

over with earth (see Social Inequality, Development of). At or shortly after this same time, the ‘Adena’ people of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia followed suite, and began to raise accretional burial mounds to great heights, some reaching 20 m. These were not insular people. Their society appeared built on gatherings of outlying people to commemorate corporate ancestors via elaborate mortuary rites that were, primarily, ceremonies of the living. The smoking of high-nicotine tobacco, domesticated in the Caribbean and grown in eastern North America by the Middle Woodland period, was central to the ceremonies, possibly indicating the emphasis (also seen in Middle Woodland art) of transcendental experience. By 50 BC, the mortuary gatherings appear to have reached a pinnacle, drawing into them the people of the Mississippi valley and adjacent portions of the Deep South, whose Marksville and Copena traditions reinvented or emplaced versions of the Midwest’s Hopewellian cults in the South. At that time, the native Ohioans of the Scioto tradition, at the type site of Hopewell and at hundreds of other sites around southern Ohio, constructed great earthen enclosures – circles, squares, and polygons – connected, at times, with enclosed processional avenues (or bounded linear spaces). The individual enclosures were great unroofed open-air gathering sites, not residential settlements. Each was bounded by embanked earth, the outer embankments standing up to 3 m high, blocking views if not also constraining bodily movements (Figure 4). The largest enclosures covered 20 ha. Openings at their corners or side walls allowed passage into and out of the sacred interior. Some of these openings, or other key points within

the embanked spaces, were punctuated by small platform mounds – veritable earthen stages for some performance at that spot. Certain of these stages and the associated enclosures were constructed in such a way as to make the entire space a virtual uterine or ‘Mother Earth’ geoglyph, the experience of which would merge people’s sensibilities with mythic events. Hopewellian cosmology, that is, was a lived cosmography. Presumably, great processions passed from one to another, the longest avenue, the Great Hopewell Road, stretching 48 km from the Newark earthworks to the numerous enclosed spaces of Chillicothe, Ohio. Some are also aligned to celestial events – movements of the sun, moon, and stars – affirming a grand design intended to be experienced by pilgrims. Presumably, persons who embodied the social collectivities hosted such gatherings. Perhaps it was their bones that were later kept in Ohio’s charnel houses and, later, buried under huge Hopewellian burial mounds. Finally, perhaps it was such hosts who, late in this mere two- or three-century span, formed a unique political alliance or confederation. The construction of composite geometric enclosures in the Scioto valley, rather than isolated squared, circular, or polygonal embankments, may have created – through mound-building – a political-ritual confederation, a veritable ‘triple alliance’ in Ohio. Fantastic hoards of ritual objects were uncovered at the Hopewell site, in Ohio, from burials or from the floors of dismantled and mounded-over charnel houses. There were things made out of mica from North Carolina, copper from the Appalachians, pipestone from Ohio and Illinois, and grizzly bear teeth and obsidian (a black volcanic glass) from Wyoming.

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As noted earlier, the means whereby such exotic materials were acquired probably included occasional forays or expeditions of acquisition. Given the concentrations and provenience of some such material, such as obsidian, it is likely that ‘trade’ relations between Illinois, Ohio, and Louisiana communities did exist up until AD 400 (see Ritual, Religion, and Ideology). The accumulations and ritualized deposition of the valued materials or craft objects manufactured from them characterized many Hopewellian mortuary sites from Ohio west across Illinois and south into the Marksville homeland. Emphases on select exotic or colorful raw materials pervaded daily life as well, seemingly indicating the centrality of ancestral observances and reckonings to personal and collective identities. As indicated by the elaborate abstract decorations on pots, fabric, bone tools, and more, those identities were intimately associated with a cosmos comprised of upper and lower worlds and supernatural animals, including falcons and the long-necked spoonbills and flamingoes (Figure 5). However, by AD 400, the Middle Woodland experiments were subverted, abandoned, or in some other way brought to a close. From the Scioto south to

Pinson mounds, Tennessee and Marksville, Louisiana, the construction of burial crypts, elaborate charnel houses, earthen platform mounds, and embanked enclosures ceased as sites of Hopewellian happenings. The reasons are not known with any degree of certainty. However, there is renewed general agreement among archaeologists that what followed did involve a de-emphasis of the mortuary commemorations and panregional gatherings, if not also a ‘collapse’ of long-distance alliances or trade relations. With the exception of the Deep South, the subsequent ‘Late Woodland’ period used to be described, perhaps appropriately, as bland and uninteresting, comprised of Good Grey cultures. However, south of the Appalachians in Georgia and northern Florida, the formation of community identities through the promotions of apical ancestors continued, albeit untethered to the now-terminated Hopewellian Interaction Sphere. Major Middle–Late Woodland cultural phenomena are termed by archaeologists Weeden Island and Swift Creek, dating from about AD 300 to 850, with central sites featuring large platform mounds including Kolomoki, Swift Creek, Mandeville, and Napier. At the small short-term three-mound site

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Figure 5 Carved stone effigy-bird smoking pipes, left, and earthware pot showing abstract long-necked bird motif, right. From plate XLVI[2] and figures 173–174, Squier EG and Davis EH (1848) Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley : Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

of McKeithen, archaeologists found evidence of a planned center of 100–200 people living around an open oval plaza. One platform mound elevated a scaffold or space for the disarticulation of dead bodies. Another was a burial mound. The third elevated a communal building or leader’s house. As discovered atop that platform mound, the final events of the McKeithen center involved the dead leader, red-dyed hair and arrowhead in hip, lying in state on the floor of the surmounting building. Perhaps comparable to such Weeden Island centers are the post-Marksville Baytown (c. AD 400–700) and later Coles Creek (c. AD 700–1100) mounded centers in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Some of these, such as the now-destroyed Troyville site, possessed singular qualities: layout, mound shape, or mound size. Coles Creek sites are compact centers with well-defined four-sided pyramidal mounds around rectangular plazas, at least some of which were themselves constructed (i.e., land-leveled) features. For many, it is unclear how many people lived on site. Hamlets, presumably home to sedentary food producers, surrounded them within a day’s walk or so. In many cases, what was grown by such people seems limited to some part of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Maize was not a staple in the Lower Mississippi valley before AD 1000. The Coles Creek centers of the mid-South are significant in part for how many there were and, related to this, how ‘insular’ they appear. As with Late Woodland societies generally, there is little evidence of a program of cultural outreach of the sort seen in preceding periods. Each center, that is, appears isomorphic with localized community identities. Substantial communal labor was invested in each center, but the basis of

labor mobilization is unclear. From the Coles Creek components at some sites, there are hints of once-powerful corporate persons, perhaps ceremoniously buried political leaders who embodied community identity. These seem indicated by the skeletons of extended adult men who were buried with the bodies of women and children, in one case including 13 infants. In another case, an adult male was buried on the surface of a platform mound wearing a deer-antler headdress. Next to him were the bodies of three adolescents and two adult females, one of whom had a chipped-stone projectile point still embedded in her right arm. At about the same time, far to the north in and around present-day southern Wisconsin, equally insular but more transient Late Woodland peoples maintained special mortuary sites, burying bones in or near low-effigy mounds. The mound sites of these semi-sedentary Effigy Mound culture people appear to reveal corporate identities tethered to zoomorphic mythical ancestors – thunderbirds, waterspirits, and bears (earth creatures). Territories seem marked by concentrations of one or another supernatural entity, and the distribution of different sorts of effigy mounds across this northern region is uneven. The transregional pattern of localized or insular communities, and the occasional projectile pointembedded body, might suggest that much of eastern North America was an increasingly divided and dangerous landscape. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the midst of the Late Woodland period, around AD 600, people in most eastern locations adopted the stealthy bow and arrow (over the traditional atl-atl and spear) as the weapon of choice. The timing of this adoption suggests a relationship to some larger set of social conditions, not the least of which might have been territorialization and the negotiation of tensions between evermore circumscribed groups. These changes seem to have led, in New York and Ontario, to the rise of corporate villages better known at contact as the longhouse settlements of maize-growing northeasterners. Here, after AD 800, maize emerged as a staple crop. Maize, a Mesoamerican crop, had actually been introduced during the Middle Woodland period centuries earlier. However, maize production initially seems to have had little impact, and it was not significantly intensified until c. AD 800 in the central Mississippi valley. There, maize intensification seems to closely correlate with the growth of populated sedentary villages, some of which, particularly in southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, and adjacent portions of southern Indiana, western Kentucky, and Tennessee, grew large as the centers of farming communities. Between AD 800 and 1050, two of the largest such centers were situated within 30 km of each other in

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the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois: Pulcher and ‘old’ Cahokia. Both comprised contiguous clusters of houses around small courtyards and both were populated by hundreds of terminal Late Woodland maize-, squash-, and starchy seed-growing farmers. One to several modest platform mounds – modest versions of contemporaneous Coles Creek tumuli farther south – occupied centerstage at Pulcher and, presumably, old Cahokia by the beginning of the eleventh century. Whether corporate leaders, similar to those of their southern mound-building neighbors, existed at that time is unclear.

Mississippianization Less unclear is what happened next. The decades of the middle eleventh century witnessed tremendous social and political change, sparked apparently by unique events or people in the American Bottom. At that time, Cahokians rebuilt their village into a veritable planned urban center, eastern North America’s only pre-Columbian city, around oversized earthen pyramids and a 19 ha plaza. In outline, the new central complex is reminiscent of Coles Creek centers, perhaps indicating historical linkages between the two. However, Cahokia far exceeds in scale and internal organization anything known up to that time in the lower valley. Extensive excavations in and around Cahokia since the late 1950s verify great central festivals, construction projects, new (wall-trench) house styles, feasts, and theatrical mortuary rites – featuring human sacrifice – from the earliest phase of this earliest and archetypal ‘Mississippian’ polity. The population of this proto-urban place swelled rapidly, reasonable estimates for the late 11th century ranging from about 10 000 to 15 000 people at Cahokia proper. From the beginning and over the next century and a half, approximately 120 earthen pyramids were built at ‘new’ Cahokia. An art style developed that emphasized the relationship of gendered human or superhuman characters, agricultural production, and cosmic forces (Figure 6). More people lived in a series of outlying towns and two nearby sister complexes, East St. Louis and St. Louis, each with 45 and 26 earthen pyramids, respectively. Surrounding this entire central complex, and within 50 km radius, were rural farmsteads and farming villages. Interspersed among them were ‘nodal’ sites – farmsteads and villages – that appear to have assisted in the administration of a Cahokiacentric tributary economy. At least some of these farmers of greater Cahokia, if not significant numbers of the early Cahokians themselves, were immigrants or

Figure 6 Mississippian ceramic bottle depicting mother and nursing child, found near the Cahokia site, Illinois.

the children of immigrants – farmers who moved in from outlying areas including far-off southern Indiana and southeast Missouri. Archaeologists studying the Eastern Plains, midSouth, and northern Midwest recognize changes in local cultures simultaneous to the construction of new Cahokia. The largest impact might have been in the Illinois River valley due north of greater Cahokia. There, Cahokian settlers or affiliates founded places such as the Eveland site and its cemetery (called Dickson Mounds). The effects were equally profound farther north, in southern Wisconsin, where centuries of Effigy Mound building ceased and collared-wareusing people migrated from old homelands to new southern Wisconsin locations. Most notably, after AD 1050, a few prominent Cahokian or Middle Mississippian outposts, ritual centers, colonies, or copy-cat sites were built, especially in the unglaciated ‘Driftless Area’ along the upper Mississippi river. Although located further to the east, the unusual Aztalan site is most famous. This settlement was superimposed over an earlier Effigy Mound landscape and very nearly hidden along the Crawfish River. Its two small platform mounds, extensive palisade system, wall-trench architecture, and hybrid artifact assemblages seem a mix of local Late Woodland and Mississippian peoples. But there are other such sites that also look like physical intrusions into northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Of these, the Trempealeau site is located near the

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northern edge of the Driftless area, its terraced platform mound built on a high blufftop overlooking the surrounding landscape. The John Chapman site sat at the southern end of the Driftless area, its singleplatform mound (that contained some sort of beaded human burial perhaps in association with a Mississippian temple) and village area built in the midst of pre-Mississippian Effigy Mounds and even older Woodland burial mounds. There was nothing quite so obviously intrusive among the early Mississippian settlements south of Cahokia. There, towns appeared after AD 1050 at places such as Angel in Indiana, Kincaid in southern Illinois, and Obion in Tennessee. The pottery and lithic assemblages from all of these sites suggest that, minimally, the local people were in contact with or emulated Cahokia to the north. Farther south, there are less obvious signatures of such contact or sustained intercourse. In Alabama and northern Georgia, the terminal Late Woodland period leading up to the twelfth century saw palisade constructions and pervasive small-scale violence. In the Black Warrior and Tombigbee valleys of Alabama and eastern Mississippi to the Etowah valley in northern Georgia, the first glimmers of Mississippianism began as the founding of modest towns with one or two earthen platforms: Lubbub Creek, Moundville, and Etowah among them. Elsewhere in Georgia, the earliest Mississippian towns appear to have been ‘site-unit intrusions’ – entire populations moving into new localities and building unprecedented pyramidand-plaza complexes surrounded by palisades; Macon Plateau and Cool Branch are the best known cases. Their founding populations probably derived from Tennessee or northern Alabama, respectively. The transformations of southeastern society that accompanied the Mississippian period may be best understood at Moundville. Recently redated to the early twelfth century, the Moundville I phase followed the pre-Mississippian intensification of maize production (at c. AD 1000). This first Mississippian phase saw the appearance of the same ‘wall-trench’ architectural styles and ‘shell-tempered’ pottery seen to the north, a century earlier. Yet these were merely harbingers of the regional political consolidation to follow (during Moundville II) at or just after AD 1200. As at Cahokia, Moundville underwent a massive planned reconstruction that saw establishment of a 20 ha plaza and the construction of some 30 earthen pyramids around its perimeter (Figures 7 and 8). Built at the same time and enclosing the entire complex was a massive circumferential palisade wall with large evenly spaced bastions. Inside, highstatus Moundvillians were arrayed around specific

Figure 7 Plan map of the Moundville site, Alabama. Adapted from Pauketat TR (2007) Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. Walnut Canyon, CA: AltaMira.

platform mounds in substantial houses, where they used discrete sets of ritual materials in cultish performances, each perhaps the exclusive prerogative of specific kin groups. Like all such southeastern Mississippian places, Moundville’s preeminence eventually faded, replaced by other towns elsewhere, a process sometimes described as ‘cycling’. All across the Southeast, polities large and small and more or less hierarchical rose and fell every century or two. Early on, the people of many such places drew inspiration from Cahokia as a founding city and, some would argue, art style. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the political cults, formerly known as the Southeastern ceremonial complex(es), that seemed to mobilize communal labor (and politicize community identities) had begun to lose their meaning, even as interpolity war making reached new levels in parts of the Southeast. Entire histories, or cycles of chiefdom development, could be truncated by war parties from another polity.

Historical Ends Hernando de Soto witnessed the fragility of it all on his entrada in 1539–43, his passage and the swirl of historical circumstances to follow bringing down the curtain on the larger purely native history of the Southeast. Native historic-period ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘confederacies’ described in European accounts may or may not have been typical of the earlier Mississippian

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Figure 8 View of Moundville’s plaza and perimeter mounds.

period. There was great variability in their subsistence base, historical trajectories, and linguistic background. Many Southeastern polities were made up of Muskogean speakers. But far to the west were Caddoan speakers. In the Midwest, perhaps around Cahokia, Siouan languages might have been prevalent. Even farther north, around the Great Lakes, Algonquian and Iroquoian speakers predominated. In any event, it seems likely that various colonialera polities, from the Natchez of southern Mississippi to the Powhatan of northern Virginia, created powerful governments based on ancient principles. Like them, great native confederacies and proto-states, such as the League of the Iroquois, were not mere reactions to European contact. Instead, the political, ritual, and communal diversity of ancient forerunners, from the Hopewellian Scioto valley and insular Coles Creek provinces to proto-urban greater Cahokia, indicates that an archaeological understanding of the complexity of eastern Woodlands history needs to be understood in similar terms as those known to historical accounts: as ancient contacts, colonies, wars, alliances, and identity formations. Understood in that way, the ancient history of the eastern Woodlands has immediate and sometimesprofound implications for native and non-native people today and is essential for any fuller appreciation of world history. See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Americas, Central: Lower Central America; Craft Specialization; Exchange Systems; Image and Symbol; New World, Peopling of; Plant Domestication; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Social Inequality, Development of.

Further Reading Adovasio JM and Pedler D (2005) The Peopling of North America. In: Pauketat TR and Loren DD (eds.) North American Archaeology, pp. 30–55. Oxford: Blackwell. Anderson DG (1994) The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Carr C and TroyCase D (eds.) (2005) Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum. Doran GH (ed.) (2002) Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Farnsworth KB and Emerson TE (eds.) (1986) Early Woodland Archaeology. Kampsville, IL: Center for American Archeology. Hall RL (1997) An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Knight VJ, Jr. and Steponaitis VP (eds.) (1998) Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Milanich JT, Cordell AS, Knight VJ, Jr., Kohlern TA, and Sigler-Lavelle BJ (1984) McKeithen Weeden Island: The Culture of Northern Florida AD 200–900. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Minnis PE (ed.) (2003) People and Plants in Ancient Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pauketat TR (2004) Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pauketat TR (2007) Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. Walnut Canyon, CA: AltaMira. Sassaman KE (2004) Complex hunter-gatherers in evolution and history: A North American perspective. Journal of Archaeological Research 12: 227–280. Smith BD (2002) Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Squier EG and Davis EH (1848) Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Great Basin William R Hildebrandt and Kelly R McGuire, Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc., Davis, CA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary adobe Building material of sun-dried earth and straw. aggregation Aggregate: a group of many distinct parts or individuals. alluvial Composed of alluvium – clay, silt, sand, gravel, or similar material deposited by running water. atlatl A device for throwing a spear or dart that consists of a rod or board with a projection or hook at the end to hold the weapon in place until released. cal BP Calibrated radiocarbon years before present, adjusted to match tree-ring dates and correspond more closely to calendar years. intermontaine Situated between mountains. lanceolate Shaped like a lance with a tapering point and sometimes a tapering base. megafauna Animals of very large size (such as bison or mammoths). playa The flat bottom of an undrained desert basin that becomes a shallow lake when it rains. pluvial lake A lake which experiences significant increase in depth and extent as a result of increased precipitation and reduced evaporation. sedentism Sedentary: staying in one place, not migratory.

Introduction The Great Basin occupies about 165 000 square miles of the intermontane West, encompassing most of the state of Nevada, as well as parts of California, southern Oregon, western Utah, and small portions of Idaho and Wyoming (Figure 1). As its name implies, it has no outlet to the sea, with its rivers and streams generally emptying into low desert lakes and playas, such as the Carson Sink and Great Salt Lake Desert, or simply disappearing through evaporation or absorption into the ground. In addition to its desert valleys, much of the Great Basin is rippled with a series of massive northwest–southeast-trending mountain ranges, many with peaks in excess of 10 000 ft. The abrupt shifts in elevation, and their corresponding rainfall and temperature regimes, produce a spectacular range of plant communities and habitats, with vast expanses of sagebrush and shadscale in lower valleys, stands of pinyon and juniper at mid-elevations, and pockets of conifer forests on the highest peaks. The Great Basin is the home of the ethnographic Paiute and Western Shoshone, whose simple but exquisitely adapted desert lifeways loom large in the development of American anthropology. The Great

Basin provided the theoretical backdrop for Julian Steward’s pioneering work on cultural ecology, as well as his conception of the family band. This extraordinary landscape, and the people who have inhabited it over the last 13 000 years, continue to provide a laboratory for the study of human adaptation and the environment, and more specifically for the relationship between simple hunter-gatherer societies and the deserts they inhabit. The natural and cultural histories of the Great Basin, however, have been far from static. Major shifts in Late Pleistocene and Holocene climate regimes, with their concomitant effects on environmental productivity, have long been recognized. At the close of the last Ice Age, for instance, immense lakes such as Lahontan and Bonneville covered vast tracts of the Great Basin (Figure 2). These lakes shrank and in some cases completely evaporated, as warmer and dryer conditions set in during the Early Holocene. The Middle Holocene, dating to about 8000–4000 years ago, was marked by even more severe droughts that altered major hydrological and ecological systems, fundamentally shifting the course of landscape evolution. By the Late Holocene, with shorter but often still extreme droughts, climatic conditions were greatly improved. Through all of this, human beings have attempted to wrest a living from this landscape, changing and adapting to this challenging desert realm. The following presentation tracks the chronological progression of prehistoric lifeways in the Great Basin within this dynamic natural context. We emphasize general themes and patterns, at the expense of more detailed local examples and explanations. Chronology

While archaeologists have proposed several regional chronological sequences and schemes, we divide time into five broad periods (cal BP ¼ calendar years before present): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Palaeo-Indian 13 500–8000 cal BP, Early Archaic 8000–4000 cal BP, Late Archaic 4000–1400 cal BP, Formative (Fremont) 1400–600 cal BP, Recent Prehistoric Post-600 cal BP.

The Palaeo-Indian period (13 500–8000 cal BP) While there have been occasional claims of a more ancient Pleistocene occupation, most archaeologists now agree that the earliest definitive human use of the Great Basin is reflected by the fluted projectile points recognized across the New World as ‘Clovis’ points (Figure 3), named for the place in New Mexico where they were first found. These artifacts have been recovered almost exclusively from the surfaces of

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Figure 4 Stemmed points. By Tammara Ekness Norton. Figure 3 Clovis point. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

ancient landforms, such as playa margins, rather than from intact buried deposits. Thus they have not been found in the Great Basin in contexts suitable for radiocarbon dating and cannot be directly dated; instead they are assumed to date in the range of Clovis points found elsewhere in North America, that is, between 13 500 and 11 500 years old. In western North America, Clovis points have been found in association with the bones of now-extinct megafauna (e.g., mammoth and large bison), suggesting that these early populations were focused on biggame hunting. This also may have been the case in the Great Basin, but it has not yet been demonstrated. Great Basin Clovis peoples are thought to have been highly mobile, traveling in small groups and settling around lakes and along rivers where game also tended to congregate. Millingstones, the hallmark of Archaic and other, later-dating prehistoric occupations, are generally absent from Clovis sites. Prehistoric occupation of the Great Basin toward the latter end of the Palaeo-Indian Period (between 11 500 and 8000 cal BP) is documented by various large lanceolate and stemmed projectile points (Figure 4) which typically occur with a variety of heavy coretools, cores, stone knives, domed scraping tools, and chipped-stone crescents. Often referred to as the Western Pluvial Lakes tradition, and like the Clovis pattern that preceded it, archaeological assemblages dating to this time generally occur around the former shores of now-extinct pluvial lakes and other ancient landforms. Evidence of this later pattern, however, is found throughout the Great Basin, suggesting larger populations. While archaeologists have tended to view Western Pluvial Lakes peoples mostly as big-game hunters, many sites from this period have a wide variety of artifacts that reflect both hunting (projectile points, flaked stone cutting implements) and plantfood processing (grinding slabs, handstones). These

tools have been found with significant concentrations of small game, fish, and shellfish remains, clearly reflecting a wider subsistence focus than just the hunting of large game. There is no question, however, that Western Pluvial Lakes populations wandered far and wide in pursuit of the plant and animal resources they so depended on. Evidence for this is provided in the obsidian source profiles of projectile points and other tools dating to this time. Obsidian is a volcanic glass that was preferred by prehistoric stone workers for making their tools. Each obsidian flow exhibits its own distinct chemical signature, which can be identified using techniques known as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) mass spectrometry or instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). By matching the proportions of trace elements in an obsidian artifact with those from a known volcanic glass flow, archaeologists can determine the quarry where the material was obtained, and how far the toolmaker carried it before eventually discarding it. This information is then used to reconstruct broader settlement patterns, on the assumption that the distribution of the discarded obsidian reflects the travel patterns of the particular group of people who discarded it. Archaeological sites of the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition usually contain a wide variety of obsidians from different, far-flung source locations. This pattern, which has been seen throughout the Great Basin, is interpreted as evidence of a population’s high mobility and large geographic range. Although no one knows the origin of these earliest inhabitants of the basin, recent discoveries of human skeletal remains and re-analyses of older museum collections have shed new light on this old question. Radiocarbon dating of human remains and associated artifacts found in the Carson Sink area during the 1940s showed them to be in excess of 9000 years old. One of these burials, recovered from Spirit Cave (Figure 5), represents one of the oldest and

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best-preserved sets of human remains ever recovered in North America. What is even more noteworthy, however, is that these skeletal remains, as well as some found elsewhere in North America, are morphologically different from those of the ancestors of modern Native Americans. These findings probably indicate that there were multiple migrations of different groups from northeast Asia into North America and eventually into the Great Basin. This line of scientific inquiry is somewhat controversial, because many contemporary Native American tribes who call the Great Basin home believe that their direct ancestors were the original inhabitants of these lands, and that their people were created here. The Early Archaic (8000–4000 cal BP) As we have noted, there is compelling palaeoenvironmental evidence indicating that the transition into the Early Archaic (Middle Holocene) period was marked by a shift to both warmer and dryer climates in the Great Basin. A number of archaeologists have speculated that this Middle Holocene warm period may have either reduced human populations or led them to totally abandon the central Great Basin during this interval. As evidence, they point to a series of caves and rock shelters in the region that have human occupation sequences at least 9000 years long, but show evidence of abandonment during parts of the Middle Holocene warm period. This drought may have been more severe,

and its effects on human populations more extreme, at the early end of this period (c. 8000–5500 cal BP), but it is likely that dry conditions prevailed until about 4000 cal BP. In this scenario, better-watered areas along the western, northern, and eastern portions of the Great Basin may have sustained occupation during this time or even acted as refuges for populations who were forced to abandon the central Basin. Other archaeologists, while acknowledging that this was a time of severe environmental stress and declining populations, argue that large tracts of the Great Basin were never completely abandoned. Early Archaic artifact assemblages, and the lifeways they represent, show more regional variation than their Palaeo-Indian counterparts. In the southwestern Great Basin, many of the sites dating to this time are characterized by Pinto-series projectile points (Figure 6) and increasing numbers of milling tools, but retain many of the large, percussion-shaped cores, knives, and scraping tools characteristic of the earlier Western Pluvial Lakes tradition. It follows that lifeways associated with these two assemblage types – those of small, mobile bands with geographically extensive foraging ranges – were also little changed. Along the northern tier of the Great Basin, however, a completely different pattern emerged at this time, marked by the presence of Northern Side-notched dart points (Figure 7). As nearly as can be reconstructed, these points are distributed in a

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Figure 6 Pinto Series points. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

Figure 7 Northern Side-notched Point. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

fan-like pattern across the Columbia Plateau and the northern Great Basin, suggesting cultural influences from the north during this period. The best known of these site complexes is located in Surprise Valley, California, in the northwestern part of the basin (Figure 8). They contain formal, semi-subterranean house structures which date to between 6500 and 4500 years ago. Stylistically, distinctive artifacts found in these deposits include large side-notched projectile points, antler wedges, mortars with ‘V’-shaped bowls and pointed pestles, ‘T’-shaped drills, tanged blades, and flaked stone pendants. All of these artifacts and features appear to be of northern derivation, with comparable forms identified at numerous sites on the Columbia Plateau. The Late Archaic (4000–1400 cal BP) A major restructuring of the subsistence-settlement strategies used by Great Basin peoples occurred during the Late Archaic period. The small, highly mobile groups that characterized much of the Early Archaic were replaced by larger aggregations of people living in more permanent settlements. These settlements result in an archaeological record characterized by large accumulations of midden (organic-rich sediments

created by human occupation) and artifacts, as well as elaborate house structures and storage facilities. This higher degree of sedentism was probably supported by a more intensive collection and storage of plant foods, which is evidenced in the archaeological record by an increased frequency of milling equipment and the recovery of a wide range of wild seeds. A good example of a Late Archaic village was discovered in Owens Valley, within the southwestern portion of the Great Basin. Excavations at CA-INY-30 (Figure 9) revealed the presence of house structures made from frames of wooden poles covered with thatched roofs made from tule reeds. The houses contained a rich assortment of tools, including caches of obsidian knives, projectile points, and bone awls. Several storage pits were also found, one with a large accumulation of pinyon nuts. Midden deposits adjacent to the houses produced food remains indicating a multiseason occupation. Fall was marked by pinyon nuts, winter by migratory water fowl, while spring and summer were indicated by a variety of smallseeded plants like Indian rice grass. This new village-based pattern was accompanied by the emergence of several other settlement types, including specialized hunting camps. Excavations at these sites indicate that large-game hunting became more important than at any other time in Great Basin prehistory, and much of this hunting was focused on bighorn sheep killed high in the mountains. One of the best examples of this comes from the White Mountains, where projectile points, knives, and butchered sheep bones were discovered at sites located more than 10 000 ft above sea level. These remote habitats had rarely been used until the Late Archaic, when small groups of hunters armed with atlatls and darts tipped with Elko points (Figure 10) began killing sheep among the craggy alpine peaks, and transporting the meat down to the lowland villages. The focus on large-game hunting expanded well beyond the simple goal of providing food for people living in the lowland villages. Archaeologists interpret this from the explosion of ritualistic behaviors associated with hunting that emerged during this period. Perhaps the most obvious example of this behavior can be seen in the increased production of petroglyphs (artistic images pecked into natural rock outcrops), most of which portray bighorn sheep, often associated with human hunters (Figure 11). Sheep petroglyphs are found throughout the Great Basin, but the highest concentrations are located in the volcanic Coso Mountains of southeastern California, where thousands of engravings were created during the Late Archaic period. Other ritual activities were indicated by the severed heads of mountain sheep cached in remote mountain caves, and the

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Figure 9 Location of CA-INY-30. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

manufacture of split-twig sheep figurines found at many sites in the southernmost reaches of the basin. This period of cultural elaboration was accompanied by the interregional exchange of many commodities,

the most conspicuous being obsidian. As we have noted, obsidian occurs naturally at a limited number of locations, and these places can be identified with XRF or INAA analysis. Obsidian can also be

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dated, because when a new surface of the material is exposed to the atmosphere by a stone worker, it begins to absorb small amounts water, forming a hydration rim. The longer an artifact is exposed,

Figure 10 Elko points. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

the thicker the hydration rim becomes. Measuring these hydration rims, and calibrating them against radiocarbon dates on organic remains (e.g., an obsidian artifact found in a burnt house structure), allows archaeologists to estimate how quickly the hydration rim develops on a particular type of obsidian. This in turn allows us to convert a hydration rim reading (measured in microns) to an approximate date range. The data that have already been generated by these techniques show that the Late Archaic stone workers produced thousands of obsidian blanks, which were exported across hundreds of miles to meet the demands of hunters throughout the region. Some of the obsidian artifacts were traded over the Sierra Nevada and across the Central Valley of California, and ultimately reached the Channel Islands off the Santa Barbara coast, more than 50 miles out to sea.

Figure 11 Petroglyphs of hunters and bighorn sheep. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

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The Formative Period (1400–600 cal BP) For a brief period between about 1400 and 600 cal BP, a farming culture known to archaeologists as the Fremont, occupied significant portions of the Great Basin (Figure 12). They ultimately settled in much of what is now Utah, and appear to have borrowed many of their farming techniques from neighboring Anasazi populations living in the Southwest. Although some Fremont groups focused on the cultivation of maize, constructed extensive pit-house villages with adobewalled granaries, and created elaborate forms of pottery and rock art, others lived in smaller settlements and used a mixed economy reliant on both hunting/ gathering and agricultural production. The first hints of Fremont culture can be found at sites dating between 2500 and 1400 cal BP, which begin to show evidence of a few pit houses with slab-lined pits containing corn, though it was not until after about 1400 cal BP that full-scale village life emerged among these people. A good example of a major Fremont settlement is the Nawthis Village, located in Utah just east of Salina. Many of the houses there were composed of deep, circular pits covered with superstructures of timber and mud (Figure 13). Storage facilities were usually built above ground, and consisted of several rectangular rooms made of adobe and lined with large slabs of stone (Figure 14). Typical Fremont artifacts include the bow and arrow tipped with Rose Spring points (Figure 15); grayware

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pottery, sometimes painted with geometric designs; rod and bundle basketry; leather moccasins; polished stone balls; and ceramic human figurines. As with Late Archaic peoples, rock art was important to the Fremont. A signature icon of this culture is the engraving of broad-shouldered humans wearing elaborate necklaces, earrings, and headdresses. Subsistence remains from these sites indicate that maize, beans, and squash were important staples, but were supplemented with wild foods such as pinyon nuts, chenopod seeds, cattails, Indian rice grass, and various types of game. Ditches were sometimes constructed to irrigate crops, beginning at the mouth of a canyon and directed downstream across an alluvial fan and into the cultivated fields. Many of the canyon sites also contain pole and mud-walled granaries built into overhangs and crevices in hard-to-access places. These facilities probably indicate that people living in even the largest villages took to a more mobile hunter-gatherer lifeway from time-to-time, and used these caches to help secure their stored resources while they were away. The Fremont also occupied much smaller settlements, particularly along the northern and western margins of their territory. These sites often contain two or three houses, representing just a few families, or small deposits in caves and rock shelters created by part-time hunter-gatherers traveling away from their home villages. Why the Fremont chose to farm at

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Figure 13 Circular pit from Nawthis Village. From Exploring the Fremont by David B. Madsen.

Figure 14 Storage facilities from Nawthis Village. From Exploring the Fremont by David B. Madsen.

Figure 15 Rose Spring points. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

certain times and be hunter-gatherers at others remains an important research issue for Great Basin archaeologists. Most researchers believe that the decision to farm was based largely on the changing availability of the most lucrative wild foods in the

region, such as pine nuts and mountain sheep. If these resources were readily available, then people would spend little energy farming. But if human populations over-harvested these wild commodities, or their productivity dropped due to climatic changes, then people would focus on the more labor-intensive cultivation of domesticated plants. Sometime around 600 BP, the Fremont culture disappeared from the archaeological record. No one really knows why this occurred. Many archaeologists think that severe droughts associated with what is known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly or the Medieval Warm Period (1000–600 cal BP) made it impossible to irrigate crops on a regular basis, and that a new group of

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hunter–gatherers moved in and took over the territory. This new group, which spoke languages belonging to the Numic family (Paiute, Shoshone, Ute), either pushed the Fremont back toward their agricultural neighbors in the Southwest, or assimilated them into the new lifeway through intermarriage. While we cannot be sure which of these actually happened, analysis of ancient DNA from Fremont skeletal materials shows greater affinities with the Anasazi than with the Numic, providing some support for the Fremont being displaced from the Great Basin. The Recent Prehistoric Period (post-600 cal BP) The Recent Prehistoric period was marked by major shifts in land use resulting from the rapid spread of Numic populations across the region. Linguistic data indicate that Numic speakers originated in the southwestern corner of the Great Basin and spread quite quickly. By the time non-native people entered the region, much of it was occupied by people speaking similar (Numic) languages. If these people had lived here for a very long time, their languages would have diverged – in the way that Latin, which spread over much of Europe during the Roman Empire, evolved in different areas into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. That a Northern Paiute person living just east of Yosemite could speak to someone living on the Snake River indicates a relatively recent spread of a single population, perhaps occurring during the last 500 years or so. Unlike the large, centralized villages that characterized much of the Fremont and Late Archaic cultures, Numic peoples used smaller settlements inhabited by one or a few independent households on a seasonal basis, and are marked by brownware pottery and new projectile point types (desert side-notched/ cottonwood triangular points; Figure 16). Increased amounts of milling gear and specialized basketry, including a new type of seed beater, indicate a greater reliance on small-seed resources, while animal bones from these sites reveal that rabbits contributed much more to the diet than mountain sheep or deer. The declining importance of big-game hunting was also evidenced in the uplands, where the specialized hunting camps of the Late Archaic Period fell into disuse, or were replaced by the small family settlements. These changes in subsistence and settlement were accompanied by declines in the production of rock art and in the inter-regional exchange of obsidian. Petroglyphs portraying human figures and elaborate hunting scenes were no longer made and, in many cases, the older engravings were defaced by a style known to archaeologists as Numic Scratching. Late Archaic obsidian production sites at the quarries were also abandoned and replaced by small-seed processing stations

Figure 16 Desert side-notched and cottonwood points. By Tammara Ekness Norton.

in places that were never used for this purpose before. Not surprisingly, obsidian hydration data from the California coast show no evidence that obsidian tools entered the region after about 800 years ago providing additional evidence for the collapse of the earlier commerce between the western Great Basin and populations living west of the Sierra Nevada. Great Basin archaeologists do not have a clear understanding of why these changes occurred during the Recent Prehistoric period. Some have argued that people living in the Numic homeland (probably the Owens Valley of southeastern California), one of the most arid parts of the basin, developed an adaptation that could deal successfully with the harsh desert conditions in the local area. When the climate deteriorated during the medieval climatic anomaly, making life much more difficult for the Late Archaic and Fremont people, the door was left open for the Numic and their small-group desert adaptation, allowing them to take over much of the Great Basin. The success of this mobile lifeway was clearly evidenced at historic contact, as every habitat was occupied by people using simple but ingenious forms of technology and social organization to make a living in one of the most challenging parts of the North American continent. See also: Americas, North: American Southwest, Four

Corners Region; California and the Sierra Nevada; Plains; Rocky Mountains; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.

Further Reading Barlow KR (2005) A formal model for predicting agriculture among the Fremont. In: Kennett DJ and Winterhalder B (eds.) Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, pp. 87–102. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

300 AMERICAS, NORTH/Historical Archaeology in the United States Beck C (ed.) (1999) Models for the Millennium: Great Basin Anthropology Today. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Bettinger RL and Baumhoff MA (1982) The numic spread: Great Basin cultures in competition. American Antiquity 47(3): 485–503. D’Azevedo WL (1986) Great Basin. In: Sturtevant WC (ed.) Handbook of North American Indians 11. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Grayson DK (1993) The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Heizer RF and Baumhoff MA (1962) Prehistoric Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Madsen DB and Rhode D (1994) Across the West: Human Population Movement and the Expansion of the Numa. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Madsen DB and Simms SR (1998) The Fremont complex: A behavioral perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 12(3): 255–336. McGuire KR and Hildebrandt WR (2005) Re-thinking Great Basin foragers: Prestige hunting and costly signaling during the Middle Archaic period. American Antiquity 70(4): 693–710. O’Connell JF (1975) In: Bean LJ (ed.) The Prehistory of Surprise alley, Anthropological Papers 4. Romona, CA: Ballena Press. Stine S (1994) Extreme and persistent drought in California and Patagonia during Mediaeval time. Nature 339: 546–549. Willig JA, Aikens CM, and Fagan JL (1988) Early Human Occupation in Far Western North America: The Clovis–Archaic Interface, Anthropological Papers 21. Carson City, NV: Nevada State Museum.

Historical Archaeology in the United States Barbara J Little, National Park Service, Washington, DC, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Cultural Resource Management (CRM) A branch of archaeology that is concerned with developing policies and action in regard to the preservation and use of cultural resources. ethnicity A sense of being different than other groups because of cultural tradition, ancestry, national origin, history, or religion. material culture The buildings, tools, and other artifacts that includes any material item that has had cultural meaning ascribed to it, past and present. modernism International cultural movement after World War I expressing disillusionment with tradition and interest in new technologies and visions. National Historic Preservation Act A federal statute that established a federal program to further the efforts of private agencies and individuals in preserving the Nation’s historic and cultural foundations. National Register of Historic Places The United States’ official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation. Such resources include districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects significant in history, architecture, archaeology,

engineering, and culture. The National Park Service, which is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, administers the National Register. preservation The act of sustaining and maintaining cultural and natural resources identified as significant and/or threatened and that warrant protection. reconstruction the act or process of reproducing by new construction the exact form and detail of a vanished building, structure, or object, or a part thereof, as it appeared at a specific period of time.

Roots of Historical Archaeology in the United States Very early instances of historical archaeology in the Americas begin with the 1796 search for evidence of a settlement on St. Croix Island to fix the boundary between the United States and Canada. Half a century later James Hall excavated the foundations of Miles Standish’s home and in 1897 the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), which owned portions of James Island, uncovered the brick foundations of the 1639 church at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. In the United States, the preservation movement started during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and led to passage of the Antiquities Act which, in 1906, established the basic preservation policies of the federal government. In 1935, the Historic Sites Act built upon the ideals of noncommercial value and public benefit. Historical archaeology has been associated with the preservation movement and the needs of historic places since at least the 1930s. As it flourished in the context of the preservation movement, its early use was mainly confined to discovering architectural remains. When historical archaeology got its start in the 1930s, it joined the social history of the time in creating and supporting national mythology. Jamestown and Williamsburg, in particular, provide examples of government and private interest in the historic past. The work done at each and the interpretations offered have greatly influenced the shape of colonial historical archaeology. The 1920s and 1930s saw Rockefeller’s establishment of Colonial Williamsburg, which set new standards for historic preservation and used excavations to inform architectural restorations and reconstructions. Jamestown and Yorktown became part of the National Park Service in 1934. Some of the first large-scale excavations in historical archaeology in the country took place in Jamestown in the 1930s, alongside quite a few other projects, many of them funded by Federal relief monies. During the 1940s and 1950s, historical archaeology was not tied to the intellectual pursuits of

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prehistorians who worked in museums and academic departments but to the commemorative pursuits of preservationists and park interpreters. The preservation movement provided a home to archaeologists whose work on historic period sites was not valued by academic colleagues. In addition to undertaking salvage work, historical archaeologists excavated sites mainly for the purposes of reconstruction and visitor interpretation, in some cases rewriting the details of history. For example, Hale Smith’s excavations at the Scott Miller site near Tallahassee and John Griffin’s work at San Luis de Talimali comprised the first archaeology of Spanish missions in Florida. Archaeology systematically dismantled the local mythical identification of certain ruins as ‘missions’ as research revealed sugar mills and plantation buildings instead. JC Harrington excavated Fort Raleigh and Fort Necessity National Battlefield in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Accurate reconstruction of the forts relied upon archaeological information. The 1950s excavations at Jamestown were done in preparation for the 350th anniversary celebration in 1957. In the 1960s the new social history emerged and had a lasting impact on the field. One of the defining debates for historical archaeology during the 1960s raged as its practitioners struggled to define their work and create a separate profession. Would that profession be historical or anthropological? At times, that debate threatened to destroy the field because it was treated as the primary theoretical issue facing the discipline. However, the founding of the Society for American Archaeology (SHA) in 1967 brought some measure of academic legitimacy to the field. During the 1970s anthropology as a whole was moving closer to history, although prehistoric archaeology was not following suit. In turn, historians became enamored of anthropology, discovering culture, but not necessarily material culture. Growing awareness of pluralism and social history influenced the topics taken up by historical archaeologists. Much of the research starting in the 1960s and particularly in the 1970s was focused on subcultures of American society. Ethnicity was embraced as a subject to which historical archaeology could make real contributions in anthropology. Charles Fairbanks initiated the historical archaeology of African–Americans with his investigations of plantation slavery. While historical archaeology continued to work on the contact between Native and European Americans, it also developed strong interests in plantations and plantation slavery, the frontier, subsistence, ethnicity, and method. Within the Preservation Movement, the most influential legislative developments occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), passed in 1966, established the

National Register of Historic Places and created the field now known as Cultural Resource Management (CRM). The new requirements of the NHPA stimulated the growth not only of history and architectural history but also of historical archaeology because of requirements for survey and excavation of archaeological sites from all time periods. The volume of historical archaeology done in the United States increased dramatically with the legislated needs of CRM. The sheer volume of projects driven by legal requirements to evaluate sites in terms of their proven or potential information value (criterion ‘d’ of the National Register eligibility criteria) stimulated the field to define important questions of historic period sites that can be addressed fully only by incorporating archaeology. There would be far fewer archaeologists and far less archaeology done without the organizing structure of CRM. Given the dearth of historical archaeologists in American universities, it is unlikely that archaeologists would have turned their attention toward the research domains of social history without the surge of research supported through CRM. With this impetus, the topics addressed by historical archaeologists increased dramatically to embrace urban settings, occupational categories, landscape, mining, ranching, households, farmsteads, industry, consumer choice, burials, and battlefields along with methodological developments. In the 1980s archaeology as a whole was beginning a new period of critical self-examination and, in response, reactionary entrenchment. Since then numerous debates have taken place about the pros and cons of processual and post-processual archaeology. Historical archaeology has gone through its own periods of growth and change, and its practitioners have often been the most successful with approaches that seek to uncover intention, social relations, and ideology along with economy, function, and structure.

Approaches and Subject Matter Both the geographic and analytic scales at which historical archaeologists work vary considerably. Scholars have argued for fruitful scales of analysis from the global world system, to regions, to communities, to household, and even to individual artifacts. Because historical archaeology in the United States is somewhat fragmented, practitioners struggle to define unifying questions, looking for ‘questions that count’. Some archaeologists look to social historians and cultural anthropologists to define important questions. Certainly some of the questions concern race, class, and gender and are of current political and sociological import.

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One of the unifying commonalities in the discipline is the inevitable focus on material culture. Historical archaeology in the United States has matured into a diverse discipline using a wide range of material culture, historical documents, and theoretical frameworks. The range of issues is broad. Practitioners experiment with the methodologies and theoretical approaches needed to address topics such as ideology, resistance, ethnic and gender identity, power relations, and capitalism, beyond but not abandoning traditional concerns like chronology, subsistence, and land use. Whatever the approach or topic, artifacts lie at the core of the discipline. Interpreting material culture depends upon archaeological context. Without such context, artifact analysis is limited to aesthetic opinion and market value. Every archaeology student trained in the United States is told repeatedly that without context, artifacts are meaningless. Similarly, the contexts themselves are broadened to encompass not only stratigraphic levels and features, but also societies and cultural patterns. As the questions become more complex, broader contexts are required. Historical archaeology makes significant contributions to material culture studies as it broadens the sources for writing history. Several disciplines beyond archaeology, such as the history of technology, materials science, and art history are interested in artifacts. Because things are central to human expression, Material Culture Studies has emerged as a new discipline. Under this umbrella, many disciplines are making the leap from studying isolated objects to a more comprehensive look at meanings of objects in broader contexts. The influence of anthropology is at least partly responsible for this transition but material culture studies in many disciplines are broadening the contexts they study. The focus on material culture invites interdisciplinary cooperation and synergistic research. Several archaeologists suggest that capitalism be considered the proper primary focus of the discipline and argue that such a focus solves a long-standing problem of an atheoretical and eclectic stance in the discipline. Capitalism is recognized as important because it focuses on the development of the current dominant ideology of the modern Western world. There are weaknesses though, not the least of which is a Western/European centered viewpoint that may serve to omit cross-culturally relevant work incorporating written documentation such as that on Old World precapitalist states, political maneuvering between Native American groups, medieval Europe, or African cultures documented through oral history. The European emphasis comes from the history parentage of historical archaeology. The anthropology parent provides an emphasis on the ‘other’. Historical

archaeology need not shortchange either outlook but may examine the dynamic interplay between and within societies and social groups in various positions of power and powerlessness. In the United States such a historical archaeology is nearly always centered on time periods and people embedded in or buffeted by the complex context of capitalism. Research on the culture of capitalism seeks to understand the most pervasive changes of the past half-millennium: how did people make sense of capitalism’s economic, technical, and social transformations and their cultural effects? A focus on capitalism in this case begins with mercantile capitalism from the fifteenth century rather than solely on forms of industrial capitalism from the eighteenth century. Capitalism as world system serves as a way to keep myriad issues connected. Within the world system of capitalism there are different spatial and temporal scales of analysis and different foci for research. Within the United States the phenomenon of capitalism is not limited by region or time period; it is not unique to East Coast industrialism. Although capitalism supports and is supported by dominant cultural ideologies, neither it nor the ideologies are transcendent or all-encompassing; they are challenged, changed, and embraced. An archaeology of capitalism cannot be confined within the United States. Instead it is worldwide in scope. Therefore, historical archaeology considers the development of the modern world system, with all the ‘haunts’ of modernism, in cross-cultural perspective. In looking to capitalism and the development of contemporary society and the modern world as unifying concepts, historical archaeologists turn their attention around the globe to areas colonized or otherwise affected by Europeans. Capitalism is not monolithic, as regional differences in indigenous culture, historical contingencies, and ecological setting are understood to influence as well as be influenced by Europeanled economic conquest. The cross-cultural approach is needed to understand the contemporary ‘modern world’ that is truly diverse.

Goals of Historical Archaeology in the United States As a social science, historical archaeology’s goals are to systematically investigate, describe, and explain human activities in the past through the study of material culture, broadly conceived. As one of the humanities, historical archaeology seeks knowledge of the past in order to gain insight into the human condition. As a practice, historical archaeology in the United States is situated within the private sector in CRM firms, the government sector at all levels of government, and the academic sector, although it is

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weakly represented in the latter. Because so much historical archaeology is done as public archaeology that is funded or mandated by legal requirements, it is meant to provide public benefits. Therefore, its goals must reach beyond professional research goals toward the needs of the many participants and the public who use and value it. Public benefits involve not only the knowledge and understanding gained through research, but also the use of sites and collections for such purposes as entertainment, education, community cohesion, and economic development. Research goals of historical archaeology include preservation and site interpretation, historical supplementation, reconstructions of past life ways, understanding modernization and globalization, and contributions to archaeological science. Each of these is particularly challenging in a discipline that often struggles to be truly interdisciplinary. Partly due to its development in tandem with historic preservation and historic places, historical archaeology is often used to document architectural and landscape details for management and public interpretation. Excavated artifacts also provide information for historic furnishing specialists who select material for display, for example, in historic house museums. Historical archaeology supplements history in the sense that it can fill in gaps created by biased and incomplete records. Archaeology, often, may correct history derived from documents by providing alternative questions and interpretations. Supplementing history by filling in gaps calls attention to those gaps and to an appreciation of their importance. The goal of supplementation, then, is more usefully thought of as historical challenge. History thus supplemented is history re-conceptualized. The details of everyday life must be considered in the reconstruction of lifeways, which can be thought of as historical ethnography. There are parallel goals with prehistoric archaeology in describing life in the past in terms of foodways, settlement patterns, domestic life, economic relationships, social structure, and ideology. The reconstruction of past cultures and lifeways and the description of processes such as acculturation or Creolization and frontier adaptation intersect with global processes of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism and contribute to the histories of disenfranchised people as well as to those of the privileged. Thus, understanding modernization and globalization is a goal that is firmly embedded in the approach that sees the investigation of capitalism as a useful unifying approach in the discipline. As historical archaeology was being defined professionally, there were high hopes for its potential as a laboratory for anthropology, particularly concerning

processes such as colonization and acculturation. Potential for consideration of such processes continues to expand in the discipline. The idea of colonization, for example, may be dissected into dynamically related packages of power, domination, hegemonic negotiation, and resistance on many levels. Acculturation or Creolization, as it more accurately may be conceptualized, may be investigated as complicated economic, political, and symbolic negotiations. Historical archaeology has been used as a laboratory for more general archaeological science to be perfected through ethnoarchaeology and a ‘science of material culture’. At times, similar goals have been expressed for modern material culture studies. Such work includes tests of seriation, refuse patterning as a mirror of ethnicity, status indicators, and the observation and prediction of the effects of formation processes upon the archaeological record. Some historical archaeologists work to develop methods that will further the aims of prehistory and contribute to cross-cultural research, particularly among complex societies.

Time Periods, Issues, and Representative Sites Major issues include formation and maintenance of separations based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. The archaeology of the African–American experience has expanded considerably. There is also research on historic sites occupied by Native Americans, often in conflict or other contact with European–Americans; Asians, especially Chinese immigrants; and Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and other European nationalities. Archaeology is increasingly common at historic house museums, typically expanding from an initial focus on the ‘great man’ history of the place to examine the rest of the household and settlement. Domestic sites of all time periods, locations, and economic class yield insights into the transformations of everyday life. Workers’ housing and boardinghouses provide the opportunity to investigate the effects of industrialization and the changing face of work and labor. Gender presents a special challenge that is being met in innovative ways. An explosion of archaeology of African–Americans has often focused on plantation slavery but has expanded to consider the changing roles and situations of black Americans as slave and free, rural and urban. Plantation studies have undertaken to provide accounts of single plantations, experiment with Stanley South’s pattern-recognition technique, illuminate unique material expressions, and critique the archaeological treatment of slavery. Post-Civil War tenant plantations and Southern farms and the

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varying situations of free blacks provide opportunities for theorizing, analyzing, and describing strategies of power, expressions of all levels of ideology, and dynamic interactions among those attempting to dominate and those attempting to resist. The archaeology of slavery documents both covert slave resistance on plantations and overt resistance through sites of the Underground Railroad. Dividing time within historical archaeology in the United States results in relatively short periods marked approximately by centuries. Some issues are specific to particular time periods, but most continue through several periods, ranging from the earliest explorations and effects of inter-cultural contact and ethnic diversity fueled by immigration, from the sixteenth century through the era of the Great Depression and until today to include modern material culture. Many types of sites are common to all the time periods, including domestic sites, farms, shipwrecks, gardens and other landscapes, and Native American settlements. Exploration and Early Settlement

This time period of approximately the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries covers diverse issues, directly related to contact between native groups and both Europeans and Africans as well as adaptations that settlers from the old world made to new physical and social environments. Plantations and missions were established immediately when Europeans settled in the new world. Some notable site types are failed or abandoned colonies, early plantations, missions, fur trading posts, and early settlements along the East coast and in the Southwest. The Grand Village of the Natchez on the Mississippi River was the main village of the Natchez society occupied before 1682 until 1730. Two platform mounds

held the home of the leader known as the Great Sun in the main temple. French colonists described this village and some of the rituals they observed in this highly stratified society, providing accounts that help interpretations of Mississippian cultures in the Southeastern US. In 1565 the Spanish founded St. Augustine, which served as capital of Spanish Florida for most of the period until it was ceded to England in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris. The second Spanish occupation lasted from 1784 until 1821, when La Florida became a US territory. Archaeology has been particularly important for interpreting women’s roles as culturebrokers in Native American and Spanish interaction. It has also revealed the adoption of aboriginal diet and food ways in the development of a Creolized culture. In addition, archaeologists have documented the decline of local indigenous people and the influx of other native groups from Georgia and South Carolina. These and many other investigations have made it clear that ceramic assemblages indicate far more than functional use; they may inform about symbolic interaction and group competition. On Jamestown Island, in 1893 the APVA acquired more than 20 acres surrounding the old church tower and in 1934 the National Park Service acquired the rest of the island to establish Colonial National Historical Park. Projects of the 1930s and 1950s are well known (see above). Since 1994, APVA has discovered remains of the triangular 1607 James Fort, including the palisade wall lines, the east cannon projection, several cellars, a building, and several graves (Figure 1). Only a portion of the fort has been eroded away by the James River, although it was accepted for years that the fort had been lost. Analyses of hundreds of thousands of artifacts dating to the first half of the seventeenth century reveal details and patterns of the early colony, including

Figure 1 Reconstruction in progress of the barracks and palisade of James Fort, Jamestown, Virginia, in preparation for the 400th anniversary in 2007.

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the discovery that the Virginia Company supplied the colony with up-to-date medical supplies and copper stock with which to fashion jewelry to trade with the Powhatan Indians. The work on Martin’s Hundred by Ivor Noel Hume is a well-known excavation in the Chesapeake region. Within these 20 000 acres along the James River, the administrative center known as Wolstenholme Towne consisted of a palisade fort and several domestic buildings. Native Americans attacked settlements along the James River in 1622, devastating the European population. The burning of Wolstenholme Towne sealed a time capsule of early seventeenth-century plantation life that has been extensively excavated and has been interpreted for the public by Colonial Williamsburg. Virginia’s first governor, Sir George Yardley, established Flowerdew Hundred in 1619 as one of many plantations along the James River. Archaeological surveys located dozens of sites related to European settlement and have yielded important insights into early relationships between European and African– Americans. Excavations also revealed a previously unknown small-scale iron smelting industry operating in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Excavations of St. Mary’s City revealed Pope’s Fort, dating to 1645 and related to the English Civil War and the Protestant rebellion against Lord Baltimore; investigations of the 1630s Jesuit Chapel uncovered burials of some of Maryland’s founders. Analysis of the town not only located several structures, including the 1635 governor’s residence and state house, a lawyer’s lodging, private homes, and public inns, but also indicates that Maryland’s first capital did not develop haphazardly but was a planned settlement incorporating concepts of Baroque urban design. Eighteenth-Century Life

The character of European settlement in several regions changed from frontier to settled community. Plantations continued to be important but cities became increasingly so. This century saw the development of the Age of Reason, including new rules of behavior and hence new material culture, and the beginning of the industrial revolution within AngloAmerican colonies. Plantations continued to be vital parts of the economic and social landscape until the end of the Civil War. Spain’s missions continued to be vital to their colonies in California and the Southeast. Some notable site types include missions, fur trading posts, cities, and battlefields and forts of the French and Indian War, and of the American Revolution. The African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan in New York City was the burial site for that city’s enslaved population throughout the 1700s. The 1990s excavation, study, and reburial of over 400

individuals marks a watershed in historical archaeology in the United States in terms of public involvement. Analysis of the skeletal remains and burials reveal some direct connections to African cultural practices and symbolism as well as the physical hardships and effects of enslavement. Fort Necessity in Western Pennsylvania was the 1754 scene of a pivotal conflict between England and France in the French and Indian War. Archaeology revealed that long-held assumptions about the fort’s precise location, size, and shape were wrong. Excavation identified the stockade and outer entrenchments and permitted an accurate reconstruction as a circular fort, which is managed by the National Park Service. The Archaeology in Annapolis project excavated over 20 sites in Maryland’s capital, including formal gardens, colonial mansions, a print shop and artisans’ dwelling, and evidence of the baroque town plan. The project has explicitly focused on the development of the culture of capitalism and an innovative and influential public program. Archaeology at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, and at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s ‘other’ plantation, has provided insight into lives, work conditions, and accomplishments of white and black servants and slaves. As on other plantations, the analysis of food remains has been important for understanding ethnic and economic variability. Of particular importance is the analysis and understanding of a distinct culture that developed among African–Americans. In addition, the archaeology investigates Jefferson’s landscape design and the purposeful shaping of these places. Nineteenth-Century Life

While manufacturing and iron production began in the colonies during the seventeenth century and crafts began to turn into industries in the eighteenth century, it is during the nineteenth century when full-blown industry and accompanying commerce appear. Industry changed the structure of wage labor, yet slave labor continued in agricultural, industrial, commercial, and domestic settings. The California gold rush stimulated migration West within the continent and also stimulated Chinese immigration. Notable site types include plantations, railroad sites, and many other types of sites associated with Manifest Destiny, Chinese terraced gardens, industrial sites including workers’ housing, battlefields, encampments, and other locations directly associated with the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. Work at the early nineteenth-century Russian colony of Fort Ross in California goes beyond traditional studies of acculturation. Analysis in the context of mercantile colonialism reveals that Native American

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workers did not buy European goods, but acquired them as discarded items. They recycled materials such as nails and ceramic and glass sherds into objects that were useful in the Native American context and within a complex set of Native cultural strategies Investigations at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia show peoples’ responses to changes in industry as the armory was transformed from a work place run by artisans to a factory of wage laborers run by the military (Figure 2). Workers were not silent about their disintegrating social and economic position. Reactions on the job to harsher work conditions and longer hours included work slowdowns, sabotage and, in one extreme case, murder. Families also made different consumer choices in this chaotic environment. During the early nineteenth century, when the lives and livelihoods of craftsmen appeared unthreatened and secure, the households of management and labor tended to follow the same fashions in choosing their domestic goods. Later, in mid-century, the managers continued to adopt new styles. In contrast, laborers re-adopted old styles even while both cost and availability made the new and fashionable household goods accessible to the average armory worker. At the Boott Mills industrial complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, excavations of the mill girls’ boardinghouses reveal that workers frequently disregarded corporate rules about behavior, particularly

Figure 2 Stratigraphic layers at the nineteenth-century Harpers Ferry Armory in West Virginia.

concerning the consumption of alcohol. Other artifacts indicate that the mill workers sought to create distinct individual identities for themselves. In 1865 the Steamboat Bertrand, bound from St. Louis for the newly discovered goldfields of Montana, sank in the Missouri River north of Omaha, Nebraska. In 1969 the vessel’s hull was completely excavated, yielding tools, clothing, food, and equipment which were in remarkably good condition because they had been preserved in an anaerobic, only slightly acidic, environment. Visitors to the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa may view the collection storage area that protects the cargo collection of 200 000 artifacts. The objects bound for the mining towns may not be what one would expect to find on the raucous nineteenth-century American frontier. In addition to necessities, there was olive oil and mustard from France, bottled tamarinds and a variety of canned fruits, several varieties of alcoholic bitters, powdered canned lemonade, and brandied cherries. Such an inventory challenges assumptions about merchants on the frontier and provides an important resource for researchers of frontier life and consumer culture. Like-a-Fishhook Village on the Missouri River in North Dakota was occupied c. 1845–85 by Hidasta, Mandan, and Arikara people who farmed and traded with Europeans. Excavations of this multicultural village revealed both traditional and modified housing built by members of these three distinct tribes and extensive evidence of the fur trade as well as the presence of Fort Berthold. In 1983 an accidental grass fire exposed the surface of Little Bighorn Battlefield, providing the opportunity to examine the ground surface and to conduct archaeological investigations into this battle, which is one of the most famous of many conflicts over control of land and life in the American West. On June 25, 1876 the Seventh US Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, engaged the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in a battle that was part of the United States government’s military campaign against the tribes who refused to live within the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation and who were struggling to continue their traditional way of life. Because none of the 7th Cavalry combatants survived, there were no eyewitness accounts from whites. Historians had long held that the extensive Indian testimony was not accurate. Specific questions concerned where the participants of the battle took up positions and how they moved about the field. The archaeologists used geophysical techniques and excavation to translate artifact patterning into behavioral dynamics through the use of modern firearm identification procedures. The innovative archaeological methods created during these investigations changed the way that

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battlefield archaeology is done and raised expectations for results. Archaeological discoveries challenged historical details and versions of the battle and the findings support the idea that the Indian battle accounts are more accurate than those of the soldiers who buried the dead. In another example of archaeology supporting ‘alternative’ history and challenging an accepted perspective is provided by an archaeological project commissioned by the Northern Cheyenne to document escape routes taken during the Outbreak from Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1879. Archaeological results successfully challenged official Army-based accounts of the escape by providing data that bolstered Cheyenne oral tradition. This is one of many examples where oral history and archaeology are mutually supportive in providing data and perspectives that contribute to a more accurate history in which biases and the politics of knowledge are acknowledged. Excavations at the Millwood Plantation on the Savannah River in South Carolina provide insight into the transition between plantation slavery from the 1830s until the Civil War to post-war tenant farming lasting into the 1920s. Changes in settlement pattern reveal the search for greater freedom among formerly enslaved workers as quarters were replaced by clustered housing which was in turn replaced by more dispersed and independent houses. Twentieth-Century Life

The economy of the United States continued to change after the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction and with the impact of the Depression of the 1930s. Demography continued to change with immigration, anti-immigration laws, and internal migration. Notable site types include tenant farms, sites associated with mining, including mines themselves and mining camps; saw mills, logging camps, boom towns, work camps, and sites of conflicts between labor and capital. Historical archaeology of mining spans several centuries and documents not only the extraction and refinement processes, but also the social life and culture of miners. The early twentieth-century remains of Reipetown in eastern Nevada reveal interesting anomalies of a mining town without evidence of internal class distinctions. No material culture evidence indicates consumer differences among documented households of ethnic Slavs, Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, and Japanese. The Ludlow Massacre of striking coal miners and their families by the Colorado National Guard in April 1914 sparked an important turning point in labor relations in the United States. Archaeologists of the Ludlow Collective investigate this site not only to document the material evidence of the tent

colony and its destruction but also to revive the memory of working class struggle.

Disclaimer The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent any official position of the US National Park Service. See also: Americas, Central: Historical Archaeology in Mexico; Americas, North: Plantation Archaeology; Americas, South: Historical Archaeology; Historic Preservation Laws; Industrial Archaeology.

Further Reading Crowell AL (1997) Archaeology and the Capitalist World System: A Study from Russian America. New York: Plenum Press. Deagan K (1983) Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York: Academic Press. Deetz J (1993) Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, pp. 1619–1864. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Feguson L (1992) Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early Africa America, 1650–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hardesty DL and Little BJ (2000) Assessing Site Significance: A Guide for Archaeologists and Historians. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Little BJ (2007) Historical Archaeology: Why the Past Matters. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Mullins PR (1999) Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African American and Consumer Culture. Klewer Academic/Plenum. Orser CE, Jr. (2002) Encyclopedia of Historical Archaeology. London: Routledge. Orser CE, Jr. (1988) The Material Basis of the Postbellum Tenant Plantation: Historical Archaeology in the South Carolina Piedmont. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Shackel PA (1996) Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. New York: Plenum Press. Wall DD (1994) The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres of Urban America. New York: Plenum Press.

Plains W Raymond Wood, University of Missouri – Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary earthlodge An earthlodge refers to a kind of semi-permanent house, supported by four or more center posts and covered with a layer of earth and sod with a covered entry hall. fluted point A projectile point with a distinctive longitudinal groove on both faces, left after removal of a channel flake from the base of the point.

308 AMERICAS, NORTH/Plains wickiup Hut used by the nomadic Indians of the arid regions of the western and southwestern US, usually with an oval base and a rough domed frame covered with reed mats, grass, or brushwood.

Introduction The Great Plains of North America encompass the vast grasslands that lie between forested eastern North America and the Rocky Mountains; to their north the region is bounded by the boreal forests of Canada, and to the south by the Gulf Coastal Plain. The region is subject to climatic extremes of the continent’s interior, plus the aridity resulting from lying in the rain shadow of the Rockies. This vast region nonetheless is environmentally very diverse, containing forested montane areas as well as large river systems. Major streams drain from the Rockies toward the east, and provide valley-bottom habitats that bisect this great grassland, and in the east their expansive riverbottoms provided fertile land for the gardens of later peoples (see Figures 1 and 2). The region provided a perfect setting for the American bison, an animal that remained the preferred choice of prey for Native Americans for 11 000 years, though pronghorns and other smaller game were not neglected. Estimates of the historic bison population on the plains range from some 30 million upwards to twice that number. These huge beasts, though smaller than their Clovis- and Folsom-era ancestors, provided raw material for an astonishing range of needs: food, shelter, tools, and weapons – from housing to fly swatters. Folsom hunters were the first to develop techniques for killing bison in large numbers, techniques that were refined over the succeeding generations, and that included driving them over cliffs and into corrals and natural enclosures. For generations killing weapons were spears, or darts cast using an atlatl, or spear-thrower. The bow and arrow did not arrive on the plains until about the time of Christ. Historically, a bison-skin tipi was used by every group on the plains, though some semi-sedentary late farmers used it principally while they were away from their villages on the hunt. Archaeological evidence for use of the tipi goes back perhaps 5000 years, though its perfect adaptation to the needs of nomadic life on the Great Plains suggests that it has far greater antiquity. Except for differences between three-pole and fourpole foundations, there is astonishingly little variation in these conical dwellings across the plains, which were quickly erected and even more rapidly dismantled (see Figure 3).

Palaeo-Indian Cultures The earliest soundly documented inhabitants of the Great Plains were Clovis hunters, living between

about 9900 and 9200 BC, though tantalizing but inconclusive suggestions of prior human occupations persist (Figure 2). Most readily identified by their distinctive fluted lanceolate points, Clovis sites denote a mobile hunting and gathering society best known for its exploitation of mammoths (more recently, mastodons have been added to their prey), though they depended on lesser game for most of their subsistence. In the Eastern Plains and in southeastern United States, the Clovis point appears to have evolved into the fluted Dalton point. On the Western Plains, however, Clovis points were replaced by Folsom points, which were made using a different fluting technique, in which a single flake was detached from each side of the base, rather than multiple flakes (see Figure 4). Folsom hunters ranged the plains between about 9000 to 8000 BC. Their sites reveal an abrupt change in hunting: kill sites now contain large numbers of an extinct species of bison instead of animals that were stalked individually. These Palaeo-Indian hunters lived during a time of dramatic environmental and climatic change. During Clovis times the glacial climate of North America was slowly warming. Mammoths, mastodons, giant bison and ground sloths, and other giant ice-age fauna had vanished by Folsom times, probably due to changes in their food supply because of changing vegetational patterns, though human hunting may also have contributed to their demise. Though little is known of their social life, the presence of high-quality stone for making chipped-stone tools that originated hundreds of kilometers away implies either highly mobile bands or the genesis of long-distance trade. A succession of peoples who made a wide range of new and different kinds of unfluted lanceolate projectile points occupied the plains between about 8000 and 6000 BC. Collectively, these cultures are called the Plano complexes, and the points they made include Agate Basin, Plainview, Milnesand, and Hell Gap points. A group of sites in the Northern Plains containing materials known as the Cody complex includes points of varying form described as Alberta, Scottsbluff, Eden, Firstview, and Kersey points. Other terminal Palaeo-Indian complexes include Allen/Frederick. Many of these sites consist of localities where large numbers of bison were killed and butchered, a continuation of the Folsom practice of collective kills.

Plains Archaic Cultures Hunting and gathering continued to be important for the next several thousand years, during what is sometimes called the Archaic period, dating between about 6000 and 500 BC (Figure 5). Global temperatures had been increasing since the retreat of glacial ice and,

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we rt h No rn ste

No rth ea s Mi

te rn

dd

le

s Plain

Mis s o

ur

i

s Plain

Central plains

Southern

Plains

Figure 1 Spatial divisions of the Plains area. After Lehmer (1971) Introduction to Middle Missouri Archeology. National Park Service, Anthropological Papers No. 1. Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior.

Figure 2 Typical Plains view showing the interfingering of stream-bottom vegetation and upland grasslands. In the foreground is the Ray Long site, southeast of the South Dakota Black Hills. Photo by Richard P. Wheeler, National Anthropological Archives.

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Figure 3 A Skin Lodge of an Assiniboin Chief. After Karl Bodmer.

cm

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 4 Clovis and Folsom points: (a, b) Clovis points; (c, d) Folsom points. From Jack L. Hofman and Russell W. Graham, The Paleo-Indian Cultures of the Great Plains. In W. Raymond Wood, editor, Archaeology of the Great Plains (1998), Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

though the timing varies with geography, temperatures peaked in what is known as the Hypsithermal climatic episode, some 5000 to 3000 BC, then gradually began to cool to modern conditions. The effects of this warming peak and its accompanying droughts on human and animal activities must have been locally very severe, but people never abandoned the region. The record for this period is quite patchy because of poor preservation and inadequate sampling, but across the plains we nevertheless find an increasing number of distinctive complexes, largely defined on the basis of a rapidly expanding inventory of very diverse projectile points that include Logan Creek,

Gore Pit, McKean, and Pelican Lake. Lifeways were adjusting to a time of rapidly changing climate that led to striking modification in the flora and fauna upon which humans depended. Bison remained a staple in their diet, but there is now more evidence for the use of plant resources because, as opposed to the rare presence of grinding tools in late PalaeoIndian times, there is the almost universal use of manos and metates for grinding seeds and other vegetal foods. In the Eastern Plains, simple fiber-tempered pottery that dates to between 2600 and 1000 BC was unexpectedly found at the Nebo Hill site, near Kansas City.

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Time

Period

Historic

Plains villagers

Plains nomads

Coalescent

1500 1250

Taxon

Plains village

Middle Central Southern Oneota Missouri Plains Plains

1000 750 Keith Besant

500 Woodland 250 Kansas City Hopewell

AD 1 500

Pelican Lake 1000

McKean

2000 Archaic 3000 Gore Pit

4000 5000

Logan Creek

6000 7000

Plano

Agate Basin Hell Gap

Cody

8000 Folsom 9000 BC

Palaeolndian

Clovis

Figure 5 Chronological periods on the Great Plains, with a few representative cultural units.

Plains Woodland Cultures Beginning about the time of Christ or a little earlier, the eastern part of the plains began to witness the development of a wide variety of cultures that made elongate pottery vessels with conoidal bases, corner-notched projectile points, and that sometimes erected small burial mounds, elements that had their ultimate origin in eastern United States and, indeed,

these were presaged in scattered late Archaic sites in the American Midwest. Some of these emerging plains Woodland complexes, including the so-called Kansas City Hopewell, clearly were inspired by Middle Woodland influences in northeastern United States. Still other Woodland elements appear to have diffused onto the plains and were overlaid on a variety of pre-existing Archaic bases. These Woodland complexes extend west

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to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, up the Missouri River into Montana, north into southern Canada, and south into Oklahoma and Texas. Archaeologists believe that a good case can be made in many instances for a continuum between the indigenous Archaic peoples and Woodland populations, but a dramatic change in hunting took place with the introduction of the bow and arrow, and in cooking by the widespread use of pottery. Good examples of architecture appear during this time. Oval house patterns, probably resembling small dome-shaped structures covered by hides or bark, like wickiups, probably sheltered a nuclear family, and we may presume small hamlets of such structures typified their settlements. Representative complexes include Besant in the Northern Plains, and the Keith Phase in the Central Plains. Wild plant foods continued to be gathered, as always, but in about AD 250 the Kansas City Hopewell began the limited cultivation of maize, squash, and marshelder. Other groups and later Woodland sites in the Eastern Plains also contain sunflower seeds, though the cultivation of maize and other cultivated crops apparently did not extend into the western High Plains (see Figure 5).

Plains Village Traditions About AD 900 this pattern of incipient agriculture was overturned by settled peoples who lived in the valleys of major streams, built substantial dwellings capable of housing an extended family, and maintained a developed agricultural system. Gardens were prepared and tilled using sharpened bison scapulas lashed to a wooden handle. River floodplains supported small gardens containing maize, squash, and marshelder, to which were everywhere added beans, sunflowers, and gourds that contributed significantly to their diet, though bison hunting remained important. People were now tied at least seasonally to their fields though, like their historic descendants, they surely went on long-distance hunts on the High Plains, principally west of their villages. Three major traditions may now be seen among the newly developed semi-sedentary gardeners along the eastern rim of the Central and Northern Plains. Each of them is believed to have developed, in ways that are not yet clear, from local Woodland origins. Their houses are larger than those of earlier times, and are capable of housing an extended family. In the Central Plains small hamlets and the individual homesteads of these gardeners are known as the Central Plains Tradition, dating between about AD 900 and 1300. The tradition encompasses three major subdivisions: Upper Republican, along the Nebraska–Kansas boundary; Nebraska, along the Missouri River in

Nebraska and Iowa; and Smoky Hill, in north-central Kansas. Their hamlets of nearly square houses, set on terraces or hills above river floodplains, were supported by four or more center posts, and had a covered entry extending from one side; they were probably covered with earth. Bell-shaped pits were used for storing household goods and garden produce. Well-made globular pottery vessels and a wide range of utilitarian and nonutilitarian artifacts distinguish between these three subdivisions. Their small communities apparently enjoyed relative peace with their neighbors, for none is known to have been fortified. During the same time, to the north, along the banks of the Missouri and its major tributaries in northwestern Iowa and in North and South Dakota, was the Middle Missouri Tradition. Characterized by long rectangular gabled houses with extended entries on one end, they were clustered in villages of varying size, usually built on the rim of high terraces overlooking the river. The walls of their houses probably were banked with earth, but their roofs do not appear to have been covered with earth as were those in the Central Plains. Villages often were fortified by a ditch that enclosed the town margins not facing the riverbank, and was reinforced along its inner rim by a palisade of closely set posts, often augmented by bastions. It is clear that these people were menaced by some of their neighbors: perhaps by nomads, or perhaps by other villagers competing for the same resources. These communities evolved through three consecutive stages: the Initial, Extended, and Terminal Middle Missouri stages. Some Terminal Middle Missouri towns consisted of one hundred or more houses, tightly packed within bastioned defensive ditches (see Figure 6). Sometime after about AD 1350 the distinctive architecture and artifacts of the Central and Middle Missouri Traditions become blurred, in what is known as the Coalescent Tradition. The architecture of the gardening tribes from Nebraska to North Dakota soon consisted of circular earth-covered lodges supported on a four-post foundation, and retaining a covered entry (see Figure 7). Dwellings of many early Coalescent sites are scattered and without visible defenses, but later ones are uniformly large and heavily fortified (Figure 5). The nature of the processes that led to these changes is obscure, but there is little doubt the Arikaras were responsible for introducing the new circular earthlodge in the north. The arrival of the Dakota Sioux from the Eastern Plains is presumed to be a major stimulus for their defensive measures. The historic Siouan-speaking Mandan and Hidatsa Indians are lineal descendants of the Middle Missouri Tradition; the historic Caddoan-speaking Arikara and Pawnee Indians developed from the Central Plains Tradition. The Crows broke away from the Hidatsas in

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Figure 6 Aerial view of Double Ditch State Historic Site, North Dakota, a prehistoric to historic Mandan Indian site. Photo by Russ Hanson, courtesy of National Park Service.

Figure 7 Early historic Arikara earthlodge floor, Cheyenne River site, South Dakota. (National Anthropological Archives, negative 39ST1-84).

late prehistoric times to become nomads. Historically, a number of tribes along the eastern rim of the plains adopted the same general lifestyle just described for the earthlodge-dwelling tribes, including the Omahas, Poncas, and Otos. So did the Cheyennes and some of the Eastern Dakota Sioux – such as the Santees and Yanktonais – but in the historic period they abandoned this way of life for a fully nomadic one. Though it is somewhat marginal to the Great Plains, in the late prehistoric period another major complex occupied the region extending from Lake Michigan to the Missouri River, and from southern

Minnesota to central Missouri, roughly centered on the state of Iowa. Sometimes called a ‘pottery culture’ because of its distinctive if highly variable ceramics, the Oneota Tradition emerged in about AD 900, probably having its antecedents in regional Woodland groups. They share many elements with village groups on the plains, including agriculture that used hoes made from bison scapulae. Many Oneota sites are very large, some covering more than one hundred acres. Earthen enclosures are known at a few of them, and other sites are associated with burial mounds, though there are extensive

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cemeteries along the Missouri River, such as at the Blood Run site. The people were hunters, fishers, and gatherers who depended heavily on seasonally available resources near their villages. Maize was their major crop, but beans, squash, and sunflowers also were grown. Oneota culture persisted in many variants into the historic period, and has been identified as ancestral to the historic Chiwere Siouan-speaking Winnebago, Ioway, Otoe, and Missouri; and as the Dhegiha Siouan-speaking Osage, Kansa and, probably, the Omaha and Ponca tribes in the Central Plains and its margins.

Southern Plains Small village groups also began to appear on the Southern Plains in about AD 800 or 900. Living in permanent houses and practicing both agriculture and hunting and gathering (focusing on bison), they possessed a rich inventory of tools and weapons befitting a sedentary life. Set near the floodplains of major streams, and growing maize, beans, and squash, their homes assumed various forms: some had stone-slab foundations, while others were wattleand-daub structures. Thousands of these villages are scattered across the Southern Plains, differentiated by their architecture, pottery, and other possessions. It is believed that most or all of them developed from indigenous Woodland groups, with the architecture of the western groups borrowed from Puebloan groups to the southwest, and the more easterly ones borrowing from the eastern woodlands. Many of the groups are believed to be related to historic Caddoan groups who lived further to the east and north. Upper Canark Complex villages, scattered across the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and adjoining regions, were characterized by houses having stone-slab foundations, some of them having several

Figure 8 The American bison. Photograph by W. Raymond Wood.

rooms. The best-known subunit of that complex is the Antelope Creek Phase, centered in the Texas panhandle. Isolated homesteads, small hamlets, and large unfortified villages denote peaceful times, though their westernmost villages in southeastern Colorado are built in defensive settings. A number of other village complexes are known in central Oklahoma and northern Texas, several of which are assigned to the Redbed Variant. Dating to about AD 800 or 900–1450, their hamlets or small villages of rectangular or oval wattle-and-daub homes were confined to the valleys of major rivers. Like their earlier western neighbors, they depended heavily on bison, though the abundance of this animal appears to have fluctuated through time. Some of these groups are surely related to the historic Wichita Indians. The Wichitas emerge into history as the descendants of the Great Bend Aspect of south-central Kansas. Dating between AD 1450 and 1700, their large villages were built on terraces or hillsides near streams. Circular or oval homes were built on the surface or in shallow pits; they are believed to represent the kind of pole and grass-thatched structures described by Francisco de Coronado and Juan de On˜ate in the 1500s. Fragments of chain mail and other metal goods from some Great Bend sites identify them as the Wichita villages known to the Spaniards as Quivira.

Transition to the Historic Tribes Nomadic bison hunters continued to live on the High Plains in the west throughout prehistory, though the bison they were hunting after about 8000 BC were now of modern size (see Figure 8). Though we have little information on these people in late prehistoric times, their way of life was a very ancient one, and persisted with remarkably little change from Archaic

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times until the historic arrival of guns and the Old World horse. Things were to change dramatically with the arrival of these two elements. Native North American horses had become extinct after Clovis times, but their re-introduction by the Spanish in the southwest soon led to their diffusion north into the Great Plains and thence west into the Columbia River area by the early 1700s. Horses meant that burdens could be pulled more easily than by the dogs previously used, and hunters could range over vastly greater areas in search of game. The introduction of guns by French traders furthered this revolution in hunting and in warfare. Because the Spanish in the American southwest prohibited the sale of guns to Indians, Native American markets on the plains – especially in the north – saw a brisk trade as the guns obtained from French traders to the northeast were traded for horses that originated in the Spanish settlements. Plains Indians now had great mobility and the ability to kill game and enemies at heretofore impossible distances. This led to the historic stereotype of the mounted Indian warrior. These new elements radiated throughout the plains, leading to such diverse changes as larger tipis, and the ability of a man to have multiple wives. Profits made by such middlemen traders as the Mandans made them extremely wealthy. By historic times there was a plains-wide trading system, interwoven with relations with far-flung groups that, indeed, formed a pan-continental trading network. In the plains this trade was fostered by the famous plains sign language, a pidgin that permitted easy communication between groups who spoke radically different languages. Trade was also facilitated by the Calumet Ceremony, which involved the ‘adoption’ of individuals across tribal boundaries, and placed trade in a social setting that was familiar and comfortable to both parties. Exchanges between the gardening tribes and the nomadic hunters and gatherers was one of the mechanisms that led to such striking similarities between the tools and weapons of these two groups who were, on the face of matters, so distinctive in their way of life. Another effect of white contact was the precipitous decline in population that resulted from the introduction of several diseases that were previously unknown in North America and to which they had no immunity. The principal killer was smallpox, as it often led to the deaths of more than 90% of its Indian victims. The number of deaths from smallpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other diseases across the plains cannot be calculated, but between about 1750 and 1837 the number of Arikara villages was reduced from perhaps 33 villages to a single town, and the number of Mandans (see Figure 9) declined from some 12 000 to about 125 individuals. Nomadic tribes such as the Sioux and Cheyennes

Figure 9 Mandeh-Pahchu, a young Mandan Indian. After Karl Bodmer.

were less affected, for they were not tied to crowded and disease-prone villages as were the sedentary tribes. Population reduction led to many social changes from marriage patterns to political organization. Reduction in the numbers of the villagers living along the Missouri made it simpler for the Dakota Sioux to expand from the northeastern rim of the plains west across that river into the Western and Northwestern Plains, radically altering the balance of power on the plains. European-made goods, or artifacts fashioned from European materials, quickly entered the lives of Native Americans from the instant that Europeans arrived on the scene. These introduced items had an accelerating effect on traditional native crafts, ultimately eliminating many of them by the substitution of new goods. Replacement took place either as a raw material for traditional goods, or the traditional good was abandoned in preference to newly acquired implements like steel knives and metal cooking pots. The arrival of guns, horses, new technologies, and alien diseases had irreversible effects on plains Indian life – changes that culminated when they were confined to reservations following the Indian Wars in the late 1800s.

Historic Sites Archaeology Archaeologists have not neglected historic sites across the plains. Documented historic Indian sites have been systematically excavated in efforts to tracehistoric groups into the prehistoric past. In addition, early efforts by historic site archaeologists such as Smithsonian scholar G. Hubert Smith and his colleagues led to the excavation of military and furtrading posts in reservoirs that were to be flooded

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by federal dams in the mid-1900s. Among such sites were Fort Stevenson, North Dakota (a post-Civil War military post), and Forts Pierre and George (furtrading posts, mid-1800s). State historical societies and universities soon began investigating other such sites, and with the advent of federal legislation in the mid-1900s, mandated cultural resource surveys were locating many additional kinds of sites, and follow-up excavations were taking place in such diverse sites as stage stops and abandoned pioneer towns. Historians have been full-fledged partners in planning and interpreting such projects, and the murky corners of the history of the Great Plains continue to be illuminated by these interdisciplinary studies. See also: Americas, North: Eastern Woodlands; Great

southeastern United States. The term is inappropriate for similar pottery recovered from Caribbean sites. diaspora The scattering or dispersal of a people. African diaspora usually refers to the forced dispersal of Africans from Africa to other places in the world, including the Americas, Asia, and Europe. ethnogenesis Often defined as the making of an authentic culture. It refers to a process in which a new cultural group emerges from the mixture of two or more, displaced cultural groups. panopticon An observation tower or other device used for surveillance. The ideal panopticon is designed so that those being observed never know when or by whom they are being observed. Some panopticons were subtly built into a landscape by placing an owner or manager’s house on an elevated area making it possible to observe field or factory workers in both their living and working areas. Panopticons emerged during the industrial revolution, and emanated from capitalism. They were placed in a variety of institutions, including prisons, factories, even schools.

Basin.

Further Reading DeMallie RJ (ed.) (2001) Plains Vol. 13: Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Frison GC and Mainfort RC (eds.) (1996) Archeological and Bioarcheological Resources of the Northern Plains. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, Research Series No. 47. Hofman JL (ed.) (1996) Archeology and Paleocology of the Central Great Plains. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, Research Series No. 48. Hofman JL, Brooks RL, Hayes JS, et al. (1989) From Clovis to Comanchero: Archeological Overview of the Southern Great Plains. Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, Research Series No. 35. Holder P (1970) The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lehmer D (1971) Introduction to Middle Missouri Archeology. National Park Service, Anthropological Papers No. 1. Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior. Wood WR (ed.) (1998) Archaeology on the Great Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Plantation Archaeology Theresa A Singleton, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary agency An analytical concept used widely in the social sciences to examine how people either act individually or collectively to influence the social conditions within which they are enmeshed. colonoware Term used to describe a broad category of handproduced earthenware found on eighteenth-century sites in

Archaeologists have conducted investigations of plantations in North America since the 1930s. Early studies, however, were primarily undertaken either to recover archaeological data used in the architectural restoration of plantation buildings or to determine whether or not extant ruins dated to the plantation era. The systematic study of plantations as agricultural factories or settlements that could provide insights into understanding the living conditions and cultural lives of plantation residents began in earnest in the 1970s. Although archaeological studies of plantations were first undertaken in the United States, plantation archaeology is no longer limited to or primarily undertaken within the United States. Archaeologists are studying plantations throughout the world. In the Americas, the Caribbean ranks second to the United States in the number of investigations, and is now a major region for new and innovative studies of plantation archaeology. Increasingly, studies are being undertaken in South America, particularly in Brazil, and preliminary work has begun on haciendas (a type of plantation) in Peru and Argentina. A plantation is typically defined as an agricultural enterprise in which some form of bound labor produces a crop for someone else that is sold in a market, usually an international one. Philip Curtin uses the term ‘plantation complex’ to include the economic, political, and social order that emanated from the development of plantations. He places the origin of the plantation complex following the Crusades when sugar produced on plantations in the Eastern Mediterranean was sold for consumption in Europe. Plantation archaeology seeks to understand the cultural, economic, political, and social dimensions of the plantation complex through the study of material culture. In North America, archaeologists have studied numerous, plantations, primarily in the southern United

AMERICAS, NORTH/Plantation Archaeology 317

States and dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, that were engaged in the production of various staple crops: cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar, and hemp. Despite the diversity in plantations investigated, the work is still uneven as some areas have received a great deal of more attention than others. For example, more plantation sites have been studied in Virginia than any other state while some states like Texas, Alabama, or Mississippi have had very few studies. Although the vast majority of plantations in North America were in the southern United States, archaeologists have begun to study northern plantations in New York and Rhode Island, once a part of the northeastern breadbasket. These plantations produced grains and other food crops often earmarked for provisioning Caribbean plantations. Most plantation archaeology focuses on the workers, usually enslaved laborers, or tenant-andwage laborers of post-emancipation plantations. While archaeologists utilize diverse theoretical perspectives, two general ways of conceptualizing plantations predominate. The first framework approaches the plantation as a birthplace of African diaspora cultures. These studies examine identity formation, cultural interaction, and exchange among enslaved people, and with other ethnic and racial groups. A major emphasis of these studies is to interpret the cultural traditions and practices of African diaspora communities; therefore, these studies are more often thought to be studies of the African diaspora rather than strictly of plantations. The second framework approaches the plantation as a capitalist mode of production, and seeks to untangle the complex social and political relations characteristic of plantation production. These studies analyze the ways in which plantation laborers whether slave or free, were subjugated into subordinate social positions. Some studies highlight power struggles between plantation owners and laborers, as seen in slave/worker resistance to planter hegemony. Most studies of plantation archaeology consider both conceptions of a plantation to some degree, because plantations were at once a capitalist enterprise as well as a setting for the ethnogenesis of African diaspora cultures (see Americas, North: Historical Archaeology in the United States; Americas, South: Historical Archaeology). Plantations studies in the United States that give primacy to understanding African diaspora interpret a variety of archaeological materials as evidence indicative of African-American identity or cultural practices. Clay-walled housing, handcrafted pottery and pipes, and other objects have been interpreted as exhibiting African influences. Studies of colonoware (a category of pottery made during the colonial period) have been of paramount importance in

developing this line of inquiry. These undecorated earthenwares are found on plantation sites in South Carolina and Virginia. It appears that both Native Americans and African-Americans made colonoware, and those associated with AfricanAmericans were formed into globular shapes that were used for cooking, preparing, and serving food. The use of these wares suggests that enslaved Africans and their descendants influenced some culinary practices on plantations. Another group of artifacts – pierced coins (possibly worn as amulets), cowries, cosmograms on pottery, even the contents in some below-ground storage pits found in slave houses – have been interpreted as African-influenced religious practices. These objects recovered from slave houses and trash deposits singularly may not have been important, but when combined with the oral testimony left by those who were formerly enslaved, these kinds of objects were used in a variety of African-American conjuring and healing practices that were a part of African-American folk religions. Some studies of the African diaspora are less concerned with analyzing continuities and changes to African heritages in the Americas, but more in interpreting the everyday lives of Africans and African-American on plantations. While all studies of slave quarters ultimately contribute to the study of slave living conditions, some studies are specifically directed toward the examination of living conditions and enslaved people’s access to personal and household possessions. One goal of these studies is to understand the lived experiences of enslaved people by evaluating slave agency, defined here as the capability of enslaved people to take some control of their situations on their own terms. Examples of slave agency inferred from archaeological findings are seen in efforts of enslaved people to shape their material lives beyond the meager plantation rations and other items provisioned to them. These efforts include: cultivating gardens, hunting, and fishing; recycling broken or discarded objects to make other kinds of tools and implements; crafting objects for sale or for their own use; and purchasing household and personal objects. In studies of plantation archaeology framed to analyze social relations associated with capitalist production, the layout of plantations and the use of plantation space has been a major focus. This research has shown that social inequalities and hierarchies of plantation societies were incorporated into plantation design. Plantations were designed to maximize productivity and control laborers and, at the same time, appeal to the esthetic sensibilities of the planter class. On some plantations, slave/worker quarters were removed or screened from commanding

318 AMERICAS, NORTH/Rocky Mountains

views of the planter house, gardens, and administrative buildings. Whereas in other cases, a panopticon – a watchtower or some other device – was built into the landscape to observe areas where enslaved people lived and worked at any time. Linear arrangements of slave houses permitted easy access and inspection of premises, and became the standard layout for most antebellum (1830–60) plantations. Enslaved people responded to slaveholder control of slave living spaces by creating their own sense of space, both inside and outside their dwellings. On many plantations in the Upper South (Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky), enslaved people dug storage pits below earthen floors or floorboards within their dwellings to store food and valuables. On occasion, these storage pits became a source of conflict between slaveholders and enslaved people because slaveholders were concerned that these storage areas were being used to hide pilfered goods. The ubiquitous presence of storage areas, however, particularly in eighteenth-century slave houses in Virginia, suggests that slaveholders accommodated slave laborers’ desire to make and use these pits. Enslaved laborers also designated outdoor places for social gatherings away from the watchful eye of slaveholders and overseers, whenever possible. Archaeologists are just beginning to investigate such places which could be located in or near slave cemeteries, places of worship, or wooded areas not far from slave houses or agricultural fields. Plantation archaeology continues to grow and provide new and important information on many aspects of plantation life, organization, and production. Current studies are analyzing slave household formation and gender, among other themes. Perhaps the greatest contribution this research has made is to document the lives of enslaved and other bound laborers who left too few written records of their own so that their stories could be told. See also: Americas, Central: Historical Archaeology in Mexico; Americas, North: Historical Archaeology in the United States; Americas, South: Historical Archaeology.

Further Reading Berlin I (1998) Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Curtin PD (1998) The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epperson T (2000) Panoptic plantations: The garden sights of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. In: Delle JA, Mrozowski SA, and Paynter R (eds.) Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, Gender, pp. 58–77. Knoxville: Tennessee.

Ferguson L (1992) Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Colonial African America, pp. 1650–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Fritts R (1998) Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/ Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island. New York: Garland Publishers. Galle JE and Amy LY (eds.) (2004) Engendering African-American/s Archaeology: A Southern Perspective. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Kelso W (1984) Kingsmill Plantations, 1620–1800: An Archaeology of Rural Colonial Virginia. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Orser CE, Jr. (1988) The Material Basis of the Postbellum Tenant. Plantation. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Otto JS (1984) Cannon’s Point Plantation, 1974–1860: Living Conditions and Status Patterns in the Old South. New York: Academic Press. Singleton TA (2005) Before the revolution: Archaeology of the African diaspora on the Atlantic Seaboard. In: Pauketat T and Loren D (eds.) North American Archaeology, pp. 319–336. Boston, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Wilkie L (2000) Creating Freedom: Material Culture and AfricanAmerican/s Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840– 1950. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

Rocky Mountains Bonnie L Pitblado, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary archaic As traditionally defined, the period of North American prehistory from c. 7500–2000 (dates vary somewhat by region), when humans continued hunting and gathering, but intensified and diversified their subsistence base versus the earlier Palaeoindian period. forager In this chapter, the term forager is used as a synonym for ‘hunter-gatherer’ (see definition, below). Sometimes this term is used to refer more specifically to hunter-gatherers with a ‘residential’ mobility strategy (a group moves frequently from camp to camp to camp; rather than establishing a base camp and sending out task forces to bring resources back to the base, in a pattern called ‘collecting’). The term forager is used synonymously with hunter-gatherer in this chapter because Rocky Mountain hunter-gatherers used the landscape flexibly, with the same group potentially ‘foraging’ at one time of year and ‘collecting’ at another. hunter-gatherer An adaptive strategy that entails to various degrees in various settings, the hunting of large and small game, gathering of vegetable resources, and sometimes fishing. This lifeway contrasts with a horticultural or agricultural strategy, which emphasizes cultivation of plants and/or animals and typically sees reduced mobility. mobility A general term for human movement across a landscape. Understanding mobility requires documenting how far a group moves, but also the particular way in which it utilizes a landscape. Over the course of a year in the mountains, a group might simply migrate up and down a mountain, or they might move in a large circle around it. A group might camp at a large

AMERICAS, NORTH/Rocky Mountains 319 base camp for an extended period of time, sending out small parties to gather resources and return them to camp. Or, an entire group might move frequently from camp to camp to camp. Palaeoindian The period of North American prehistory from c. 11 500 to 7500 (dates vary somewhat by region), when humans lived alongside now-extinct forms of megafauna, including mammoth, mastodon, camel, and after about 11 000 years ago, giant bison. The term Palaeo-American is synonymous with Palaeoindian.

Introduction Within the context of the American West that encompasses them, the Rocky Mountains are unique. The structure of the Rocky Mountain landscape, patterns of human use over the past 11 000 years, even the history of archaeological inquiry – all of these distinguish the Rocky Mountains from their archaeologically better-known neighbors: the grasslands of the Columbia Plateau and Great Plains (see Americas, North: Plains) and the deserts of the Great Basin (see Americas, North: Great Basin) and Colorado Plateau (see Americas, North: American Southwest, Four Corners Region). In a way that the lowland Far West and Great Plains by definition do not and cannot, the Rocky Mountains encompass tremendous environmental variability in a highly compressed physical space – a structural difference with important implications for prehistoric human use of these dynamic settings. For example, whereas Plains residents throughout 11 000 years of prehistory organized their subsistence and land-use strategies around the hunting of large grazing mammals (see Americas, North: Plains) on a flat landscape (and sometimes in the adjacent mountains), Rocky Mountain-based hunter-gatherers always exploited a highly varied faunal and floral resource base and moved extremely flexibly up, down, and around the mountain landscape. Agriculture, which revolutionized prehistoric subsistence and mobility on the Colorado Plateau and played a crucial role in parts of the Great Basin and along some Plains river systems, was never adopted to any significant degree by prehistoric Rocky Mountain hunter-gatherers, and thus rarely if ever influenced their decisions about when and where to move. As for archaeological research itself, the Rockies have only recently been subjected to intensive investigations. The first systematic archaeological research in the western United States focused on Southwestern agricultural sites and began well over a century ago (see Americas, North: American Southwest, Four Corners Region). Plains archaeology likewise registers a long history of inquiry, with classic Palaeoindian sites like Folsom and Clovis documenting by 1927 that the first Americans lived alongside

now-extinct ice-age animals (see Americas, North: Plains). The remarkable preservation of textiles, subsistence debris, and even ancient human remains in dry caves of the Great Basin have for many decades lured professional archaeologists to work in that setting as well (see Americas, North: Great Basin). The Rocky Mountains, on the other hand, were traditionally viewed by archaeologists as marginal to a broad-scale understanding of the prehistory of western North America, a point punctuated by the dates of the first archaeological conferences focusing on subregions of the west. The first ‘Pecos Conference’, an informal gathering of Southwestern archaeologists, was held in 1927; the first Plains Anthropological Society meeting in 1931; and the first Great Basin Anthropological Conference in 1954. Rocky Mountain archaeologists, however, had to wait until 1993 to attend the first-ever Rocky Mountain Anthropological Conference in Jackson, Wyoming. The overarching goal of this contribution is to summarize what archaeologists have learned not just since 1993, when the subdiscipline could finally sustain its own conference, but from the earliest inklings that the Rocky Mountains may have been more to prehistoric people than a snow-capped backdrop to daily lowland activities and an impediment to travel. The chapter first introduces the Rocky Mountain region and environment, and then discusses elements that make the archaeological record of the Rocky Mountains unique: its prehistoric chronology and general observations about land use through time and site types and the many reasons why prehistoric people used the Rocky Mountain landscape.

Defining the Rocky Mountains and Their Environments Geologically speaking, the Rockies are young landforms, having emerged about 65 000 000 years ago when colliding continental plates drained an inland Cretaceous sea and uplifted the earth to elevations exceeding 4000 m above sea level (m asl). Volcanic activity, some in the ancient past and some more recent, has further shaped the Rocky Mountain landscape. Streams carved and continue to carve drainages that originate at the Continental Divide – the backbone of the Rockies – and carry rainfall and snowmelt east to the Atlantic Ocean or west to the Pacific. During the Pleistocene (Ice Age), 1.8 million to 11 000 years ago, powerful mountain glaciers sculpted craggy Rocky Mountain peaks and gouged out giant U-shaped montane valleys, putting the finishing touches on a dynamic and rugged landscape.

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investigation. With a few notable exceptions, such as Denver University archaeologist E.B. Renaud, who conducted surveys in the Southern Rockies in the early 1930s, most early archaeologists implicitly and sometimes explicitly concluded that a region so rugged and treacherous could not have supported prehistoric human occupations. Their turn-of-thecentury mindset was not equipped to reconcile that a region that claimed the lives of westward-bound European-American settlers, could have sustained substantive, even year-round occupations by indigenous Americans. Archaeologists have since recognized, however, that the very ruggedness – the steep vertical rise – that inspires and intimidates, also translates to a diverse resource base for a host of plants and animals – including humans. Ascending Mount Elbert (or any other Rocky Mountain peak) reveals ever-changing ecological communities as one traverses the mountain’s flanks to its summit. Table 1 lists the environmental zones of the Rocky Mountains, their elevation

Extending approximately 4800 km (3000 miles) from Alberta and British Columbia south to northern New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains encompass large portions of eastern Idaho, western Montana, central and western Wyoming, and central Colorado (Figure 1). The highest individual Rocky Mountain peaks are located in Colorado, with 4401 m (14 440 ft) asl Mount Elbert the highest of all. Elevations of peaks at northern latitudes are more modest in absolute terms than those located farther south. In the Canadian Rockies, for example, the highest mountain is 3954 m (12 972 ft) asl Mount Robinson, 447 m (nearly 1500 ft) lower than Mount Elbert. When most people conjure an image of the Rocky Mountains, they envision the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the towering giants that inspired innumerable pioneer stories, paintings, and songs (Figure 2). This pervasive, imposing image may be the single most important reason why it took archaeologists so long to recognize that the Rockies were a viable home for prehistoric people and a viable region for

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Figure 2 Rocky Mountain grandeur: The sort of imposing vista that convinced early archaeologists that throughout prehistory, the mountains were more a backdrop to the life of grassland and desert people than a viable region to make a living.

Table 1 Environmental zones and characteristic resources of the Rocky Mountains Zone

Elevationa

Florab

Fauna

Other resources relevant to humans

Foothills

1500–2400 m 5000–7900 ft

Mule deer, rabbit, coyote, fox, fowl, lizard, snake

Rock outcrops forming overhangs for shelter; sandstone for grinding tools

Montane

2400–2900 m 7900–9500 ft

Moose, elk, mule deer, black bear, bobcat, marmot, porcupine, fowl

Outcrops of chert, quartzite (and occasionally obsidian) to quarry for stone to make tools

Parks

1800–3000 m 6000–10 000 ft

Often dense herds of bison and pronghorn, elk, mule deer, rabbit, rodent, game and other birds

Chert and quartzite outcrops and cobble sources to quarry for stone to make tools

Subalpine

2900–3500 m 9500–11 500 ft

Elk, bighorn, mountain goat, mule deer, black bear, lynx, weasel, hare, rodentc

Respite from scorching heat of lowland summer

Alpine

> 3500 m > 11 500 ft

Elk, bighorn, mountain goat, mule deer, marmot, weasel, pika, ptarmigan

Passage across the continental divide

Riparian (Streams, lakes, etc.)

All elevations and zones

Pin˜on pine, juniper, oak, prickly pear, thistle, blue grama, milk vetch Ponderosa, lodgepole, and limber pine, Douglas fir, aspen, strawberry, blueberry, gooseberry, dandelion Grasses (including edible ricegrass), shrubs, bistort, wild plum and rose, sego lily, chokecherry Engelmann spruce, aspen, bristlecone pine, glacier lily, elderberry Mosses, alpine anemone, dwarf clover, scarlet paintbrush Water birch, cottonwood, mountain alder, willow, cattail

Beaver, fish, swan, goose, duck, frog, toad

By definition, water; stream cobbles to quarry for stone to make tools

a

Elevations are approximations, and those given are more typical for the Southern (higher) Rockies. The same life zones and resources characterize peaks at more northerly latitudes, but they occur at somewhat lower absolute elevations. b Thousands of plants and animals occupy the various life zones of the Rocky Mountains. A very few characteristic examples are listed in this table. c Most of the larger species are seasonal (summer–early fall) residents of the high country; smaller species survive the winter by hibernating.

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Figure 3 Schematic diagram representing the variability in Rocky Mountain resources by environmental zone. Table 1 complements this figure, listing approximate elevations of Rocky Mountain environmental zones, as well as typical flora, fauna, and other resources (relevant to prehistoric humans) of each zone.

ranges, and a few examples of the literally thousands of species of flora and fauna that occupy them. Figure 3 illustrates these data visually, with icons representing the plants, animals, and other resources relevant to human survival (e.g., sources of raw material for chipped stone tool and groundstone production) of the major Rocky Mountain life zones.

The Rocky Mountain Archaeological Record Having provided a sense for the unique physiographic and environmental properties of North Americas Rocky Mountains, we turn now to archaeologists’ current understanding of when, how, and why prehistoric people occupied them. Prehistoric Chronology and Land Use

Archaeologists have known since the 1960s, when National Park Service Archaeologist Wilfred Husted first proposed the theory, that humans have occupied the Rocky Mountains on a sustained basis for at least 10 000 years – nearly as long as people are known to have occupied North America generally. The first archaeologically recognizable North American culture, Clovis (see New World, Peopling of), penetrated the Rockies, but left only a light signature of their tenure, 11 500–10 800 radiocarbon years before present. Clovis spear points have been recovered as isolated surface finds throughout the Rocky Mountains, but Rocky Mountain Clovis sites are limited in number, type, size, and elevation (they are particularly rare in the subalpine and alpine zones, probably

because some – though not all – Rocky Mountain peaks were still glacier-covered during the latest Pleistocene). By subsequent Folsom time, 10 800–10 200 radiocarbon years before present, evidence suggests that Palaeo-Americans had started to move into the Rocky Mountains on a more sustained basis. Though many archaeologists associate them intimately with the High Plains, Folsom people and their contemporaries frequently hunted bison in large Rocky Mountain parks (e.g., Figure 4), including Colorado’s Middle Park, San Luis Valley, and Gunnison Basin. A few of their kills occurred during the winter months, suggesting that some of these early occupants may have utilized the Rocky Mountains on a year-round basis. Folsom folk also occasionally camped in rockshelters in the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming, and in open foothills settings farther north, in the Elkhorn Mountains of west-central Montana. If there is any doubt as to whether or not some Folsom bison hunters utilized the Rockies on a yearround basis, there is no doubt that after Folsom time, prehistoric groups moved into this niche and never looked back. A few residential sites, most exceptionally two large rockshelters in the foothills of northwestern Wyoming – Mummy Cave in the Absaroka Range and Medicine Lodge Creek in the Bighorn Mountains – show human occupation beginning in the very early Holocene and continuing through the recent historic past. Such deeply stratified, continuously used sites have played an immeasurably important role in characterizing 10 000 years of human use of the Rocky Mountains.

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Figure 4 High altitude (c. 3100 m (10 170 ft) asl) mountain meadow – reasonably considered a park – in the Upper Rio Grande Basin of southern Colorado. This photograph was taken from the Black Mountain Folsom site, a hunting camp nestled today at the fringes of subalpine forest. Margaret Jodry excavated the site in the 1990s.

From approximately 10 000–7500 radiocarbon years before present, Palaeoindians utilized all environmental zones of the Rocky Mountains, exploited local Rocky Mountain stone raw materials, and manufactured spear points that differed from those of their contemporaries living either on the Plains to the east or in the Far West. In addition to hosting what seminal Central Plains and Rocky Mountain archaeologist George C. Frison has termed ‘Foothill-Mountain’ groups (year-round late Palaeoindian residents), the Rockies were also used seasonally by lowland late Palaeoindian people needing or wanting such resources as chipped stone and groundstone raw material, vegetable and nut crops (notably pin˜on) that grow only in the mountains, and large game (perhaps because it is more pleasant to hunt bighorn by a columbine-ringed alpine lake than bison by a desiccated Plains playa in August). Archaeologists lack sufficient numbers of sites to offer well-substantiated models for how late Palaeoindians moved around the mountain landscape, but available evidence suggests that like subsequent Archaic hunter-gatherers, late Paleoindians organized their mobility strategies according to seasonal constraints and resource needs of both the short and long term. The Archaic era is, throughout North America, traditionally defined as the period of prehistory ushered in by an intensification and diversification of resource use by hunter-gatherers as the last of the megafauna went extinct; and ushered out when groups adopted agriculture. Neither of these defining phenomena was particularly noteworthy in the Rocky Mountains. Earlier mountain-based, postFolsom Palaeoindians used the same broad spectrum

of plant and animal resources that later Archaic people did, and Rocky Mountain residents never adopted agriculture to an appreciable degree. Nonetheless, because the term ‘Archaic’ is so ensconced in the North American archaeological literature, Rocky Mountain archaeologists use the term, but view it as a chronological designation (for the period c. 7500– 2000 radiocarbon years before present), rather than as a label for a unique adaptive posture. During the Rocky Mountain Archaic, huntergatherers left behind increasingly obvious signatures of a year-round presence on the landscape. Numerous foothills-zone rockshelters with long histories of occupation, and a significant number of subterranean house structures – often located in parkland settings and some reflecting winter occupation – represent residential mountain base camps. Palaeoclimatic research at Rocky Mountain localities from Canada to New Mexico indicates that environmental conditions fluctuated over the course of the Archaic. Changing environmental conditions engendered concomitant shifts in land-use strategies of Rocky Mountain hunter-gatherers. For example, winter residences in mountain parks are more commonly associated with intervals of warmer or more equable temperatures, whereas foothills rockshelters were preferred winter base camps during colder spells. Under all environmental conditions, site types, sizes, and distributions suggest that mountain-adapted, Archaic foragers utilized the landscape flexibly, sometimes foraging logistically from residential base camps for up to a season at a time and at other times moving residentially from campsite to campsite (see Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient).

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Archaeologists refer to the period immediately following the Archaic as the Formative or Late Prehistoric; and to the period following that as the Protohistoric. The term Formative connotes the adoption of corn agriculture and is misleading when invoked to label Rocky Mountain people who only rarely cultivated plant species of any kind (although some mountain archaeologists still use it). In any event, the terms Formative and Late Prehistoric both refer to post-Archaic residents who lived alongside others, such as the Hisatsinom (Anasazi) and Fremont, who did engage in agriculture or horticulture (and who in some cases – notably the Fremont – used the Rockies occasionally or regularly); and prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in North America. Once Europeans began recording their encounters with indigenous cultures of North America, including in the Rockies, archaeologists refer to the period as the Protohistoric. Throughout the Formative/Late Prehistoric and the Protohistoric, Rocky Mountain residents continued flexibly exploiting a diversity of plant and animal resources. The major change for them – as for so many Native Americans – came with the adoption of European-introduced horses in the 1700s. The horse not only permitted mountain-dwellers who embraced it to use their land differently—typically much more expansively – but also for theretofore pedestrian-based tribes from adjacent regions to penetrate the Rockies either for the first time or to a greater extent than they had previously. Adoption of the horse caused such profound changes in the fabrics of mounted societies that trying to glean insights into settlement patterns of pedestrian Rocky Mountain foragers from later, mounted counterparts – even of the same ethnicity – is problematic at best. On the other hand, early European explorers who entered the Rocky Mountains for various reasons (passage west, trapping, prospecting, ethnographic interest), encountered Rocky Mountain populations that either never embraced the horse (as in the case of the Toyani, a Shoshone band of the Middle Rockies) or whose members could recall how the group made a living prior to the adoption of the horse (as in the case of many Ute bands of the Southern Rocky Mountains and the Kootenai of the Northern Rockies). Such accounts provide concrete evidence for how some groups of Rocky Mountain hunter-gatherers occupied the mountain landscape. They demonstrate that different bands – and even the same bands in different years – utilized Rocky Mountain resources in an extremely flexible and local-resource-dependent fashion. First Nations in the Rockies and beyond often rendezvoused to nurture social ties and exchange

resources, but they also frequently fragmented into groups of small sizes and varying age and gender compositions, to take advantage of mountain resources available at different times of year and in discrete places. Even before indigenous people of the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere adopted horses, some bands of the Shoshone and Ute used the Rockies on a seasonal basis, spending other parts of the year hunting bison on the Plains, or hunting and gathering in the Far West. Such groups interacted regularly with mountain-based bands, in some cases visiting the Rocky Mountains expressly for this purpose. This historically documented flexibility in resource use, settlement strategy, and group membership by populations based in the mountains year-round and their contemporaries (often relatives) based elsewhere but using the mountains on a seasonal or occasional basis is highly consistent with the archaeological evidence of human use of the Rocky Mountains for 10 000-plus years. Predominant Rocky Mountain Site Types

Having summarized who occupied the Rocky Mountains during the latest Pleistocene and Holocene and discussed how hunter-gatherers used the mountain landscape for over ten millennia, it remains to relate common archaeological site types of the Rocky Mountains, and to discuss how they pertain to the above chronology. As a result of their geologic history, the Rocky Mountains are rich in accessible tool stone (e.g., Figure 5). Sandstone, chert, and quartzite represent uplifted sedimentary (sometimes metamorphosed) sea beds. Obsidian deposits resulted from volcanic flows in the Rockies of Northern New Mexico, Yellowstone National Park, and Southern Idaho. When prehistoric people found and used primary (outcrop) or secondary (e.g., stream-cobble) deposits of any of these rock types, the resultant site is called a quarry. Macroscopic, petrographic, and geochemical fingerprinting of artifacts made of various stone types has permitted archaeologists to trace the movement of ground stone (typically sandstone or basalt) and chipped stone (usually chert, quartzite or obsidian) tools within the Rockies and in some cases, well beyond their borders. Documenting at Rocky Mountain sites the use of stone that occurs naturally only in that region has bolstered the argument that some prehistoric groups used the Rockies on a year-round basis (the presence of stone that originated elsewhere would weaken such an argument). On the other hand, documenting

AMERICAS, NORTH/Rocky Mountains 325

Figure 5 Primary outcrop of high-quality Windy Ridge quartzite. The Windy Ridge quartzite quarry is located about 10 km from Rabbit Ears Pass in the Gore Range of northern Colorado. The quarry extends to elevations as high as 3050 m (10 000 ft) asl. Diagnostic artifacts of this raw material span 11 000 years of prehistory, indicating the quarry was long-known and long-used.

the presence of Rocky Mountain stone at sites outside the Rockies – as commonly occurs – reveals the importance of Rocky Mountain raw material to others who visited the Rockies to obtain the stone themselves, or traded to get it. An extreme example illustrating the value placed on some Rocky Mountain stone comes from Midwestern Moundbuilder sites, where Yellowstone obsidian has been recovered as far east as the Hopewell heartland (see Americas, North: Eastern Woodlands). The uplifted sandstones (and sometimes other rock types) common in many Rocky Mountain foothills settings were not only quarried for the manufacture of groundstone tools, they also form natural overhangs that prehistoric people used for shelter – sometimes for extended periods of time, and often in winter. Only the earliest Clovis people appear not to have availed themselves of the natural protection afforded by textured geological formations of the Rockies. From Folsom time on (although perhaps only occasionally in Folsom time), archaeological rock shelters from the Northern to Southern Rockies served residential functions for mountainbased hunter-gatherers. Many such sites, including Mummy Cave and Medicine Lodge Creek (Figure 6), mentioned previously, enjoy better preservation conditions than open sites, and have afforded archaeologists glimpses of sometimes numerous storage pits – which can indicate both long-term and winterseason occupation – as well as plant and animal remains that can and have revealed season(s)-of-use of the sites.

Although prehistoric mountain residents often mitigated difficult winter conditions by seeking out naturally sheltered long-term residential camps, they also frequently camped in open settings throughout all the environmental zones of the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes these camps, like rock shelters, were used over the longer term; sometimes, the occupations were ephemeral. Camps occupied for longer periods of time and/or in winter show greater architectural investment than those used for the short term or during milder times of year. At the high-investment end of the spectrum, for example, the central-Colorado Yarmony site was occupied repeatedly between 7000 radiocarbon years before present and the Late Prehistoric period and includes two 6500–6000 yearold pit houses. One of the pit houses is associated with the burial of a 60 year-old woman, and both pit houses and the burial represent winter base camp activities. The Rockies contain a plethora of other prehistoric house styles as well, including particularly common basin structures, which represent a lower labor investment than deeply excavated pit houses. And, the mountains are home to many thousand short-term camp sites, where hunter-gatherers rested for a matter of days and either did not build shelters at all, or built shelters so ephemeral that they do not register in the archaeological record. Ethnographically documented wickiups, brush structures used by recent indigenous foragers of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains, are examples of structures with little chance of being preserved in open mountain settings

326 AMERICAS, NORTH/Rocky Mountains

Figure 6 The Medicine Lodge Creek site, located in the foothills of the Absaroka Range, northwestern Wyoming. Note the natural overhang produced by the sandstone outcrops characteristic of many foothill regions throughout the Rocky Mountains. Prehistoric people used Medicine Lodge Creek and other rockshelters in the vicinity repeatedly for 10 000 years.

for more than 50 years, much less for several thousand. However, they were probably as commonly used throughout Rocky Mountain prehistory as nylon pup-tents are used today by Rocky Mountain backpackers. A vital source of sustenance for year-round and seasonal Rocky Mountains residents from 11 000 radiocarbon years before present through the Protohistoric period were the region’s large mammals. Full-time residents hunted species like mule deer, pronghorn, elk, moose, bison, and bighorn in all zones ranging from the foothills through the treeless alpine. Seasonal residents from adjacent grasslands and deserts may have taken particular advantage of the pleasant conditions of the Rocky Mountain high country in summer and early fall to hunt elk and bighorn, and/or of dense congregations of large grazers in mountain parks and foothills in the winter months. How mountain hunters harvested their prey depended on the target species, environmental structure, and season, but a site type common in the Rockies – though highly varied in form – is the game drive. One of the most efficient ways to obtain large quantities of meat at once, without horses, game drives assume a variety of forms ranging from long stone walls above timberline to wooden fences with corral catch-pens at their terminus in lower zones. Many drives have associated hunting blinds made of stone or brush (the latter must often be inferred for lack of preservation), where members of the hunting party positioned themselves to nudge the animals along a drive system or dispatch them (Figure 7).

Rocky Mountain archaeologists James Benedict and E. Steve Cassells have meticulously documented many alpine game drives in the Colorado Front Range, demonstrating how intricate and extensive such systems can be. When archaeologists encounter a game blind at a high elevation with panoramic views, they must consider the possibility that the feature truly represents that economic function, and is not, instead, the site of a vision quest. Even today, many Native Americans view particular loci, and sometimes whole Rocky Mountain landscapes, as sacred places. From an archaeological perspective, vision quest sites take many forms, and are sometimes identified as much by what is not present at the site as by what is present. Vision quest sites are typically located in high, remote places with commanding views. When present, artifacts tend not to represent the mundane debris of everyday life (as one might see at a short-term camp site), but are likely instead to be special objects, such as complete pottery vessels or never-launched projectile points. Many vision quest sites show evidence for prehistoric use, sometimes over long time frames. Some show use by contemporary First Nations people.

Conclusion This chapter has provided a flavor for the prehistory of the Rocky Mountains, both in terms of the archaeological record that prehistoric people left behind and the lifestyles they led. A key theme of the chapter has

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Figure 7 A game blind associated with an alpine game drive system in the Devil’s Thumb Pass area of the Indian Peaks Wilderness, west of Boulder, Colorado. This blind, like the many others associated with game drives in the vicinity, provided cover for hunters waiting to ambush elk and bighorn sheep. Sites associated with Devil’s Thumb game drives have been dated to older than 9000 radiocarbon years before present through the recent past.

been flexibility. From the time people first occupied the Rocky Mountains over 10 000 years ago, they have taken full advantage of the suite of subsistence resources available on a vertically oriented landscape and of the many potentially successful land-use options available for exploiting those resources at any given moment. Archaeological evidence suggests that from the dawn of human use of the Rockies, some groups chose to live there full-time, occupying all environmental zones (though not always in the same way from culture to culture, or even from year to year). Evidence also suggests that again, even during the earliest period of use, other groups viewed the Rockies as a seasonal retreat from the grasslands to the east or arid lands to the west. This pattern of multiple-use continued throughout the Archaic, Formative/Late Prehistoric, and Protohistoric periods, culminating in historic and ethnographic accounts of Shoshone, Ute, and other indigenous mountain groups that mesh neatly with reconstructions of prehistoric land use. Reasons why prehistoric people used the Rockies were as varied as the environmental zones that morph so dramatically with elevation and latitude. For some, the Rocky Mountains were home-sweet-home, meeting every conceivable human need during every season of the year. For others, the Rockies were a place to temporarily rendezvous with friends and family, escape the heat of a Plains or Great Basin summer, hunt bighorn or elk via communal game drives or bison in mountain parks, procure raw materials for

making chipped stone and groundstone tools, harvest pin˜on or other pine nuts to store for winter consumption back at a Far Western residential base, or pay homage to the spirits who dwell there. In fact, as any resident of Jackson, Wyoming or any Plains, or Far Western travel agent will attest, although the details may have changed a bit, the mountains continue to play a vital and dynamic role in the lives of contemporary westerners who rely on them for economic, social, and spiritual fulfillment. See also: Americas, North: American Southwest, Four

Corners Region; Eastern Woodlands; Plains; Sub-arctic.

Further Reading Cassells ES (1997) The Archaeology of Colorado, 2nd edn. Boulder: Johnson Books. Frison GC (1991) Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, 2nd edn. San Diego: Academic Press. Husted WM and Edgar R (2002) National Park Service, Midwest Archaeological Center and Southeast Archaeological Center, Special Report No. 4, Technical Report Series No. 9: The Archaeology of Mummy Cave, Wyoming: An Introduction to Shoshonean Prehistory. Lincoln: National Park Service. Janetski JC (2002) Indians in Yellowstone National Park. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Madsen DB and Metcalf MD (eds.) (2000) University of Utah Anthropological Papers 122: Intermountain Archaeology. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Pitblado BL (2003) Late Paleoindian Occupation of the Southern Rocky Mountains. Niwot: University Press of Colorado. Stanford DJ and Day JS (eds.) (1992) Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies. Niwot: University Press of Colorado.

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Sub-arctic Bryan C Gordon, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, QC, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Barrenlands Treeless tundra north of the Prairies, west of Hudson Bay, east of the Mackenzie River and south of the Arctic Ocean. Dene call it dechinule, ‘land of little sticks’. beamer Long bone split lengthwise and sharpened along its length to remove hair from skins. blade Pressure-removed parallel-sided stone flake less (microblade) or greater (macroblade) than 10 mm in width. burin (spalls) Small grooving or planning tool for shaping bone and antler. Sharpened by removing spalls to create a new cutting edge. chitho Flat oval scraper of lightly abrasive stone, used to soften hides for clothing. core Roughly chipped rock or bone mass used to make flakes from which tools are made. eulachon From Chinook language. Also candlefish because it contains so much oil it can burn, is a small anadromous smelt (Thaleichthys pacificus) caught during Northwest Coast spawning, and an important human food source and trade item when processed as an oil. flesher Long bone with diagonally cut and serrated end for removing fat from a hide. hammerstone A cobble used to break cores for flakes or long bones to extract marrow fat. point Tip attached to a lance, spear, or dart used to kill game. pushplane Steep-sided, turtle-shell-shaped stone tool used to plane wood. scraper Steep-sided tool for stripping membrane from a hide; precedes chitho use. Taltheilei Named after Taltheilei Narrows draining the East Arm into Great Slave Lake. thrusting lance Lance kept in the hand and used for jabbing caribou to mortally wound. uniface Artifact chipped on one or both (biface) sides, usually applied to stone knives. wedge Tapered flaked stone for splitting bone, antler, or wood.

Introduction The Western and Central Canadian Subarctic, stretching from Alaska east to Hudson Bay and north to south from the Beaufort Sea to the northern parts of the four western provinces (Figure 1), has been home to Indian peoples for at least 12 000 years in the west and for somewhat less time since deglaciation in the east. Some archaeologists believe humans entered the New World 14 000–16 000 years ago, just before the 11 000 year-old Clovis fluted projectile points found in New Mexico. Clovis points occur across North and Central America but not in South America, where some earlier sites occur, leading other archaeologists to believe a pre-Clovis population

crossed Alaska before 20 000 years ago. The reality is unclear because archaeological sites that old often have unclear associations between their artifacts and radiocarbon dates. The presence of fluted points (see Glossary) at Charlie Lake Cave and Pink Mountain 100 km farther north, Old Crow Flats and many Alaskan sites, suggests a reverse or northward migration of hunters bearing Clovis-like points (Figure 1). Three migration routes from Asia into the New World through the Subarctic have been proposed, none of them well documented and none of them having the earliest Clovis fluted points, although later fluted points occur. Peoples using the Mackenzie Valley route may have ascended the Yukon River west through the unglaciated interior of Alaska, then north around the Continental Divide and south along the Mackenzie Valley. But this valley was too heavily glaciated at the time of the expected first arrivals. A similar Intermountain route through Alaska but southeast through the southern Yukon would also have encountered closed mountain and continental glaciation. Lately, interest has been sparked in a proposed pre-Clovis movement by boat down the West Coast. But finding archaeological sites on the ocean floor became almost impossible when postglacial meltwater inundated the route milleniums ago. About 6000 years ago, the early people of the southwest Yukon and northern British Columbia lived in small fishing camps and hunted for mixed game as well as caribou. There they developed into the Dene (the ‘people’) or Athabaskan culture. From 10 000 to 8000 years ago in the District of Mackenzie, Palaeoindians from the south followed retreating ice and caribou herds north into the Barrenlands to be later replaced by a possible amalgamation of Palaeoindian and Archaic forest peoples (Shield Archaic) as the climate warmed. These Shield Archaic people retreated south during a cold climatic interval, leaving the Barrenlands open to Inuit-like Pre-Dorset coastal hunters arriving from the northwest. The Pre-Dorset hunted migrating herds, just as had the Indians before them. When the climate warmed, the Pre-Dorset probably returned to the north and Indians again hunted caribou on the Barrenlands, this time in groups related through language and archaeology to the Dene, who from 4000– 6000 years ago had evolved in Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia. These Dene, predecessors of the tribes of the Mackenzie Valley, Northwest Territories and northern Prairie Provinces, began to move east 2600 years ago. Mirroring the migration paths of the early Dene, the archaeology of all cultures will be discussed from north to south in the Yukon and British Columbia, down the Peace River

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Figure 1 The earliest cultures. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

to northern Alberta, up the Mackenzie Valley, and then east to the Northwest Territories and northern Prairie provinces. Linguistic and genetic data supplement Dene prehistory and define historic Dene location: Gwich’in in northern Yukon, Ha¨n and Tutchone in central and southern Yukon, Tahltan-Kaska-Tsetsaut in northern British Columbia; Sekani-Beaver, Carrier, Chilcotin and Nicola in its Central Plateau, Chipewyan-SlaveyYellowknife in the northern Prairie Provinces and Northwest Territories; Dogrib-Bear Lake, Mountain or Nahanni and Hare in the northern Mackenzie District; Sarsi in southern Alberta, and Navaho and Apache in the American southwest. Greatest linguistic divergence is in the northwest, the proposed area of Dene emergence. From there the Dene migrated south and east via the Peace River to the Mackenzie Valley and Barrenlands (2600 years ago), to the coast of Oregon and California (l500 years ago), and south on two migration routes: to the American Southwest (850–1150 years ago) and to southern Alberta (250 years ago). Their language group came to occupy the largest area of all North American Indians.

Northern Yukon The earliest occupation of Canada’s subarctic was in the Bluefish Caves, northern Yukon, while older Old Crow, Yukon, Pleistocene exposures are secondary depositions (Figure 1). Bluefish Caves were used sporadically by a few hunters from 25 000 to 12 000 years ago. Possibly humanly altered mammoth bone in the Old Crow area is two–three times older than that in the 12 000-year-old non-microblade Nenana complex in Alaska. Microblades and their cores, and burins and their sharpening spalls (see Glossary) found at Bluefish Caves resemble those in the more recent 10 500 year-old Denali complex in Alaska and are also reminiscent of similar artifacts in Siberia’s Dyuktai culture. Whether the microtools in Bluefish Caves are associated with the earliest occupation is controversial. If they are, they may be tied to interior Alaska’s 11 000 year-old Healy Lake and 14 000 yearold Swan Lake microblade sites. Microblade-using cultures existed from central Siberia to eastern Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, their Siberian ancestors reaching central

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Alaska 14 000 years ago, the southern Yukon and northern British Columbia before 6000 years ago, and the western Mackenzie District by 4500 years ago. Three cultural traditions (historical and technological), accounting for their presence and based on their use of microblades, have been proposed by archaeologists: Northwest Microblade, Northern Archaic, and Palaeo-arctic. The fact that different tool types exist within each tradition at different times and locations makes them awkward markers through which to coordinate cultural interpretations. This is shown in the overall archaeological sequence (Table 1) by the absence of firm dividing lines or the use of hatched lines. In the northern Yukon at a time later than microblade cultures, archaeological sites along the Porcupine River show greater affinity with southwest Yukon than with central Alaska. Ancestral Gwich’in stratified sites are Rat Indian Creek, Old Chief and Klo-Kut. Lithics include whetstones, maulheads, hammers, notched and contracting stemmed small Klo-Kut or Kavik arrowheads (so named from two northern sites where they have been found; see Figure 2a), adzeblades, axheads, boiling stones, scrapers (Figure 2c), and wedges. Bifacial stone tools (shaped on their two faces or sides) were less common in later phases when more bone and antler tool manufacturing took place (Figure 2). Rat Indian Creek is one of the Yukon’s bestcontrolled excavations, with 17 radiocarbon dates in seven levels spanning 2430  60 years ago to White Contact. Early and late uses of boulder spalls, chitho scrapers (Figure 2d) and bone, antler and pebble cores are similar, but bifacial chert tools decrease and scrapers and cores change 1200 years ago. The level 6/6A components lack burins but correlate with many sites in western and central Alaska and the pre-800 yearold Taye Lake phase in the southwest Yukon. It has similar points and bifaces to Aishihik. Its post1220 year-old tools resemble those found in Alaska, southwest Yukon and northwest Mackenzie District. The Old Chief sequence resembles that of Rat Indian Creek, with Klo-Kut contracting stemmed points appearing in the Old Chief phase 1300 years ago, indicating the adoption of the bow and arrow and suggesting continuity from the Old Chief phase to the Klo-Kut site. The latter is located just downriver at Old Crow. Klo-Kut, a Gwich’in spring caribou water-crossing site beginning 1700 years ago, includes artifacts like those in the upper levels of Rat Indian Creek and continues the Dene sequence forward to White Contact in the 1800s. Continuity within the archaeological sequence in Porcupine River sites supports a hypothesis of in situ development. Ancestral Gwich’in adopted their bifacial stone

technology and contracting stem Klo-Kut (Kavik) arrowheads from Alaskan tribes, the Klo-Kut arrowhead being an excellent marker for tracing Dene to the southwest Yukon and to the Interior Plateau of British Columbia. Some archaeologists tie Yukon Dene outmigration with land temporarily affected by 1200 year-old White River ashfall from a nearby Alaskan volcano, an event concurrent with the Tanana-Gwich’in language split. But the ashfall never reached the Porcupine Gwich’in, and would not have affected their movement. Indications of heavy pre- and post-Contact fishing exist at the nearby Dechyoo Njit camp. There, Dene used long, round-fronted snowshoes for hunting on fresh snow and short, pointed, upturned snowshoes for breaking trails. Subsistence came from ice fishing and hare- and ptarmigan-snaring in late winter, and hunting for porcupine, spruce grouse, caribou, and moose. In the far northwest, the Gwich’in hunted the Porcupine caribou herd in spring and summer, and sub-herds and other animals in winter. They extensively used wooden caribou fences, but only mid-Contact period fence remains have survived. A Black Fox Creek fence had protohistoric stoneadze-cut stumps, but older ones are inferred because 8000 years of stable spruce forest-tundra may have allowed stable caribou migration routes and provided wood for fence construction. For this, two long rows of poles, oriented transversely across low valleys, converged in a brush corral interlaced with rawhide snares where 80–150 caribou were trapped and killed with arrows and lances.

Southern Yukon The occurrence of extinct bison bone in the southwest Yukon led early researchers to believe that grassland dominated the post-glacial landscape, but forest pollens show a lengthy stable forest environment. A nonmicroblade Northern Cordilleran tradition (Figure 3) is the earliest documented human group and precedes the 8000–4500 year-old Little Arm phase, which has microblade cores, burins and microblades, but no notched points. Microblades like those at Little Arm occur in the Otter Falls, Canyon and Moosehide sites. Dating between the Little Arm and Taye Lake phases, the Annie Lake site has microblades and distinctly styled concave-based points. Microblades disappear in the 4500–1600 year-old Taye Lake phase (4500– 1600 years ago), but it has notched points, large barbed bone points, stone wedges, boulder spalls, several endscraper types, discoidal scrapers, burins, and extensive use of obsidian occur. The side-notched points resemble those at Mummy Cave, Wyoming,

Table 1 Generalized archaeological sequence of the Western and Central Canadian Subarctic

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One Dene Klo-Kut or Kavik (a) and four Late Taltheilei (b) arrowheads, scraper (c) and three chithos (d) Figure 2 Dene Klo-Kut (Kavik) arrowhead, Taltheilei arrowheads, scraper and chithos (clockwise from top left). ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

their style probably diffusing north from the Plains via northern British Columbia, as such points are absent in northern Alberta and the Mackenzie Valley. Technologically continuous toolkits that extend in time from Taye Lake phase through the Aishihik phase until White Contact suggest all represent Dene (Table 1 – shaded area) (Figure 3). The 1600 to 150 year-old Aishihik phase marks the introduction of the bow and arrow. This phase’s nine components include copper artifacts, small barbed bone points, Klo-Kut arrowheads, bifaces, and ground adzes, like those at Rat Indian Creek and Klo-Kut. While all three later phases have tabular bifaces, chitho scrapers, concave-based points, and wide endscrapers, Aishihik phase has thinner, rounder endscrapers, more unifaces, and more stone wedges than Taye Lake. Diagnostic of Dene are chitho scrapers and Klo-Kut arrowheads, while hearth traces surrounded by artifacts and boiling stone fragments are all that remain of most camps, suggesting that families boiled some of their meat or fish. People depended on salmon but took woodland caribou and upland game. Archaeological continuity and linguistics agree with the concept that Dene developed in situ in eastern Alaska and the southwest Yukon, developing from the Little Arm phase over 6000 years into the Dene-speaking tribes. In the Yukon, these tribes included Gwich’in, Ha¨n, Tutchone, Kaska and Tagish. European goods are found in the most recent levels of many sites.

The 1200 year-old White River ashfall was 3–5 cm thick in populated areas of the southwest Yukon several hundred kilometers from the volcanic vent (Figure 4). Some archaeologists maintain that this eruption caused a Dene exodus, with a populationdisplacing domino effect all the way to the American Southwest, where the Navajo-Apache formed from a Dene root (see Section on Move Through Saskatchewan). However, any major displacement based on this winter ashfall is unsubstantiated. Research after Washington’s Mount. St. Helens eruption shows that distant volcanic effects were tolerable to aquatic invertebrates and flora. While fish decreased initially due to ash suspension in the water affecting the fish food chain, spawning recovered in less than 2–3 years. In the Yukon, humans and game were several hundred kilometers away, far enough to be clear of any catastrophic consequences from the eruption itself. The level above the ash in the Tatlmain Lake site north of Carmacks had fewer fish remains (9%) than the level below the ash (25%), but fish recovered soon thereafter. World history does not record a terrestrial volcanic event capable of fully disrupting extensive human resources where flexible cultural mechanisms could counteract it, but such an event may have indirectly fostered a change in human technology. Post-ashfall firing of trees killed by ash accumulation may have opened the forest, favoring the adoption from Alaska of the arrow over the dart for hunting. New Ice Patch research in the Kluane region of the southwest Yukon suggests an abrupt switch to the bow and arrow, with little overlap of darts or spears spanning the period of ashfall on 10 AMS dates. The youngest dart dates 1260  60 years, the oldest arrow; 1300  60. While darts were tipped with stone points, arrows were made of bone and antler, some archaeologists suggesting this was done using copper carving tools. The southwest Yukon Dene also mined native copper nuggets along the White River, both to make arrowheads and for trade. Before and after White Contact in the early 1800s, eulachon oil (see Glossary) was traded from the coastal Tlingit by the Kaska and Tutchone for copper and furs. The Tagish were drawn into the fur trade as middlemen, and over time, adopted Tlingit social customs (Figure 4).

West of the Continental Divide Northern British Columbia

Microblades began in north coastal British Columbia, their makers moving up the rivers and over passes to the undated Callison site with its many Taye Lake traits, and Grizzly Run on Mount Edziza, Stikine drainage, with its many microblades (Figures 1 and 5).

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Figure 3 The early cultures. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This was a quarry site, high and far from water, where microblades were made, but taken elsewhere to be used. Contemporaneously, the Rattlesnake Hill fishing station far to the south on the Thompson River has fish remains, but no microblades. Some rare cases of microblades older than 7000 years occur on the Interior Plateau, but their use ended 4000–5000 years ago, contemporaneous with those of Yukon’s Little Arm phase and Mount Edziza and the appearance of pithouses probably derived from the south (Figure 5). Almost nothing is known about the ancient people of British Columbia’s rugged interior, especially between Hazleton–Lower Liard and the Rockies. Unlike the coast, the interior ranges could not support many people. The rivers with salmon were mainly controlled by coastal people, but some degree of accommodation with the interior Dene likely occurred, especially far upriver. Along these east–west ecotones leading to the coast, midsized early-looking points are ubiquitous but undated. It is likely some were ancestral to Early Taltheilei points that occur after 2700

years ago along the Peace River. Taltheilei points (see section on the Barrenlands) are a distinctive marker for Dene that were first defined around Great Slave Lake. They are ubiquitous east of the Continental Divide and occur occasionally in northern British Columbia. A better understanding of Taltheilei shouldered points and artifact associations is needed by archaeologists studying British Columbia, if they are to identify them confidently. Too large for arrows, many may have been dartheads until their makers carried them down the Peace River to the Barrenlands, where they would have been used to tip thrusting lances at caribou water-crossings. Complicating interpretations, some Late Palaeoindian-like points persist long after small notched and stemmed forms are found elsewhere. Notched and stemmed forms are in the 3600– 3200 year-old Skeena River Kitselas Canyon site, the 4000–2400 year-old Shuswap Horizon on the Plateau and the 5600–3500 year-old Plains McKean complex. Tracing pre-Contact Dene movements in British Columbia is tenuous because the tribes at Contact

334 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic

lnuit

Ho

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huk

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c lika

Beaufort Sea Koyukon Kutchin

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an

Tanaina

a

Ah tna

Moun tain

ane

Klu

ska

Sla vey

Sekani

t

tsau

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lnuit

Yellowknife Dog rib

Ka

an Tahlt

git

Chipewyan

Bea ver

Ca

rrie

Sa

r

rs

i

CAN

ADA

Sites with chithos

c. 800 AD

PACIFIC COAST ATHAPASKANS

and

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Tlin

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gisn

803 AD White River ash distribution east

0 500 km km © Bryan Gordon

Har e Lak & Be ar e

Han

Gulf of Alaska

NORTHERN ATHAPASKANS

Proposed origin of the Navajo-Apache from Chipewyan c. 800 AD

Algonkian (Cree?)

USA

APACHEAN ATHAPASKANS

Navajo-Apach e arrival in Sout hwest after 1200 AD

Figure 4 Proposed origin of the Navajo-Apache from the Chipewyan c. AD 800, including the distribution of the White River ashfall. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

are too difficult to differentiate through their toolkits. Kaska artifacts in the far north of British Columbia resemble those of the Beaver, Sekani and Slave. For example, Late Fisherman Lake material from the southwest Mackenzie District of the Northwest Territories could be Kaska or Slave because the Kaska were Fort Simpson traders before the Slave pushed them up the Liard River to British Columbia. To the west, the rugged Stikine and Cassiar Ranges were occupied only by scattered, seasonal Tahltan Dene hunters. Along the Stikine River, the Tahltan caught seasonally abundant fish using nets and weirs. They hunted caribou with the aid of traps, snares and fences, the last extending 5–16 km to prominent headlands. To augment their construction, fences were interlaced with deadfalls and branches. Snares were placed in open portions. In 1821, Fort Halkett was built on the upper Liard River, followed in 1838 by a Hudson’s Bay Company post on Dease Lake.

We know little about Interior Plateau Dene, although Klo-Kut arrowheads occur in the early phases. The Ulkatcho and Chinlac site pithouses north of Anahim Lake have barbed bone points, eared endscrapers, bone beamers and awls, and birchbark, but their Carrier occupants were recent immigrants. They ate caribou, then moose when caribou retreated west into the mountains. Taltheilei-like points were replaced by side-notched arrowheads, but the only preserved Dene bow is a 50  5 cm Tahltan, for example, tapered at each end with flat inner and round outer surfaces. It had been rubbed with beaver castor and wrapped in hide for toughening. Twisted caribou sinew was used to make bowstrings. It is associated with 75-cm-long saskatoon berry cane arrows with notched caribou bone, antler or obsidian points. Late Taltheilei Dene spread south to the Oregon and California coasts to form the Pacific Dene about 1500 years ago (Figure 6), but little can be said until

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic 335 Bering Sea

Beaufort Sea

The Early Intermediate Cultures bp = years before present

Whi rl Lake

121 Arc Shie ld h 650 aic sit es 0–3 500 bp

Gulf of Alaska

Pre sou Dorset th c . 35 moving NT 00 b p Do ck s Microblade Nor thwest Tradition Pointed Mtn. ins N. Pla s Cal ion s lis incur site on C middharlie L. le pr 4 ehis bur 000 bp Kit i t o s r i c ns & m Bezya Ca ela icro ny s blad on es No Ar r the ch rn aic

Re tre h

© Bryan Gordon

CAN ADA USA

ut

500 km

so

0 km

at

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Figure 5 The early intermediate cultures, including their movements. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

more excavation reveals their routes. Bridging the gap somewhat are similar Interior Plateau and central California rectangular houses. Unfortunately, Interior Plateau pithouses have mixed components and mixed radiocarbon estimates because older soil from the pit was often piled upon younger soil around its edge during house construction. In both Interior Plateau and Pacific Dene in the White Contact period, there were unique puberty and curing rites. A warrior status from raiding was initiated and focus switched from group to individual, a widespread Dene trait. Coquille arrowheads in the Standley site in Oregon are reminiscent of Klo-kut ones, but their context in large coastal villages with highly visible shell middens does not compare well with small single-family dwellings in the interior. New British Columbia research should be continued away from pithouses, with a view to tying Plateau and Pacific Dene by focusing on hide smoothers like chithos, Klo-Kut arrowheads, stylistic artifact differences, and sequential radiocarbon dates (Figure 6).

East of the Continental Divide Northeast British Columbia and Alberta

On the east side of the Rockies near Fort St. John, the earliest signs of Palaeoindians are at Charlie Lake Cave in a Palaeoindian level dating about 10 500 years ago, with lanceolate, fluted spear points and square-stemmed Cody-Alberta points (Figure 1). They were found on the surface and likely diffused from the contiguous Plains. At Charlie Lake cave and the Farrell site, 5000–6000-year-old stemmed and notched points precede 2900–2500 year-old points suggestive of the Oxbow type on the Plains, followed by smaller post-1500 year-old notched arrowheads. In northeastern British Columbia, the pre-1830 Beaver people hunted bison on the Peace River prairie and woodland zones, and moose, woodland caribou, sheep and goats in the hills. The oldest artifacts in northern Alberta may be macroblades similar to Clovis culture specimens found farther south. Later lanceolate points resembling

336 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic

Ing

al i k

k chu lika Ho

Bering Sea

Beaufort Sea

Inuit

Proposed Dene movement south across B.C. Plateau to become Pacific Dene (Athabaskan) c. 500 AD

Koyukon Kutchin

Kolchan n na Ta

Tanaina

a

tn Ah

Har e Lak & Bea e r

Han

a

ntain Mou

Gulf of Alaska

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500 km

© Bryan Gordon

ska

Sla vey

Chipewyan

ut

tsa

Tse

NORTHERN ATHAPASKANS

CANAD

A

PACIFIC COAST ATHAPASKANS APACHEAN ATHAPASKANS

Inuit

Yellowknife Dog rib

c. 500 AD

PACIFIC OCEAN

tan Tahl

0 km

Ka

and

USA

Pacific Coast Dene

Figure 6 Proposed Dene movement South across the British Columbia Plateau to become the Pacific Dene (Athabaskan) c. AD 500. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

the Agate Basin Northern Plano and Hell Gap points of the northern Plains were found on the surface of the Gardiner Narrows and Beaver River Quarry sites, as was an Alberta-Scottsbluff point found near Fort Mackay south of Lake Athabasca (Figure 1). All date about 10 000 years ago on the Plains, but are probably much younger in northern Alberta. A notched burin (see Glossary) and spalls from burin sharpening, microblades and cores came from the 4000 year-old Bezya site, while a microcore came from near Fort Vermillion (Figure 5). These may show ties to the southwest Yukon’s Little Arm phase and to the southwest Mackenzie District’s Pointed Mountain site. The Middle Prehistoric phase along the southern forest fringe includes 5500–2500 year-old notched Oxbow points, representing diffusion, trade or actual Plains people. The Eaglenest Portage site has stemmed and notched points, some being Middle Prehistoric projectiles, others Late Taltheilei arrowheads. The Gardiner

Narrows and Satsi sites, with 3500–2700 year-old Arctic Small Tool tradition points, demonstrate that their Inuit-like bearers came quite far south and even adapted to game other than tundra caribou. Gardiner Narrows and Satsi are not that far from the Karpinsky site, where all Taltheilei phases are represented. The Taltheilei tradition originated in northern British Columbia from a Yukon Na-Dene tradition and went east via the Peace River to Alberta (Figure 7). This is the only viable portal through the Rockies for groups larger than small, scattered mountain bands and is in the right location for these events. The presence of large sites, like Peace Point on the Peace River gives credence to the importance of waterways to human movement. Unfortunately, most sites have been buried or washed away, although a number of Albertan sites point to derivation from the west by way of the Peace River drainage. A precursor to 2450–2600 year-old narrow, thick, Earliest Taltheilei lanceheads has not

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic 337

but none is well stratified and few are radiocarbondated. The fact that some points resemble those of Late or Middle Taltheilei and also resemble points found farther south in the Alberta foothills has been the basis of a postulated Rockies foothills route of the Yukon Dene to the American Southwest. A protohistoric foothills migration by Dene hunters is better documented, when Dene left western Lake Athabasca through Beaver territory to cross the far Northwest Plains along the Rockies foothills to become the Sarsi (Figure 8). Indeed, Sarsi and Beaver are close relatives, sharing oral traditions even after Sarsi became Plains hunters. Early historic Sarsi took advantage of annual bison migrations, following them south to amalgamate with and finally dissolve in the dominant southwest Alberta Blackfoot (Figure 8). A pre-1650 location for Sekani was just north of the Sarsi on the Alberta Plains, while Carrier and

been found on the Peace River, but one thin, wide, shouldered point found in British Columbia in the late nineteenth century by Morice resembles Early Taltheilei points. Perhaps looking for Taltheilei origins in the earlier Taye Lake phase in the Yukon is logical because both Taltheilei and Taye Lake have similar overall toolkits, with the exception that side-notched points (in Taye Lake) are absent in Early Taltheilei. And there are the Taltheilei-like points mentioned earlier on the Northwest Coast and Interior of British Columbia. More survey is needed (Figure 7). The Karpinsky site in western Alberta is pivotal in tying Taltheilei origin to the Peace River and British Columbia. Judging from the form and non-parallel flaking of unprovenanced Early and Middle lanceheads, it has points of all phases, suggesting the Peace River was a regularly used route. The heavily surveyed northern Alberta Oil Sands have 1000 sites,

Inuit

alik Ing

k

chu

lika

Ho

Bering Sea

Beaufort Sea

Koyukon

Pre-600 BC Dene movement from British Columbia down the Peace River

Kutchin

Kolchan n Ta a

an

Tanaina Ah

re HaP re Lak & Bea e r

tna

Han

Pre-tain n Mou

Gulf of Alaska

Tutchone ish

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Yellowknife Dog rib

Tag

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Figure 7 Pre-600 BC Dene movement from British Columbia down the Peace River to the Barrenlands. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

338 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic

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al i k

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Bering Sea

Inuit

Proposed Dene movement south to become Sarsi c. 1650 AD Beaufort Sea

Koyukon Kutchin

Kolchan n Ta an

Tanaina

a

a

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Gulf of Alaska

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Ka

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and

Inuit

Yellowknife Dog rib

Sla vey

Chipewyan

Bea ver c. 16 50 A D

tn Ah

Har e Lak & Bea e r

Han

Sarsi

- Blac kfoot

Cree

CANADA USA

Figure 8 Proposed Dene movement South to become the Sarsi c. AD 1650. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sarsi were adjacent to one another east-west, a condition requiring the Beaver to be farther east than at present. Linguistic data show southern disruption of Sekani and Sarsi, who share enough traits to indicate extensive earlier contact, something they have in common with the Carrier. Evidence also exists for the Sekani being farther east, later to be forced up the Peace River from the Alberta Plains by the Cree. If the Sarsi, on their movement south, carried the chitho or hide abrader, it disappeared or changed completely because it is absent in the Old Women’s phase of Alberta. Northwest Territories-Western Mackenzie District

East of the Yukon and British Columbia, microblade technology occurs only in the late Northwest Microblade tradition and is often associated with flake burins (made by spalling the edge of a flake). Mackenzie Valley and Great Bear Lake microblade assemblages are variants of earlier Alaskan and

Yukon cultures. Simultaneous to the Middle Shield Archaic in the Beverly range of the Thelon River, the 5000–3500 year-old Great Bear River and Franklin Tanks sites near Great Bear Lake have lanceheads, knives, choppers, endscrapers, and microblades mixed with an Arctic Small Tool burin. The nearby NT Docks site has a bladelike assemblage related to the lower level of the Whirl Lake site and dating about 5000 years ago (Figure 5). The lower level at Whirl Lake shows more southern as well as Alaskan and Yukon influence. It and the NT Docks, Pointed Mountain, and Bezya (Alberta) sites all could be defined as 4000–5000 year-old Northwest Microblade variants. But in all assemblages, composition is inconsistent; some have microcores, others have stemmed, notched, and leafshaped points under possible Plains influence. The Great Bear Lake Taltheilei people made lance and arrow heads like those in the Eastern Mackenzie District, plus scrapers, knives, adzes, whetstones, drills and small native copper awls, and

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic 339

knives. Bone, wood, antler, hide, and fur items have not survived the acid soil. Permanent White contact was established when the Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort McPherson on the lower Peel River in 1840, followed two years later by La Pierre House on the Yukon’s Bell River and seven years later by Fort Yukon at the junction of the Porcupine and Yukon Rivers. The reputed co-occurrence of notched points, burins and microblades continues to obscure the definition of the Northwest Microblade tradition. The Pointed Mountain site has Taye Lake burins, plus microblades; other sites do not. Tenuous ties have been drawn across the Continental Divide between the 1500–2300 year-old Mackenzie complex and late Taye Lake-early Aishihik point types, notched endscrapers and burins. The 1400 year-old Fish Lake complex retains side-notched points, but its microblades may, in fact, be parallel-sided flakes. The co-occurrence of crudely flaked notched points with microblades taken from cores using a refined technique seems odd. They occur in thin soils and may represent separate technologies. Contiguous with Yukon Gwich’in sites are those in the Mackenzie Delta and Anderson Plain. Whirl Lake near Arctic Red River and the Anderson Plain have similar dwellings. The Whirl Lake dwelling lacks timbers and was probably covered with birchbark and skin, while Anderson Plain pithouses had beams supporting a low turf roof. Both areas have birchbark trays for holding fish, while Whirl Lake shows a varied subsistence of pike, waterfowl, moose, caribou, muskrat, beaver, and dog or wolf. A 10 cm bone snowshoe netting needle decorated with stylized ‘beavers’ represents a rare Dene art object. East of the Rockies, thrusting lances partially replace the atlatl because they were better tools for killing caribou at close range, as was necessary at water-crossings and corrals. Where rapid-fire hunting was needed on frozen lakes and in open space, the bow and arrow was superior for small subherds, but prior to the bow, the atlatl was used in winter. The change to side-notched arrowheads spread east of the Rockies, down the Peace River to the Northwest Territories to form part of the AD 800–1200 Late Taltheilei phase. Early Taltheilei began 2100 years ago on Great Bear Lake, eventually evolving into the Hare, who used lance and arrowheads until White Contact. Little is known about the Mountain Dene on the Nahanni River, as epidemics and famine reduced them. Up the Liard River as far as Fisherman Lake, Spence River points resembling Prairie Side-Notched arrowheads are interpreted as Slavey Dene.

Northwest Territories-Central Mackenzie District

The Mackenzie District includes the Bathurst caribou range north of Great Slave Lake and east of Great Bear Lake. Its earliest inhabitants were a 6000–3500 year-old Archaic group called Acasta, its side-notched lanceolates being a possible southern modification (Figure 3). A link may exist between its edge-burinated flakes, called Donnelly burins, and multi-gravers and those in Little Arm phase. Other items are large bipointed knives, scrapers, planes, gravers, burins, wedges and a whetstone. Acasta’s 15–25 huge 3–4 m diameter hearths were used in heat-treating quartzite to make it more suitable for flaking. One hearth had charred caribou, bear, beaver, hare, and fish bone. Rare Oxbow, narrow concave-based Duncan and larger convex-based side-notched Pelican Lake points found near Great Slave Lake’s East Arm represent Middle Plains influence. Dene prehistory is recognized throughout the subarctic by generalized toolkits: bifacial knives, scrapers, wedges, hammerstones, pushplanes, and chithos. Points are the most diagnostic tool for differentiating phases. But most Barrenland surface sites have collections mixed from two or more phases because they are situated at caribou water-crossings used over and over again for millennia. Stratified sites are rare in the Bathurst caribou range, so attempts were made to separate assemblages through estimating the age of raised beach ridges and dating charcoal in isolated hearths. As these were too crude to properly separate the 10 complexes in the 2500–160 year-old Taltheilei Shale tradition, the complexes were assigned to the three well-dated Taltheilei tradition phases in the Beverly caribou range (Table 1). Thus, the Central Mackenzie phases translate as follows: Hennessey is Early Taltheilei; Taltheilei and Windy Point are Middle Taltheilei; and Waldron River, Narrows, Lockhart River, Fairchild Bay, Snare River, and Reliance are Late Taltheilei. Earliest Taltheilei lanceheads are absent in the Bathurst caribou range, casting doubt on Dene movement across the Mackenzie Mountains via the Liard River and strengthening the theory of migrations via the Peace River. Early Taltheilei points are shouldered. Middle Taltheilei lanceheads are stemmed. Late Taltheilei is characterized by notched arrowheads, indicating introduction of the bow and arrow. The last prehistoric phase in the Bathurst caribou range is ancestral Yellowknife, but it would also include Dogrib. In historic times, both Dogrib and Yellowknife built caribou fences on lake ice in March and April, and both hunted migrating Bathurst caribou in the spring. The Bathurst range was taken over by the Dogribs in the mid-nineteenth century after years of friction and two battles with the Yellowknife.

340 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic Eastern Mackenzie District (Barrenlands), Northern Saskatchewan, and Manitoba

Hearne was first to record Dene groups following the caribou when he crossed the Barrenlands in 1771. Later ethnographic reports and archaeology confirmed that caribou was the controlling factor in the development of Dene groups on the Barrenlands, in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. All Dene groups had to follow the caribou within its wintering area and migration corridor to and from the calving grounds if they were to survive. Alternative food was insufficient to sustain them. Distance between herd ranges and the timing of each respective herd’s migration prevented any one human group from hunting more than one range. Such is the nature of joint culture and herd occupancy that tools and dialects reflect this dependence. Within each caribou range, tools become more homogeneous with time, and differ from those in adjoining ranges because of limited contact between groups. This pattern has been evident since the first peoples entered the Barrenlands. Within the Beverly Range, stratified sites provide a cultural sequence from then until Contact. The association of the Dene tribes with caribou ranges continued into historic times. From northwest to southwest, and with respect to tribal division and range, the Satudene (Hare and Dogrib) occupy the Bluenose caribou range; the Dogrib and Yellowknife occupy the Bathurst range; and the Western and Eastern Chipewyan occupy the Beverly and Kaminuriak ranges (Figure 4). The earliest people to enter the Barrenland range of the Beverly caribou were Northern Plano who followed the retreating continental ice sheet north. They occupied 34 water-crossings, each having at least one Northern Plano lancehead and dating to 8000–7000 years ago (Figure 3). Northern Plano artifacts are also seen to the south, at Black Lake in northern Saskatchewan. Northern Plano may have merged into Shield Archaic people 6500–3500 years ago, as 121 Beverly sites show no substantial interruption in artifact frequencies, particularly in knives (Figure 5). But their earliest radiocarbon-dated (6120 years ago) small, crude, side-notched point looks nothing like the elegant, long, unnotched Plano points. In time, the Shield Archaic people retreated with incoming very cold climate from the Arctic coast. Hard on their heels were 3500–2700 year-old Arctic-adapted Pre-Dorset people who moved south during this cold period. They left distinctive microblades and cores, burins and spalls, and other refined tools at many Bathurst, Beverly (246 sites), and Kaminuriak caribou range sites (Figure 9). To the southeast, Pre-Dorset artifacts are found at Black

Lake, Saskatchewan, and near Churchill, Manitoba, at the Twin Lakes and Seahorse Gully sites (see Americas, North: Arctic and Circumpolar Regions) (Figure 9). With climatic warming, Earliest and Early Taltheilei people moved into the Beverly range via the Peace River (Figure 7), leaving 190 sites in the Beverly range. From 2600 to 1800 years ago, they used long thick lanceheads, then thin shouldered lanceheads. The 1800 to 1300 year-old Middle phase expanded to occupy 355 Beverly sites, reflecting a cultural efflorescence. It also spread east to the Kaminuriak range of Manitoba and southern Nunavut leaving well-made stemmed points as evidence of mass hunting at water-crossings. The 1300 to 200 year-old Late phase people adopted the bow and arrow that is recognized in crude notched arrowheads. These people evolved directly into protohistoric Chipewyan, met by Hearne on the lower Dubawnt River and on the Thelon River’s ‘Arctic Oasis’ at its junction with the Hanbury, where the richest stratified sites occur. The Chipewyan used the bow horizontally, as probably did their Late Taltheilei ancestors. Along the Dubawnt and Thelon rivers, upturned stone slab shooting blinds and stone pile or brush fences used by these bowmen, mark the Beverly caribou migration corridor. The Thelon corridor was especially depended upon, as seen in 16 blinds and 15 fences near water-crossings on the upper Thelon River. The high quality quartzite, dominant in Taltheilei toolkits, was collected on the tundra and carried hundreds of kilometers south in the fall when the people migrated into the forest. By winter, local stone was under several meters of snow and was of poor quality. Thus, repeated sharpening over the winter of the tools they had carried from the tundra reduced the size of tools in forest sites. Scrapers and knives were serrated and four-sided in the forest zone for easier winter handling and use on frozen hides and meat. Chithos either became more worn because of use on frozen hides or from prolonged winter use before they could be replaced in summer.

Dene Move through Saskatchewan to the Southwestern United States Three routes from Subarctic Canada to the American Southwest have been proposed. The Intermountain one is the least promising because the Hare, Bear Lake, Dogrib, Yellowknife and Chipewyan are not mountain Dene and there is little supporting data. A Foothills route has been suggested because some arrowheads are supposedly similar along Alberta’s foothill sites, but others disagree on their specific traits. Furthermore, notched quartzite cobble axes

AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic 341

Beaufort Sea

The Late Intermediate Cultures bp = years before present

500 km

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son riak t 350 al mo carib 0–1 vem ou 700 en bp ts

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Gulf of Alaska

P se Bat reas hu Do on rst rs 35 al c e 00 mo arib t –1 ve ou 70 m P 0 b en p ts se Bev re-D as erl or on y c se t a a 35 0 0 l mo r ibo –1 v u 70 eme 0b nts p Kam Pre-D sea inu orse

Ol Ch d De ief ne

CAN USA

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Figure 9 The late intermediate cultures, including seasonal movements of Barrenland hunters and caribou herds. ã 2008 Bryan Gordon. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

and adzes like those of the northern Yukon Dene are present in Saskatchewan sites, but are absent in Alberta. These and unproven arrowhead similarities mitigate against a Foothills route. The most plausible route for southern Navajo-Apache migration is via the open Plains (Figure 4). Evidence of a Plains route south appears in Late Taltheilei times, as indicated in Plains Side-Notched arrowheads mixed with Taltheilei side-notched arrowheads and other artifacts at Black Lake near Lake Athabasca. The Plains path crosses the Churchill and Saskatchewan Rivers via an archaeologically unknown area west of AD 500–1000 Laurel and AD 1250 Selkirk peoples of Manitoba, and it remains unknown if the Dene contacted them. Crude quartzite Late Taltheilei side-notched arrowheads (Figure 2b) merge into fine chert Plains Side-Notched arrowheads across Saskatchewan. This is the first suggestion of Late Taltheilei fading into the dominant Plains culture, as Taltheilei knappers honed their skills using

superior Plains chert. On the North Saskatchewan River, Taltheilei is inferred to be present by Middle Plains Period ovoid and notched knives and gouges and pushplane-shaped endscrapers very like those of Late Taltheilei. Over a millenium ago, at the northern edge of the Saskatchewan parkland and prairie, some Late Taltheilei or ancestral Chipewyan bands became more dependent on bison and less on caribou. Gradually being drawn to the seasonal movements of the bison going south to the short grass prairie of southern Saskatchewan, some bands adjusted fully to the bison’s ‘spoke-and-rim’ migrations, often ending in winter far from where they started in spring. Bison move into the short grass prairie in summer and out to the aspen parklands to the north, the foothills to the west, or the woodlands to the east in autumn. Hunters beginning their seasonal hunts may move into the short grass prairie from one direction and out another, especially after a drought. In the process,

342 AMERICAS, NORTH/Sub-arctic

and likely being driven by drought effects on moving bison, several Chipewyan bands kept moving south, rather than north, west or east. The stable AD 900– 1200 Neo-Atlantic Episode grassland may have first attracted ancestral Chipewyan to the Plains, while the AD 1200–1550 Pacific Episode climatic deterioration may have hastened their move south (see Americas, North: Plains). Supporting this hypothesis of a southern Chipewyan movement via the archaeological record is their speech, which most clearly resembles Navajo. Navajo has the greatest retention of Chipewyan words. Minimal Chipewyan linguistic divergence puts the Navajo within the AD 800–1200 date range of Taltheilei side-notched arrowheads (Table 1). The relationship between Chipewyan and Navajo is also supported by three skeletons excavated near Colorado’s Trinidad Reservoir. They have Dene-specific first molars, suggesting the Navajo or ancestral Chipewyan were there from AD 750–1000. If so, they arrived in the southwest well after the Avonlea phase of the Northern Plains, and well before the Dismal River phase of the Central Plains, the previously accepted indicators of Dene or Athapaskan presence. They arrived well before Coronado’s 1541 notations of Apache in his journal. The Apache, diverging similarly to Navajo from Chipewyan, moved south as a unit. The Navajo and Apache split in eastern Colorado, the Apache retaining a Plains orientation while the Navajo evolved into a new Southwest-adapted culture. Some linguists say the split was farther north based on the Chipewyan ‘t’ and ‘d’ sounds diverging and reappearing later and separately in Navaho and Apache. Ancestral Chipewyan may be found in the American Southwest using a testable Preceramic Dene phase. To do this, one must ignore the earliest pottery of the Navajo and their five-pole hogans and ubiquitous triangular arrowheads. Instead, one should consider side-notched arrowheads and look for the remains of simple brush shelters or tipis, arrowshaft smoothers, hide abraders, bone fleshers and beamers, large retouched flakes and knives, dog transport, and the sinew-backed double-curved bow released horizontally. Drawn to the chest, this archery technique reduced accuracy, pull and range by two-thirds, but favored a hidden approach and gave the Apache-Navajo distinct military advantages when entering new areas.

There are many gaps in the prehistory of the Subarctic Dene. The Dene west and east of the Continental Divide and north and south of the 49th Parallel appear on first impression to be so different. Yet there is an underlying similarity, not just in their language and social structure, but in the fact that they were inveterate borrowers from other cultures. This has presented immense challenges to archaeologists, but, hopefully, we can make them more visible by examining their whole culture area, the largest in North America. See also: Americas, North: American Southwest, Four

Corners Region; Arctic and Circumpolar Regions; Eastern Woodlands; Plains; Rocky Mountains; New World, Peopling of.

Further Reading Clark DW (1991) Archaeological Survey of Canada, Canadian Prehistory Series: Western Subarctic Prehistory, 152. Yukon: Archaeological Survey of Canada. Fladmark KR (1986) British Columbia Prehistory. Yukon: Archaeological Survey of Canada. Gordon BC (1996) Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series 19: People of Sunlight, People of Starlight-Barrenland Archaeology in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Yukon: Archaeological Survey of Canada. Hare PG, Greer S, Gotthardt R, and Farnell R (2004) Ethnographic and archaeological investigations of alpine ice patches in SW Yukon, Canada. Arctic 57(3): 247–259. Krauss ME and Golla VK (1981) Northern Athapaskan Languages. In: Helm J (ed.) Handbook of the North American Indians. Subarctic Vol. 6, pp. 67–85. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Kroeber AL (1959) Reflections and tests on Athapaskan glottochronology. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 47: 241–258. LeBlanc R (1984) The Rat Indian Creek Site and the Late Prehistoric Period in the Interior Northern Yukon: Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series 120. MacNeish RS (1964) Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Paper 6: Investigations in the southwest Yukon: Archaeological Excavations, Comparisons, and Speculations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noble WC (1981) Prehistory of the Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake Region. In: Helm J (ed.) Handbook of North American Indians. Subarctic, vol. 6, p. 97–106. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Workman, W (1978) Prehistory of the Aishihik–Kluane area, southwest Yukon Territory, Canada. Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series 74.

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AMERICAS, SOUTH Contents Amazon Basin Early Cultures of the Central Andes Early Villages Historical Archaeology Inca Archaeology Inca Ethnohistory Northern South America Southern Cone

Amazon Basin Anna C Roosevelt, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Archaic period Early Holocene period of often-complex hunter-gatherer cultures. diffusion The spread of archaeological cultures. Formative period Period between about 5000 and 2000 years ago when people first used cultivated plants as staple foods. hypoplasia A horizontal line of reduced enamel formation that forms in a child’s teeth when growth slows because of an illness or period of famine. interfluves Nonflooded land between the main rivers. Manioc Tropical shrub of the Euphorbiaceae family whose fibrous, starchy roots are a staple food in Latin America and the Caribbean. New Archaeology A period of theoretical and methodological innovation in American archaeology that emphasized the formation and testing of explicit hypotheses. Oriente Eastern Ecuador, which lies in the Amazon basin. osteology The study of bone morphology. palaeoindian period New World cultural period of early hunting and gathering cultures dating to the later Pleistocene and Early Holocene. paradigm An overarching theoretical approach to scientific causality from which a group of related theories and hypotheses is derived. photogrammetry Three-dimensional mapping carried out by binocular resolution of dual, offset photographic images. phytolith A silica-rich, plant-cell wall structure that can be preserved in soil, recovered, and identified to species. Pleistocene Geological period of the Ice Age between c. 2 million and 10 000 years ago. pressure-flaked a method of flaking stone to shape artifacts by pressing the rock surface. radiometric dating Dating methods that use the behavior of radioactive materials to measure the amount of time since a material was used or buried. stable isotope analysis Study of vegetation cover or diet by mass spectrometric analysis of nonradioactive isotopes extracted from plants, fauna, or soils.

varzea Brazilian Portuguese term for alluvial floodplain land. Xanthosoma Tropical South American root crop of the Aroid family distantly related to Asian taro.

Interpretive Themes in Amazonian Archaeology The dominant theme of archaeologists’ interpretations of Amazonia is the question of the role of the tropical forest in human cultural and biological evolution. Environmental determinism was the explicit paradigm of the first archaeologists to espouse a theory; Betty J. Meggers and Clifford Evans of the Smithsonian Institution. Like many early scientific archaeologists, they believed that the tropical forest environment strongly limited human cultural evolution. Influenced by theoreticians such as Julian Steward, they considered the habitat so poor in resources that early foragers could not have penetrated it. The archaeological sequence thus only could have begun in late prehistory when pottery-using migrants from agricultural Andean civilizations invaded Amazonia. In the tropical environment, their cultures would have deteriorated into horticultural village societies and foraging bands. Their small, shifting settlements and limited subsistence activities would have left the forest essentially virgin of human impacts. Archaeologists who came to work in Amazonia after Meggers and Evans suggested variations to the environmental determinist hypotheses. They argued that, although poor interfluvial resources might have limited cultural developments, humans in the rich alluvial floodplains could have intensified agriculture and fishing and developed complex cultures. Donald Lathrap’s idea was that manioc had been the staple, whereas Anna Roosevelt thought that maize would have been a staple in some areas. Lathrap felt that competition over floodplain resources had led to migrations into the interfluves, where peoples’ cultures would have deteriorated in the poor environment. Roosevelt thought

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that the deterioration only happened after the European conquest of Amazonia. For earlier occupations, Lathrap doubted that Palaeo-Indian hunter-gatherers could have survived on Amazon resources, whereas Roosevelt thought that they could. The early theoretical thinking of scientific archaeologists about Amazonia was consistent with the main paradigm of the New Archaeology movement of the 1970s, itself an extrapolation from Julian Steward’s ideas. Like New Archaeologists, the early Amazonianists assumed that the environment shaped the trajectories of local cultural evolution. In their explanations, agriculture was the basis for village sedentism and the evolution of state societies involved agricultural intensification, population growth, monumental public works, and high art. The phase of field and lab research that followed the early phase of theory making in Amazonia has motivated the revision of many early theoretical ideas and the formulation of some significantly different understandings of human history and prehistory there. By the 1990s, archaeological field research had revealed an unexpectedly long and complex cultural sequence for Amazonia. The discovery of tropical forest Palaeo-Indians and Early Holocene ceramic foragers and farmers constituted problems for neoevolutionary optimal foraging theory and for diffusionary explanations that attributed Amazonian cultures to Andean intrusions. The diverse complex cultures unexpectedly found in interfluves as well as floodplains complicated 1970s theories about the role of intensive agriculture in social evolution, and the apparent lack of stratification and centralized rulerships in some of the complex cultures encouraged alternative explanations from heterarchy theory. Moreover, recognition of the historical role of the European conquest in the disappearance of the complex societies undermined adaptationist explanations of ethnogenesis in Amazonia. Finally, evidence that the environment itself might have coevolved with prehistoric humans has placed in doubt aspects of theory and practice in conservation biology. Since the first and second phases of systematic theoretical thinking, however, the debates among Amazonian archaeologists have not really moved into new directions. Although a few archaeologists are addressing issues from historical ecology, critical theory, and heterarchy, many continue with assumptions from New Archaeology theory. Current theoretical arguments often focus on minor refinements of conclusions, rather than questions about the appropriateness of paradigms. Such questions include: whether a particular Palaeo-Indian group lived in savanna or rainforest, whether a complex society’s site catchment was varzea or interfluvial forest, whether it had manioc or maize as a staple, whether

certain complex societies had classes and central rule, and where certain cultures originated. However given the role of the tropical forest as an archtype in determinist evolutionary theory, the new evidence for more mutual causality, greater complexity, and more lines of development than expected makes Amazonian prehistory a potent stimulant for major new paradigms. A new paradigm that acknowledged the human role in the evolution of habitats and cultures and recognized the dynamic character of the interrelationships might well transform general theory not only in anthropology but throughout the natural sciences and beyond.

Research Methodology The methodology of research in Amazonia has had a trajectory somewhat comparable to that of North American archaeology. It begins with an early prescientific period of free-ranging observation and inference. Then comes an early scientific period of theoretical writing whose research is not explicitly oriented to theoretical problems. There is a final period of field research with explicit problem-oriented design and an expansion of research for cultural resource managment. In each period, however, there are many researchers who do not fit into the trajectory. During the prescientific period, scholars working in Amazonia noted a diversity of archaeological sites and materials but did not use systematic research methods or relate their findings to general theories. However, their important, open-minded empirical observations were the basis of an eventual rethinking of early modern scientific theory by scholars of the first phase of scientific interpretation and the subsequent period of problem oriented research. For example, Charles Hartt, Alfred Russel Wallace, and H. H. Smith, and Joao Barbosa Rodrigues were all aware of preceramic sites and rockpaintings. Domingos Soares Ferreira Penna, Joseph Steere, and Hartt all recognized that there had been early pottery cultures subsisting on fishing, rather than agriculture; and Ladislav Netto, Orville Derby, and Hartt all recognized that there had been populous indigenous prehistoric complex cultures with high art, urban-like centers, and extensive earthworks. In the subsequent early scientific period, work by the Smithsonian group and their affiliates as well as by Lathrap and his associates (c. 1948 through 1975) focused mainly on excavating and descriptively analyzing pottery styles to define archaeological cultures, despite the fact that the New Archaeology had developed a quiver of refined archaeological methods and systematic measurement techniques. The narrow research interests of the early scientific archaeologists

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in Amazonia prevented them from exploiting the theoretical implications of prescientific researchers’ observations and interpretations. Thus, neither the Smithsonian group nor Lathrap’s group realized at that time that there had been Palaeoindian cultures and early Pottery Archaic cultures in Amazonia. When the Smithsonian Institution began producing radiocarbon dates, the dates definitely contradicted their presumption of late human arrival and prehistoric cultural deterioration. But the institution’s scholars found it impossible to integrate the early dates into their short chronology of the human occupation. Lathrap’s group, although aware of some of the early dates, nonetheless concentrated on late prehistory. So it was that only in the 1980s and 1990s were new groups of archaeologists able to establish the outlines of a long archaeological sequence by discovering new cultural phases with stratigraphic excavation techniques and intensive dating of multicomponent sites. Only then, too, were sites systematically instrument-mapped, allowing community analysis for the first time. The archaeologists who created this longer sequence were inspired by the US New Archaeology (or processual archaeology) movement of the 1960s and 1970s to broaden data gathering with techniques from archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, and human osteology and to sharpen analysis by the application of accelerator dating, geoarchaeology, geochemistry, computerized topographic mapping, informatics, and statistical analysis. It was this quiver of techniques that revealed the types of settlements and subsistence technologies not envisioned by the environmental determinists. By the 1980s, critical theory archaeologists opposed to processual archaeology had raised questions about the organizational mode and economic base of complex societies, and in Amazonia, these questions stimulated the use of methods that could better define prehistoric organization and economy. Within-site settlement subsurface mapping, regional settlement surveys, subsistence analysis, and cemetery analysis all have been recruited to test hypotheses. Of special theoretical significance have been the complex site plans and corpus of dated and biological remains that archaeologists have recovered in stratigraphic context with the new data gathering techniques. Aggregate information from pollen, macroscopic biological remains, as well as skeletal analyses has allowed more informed inferences about change in environment, subsistence, socioeconomic differentiation, and health patterns. Osteological techniques pioneered in the New Archaeology period have showed in the Amazonian populations a persistence of robust good health through prehistory, with a decline only in postconquest times. This sequence of data, along with the settlement data, did not support

the idea that the Amazon lacked sufficient subsistence resources for prehistoric populations. Not all Amazonian researchers buy into the idea of problem-oriented research or operationalized field methods. Many do not use the methods of data collection and analysis popularized by the New Archaeologists, and many do not subject their theoretical arguments to empirical tests. For example, some researchers argue for particular chronologies but do not carry out systematic radiometric dating and statistical analysis to make their case. Some researchers define land-use areas without justifying them with remote images or empirical soil classifications. Others make claims about ancient subsistence but do not feel the need to test them with fine-screening, quantified biological identifications, or stable isotope analysis for palaeodietary information. Others making claims about settlement patterns do not make instrument maps of sites to justify their arguments. Researchers on rock art do not use photogrammetric or laser mapping to record images precisely nor chemical analyses to trace pigments.

History of Research at Sites In the period from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, researchers mainly from natural science fields and cultural studies took great interest in the archaeology of the Amazon. They traveled widely, made astute observations, carried out excavations, reached insightful interpretations, and published extensively. However, their use of theory was unexplicit and their data gathering and analysis unsystematic. Their work was ignored until the late twentieth century, when it became the basis for a critical review of theories and a new stage of problem-oriented field research. The early natural science researchers described a wide range of materials in sites, including diverse biological remains, and already recognized most of the cultures now accepted by archaeologists at the time of this writing. Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Hartt published on the rock paintings at Monte Alegre; J. Barbosa Rodrigues, Hartt, and H. H. Smith noted the existence of projectile points in the Taperinha–Monte Alegre area. Domingos Soares Ferreira Penna and his invitees, Hartt and Joseph Steere, reported on research at early pottery shellmounds at Taperinha, the mouth of the Amazon, and elsewhere. Hartt’s research team excavated on Marajo Island, at Taperinha near Santarem, and at Monte Alegre in Para. Ladislav Netto published an ambitious analysis of iconography and social organization at the Marajoara culture. Curt Nimuendaju surveyed and collected extensively, documenting the incised and punctate pottery horizon near Santarem and ceramic and standing stone sites just north of the mouth of

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the Amazon. He also ventured a still-influential reconstruction of the ethnohistoric Tapajo society of Santarem, which he associated with the Santarem archaeological pottery culture. Unfortunately, important early reports were published in Portuguese and stayed generally unknown to North Americans, but erudite scholars such as Helen Constance Palmatery disseminated important excerpts in their own English syntheses on Amazon archaeology. Also writing in English, Erland Nordenskiold synthesized lowland South American archaeology and ethnology in comparative schemas, pioneered research at lowland mound sites in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia, and inspired many others to work in the area. The materials collected by them from that area have mostly lain unpublished in European museums. The Peruvian and Columbian Amazon regions have less recorded work from this period. By the end of World War II, scientific archaeology had become established as a discipline, and government funding for foreign area studies supported archaeological research abroad. As mentioned above, in Amazonia, the early scientitific archaeologists of the postwar period focused on the definition and analysis of pottery cultures. Despite their theorizing on the history of human adaptation to Amazonia, they did not do systematic empirical research on settlement pattern, chronology, or human ecology. Meggers and Evans wrote their dissertations on their mid-twentieth century research on archaeological sequences at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. Their theory about the invasion and deterioration of Andean cultures was framed before radiocarbon dating. In the late 1950s they expanded research to British Guiana and in the 1960s to Venezuelan Guyana. Meggers and Evans then worked in the Napo River valley of the Ecuadorian Amazon, finding a local sequence that only later was understood to demonstrate a sequence contrary to their theory of the colonization of the Amazon. Their prote´ge´s in Brazil, British Guiana, and Uruguay carried on their effort by identifying cultures at many new sites in Amazon. The new cultural phases they found in eastern Amazonia included presumptive Formative and Archaic cultures, which by definition embodied a longer human occupation in the Amazon than their theories allowed for. In addition, dates from their excavations on Marajo suggested that the Polychrome horizon was older in Amazonia than in the Andes and that some mound constructions there dated back to Formative times. However, Meggers and Evans expressed doubts about those dates and argued against the idea that there had been early ceramic fishing cultures and early preceramic cultures. Lathrap wrote his dissertation on his late 1950s excavations at sites in the vicinity of Pucallpa in the

Ucayali River valley of the Peruvian Amazon. He argued, despite very incomplete dating, that these showed an indigenous cultural development, rather than foreign invasions and collapse. His PhD students at the University of Illinois, Urbana, added to his data by focusing on specific cultures. Together, they pushed the beginnings of the Upper Amazon sequence back into the first 1000 years before Christ, and they documented the existence of complex, populous societies at least by the time of the first European accounts. Although the Smithsonian group limited access to dig permits in the Brazilian Amazon, Lathrap students were able to use Brazilian museum collections and archives on the Marajoara culture to document that the area had a richer resource base and longer indigenous sequence than Meggers and Evans had hypothesized. Numerous Brazilian researchers of the later twentieth century carried out regionally focused research for museums, universities, and public archaeology contracts. In advance of the Carajas region iron-mining development, a team led by Marcos Magalhaes of the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi excavated caves and rockshelters and defined and dated new Early Archaic and Late Formative cultures at Gruta do Gaviao and other sites. Archaic zooarchaeological finds from Gaviao were analyzed for subsistence information by Mara Imazio da Silveira. In the lower Tapajos River area, Denise Cavalcante Gomes excavated late Formative period sites for her dissertation. On Marajo Island, an interdisciplinary team from the Museu Goeldi did geophysical survey and test excavation at several sites. Their research, though illuminating for methodology and culture history, was not explicitly problemoriented. Edith Pereira, also of the Goeldi, conducted intensive long-term research and publication on the rock art of Para, a necessary first step allowing for interpretive analysis in the future. Researchers Vera Guapindaia at the Museu Goeldi and Denise Cavalcante Gomes at the University of Sao Paulo have systematically analyzed the technology and style of pottery from Santarem in museums. At the same time North American archaeologists and Brazilians began long-term problem-oriented research inspired by processual archaeology concepts and methods. Roosevelt’s team conducted long-term research on the history of cultures and habitats in the Lower Amazon. They used detailed instrument mapping, geophysical survey, extensive stratigraphic excavations, and exhaustive soil processing to test theories on the history of human adaptation in Amazonia. Their research sites include Santarem, Taperinha, Monte Alegre, Marajo Island, and the Curua River. A major focus of that research has been dating and analysis of biological remains and artifacts in stratigraphic context. To augment excavation data,

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the team also sampled, dated, and chemically analyzed biological collections in museums. Renato Kipnes has excavated and synthesized information from Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites throughout the southern Amazon and southeastern Brazil. Delores Piperno, with collaborators including Deborah Pearsall, has analyzed sediment cores from water bodies in Ecuador and Brazil to collect microfossils for data on subsistence and environmental change. In aid of transportation planning, Brazilian Denise Schaan then of the University of Pittsburgh headed a team that carried out the first extensive regional surveys, geophysical mapping, and test excavations on Marajo at the mouth of the Amazon. Her dissertation assessed the sociopolitical organization of the Marajoara culture as a possible complex chiefdom. Also in the lower Amazon, Vera Guapindaia has researched open sites and cave urnburial cemeteries of the late prehistoric Maraca culture. Her inventories reveal that the famous burial urns depicting humans seated on effigy stools include men and women in equal numbers. Dirse Kern has led teams that systematically investigated the chemistry of anthropogenic ‘black Indian soils’ for the first time. In the upper Xingu, Eduardo Neves of the University of Sao Paulo and Michael Heckenberger now of the University of Florida investigated the settlement pattern of a cluster of large, late prehistoric ‘round’ village sites, as units of a possible complex chiefdom. The team also has carried out preliminary testexcavation and site survey at terra firme sites near extensive varzea at the mouth of the Rio Negro, looking at the nature and production of the black Indian soils as elements of prehistoric land management. In the upper Amazon, several Peruvian researchers, including Monica Teixeira, mapped and test-excavated architectural, funerary, and habitation sites along the Andean slopes of the Amazon drainage. In Bolivia, Clark Erickson established a long-term research on agricultural earthworks and habitation sites of the Llanos de Mojos. European researchers have worked both on the history of Inca contact in Andean slopes of the Bolivian Amazon and also on large enigmatic earthworks in the Bolivian Llanos. In Ecuador, researchers led by Ernesto Salazar have mapped and test-excavated numerous diverse mounds in the rich archaeological zone of the Faldas de Sangay area, studied earlier by Pedro Porras, a collaborator of Betty Meggers.

The Human Developmental Sequence in Amazonia Palaeo-Indian foragers 11 000 to c. 9000 in main floodplain and 10 000–4000 BP elsewhere

The earliest human occupation discovered as yet in Amazonia is Late Pleistocene in age but is distinct

from the Clovis big-game-hunting, fluted-point culture of North America (see Figures 1 and 2). The occupation consists of small and widely dispersed groups with a culture of broad-spectrum foraging on tropical forest and river resources. Identified environmental plant remains document humid tropical forest vegetation, not grassland. Vegetation around campsites seems to have been disturbed, possibly by purposeful burning, and by Late Paleoindian times, people may have cultivated a few trees, roots, shrubs, and herbs. The most detailed evidence on their culture comes from the multicomponent site of Cavern of the Painted Rock at Monte Alegre in the Lower Amazon (see Figure 3 and 4). The preceramic layers of the 2-m deep deposit produced over 60 radiometric dates between c. 11 000 and 10 000. The food remains recovered there document consumption of very numerous palm and tree fruits and seeds, abundant, mostly-small fish, turtles, a small amount of shellfish and small game. No grass was identified among the plants remains. The material culture is dominated by red pigment and numerous flaked stone tools of both fine- and coarse-grained siliceous rocks. The occurrence of such tools at Polychrome rock art sites and the fact that nearly all the pigment of the same chemical composition is in the Palaeoindian layers suggest that Palaeoindians were responsible for many of the paintings. These early Amazonians made finely pressure-flaked triangular and/or stemmed two-faced points and limaces (unifacial endscapers) more comparable to Late Paleolithic Eurasian and Beringian cultures than to Clovis cultures. They also flaked heavy cutting tools from coarse, tough rocks. Such tools may have been for woodcutting or digging. On the Caqueta River in Colombia, test excavations at Late Paleoindian Pen ^a Roja, a ninth millennium preceramic site, found abundant palm fruits, phytoliths of a starchy root crop, Calathea allouia, curcurbits such as bottle gourd, but no faunal remains. Grinding tools were abundant, and flaked ones were rare, but the latter included bifacial pressure flaking. Phytoliths revealed the presence of forest but not grasses. Surface finds of lithics and rock paintings have been made both in interfluves and floodplains of the Brazilian Amazon and from stratified sites in central and southeastern Brazil. The radiocarbon dating of these sites is comparable to the Amazonian Palaeoindian dates: c. 11 000–8000 BP. Skeletons from those Brazilian sites closely resemble Palaeoindian and early Archaic skeletons documented in the Andes coast and western North America. In interfluvial Amazonia, the preceramic stage continues until the Formative, between c. 4000 and 2000 BP, in contrast to parts of the main floodplains, where the pottery stage has already begun by 7500. Compared with floodplain sites, sites relying on the

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Figure 2 Quartz crystal projectile point from Cachoeira do Chacorao, Tapajos River Brazil. Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belem, Brazil.

dispersed resources of the interfluves have a wider range of plant and animal species in them. The Early Holocene interfluvial preceramic culture of Carajas is particularly well known. Wide area excavations at Gruta do Gaviao (see Figure 5) and other sites have revealed a very broad-spectrum economy of broad collecting, fishing, and hunting. There, small fruits of diverse trees and palms, numerous fishbones, shellfish, bones of diverse small game, and rare larger game were recovered. The artifact tradition was characterized by coarse flaking of white or colored crystalline quartz. Recently discovered Early Holocene preceramic sites in the interior of French Guiana also have abundant grinding stones, but food remains and flaked lithics have not been reported yet. The Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene preceramic cultures were not foreseen in traditional Palaeoanthropological theory about Amazonia, which assumed that Palaeoindians would be exclusively adapted by hunting big game in cool open habitats and thus would not colonize Amazonia, where game is comparably rare. Considered with the Late Pleistocene Patagonian small-game hunters and newly discovered southern Peruvian marine foragers, the new cultures of the Amazon are further evidence that early Palaeoindians developed the kinds of diverse regional cultures that theoreticians had only expected to see in the Early Holocene, when the big game went extinct and modern climates had formed. The diversity and regionalism of these new early cultures have inspired a rethinking of the role of environment and subsistence in the evolution of Palaeolithic cultures worldwide. Archaic shellfishing and fishing cultures with pottery, c. 7500–3000 BP

Figure 3 Monte Alegre Hills, Brazil. By Nigel Smith.

Another new group of Amazonian cultures are the Pottery Archaic cultures of the Amazon floodplains and estuary. These unexpected cultures, the earliest pottery

Figure 4 Cavern of the painted rock and rock painting details, near Monte Alegre, Brazil. By Anna Roosevelt.

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Figure 6 Incised and punctate Early–Mid Holocene Archaic Pottery, Taperinha, near Santarem, Brazil.

Figure 5 Caverna do Gaviao, Early Holocene Preceramic Site, Carajas Region, Brazil. By Marcos Magalhaes.

cultures yet known in the Western Hemisphere, appear to have been supported not by agriculture but by intensive harvesting of aquatic resources. Spatially, the sites are associated with river floodplain lakes and coastal estuaries. One possible interpretation, then, is that after most local regions of Amazonia had been colonized by Paleoindian cultures, some local populations solved the problem of increasingly constricted catchments by intensifying their exploitation of local resources. Nine sites of pottery-making fisherpeople, dated to the Early Holocene by more than 30 radiometric assays, some of them directly on the pottery, have been excavated along the flooplains of the Lower Amazon, Amazon mouth, and the Guianas’ coasts. The Taperinha culture was found at the mouth of the Tapajos River in the Lower Amazon (see Figure 6 and 7); the Mina culture was defined in the Salgado area just south of the Amazon mouth; and sites of the Alaka culture occur along the coast of Guyana north of the mouth of the Amazon. The sites of these cultures tend to be shell middens, several of them relatively large, from 5 to more than 20 ha in area and 5 to more than 10 tall. These fishing peoples subsisted mainly on intensive aquatic foraging focused on small fish and shellfish. Carbonized plant remains are much less common at these sites than in earlier and later sites. (Shellfish are one of the few faunal food sources with considerable carbohydrate content.) Pollen cores of the period from Prainha on the edge of the Amazon opposite Taperinha

show human disturbance of the forest but no evidence of cultivation in the form of cultivated-plant pollen. Despite the apparent lack of agriculture, people made substantial cultural achievements, including the firstknown Amazonian villages, structures with prepared floors, artificial mounds (of shell), and pottery. The pottery is predominantly tempered with sand and decorated only occasionally, with paint in some regions and incision and punctation in others. Stone tools are not common, but include flakes, boiling stones, and rocks used for grinding. Both bone and shell tools and ornaments also were made. Flexed burials have been found at several sites and so have turtle-feasting areas. One skeleton analyzed at Taperinha was a pre-teen whose excellent teeth showed no dental caries associated with starchy food nor hypoplasias from severe or repeated childhood diseases or famines. The existence of large, apparently sedentary settlements of very Early Holocene fishing peoples using pottery in Amazonia has encouraged revision of thinking about the role of subsistence in the evolution of human technology and of settlement pattern in the Americas. The new Amazonian Pottery Archaic cultures seem quite parallel to early pottery-making cultures along coasts, lakes, or rivers in the southeastern US, north central Africa, Southeast Asia, south coastal China, and Japan. Following the hypotheses of geographers and botanists, it seems likely that the relatively sedentary settlements of the intensive fisherpeople caused landscape changes encouraging weedy types of species that were the forebears of domesticated plants. But since the plant remains of only a few sites have been studied systematically, tracing the origins of Amazonian staple crops archaeologically is an important task for future work. In addition, osteological and chemical analyses

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Figure 7 Taperinha shellmound, near Santarem, Brazil. By Anna Roosevelt.

need to be carried out on skeletons from Mina and Alaka phase sites, for comparison with those from Taperinha and Monte Alegre. One or two microfossil specimens in Ecuadorian Oriente lake pollen cores have been claimed to represent staple maize cultivation at 6000 BP, but the core levels with the maize were not directly dated. Future research that directly dates a whole suite of botanicals from such sequences can help clarify this important economic transition. The total lack of maize-type isotopic chemistry in Amazonian human skeletons until after the time of Christ, however, seems clear evidence that maize, if present as early as 6000, could not have been a staple food. In experimental tests, when humans or animals have eaten appreciable quantities of maize, their bone chemistry always shows the isotopic effect of the maize. People whose bones show no such effect cannot, therefore, have been staple maize eaters.

Figure 8 Formative period pottery effigy pipes and stamp, decorated with Zoned Incised Hachure, from Sambaqui Ponta do Jauari, near Alenquer, Brazil, Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belem.

Formative Horticultural Cultures, c. 4000–2000 BP

Formative pottery cultures, which have been found throughout Amazonia, are thought to have subsisted by horticulture, supplemented by foraging, especially on fish, turtles, other small game, and tree fruits. The particular role of different crops is not yet welldocumented and seems to have varied from site to site and region to region. Numerous maize pollen exines and phytoliths have been identified in Upper Amazon pollen core levels from about c. 3000 years old, but maize carbon patterns have not been detected in any Formative human skeletons yet analyzed in the Amazon. For example, two Aroxi-culture Formative skeletons dated between c. 3600 and 3200 BP (on a palm fruit, a human molar, and a human cranium) from Cavern of the Painted Rock at Monte Alegre lacked any maize signal, as did three skeletons from the Olaya site in the Ucayali, Peru, dating to about 2000 years ago. All these individuals had carbon signals typical of people who eat plants of a large

group that includes manioc, an important staple in the Amazon today. Other crops of similar carbon signature may also have been cultivated in the Formative: the minor ‘root’ crops, such as sweet potato and Xanthosoma, local seed crops, and shrub, palm, and tree fruits. In Formative sites of this apparent transition to reliance on cultivated plants for calories, shellfish are no longer common among excavated food remains, presumably because cultivated plants are a more productive and storable carbohydrate source. Also, palm fruits, so common in Palaeoindian sites, were rarer in Formative sites. Like pottery Archaic skeletons, the Formative skeletons from Monte Alegre have excellent teeth that have no caries or hypoplasias. However, Formative sites have been mapped and excavated in few regions. Only a handful have been screened and floated for food remains, and only a couple have had skeletal studies. Most seem of moderate size, but site like Faldas de Sangay in the Upper

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Amazon of Ecuador and the Castanheira site of the Ananatuba culture on Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon have artificial earth mounds, sometimes in structured groupings. In fact, many late prehistoric Polychrome horizon Marajoara mounds have Formative pottery in their basal layers, as does the late prehistoric Santarem site of the Incised and Punctate horizon. Some Marajo Island Formative sites, such as Castanheira, also have large adobe semitubular stoves common later on in Marajoara mounds. Such substantial built facilities are considered evidence for relative site permanence and complexity at this time. Researchers at Sangay have documented the existence of large, organized mound centers with both residential and ritual constructions and a rich material culture.

While the dating at Sangay is still preliminary, there seems a possiblity of a Formative age for some of the mounds. Many local pottery styles of the Amazonian Formative are linked to regional pottery traditions/horizons related to the Saladoid and Barrancoid horizons of northern South American and the Caribbean. Among these Amazonian Formative pottery styles, two supraregional groupings have been defined: the Zoned Incised Hachure horizon (see Figures 8 and 9) and the Incised Rim Horizon. Formative pottery, regardless of horizon, tends to be rather complex in form and elaborately decorated, especially by incision and modeling on rims and shoulders. Among the forms are griddles, keeled and flanged bowls and jars,

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Figure 10 A Marajoara Polychrome horizon burial urn, Guajara, Brazil. By Sal Catalano.

adorno-rim bowls with geometric and zoomorphic iconography, carved pottery paint stamps, tobacco effigy pipes, and other ritual objects possibly associated with rituals of shamanism. Although there is continuity from Palaeoindian cultures to indigenous cultures today, the Formative is the most important cultural influence for the late prehistoric complex cultures. Of all the archaeological stages in the Amazon, too, the Formative seems the one most similar to modern ethnographic cultures there. Some Formative settlements were more complex architecturally than modern ones, a difference could be elucidated when archaeologists excavate sites of the ethnohistoric period of ethnogenesis. Polychrome Mound-building Cultures, c. 2000–1000 BP

The Polychrome horizon links a series of diverse, long-lived cultures with elaborate and often largescale decorated pottery with geometric, zoomorphic, and human imagery (see Figure 10). All share a characteristic style of bold, complex polychrome painting, often combined with modeling, incision, and excision. Despite lacking evidence of statelike or imperial political organization, many Polychrome cultures had large spheres of interaction, extensive residential mound complexes, shamanic female figures, diverse ritual objects, drug-paraphernalia, feasting facilities, and numerous, large urn-burial grounds. The secondary urn burial cults could represent ancestor worship, and some authors think that the female images and some rich female burials may reflect matrilineal descent myths and female ritual and political roles. Although the horizon was assumed to represent an invasion from the Andes, radiocarbon dates are earlier in the eastern basin, not in the western, Andean

Amazon headwaters. It seems to begin about the time of Christ in the east, the late first millennium AD in the Middle Amazon, and not until the early second millennium AD in the west. Some Polychrome cultures in the Upper Amazon, Northwest Amazon, and Guianas survived the European invasion. Records of the conquest period mention not only polychrome pottery but also elaborate polychrome robes, and indigenous people in many parts of the basin today still make and use pottery, clothing, and ornaments in related styles. In some regions Polychrome horizon prehistoric sites are numerous and very large, indicating relative population density (see Figure 11). Most details about the lifeways come from the mouth of the Amazon. Subsistence economies based on agroforestry, plant collecting, fishing, and horticulture appear highly intensive. Bones of very small fish and nourishing seeds of common trees, shrubs, and herbs dominate residential facilities and garbage dumps, but valuable cultivated tree fruits, such as the palm, acai Euterpe oleraceae), and the bones of huge fishes (more than 1–2 m long) are common in feasting facilities. Only a few seeds of maize have been identified, and they come from a hard-kerneled, pod-pop race. Large skeletal collections in museums show a rather healthy, muscular population relying on a varied diet. In contrast to earlier periods, some skeletons’ bone chemistry is shifted toward maize and away from C-3 tropical forest plant groups. This change may reflect an increased deforestation and possible low-level maize consumption. The bone chemistry varies from person to person, possible evidence of socioeconomic differentiation. The plants and isotopes nonetheless indicate much better-preserved forest cover than in the current cattle pastures. People’s jaws show evidence of gum inflammation but not pyorrhea. Most crania have all their teeth, and, though teeth are worn, very few bear enamel hypoplasias from famine and childhood sickness. Skeletal infectious lesions also are mostly lacking. Many people are as tall as modern North Americans, and the only notable bone pathology is occasional cribra orbitalia, considered to indicate moderate intestinal parasite infections. Crania are narrow with projecting occiputs, a long-term Amazonian pattern unlike Andean morphologies. A few people’s crania have been purposely shaped in the Bishop’s Miter pattern, a possible symbol of rank. Incised and Punctate Horizon, c. AD 1000–1600

By about 1000 AD the influential incised and punctate cultural horizon known for its elaborate modeled representational pottery and fine-line polychrome painting had spread widely in Amazonia and beyond. In its greatest extent, the horizon reached from the

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Isthmus and Caribbean to the Guianas and Andes foothills, and throughout the Amazon basin. In Amazonia, styles of the horizon are found as far as the southern Amazon tributaries in Brazil, the southwestern Amazon tributaries in Bolivia, and eastern Ecuador. The earliest dates for the horizon, c. AD 500, are from the Middle Orinoco, but most regional styles have not been dated in detail. In some areas, such as the frontier zone between Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, forms of the earlier Polychrome horizon continue, and in others people seem to have developed independent local sytles, like Maraca culture, famous for cave urn cemeteries, and the Arua culture on eastern Marajo. In other areas, such as the Lower Tapajos, no sites of the period have been dated, suggesting abandonment after

the Formative. Along the Guianas coasts and Upper Amazon in Peru, cultures combine features of several horizons. Although archaeologists tend to assume that different cultural horizons coincided with different language families, early ethnohistory does not show that coincidence. Within particular horizons, different unrelated languages were spoken, and distinct horizons could speak languages of the same family. The best-known Amazonian style of this horizon is named after Santarem city in the Lower Amazon. This local culture began about AD 1200 and ended at about 1500, just before the European conquest, contrary to common assumption that it was a conquest-period phenomenon (these dates are treering-calibrated). As in other styles of the horizon, large and small female figures (see Figure 12) and

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Figure 12 Incised and Punctate Horizon pottery effigy Jar, Santarem, Brazil. Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belem, Brazil.

adorno bowls, jars, and bottles comparable to earlier local cultures continued to be popular in pottery wares, but new images of raptors, predatory animals, and large terracotta images of males were present, accoutred with feather crowns, rattles, and shoulder bags. Both male and female figures are shown with alter ego animals on their shoulders, an apparent reference to shamanic spirit possession. Burials are rare at sites, perhaps because most were bowl cremations. Elaborate carved stone weapons, tools, figures, and fine lapidary works were produced in quantity. New ground-stone weapons, such as arrow-points, axes, and semicircular, may represent an increase in organized armed conflict, like that described by European chroniclers passing through the area in 1540–1541. Contact sources also suggest that greenstone ornamental carvings functioned as women’s ornaments and were widely traded. In many parts of Amazonia, late prehistoric people built major constructions, regardless of their cultural affiliation. At Santarem, people laid out roads, erected house mounds (see Figure 13), and dug wells. Early contact travelers describe large turtle corrals, too. In the lowlands of Bolivia and the Guianas, large mounds and causeways were built, and tens of thousands of hectares of floodplain were raised and ridged for cultivation, apparently. Such developments indicate the need to expand food production. In Ecuador large centers with numerous ritual, figurative, and residential mounds and elaborate pottery of the horizon date to this period. On Marajo, earlier mounds continued to be occupied and added to, and new, independent styles develop. In the Upper Xingu and central Brazil, people built very large round villages, some of which had defensive moats and raised connecting roads. In the

largest, there were multiple concentric rings of houses. In many such areas, full cultural sequences are not yet worked out, so regional cultural affiliation and sequence of subsistence and political organization remain obscure. In the better-known regions, human pressures on ecosystems seem to increase in late prehistory. Site sizes, site clustering, Indian black-soil deposition, and facility-construction rates increase in many areas. Skeletal evidence from the Ucayali Valley in Peru and pollen evidence from eastern Ecuador suggest a narrowing of daily subsistence to maize and small fish. Without detailed studies of human skeletons of the period, though, it is not known whether dental health and stature changed because of these pressures. At Santarem, small fish were common daily fare, but, skeletal isotopes, the role of staple plant foods at Santarem remains uncertain. By the time of the conquest there, tithes of maize beer had become a necessity for communal feasts there, according to early chronicles. In the prehistoric site, turtles, large fish, and valuable cultivated fruits were reserved for feasting or elite activites. Prehistoric vegetation isotopes near major sites in many parts of the Amazon: Marajo, Santarem, Manaus, and Pucallpa in the Ucayali, indicate appreciable thinning of forest during the period, presumably for fuel, building material, and agricultural clearing around the large population centers. Ethnohistoric Transition and Ethnogenesis, c. AD 1540–Present

The period following the European invasion saw rapid change in the nature of archaeological materials and sites as indigenous cultures and populations were eliminated or transformed by contact in the Brazilian mainstream and part of Atlantic coasts. Groups in the interfluvial and Andean foothill areas changed more slowly than mainstream ones. In early ethnohistoric times, many mainstream groups were brought into missions, where they were subect to acculturation, miscegenation, poor health, corporal punishment, and forced labor. Explicit policies aimed at eliminating indigenous males and mating the females with white male settlers were enforced, and indigenous languages eliminated. By the mid-nineteenth century, many mainstream populations in the Brazilian Amazon had become Portuguese-speaking peasants and smallholders, of whom DNA studies reveal a predominance of female indigenous and male Europen genetic patterns. In some areas, such as eastern Marajo, religious orders and settlers took the land for ranches, and local people became tenants and unpaid laborers. Military leaders of the conquest gained baronies over large properties, such as the municipality of Santarem. The interfluves and foothills became refuge areas where indigenous societies dispersed and survived.

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Ethnographic accounts of their lifeways depict smaller sites, more nomadic populations, less intensive food production, and more ephemeral material culture than was seen in the late prehistoric archaeological cultures. For example, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, small, ephemeral house compounds of Jivaroan or Quechua speakers are thinly dispersed over large nucleated archaeological mound complexes rich in pottery and stone artifacts. In the southern Amazon, ethnographic round villages have been reduced to single rings of houses or incomplete rings, and some no longer farm, make pottery, or make stone artifacts, and none build mounds. Thus, ethnographic life patterns once explained as adaptations to the environmental limitations of tropical forest seem more likely to be adaptations to life in postcolonial nations.

Despite the systematic changes in indigenous lifeways after the conquest, there is much continuity between ethnographic and prehistoric societies. Manioc and maize are still important plants, larger game and tree fruits still figure in feast food, and fish are often the main daily protein source. Personal and object ornamentation, although less elaborate today, includes elements clearly depicted in ancient designs. The complex, nonlinear history of human ecological adaptation in Amazonia has some unexpected implications for the future of conservation biology in Amazonia. In most areas, indigenous people live much more lightly on the land than their ancestors did. There is thus little ecological justification for removing them to ‘protect’ reserve land, and once vacated, park land is difficult to protect from settlers

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and extractive businesses. Rather, reserves need to help indigenous people stay on, both for the sake of their survival and for the continuation of their cultural knowledge, an indispensible source of expertise on the habitat for the future. See also: Americas, South: Early Cultures of the Central Andes; Early Villages; Historical Archaeology; Northern South America; Southern Cone.

Early Cultures of the Central Andes Danie`le Lavalle´e, CNRS – UMR 8096 ‘‘Arche´ologie des Ame´riques,’’ Nanterre Cedex, France ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Further Reading Bevan B and Roosevelt AC (2003) Geoarchaeological exploration of Guajara, a prehistoric Earth mound in Brazil. Geoarchaeology 18(3): 287–331. Erickson C (1980) Sistemas agricolas prehispanicos en los llanos de mojos. America Indigena 40(4): 731–755. Hartt CF (1885) Contribuicao para a Ethnologia do Valle do Amazonas. Archivos do Museu Nacional 6: 1–174. Heckenberger M and Neves E (1999) Village size and permanence in Amazonia: Two archaeological examples from Brazil. Latin American Antiquity 10(4): 535–576. Imazio da Silveira, M (1994) Estudo Sobre Estrategias de Subsistencia de Cacadores-Coletores Pre-historicos do Sitio Gruta do Gaviao, Carajas, (Para). Masters Thesis, Arqueologia, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lathrap D (1970) The Upper Amazon. New York: Praeger Publishers. McEwan C, Barreto C and Neves E (eds.) (2001) Exploring the Amazon, explaining the unknown: Views from the past. In: The Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil, pp. 232–251. London: The British Museum Press. Magalhaes M (1994) Archaeology of Carajs: The Pre-historic Presence of Man in Amazonia. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Valle do Rio Doce. Meggers BJ (1971) Amazonia: Man and Nature in a Counterfeit Paradise. Chicago: Aldine Publishers. Meggers BJ and Clifford E (1957) Bureau of American Archaeology 167: Archaeological Investigations at the Mouth of the Amazon. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Nimuendaju C (2004) In Pursuit of a Past Amazon: Archaeological Researches in the Brazilian Guyana and in the Amazon Region (a posthumous work compiled and translated by Stig Ryden and Per Stenborg and edited by Per Stenborg) Ethnological Studies 45. Goteborg Ethnographic Museum. Roosevelt AC (1992) Early Pottery in the Amazon: Twenty Years of Scholarly Obscurity. In: Barnett WK and Hoopes J (eds.) The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies, pp. 115–131. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Roosevelt AC (1999) The development of prehistoric complex societies in Amazonia, a tropical forest. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 9: 13–33. Roosevelt AC, Douglas E, and Brown L (2002) Migrations and Adaptations of the First Americans: Clovis and Pre-Clovis Viewed from South America. In: Jablonski N (ed.) Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences No. 27: The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, pp. 159–236. Berkeley: University of California Press and the California Academy of Sciences. Schaan, DP (2004) The Camutins Chiefdon: Rise and Development of Social Complexity on Marajo Island, Brazilian Amazon. Ph.D. Dissertation, Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, PA.

Andes A mountain system of western South America extending more than 8045 km (5000 miles) along the Pacific coast from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego. Ayacucho Basin A valley in southern Peru, north of the city of Ayacucho, with a series of caves – notably Pikimachay (Flea) Cave and Jayamachay (Pepper) Cave – which were the site of a complex of unifacial chipped tools (basalt and chert core tools, choppers, unifacial projectile points) and bone artifacts (horse, camel, giant sloth) dating between 15 000 BC and 11 000 BC. A human presence has been suggested in the Ayacucho Basin at that time, which would correspond with the ‘first wave’ of immigrants to the New World. bioindications Indications by organisms used for biological monitoring. geomorphology A branch of geology concerned with the form and development of the landscapes. highlands A mountainous or hilly section of a country. sedentism The process of settling down, that is, one of becoming more sedentary.

Introduction Under the term Central Andes, we include the ensemble of territories extending from southern Ecuador to northern Chile, including Bolivia and northwest Argentina, between approximately the second and twentieth southern latitude degrees. This ensemble is structured by the Andes Cordillera, the second largest mountain range in the world after the Himalayas, whose highest summits attain between 6000 and 7000 m. On each side of this formidable barrier extend two completely opposed worlds: to the west a semidesert piedmont and narrow coastal band that is gradually being transformed into desert by an increasingly dry climate from north to south, and to the east a warm and humid piedmont that is covered by tropical forest. Despite different but equally strong environmental constraints – from west to east, the desert, high altitudes, and warm and humid forest – this mosaic of territories has never been an obstacle to human occupations or movements. According to present knowledge, the earliest peopling of this region probably began around 15 000 years ago.

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Current and Past Environments A desert climate, which is surprising at these latitudes, occupies the whole Pacific border of the central Andes zone. This situation originates from a very particular climatic phenomenon: under the influence of trade winds that continually blow from the southeast, superficial ocean masses (warm) are pushed from the south to the north, but due to the Coriolis force, are deviated to the west at the level of the Peru–Ecuador border. This drifting of waters to the open sea is known as the Humboldt Current. Along the coast, this movement is compensated by the rising of deep waters with temperatures 5 to 8 lower than those usually measured on the surface at these latitudes. Upon contact with these cold waters, the air coming from the ocean cools down and its humidity is condensed. A sea of clouds is formed, covering the coastline with a very dense fog during much of the year. Rainfall is nonetheless very rare, occurring only episodically when the warm equatorial current, called El Nin˜o because its effects are generally felt around Christmas, approaches the continent and brings warm water to the coast. Torrential showers can then result. More generally, the absence of rainfall explains the aridity of the ground, though the humidity of the air allows the growth of numerous epiphytes on the sand, and in some sectors, the formation of ‘fog oases’, or lomas, which live on ‘thin air’. To the south, on the borders of Peru and Chile, this aridity increases and attains higher altitudes. Extending from the coast until nearly 3000 m, the Atacama Desert is the most arid in the world. Following the coastal desert plain and the dry mountainous foothills of the western piedmont of the Cordillera, the highlands correspond to the ensemble of territories located above 3000 m and constitute a geoclimatic unit in which the altitude plays an essential role. Between the more or less parallel, N–S oriented chains, vast, high plateaus extend at altitudes between 3800 and 4800 m, reaching their maximum amplitude in Peru and Bolivia. Called pa´ramo in Colombia and Ecuador, and altiplano or puna in Peru to the south, this undulating high steppe, cut by deep valleys and bordered by bald mountain peaks and ice-covered summits, constitutes the archetypal Andean landscape. The vegetation is sparse and not very variable: clusters of graminae grouped under the generic name Ichu, low, thorny bushes, and in the sheltered depressions a few thin coppices of quinuales (Polylepis). Below the puna level, a shrubby steppe carpets the slopes and basins located between 2300 and 3800 m altitude. In Peru, this is the ‘quechua’ level, which is well watered, wooded, and green. It

is the most habitable, and perhaps earliest occupied level of the Andean region. Finally, the climate of the eastern Andes piedmont, with its uneven relief, is permanently hot and humid. Between 1800 and 3000 m, this ‘cloud forest’ (selva nublada) level is carpeted with an almost impenetrable maze of bamboos, ferns, and vines, dominated by a few large trees. Rainfall occurs almost daily and is often violent. Due to their extension, multiple levels and variable relief, expositions and rainfall amounts, the central Andes present a great diversity of landscapes and climates, resulting in a mosaic of ecological contexts that are both very different and close to each other. But was this true in the past, when humans first began to occupy the region?

Climatic Changes during the Final Pleistocene The landscapes described above have changed relatively little since the beginning of the Holocene, that is, since 10 000 years ago. Paleoclimatic studies have nonetheless revealed a somewhat warmer and more humid period between approximately 8000 and 3000 BP, related to what is known as the Climatic Optimum. In contrast, major environmental modifications occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, between 14 000 and 10 000 BP. We will explore those that had a direct influence on the modes of human occupation. In the high Andes, before 14 000 BP, and even during the last great glacial advance of the Quaternary between 21 000 and 14 000 BP, the ice fields never formed an uninterrupted barrier. From Ecuador to northern Peru, where the altitude is largely compensated by the latitude, the ice-covered sectors remained separated from each other by basins or plateaus with more temperate climates. Only the central Andes of Peru, above 4000 m, were covered with ice. The Andes of Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwest Argentina remained free of ice except for a few isolated massifs above 4500 m. During this time, the high plateaus and intra-mountainous basins had open landscapes, which were usually treeless and, depending on the latitude and altitude, covered with prairies, savannas, deserts, or tundras. The eastern piedmont of the Cordillera was also covered with savannas, punctuated by a few wooded enclaves. Beginning in 14 000 BP, the glaciers began to retreat. After the last short cold phase of the Late Glacial period, around 11 000/10 000 BP, the general climatic warming gradually leads to our current climatic conditions. Accompanied by the re-establishment

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of a seasonal rhythm of precipitations, this warming led to a general increase in vegetal cover at high altitudes. In the northern Andes, pa´ramos developed, while the eastern piedmont was progressively invaded by tropical forest. In the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, the deglaciation cleared vast extensions of high plateaus where a climate less humid than that of the north favored the extension of vast carpets of puna and altiplano graminae. Further south, this rapid warming resulted in the extension of high altitude deserts, the Dry Puna and Salt Puna of Atacama and southern Bolivia. Along the Pacific coast, the sea level during the last glacial maximum was around 100 m lower than it is today and the coastal plain was probably 2 times wider. Beginning in 12 000 BP, the sea level began to rise and coastal zones were gradually submerged. We must remember, however, that while the melting of Andean glaciers was rapid (a few centuries or even a few dozen years), that of the inlandsis glaciers extended over several thousands of years. For this reason, while the Andean glaciers attained their current limit everywhere around 10 000 BP, the level of the Pacific was still 50 m lower than its current level. This slow rise in sea level continued over thousands of years until around 6000 BP when it exceeded the present level by 2–4 m. This ‘transgression’, though compensated in part by the slow elevation of continental masses liberated from the weight of glaciers (isostasy), resulted in the submersion of all human occupations older than 6000 BP along the low coasts. Though the climatic fluctuations that occurred from 14 000 to 10 000 BP led to only moderate landscape modifications, we can easily imagine that human occupations were largely dependent on them. At the time when the maximum extension of the glaciers stretched over vast cold and humid surfaces, the valleys and intra-mountainous basins of the lower altitudes remained sheltered and relatively dry. They thus constituted favorable zones for occupation by small hunter–gatherer groups, while the higher zones remained uninhabitable. During the phases of glacial regression, on the other hand, the increase in herbaceous vegetal cover at high altitudes contributed to the multiplication of faunal species, notably herbivores, cervidae, and camelidae. The vast open spaces of the high plateaus thus presented advantageous conditions for mobile hunter groups.

First Researches, First Milestones Our knowledge of Andean prehistory is still imperfect, and research specifically aimed at identifying the oldest traces of human occupation began only around 60 years ago. In 1946, the work of Junius Bird at

Huaca Prieta on the northern coast of Peru revealed the existence of a ‘preceramic’ period during which, around 2500 BC (Huaca Prieta was shortly after one of the first Andean sites dated by the C14 method, invented by Willard Libby in 1949), early horticulture was already practiced. The same year, Harry Tschopik excavated test pits in rock shelters in the central Andes of Peru, at 3340 m altitude. This work revealed knapped stone industries, and those found in the deepest levels were not found in association with ceramic remains. In 1961, Robert Bell excavated the site of El Inga in the highlands of Ecuador at 2550 m altitude. Finally, in 1958, Augusto Cardich published the results of his first excavations at Lauricocha in Peru (4100 m) and announced to a stupefied scientific community the oldest absolute date then known in the Andes: 9525  250 BP. This discovery clearly marks the beginning of prehistoric research in the Andean highlands.

The First Occupations (Before 10 000 BP) Given the environmental conditions described above, it is not surprising that the oldest traces of human presence, prior to the definitive retreat of the glaciers, were detected in moderate altitude regions that were never directly affected by glaciations. These were either regions where the glaciers were small, such as on the Colombia plateaus, or valleys and intra-mountainous basins not attained by the extremities of the glaciers, all located at an altitude below 3000 m. The first traces date to around 15 000 BP: Pikimachay Cave (2850 m), in the Ayacucho basin of Peru, yielded an occupation sequence that appears to begin around 14 000 BP with the Ayacucho phase (14 150  180 BP). We must note, however, that Richard MacNeish wanted to push the occupation nearly 10 000 years back. According to him, during a first Paccaicasa phase (25 000–15 000 BP), crude stone tools (choppers and large flakes) associated with Quaternary fossil fauna (toothless Scelidotherium and Megatherium, horse Equus Amerhippus, fossil cervidae and a large carnivore) indicate the passage of small bands of hunters that would have tracked down this large prey in their den before butchering and consuming them. However, this phase remains very hypothetical for several reasons. First, the C14 dates were obtained, not from charcoal (the level contained no evidence for the use of fire), but from the bone of a Scelidotherium, a large toothless animal that inhabited the cave at the time, as is proved by the presence of its excrements. This evidence shows that the carcasses could have been present there without necessarily being brought in by humans, and perhaps even long before the passage of humans. Second, the ‘tools’ attributed to this phase (with the exception

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of four objects that could have fallen from the upper levels) consist of more or less amorphous, chipped fragments of volcanic tuff, which is the same material in which the cave is hollowed out and which is not apt for stone knapping. According to numerous specialists, these unlikely tools are probably no more than simple flakes detached from the cave wall. During the following Ayacucho phase (14 150  180 BP), on the other hand, a more abundant and clearly identifiable lithic industry – more than 200 tools, including choppers, crude bifacial pieces, and large flakes, sometimes retouched (but no projectile points) – made on exogenous (thus imported) materials indicates that the site was occupied by hunters whose prey still included not only a few Pleistocene species (megatheridae, horse and the fossil camelidae, Palaeolama), but also, already, smaller, modern species (camelidae and rodents). Meanwhile, in this phase, as in the precedent, no traces of fire were discovered. One other site that must be noted is Guitarrero Cave, also in the Peruvian Andes, at 2580 m, in the Callejon de Huaylas. At this site, Thomas Lynch established one of the longest sequences in Peruvian prehistory. However, the oldest date obtained for the lower occupation level – complex I, 12 560  360 BP – is still strongly debated since the two other dates obtained for the same complex do not exceed 9500 BP. Moreover, this deep level yielded only modern fauna, to the exclusion of all Pleistocene megafauna species. For these reasons, we do not retain this site among those occupied 10 000 years ago. At Pikimachay Cave, on the other hand, Pleistocene megafauna, which begins to disappear at 11 000 BP and whose extinction is complete in the Andes at 9000 BP, is well represented. At present, this site is thus the only one that could attest to a peopling of the Andean mountains during the Final Pleistocene, as well as the utilization of a tool industry lacking projectile points. However, both of these propositions are strongly contested by many specialists of prehistory in the Americas. This extreme rarity of ancient sites in the central Andes (as in the northern Andes of Colombia and Ecuador), despite a recent multiplication of research projects, thus tends to indicate that the Cordillera was peopled relatively late and that the population density remained low for a long time. This is also true on the Pacific coastal plain where, as we will see later, the first traces of occupation also do not exceed 10 000 years. It is still surprising that if humans were indeed present in Brazil more than 20 000 years ago, they did not reach the Andean regions until 10 000 years later. Specialists have not yet found a satisfactory explanation for this, except perhaps – and this remains hypothetical – that movements along the low zones of the Atlantic coastal

plain, after an obligatory passage by the Panama isthmus, would have presented fewer natural obstacles than a passage along the Andean Cordillera or by a maritime route along the coast. Another possibility is that over thousands of years, the sporadic passage of probably very small human groups left only scarce traces in the Andes, which are today barely perceptible. The lifeways of this period remain difficult to characterize. Current evidence indicates the presence of small, very mobile groups with relatively crude tools reflecting the use of simple techniques. The use of projectile points, and thus of projected arms, seems to have been unknown (or perhaps forgotten?), unless only clubs or wooden spears with fire hardened points, or bone points, were used. It is also probable, though we have no preserved evidence, that humans knew very early on how to successfully exploit a natural environment rich in diverse resources. Depending on the season, they could have complemented hunted resources with trapped ones, as well as with the collection of edible berries, seeds, and tubers where they could be found. Finally, no human skeleton or skeletal part older than 11 000–10 000 BP has been discovered in the Andean zone (as is also true in the rest of Latin America), and the physical appearance of these first occupants thus remains unknown.

Early Archaic: The Time of Specialized Hunters (10 000–8000 BP) The rapid climatic warming, accentuated from 10 000 BP on, marks the beginning of a new phase of Andean prehistory, which is much richer in evidence and presents clearer milestones than the preceding one. It is possible that the sudden proliferation of sites discovered indeed reflects a true increase in population density. Occupation of the Highlands

The pa´ramos of Ecuador Only a few ancient occupations have been discovered in the Ecuadorian Andes. Only three sites at middle altitudes were occupied between approximately 10 000 and 8000 BP: Cubila´n (between 10 300  170 and 9100  120 BP), Chobshi (between 10 010  430 (?) and 8430  200 BP) and El Inga (around 9000 BP?). At Cubila´n (3100 m), Mathilde Temme revealed the remains of an open-air camp and a knapping workshop, both containing high-quality lithic tools made on jasper (flake tools and stemmed or foliate bifacial points), but lacking fauna. Chobshi Cave (2400 m), which was probably occupied a little later, was excavated

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by Thomas Lynch. It yielded a similar lithic assemblage in association with cervidae (Odocoileus virginianus) and rodent remains. The site of El Inga, a vast obsidian knapping workshop, is more problematic. Its stratigraphy is unclear and, worse, it was excavated in the early 1960s by artificial levels. More than 80 000 knapped lithic objects were collected there, including beautiful bifacial points whose so-called Fishtail form incited its discoverer, Robert Bell, to attribute an age of 9000 years or more to the site, despite C14 dates all later than 8000 BP. This ancient date is now highly contested. The basins and punas of Peru The most significant increase in population density seems to have occurred in the Peruvian Andes at the beginning of the postglacial period. On the high plateaus newly liberated from their ice, the extension of the great grassland steppes favored the growth of ungulate populations. In this context, starting at approximately 9000 BP, the caves and rock shelters located between 4000 and 4500 m on the puna of Junı´n in central Peru – Lauricocha (4100 m), Pachamachay (4250 m), Telarmachay (4420 m), Panaulauca and Uchumachay (4050 m) – began to be intensively utilized by hunters of cervidae (O. virginianus and Hippocamelus antisensis) and camelidae (Lama vicugna and Lama guanicoe). These groups gradually became specialized hunters of the latter (vicun˜as and guanacos), as is demonstrated by the studies of Jane Wheeler at Telarmachay. At the same time, between 10 000 and 8000 BP, human occupation also increased in the moderate altitude (2500–3000 m) basins and valleys, though in this context environmental modifications played a less significant role than on the high plateau. As already discussed, the only site probably occupied since the preceding period (Pikimachay Cave, Ayacucho phase) is located in the Ayacucho basin of southern Peru. During the phases Puente (11 000–9000 BP) and Jaywa (9000–7800 BP), the same location seems to have been more intensively populated and occupations in caves and rock shelters continued and multiplied (Pikimachay, Puente, and Jaywamachay). According to MacNeish, these occupations were seasonal and corresponded to, within the different ‘microenvironments’ defined, the presence of ‘microbands’ associated with a season and subsistence strategy favoring, depending on the case and the time, hunting, trapping, or vegetal resource collection. In the large valley of Santa, or Callejon de Huaylas, in northern Peru, Guitarrero Cave (cited above) was more certainly occupied by camelidae and cervidae hunters at around 9000 BP (Complexes II and IV) than during the preceding period, though an older date of 12 560  360 BP has been advanced by

Lynch. Its occupants used a classic tool kit for the period, including foliate and lozenge-shaped points, end scrapers and side scrapers on flakes, and bone tools. The originality of Guitarrero is that the remains of cultivated chili peppers (Capsicum chinense) have been identified as early as 9000/8000 BP (Complex IId, 8800–8200 BP), along with two species of beans (Phasaeolus lunatus then, a little later, Phasaeolus vulgaris), making these the oldest known cultivated species in the Andean zone. However, as we will see later, these dates have recently been questioned. Guitarrero is also one of the rare Andean sites where it was possible to collect certain elements that are usually absent in the highland sites: fragments of cords and ties made from diverse vegetal materials, a scraper still enveloped in a skin and several intensively used fire drills. Another site, this one in the open-air, signaled by the same author in the same region at Quishqui Puncu, yielded more uncertain remains of an occupation between 10 500 and 8500 BP. These dates must be considered with caution, however, due to the disturbed nature of the deposits, in which fragments of wood and glass were found. Dry Punas and Salt Punas in the central-south Andes At the other extremity of the central Andean zone, the cold and arid highlands of the Andes in the extreme south of Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile were little affected by the final glacial maximum, though climatic conditions dryer than those in the north led to the formation of high altitude deserts. In this context, no trace of human occupation dating to the end of the Pleistocene has yet been found. Human occupation seems to have begun little before 10 000 BP, and was apparently associated with two distinct adaptive strategies in rather different environments: from the north to the south in the Dry Puna of the Peruvian–Chilean borders, and in the Salt Puna of Atacama in Chile, scattered with large salares. The natural refuges of the latter, more southern zone – Tuina 1 (10 820  630 BP), Pichasca (9890 BP), San Lorenzo (10 400  130 BP), and Chulqui (9590 BP) in Chile – seem to have been occupied a little earlier than the former – Toquepala (9580  160 BP) and Caru´ (8190  130 BP) in southern Peru, Las Cuevas (9540 BP), Tojo-Tojones (c. 9500 BP), and Patapatane (8160 BP) in Chile. In both cases the occupation is attributed to vicun˜a (Lama vicugna), guanaco (L. guanicoe), and especially rodent (Lagidum viscacia) hunters who completed their meat diet with the intensive collection of wild plants. Also in both cases, the human groups seem to have practiced some sort of seasonal ‘transhumance’ between the different ecological niches of the western slope of

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the Cordillera. The two cases are differentiated by their choice of camp locations, a little lower in the Dry Puna (2500/3000 m) than in the Salt Puna (3000/4000 m), and by the types of bifacial points used, most small and triangular. In both cases, these points are associated with a highly comparable flake tool kit that is classic for the period (scrapers, knives, denticulates, etc.) and numerous bone tools. Not far away, on the high plateaus of northwest Argentina, the first known human occupations are similar and contemporary. At the natural refuges of Inca Cueva and Huachichocana, located between 3500 and 3800 m and occupied from 9600/9000 BP, the cultural inventory is nonetheless richer. In the deepest level (9230  70 BP) of shelter no. 4 of the Quebrada Inca Cueva, Carlos Aschero found, in association with a lithic industry similar to that of Tuina in Chile, numerous rodent bones and, especially, the remains of diverse constructions, such as postholes, hearths, and pits filled with vegetal remains. In Huachichocana Cave, where occupation began at 9620  130 BP, Alicia Fernandez-Distel also notes, in association with a banal lithic industry for the period (foliate and triangular bifacial points, flake tools), numerous remains of wood and basketry objects, along with vegetal remains. Among the latter are beans and chili peppers (Capsicum sp.), which botanists believe were cultivated at the beginning of the occupation (level E3). These would thus be among the oldest domesticated vegetal species in the Andean zone, along with those found at Guitarrero Cave in Peru at around the same time. Finally, the site of Asana, located in southern Peru at 3430 m, excavated by Mark Aldenderfer, is exceptional for several reasons. First, because it is an open-air camp, while all the other sites we have described, with the exception of Cubila´n and El Inga in Ecuador, and perhaps Quishqui Puncu in Peru, are located in natural refuges (caves or rock shelters). Second, because its occupation sequence covers nearly six thousand years (9820  150 to 4000 BP) and is thus currently the most complete known for this southern mountainous part of Peru. Finally, because excavations over large surfaces revealed the remains of habitation structures (circular structures enclosing hearths) and differentiated activity zones. Activities and lifeways during the Early Archaic The human occupations during this period are thus much more numerous than in the preceding one (and we have only cited the most representative and welldocumented ones) and certain common traits that characterize the Central Andean Hunting Tradition can be distinguished:

1. Almost all the sites yielded evidence for an intensive exploitation of animal resources of a variable nature depending on the region: cervidae and numerous rodents in the north; cervidae, and especially camelidae in the central Andes; cervidae and rodents again in the south. The majority of the activities identified in the habitats is related to the treatment and utilization of animal materials (butchery, culinary activities, skin working, fabrication of hunting instruments and appropriate tools). Stone scrapers are among the most frequent tools, along with bone spatulas and scrapers, often with traces of red ochre, used to scrape and soften skins. 2. Almost all the sites, but especially those located in the basins and middle altitude valleys, also show evidence for the exploitation of various vegetal species for technical and alimentary purposes. This is shown by the frequent presence of grinding instruments in the rock shelter sites, as well as rare, but well-attested remains of vegetal material productions, such as cords, weaving and basketry, at Guitarrero (Peru), Inca Cueva 4, and Huachichocana (Argentina). 3. Most of the habitat structures (when they could be observed) show evidence for long, repeated occupations: low stone walls or aligned posts, diverse types of hearths and pits were all constructed and reshaped many times. 4. The data collected suggest a seasonal exploitation of the territory, whether through the large herbivore hunting, small animal trapping, or the collection of vegetal resources. Moreover, the practice of an annual cycle of nomadic movements seems to be well attested, while its limited amplitude indicates an objective to optimally exploit the diverse resources accessible within a range of some dozen kilometers. 5. Human burials were found in a few natural refuges. They are the oldest known in the Cordillera, though they do not exceed approximately ten thousand years. Their presence demonstrates that the dead were respected and that their burial was sometimes accompanied by an elaborate ritual ceremony. The burials are most often single, as at Lauricocha and Telarmachay. The bodies were deposited in extended or flexed position in pits located in the back of the rock shelters and accompanied by body ornaments or tools. At Telarmachay, a woman around 20 years old was buried in this way with an assemblage of skin working tools (stone end and side scrapers, bone smoothers and awls still covered with red ochre). Nearby, the skeleton of a child a few months old was halfcovered with a necklace of marine shell beads (showing evidence for long distance exchanges already during this period) and a series of polished bone pendants. At Lauricocha, a 12-year-old child

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was buried with several stone and bone tools and turquoise beads. Another child was covered with a brilliant iron ore powder. Most of the burials also contain traces of red ochre, which was sprinkled over the bodies either for ritual purposes that are unknown to us, or more mundanely, to prevent them from rotting. Our knowledge of the human type of this period is still poor. The adult individuals were generally dolichocephalous with a high face. They seem to have been very muscular but rarely more than 1.6 m tall. 6. Starting at 10 000 BP, the lithic industries become more elaborate and diverse than before, including bifacial armatures of various forms: foliate or pentagonal (especially in the central Andes); triangular (southern Andes), stemmed, or exceptionally, Fishtail points (Ecuadorian Andes). Foliate points of the Ayampitin type are the most largely and abundantly represented. They were identified as early as 1940 in the eponymous site of the eastern Argentinean piedmont, where they are nonetheless more recent. This diversity of armature forms suggests the existence of differentiated traditions, or perhaps social units, as much as it indicates different adaptations to the available materials and hunted prey. The Fishtail points found at El Inga are particularly problematic. These points are more or less oval with a large stem that indeed resembles a fish tail. On one of their two faces, most have a small, thin, vertical and proximal removal scar, or ‘fluting’. While they are characteristic of numerous ancient sites in the extreme south of Chile and Argentina, dated to between 11 000 and 10 500 BP, in the central Andes they have been found only at El Inga, and, in very small numbers in the Paijan region on the northern coast of Peru (cf. infra). Therefore, along with their unquestionable technical originality, these points present a distribution that is difficult to explain at the scale of the subcontinent. Many specialists believe they derive directly from the Clovis points of North America, which characterize the Llano Paleoindian tradition between 12 000 and 10 000 BP. For the most conservative specialists, they would thus provide direct evidence for the arrival, from the Great Plains of North America, of the first hunters that peopled South America approximately 11 000 years ago. Others take a more nuanced stance, seeing only the diffusion, still from North America, of a technical trait adopted by populations already present in South America. Still others, though very few, believe they reflect a sort of ‘synthetic product’ originating in South America: to the proximal fluting technique arriving from North America would be added the basal narrowing already

known in the extreme south where bifacial shaping and projectile points would have been invented independently, the combination resulting in the famous Fishtail points. It is not difficult to guess that the adherents of the first explanation are the same as those who continue to deny the appearance of humans in South America earlier than 11 000 BP, while the others have since accepted without restriction the idea of a more ancient peopling (see New World, Peopling of). Finally, for this period we must note the few isolated finds of apparently cultivated vegetal species. Though this evidence is still fragile, the importance of these remains will become exceptional if their authenticity is confirmed and if other discoveries are made. The cultivated chili peppers at Guitarrero at 8800 BP, along with the beans and chili peppers at Huachichocana at the same time, would attest to the very early practice of a primitive horticulture in a few favorable biotopes, while in all other zones a predation economy dominated. Due to the disturbed stratigraphies of both of these sites, however, we cannot rule out the hypothesis that these remains are intrusive. Moreover, several of the dates announced for these vegetal remains, which were obtained indirectly (not on the vegetal remains themselves, but on elements in their context thought to be associated), have recently been revised through the AMS technique. According to Lawrence Kaplan, the cultivated beans identified by him at Guitarrero have a maximum age of 5000/4500 BP. Occupation of the Coastal Plain and Pacific Littoral

Though we are beginning to have a good knowledge of the hunter-gatherer occupations in the mountainous regions where natural refuges are numerous, finding and reconstructing their occupation modes is more difficult in open zones, such as the Pacific coastal plain. This task is highly complicated by a paleoclimatic element: the slow postglacial rising of the sea level probably submerged many occupations near the shore, and only those located more inland or at sufficiently elevated points along the coast would have been preserved. In addition, this sea level rising affected more or less extended surfaces according to the width of the continental shelf. The sectors most submerged were those where the shelf extends the furthest offshore and where the coastal plain is the lowest, as on the northern coast of Peru in the central Andes. In the extreme south of Ecuador, only one site dated to around 10 000 BP is currently known, but it has furnished very rich information. On the semidesert peninsula of Santa Elena, Karen Stothert studied the remains of the stratified camp of Las Vegas OGSE-80,

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today located 4 km from the shore but probably less in the past. According to Stothert, during the Early Las Vegas phase (10 000–8000 BP), in an environment close to the modern one – savannas inland and mangrove swamps on the coast – a small group of 25–50 individuals lived by fishing and mollusk collection, especially the mangrove species Anadara tuberculosa, complemented by terrestrial hunting (cervidae, fox, and small fauna) and the collection of wild vegetal species for alimentary (Opuntia cactus, prosopis sp., algarrobo berries) and technical (rush, wood) purposes. Because all these resources were accessible in close proximity during the whole year, Stothert proposed that this was a permanent occupation. The groups occupied circular huts composed of a wooden frame and rush covering. In contrast to what we observe in the sites of the Cordillera occupied at the same time (El Inga, Cubila´n), the material culture developed by the inhabitants of Las Vegas 80 is surprisingly poor. The barely specialized technical equipment includes lithic flakes with little or no retouch, used cobbles (hammerstones and grinding stones) and a few bone and shell instruments, but no bifacial tools or projectile points. Complex fishing tools are also absent, unless the more elaborate objects made from perishable materials – baskets, mats, nets, wooden tools – were not preserved, as is the case in the highland sites, except for Guitarrero. In the extreme north of Peru, in a similar environment at the foot of the Amotape hills, James Richardson revealed the tenuous remains of surface occupations that correspond to a similar lifeway combining terrestrial hunting and the collection of mangrove mollusks. However, the dates obtained (between 11 200  115 and 8125  80 BP, on shell) must be confirmed by further research. Further south, in the Cupisnique region, Claude Chauchat discovered and conducted a detailed study of a cultural and industrial complex contemporary with, but totally different from, the Paija´nian complex, dated to between 10 720 and 7490 BP. Dozens of open-air occupations, including lithic raw material quarries, knapping workshops, and camps, were identified on the interior of the coastal desert plain, during a period somewhat less arid than today. According to Chauchat, small groups of very mobile hunter-gatherers moved between the first foothills of the Andes and the coastline, currently around 15 km away but probably 30 at the time (the sea level was then 50 m lower than today). These human groups lived by fishing, as well as hunting, trapping, and collecting small desert species (rodents and lizards). Their lifeways were similar to those observed in the north but differed in that they possessed a very elaborate lithic industry, including very well made flake

tools and bifacial tools. Among these, Paija´n points – long, narrow-stemmed pieces with a very sharp distal extremity – were unique in America. Their high wounding capacity, along with their fragility, suggests that they could have been used for fishing with a harpoon rather than for hunting. According to Chauchat, this type of point could be the result of a local adaptation of Fishtail points, which are well represented in the southern part of the continent (the Fell points of Patagonia) but until then present in the central Andes only at El Inga (Ecuador). However, in the Paija´n workshop of Quebrada Santa Maria, located rather far from the coast at the foot of the western Cordillera, Jesus Bricen˜o discovered several fragments of Paija´n-type points associated with Fishtail points. For Bricen˜o and Chauchat, this demonstrates that Paija´n points represent a local adaptation of Fishtail points to a new form of resource exploitation (coastal fishing replaced terrestrial hunting), but the evidence is still not fully convincing. The Paijanian cultural complex seems to have extended over a large part of the Peruvian coastal desert to the south, and even until 2000 m altitude on the western piedmont. As at Cupisnique, most of the occupations detected were open-air sites (El Volca´n in the Huarmey Valley, lomas de Anco´n on the central coast, Pozo Santo near Ica). Only one stratified rock shelter site was recognized by Paul Ossa at Quirihuac. Finally, at Paija´n, Chauchat also discovered a human burial dated to 10 200  180 BP, which is one of the oldest human remains known in South America. If we continue to descend along the Pacific coast, we arrive in southern Peru where diverse coastal occupations of a different type, dating from around 10 000 BP, were recently studied. From north to south, these are the sites of Quebrada Jaguay, Ring Site (or El Anillo), and Quebrada de los Burros. All three of these sites are fisher-gatherer camps located a few kilometers from the shore. At Quebrada Jaguay, detected in 1970 by Fre´de´ric Engel, then re-excavated and studied by Daniel Sandweiss starting in 1996, the first occupation dates to between 11 200 and 10 500 BP and continues until 8000 BP. During the entire sequence, the economy seems to have been based on the exploitation of marine resources consisting mainly of mollusks, especially the beach species Mesodesma donacium (wedge clam), as well as on fishing. Sandweiss notes the existence of ‘domestic’ structures such as postholes and hearths, which would be evidence for the construction of a ‘house’. The lithic material includes abundant knapping waste products but few shaped pieces and no bifacial projectile points. Ring Site was excavated from 1983 to 1985 by James Richardson and Daniel Sandweiss. Its deep,

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stratified shell midden with a circular form (hence its name) indicates an occupation by a small community that exploited the same resources during the same period. The deepest levels, however, did not yield lithic tool remains or fishing instruments. A date of 10 575  105 BP, obtained (on shell) for the earliest level, is questioned by the excavators themselves. The other dates obtained do not exceed 9000/8000 BP. Further south, not far from the Chilean border, the camp of Quebrada de los Burros has been excavated since 1996 under the direction of Danie`le Lavalle´e. It was occupied from 9500 BP in a similar economic context where fishing was the principal alimentary resource, associated with the collection of mollusks (mainly M. donacium and Concholepas concholepas). The domestic structures are numerous and varied, including constructed terraces, windbreaks, and hearths. The lithic industry is also abundant, providing evidence in particular for the fabrication of bifacial weapons. Specialized fishing instruments are also present from the beginning, including shell and bone barbs, weights of composite fishhooks or lines, and harpoon foreshafts. Finally, in northern Chile, several occupations of the same type and age are known. From north to south, Acha 2 (8900  150 BP), Tiliviche-1b (9760 BP), and La Chimba (9680  160 BP) attest to a well-established occupation by fisher-gatherers. The data provided by all of these more or less contemporary coastal camps are difficult to synthesize because the scope of the excavations conducted is very unequal. All demonstrate the predominance of an economy based on marine resources, but each site also yielded a small quantity of terrestrial faunal remains (mammals and birds), showing that terrestrial hunting was a secondary activity. For most of the sites, a seasonal occupation during the austral summer is suggested, leading to the hypothesis that the groups migrated to the highlands during the winter months. Meanwhile, no proof for such a long distance ‘transhumance’ has yet been found. Moreover, it seems to be well demonstrated that the occupation of the Pacific coast probably occurred as early as that of the central Andean inland territory. If we consider the perfect mastery of the maritime environment demonstrated in the earliest stages of all the sites cited here, along with the presence of very specialized technical equipment and the probable use of boats, suggested by the nature and size of some of the pelagic fish captured, the hypothesis of an arrival of human groups by a maritime route, independent of the terrestrial paths, cannot be ruled out, though further research is indispensable to confirm this hypothesis.

Middle Archaic: The Beginnings of a Production Economy (8000–5000 BP) Following the period between 10 000 and 8000 BP, during which a rich diversity of elaborate strategies were implemented by human groups in order to adapt and exploit environments that were also very diverse, the cultural development of the central Andean zone began to follow a new rhythm at 8000 BP. New lifeways were gradually developed, though those based on hunting and gathering did not immediately disappear. The innovations, which nonetheless concerned only a few regions, were of two types: a progressive generalization of horticulture and the appearance of animal husbandry. In southern Ecuador, the site of Las Vegas was most densely occupied between 8000 and 6500 BP (Late Las Vegas phase). Marine resources played a less important role than before (50%) while the collection of vegetal species intensified. Some, such as Cucurbitaceae and perhaps a primitive maize, began to be cultivated. The space covered by habitations and domestic waste augmented, indicating an increase in population size. The large dumping areas also served as cemeteries: one of them contained the primary or secondary burials of at least 192 individuals, making it the largest ensemble of skeletons known in the central Andes during this period. The most famous one, a double sepulture of a man and woman buried together and apparently embracing, has become famous as The Lovers of Sumpa. On the Peruvian coast, the fisher-gatherer camps already occupied for nearly 2000 years show a significant population increase from 7000 BP. This is demonstrated at Ring Site and Quebrada de los Burros by an enlargement of domestic areas and increased in deposit densities. But it is on the coast of Chile that the occupation density is greatest (it is also here that the most research has been conducted). The numerous shellfish collector camps of the Camarones Complex (7800–5600 BP), which extend along the southern littoral of Arica – Quiani, Chinchorro, Camarones 14, Pisagua, and Punta Pichalo, among the most important – were occupied by a population of fishers with sophisticated fishing equipment, notably fishhooks shaped from the valves of the large mussel Choromytilus chorus. This is the origin of the name Shell Fishhook Culture first given to this complex by Junius Bird. A little later, the occupants of Tiliviche and Aragon, though located nearly 40 km from the shore, lived mainly on marine resources and used similar equipment. The Camarones Complex, and the succeeding Quiani Complex (5600–3200 BP), in which fishhooks

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made from cactus thorns replaced those made from shell, constitute the successive phases of the Chinchorro Tradition. This tradition, present from the Antofagasta latitude in Chile to the Ilo in Peru, is defined by its mortuary practices. Following extremely complex processes, the bodies were eviscerated, dried, and then stiffened with wood elements and ligatures. They were then covered with a coating of painted clay, which depending on the period was first black and then red. A ‘black mummy’, recently dated to 7800 BP, confirms that the Chinchorro mummies, more than 2000 years older than the first known Egyptian mummies, are the oldest in the world. In the highlands, the natural refuges of the Cordillera continue to be occupied during this time by bands of seminomad hunter-gatherers whose lifeways remain astonishingly similar to those of the preceding period. Meanwhile, it is during the same period that horticultural practices were developed and generalized, though they perhaps first appeared as early as the Early Archaic in northern Peru (Guitarrero) and northwest Argentina (Huachichocana). The stratigraphic contexts of these sites are, however, questionable (cf. supra). Also at Guitarrero, more reliable evidence of squash (Cucurbita sp.) and gourd (Lagenaria sp.) cultivation appears at around 7000 to 6000 BP, as well as in the Ayacucho basin (Piki phase, 7700– 6300 BP). Meanwhile, the role of these plants was never as significant as that of maize, which, though it was not the first cultivated, rapidly became of singular importance. Later, all of the ‘Andean high civilizations’, which first appeared during the second millennium BC, would be based on the intensive cultivation of this plant. A primitive domestic maize was again observed at Guitarrero between 7600 and 4000 BP (Complex III) and, less certainly, at Ayacucho between 6500 and 5000 BP (Chihua phase). In both of these regions, these elements provide evidence for the manipulation of several vegetal species and already elaborate horticultural practices, if not true agriculture. Meanwhile, in all regions, the majority of alimentary resources continued to be obtained through hunting, trapping, and the collection of wild edible plants, still in a nonsedentary context. The history of maize is complex and its origin is still far from clear. Though there is near consensus that this plant originated in Mexico, its diffusion and domestication are still poorly understood. For certain researchers, the diffusion of an already-domesticated maize would have occurred very early starting from Mexico. For others, it was a still wild maize that attained the central Andean zone, where it would have been independently domesticated, one or more

times, in the central and southern Andean zones. In any case, all of the available data suggest that in the central Andean zone the culture of three essential plants – beans, squash, and maize – known as the ‘American trilogy’, would have begun earlier in the Cordillera than on the coast. The history of the species whose mountainous origin is certain – potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) and other exclusively Andean tubers such as oca (Oxalis tuberosa), olluco (Ullucus tuberosus), and mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), as well as maca (Lepidium meyenii) and quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) – is still poorly known. The distinction between wild and cultivated species is sometimes difficult and palynological analyses are still lacking. Paradoxically, the only concrete evidence of cultivated potatoes comes from the coast and is no older than 4000 BP (at Huynuma in the Casma Valley of Peru), indicating a more ancient domestication than in the highlands. Unlike the vegetal species, the Andean animal species suitable for domestication were very rare: two camelidae, vicun˜a (Lama vicugna) and guanaco (L. guanicoe), and guinea pig (Cavia sp.). Of these three species, only the first two would later play a significant role in the cultural development of the central Andes. We have seen that as early as 8000 BP on the punas of central Peru, the hunting of camelidae existed as a result of the behavior of these animals themselves: vicun˜as and guanacos live in small family groups that, in contrast to cervidae, circulate within a stable, defined territory from 1 year to the next. For the hunters, they were thus a certain and regular source of food. A growing familiarity between the hunters and these animals is almost certainly at the origin of the control that seems to have been exercised over wild herds from 6500 BP. At Telarmachay, where this in situ process of camelidae domestication was first revealed, a first domestic species, the alpaca (Lama pacos), was present between 6000 and 5500 BP, and a second, the lama (Lama glama) between 5500 and 3800 BP. Meanwhile, it is very likely, though the archaeological evidence is still lacking, that similar experiments leading to the same results occurred at different locations in the highlands, notably on the Bolivian altiplano. In the southern Andes, a few elements suggest that an independent, but somewhat later, zone of camelidae domestication could have existed in Chile on the border of the Atacama desert basin (Puripica-1 and Tu´lan-52, between 5000 and 4000 BP), while in the northwest Argentinean puna, alpaca is present in the Tomayoc rock shelter at 3500 BP. We must nonetheless ask whether the appearance of domestic camelidae in these two

AMERICAS, SOUTH/Early Cultures of the Central Andes 367

regions could have been the consequence of migratory movements that transferred pastoral practices from the central Andean punas. According to MacNeish, guinea pigs were first tamed in the Ayacucho basin as early as the Piki phase (7700–6300 BP) and then fully domesticated in Peru during the Cachi phase (5000–3700 BP). It is moreover surprising that this animal, which exists in a wild state throughout the highlands, is not represented in any of the high-altitude Peruvian sites (Lauricocha, Pachamachay, Telarmachay, etc.). It is also absent from the alimentary remains of sites in the Andes of Chile and Argentina, but could later have been independently domesticated in the Colombian Andes. The first villages

It is finally during the Middle Archaic that the first sure signs of sedentarization appear in a process that seems to have first developed along the Pacific Coast. Though it is a little later than the possible semisedentary occupation of the site of Las Vegas in Ecuador (Early Archaic), the ‘village’ site of the fishers of Paloma 613, studied by Fre´de´ric Engel, Robert Benfer, and Jeffrey Quilter, on the central coast of Peru, is better attested. In the beginning of its occupation, from 7800 to 7000 BP, this site was still a seasonal camp like so many others, before becoming fully sedentary at around 7000 BP. The habitat consisted of around 100 hemispherical huts made from reeds and rush, and more than a thousand burials were found in proximity or even within the habitations themselves. Multiple analyses conducted on this site have shown that 90% of the diet was composed of small fish, marine mammals, and mollusks. Vegetal resources were first exploited for nonalimentary purposes (combustibles, hut covers) and it was not until 5500/5000 BP that a primitive horticulture was practiced (squash, gourds, and perhaps beans), which contributed only a minor complement to a diet that remained essentially marine based. Paloma was abandoned a little before 5000 BP, without having developed a true agrarian economy. Between 6000 and 5300 BP, the village of Chilca 1, also discovered by Fre´de´ric Engel, was established not far from Paloma. Here also, the beach was not far away and spontaneous vegetation was abundant, particularly in the nearby lomas. The occupation included ensembles of grouped huts like those at Paloma. The mode of life was also analogous and the horticulture of squash and beans is attested. We thus cannot deny the importance of the ocean in the lifeways of the coastal populations and their role in the early process of sedentarization. But it is also true that the ocean, in spite of its rich resources, could not assure these populations a level of security equal

to that provided a little later by agricultural products. No one can challenge the fact that within the coastal societies already sedentarized or in the process of becoming so, it was not until the use of domestic plants became systematic that a qualitative advance occurred, which, within a few centuries, would lead to the appearance of complex societies. At the end of the period considered in this article, the central Andean zone thus presents a contrasted scenario. On the coast, fixed villages appeared with a territorial attachment that undoubtedly led to new ways of life, a new perception of daily space, and new relationships between the members within a community. At the same time, alongside these societies, hunter-gatherer groups organized in (apparently) egalitarian societies subsisted. As we saw, in the highlands the first sedentary occupations seem to have appeared at a later date, though, paradoxically, certain vegetal species were cultivated earlier. It is finally during the succeeding Late Archaic period (5000–3800 BP) – also called Final Preceramic – that a new type of occupation will appear. An economy dominated by agriculture, from then on well established, and the beginnings of a social hierarchy will be reflected in the edification of spectacular, ‘public’ architectural complexes, marking a prelude the dawning of the Andean Civilization. See also: Americas, South: Early Villages; Northern South America; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading Aldenderfer M (1998) Montane Foragers: Asana and the SouthCentral Andean Archaic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Arriaza B (1995) Beyond Death: The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Benfer R (1990) The Preceramic Period site of Paloma, Peru: Bioindications of improving adapatation to sedentism. Latin American Antiquity 1: 284–318. Bonavia D (1997) La domesticacio´n de las plantas y los origenes de la domesticacio´n de las plantas en los Andes centrales. Revista Histo´rica 37 (Lima): 77–107. Chauchat C (1992) Pre´histoire de la coˆte nord du Pe´rou: le Paijanien de Cupisnique. Bordeaux: CNRS Editions. Clapperton C (1995) Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology of South America. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Dillehay T (2000) The Settlement of the Americas. A new Prehistory. New York: Basic Books. Lavalle´e D (dir) (1985) Telarmachay. Chasseurs et pasteurs pre´historiques des Andes. Paris: Editions ADPF-ERC. Lavalle´e D (2000) The First South Americans.The Peopling of a Continent from the Earliest Evidence to High Culture. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Lynch T (1980) Guitarrero Cave. New York: Academic Press. Macneish R, et al. (1980–83) Prehistory of the Ayacucho Basin (3 vols.). Ann Arbor: R.S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, University of Michigan Press.

368 AMERICAS, SOUTH/Early Villages Nun˜ez L and Santoro C (1988) Cazadores de la puna seca y salada, Estudios Atacamen˜os (9). Antofagasta: Universidad del Norte. Pearsall D (1992) The origin of plant cultivation in South America. In: Cowan CW and Watson PJ (eds.) The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective, pp. 173–205. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Rick J (1980) Prehistoric Hunters of the High Andes. New York: Academic Press. Silverman H (ed.) (2004) Andean Archaeology. Blackwell. Stothert, K (1988) La Prehistoria temprana de la Peninsula de Santa Elena, Ecuador. Cultura Las Vegas, Museo del Banco Central del Ecuador, Guayaquil and Quito.

Early Villages Robert A Benfer, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Ayllu An extended family unit for the Inca, whose history was traced through ancestral mummies. BP Radiocarbon years before the present, which is set by convention to 1950. Since the number of radiocarbon years is not always the same as the number of calendar years, it is possible to adjust them into years calibrated by comparison of tree-rings from long-lived Bristlecone pine trees. catchment The region used for obtaining resources. In coastal Peru´, a village catchment could extend from beneath the ocean to altitudes in excess of 3500 m. Cribra orbitalia A special kind of pitting in the upper part of the frontal bone that forms the back of the eye socket; the pitting may become smooth with healing. It is associated with childhood anaemia as a response of the body in producing more red cells in this region, the most available one, of the body skeleton during early childhood. ENSO El Nin˜o Southern Oscillation. The interaction of the tropical Pacific ocean with the global atmosphere that results in sporadic episodes of changing ocean currents and hence climate, especially along the western coast of South America. fog oasis In Peru´, the coastal hills between 200 and 800 m above mean sea level are shrouded in fog from about June until November. Trees, before nearly all have been cut down in modern times, condensed the fog and in many years, the hills had a savana-like appearance. Such foggy hills are called lomas in Peru´. lomas See fog oasis. palaeodemgraophy Modeling demographic properties such as estimated remaining life expectancy and fertiilty from the distribution of the dead. Since emigration or immigration can dramatically effect the relation between the properties of the dead and living, assumptions of stability or other data, such as living floor areas, are necessary to support such reconstructions. parental investment The varying economic investments parents might make in children with respect to their own maintainance; investment might vary by gender where there are economic differences in their values. periosteal lesions Additional bone on the surface of a bone that has a woven appearance; it is usually the results of infection, either mechanically from punctures in the skin or from some chronic infectious diseases.

Preceramic period Alternatively called Archaic, in Peru´, is the time between the end of the Holocene until 1500 BC. The Late Preceramic overlaps the Initial Period of Ceramics in the north and central coastal regions, as Tom and Sheila Pozorski have demonstrated and Leonid Velarde has recently shown for even the early part of the Late Preceramic in central Peru´. Needed changes in periodization will not be discussed here. stable isotopes As used here, the concentrations of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, which exhibit a pattern across varied food sources and can be reliably measured in human osseous tissue. village As used here, a settlement in which more than 50 persons are usually in residence. We use both floor area and palaeodemography to estimate village size. virtual reality Three-dimensional structures from digital models, which can be entered and manipulated. In Paloma World (available at my web site: http://rcp.missouri.edu), wire-frame models were covered with texture from photographs of a reconstructed house and the background at the site. Details were modeled separately.

Introduction With the onset of the Holocene, sedentary village life appeared in widely scattered locations around the Earth. Farming, facilitated by domesticated animals, produced a diet that, when supplemented by hunting, gathering, and fishing, describes one path from a nomadic life to a settled one. Full-time fishing is another possibly more ancient path. There are wellknown examples of both economies in the Neolithic of Asia and in the Middle East. The earliest villages from the Archaic (Preceramic) stage of the Western Hemisphere are those of fishermen.

Earliest Villages One can define the archaeological signature of a village as one left by multiple, clustered domestic structures of between approximately 80 and 1500 inhabitants. Larger settlements are more conveniently referred to as towns, smaller ones as hamlets. Early dispersed settlements would be difficult to distinguish from hamlets without very widespread excavation. The end of the last glacial period saw the first agglutinated villages in the archaeological record in the Eastern Hemisphere. Farming villages emerged at Xinglongwa sites such as Jiahu in inland China, by 9000 years ago. These sites are characterized by having large domestic structures and ceramics. In the Middle East, Pre-Pottery inland Neolithic sites, such as Biedla in Jordan, were also occupied by 9000 BP. Jomon fishing ceramic-using villages in Japan date to 10 000 BP. In the Western Hemisphere, the Peruvian preceramic site of Paloma, Peru´, was a small settlement at 7800 BP, growing to a peak of several hundred before abandonment after 5000 BP, when monumental aceramic Late Preceramic sites began to be constructed to the north. Valdivian sites from Ecuador, such as

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Real Alto, began to appear at about that time with pottery and a variety of cultigens. James Zeidler and Deborah Pearsall have shown that Valdivian peoples moved up the middle valleys from the earliest settlements in coastal Ecuador, suggesting initial and perhaps continuing association with fishing. Andean villages today are derived from long established patterns. They are divided into at least two allyus, between or among which marriages are typically arranged, so villages tend toward endogamy. A single village may also exist in two physically different locations, often separated by altitude, so that resources from different ecological zones are available to a single group. Households vary in success with those having the richest nexus of kin from which reciprocal aid is available doing better than less successful neighbors. Today in the Andes, a complete nuclear family with reciprocal relations among kin and nonkin is vital to sustain life. Modern villages may have elaborate social interactions with other groups such as herders. Multiple ethnic groups may have settlements close to one another in the same valley. Persistence of any village requires successful reproduction. Since half of the children born in preceramic times would die before the age of four years, and the last-born children would have to be cared for by someone other than the mother – whose life would usually end during her reproductive period – considerable community investment would have been necessary in child rearing. Unlike modern customs, preceramic village burial was often in or adjacent to domestic structures in early villages, presumably by family. Thus, early villages, before monumental architecture, display the domestic architecture of families. Conditions for Sedentism in Early Villages

Early Jomon fishermen lived year-round in their villages; shells show daily and seasonal growth increments. Early settled village life can appear variously with or without intensive cultivation of plants, domestication of animals, or the pottery needed to store and process produce. The preceramic Paloma fishing village was occupied throughout the year, at least in some years. Environmental Factors of Early Sedentism

In the Early Holocene, improvements in food production would have been stimulated by increasing carbon dioxide from the carbon released by melting glaciers. The establishment of modern patterns of ocean currents sometime after 5000 BP produced stable beaches. Flood plains and hills above the beaches would also be fruitful for collecting and hunting, and for cultivation of plants. By 5000 BP, the long period of warm, humid environment, the Holocene

Global Climatic Optimum (GCO), was ending. The result was an increased unpredictability of a new cooler and dryer climate. People had to adjust no longer sustainable systems of subsistence to these more variable conditions. These cultural changes were important and can be compared with adjustments to later climatic shifts as discussed by DeMonocal. They may have led to the abandonment of fog oasis sites like Paloma for river valley settings. Villages arise from hamlets during the beginning of the GCO.

Early South American Settlements Earlier Pleistocene hamlets, such as Monte Verde, Chile and early Paijan sites in Peru´ reported by Tom Dillahay, may have had substantial wooden dwellings. In central coastal Peru´, Frederic Engel excavated well-preserved but isolated structures close to beaches at Paracas and Quipa with dates between 9000 and 10 500 BP. Other early fishing camps on the Peruvian coasts are this old or older but lack visible domestic structures. Early fishing settlements are known for the length of the Chilean coast. In Ecuador, Karen Stothert’s excavations at OGSE-80 in the Santa Elena Peninsula possibly suggest early agglutinated households by 8000 BP. However, these sites more likely represent hamlets than villages, probably occupied seasonally, as Piperno and Pearsall note.

Paloma, Chilca Valley, Peru´ The Middle Preceramic site of Paloma, Peru´, is one of the most intensively studied sedentary villages from the Middle Holocene of the Americas. The site is situated 3.5 km from the modern beach on an alluvial fan at an elevation of 200 m above mean sea level, just below a fog oasis. Paloma lies 8 km from the Chilca River (Figures 1–3). Frederic Engel conducted the first excavations. The author directed subsequent excavations in four more seasons between 1976 and 1990 in cooperation with Engel, Alice N. Benfer, and Glendon F. Weir. Paloma presents three important archaeological resources: (1) its preservation of organic materials is good to excellent, (2) its well-stratified deposits show clearly separable village occupations over time, and (3) it was extensively excavated and analyzed. A list of 25 theses and partial list of publications is available at the PalomaWorld web site at http://coas.missouri. edu (hereafter, PalomaWorld). There were excavations of parts of 50 structures, 400 storage pits, 35 hearths, and 201 human interments over four field seasons. A series of 26 radiocarbon dates registers earliest occupation at 7800 BP, with a series of subsequent stratified villages occupied until

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about 4700 BP. The final occupation at Paloma was one in which the population began to relocate to a nearby river valley at the site of Chilca 1. Paloma is the largest site excavated from this time period; however, Engel has located two other similar, but unexcavated villages, closer to the coast in the same valley. The Paloma site is comprised of oval pit houses, three mortuary structures, and shell middens.

Many structures were in the low shell mounds. A few of the earliest domestic structures at Paloma are small and perhaps do not indicate year-round village sedentism. Large, sturdy houses in clusters were widespread by 6500 BP. Figure 4 shows what a domestic structure (S. 103) looked like during excavation; in it some burial pits and storage pits have been excavated but one storage pit is awaiting excavation. Excavation in this structure, but not in most, continued below the floor to the cut originally made by its builders to create an oval depression for the house.

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The design combined two major strategies, a small probability sample of test pits stratified by depth of deposits and extensive lateral excavations (Figure 3). We were surprised to find that domestic structures were buried throughout the alluvial fan, whether there were surface indications or not, and pleased to learn that structures encountered in the probability sample were not distributed differently from those found in lateral excavations. The total excavations were of approximately 2500 m2, which is approximately 10% of the alluvial fan on which the site is situated.

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Stratigraphy

We were able to establish three well-defined strata located throughout the alluvial fan below the fog oasis. Two domestic structures from earlier strata had to be grouped into a single level #400 for the purpose of analysis since they were from strata that were not widely distributed across the site. Dating

Of 26 radiocarbon determinations, only one did not correspond to the level assigned by our stratigraphy;

another sample from the same structure did. The three site-wide recognizable zones are dated as follows: . #100 Reoccupation, 4000 BP. It had rectangular subterranean stone structures and open areas with scattered living areas indicated by midden to the north and east of the Paloma alluvial fan; this occupation is not discussed here. . #200 4700–5100 BP. A level whose presence was announced by a layer of rotted, often purple, shells, the decay of which suggests abandonment.

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. #300 5100–5300 BP. A level topped by thick caliche (calcium carbonate) in areas and always containing more grass than either level above or below; the soil was most often orange in color. . #400 5300–7800 BP. A level of darker soil containing large hearths. The earliest date (7800 BP) applies to only a few small structures from nonsite wide strata. The later strata suggest occupations of persistent villages.

Settlement Pattern The settlement pattern makes clear why good stratigraphy was obtained in what is normally a difficult context, that of a stratified series of villages. The reason is that, once abandoned, structures were never disturbed. Burials within the structures were also never drastically disturbed; abandoned houses were abandoned household cemeteries. Figure 5 shows the central core of the structures from our virtual reality representation of Paloma, which can be visited at a web site, http://coas.missouri.edu, and hereafter, Paloma World. These more structures show a settlement pattern of agglutinated structures that never intrude upon earlier ones. Other structures, presumably a part of other complete clusters, were also encountered. Vradenburg and his associates found an interesting shift in total house floor area over time. Using a figure of 9.4 m2 of roofed area per person and a 50-year maximum life for a house suggested an average population of about 60 between 6500 and 5300 BP,

the time of the site-wide occupation of level #400. Using the same procedures, we calculated a population of about 450 in level #300, the level whose abundant grass suggests maximum moisture. We estimate the lower bound for #200 as about 200 inhabitants who, over time, moved to the nearby river valley. Not surprisingly, palaeodemographic study of the human remains showed a decrease in growth rate in the final occupation at Paloma even though the actual local population of fog oasis and river valley was expanding. Other evidence of sedentism includes the more than 400 storage pits, many containing plant or animal food. For example, one grass-lined pit was full of anchovies with heads removed; others contained ground anchovies, and many contained stored plant materials, all suggesting a sedentary life dependent upon stored foods (see Figure 4).

Architecture at Paloma We found three special mortuary structures, but living structures were the most common structures at Paloma. Domestic Architecture

All structures were semi-subterranean in profile. The original excavated area was flattened by filling it with sand and then laying down small, fine mats twined from wild plant fibers. Most structures were round to oval, with some tending to rectangular. Roof supports were occasionally of willow poles but more often groups of cane bound together and set into trenches. Roofs were covered with fine mats over which grass

Figure 5 Paloma core excavations showing parts of three villages; plans superimposed over virtual reality reconstruction; excavation units are 6  6 meter squares. S. 101 in level 200 is discussed in the text.

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was interlaced. Although it virtually never rains at this elevation, a fine mist from the winter fog, ‘garua’, can wet all exposed surfaces in the winter. The roofs of structures would have condensed water from the fog in this rainless land; excavated house poles were often encased in caliche at their base. Stone-lined wells of unknown antiquity are found in the nearby fog oasis. Abandoned houses formed depressions, sometimes visible on the surface; condensing water turned the collapsed roofs to caliche. The depressions were used later for discard of garbage. Large basaltic passive grinding stones, batanes, were sometimes cached on or under the roof of houses that had been abandoned. Human burials were found under the floors or sometimes on the floors of dwellings. Mortuary Structures

In addition to the more common practice of burial within the household, several special mortuary structures were found. One, S. 137, is associated with #200 but lies south of the core #200 group and is not depicted in Figures 5 or 6 (see the virtual reality ‘interactive site dig’ for details at Paloma World). S. 137 resembled a domestic structure in construction technique except that it was only about 60 cm in height. Inside were four burials, the only four not buried in a fetal position. One had been disarticulated before reburial, the only instance of this practice. The other three appear to have been buried in a state of rigor mortis. One explanation for all four individuals dying together could be poison from a red tide. Another, structure, S. 28, contained seven infant burials but no adults, which, if not due to very bad luck in raising babies, suggest that it may have had a special mortuary function. An unusual burial, one extremely well preserved (Tomb 159), was that of a juvenile male missing one leg and exhibiting deep grooves in

Figure 6 Paloma virtual reality reconstruction of S. 101 and nearby dwellings looking to the south.

the corresponding fore arm and hip. He had died from wounds probably inflicted by a shark. He was buried in a miniature structure made in the same fashion as a full-sized domestic structure. A Paloma Household

S. 101 was found just west of a low shell mound (Figure 6). It and adjacent S. 129 (Figure 7a) are the two best-preserved structures at the site. They were both from level #200. Over 14 person-months were devoted to the excavation of S. 101; extensive field notes are available at Paloma World (where it is listed as H. 101). S. 101 and S. 129 together comprise a domestic household. One is a larger living unit (S. 101), and the other smaller structure, whose presence marked the edge of a shell mound, is the kitchen (S. 129). S. 101 is shown in plan and profile view in Figures 7b and 7c. A reconstruction (Figure 7d) by Bernardino Ojeda is in the Museo de la Nacio´n, Lima, Peru´. That reconstruction lacks the covering grass, as do our representations here and elsewhere, in order to show architectural details. Figure 7e shows a similar modern living unit/kitchen pair from the Andes. S. 101 was somewhat unusual in that it was the only structure that we could be sure had a flat roof, which was preserved by its charring in a fire. We were able to trace ash over a caliche lens from S. 101 to the nearby structure, S. 129. The two structures returned the same radiocarbon date, 5010  60 and 5010  80 BP. Most houses had a patio area delimited by posts, and S. 101 is no exception. It is possible that an outer oval of posts might have functioned as the outer wall of the dwelling with the inner more circular row of posts being for support. However, study of partially burned but largely intact poles, mats, and grass from S. 101 suggest that the area was really a patio for the house. At Paloma, there were hearths both within the central oval of posts and outside them but within the outer ring. Larger communal health areas are sometimes found among clusters of houses. We encountered more than 35 hearths. Storage pits averaged about eight per household, and many had preserved grass linings and storage contents, such as headless anchovies. Some domestic structures showed re-occupation, with several living floors; S. 101 had three floors, each with indications of partial coverage by fine mats. This pattern argues that the dwelling was being used for multiple years, perhaps abandoned temporarily in an ENSO year when much of the marine biomass shifted to the north. Our finding of five cached batanes in a domestic structure could indicate an abandonment that was meant to be temporary but, in fact, became permanent for an extended family. There was an average of four burials interred in and around each of the 55 domestic structures. Few completely excavated houses lacked

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Figure 7 S.101/129 domestic cluster of living and cooking structures at Paloma and similar household above Huara´z, Peru´ (a) Map of site area containing S.101 (domestic structure) and S.129 (kitchen), in black; (b) plan of S 101 omitting most interments and some storage pits to show architectural details; (c) profile of S.101; (d) reconstruction of S.101 by Bernardino Ojeda, in the Museo de la Nacion, Lima, Peru´ (grass covering omitted to show details); (e) Modern sleeping structure and kitchen, on road to Chavı´n de Huantar above Huara´z, Peru´.

burials. Palaeodemographic study showed that, due to high infant mortality, approximately one-half of an extended family of eight might die in a generation (see Paleopathology). The kitchen structure S. 129 contained a burial of a woman more than 50 years old when she died. She was suffering from a chronic infection indicated by periosteal lesions on her lower limb bones. There were extensive food remains in S. 129, which is why we identified it as a kitchen. S. 129 was architecturally interesting in that posts were found only in the northern extension shown in Figure 7a. Between that small circle and the longer open oval-shaped, main cooking area, we found a packed earth step. More intensive processing of food appears to have required a separate kitchen structure in the #200 village.

The treatment of the dead also changed in #200. There appeared a new pattern, one that suggests the beginning of what would become a continent-wide emphasis on ancestor veneration. At the same time, treatment of the deaths of children was elaborated. Ancestor Veneration

Tomb 100 (shown at the bottom of Figure 7b) had small hearths just outside the limits of the burial pit. Remains of fire inside burial pits were more common. Fires had frequently been set before the body was placed in the grave, resulting in the burning of mats, skin, and even scorching of bone. Claude Cauchet reported a burial from the north coast dated to 10 200 BP that had been placed on a layer of embers

ASIA, EAST/Early Villages 375

Jeffrey Quilter, a crew chief in the 1976 excavation, published a description of Paloma burials. In a nonmetric multidimensional scaling of interments coded for mortuary content by Sharon S. Brock, the author found statistically significant differences in the dimension weights by strata that quantified an increasing emphasis on children that Quilter had also indicated. More elaborate burials for children may have reflected an increasing investment in them. An unusual orientation of the young, and the pattern of interment by gender in the last major occupation at Paloma, may be another reflection of cosmological belief systems imported from the tropical lowlands. Male/Female Dualism

In an analysis by Kate Pechenkina and Robert A. Benfer it was found that males in #200 were buried

T20

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with another layer of charcoal and ashes covering the body. At Paloma, we found embers and burned areas under sides of burials but not ashes covering the body. In Late Preceramic La Galgada, Terrence Grieder and his colleagues also reported burials interred over a layer of charcoal. Another use of fire, one that suggests ancestor veneration, was the case in which a male was placed on the floor mat or in a shallow depression, and the house was then burned down over him. In the case of the best-preserved example, Tomb 109 in S. 101, a coiled basket was placed on top of the body, and a large metate put on top of the burned roof. The Shuar of Ecuador buried an important male in a house in which he had lived and then burned it to the ground. At Paloma, burned houses may have served to mark the claims of lineages to the few highly productive beach sites. These would be the ones with good fishing and access to sweet water and carbohydrateproducing lomas or river. Besides venerating ancestors with special treatment involving fire, relatives attempted to preserve the dead. We have found that salt comprised more than one-half of the volume of some burial fills through research at the Missouri Research Reactor by Jeremy Edward (MU dissertation; MU theses are available online). These fishermen lived only a few kilometers from coastal salt deposits. At La Galgada, distant from salt mines, in the Late Preceramic, large salt crystals covered by a layer of charcoal served as the base for two burials. These rituals for venerating and preserving ancestors are related to modern tropical lowland belief systems and are thus suggested as ancient for the continent. They prefigure the mummy cult of the Inca by 4000 years. They can be compared with the Chinchorro cult of far southern Peru´ and northern Chile.

M

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Figure 8 Composite # 200 Paloma burials. Note males and females are separable by an imaginary line through the infant burials. The hypothetical house is approximately 3  4 m in dimensions. (The 114 azimuth marks the austral summer solstice.) Drawing by Ekaterina Pechenkina.

in the eastern part of houses, females, in the west, with most infants along a northeast/southwest line dividing the two (see Figure 8). The dimension of gender is a powerful indicator of dualism at Paloma, but this pattern was restricted to #200 burials. The line along the orientation of most infant burials could be viewed as tracing the nightly extreme of the Milky Way. We know that later Andeans would see the Milky Way as representing fertility. Could these new mortuary customs emphasizing dualism and the Milky Way have been brought by new peoples to the coast at the beginning of the #200 occupation? Coastal Relations with Other Peoples

Maria Rostworworski has suggested from ethnohistoric and linguistic studies that there was complete population replacement of central Peruvian coastal peoples by highland peoples at an early time. Highland incursions of the coastal valleys are known from later periods. Studies of the dental traits of the human remains from Paloma by Christy Turner III suggested that the last Paloma occupation before abandonment was by people whose dental characteristics were very different from those of earlier inhabitants. It is possible that the new mortuary customs came from the lowlands through highland intermediaries. Other relations with distant peoples are shown by trace element analysis of obsidian. Mike Glascock found that all but one piece of obsidian from Paloma came from the Quispisisa source near the headwaters of the Pisco River. From that location, the highland river systems are directly accessible from the coast.

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A bone implement from a monkey suggests contacts to the far north or the lowlands over the Andes. In palaeoethnobotanical studies, Glendon Weir found no significant plant remains at Paloma originating from more than 1000 m, so movement of obsidian or monkey bone was most likely due to chance encounters with highlanders as either group foraged the lower western slopes of the Andes.

Other Biological Studies at Paloma The primary research for the excavations was toward study of the evidence for early sedentism in a system of human/environment interactions in a fragile habitat. Fuelwood was one organic material that was critical in the arid environment, and it serves as a useful indicator of anthropogenic and natural changes. Fuelwood and Construction Materials

The fog oasis, which provided water and plant resources to these early villagers, became degraded over time. We can demonstrate this by changes in fuelwood, charcoalized twigs, and building material. Glendon Weir and Philip Dering found a significant decline in average diameter and variance as well as in quality of the fuel wood. Figure 9 shows results of a midden excavation. Both fuel wood and wood for construction show the same pattern, increasing use until the last village in #200, when use of wood for construction dramatically decreased as its use in fires increased. The environmental degradation suggested overexploitation of fuelwood at Paloma. A region-wide 100

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trend of decreasing moisture at this time has been documented by glacial cores from the Huascara´n glacier. Thus, inhabitants were forced to remove more of the shrubs from the fog oasis rather than continuing a sustainable harvest of dead twigs and branches. However, no wood from tree trunks was ever used as fuelwood at Paloma. Had the trees themselves been used for wood, the fog oasis vegetation would have quickly collapsed. This is because the trees condense the moisture from the fog that permits the lomas to bloom. In response to a dryer and more variable climate, both maritime and terrestrial resources became more intensively exploited. Changes in the lomas were consequential for water production, perhaps the major reason for abandonment. The beginning of more frequent ENSO events after 5000 BP is known from, among other evidence, changes in mollusks reported by Daniel Sandweiss, and changes in the frequency of different species of fish reported by Elizabeth Reitz. By 4700 BP, the last Paloma families had moved to the nearby river valley site of Chilca 1 where year-round water was available. The sister sites were occupied simultaneously for centuries, prefiguring some later Andean village settlement patterns.

Health, Diet, and Activities from the Skeleton and Teeeth Health

Surprisingly, despite the hygienic challenges of living in a permanent settlement, health improved over time at Paloma. Stature, one of the best indicators of childhood health, increased significantly over time at Paloma. Kate Pechenkina and her associates found through study of limb bone lengths that Paloma fishermen were taller as adults than any later peoples were. Cross-sectional growth of limb bones during childhood was always faster at Paloma than at three comparative sites, suggesting that the stature increase in adults was due to improving childhood health and diet at Paloma. Stature was significantly greater at Paloma (males 165 cm, females 155 cm) than at Real Alto (males 162 cm, females 151 cm). The inhabitants of the larger Valdivian villages probably suffered from more hygienic problems of sedentism than did Paloma. Another useful indicator of adult health is anemia, which registers first in the bones of children. Anaemia declined over time at Paloma only to become more prevalent in subsequent time periods. Periosteal lesions on bones, caused by either a treponemal agent or infection following wounds, decreased between levels #300 and #200 but increased in sites from following time periods.

ASIA, EAST/Early Villages 377 Diet

Palaeodemography

Dan Edwards and the author of this article found that dental wear decreased significantly over time at Paloma, probably as more processed small fish were eaten. The dental wear pattern of Paloma fishermen was easily distinguished from the cusp-like wear of farmers by Peer Moore-Jansen. Carious lesions, ‘cavities’, were nearly absent in the teeth of these fishermen. Lesions were more frequent at Real Alto where almost 9% of individuals had at least one, a value typical of a high carbohydrate diet. Bone chemistry confirms the dental patterns at Paloma. Stable isotopes furnished by Michael J. DeNiro are presented in Figure 10. The average suggests a diet almost exclusively from the sea. Ba/Sr elemental concentrations in bone (analysis by J. H. Burton) provide identical findings based on a different set of factors. Levels of fluoride measured by Jeremy Edward at MURR were high at Paloma, as was expected. He also showed an intriguing change in fluoride levels, with sexual dimorphism in earlier levels, to about equivalent consumption of the two genders in level 200. Gender differences in diet appear to have disappeared. In an MU thesis, Eric White found that more than 70% of the batanes were recovered in #200 despite the number of structures being approximately equal among the strata. Glendon Weir’s study of the contents of the surfaces of the batanes showed their use for both grinding plants but also small fish. Ground fish, with the meal stored in grass-lined pits, would have provided food for both men and women, especially in ENSO years when marine yields would have been lower. Apparently, the adjustment was successful. The #200 peoples show improved health. Such improved health could be translated into higher fertility and longer lives.

We estimated life expectancy from the distribution of the dead by age groups, using plausible levels of population growth rates. Fewer infant burials in #200 argue for greater investment in children, who, as discussed above, showed less stunting of growth. The lack of scars of pregnancy in the public and ilium bones of women younger than 24 years suggests that marriage was delayed, reducing fertility. High levels of cadmium in human bone samples likely reduced male fertility, perhaps most strongly in #200. Adult life expectancy increased over time at Paloma only to decrease in subsequent time periods at other sites. In Ecuador, Ubelaker also found a decline following the Preceramic period. A recent compilation of studies by Mark Cohen shows a similar decline in health and life expectancy of adults is associated with initial experiments with intensive agriculture in prehistoric peoples widely scattered around the earth.

d 15N and d 13C in bone collagen d 15N (per mil) Marine +25.0 vertebrate eaters +20.0

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Elizabeth Reitz found that the diet was one typical of fishermen, an interpretation that accords with that from the bone chemistry and dental patterns. Fish and sea lions were important components of the diet, augmented by shellfish. Remains from juvenile sea lions are found. These animals are resident in summer, whereas guanaco (ancestral to llamas), deer, and fulmar (a gull-like bird), also present, would have been attracted to the fog oasis in the winter when it blooms. The single bone from a monkey was from Atelles spp. Reitz concluded that overall, most calories were obtained from the sea. She noted a shift over time toward smaller animal species. Nevertheless, plants constituted a minor but important component of the diet. Palaeoethnobotany

Marine invertebrate eaters

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Figure 10 Human bone carbon and nitrogen isotope levels for Paloma. Data from analysis by Michael J. DeNiro; figure by Ekaterina Pechenkina.

The identification of the plant macrofossils has been completed by Deborah Pearsall following the earlier work of Glendon Weir and Philip Dering. Pearsall studied plants from over 100 storage pits and other contexts from levels #200 and #300. She found plant remains more ubiquitous in #200 than #300. Charred begonia plants were the most common edible plant in #300. Glendon Weir had found evidence that the tuberous begonia was cultivated; its masticated roots were common. Amancay (Hymenocallis amancaes), a lily, was also important. Uncharred begonia and charred bottle gourd were equally common, with rare examples of charred cotyledon pieces. There is also an unknown charred tuber/root. Gourds became less common over time. Maize was found in two areas: one was an intrusive offering (dated to more recent times), the other, a

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single cupule. One important new food plant appears in #200, Phaseolus, the common bean. Much smaller seeds appeared to be secondary to root and tuber foods in the samples collected from 1 and 0.5 mm screens, possibly because they passed through them. Human Coprolites

Study of plant and animal remains from several hundred desiccated human fecal remains was made by Glendon H. Weir and Phillip Dering. These demonstrated that grass caryopses (grass ‘fruits’ of ‘seeds’) in fact were one of the major plant foods consumed. The smaller seeds apparently passed through our fine screens. Seeds of plants other than grasses in the coprolites included chenopods (Chenopodiacaea), solanaceous (Solanacae), and composites (Compositae). Evidence of the preparation of these foods is observed in finding charcoal and fragments of stone in coprolites, perhaps from grinding. Parasitological studies of large samples of coprolites by two specialists (Karl Reinhard and Michael Kliiks) produced no ova or other indications of intestinal parasites. Fishermen may have unusually good sanitary habits. Frequent immersion in the sea would have reduced fecal transmission from person to person. At the site, we found a latrine area composed of coprolites. Some coprolites were adhering to a shell that experiments showed made an adequate substitute for toilet paper. Taken together, the coprolites, macrofossils of plants, faunal remains, and bone chemistry identify the diet as one of fishermen who were extracting as much from the fragile terrestrial environment as possible. Indicators of diet predict habitual subsistence activities necessary to produce and process food. Habitual Activities

Anna McNair studied humeral and femoral shape at Paloma (MU Honor’s Thesis). She found significant shifts over time in humeral shape. Humera were wider at the elbow in the early levels and associated with more robust muscular development. This robustness decreased over time at Paloma, a trend stronger in males than in females. This decrease is associated, surprisingly, with an increase in large grinding stones. More recently, Alexander Robling in an MU dissertation confirmed that there was a decrease in the amount of physical work at Paloma over time from studies of bone turnover rates and geometric properties of the femur. Sexual dimorphism was also seen to diminish so that in #200 women show almost as heavy development of musculature as men. Another recent MU dissertation by Mathew Rhode showed that entheses, muscle markings on bones, at Paloma

produced a pattern similar to preceramic Chilean fisher populations. Women could have been hauling nets, carrying babies, carrying shellfish the 3.5 km uphill to the village, swimming while pushing nets, or managing plants and collecting. Men would have fished, hunted larger marine prey, and dived for shellfish. Auditory osteomas, bony growths produced by exposure to cold water (‘surfer’s ear’), were restricted to males, which correspond to the pattern observed on the west coast of South America, where men and not women dived for mollusks. Dancing is implied by the widespread presence of rattles. The custom became more evident in later Initial Period with the construction of numerous sunken circular platforms. Habitual activities could be reflected in aspects of technology; however, the material technology at Paloma was a simple one.

Technology Artifacts were scarce, with nonfiber objects averaging only a few per cubic meter of excavation. Lithics

Eric J. White found no difference in the frequencies of types of laurel leaf-shaped stone points over time. However, higher-quality lithic stone points became less common. Stone points were not frequent at the Paloma villages, and, indeed, they are infrequent in fishing sites from middle and late coastal preceramic periods from Ecuador to southern Peru´. White also noticed a dramatic decline in wood polish in scrapers from #200. This finding is congruent with decrease in wood use for construction shown in Figure 9. Manos and smaller grinding stones were common. Boiling stones for cooking in gourds were sometimes found in hearths with their inferior surface caked with carbon. There was usually one batan per household. Obsidian flakes were encountered throughout the deposits, and their source was in the highlands, as discussed above. In a single pit, rocks of all the types observed at Paloma were cached together, in the house of the presumed village knapper. A few stone beads were found in other contexts. Fiber Objects

Two reports on fiber objects are available in English at the Paloma World web site. Twined mats and netted apparel were found around the head and waist of buried individuals. Apart from string and rope, these were the most common fiber objects. All of the fiber was from wild plants, except for the intrusive cotton offering dated much later.

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Of special interest is the charred simple basket in the shape of flat circular tray discussed above with S. 101 (upper right corner of Figure 7b). Its date of 5010 BP suggests that it may be one of the oldest examples of a true coiled basket known for the Western Hemisphere, which can be distinguished from earlier simple twined objects often reported as ‘basketry’ in North America.

a consumable artifact has been discussed above. Split cane was also used for fire starters and to construct wall coverings and sleeping/mortuary mats. Penguin feathers were relatively common in burials, presumably as adornments; other feathers were probably from birds that were eaten.

Summary Bone Implements

Paloma bone artifacts include points, needles, bullroarers, and fishhooks. Thirty-three bodkins, flat spatula-shaped bone objects with a perforation at the proximal end, varied in size and amount of polish. Most were found with burials. Bone spatulas, flat, polished bones lacking a perforation, were sometimes made from sea mammal bone, perhaps reflecting the scarcity of land mammal bone, which has more compact bone. We recovered pendants, punches, and fragments of barbs, as well as ‘atlatls’ or spear throwers. Awls were present. Individual tubular bone beads were flat with a wide range in size. Twenty-four beads were found as a necklace in an interment, all of which are tubular avian bones. Two bone objects were recovered that may have functioned as knives. Gourds

Bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) were found principally in burials. Most were undecorated. One fragment, from S. 36 is over 6500 years old, which is older than other reported decorated gourds. The fragment has a painted design of brown over an orange background. Gourds were fashioned into rattles, sometimes with a stick handle, worn shell fragments and pebbles from the beach, and seeds. Rattles are found in about 20 of the 201 burials and the frequent presence of gourd fragments in other burials suggests that the practice of interring rattles was actually more common. One infant burial had a complete rattle; other fragments were found in burials of children and adults of both genders. Some gourds had been broken and repaired by sewing segments back together, suggesting the maintenance of an important heritage treasure. Shell, Wood, and Feathers

Large shell implements showed abrasion from use. Shell beads, pendants, and necklaces were found. Complete and fragmentary fishhooks were recovered. Wooden stoppers or floats and a handle that may have given purchase to a fishing net were excavated. One piece of wood was used as a fire drill. Fuelwood as

Villages do not require pottery or intensive plant production to grow and prosper. Paloma fishermen cultivated some plants. Villages more focused on farming came later, as represented by Valdivian sites such as Real Alto in Ecuador. Valdivia culture persisted over a long time, whereas in central Peru´ dramatic changes in settlement pattern and monumentality of structures followed abandonment of the earliest fishing villages. Early Ecuadorian villages were larger than early Peruvian ones. The Valdivian sites are associated with larger numbers of species of domesticated plants and represent more densely settled populations, and people were less healthy as adults than were the Paloman fishermen. Findings from the Paloma Project support the celebrated hypothesis by Michael Moseley that maritime resources were the critical ones in the development of Andean civilization, at least at the level of the first permanent villages. The larger Valdivia sites support Moseley’s more recent reformulation of the hypothesis, that fishing and farming resources formed necessary parts of a dual economy. In Peru´, the large, complex monumental sites that followed Paloma date to earlier times than equivalent ones in Ecuador. Thus, early villages in Ecuador and Peru´ suggest two paths that permitted populations to grow from villages to towns. Present evidence favors the hypothesis that resources from the sea and the land were necessary for the precocious construction, between 5000 and 4000 BP, of large, monumental Peruvian sites such as Chupacigarro/Cara´l, Aspero, and El Paraı´so. Adjustment to the dryer and more variable climate encountered at the ending of the GCO may have been the stimulus for important changes in subsistence practices. Cotton, essential for construction of large nets, was domesticated after the abandonment of fog oasis sites and resettlement in river valleys. Increased farming of agricultural food products may also have been simultaneously pursued. With large cotton nets, yields of fish could have been dramatically increased over a wider variety of beach habitats. Subsistence level fishing at Paloma was replaced by fishing that produced the large surpluses necessary to tide agriculturalists and fishermen over during ENSO years when all their food crops could be lost to flood or drought and marine foods would also be scarce.

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Acknowledgments The field and laboratory work was made possible by four awards from the NSF and additional awards from the University of Missouri-Columbia that provided vital bridging support. The author especially thanks the laboratories that conducted analysis of Paloma materials through their own resources.

Prehistoric Population, pp. 150–151. Occasional Paper No. 24, Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Weir G and Dering P (1986) The lomas of Paloma, human– environment relations in a central Peruvian fog oasis: Archaeobotany and palynology. In: Matos MR (ed.) Andean Archaeology, pp. 18–44. Los Angeles: UCLA. Zeidler JA and Pearsall DM (eds.) (1994) Regional Archaeology in Northern Manabı´, Ecuador. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology, No. 8.

See also: Americas, South: Early Cultures of the Central

Andes; Northern South America; New World, Peopling of; Osteological Methods; Paleodemography; Paleopathology; Stable Isotope Analysis; Trace Element Analysis.

Relevent Website http://coas.missouri.edu – University of Missouri-Columbia, The College of Arts and Science.

Further Reading Benfer RA (1990) The Preceramic period site of Paloma, Peru: Bioindications of improving adaptation to sedentism. Latin American Antiquity 1: 284–318. Benfer RA (1999) Proyecto de excavaciones en Paloma: El Valle de Chilca, Peru´, El Perio´do Arcaico en el Peru´. Hacia una definicio´n de los orı´genes. Boletin de Arqueologia PUCP 3: 213–237. Cauchet C (1988) Early hunter-gatherers on the Peruvian coast. In: Keatinge RW (ed.) Peruvian Prehistory, pp. 41–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Damp J (1984) Architecture of an Early Valdivia village. American Antiquity 49: 573–585. DeMonocal PB (1991) Cultural responses to climate change during the Late Holocene. Science 292: 667–673. Engel F-A (1987) De las begonias al Maiz. Lima: Centro de Investigaciones de Zonas Aridas, Universidad Nacional Agraria, La Molina. Grieder T, Mendoza AB, Smith CE, Jr, and Malina RM (1988) La Galgada, Peru: APreceramic Culture in Transition. Austin: University of Texas Press. Moseley MM (2003) The Incas and Their Ancestors. London: Thames and Hudson. Pechenkina EA, Vradenburg JA, and Benfer RA (n.d.) Disease and the effects of intensive agriculture on the central coast of Peru´. In: Cohen, M (ed.) Recent Investigations into Paleopathology and the Origins of Agriculture. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Piperno DR and Pearsall DM (1998) The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics. London: Academic Press. Quilter J (1989) Life and Death at Paloma: Society and Mortuary Practices in a Preceramic Peruvian Village. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Reitz EJ (1988) Faunal remains from Paloma, an Archaic site in Peru. American Anthropologist 90: 310–322. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco M (1998) Ensayos de Historia Andina II. Lima: Institute de Estudios Peruanos. Sandweiss DH, Richardson JB, Reitz EJ, Rollins HB, and Maash KA (1996) Geoarchaeological data from Peru for a 5000 year BP onset of El Nin˜o. Science 273: 1530–1533. Shady R, Hass J, and Creamer W (2000) Dating Caral, a preceramic site in the Supe Valley of the central coast of Peru. Science 292: 723–726. Vradenburg JA, Benfer RA, and Sattenspiel L (1997) Evaluating archaeological hypotheses of population growth and decline on the central coast of Peru´. In: Paine RR (ed.) Integrating Archaeological Demography: Multidisciplinary Approaches to

Historical Archaeology Andre´s Zarankin, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Melisa A Salerno, DIPA-IMHICIHU-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary historical archaeology The archaeological study of historically documented cultures. diffusionism An anthropological theory of spread of culture stating that similarities in tools, practices, or other features between cultures result from their being spread from one culture to another rather than being arrived at independently. post-processualism A form of archaeological theory which is related to the broader development of postmodernism. urban archaeology The milieu of old and new artifacts populating the urban landscape. ethnicity A sense of being different from other groups because of cultural tradition, ancestry, national origin, history, or religion.

Introduction Historical archaeology in South America has experienced an accelerated growth since the mid-1980s, a process which was particularly intensified during the 1990s. This growth has been reflected in the creation of several projects of investigation, the appearance of specific courses in college curricula, the spread of national and international meetings, and the increasing number of papers published by different South American archaeologists in the first years of the third millennium. This article intends to offer an overview of the history and development of historical archaeology in South America. In order to accomplish this objective, we discuss – among other topics – the relationship between historical archaeology in South America and

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historical archaeology in the rest of the continent, its origins, theoretical frameworks, problems of investigation, and local achievements.

conformation at a local level, highlighting the role of agents in the definition of the practices they use to construct their identities.

Historical Archaeology in America

South America

The development of historical archaeology in South America is closely connected to the history of the discipline in the United States. Since the second half of the twentieth century, American historical archaeology defined itself as a distinct field of study oriented towards the discussion of Europeans’ past in the New World. As a consequence, it managed to take distance from prehistoric archaeology, related to anthropology and the analysis of cultural others (aboriginals). Historical archaeology in South America rapidly adopted this perspective. Historical archaeology was conceived in all manners of ways along time, generating a lot of controversy within the discipline. Some authors considered that historical archaeology represented the study of material culture associated with historical or literate periods. In the meantime, other researchers defined it as a methodology which combined the interdisciplinary use of archaeological and documentary evidence. This perception limited the specificity and autonomy of the field, transforming it into the ‘handmaiden’ of history. In recent bibliography, historical archaeology has been understood as a discipline concerned with the analysis of modernity – associated to European expansion and the consolidation of capitalism. Specifically, conformation of modern society has been explained as a result of changes involving everyday life. Ideas used to describe this social order stemmed from the analysis of nineteenth-century English colonies in North America. Finally, they were completed with the study of Georgian Order’s genealogies in England, where archaeologists sought to extend modernity’s time and space boundaries to understand its origins. Nowadays, modern society is associated with the appearance, spread, and maintenance of capitalist practices. It implies a change in relationships among individuals, as well as between individuals and things. It has been proposed that individualism, segmentation, standardization, and consumerism are key concepts to analyze transformations in practices during modernity. Following this idea, some archaeologists try to identify sets of rules which might be applied to understand material culture and lifestyles in recent past. This theoretical perspective – along with its variants – is commonly used to explain conformation of modern society in different geographical contexts. In recent years, several South American archaeologists have started to discuss the singularities of social

There have been investigations in historical archaeology since the very beginnings of professional archaeology in South America, but these projects only became systematic in the 1960s. Nevertheless, studies in historical archaeology during the 1960s and 1970s were usually restricted to excavations conducted by nonarchaeologists – such as amateurs, historians and architects. In general, their investigations looked forward to finding correlations between material and documentary data, rescuing valuable historical objects and structures, supplying information to restoration activities, or simply satisfying researchers’ personal curiosity. It was not until the 1980s that archaeology acquired a program of investigation of its own. As a consequence, it became understood as a distinct discipline, specialized in the study of material culture and interested in offering an alternative way to construct discourses about the past – considering or not the existence of written documents. On the other hand, historical archaeology enjoyed an independent status for the first time. In this way, archaeologists began to create multiple visions of recent history, which could be opposed to or different from ‘master narratives’. Historical archaeology has shown a heterogeneous development in South America. According to Pedro Funari, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay have traditionally stood out in this field of study. As a matter of fact, professionals from these three countries have written most of South American modern literature on historical archaeology. The heterogeneous development of South American historical archaeology might also be recognized in the nationality of the authors who published their papers in any of the 16 volumes of Historical Archaeology in South America, the only specialized magazine that has ever been published for the region. Historical Archaeology in South America was edited by Stanley South in 1994, 1995, and 1996 (University of South Carolina), and presented articles written by South American archaeologists in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Ninety percent of them were produced by Argentinean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian archaeologists. Pedro Funari explains this situation, pointing out that in some South American countries – such as Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and, to some extent, Venezuela – the lack of interest in historical archaeology might be closely associated with the use of archaeology as a privileged tool to build national identities based on the search of precolonial splendor.

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There are few authors – such as Pedro Funari or Gustavo Politis – concerned in explaining the development of historical archaeology in South America. But there are plenty of professionals who discuss the state of affairs of historical archaeology in particular countries – such as Tania Andrade Lima, Pedro Funari, and Marı´a Gaspar in the case of Brazil; Andre´s Zarankin and Marı´a Ximena Senatore in Argentina; Julio Sanhueza in Chile; Nelsys Fusco and Jose´ Marı´a Lo´pez Mazz in Uruguay; and Monika Therrien in Colombia.

Theoretical Frameworks in South American Historical Archaeology Problems of investigation, as well as the way in which scientists approach them, are intimately bound to the selection of theoretical frameworks. In South America, several conceptual currents have been popular along time: diffusionism, processualism, and post-processualism, among others (Table 1). Their characteristics are briefly summarized below: The main objective of diffusionist investigations was to provide spatial, chronological, and technological orderings of past cultural groups. As a consequence, archaeologists coined several concepts such as ‘phase’, ‘horizon’, ‘cultural area’, or ‘industry’ to describe them. Within a normative idea of culture, people were defined as bearers of fixed cultural characteristics. In general, identification of cultural traits in the archaeological record led to the recognition of different identity groups. Moreover, transformations in objects were explained as results of specific mechanisms which spread cultural features from

nuclear centers – where they were invented – to marginal areas. Diffusionism in historical archaeology was associated with investigations which classified findings according to biological criteria (European, aboriginal, African, or ‘mestizo’ artifacts), or ended up justifying – even in an explicit manner – European conquest through the use of concepts such as ‘acculturation’. As Charles Orser Jr. stated, diffusionist perspectives thought of archaeology as an appropriate tool to help history. In this way, numerous researchers accounted for things recovered in archaeological sites and did not propose larger discussions. It was characteristic of diffusionism to present exhaustive descriptions of artifacts and structures found in excavations. This was considered the only way to insert archaeological sites within previously defined culturehistory sequences. In the 1980s, investigations in historical archaeology turned to use different processualist models, such as Stanley South’s ‘pattern recognition’, Susan Spencer Wood’s ‘consumer choice’, or Pam Cressey and John Stephens’ ‘city-site’ approaches. On the other hand, post-processualist ideas became popular in the late 1990s – for instance, Mark Leone, Randall McGuire, and Robert Paynter’s neomarxist models, or Ann Yentsch’s proposals for the analysis of gender. There are some historical archaeologists who, despite taking into account world theoretical contributions, prefer to generate their own conceptual frameworks to deal with the conformation of local societies. In this respect, it is relevant to distinguish the efforts made by some South American researchers, such as Pedro Funari, Tania Andrade Lima, Marcos

Table 1 Development of main theoretical frameworks in South American historical archaeology Time span

Theoretical framework

Place of birth

Main idea

Some other features

1970. . .

Diffusionism

Europe

Diffusion centers

1980. . .

Processualism

USA

1990. . .

Postprocessualism

Although its origins might be found in England, historical archaeology in South America uses North American authors as references for this theoretical framework

Universal laws of behavior. One and only real past Individual actions. Multiple and subjective pasts

Diffusionism is associated with the process of European colonization (acculturation) and its justification Processualism keeps on looking for universal patterns of behavior (now inside European society) In most cases, postprocessualism has been aimed to propose critical analysis of difference and exploitation inside first world societies

It is necessary to make it clear that marks next to dates indicate coexistence of different theoretical currents along time. Nowadays, although investigations in historical archaeology generally adhere to a normative and traditional conception of archaeology, the three conceptual frameworks presented in this table coexist at the same time.

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Abuquerque, Veleda Lucena, Luis Symanski, Marı´a Ximena Senatore, Carmen Curbelo, Marcos Torres de Souza, Andre´s Zarankin, and Monika Therrien.

Subjects of Investigation South American historical archaeology has traditionally focused on several subjects of investigation, which emerged bound to different theoretical frameworks. Nowadays, historical archaeology shows a heterogeneous production, ranging from investigations interested in studying Europeans’ settlement strategies to projects involved in analyzing today’s garbage. In this section, we present an overview of South American investigations in historical archaeology, bearing in mind that most part of these studies have been conducted by Argentinean, Brazilian, and Uruguayan archaeologists. South American Colonial Archaeology

Historical archaeology has already proved its potential for the study of European settlement in America. From different perspectives and in several geographical locations, historical archaeology has been able to shed light on social, economic, ideological, and ecological aspects of the process of colonization. Archaeological analyses on the subject have usually focused on Hispanic urbanization, daily life in religious missions, colonial enclaves, and the relationships between Europeans and native populations. Urban centers The origins of historical archaeology in the American continent were associated to the study of valuable historical sites, often related to European colonization. As a consequence, first investigations on the subject – usually directed by historians, architects, and amateurs – were oriented towards the analysis of city foundations (see Urban Archaeology). In Argentina, there have been relevant antecedents of these investigations since the 1970s. Among them, it is important to take note of the archaeological project developed by Agustı´n Zapata Golla´n in the Spanish city of Santa Fe la Vieja (1573–1660). Although Zapata Golla´n was not an archaeologist, his work was pioneering and might be taken as the starting point of colonial historical archaeology in Argentina. Zapata Golla´n used archaeology as a methodology to validate historical data regarding location and identification of Santa Fe. His investigations on different aspects of the city’s daily life were published one year after his death. Many archaeological remains were recovered in excavations conducted by Zapata Golla´n. These artefacts represent the material base of the site and have been the object of several partial studies over a period of time. Particularly, Carlos Cerruti studied the origin

and characteristics of Santa Fe’s wine containers in order to become acquainted with regional production and internal channels of communication during the colonial period. Additionally, he studied the characteristics of Hispanic–aboriginal contact, taking into account the analysis of archaeological polychrome pottery. After Cerruti, other archaeological projects were conducted by Marı´a Teresa Carrara, Ne´lida de Grandis, Andre´s Zarankin, and Marı´a Ximena Senatore. Another archaeological site which was intensively excavated is Las Ruinas del Km75, usually associated with the old city of Concepcio´n del Bermejo (1585– 1632). As in the case of Santa Fe la Vieja, first works on the site were conducted by nonarchaeologists – mainly, Eldo Morresi – who started systematic investigations in the late 1960s. Buenos Aires has become a subject of intense investigations. Since the 1980s, architect Daniel Scha´velzon has excavated different areas of the city. He has published several works, describing and classifying archaeological remains, as well as discussing Buenos Aires’ past cultural life. Besides Scha´velzon, other archaeologists studied specific problems of investigation in the city, such as fauna (Mario Silveira), industry (Marcelo Weissel), architecture (Andre´s Zarankin), and pottery (Marı´a Ximena Senatore). At the present time Marı´a Ximena Senatore is analyzing different urban projects intended to integrate Patagonia with Spanish domains. Her project focuses on a comparison between European and aboriginal strategies for the use of space and contact. Her case studies are the eighteenth-century village of Floridablanca in San Julia´n, Santa Cruz, and the sixteenthcentury settlement of Nombre de Jesu´s in Cabo Vı´rgenes, Santa Cruz (Figure 1). In Brazil, several Portuguese colonial cities – which still remain inhabited – have developed their own

Figure 1 Archaeological excavations at Floridablanca (eighteenth century, Patagonia).

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archaeological projects. Among them, it is possible to take note of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, San Pablo, Recife, and Porto Alegre. For instance, Salvador – capital of the state of Bahia and first capital of Brazil – has been object of many excavations headed by Carlos Etchevarne. His investigations have been mainly interested in analyzing Bahia’s history from a material point of view. Other cities, which, due to their accelerated growth, have developed remarkable archaeological programs, are San Pablo and Porto Alegre. In San Pablo, the work of Margarida Andreatta has been prominent since 1980, when she started to conduct several rescue excavations in different areas of the city. In the case of Porto Alegre, Fernanda Tocchetto has run an interesting study on the transformations of local society, focusing on consumer choice, discard patterns, urban growth, and pottery typologies, among other subjects. Uruguay has been a pioneer in colonial urban studies. Since the 1980s, two different cities have been studied in detail; Colonia del Sacramento and Montevideo. In the case of Colonia, Nelsys Fusco has analyzed the succession of Portuguese and Spanish occupations, supplying information about the history of the city and broadening the importance of cultural tourism in the area. On the other hand, Carmen Curbelo has developed her investigations and rescue works in Montevideo and Punta del Este. In Chile, despite Omar Ortiz Troncoso and Mauricio Massone’s early investigations in colonial sites like Rey Don Felipe, studies in the field have been sporadic. It was only in the 1990s that new systematic projects, generally associated rescue archaeology (such as the widening of Santiago’s subway service or the excavations at the cemetery of Pampilla), took place. There are other case studies of colonial cities in South America. For instance, it is important to consider the investigations of Monika Therrien in Bogota´, Carlos Lo´pez and Marta Cano Echeverri in Pereira (Colombia), Ross Jamieson in Cuenca (Ecuador), and Jose´ Marı´a Cruxent in Cubagua (the most ancient colonial city of Venezuela). Jesuitical missions Investigations on Jesuitical missions (particularly, in the area surrounding the limits of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil) date back to exploratory trips headed by Argentinean researcher Juan Bautista Ambrosetti in the early years of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in spite of their magnificence and importance, missions were not considered by archaeological projects until the 1980s. At that time, Beatriz Rovira conducted her PhD project applying analytical models proposed by Stanley South and Bernard Fontana to the study of

Jesuitical villages. She focused her work on Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Candelaria Mission. Her goal was to study the expansion of European societies over guarani populations. As a conclusion, she proposed the existence of a ‘village despotic or communitarian despotic’ mode of production in the missions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the 1980s, Brazil developed new archaeological projects in Jesuitical villages. In this way, Arno Kern offered an overview of the historical, ethnographical, and cultural nature of guarani groups who lived in reductions. At the present time several archaeologists are working in the missions, taking part in restoration activities or ethno-archaeological investigations. Colonial Archaeology: Other Subjects

Archaeology of ethnicity Since the expansion of post-processual theoretical frameworks, the discipline started to discuss the role of social minorities in history. We refer to ethnic, age, and gender groups who were not considered by official narratives. In this context, the analysis of African American populations became relevant in South American historical archaeology. Without the shadow of a doubt, the most important project developed on the subject was the study of Palmares’ Quilombo (Alagoas, Brazil), which constituted a long-lasting example of slave resistance in the American continent. This project was directed by Pedro Funari, Charles Orser, Jr., and Michael Rowlands during the 1990s. The results obtained by these professionals allowed them to discuss new problems in South American Historical Archaeology, such as identity, material culture (understood as an active element in the construction and negotiation of identities), public archaeology, and social use of the past. Camila Agostini was one of the first archaeologists to study African pipe collections excavated in the region of Vassouras (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), as well as the permanence of African cultural traditions in present Brazilian society. Another researcher interested in studying African American groups – in this case, in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina – was architect Daniel Scha´velzon. In his book Buenos Aires Negra, he analyzed Buenos Aires’ archaeological collections in order to distinguish a characteristic African ‘type’ of artifacts. He also took note of the importance of African American ethnic groups – nowadays, almost invisible – in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. On the other hand, Terrance Weik worked with the idea of ‘African diaspora’ in Latin America. In his opinion, archaeological research focused on maroon and slave societies has contributed to broaden the understanding of complex processes of cultural production.

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Interest in ethnicity does not exclusively refer to African American groups, but to diverse postcontact identities, including relationships between conquerors and conquered societies, usually analyzed by an ‘archaeology of contact’. In general, most studies conducted in colonial urban centers and religious missions consider these problems of investigation. Nevertheless, there are other projects which deal with contact at a regional level, such as Rafael Gon˜i’s studies in Neuque´n (Argentina), Alicia Tapia’s in la Pampa (Argentina), Franz Scaramelli and Kay Tarble’s in Orinoco (Venezuela), among many others. In recent years, some archaeologists adopted an ethno-historical perspective to analyze ethnic processes of integration and transformation. These investigations often use written documents as their most important source of evidence, considering material culture as a mere correlate of hypothesis generated by other media. Archaeology of mining sites Investigations in historical mining sites have traditionally discussed strategies of economic exploitation – including extractive techniques or site organization – and, on rare occasions, ideological and social aspects of workers’ daily life. Nowadays, archaeology of mining sites is attracting archaeologists’ attention more than ever. In Brazil, investigations on the subject have mainly focused on a series of structures known as ‘encanados’, which consist of stone alignments used during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to divert water courses in search of gold. Some years ago, Marcos Torres de Souza developed an archaeological project to analyze the social construction of space in an urban mining center in Goia´s. At present, Carlos Magno Guimara˜es and the members of his team are studying several systems of mining exploitation in the area of Minas Gerais. Their objective is to discuss production and daily life in colonial mining communities. One of the first antecedents of mining archaeology in Argentina was Humberto Lagiglia’s work on colonial mineral exploitation in Mendoza. At present, Vı´ctor Durand is studying nineteenth-century mineral production in the same area. In the case of Chile, Bente Bittmann has headed the only archaeological study concerned with analyzing the nitrate plants which flourished throughout Atacama Desert from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Archaeology of wine production This subject was mainly taken into account by Prudente Rice in Peruvian sites. Wine cellars, kilns, and other structures were excavated to study wine production during Spanish colonial period. Some time before Rice’s investigations, another group of American archaeologists, including

Collin Beck, Eric Deeds, Shelia Pozorski, and Thomas Pozorsky studied traffic routes in the region. Archaeology of fortifications The colonial period might be characterized by the need to protect conquered territories from aboriginal or other European groups. As a consequence, thousands of fortifications were built along coastlines with the aim of protecting newly founded cities. Other forts, even though in lower proportions numerically, were established in the continent. Many of these structures were excavated, and some of them were restored to be used as tourist attractions. Marcos Albuquerque is probably the most prominent South American archaeologist in this field of study. Since the 1970s, this archaeologist and a group of collaborators have excavated several fortifications in the northeastern area of Brazil. Archaeology of materials In order to study a specific period or social group from an archaeological perspective, it is important to know and identify its cultural remains. Having this objective in mind, archaeologists created several typologies and classifications, which, in the case of colonial artifacts, took into account the information given by different kinds of written documents (from inventories to paintings or photographs). Until the end of the 1980s, Kathleen Deagan, John Goggin, and Robert Lister and Florence Lister’s works were used as the basic bibliography for the classification of archaeological materials in South America. After the development of several historical projects in the region, local classifications of archaeological remains were produced by different researches, such as Daniel Scha´velzon, Marcos Albuquerque, Fernanda Tocchetto, and Monika Therrien. On the other hand, hundreds of papers were published with the results of the analyses performed on specific types of materials – mainly glass, china, and metal (Figure 2). Archaeology of South American Modern Society

In this section, we discuss different problems of investigation regarding the construction of modern societies and national states in the area. Among them, we consider the expansion of country boundaries towards the end of the nineteenth century, the appearance and consolidation of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, industrial archaeology, twentiethcentury archaeology, and archaeology of repression. Since the 1990s, and generally under the postprocessualist umbrella, archaeology of ‘modern society’ has been one of the topics that has attracted more attention among researchers.

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Figure 2 Nineteenth-century whiteware recovered from archaeological excavations in Buenos Aires.

Figure 3 Archaeological excavations at ‘Club Atle´tico’ clandestine center of detention (Buenos Aires).

Archaeology of discourses, practices, and identities Without social identity there is no society. As a consequence, to understand modern society it becomes necessary to have an idea of the changes experienced in the use of objects and the construction of new identities – including ethnicity, status, gender, and age – in different times and spaces. These transformations express new hierarchies and power relationships. Interest in material culture and identity forces archaeologists to develop investigations concerned with discussing the singularities of local contexts within the process of capitalist expansion. It also makes it possible to deconstruct macro-identities generated by hegemonic discourses, meaning white occidental discourses, rescuing the multiple identities on which modern South American society was built and still works. One of the most outstanding studies within this theoretical framework is currently conducted by Tania Andrade Lima. This archaeologist analyzed the conformation of bourgeoisie and gender relationships during nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, as well as food consumption, hygiene, and mortuary practices. Other investigations which deserve to be mentioned are conducted by Fernanda Tocchetto, who studies Porto Alegre’s society; Claudia Plens, who takes into account the organization of space in San Pablo’s nineteenth-century workers’ villages; Monika Therrien, who considers the structuring of consume in Bogota´; Andre´s Zarankin, who analyzes transformations in domestic and scholar architecture in Buenos Aires; and Melisa Salerno, who discusses the diversity of dress practices in modern society.

researchers is the expansion of national states’ internal boundaries during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Argentina, several forts have been excavated with the aim of understanding conquer strategies over aboriginal populations and their territories, as well as ethnic relationships between aboriginals and white groups. For instance, we can mention Rafael Gon˜i’s investigations in Fuerte Blancagrande (Buenos Aires) and Facundo Go´mez Romero’s in Fortı´n Min˜ana (Buenos Aires).

Archaeology of the expansion of national boundaries Another subject which is gaining importance among

Archaeology of repression Archaeology in South America has proved its political commitment with human rights causes. Particularly, it has supplied tools for the study and elucidation of dictatorships’ consequences in the region. The Equipo Argentino de Antropologı´a Foresense (EAAF) gives us a clear example. Excavating common graves in cemeteries and army bases (not only in Argentina, but also in several countries of the continent) it was able to shed light on the killing of thousands of people during military regimes, giving back the remains to their families. At present, different archaeological projects are excavating clandestine centers of detention (Figures 3 and 4). With that aim, they seek to construct a ‘material memory’ of genocide, analyze repressive strategies expressed in spatial organization, and study unnoticed practices of resistance. Underwater archaeology It is worth noting the development of underwater archaeology (with a historical orientation) in South America. It was not until the 1990s that this field became a serious part of archaeology in some South American countries. Today, two particular projects stand out for their capacity and work. They are directed by Dolores

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Figure 4 Picture painted by survivors at an archaeologically excavated clandestine center of detention.

Elkin (Argentina) and Gilson Rambelli (Brazil). These researchers and their collaborators have excavated dozens of shipwrecks from different time periods, offering valuable information on consumption, goods transport, ships’ traffic, and sailors’ daily life.

Funari P and Zarankin A (eds.) (2004) Arqueologı´a Histo´rica en Ame´rica del Sur: los desafı´os del siglo XXI. Bogota: Uniandes. Funari P, Zarankin A and Stovel E (eds.) (2005) Global Archaeological Theory: Contextual Voices and Contemporary Thoughts. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Funari P and Zarankin A (eds.) (2006) Arqueologı´a de la Represio´n y la Resistencia en Ame´rica Latina en la Era de las Dictaduras (De´cadas de 1960–1980). Co´rdoba: Brujas. Scha´velzon D (2000) The Historical Archaeology of Buenos Aires: A City at the End of the World. New York: Kluwer. Tocchetto F, Oliveira A, Cappelletti A, Symanski L, and Ozo´rio S (2001) A Faianc¸a Fina em Porto Alegre: Vestı´gios Arqueolo´gicos de uma Cidade. Porto Alegre: Unidade/SMC. Zanettini P (2002) Arqueologia e Reconstituic¸a˜o Monumental do Parque Estadual de Canudos. Salvador: Centro Euclydes da Cunha. Zarankin A and Senatore M (eds.) (2002) Arqueologia da Sociedade Moderna na Ame´rica do Sul. Buenos Aires: Del Tridente.

Inca Archaeology Michael A Malpass, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Nowadays, South American historical archaeology is fully integrated with the investigation agenda of the region. As a matter of fact, almost every meeting in archaeology offers the opportunity to attend a symposium on historical archaeology. On the other hand, historical production has been intensified and archaeologists have been able to spread their investigations out from the continent. In spite of these achievements, South American historical archaeology is still searching for its own identity. Particularly, it is trying to transform itself into a tool of social change, which might be able to construct a critical history of the exploitation and poverty of the region. See also: Americas, Central: Historical Archaeology in Mexico; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; Methods; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Urban Archaeology.

Further Reading Albuquerque M and Lucena V (1988) Forte Real do Bom Jesu´s: Resgate Arqueologico de um Sitio Histo´rico. Recife: CEPE. Andrade Lima T (1993) Arqueologia Histo´rica no Brasil: Balanc¸o Bibliogra´fico (1960–1991). Anais do Museu Paulista: Histo´ria e Cultura Material, Nova Serie 1: 225–262. Funari P (1997) Archaeology, history and historical archaeology in South America. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1: 137–148.

Glossary Acllacunas Conquered women who worked full time for the Incas doing a variety of domestic and/or religious activities. Ayllu The basic political unit of pre-Inca and Inca life, these were essentially extended family groups but they could adopt non-related members, giving individual families more variation and security of the land that they farmed. Chasquis (or chaskis) Message carriers who relayed information from anywhere in the Incan empire. Huaca A sacred place in the landscape. M’ita Obligatory labor service owed the Incas by their conquered people. Mitima A person separated from her/his place of birth, typically a colonist moved by the Incas for economic or political reasons. Panaca A corporate group consisting of a dead king, his wives and descendants, exept for the son who succeeded him as king. Quipu (or khipu) Recording devices used in the Inca Empire and its predecessor societies in the Andean region. A quipu usually consists of colored spun and plied thread from llama or alpaca hair or cotton cords with numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base 10 positional system.

Introduction Environments

The Incas were the last and greatest civilization to exist in South America before the arrival of European conquerors in the sixteenth century. They both drew on institutions of the existing cultures that they conquered and developed their own unique practices

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that allowed them to create the most extensive empire in the New World. Their rule extended from the modern border between Ecuador and Colombia to south central Chile, including large segments of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northwest Argentina, and Chile (see Figure 1). To appreciate the Inca achievement in conquering this vast area, one has to note that western South America includes many distinct environments, from coastal deserts to tropical forests. These environments can be grouped into three major types, highland, arid coast, and tropical forest. The highland is a broad term for the regions that lie above 1000 m. For much of central Peru, the heartland of the Inca empire, the Andes mountains run in north–south trending chains, with deep valleys separating the high peaks of the chains. Altitudinal variation can be extreme, with the bottoms of the valleys lying at altitudes of around 1500 m while the adjacent peaks are well above 6500 m. Rainfall occurs during the southern hemisphere summer, between October and May though the number of months and quantity of rain is variable from north to south. During the austral winter, skies are sunny, but night temperatures may drop below zero, especially in the higher altitudes. Because of the proximity of the area to the equator, day temperatures can still reach relatively high levels, making the daily temperature variation in the winter quite high. One distinctive part of the highland zone is the region known as the Altiplano, a high, flat region that lies in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, centered on Lake Titicaca. This entire region lies near or above 4000 m, so is above the tree line, making it a vast grassland. The region is near the limits of plant agriculture, but it is ideal for the herding of ‘camelids’, llamas and alpacas. The arid coast extends along the western margin of South America from the Peru–Ecuador border to south central Chile, and from sea level to roughly an altitude of 1000 m. This zone is wide in far northern Peru, narrows considerably through central Peru, and then broadens out again in southern Peru and northern Chile. The Atacama Desert in the latter region is the world’s driest, with less than 10 mm of precipitation falling yearly. Cutting across this arid region is a series of rivers that have their sources in the western cordillera of the Andes. In central Peru, these rivers are approximately 25–30 km apart, but the intervalley distance widens in both far northern Peru and in Chile. The rivers are also much more deeply incised in southern Peru and Chile, restricting agriculture to a narrow strip on either side of the rivers. Rainfall does not typically fall in the arid coastal zone. During the winter, fogs come in over the coast

from the ocean, blanketing the region below 800 m. During the summer, the warmer coast causes the cool onshore moisture to rise against the western slopes of the Andes. Because rain originates in eastern South America, the Andes catch most of the rain before it can reach the western coast, which also contributes to the latter’s aridity. The third environmental zone is the tropical rainforest. This region extends along the eastern flanks of the Andes from Ecuador to Bolivia. The rainforest proper lies below 300 m in altitude, but the zone that extends upward from that altitude to around 1500 m is called ‘montan˜a’, a thickly forested region. High year-round temperatures and summer rainfall make this region one with very high biological diversity. People

The societies that occupied these three environments were as varied as the environments. There were simple fishing communities in the Lake Titicaca area of southern Peru, and powerful state-level societies such as the Chimu of the north coast of Peru. These represent the extremes, and in most areas, both the early Spanish documents and archaeological work done indicate that societies were organized into groups of villages under the control of a powerful chief or chiefs. Some of these could be quite large, such as the Colla and Lupaca of the Altiplano, while most were considerably smaller. Coastal communities of northern and central Peru appear to have been at the higher end of the complexity scale during the period just prior to Inca expansion. As noted above, the Chimu was an empire that stretched from northern Peru to the central coast, near modern Lima. On the central coast, the Chincha society developed a hierarchical organization that was based on highly specialized occupations. In contrast, the societies of southern Peru and Chile were small and lacked significant political integration. Chronology

The period of Inca expansion occurred just prior to the appearance of Spanish explorers along the western coast. The generally stated dates for the empire are from CE 1428–1532. These dates are from the Inca king list that was recorded by Spanish officials after their conquest of the Incas. They represent a best guess at the beginning of Inca expansion, as the Incas did not keep track of a person’s age. Archaeological work in recent decades suggests the conquests began earlier than this, but perhaps decades, not centuries, earlier. All evidence points to a relatively rapid expansion.

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In the most commonly used central Andean chronological scheme, the period of Inca expansion is called the Late Horizon. A horizon is a period when a large area displays evidence of a common influence, be it a religion or conquest. The Late Horizon succeeds the Late Intermediate Period, the time when there was regional development of local polities but little large-scale integration. This period dates between CE 1000–1428.

Sources on the Inca Ethnohistory

No pre-Hispanic culture in South America, including the Incas, developed a writing system, so there are no indigenous records of what life was like prior to the arrival of Europeans. When the Spaniards arrived along the coast of South America in CE 1532, the Inca empire was at its largest extent, though in the throes of a civil war between two half-brothers (see below). During and after their conquest of the Incas, Spanish officials and priests began to record information about the Incas, both through observations and interviews with surviving Inca individuals. The important point about this is that the history that was recorded was the Inca version, and that of the dominant faction of the Incas. There are relatively few documents that deal with non-Incas, although as time wore on, litigation brought by non-Incas began to show up in court records. In addition, there are some chronicles that discuss what life was like before the Incas came. Still, what we know from these early Spanish documents is one version, and one that was an oral tradition as well. When Inca society is described below, it is well that the reader remembers that this is a skewed view; if a history had been written by a conquered people, or a member of the lower social groups, it might have looked very different (see Americas, South: Inca Ethnohistory). Another drawback to using ethnohistorical documents is the limitations of the writers. Spanish officials were writing about a culture that was very foreign to them, and they described it in terms that they understood from their own experiences. They also chose to write about those aspects of the Inca society that were important to them, like economic activities, politics, and religion. Daily life and material culture were less important. Spanish writers could also be opinionated, and take the sides of certain factions of the Inca, a point noted by recent authors on the Incas. Still, these documents provide a wealth of information that is not available about the earlier cultures, despite the cautions needed in taking them as the truth. D’Altroy provides a useful guide to the best of the sources on the Inca.

Archaeology

A complementary source of information on the Incas is the archaeological record. Archaeology can provide information about those aspects of culture that ethnohistorians neglect. What kinds of tools, houses, settlements, items of personal adornment that cultures used are the principal data of archaeology. Less accessible are things like religious beliefs, social structure, marriage patterns, and language. As is evident in other articles in this encyclopedia, the archaeological record has its own drawbacks, the most obvious being that the understanding we gain from it about past cultures is fundamentally one of interpretation. Scholars can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. Much of this is due to the incompleteness of the record, but some is also due to the viewpoint of the archaeologist. Archaeology provides a good test of the ethnohistorical record. The book entitled Provincial Inca. Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Assessment of the Impact of the Inca State provides several case studies of how the two sources of information used together provide a better understanding of the nature of the Inca impact on its vassal polities than either source individually.

Historical Overview of the Inca Expansion Early Inca History

Most early Spanish chroniclers agree that the Inca expansion occurred during the reigns of three Inca kings: Pachakuti Inca Yupanki, Thupa Inca Yupanki, and Wayna Qhapaq, kings 9, 10, and 11 on the conventional king list. (Inca names are spelled using Quechua orthography, while other terms use more traditional Spanish orthography.) It is with the reign of Pachakuti, designated as occurring around CE 1428, that the empire is said to begin. Their exploits will be recounted later. What is much less certain is what happened prior to this time, and in fact what the origins of the Inca as a distinct political and ethnic entity were. Inca oral traditions state that the Incas were founded by the first king, Manqo Qhapaq, who emerged from a cave in the town of Pacariqtambo along with his three brothers and their wives, who, in some accounts, were also sisters. They traveled north to find a place to settle along with other people who came out of adjacent caves. When a golden rod was flung into the air and embedded itself deep in the ground, the Incas knew they had found their new home. They proceeded to displace the inhabitants of the region, and set up their capital of Cuzco. The history of the next seven kings is one of local affairs,

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often mentioning conflicts with groups nearby. Contradictory reports in different chroniclers’ accounts indicate that the actual triumphs and defeats that occurred for these early Incas may never be known. It is precisely at this point that archaeology becomes useful. Two major pottery styles, Imperial Inca and Killke, or pre-Inca, are associated with sites in the Cuzco region. The former was associated with the last four Inca kings, beginning with Pachakuti. The Killke was said to date earlier, though it was only later after radiocarbon dating was invented that the dates of approximately CE 1000 for this style were assigned. The general idea was that the Killke style was associated with the first eight kings, and the imperial style with the later kings. Archaeological research by Brian Bauer and Alan Covey in the Cuzco Valley and regions to the north and south has advanced our understanding of early Inca political history beyond the Spanish documents. In the Cuzco valley during the Late Intermediate Period, there are a few much larger settlements among the smaller ones, indicating a developed political landscape. In addition, the sites in the vicinity of Cuzco are located on low hills or in the valley itself, suggesting little concern for defense. Outside the Cuzco Valley, Bauer and Covey’s work indicates that some regions, like Paruro, south of Cuzco, were incorporated early, without any evidence of conflict. Sites are not located in defensible positions, nor is there evidence of a marked change from pre-Inca to Inca times. Other areas, like the region of the Quilliscaches to the northwest, apparently fought the Incas until they were subjugated. Here, fortified sites are located on high ridge tops for defense. Taken together, the archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence argues for an earlier political development of the Killke people around Cuzco. The conclusion of these researchers is that the Incas used different strategies of coercion, alliance building, and marriage exchange to consolidate the region around Cuzco before they began their imperial expansion outwards. The lessons they learned set the stage for the imperial expansions of the fifteenth, or perhaps late fourteenth, century. The Inca Expansion

Most sources on the Incas suggest that a critical battle fought at the capital of Cuzco between the Incas and their powerful neighbors from the west, the Chanka, was the critical point that set the Incas on the road to expansion. In this battle, Wiraqocha Inca and other lords had abandoned Cuzco in the face of the Chanka approach, and it was the prince Inca Yupanki who rallied support to drive the Chankas away. After the

battle, Inca Yupanki took the political power from his father and also the new name Pachakuti Inca Yupanki. Upon securing the throne, Pachakuti traveled south to secure the lands around Lake Titicaca, no doubt to prevent an attack from the powerful groups who lived there. Some sources suggest alliances with the groups in this region were already made by Wiraqocha Inca, in which case, it is possible that Pachakuti formalized the alliances. Others state that Pachakuti conquered them. He then conquered other groups farther south and east, before returning to Cuzco. Subsequently, Pachakuti and his generals conquered north along the spine of the Andes, bringing the agricultural core of the central Andes into the empire. Sometime during this period, the mighty Chimu were defeated, and much of the central and north coasts were brought into the empire. At some point the chroniclers state that he turned the armies’ controls over to his designated heir, Thupa Inca, and returned to reorganize the capital of Cuzco. Upon his father’s death, Thupa Inca assumed the ‘fringe’ (a tassel worn on the forehead as symbol of the kingship) around CE 1470, and continued the expansion north with his generals into Ecuador, founding a second capital at Tumipampa. Around the time of his father’s death, Thupa began a series of expeditions into the eastern lowlands that generally were unsuccessful, due to the inhabitants’ habits of not facing the Inca armies head on, but by fighting and fleeing into the jungle. During one of these, the Altiplano groups staged a major rebellion, which brought Thupa Inca out of the jungle to face the threat. Over a series of campaigns and many years, the Qolla and Lupaka were defeated. Thupa then continued the conquests southward, annexing much of southeastern Bolivia and northwestern Argentina, then crossing over the Andes into Chile. The southward expansion stopped at the Maule River, either due to Thupa Inca’s desire to return to Cuzco after several years’ absence or sufficient resistance from groups south of the river. Much of the central and northern parts of Chile were conquered on the trip north, either by Thupa himself or his generals. Whether the far south coast of Peru and far northwestern Chile fell at this time or some other is not certain. There are relatively few ethnohistorical documents that deal with this region, and the archaeology is likewise sparse. Sometime during the final decade of the fifteenth century, Thupa Inca died and his heir, Wayna Qhapaq, succeeded him. This eleventh king spent most of his rule in the northern provinces, first subduing the fiercely resistant Chachapoyas of the northern Peruvian montan˜a, and then fighting the groups

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of central and northern Ecuador. It took him decades to move the northern border to its final location near modern Colombia. Sometime around CE 1528, he contracted a virulent disease, probably an introduced European one that had moved down into South America from Mexico, and died, along with his designated heir. This set up a war of succession between two rivals to the fringe, to be discussed in the final section. Basic military gear consisted of spears, spear throwers, shields, slings, and war clubs. Bows and arrows, while known, were apparently not used in most instances. Andean warfare was mainly fought by hand-to-hand combat, so the group with the largest army was likely to emerge victorious. After a certain time, the Inca almost certainly could field a very large number of warriors, enough to tip the scale in their favor. They also had a series of excellent generals to lead their armies, and the chronicles are full of the stories of how these generals won battles through skillful strategies, trickery, and other means. The Inca also practiced a carrot-and-stick approach to conquest. They would send emissaries into regions to be annexed, offering the terms of subjugation. The local groups could either submit or be conquered, and it is apparent that in some circumstances, diplomacy won the day. The other factor that allowed the Incas to achieve their imperial success was their effective administrative system. It is one thing to conquer a large and powerful political enemy; it is quite another to keep that enemy subjugated and doing the activities you demand of them. The system to be described below, whose development is attributed to Pachakuti Inka, apparently was largely successful in this goal, though rebellions and resistance were frequent.

The Incas of the Early Sixteenth Century The following sections are a composite reconstruction of the way the Inca empire existed at its height. Due to the large amount of archaeological work done on Inca occupations in their provinces, variation in Inca practices can be identified. It is now clear that the monolithic view of the Inca as having a one-sizefits-all imperial rule is incorrect. The Incas tailored their ideal model of statecraft to the particular circumstances of individual conquered ethnicities. Still, discussing the model as it has been generated from the ethnohistorical records is useful as a starting point. Social Structure

The basic unit of Inca society and most others that they conquered was the household. This was a residential unit that lived together, and typically consisted of a

nuclear family and unmarried adults. Households belonged to ‘ayllus’, groups of families that shared a common ancestor and place of origin, and often shared labor in subsistence activities. Ayllus were typically grouped into two parts, in Quechua, the language of the Incas, called ‘hanan’ (upper) and ‘hurin’ (lower). These divisions were largely for ritual purposes, though they also allowed larger groups within a community to participate and divide labor equitably, such as to clean out an irrigation canal or reservoir. For the Incas of the Cuzco region, social structure and status were based on the relationship to the founding kings. Each king founded a new ayllu that included the king, his wives, and their children, then subsequently, all their children’s children, etc. The former king’s ayllu became a panaca, a kind of corporate group charged with taking care of the king’s mummy and all his estates and possessions. This occurred because the kings were semi-divine, so required their material goods even after death. The ten royal panaca, each with its king’s mummy, were the highest elite in Inca society. Below the ten royal panaca were ten non-royal ayllus, which were said by some chroniclers to be the descendants of the people who accompanied Manqo Qhapaq from Pacariqtambo to Cuzco. They enjoyed the status of being elites in Inca society, which allowed them certain privileges not available to commoners. A final elite group in Inca society consisted of the Incas by Privilege. These were ayllus of ethnic groups who lived in the vicinity of Cuzco, and had been drawn into the Incas’ sphere of influence early on. They were treated as Inca nobility, and were therefore able to serve in specific posts in the empire, which is one possible reason for their elevation to Inca status (see below). Below the Inca elites were a level of conquered leaders, called ‘curacas’, who served posts in the Inca political hierarchy. They had duties that were related to the numbers of households under their command, but the more powerful ones had a status that could rank nearly as high as an Inca by Privilege. They could own land, have servants and wear particular kinds of high status clothing. Finally, at the bottom of the social hierarchy were the commoners, the great mass of conquered people with no political leadership positions. Political Structure

The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the Four Parts Together. The empire was divided into four parts, Chinchaysuyu, the northern part, Collasuyu, the southern part, and Antisuyu and Cuntisuyu, the eastern and western parts, respectively (Figure 1). As can be seen, the parts were highly unequal, both in terms of geographic area and population. The capital

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Figure 1 Map of Inca empire at its greatest extent, with four divisions (suyus) included.

was Cuzco, the navel of the universe, located at the intersection of the four parts. Within each suyu, there was a series of provinces, each corresponding roughly to the territory of a conquered group. However, the Inca used a decimal system of administration, and each province was supposed to have either 20 000 or 30 000 households. If a conquered ethnicity had that number, they could form a single province. If it were smaller, it might be lumped with other small ethnicities to make a province; if it were larger, it could be broken into more than one province. Administratively, the political hierarchy was also organized in decimal units. At the top was the king, the ruler of the entire empire. Below him were four ‘apos’, or suyu heads. Each province had a governor, or ‘tocricoq’. Below the governor were heads of different decimal units of households, in descending order of

10 000, 5000, 1000, 500, 100, 50, and 10. These were the curacas mentioned in the previous section. It is in the administrative hierarchy that the Incas combined social and political aspects. The curacas were hereditary leaders who served as the decimal official for the appropriate sized number of households that he had ruled before the Inca conquest, if possible. The most able son of a curaca followed his father in that role. However, this only applied to the curacas; the apos were typically close relatives of the king, brothers or uncles, and this was the one position that was not hereditary. Because the intrigues surrounding the designation of a new heir were considerable, the king needed apos who he knew he could trust. Since the descendants of previous kings’ apos might be in opposing factions, this position had to be one made by appointment. Governors were typically of the Inca class and were appointed at first, but then the position became hereditary. The large number of political officials that were required by this administrative system suggest the reason for the inclusion of local leaders: there simply were not enough capable members of the Inca elite to fill all the positions. With approximately 80 provinces in the empire, this would have meant thousands of individuals were needed. This might also indicate a rationale for the Inca by Privilege group, to help fill the higher levels of the bureaucracy with loyal members of the Inca elite. The inclusion of local lords was also an effective means to rule, because it meant a local, familiar leader would be in charge of fulfilling the responsibilities of the empire. Local leaders were required to learn Quechua, and their sons, who would inherit their positions, were taken to Cuzco for training in imperial policies, including Quechua, quipu use (see below) and other duties. When their fathers died, the Incas returned new leaders who had better experience and skills to do the empire’s bidding. Economic Structure

D’Altroy and Earle discuss two kinds of finance systems that were employed by the Incas, staple finance and wealth finance. The former involves the production of food and basic services that allow the empire to maintain itself. The latter refers to special kinds of goods, luxury items mostly, that are restricted to the elite segments of society. Understanding the different ways these two financial systems operated is a key to comprehending the Incas’ success at empire building. Upon the conquest of a group, the land was divided into three parts, one for the use of the state, one for the Inca religion and one remained for the use of the local population. Camelid herds were divided

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similarly. It is likely that in many cases this policy was implemented slowly, by using the local population to increase productivity through the construction of new fields and irrigation systems. One part of the conquered people’s responsibility to the Incas was to work the fields of the state and religion first, assuring that the productivity required by the empire was fulfilled. Collectively, this staple finance production is often called an agricultural tax on the conquered people, though it could also be called tribute. Another part of the responsibility owed to the Incas was labor, an obligatory amount that was called ‘m’ita’. Every household owed the Incas m’ita every year: this was always done in rotation, and directed through the local curaca. What the person did depended on the needs of the empire and the skills of the individual. Much m’ita was fulfilled by simply delivering food from its point of origin to an Inca administrative center. Many men served their m’ita in the army, and it was this system that allowed the Incas to field the large military that achieved success in warfare. Other jobs included construction worker, wood collector, potter, toolmaker as well as many other occupations. All households were required to provide one piece of clothing to the empire as well. This cloth was used by the army and other state officials. An important feature of m’ita was that a person simply showed up to do the required work. All the necessary materials and tools were provided by the state, and food and drink were provided as well. Thus, no one was required to provide anything of her/his own. When one’s rotation of work was done, one returned home and was replaced by someone else. While much work was locally done, other activities, such as warfare, might require a person to be gone for long periods. To reduce the negative effect this might have on agricultural productivity, other community members were required to do the fieldwork of m’ita laborers. All of the above refers to the staple finance of the empire. Wealth finance was conducted in a different way. Luxury items, such as jewelry, fine cloth, high quality pottery, and gold and silver objects, were produced in workshops controlled by the Incas. Many of these were in Inca administrative centers, built along the Inca highway as service centers for the empire. The best craftspeople were taken to Cuzco to work directly for the Inca elite of the capital. Regarding craft production, most crafts were produced either in the households of conquered people, or in the administrative centers. There were some specialized communities where everyone worked in one craft, such as the weaving center at Milliraya northwest of Lake Titicaca. Crafts were generally

standardized, both in forms and decorations. Cloth was the most important craft, and three different qualities were made. Decorations included geometric designs, and checkerboard patterns on the finest grade. Pottery had several basic forms, among them the ‘aryballos’, or storage vessel; plates with duck heads and tails, for eating; and beakers for drinking. Designs were largely geometric, as with the textiles, including diamonds and triangles, the fern or feather motif, and bands of decoration separated by large open zones of color. Silver and gold metallurgy was mostly for jewelry and eating utensils, such as plates and cups. Small silver and gold llama figurines were often included in important burials (see below). Copper and bronze were also used, the latter for tools. All of this economic activity generated enormous amounts of information. In the absence of a writing system, the Incas used a device known as a ‘quipu’ to maintain their records. A quipu is a system of knotted strings that hang from a central cord. The location of the knots, the number of knots and the color of the string all provided information about what was being tracked and where it was from. Special individuals, called ‘quipu camayoqs’, were in charge of this important activity. Special Categories of People

Both staple and wealth finance required the development of specialized groups of individuals by the state, groups who were full-time workers, not m’ita laborers. The quipu camayoqs were one of these groups. ‘Yanacuna’ were a special group of individuals who were attendants to the Inca elite. These people were not just servants, but could be given positions of responsibility as well. They were recruited from the ranks of conquered people, though using what criteria is unknown. A particularly rebellious group, the Chachapoyas of northern Peru, were often used as yanacunas by the Incas, suggesting it was a way of breaking down ethnic loyalty. A group of women were selected from among conquered peoples at a young age to serve as ‘acllacuna’. The women did a variety of tasks for the Incas, including food and beer preparation, spinning and weaving of fine cloth and even entertainment. They were schooled in special sectors of administrative centers, and also functioned in religious activities. Acllacuna could also be given as wives to officials as rewards for service well done. A final special group of workers for the Inca state was the ‘mitimaes’. These were people living away from their place of birth. The Inca moved groups around their empire, both for economic and political reasons. If a region was underutilized for food

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production, mitimaes might be brought in to increase it. Villages that were rebellious could be moved across the empire to separate them from their ancestral homes, religious places and neighbors. Such mitimaes would also serve economic purposes, generally agricultural work. Mitimaes were not required to do m’ita labor. Inca Infrastructure

A successful empire must facilitate communications and logistical support for its armies and outposts, and provisions for all its subjects. This requires both food and material to be provided along the main lines of travel. As the empire expanded, the staple and wealth finance systems had to be planned and developed. Like the Romans and other Old World civilizations, the Incas created a large road system, which at its height included over 40 000 km of marked roadway. The road system actually consisted of two main trunks, a highland one and a coastal one (Figure 2). Connecting roads linked the two across the Andes from north to south. In swampy regions, the roadbed was elevated by infilling with rocks and soil. Chasms formed by rivers were crossed with suspension bridges, and the road rose up the mountainsides with wellplaced stone steps. Along the coast where there were fewer obstacles and the terrain was more level, the road might have markers only indicating the direction of the road between river valleys, with more clearly marked entrances and exits from the valleys. All along the highland trunk was a series of large administrative centers that were in effect small cities. The best preserved of these is Hua´nuco Pampa, located in the northern highlands west of the modern city of Hua´nuco. Research there indicated the city had a hospitality center for people coming into the city, a large ceremonial plaza in its center, complete with an ‘ushnu’, a platform where rituals could be conducted. Other parts of the city included housing for m’ita workers, craft workshops, an area where acllacuna are thought to have lived and worked, and over 4000 storehouses on a hill overlooking the city. An area of exquisitely fitted stone marks the location of the king’s quarters, a place that included baths and food preparation areas. The administrative centers were located where they could draw on populations from a wide area, but also provide goods and services for those regions. Hua´nuco Pampa, for example, served five different ethnic groups. While the usual flow of goods and labor was into the centers, they also served as buffers against agricultural failure. If a group suffered a severe frost or drought, such that insufficient food was produced to feed the population, they were given food

from the storehouses, though they were supposed to repay the food in a year of greater abundance. The administrative centers were located several days’ walks from each other along the highland trunk. No major center has been found along the coastal road, although there are centers like Incawasi in the Can˜ete Valley which was created to provide support for the conquest of the valley. In the region of Chile, there are very few administrative centers the size of Hua´nuco Pampa, likely because the population density of conquered people was much less in this desolate vicinity. Located approximately every 20 km along the roads between the major centers were ‘tambos’, smaller centers that provided some services but on a smaller scale. Travelers along the roads, located about one day’s journey apart, could stop at these centers for food and rest. The roads were strictly for the use of people on official business, not just anyone. They were used for communications, at least along the main highland road. A system of runners, called ‘chasquis’, was used for sending messages along the road system. Every 6–9 km was a small structure where the runners stayed, and as one approached, he would call out, and another runner would get up to hear the message, then set out running for the next outpost. It is said a message could be sent from Lima to Cuzco in a week, though how messages were prevented from becoming muddled is unclear. Archaeology of the Provinces

The preceding information is a description of a static system, a snapshot of the empire as it has been described by various Spanish sources. Archaeological research in different regions has indicated that this model is more difficult to corroborate archaeologically than one might expect. The typical indicators of an Inca presence – square houses with trapezoidal niches and doorways, ceramics in the form of aryballos with diamond or feather patterns, finely fitted stonework – are sometimes difficult to identify. Two examples will serve to illustrate the issues. John and Theresa Topic found that the presence of the Inca highway running through the province of Huamachuco in northern Peru was the best indicator of the Inca presence, and that new Inca settlements, both tambos and storeroom complexes, were located along the route. They were able to identify the provincial capital as having been located in the modern city of Huamachuco, on several subtle architectural and artifactual pieces of evidence. However, differentiating occupations dating to the Late Horizon, when the Inca had conquered the region, was daunting

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Figure 2 The Inca road system. Reprinted from The Inka Road System, Hyslop J (1984), with permission from Elsevier.

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because there were so few good Inca-style ceramics, and so much continuity from earlier styles. The inclusion of ethnohistorical information allowed the Topics to understand the subtle way that the province was organized by the Incas, which would have been difficult without the written sources. Thomas Lynch identified the major Inca occupations in the region of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. There he found the highway was again the major indication of Inca presence, and that Inca sites tended to be located along it. Local settlements were found near, but not on, the road. There were no fitted stone constructions anywhere, and the main site, Catarpe Tambo, had relatively few Inca ceramics. In contrast, Inca pottery was common in tambos along the road. The importance of Catarpe was indicated more by the presence of architectural features such as long halls called ‘callancas’ and the orientations of major buildings. With few ethnohistorical records for this region, the fine nuances of imperial control were not able to be distinguished as they could be in areas with more documents, like Huamachuco. Inca Religion

The Incas had a complex set of religious beliefs, including a host of deities, sacred places, oracles, and ancestor worship. Like many ancient societies, life was a set of actions dictated in large part by religious beliefs. No major decision was made without consulting with the priests about possible outcomes. The Incas, like many of their contemporaries, had a belief that founding ancestors played a role in the daily affairs of their descendants. For the Incas, these ancestors were the early kings, and their bodies were mummified and maintained by their panacas. As semi-divine, the kings were brought out at important ceremonies, given food and drink, and treated as if they were alive. The ancestors were important in providing good harvests, so their veneration was particularly important to assure the food supply. The major deities of the Incas included a creator god, Wiracocha, Inti, the sun god, and Mama Quilla, the moon goddess, Inti-Illapa, the thunder god, and several celestial gods associated with stars and planets. While Wiracocha created the world, and the other gods, he was not a major figure of reverence, having few if any rituals or temples dedicated to him. In contrast, Inti appears to have been the most important god, at least during the reign of the last few kings. Inti was the god of harvests, which explains something of his importance, and also of warfare. The sun temple in Cuzco, the ‘Coricancha’, was the most important temple in the empire, and all administrative centers

likewise had sun temples. Mama Quilla, the moon goddess, was the wife of Inti, and was served by priestesses. Inti Illapa was the god of thunder and lightning, and was associated with rainfall. Another aspect of Inca religion, and one shared again with many of their contemporaries, was the idea that certain places, called ‘huacas’, were sacred. Many things could be ‘huacas’ – springs, large rocks, tombs, fields, mountains – and not all of them were sacred to all people. Huacas could be of local or national importance. The Incas linked many of the huacas in the vicinity of Cuzco into a complex sacred landscape called the ‘ceque system’. This system was a set of imaginary lines that originated at the Coricancha and radiated out in all four directions. According to Brian Bauer, the lines were not necessarily straight, although that might have been the ideal. The lines were also associated with the four suyus and linked huacas; particular social groups in Cuzco conducted rituals at the huacas along the lines. The schedule of rituals defined a complicated calendar that even experts do not understand well. In addition to the huacas near Cuzco, there were many others spread across the empire. Many high peaks were considered the homes of powerful deities by local people, and the Incas often co-opted these by placing shrines at their summits. Especially in the southern part of the empire, special shrines including human sacrifices of children and adults, were located at the summits of the highest mountains. Oracles were also important parts of the Inca and pre-Inca religions of the Andes. There were four major oracles, including one near Cuzco, where people could go to get advice. The Oracle of Pachacamac, located near modern Lima, was an ancient one, dating at least to CE 500. The Incas took control of it, and allowed it to continue as an oracle, but built their own sun temple and other structures nearby. Rituals Great and Small

Rituals were extremely common in Inca life, and could involve something as simple as burning some coca leaves or as complicated as sacrificing a child after ascending a mountain peak above 6000 m. Rituals were conducted to assure that deities were pleased or to ward off malevolent spirits. Some rituals were daily events, like the offering of llamas and cloth to Inti every morning at the Coricancha, while others were only conducted at special occasions, like the investiture of a new king. All rituals involved some kinds of sacrifice, though the great majority were either llamas or guinea pigs. Food, ‘chicha’, or corn beer, and coca were also used, and fine cloth, seashells, gold and silver could

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be used as well. The ceremony defined the material to be sacrificed. There was a full calendar of ceremonies marking out the Inca year, although there were two major festivals: ‘Capac Raymi’ in December and ‘Inti Raymi’ in June. These fell on the summer and winter solstices, respectively. Both involved several days’ festivities and ceremonies, including male puberty rites during Capac Raymi, and great displays of the present and past rulers (in the latter case, their mummies) during Inti Raymi. Large quantities of llamas, chicha and coca were sacrificed to assure the successful completion of the rituals. One of the most important rituals was called the ‘Capac hucha’, a ritual conducted in Cuzco, but then in every part of the realm, to glorify the Inca gods. Children of about ten years of age were summoned from villages all over the empire to Cuzco, where they were dressed in the finest clothes and paired as if they were husband and wife. They were paraded through the streets from the Coricancha, past the royalty, both living and dead, and to one of the main plazas in town. Some of the children were sacrificed to Wiracocha and Inti, then to other gods and huacas in the vicinity of Cuzco. Priests then took other children and items throughout the empire, making subsequent sacrifices along the way. Particular attention was given to the powerful huacas of high mountains, as mentioned above. Technology

The Incas are probably best known for their extraordinary stonework, where rocks weighing many tons

were fitted together very tightly. Such stonework was exceptional, but no less impressive were other aspects of their technological achievements, such as their agricultural and irrigation systems. High-quality Inca stonework was restricted to the most important buildings in the empire, and served to both emphasize the functions of such structures and the importance of the Inca system that constructed them. Hua´nuco Pampa is a good example of this, as the majority of the buildings are of fieldstone and no great effort was put into their construction, but at the main entry buildings and the royal residence are found, the fitted stones and architectural embellishments, such as carved pumas, to impress the person entering them of their importance. The Coricancha in Cuzco has some of the best stonework in the empire, as befits its importance in Inca ideology, and many of the residences of the kings and their panacas also were of finely dressed stone. The foundations of many of these still can be seen in Cuzco, where they continue to stand, despite five hundred years of seismic activity, a tribute to the skills of Inca engineers. Inca agricultural systems are equally impressive. Everywhere the Inca went, they constructed or reconstructed agricultural terraces to maximize productivity (Figure 3). Systems were designed to distribute water from canals many kilometers long that came down from springs or glacial melt water higher up and then flowed down feeder canals to the systems. Sometimes reservoirs were built to store water into the dry season. These systems, like the buildings just described, continue to function to the present day.

Figure 3 Inca agricultural system at Pisac. Note projecting rocks used as steps from one terrace to another. Photo by author.

398 ASIA, EAST/Inca Ethnohistory The Spanish Conquest

To understand how a group of 168 Spaniards could bring down the Inca empire, it is necessary to briefly discuss the events leading up to their appearance. With the death of Wayna Qhapaq and his heir from a European disease, the empire was left with no king. Two main rivals soon emerged, Washkar, a son who lived in Cuzco, and Atawalpa, a son by a different mother who lived in Ecuador. Washkar sent armies north to Ecuador to defeat Atawalpa, but the latter’s armies were much better seasoned, having spent many years in wars of expansion against local groups. The armies of Atawalpa defeated the forces of Washkar repeatedly, as the latter retreated down the spine of the Andes toward Cuzco. In a final series of battles fought outside Cuzco, Atawalpa’s generals decisively defeated Washkar and took him prisoner. In a grisly display of retribution, nearly all of Washkar’s kin were killed, and Washkar himself was brought north to face Atawalpa, who was now coming south to take control of the empire. The year was 1532. As Atawalpa was resting in Cajamarca, in northern Peru, word came to him that the Spaniards had arrived and were killing and robbing the northern coastal provinces. He sent a contingent of forces under a loyal general to bring them to Cajamarca. He agreed to meet them in the main plaza of the town, a place where such meetings of important leaders would typically occur, but also a location that was perfect for an ambush. There were few entry or exit streets from the plaza, and the callancas on the sides were well suited to hiding soldiers and horsemen. When Atawalpa and several thousand of his personal guard arrived, they were met by a priest, who offered Atawalpa a book of prayers. When Atawalpa threw the book down and rose from his litter, Pizarro gave the order to attack. In the ensuing carnage, most of the Inca warriors were killed, and Atawalpa was captured. Not a single Spaniard died. Atawalpa agreed to fill a room half-full of gold and twice fill it with silver for his ransom, an offer the Spaniards could not refuse. As the months passed, reinforcements arrived from Panama, and the Spaniards made exploratory trips to the coast. However, after the ransom was paid and melted down, it became apparent that something had to be done about the Inca king. Pizarro ordered Atawalpa garroted, and buried unceremoniously. He placed a son of Washkar on the throne and began to travel to Cuzco. After both victories and defeats, Pizarro and his troops entered Cuzco unchallenged, exactly a year after they had arrived in Cajamarca.

See also: Americas, South: Inca Ethnohistory; Northern South America; Southern Cone.

Further Reading Bauer B (1992) The Development of the Inca State. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauer B (1998) The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauer B and Covey RA (2002) Processes of state formation in the Inca heartland (Cuzco, Peru). American Anthropologist 104(3): 846–864. Burger R, Morris C, and Matos Mendieta R (in press) Variations in the Expression of Inka Power. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. D’Altroy T (2002) The Incas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hyslop J (1984) The Inka Road System. New York: Academic Press. Hyslop J (1990) Inka Settlement Planning. Austin: University of Texas Press. Malpass M (1993) Provincial Inca. Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Assessment of the Impact of the Inca State. Ames: University of Iowa Press. Morris C and Thompson DE (1985) Hua´nuco Pampa: An Inca City and Its Hinterland. London: Thames and Hudson. Pa˚rsinnen M (1992) Tawantinsuyu: The Inca State and Its Political Organization. Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae.

Inca Ethnohistory R Alan Covey, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary imperial provinces Peripheral populations or territories administered directly or indirectly by the central government of the empire. historiography The study of the practice of history, including the study of historical method and the historical development of history as an academic discipline. religious integration The use of ritual activity or religious belief to incorporate and govern peripheral populations Spanish conquest Colonization of the Americas with the arrival in the Western Hemisphere of Christopher Columbus in 1492. From early small settlements in the Caribbean, the gradual expansion to include Central America, most of South America, Mexico, and southern and central portions of today’s United States.

Sources and Historiography All known written accounts of the Inca realm were produced after Europeans arrived in the Andean

ASIA, EAST/Inca Ethnohistory 399

region in the early 1530s. Although the Incas used a record-keeping device – the khipu, a system of knotted cords – for bureaucratic functions, it remains debatable to what extent it was employed in a standard fashion for encoding historical content, or to what degree modern researchers might expect to decode such information. Complicating questions of precontact historicity is the fact that more than one Inca ruler is said to have destroyed existing khipu records, purged the specialists who kept them, and commissioned the production of new imperial narratives. The malleability of accounts of the Inca past is an important starting point for considering the different sources of Inca ethnohistory and their appropriate use for modern scholarship. In considering written sources produced in the 1530s and after, distinction may be made between eyewitness accounts made at the time of the European invasion, chronicles assembled in the first century after conquest, and administrative

documents written throughout the Colonial Period (Table 1). Eyewitness Accounts

In June and July of 1533, members of the Pizarro expedition melted down and distributed gold and silver that had been brought to the Inca city of Cajamarca to ransom Atahuallpa, the ruler held by the Spaniards. Some members of the Pizarro expedition returned to Spain from Cajamarca bringing treasure and news of the Inca realm to royal officials. Eyewitness accounts of the Inca empire reached European readers soon after the Pizarro expedition and its Andean allies had arrived in Cusco, the Inca capital, at the end of 1533. Accounts of Spanish activities in Andean South America continued to be written for decades afterward. Some (e.g., the chronicles of Pedro Pizarro and Diego de Trujillo) were not produced until 1570 or

Table 1 Twenty-five important published sources of Inca ethnohistory Author [date] Eyewitness documents Hernando Pizarro (1533) Francisco de Xe´rez (1534) Pedro Sancho de la Hoz (1543) Inca Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui (1570) Diego de Trujillo (1571) Pedro Pizarro (1571) Witness-aided chronicles Pedro de Cieza de Leo´n (c. 1550) Juan de Betanzos (1551–1557) Bartolome´ de Las Casas (1550s) Polo de Ondegardo (1571) Diego Ferna´ndez (el Palatino) (1571) Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572) Miguel Cabello de Balboa (1586) Martı´n de Murua (1590 and later) Jose´ de Acosta (1590) Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘‘El Inca’’ (1609) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1615) Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua (c. 1615) Bernabe´ Cobo (1653) Administrative/Other Cristo´bal Vaca de Castro (1543) Domingo de Santo Toma´s (1560) Polo de Ondegardo (c. 1560) Hernando de Santilla´n (1563) Juan de Matienzo (1567) Cristo´bal de Molina (1573)

Title

Letter to Oidores of Santo Domingo, Panama, 23 November, 1533 Verdadera relacio´n de la conquista del Peru´ y provincia del Cuzco Relacio´n para S. M. de lo sucedido en la conquista y pacificacio´n de estas provincias de Nueva Castilla y de la calidad de la tierra Relacio´n de la conquista del Peru´ y hechos del Inca Manco II. . . Relacio´n del descubrimiento del reyno del Peru´ Relacio´n del descubrimiento y conquista de los reinos del Peru´ Segunda parte de la cro´nica del Peru´. . . Suma y naracio´n de los incas Apologe´tica historia sumaria Relacio´n acerca del linaje de los Incas y como conquistaron y acerca del notable dan˜o que resulta de no guardar a estos yndios sus fueros Primera y segunda parte de la historia del Peru´ Historia indica Miscelanea austral, pt. 3: Historia del Peru´ Historia general del Peru´ Historia natural y moral de las Indias Primera parte de los comentarios reales de los Incas Nueva coro´nica y buen gobierno Relacio´n de antigu¨edades deste reyno del Piru´ Historia del Nuevo Mundo Ordenanza de tambos, distancia de unos a otros, modo de cargar los indios y obligaciones de las justicias respectivas Le´xicon o vocabulario de la lengua general del Peru´ Instruccio´n contra las cirimonias y ritos que usan los indios conforme al tiempo de su infidelidad Relacio´n del origen, descendencia, polı´tica, y gobierno de los Incas Gobierno del Peru´ Relacio´n de las fa´bulas y ritos de los Incas

400 ASIA, EAST/Inca Ethnohistory

later, and should be seen as projects intended to justify the Conquest and mitigate its effects. Descriptions of functioning Inca institutions are invaluable for modern scholars, but eyewitness information falls far short of ethnography. Spanish writers were principally concerned with detailing their own experiences in a hostile and strange world, using terms picked up from Moors and Caribs to fashion a lens for viewing an Andean Other. Some eyewitness accounts employ the language of the Reconquista, referring to the invading Spanish force as cristianos and describing native temples as mosques (mezquita). Aspects of circum-Caribbean culture provided another means of conceptualizing the Andean world, as seen in the use of terms for local elites (cacique), their houses (bohio) and seats of authority (duho), and maize beer (chicha) served during ceremonial encounters. It would take years for Spaniards to begin to understand the natural and cultural world of the Incas on its own terms. Witness-aided Chronicles

The earliest extant Inca histories that draw on extensive native testimony were produced around 1550, part of a second-generation historiography that capitalized on an improving knowledge of Quechua and an interest among political and religious figures in Inca history and customs. The fact that Inca histories were not published widely in the sixteenth century indicates that the native past was of more interest to officials at the Spanish court than to the literate public of Europe. The most detailed sources (viz., Juan de Betanzos, Pedro de Cieza de Leo´n, Polo de Ondegardo) relied principally on accounts of Inca elite men living in Cusco. These chronicles provide a great deal of culturally sensitive information regarding Inca

customs and accounts of the past, although narratives are heavily colored by the interests of the chronicler and the experience of his witnesses. Spanish writers in the 1550s and 1560s assembled information on elite life at the Inca capital, religious activity, political administration, and the relationship between the imperial capital and provincial regions. The year 1570 marks a crucial point in the production of Inca historical narratives. As part of his program of administrative consolidation, the viceroy Francisco de Toledo and the royal cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa gathered Andean and Inca elites and administered questionnaires regarding Inca history and customs. Sarmiento de Gamboa produced a historical narrative that synthesized the often conflicting accounts of the elite Inca lineages, and he linked key points in the Inca past to European calendar dates and the reigns of Spanish monarchs and Catholic popes. Chronicles produced after 1570 tend to follow the same general sequence of rulers, suggesting that a more standardized version of the Inca past – one that was developed with the participation of elite Inca lineages that were prominent in Cusco’s early Colonial society – coalesced as time went on (Table 2). Native Andeans recounted historical narratives to Spanish administrators in the years following the Conquest, but the first substantial treatments of Inca culture by Andean authors were produced in the first years of the seventeenth century. The factual accuracy of these chronicles is often questioned by modern scholars, and the authors often emphasize their identities as good Christians and loyal Spanish subjects. Still, the chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua provide some interesting perspectives on Andean cultural organization.

Table 2 A list of Inca rulers, with calendar dates # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Ruler

Khipukamayuq account

Cabello Balboa

Sarmiento de Gamboa

Va´zquez de Espinosa

Manco Capac Sinchi Rocca Lloque Yupanqui Mayta Capac Capac Yupanqui Inca Rocca Yahuar Huaccac Viracocha Inca Pachacutic Inca Yupanqui Tupa Inca Huayna Capac Huascar

Start
AD 1060 Ruled to age 70þ Ruled 50þ yrs Ruled 50 yrs Ruled 60þ yrs Ruled to age 80þ Ruled 40þ yrs Ruled 70þ yrs Ruled to age 80þ

AD 946–1006 1006–1083 1083–1161 1161–1226 1226–1306 1306–1356 1356–1386 1386–1438 1438–1474

AD 565–665 665–675 675–786 786–890 890–980 980–1088 1088–1184 1184–1285 1294–1397a

1473–1493 1493–1525 1525–1532

1397–1464a 1464–1524 1524–1532

AD 1031–1071 1071–1105 1105–1141 1141–1171 1171–1211 1211–1261 1261–1291 1291–1351 1351–1411 1411–1441 1441–1481 1481–1523 1523–1532

Ruled to age 80þ Ruled 50þ yrs Over 2 yrs, 4 months

a Not the dates given by Sarmiento de Gamboa (who lists AD 1088–1191 and 1191–1258), which overlap with earlier rulers. Dates listed are the length of rule given by Sarmiento de Gamboa and subtracted from the final ruler date.

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Bernabe´ Cobo’s 1653 chronicle provides a convenient point for marking the commencement of secondary syntheses of primary source material. The Jesuit priest consulted a wide range of published sources and manuscripts, and also interviewed Andean informants. His writing is structured as a scholarly work on Inca culture, but its relevance is hindered by the feedback of European cultural values onto the subject material. Descriptions of primogeniture, anthropomorphic divinities, and the importance of creator worship and afterlife are but a few concepts that are not prominent in the earliest chronicles. Archival Documents

A wide range of administrative documents can be brought to bear on Inca society. The earliest include encomienda grants, Cabildo records, and legal proceedings over lands and native labor. The consolidation of Spanish colonial rule – particularly under the viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s – led to the collection of witness testimony on the Inca empire (informaciones), as well as census documents and tribute records (tasas). Standardized provincial reports (relaciones geogra´ficas) were conducted in several regions in the 1580s, and the 1590s saw Spanish administrators visiting lands held by native Andeans and criollos to establish boundaries (composiciones de tierras). Wills, lawsuits, and other legal documents are sometimes useful for tracing descent and land tenure in the final years before the European invasion. Use of Documents

A detailed documentary record of Inca culture and history began to be produced about 20 years after the Conquest. As John H. Rowe observed in 1946, this resource informs us most consistently about elite life in the Inca capital in the years bracketing the European invasion; projecting this material outward onto the Inca provinces or back into the imperial past can be problematic. Regional approaches to archival documents and the systematic collection of archaeological data will put future researchers in a position to reconsider aspects of Inca ethnohistory, and the published chronicles should not necessarily be given interpretive priority.

Ethnohistoric Descriptions of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire Inca ethnohistory provides incomplete but often colorful descriptions of Tawantinsuyu, including myths of ancestral origins and the rise of imperial society, descriptions of expansion and provincial administration, and accounts of elite life in the imperial heartland.

The Rise of Inca Civilization

The Incas identified themselves as highland maize farmers whose founding ancestors came from a distant origin place and settled in the Cusco Basin, where they introduced the fundamental features of Inca social order and established dominance over autochthonous groups. Accounts of the earliest Inca rulers often have a legendary element, featuring acts of superhuman strength, miraculous birth, and a permeable boundary between the mundane and the supernatural. Although no clean divide exists between myth and history in Inca narratives, accounts of rulers from the Hanan (Upper) Cusco moiety – that is, from the sixth ruler and after on the traditional dynastic list – describe qualitative changes in Inca society in the generations leading up to the first imperial campaigns. The most detailed chronicles describe how Inca elites extended their control over the Cusco Basin and established many features of a centralized state government. They then began to conquer and administer new territory in the neighboring Sacred Valley and along caravan routes to coca-producing regions in the lowlands. Inca rulers used marriage alliances with elite women from neighboring groups to limit conflict and simultaneously increase the pool of labor tribute available to intensify maize agriculture throughout the Cusco region. While the Inca elite forged alliances with some groups, they conquered others militarily and reduced them to subordinate status. By the reign of Yahuar Huaccac, or Viracocha Inca, all but the strongest regional rivals had been brought under Inca hegemony or direct administration, and the Inca state began to incorporate non-Quechua speakers living in the upper Vilcanota Valley and Titicaca Basin (see Americas, South: Inca Archaeology). Many chroniclers and modern scholars have credited Pachacutic Inca Yupanqui with the innovation of the imperial order, although archaeological research in the Inca heartland now suggests more gradual processes of state formation, territorial expansion, and administrative consolidation. When the Cusco region was invaded by a neighboring ethnic confederation (the Chancas), Pachacutic is said to have successfully defended the Inca capital with the help of a few friends and the divine aid of the creator deity. He then personally crafted the essential elements of Inca imperial society, much like the first Inca ancestors who brought Inca culture to the Cusco Basin. The ‘great man’ account of Inca imperial origins was firmly fixed in contemporary Inca scholarship by John H. Rowe. In a series of influential publications in the 1940s, Rowe noted that the ethnohistorical and archaeological records indicated that most Inca provincial regions had been annexed or conquered only

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in the last century or so before the Conquest. These observations challenged the interpretation of Philip Ainsworth Means, who had argued that accounts of late, punctuated expansion were the result of Spanish propaganda aimed at challenging the temporal depth of Inca ‘good government’. Rowe’s late expansion paradigm is still upheld by the archaeological evidence in provincial regions, although the glorification of a single individual obscures the dynamic processes occurring in the Cusco region in the 150–200 years before the first imperial campaigns. It is worth making an observation regarding the gradualist chronicles, whose substantive weaknesses are now so well known. The gradualist paradigm is most common among native Andean writers – in particular, the khipukamayuq narrative and the chronicles of Guaman Poma de Ayala, Pachacuti Yamqui, and Garcilaso de la Vega – who credit Manco Capac, the founding ancestor, with the establishment of Inca cultural order and the initial organization of the imperial heartland. These chronicles are rather late, and some authors are from Inca provincial regions, raising the question of whether the gradualist paradigm represents an official imperial history that was promoted in provincial regions even as royal lineages preserved and performed contradictory narratives glorifying their own ancestors in the imperial capital. Patterns of Imperial Expansion

Inca imperial expansion campaigns began around AD 1400 with the conquest of highland farming and herding groups living outside of what the Incas considered to be their imperial heartland (Figure 1). The conquest and administration of the first imperial provinces followed strategies that were developed as the Inca state expanded in the Cusco region between c. 1250 and 1400. Chronicle descriptions suggest that military intervention was justified when rulers of other groups used titles that contradicted the peerless status of the Inca ruler, or in instances where they rejected the offers of ‘friendship’ – or, more precisely, peaceful subordination – that his messengers brought. Early campaigns targeted areas with compatible social structures and political economy, and the prospect of lavish gifts and marriage alliances was often enough to win new allies, although areas with multiple competing groups frequently saw one group align itself with the Incas while the other resisted militarily. The incorporation and administration of highland valleys was relatively straightforward for the Incas, but imperial strategies had to be modified to deal with lowland groups of different degrees of political complexity. The south-central coast was ecologically

marginal and sparsely populated, and the Incas contented themselves with a more indirect presence by developing colonies in the piedmont where new hydraulic works brought new tracts of maize land under cultivation. By contrast, the south and central coast of Peru was divided among several small states. These had centralized administrative hierarchies, specialized economies based on intensive maize agriculture and fishing, and religious systems that were integrated with pan-regional pilgrimage centers such as Pachacamac and Pariacaca. To the north of these polities lay the Chimu´ empire, which dominated the lower valley and flood plain areas along a stretch of roughly 500 km of coastline. As with earlier campaigns along the axis of highland valleys, Inca expansion to the coast involved diplomacy and warfare, but imperial administration was more limited than in the highlands, and established as a parallel to local hierarchies. At the time of the European invasion, Inca armies were involved in protracted campaigns to consolidate control over rebellious provinces and extend imperial control over lowland areas on the eastern Andean escarpment. Inca military organization was evolving into a more permanent standing fighting force, and campaigns along the northern frontier occupied Tupa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capac personally for 40 years or more. The documentary record indicates that the final decades of Inca expansion involved the time-consuming sequence of (1) military invasion, (2) establishment of a system of fortifications, (3) resettlement of local populations, and (4) introduction of colonists to implement provincial rule. This signals a developmental trajectory for Inca expansion policies, a departure from earlier practices of establishing an initial phase of indirect rule while intensifying resources for funding provincial administration. Reliance on an experienced fighting force and the permanent colonization of settlers from pacified provincial regions suggests a distinct imperial relationship with the occupants of regions targeted for later phases of territorial annexation. The Incas described the Amazonian piedmont as culturally and environmentally foreign, yet they invested heavily in the gradual resettlement of highland farmers into lower elevations while maintaining an uneasy interaction with native groups. Accounts of the Imperial Heartland

Because Cusco’s Inca elite served as informants for many of the chronicles and administrative documents available today, descriptions of life in the imperial capital and its hinterland are much more detailed than those of provincial regions. The lineages of Inca

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Cusco

Viracocha Inca 0

500 km

Inca Yupanqui (Pachacutic) 0

500 km

Tupa Inca Yupanqui

Huayna Capac

0

0

500 km

500 km

Figure 1 Reported conquests during the reign of Inca emperors. Based in part on Pa¨rssinen 1992.

rulers dominated the economic and social life of the region lying within about 50–70 km of Cusco. The imperial heartland was radically transformed by provincial territorial expansion. Many (but not all) local groups were granted honorary Inca status, and, as Quechua speakers, were drawn on heavily to serve as

colonists in provincial regions. An influx of temporary labor colonists (mitmaqkuna), retainers (yanakuna), and production specialists complemented the transfer of population between heartland and province, and the Cusco region in the early sixteenth century was ethnically diverse and densely populated. For example,

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at least 10 ethnic groups lived on the estate of Huayna Capac at Yucay at the time of the Conquest. The imperial heartland was economically variegated; honotary Inca groups retained certain rights to traditional lands, while royal lineages and the state religion possessed and managed improved farmlands for intensive maize agriculture, as well as substantial tracts of pasture for herding. Inca rulers and their wives also owned plots of coca lands in low-lying valleys near Cusco. Local groups provided labor tribute to the Inca elite, but mitmaqkuna and yanakuna accounted for the bulk of the work on a system of royal estates where production focused on high-yield varieties of maize, as well as the cultivation of exotic foods for elite enjoyment. Estates were putatively managed by the royal Inca lineages on behalf of the dead rulers who had developed them, and the mummies of dead Inca lords and ladies played important roles in ceremonial and administrative life in and around the capital. These estates were inherited following a system of split inheritance, where the ruling title was inherited by one son and his sister-wife while all other descendants possessed the resources comprising the royal estate. The state religion focused on veneration of the sun as the ancestor of the Inca elite, and the ritual calendar and regional shrine system organized water and land resources, emphasizing a maize agriculture schedule. Important ritual events in the capital involved demarcating divisions among the Inca elite, as well as distinctions between Incas and provincial groups. Sacred objects from provincial regions were kept in Cusco, and provincial elites and sacrificial victims traveled to the capital to be vested with administrative power or sanctified. Some rituals were celebrated in Inca cities in the provinces and culminated with a pilgrimage to the capital. Ritual occasions helped to maintain an economic link between the imperial heartland and provinces. Staples produced in the provinces tended to be stored there and used to maintain administrative and ceremonial life and imperial infrastructure, but wealth goods were brought to the capital where they were stored, worked into prestige goods, and redistributed to loyal subjects. Craft specialists resided in the capital, and Inca rulers would give gifts of fancy cloth, precious metals, as well as special privileges. Eyewitness accounts of Cusco at the time of the European invasion attest to the vast wealth of the empire and the extent to which it was concentrated in the capital. Imperial Interactions in Provincial Regions

Recent studies of the Inca empire emphasize the variability of provincial strategies, but some general features can be identified for the empire as a whole.

Basic infrastructure consisted of a highway system (qhapaq n˜an) that linked highland and lowland regions (Figure 2). Posts for messengers (chaski) were placed at intervals along the highways, and waystations (tampu) were built about a day’s travel apart. These facilities were maintained by local populations and stocked with stores for the use of Inca officials and traveling armies. Larger complexes of storage structures (qollqa) were found at important installations and new administrative cities that were built every 100 km or so along the principal highland highway. Higher-order administrative sites often were built around a large open plaza and included an administrative palace, a sun temple, and an akllawasi – a cloister where select provincial girls were taught by female specialists to weave state textile designs and prepare ceremonial foods and maize beer.

Religious Organization Religion provided a critical link between Cusco and provincial regions, and religious organization varied substantially throughout the empire (Figure 3). To promote its intensive maize economy in directly administered provinces, the Inca state established its own sun cult in new cities along the royal road, constructing temples and akllawasi compounds. The reverence of local numina and sacred objects (wak’a) continued in these regions, as did veneration of ritual elements associated with extensive polycropping and herding. The state required that some local wak’a be housed in Cusco, and underwrote festive activities for others. Pilgrimage centers at Pachacamac, Pariacaca, Raqchi, and Titicaca provided a region-wide religious integration along parts of the coast in the Lake Titicaca area. In these areas the Incas co-opted creation myths and took steps to control pilgrimage by constructing religious facilities at established centers. Female ritual specialists (mamakuna) were established at pilgrimage centers and at some highland oracles, although local priests appear to have retained their positions. The transformation of the Copacabana Peninsula and nearby islands in Lake Titicaca signals a more direct control over highland pilgrimage than was achieved along the coast. The southern half of the Inca empire lacks documentary references to sun temples and akllawasi. In this region the Incas appear to have made direct sacrificial appeals to important mountains (apu) by leaving human sacrifices on their peaks. Such sacrifices may have been conducted as part of the qhapaqhucha ritual, although it is difficult to correlate the documentary record with the archaeological evidence. In general, the establishment of the sun cult is strongly

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Quito ECUADOR Tomebamba BRAZIL Cajamarca Huamachuco Huánuco Pampa PERU Pumpú Xauxa Vilcashuamán Pachacamac CUSCO La Centinela (Chincha) Hatun Qolla Chucuito Chuquiabo Chan Chan

Paria PA

CIF

IC

OC

EA

BOLIVIA

N

New administrative center

ARGENTINA

Established local center

0

500 km

Figure 2 The Inca road system, with some new administrative cities and existing local centers shown.

correlated with regions where the documentary record also describes the establishment of provincial infrastructure and decimal administration. Areas under more indirect administrative control also saw a less marked presence of the imperial cult.

Administrative Organization Inca administrators governed the most directly integrated provinces – those located beyond the boundaries of the imperial heartland but generally in highland valleys to the northwest and southeast – by means of decimal administration that was imposed when a province was (re)conquered. The decimal hierarchy consisted of nested administrative positions (kuraka) staffed by local elites and supervised by Inca governors and inspectors. Subject populations

provided labor service, and Inca officials monitored population levels and service requirements, punishing a local kuraka who failed to meet state demands. Service was worked in rounds by a proportion of the population, and it appears that local elites were responsible for deciding who would satisfy a given service category. Canny local elites were able to increase their wealth and prominence through the implementation of imperial labor demands, organizing caravan transport and pursuing their own exchanges and resource extraction alongside the imperial system. While provincial decimal officials managed local labor tribute mobilization, the principal administrative activities took place in Inca cities, which reproduced essential open spaces and administrative and religious institutions that moderated encounters between Inca administrators and local elites. Decimal

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Catequil

Pachacamac Chinchacamac

Pariacaca Raqchi Titicaca

Sun Temple with Akllawasi

Important Wak'a High Elevation Sacrifice

0

500 km

Sun Temple 0

500 km

Figure 3 Religious integration in the Inca empire. Information on high elevation sacrifices from D’Attroy, TN (2002).

administration appears to have been linked to population movement between the imperial heartland and provinces – Quechua-speaking colonists from Cusco’s Inca-of-Privilege groups were settled into some provincial regions to facilitate consolidation strategies, while provincial populations were resettled as labor colonists and retainers. Coastal regions do not appear to have been as affected by decimal reorganization or obligate resettlement. Ethnic Incas were not heavily settled into coastal state territories, nor did coastal polities provide large populations of mitmaqkuna or yanakuna for service in the imperial heartland. Craft specialists (e.g., Chimu´ silversmiths) are known to have been relocated to the capital, and the production and distribution of craft goods and wealth objects changed in coastal regions under Inca governance. According to some documents, Inca administration on the coast was limited to state interests while the local political economy remained under the existing ruler. Imperial officials were established at important coastal centers and looked after whatever new agricultural lands could be developed – particularly in the mid- and upper-valley areas – as well as retainers and female ritual specialists (mamakuna) placed in the valley. Coastal elites tended not to control significant territories beyond what was needed to protect irrigation

intakes that watered the flood plain of their valleys, and the Incas were able to invest in economic intensification further inland, employing strategies similar to those already described for highland valleys. Patterns of decimal administration in highland provinces and parallel administrative structures in coastal states indicate that the fiction of local economic autonomy was important throughout the empire, while the Inca state invested labor tribute in improving farmland and developing intensive agriculture in areas that were unused or under-utilized. Such a system reduced the prospect of conflict during the initial annexation of a new province, but gradually made local elites redundant or dependent on the state for their status and its communication. Provincial rebellions were common, particularly after an Inca ruler died, and local uprisings justified the state in confiscating resources and imposing a more extractive administrative apparatus. The degree of military investment on the imperial frontier indicates that the Incas were in no hurry to consolidate administration along the coast, but also suggests an important development in imperial strategies. A direct occupation was required in the highland valleys of the frontier zones, but the Incas left local exchange networks in place in some areas to acquire lowland goods whose provenance lay outside

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of direct administrative control. Highland groups like the Can˜aris were massively reorganized, with large proportions of the population resettled as mitmaqkuna, brought to Cusco as yanakuna, or pressed into more or less permanent military service. Conquest and Colonialism

The documentary evidence provides our most complete means of reconstructing the Spanish Conquest and imposition of colonial administration in Inca territory. Eyewitness accounts present important discrepancies, and, with the exception of the 1570 account of Titu Cusi Yupanqui, the Andean voice is almost completely absent in the reconstruction of the story. Although the story of the Pizarro invasion was told by Spaniards, administrative documents from the Cusco region provide important details for reconstructing the decades-long process of administrative reorganization that transformed the Inca imperial heartland into a Spanish provincial region.

Prospects for Future Study The study of Inca ethnohistory remains dynamic, as long as certain intellectual constraints are recognized. First, the discovery (and subsequent transcription and publication) of previously unknown eyewitness documents and chronicles is likely to remain as rare as it has been in the past century. While this corpus remains relatively static, administrative documents still hold a vast unrealized potential, and Inca archaeology is proceeding at an unprecedented pace. Archaeological analytical techniques have advanced dramatically, and the present database permits important regional perspectives that surpass the accuracy of documentary observations. These conditions encourage new historiographic practices – gleaning regional perspectives through the careful study of personal names and toponyms in administrative documents – as well as new interdisciplinary relationships. See also: Americas, South: Inca Archaeology; Ethno-

history.

Further Reading D’Altroy TN (2002) The Incas. New York: Blackwell. Parssinen M (1992) Tawantinsuyu: The Inca State and its Political Organization. Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae. Pease F (1995) Las cro´nicas y los Andes. Lima: Instituto RivaAgu¨ero, Pontificia Universidad Cato´lica del Peru´-Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica. Porras Barrenechea R (1986) Los cronistas del Peru´ (1528–1650) y otros ensayos. Lima: Banco de Cre´dito del Peru´. Rostworowski de Diez Canseco M (1999) History of the Inca Realm. H. Iceland, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowe JH (1946) Inca culture at the time of the Spanish Conquest. In: Steward J (ed.) Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 2: The Andean Civilizations, pp. 183–330. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 143. Washington, DC: US Goverment Printing Office. Zuidema RT (1995) (1964) El sistema de ceques del Cuzco: La organizacio´n social de la capital de los Incas. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cato´lica del Peru´.

Northern South America J Scott Raymond, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Chavin A religious cult of Peru, dating to the first millennium BCE, and characterized by a distinctive iconographic art style. Clovis tradition A North American, Late Pleistocene cultural tradition, believed to have been associated with the hunting of large game animals and with distinctive fluted spear points. fluted spear points Distinctively shaped spear points associated with the Clovis tradition in North America and the Magellan Tradition in South America. A flute (or channel) was created by the removal of a flake from one or both faces of the point. South American variants usually have a narrow base resembling the tail of a fish. Holocene The present epoch in the geological timescale, beginning at the end of the Pleistocene approximately 10 000 years ago. mangroves Trees and shrubs that grow in tropical lagoons and estuaries. megafauna Large animals such as mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths of the Pleistocene. Magellan tradition A South American cultural tradition, believed to have been associated with the hunting of large game animals and with distinctive fishtail-fluted points. obsidian hydration A dating method that relies on the measurement of the diffusion of atmospheric water into obsidian. Olmec A Mesoamerican religious cult, dating to the first millennium BCE and associated with a distinctive iconographic art style. Pleistocene The geological epoch that began about 3 million years ago and ended approximately 10 000 years ago with the beginning of the Holocene. It is sometimes called the Ice Age. tapir The largest native game animal of South America. Tapirs are solitary forest herbivores, distantly related to the horse and rhinoceros.

The Setting Northern South America comprises a diverse and varied tropical landscape that extends from the island of Trinidad in the east to the Pacific shores of Colombia and Ecuador (Figure 1). The northern coast is bathed

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Caribbean Sea 24 20 5 Panama 19 6 8

1

Ve

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z ne

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Colombia 23

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Figure 1 Map of northern South America. The following correspond to the numbers on the map: 1, Paria Peninsula; 2, Goajira Peninsula; 3, Gulf of Venezuela; 4, Lake Maracaibo; 5, Sierra de Santa Marta; 6, Magdalena River; 7, Cauca River; 8, Sinu´ River; 9, Esmeraldas River; 10, Guayas River; 11, El Inga; 12, Taima Taima; 13, Las Vegas; 14, Bogota´; 15, El Abra; 16, Santa Maria Valley; 17, Santa Elena Peninsula; 18, Cerro Mangote & Monagrillo; 19, San Jacinto 1 & San Jacinto 2; 20, Puerto Hormiga; 21, Valdivia; 22, Real Alto; 23, San Agustı´n; 24, Tairona culture.

by the Caribbean Sea and backed across northern Venezuela by an eastward extension of the Andes mountains, which embrace a series of fertile highland valleys. From the Paria Peninsula in the east to the Goajira Peninsula in the west the Caribbean coast is a semi-arid desert, the native vegetation consisting mainly of cactus and thickets of thorny shrubs and trees. The Gulf of Venezuela, which opens onto the Caribbean near the Colombian frontier, connects to the south with Lake Maracaibo, South America’s largest lake, which is surrounded by tropical forests, savanna grasslands, and swamps. Rising more than 6000 m above the Goajira Peninsula stands the Sierra de Santa Marta, snow-topped mountains with a vista of the Caribbean. To the west lie the extensive alluvial lowlands of northern Colombia, comprising swamps, lakes, savannas, forests, and dissected by the lower courses of the Magdalena, Cauca, and Sinu´ Rivers. The landscape rises again in northwestern Colombia where a low chain of the Andes extends northward to form the Isthmus of Panama. This region, where North America meets South America, is the wettest part of the Western Hemisphere, with annual rainfall ranging between 6 and 8 m. Heavy rainfall, with associated forests, lagoons, and swamps, continues south along the Pacific coast to the central littoral of Ecuador, where drier conditions prevail (see Americas, Central: Lower Central America). The interior of western Ecuador is a wet tropical lowland region, dominated by two river systems, the

Esmeraldas River in the north and the larger Guayas in the south. The Andes in Ecuador form a narrow chain, trending north–south, punctuated by a series of highland basins and snowcapped volcanoes. Tropical forests cover the mountain slopes to the west and to the east. Passing north into Colombia, the Andes are divided into three separate chains by the Cauca and Magdalena River Valleys. The eastern chain contains the high grassland region known as the Sabana de Bogota´ and continues eastward into Venezuela.

Pleistocene Ecology The Pleistocene environment encountered by the first migrants to northern South America differed in some important respects from that of today. In the mountainous regions, cooler average temperatures meant that plant and animal communities were situated at lower elevations than they are today. The most dramatic difference, however, was along the coast. At the time of maximum world glaciation, c. 18 000 years ago, sea levels were nearly 120 m lower than today and broad segments of continental shelf were exposed. Average rainfall was less, meaning that some of today’s forested areas were more open and that savanna areas were more expansive, possibly making the environment more attractive to large ungulate fauna such as mastodons and horses. Missing in northern South America were the large herds of grassland

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animals such as the bison in North America or the wild camelids of southern South America.

The First Migrants The Isthmus of Panama is the gateway to South America, but because of the dense vegetation and the swampy terrain of the region south of the Panama Canal, archaeologists have struggled to understand how the first human migrants to South America, usually envisioned as hunters of big game, managed to survive their journey through an environment perceived as inhospitable to hunters. The current archaeological evidence, however, not only attests clearly to the presence of humans in South America during the last few millenniums of the Pleistocene, but also to the presence of human settlers in the forests of Panama. These humans, whose ancestors had traversed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia and spread across North America and down through Mexico and Central America, had adapted their technologies and their economies to a wide variety of environments, and they capably exploited the resources of the forests and savannas that existed in Panama in the Late Pleistocene. The earliest evidence of human presence in Panama, which dates to about 11 000 years ago, is not as early as the earliest evidence from southern South America. Monte Verde, for example, a site in south-central Chile, dates to 12 500 years ago. To explain this discrepancy, some archaeologists have suggested that the first migrants to the continent practiced a maritime economy and settled along the shore. Rising sea levels in the Holocene would have erased the evidence of their campsites, except in instances where the shoreline was elevated or, as in the case of Monte Verde, when they established campsites away from the coast. Alternatively, of course, it may be that the population density of the first humans in Panama was not sufficient to leave lasting evidence of their presence. The earliest cultural remains from Panama are not as yet firmly anchored in time. They consist of fluted spear points in the North American Clovis tradition and fishtail-fluted or Magellan tradition of South America, as well as assemblages of waste flakes from the manufacture of such points. The spear points have not yet been found in excavated contexts, but rather as surface finds on the eroded shores of the tropical lakes. The conclusion that they date to about 11 000 years ago is based on their distinctive shapes and manufacturing technology which are closely similar to the dated Clovis and Magellan traditions. The flake assemblages, however, are from excavated contexts and are a current focus of archaeological

research in Panama, research which very likely will yield reliable radiocarbon dates. Fishtail points, many of which are fluted, have been found elsewhere in northern South America, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Trinidad. Most of the finds are from undated surface contexts. The El Inga site in the northern highlands of Ecuador is a rare exception. El Inga, however, lacks reliable stratigraphic context and appears to have been a workshop where stone points were manufactured over several thousand years, using volcanic glass from a nearby outcrop. Obsidian hydration analysis of some of the fishtail points suggests a date in the range of 9000 years ago. None of these sites, including those from Panama, has yielded clues about the subsistence practices of the early migrants. The inference that they were big-game hunters is based on the extrapolation of evidence from Patagonia where fishtail points have been found in association with Pleistocene megafauna. The only evidence of the hunting of megafauna in northern South America comes from the site of Taima Taima, situated in the Maracaibo Basin of Venezuela. At Taima Taima, the remains of a mastodon were excavated and found to be in association with a stone spear point. The animal had apparently become stuck in a bog and was dispatched by humans. The point belongs to the El Jobo tradition, which is distinctively different from that of the fluted-fishtail points and limited in its distribution to northern Venezuela. Stomach contents of the mastodon dated to about 14 000 years ago, slightly older than Monte Verde. Taima Taima is hardly strong support for the idea that the first settlers of northern South America were big-game hunters – in fact, quite the opposite. It would seem that the people occupying the Maracaibo Basin in the Late Pleistocene were opportunistic hunters, who took advantage of a trapped mastodon to have a rare feast or temporarily fill their larder, much like the historically recorded peoples of the southern Chilean coast who, on the rare occurrence of a beached whale, seized the opportunity to gather together in multifamily groupings and practice communal rituals. In the absence of further evidence, we can only speculate about their food economy, but it is possible that the El Jobo hunters were exploiting a broad range of plant and animal foods and that the use of spear points to kill game constituted only a small part of their economic activities. Further evidence of broad-spectrum huntergatherers in northern South America during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene has been found in western Ecuador and highland Colombia. In Ecuador, the Las Vegas culture, which dates from the Late Pleistocene to the Mid-Holocene, is characterized by a simple stone-tool technology. Rather than spending

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the time and effort to manufacture finished stone tools or weapons, the Las Vegans used an expedient technology. They collected the locally abundant cobbles and nodules of stone, smashed them, and then picked out flakes that could be used as tools. Most of the flakes were almost certainly used to make more refined tools out of wood, bone, tooth, and cane, none of which has survived in the warm tropical climate. Modern-day hunter-gatherers of the Neotropics, however, make a range of tools from organic materials, including cane arrow points that are sharp enough to cut through the thick, elephant-like hide of a tapir. Evidence of Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene human occupation in Colombia comes principally from the region surrounding Bogota´, the middle Magdalena valley, and the highland region near Popaya´n, and also in the Amazonian lowlands of Colombia, discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article. The Abriense complex, first discovered at El Abra cave in the Sabana de Bogota´, exemplifies a stone tool technology similar to that of Las Vegas, in that the tools are stone flakes, expediently removed from cobbles and used without further modification. Again, the assumption is that they were used to produce more refined implements and weapons from organic materials. Tequendamiense, a second stone industry dating to the late Pleistocene, has also been discovered in the region of Bogota´. The Tequendamiense industry made use of stone material imported from the Magdalena Valley and, in contrast to Abriense technology, used bifacial retouch to shape and sharpen the edge of flakes. Among the rolling hills and valleys of the middle Magdalena Valley, the probable source of the Tequendamiense raw material, assemblages with stone projectile points have been found. The points are triangular with a stemmed base, and do not resemble either the El Jobo or the fishtail points. In the Ecuadorian highlands at El Inga yet another point type, a long narrow point with a bulbous stem, occurs in apparent association with some of the fishtail points. In the terminal Pleistocene, then, there seems to have been a diversity of stone-working technologies and styles in northern South America. Evidence of subsistence is absent or minimal at these Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites. Las Vegas, however, which is represented by more than 30 sites in the Santa Elena region of Ecuador, has yielded remains of bone and shell. The people were hunting, fishing, and collecting a very broad range of food resources that included near-shore and shoreline sea life, as well as land game, including deer, peccaries, giant anteaters, and several species of small rodents and birds. A large number of wild plants were without doubt also exploited, and some plants were undergoing morphological changes indicative of domestication. Direct

evidence of plant foods has not survived in the early archaeological record of southwestern Ecuador, but microscopic bits of silica, known as phytoliths, have been recovered and identified with respect to the plant genera (and sometimes species) from which they derived (see Phytolith Analysis). The large size of squash and bottle gourd phytoliths suggests that both plants were being intensively cultivated by humans and well on their way toward domestication. Squash was probably initially exploited for its tasty, nutritious seeds. The phytoliths also indicate that Calathea allouia, a tropical root crop commonly known as lleren, was also being cultivated. It seems, then, that as early as the terminal Pleistocene, populations in the tropical regions of northwest South America were practicing horticulture as a complementary adjunct to their broad-spectrum hunting, fishing, and collecting economy.

Holocene Environmental Changes The worldwide warming of temperatures at the end of the Pleistocene led to a gradual rise in sea level and inundation of the coastal plains. Rivers, which had deepened their channels during the Pleistocene, began flooding annually and filling in their lower channels. By the time the sea level began to stabilize c. 6000 years ago, vast alluvial wetlands had been created in northern Colombia and western Ecuador, and thousands of tropical lagoons existed along the littoral zones. These ecological changes expanded the habitats for crustaceans, mollusks, fish, and amphibians, creating new subsistence opportunities for humans. In the mountainous regions, there was a vertical shift in the distribution of biological communities to higher elevations, which probably only minimally enhanced hunting in the northern Andes, but had more significance for the eventual development of highland farming. Tropical forests expanded as rainfall increased, but significant grassy savannas survived, most notably in the lowlands of northeastern Colombia.

Social and Economic Changes during the Early to Middle Holocene The social and economic changes that occurred during the Early and Middle Holocene are most clearly documented in the archaeological records of the tropical lowlands of western Ecuador, northern Colombia, and in the Santa Maria valley of Panama. In all three regions, a broad range of food resources was being exploited, from both land and sea, but through time there was greater concentration on

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particular resources – especially calorie-rich plant foods. At the same time, it is evident that territoriality was important, as well as community solidarity. The people of the Las Vegas culture (c. 10 500 to 6500 years ago), established a centrally located ‘base camp’ on the Santa Elena Peninsula of Ecuador. The camp was strategically located near water, in what was a seasonally dry landscape, and near areas of enriched plant growth. From that camp, individuals or small foraging groups could set out to exploit various resource patches that were mostly within less than a day’s hike from the camp. Mangrove lagoons, rocky sea cliffs, sandy beaches, hunting areas, and seasonally productive seed, berry, fruit and root localities were within range. Exploitation of these resources is attested by the remnants of small ‘lunchtime’ or overnight camps that were apparently visited repeatedly by the human groups. During the dry season, it is likely that groups of foragers trekked deeper into the interior valleys, but the archaeological evidence of those journeys has not yet been discovered. By 8000 years ago, the phytolithic record indicates that maize had been added to the inventory of plants cultivated by the Las Vegans. Grinding stones were used for processing some foods, but food storage containers have not survived in the archaeological record. The base camp of the Las Vegans not only served as a logistic depot for the foraging groups but also as sanctified ground that represented the existence and continuity of their society. Nearly 200 skeletons were excavated from the site, most of them apparently buried beneath the floors of small huts. Funerary rites, at least, and probably other periodic and/or seasonal rituals were carried out at the site, some rites probably drawing together all members of the community and reaffirming their common heritage. Such solidarity would have become increasingly important as population density increased, which would have intensified competition for resources, in turn requiring defense of territorial boundaries. In Panama, a similar scenario was unfolding. About 7000 years ago, a camp was founded at the site of Cerro Mangote, which was situated near the Pacific shore. Because of the abundance of mollusk shells in the midden, the site was initially interpreted as a shellfish-collecting camp, but subsequent more detailed investigations have revealed that at least half of the foods consumed at the site were from plants and game collected and hunted from the terrestrial environment. Contemporary sites and small encampments have now been identified in nearby caves and more distant hills to the east. The sites in the hills have been linked to progressive deforestation of the region, resulting from successive small-scale fires

believed to have been set by humans wishing to expand game grazing areas and/or practicing slash-andburn agriculture. The latter inference is based on the discovery of microbotanical remains of maize, arrowroot, and other domesticated plants extracted from grinding stones that archaeologists have excavated from the cave sites. Many human burials have been excavated at Cerro Mangote, and the chemical analysis of their bones indicates that their diet was composed partly of maize. The economic picture in Panama, then, during the Early to Middle Holocene, is one in which human groups were highly mobile, ranging over a considerable territory, exploiting a wide range of resources from sea and land, and at some point beginning to incorporate domesticated plants into their food base. Cerro Mangote may have been a base camp from which daily treks were made to nearby resource hot spots, but the nearby temporary campsites are not as evident as those associated with Las Vegas in Ecuador. The concentration of human burials, however, suggests that Cerro Mangote was consecrated as a place of the ancestors and that, although its community members trekked over a wide area in pursuit of food, they gathered together to venerate and bury their dead and to reaffirm their common heritage. In Colombia, the most detailed record for this segment of time comes from the San Jacinto hills and the alluvial plains of the lower Magdalena River Valley. This is a large area extending from the Caribbean coast to the savannas 180 km inland, an area that probably encompassed the territory of more than one social group. The excavated record begins in the hills at the site known as San Jacinto 1. Recorded in the stratigraphy of San Jacinto 1 are a series of seasonal occupations ranging in time from c. 6000 to 5300 years ago (Figure 2). The excellent preservation and clear delineation of each stratum is unique for sites of comparable age from the Neotropical lowlands. The site was situated on the point bar of a small stream and was occupied during the dry season; annual floods buried the occupation debris. The salient features of the site are shallow pits that were renewed with each occupation. The linings of the pits were burnt, and many of the pits were associated with fire-cracked stones and carbonized plant residues. An abundance of wild grass seeds was recovered from the carbonized remains, but as yet no domesticated species have been conclusively identified. The broken remains of ceramic vessels and grinding stones were also found in significant numbers. The function of San Jacinto 1 clearly differs from that of Cerro Mangote or the main site of the Las Vegas culture. All the evidence points to it having been a seasonal camp, occupied annually for the

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Figure 3 A ceramica adorno in the shape of a bird head from San Jacinto 1. The fabric of the pottery is fiber-tempered. (Photo by Vic Krantz)

Figure 2 Excavations at San Jacinto 1, Colombia. (Photo by Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo)

purpose of harvesting, processing, and possibly storing wild plants, particularly wild grass seeds that grew on the point bar. Heated rocks were used in the pits to steam the grass seeds. With the exception of the Taperinha pottery of the Central Amazon, the San Jacinto ceramics are the oldest yet discovered in the Americas. The ceramic vessels show no evidence of having been used for cooking; rather the large jars were probably used to detoxify, ferment, and/or store the seeds after processing. A high percentage of the vessels is elaborately decorated with incised, excised, and modeled motifs, indicating that pottery played a social-symbolic role (see Image and Symbol; Pottery Analysis: Stylistic); the vessels were likely used in feasting and rituals that accompanied the harvest (Figure 3). No base camp or network of temporary camps has yet been found contemporary with San Jacinto 1. Within less than 1000 years, however, San Jacinto 2, which may qualify as a base camp, but is as yet unexcavated, and a number of other sites were established in the region, some near the coast, associated with wetland environments. The distinctive ceramic

style of San Jacinto continued. Vessels were manufactured, in greater quantities and with still more elaborate motifs. The people of the wetland sites focused on shellfish, turtles, and other local resources. No domesticated plants or other evidence of agriculture have yet been found in association with these sites, but it is plausible, given the record from Panama, that they were linked with as yet undiscovered farming communities situated in the San Jacinto Hills. Puerto Hormiga, the best known of these sites, was organized in a doughnut shape, with a central cleared area with household garbage around the periphery. Other sites of the same period, including San Jacinto 2, show evidence of similar planning, suggesting that settlements were organized according to a culturally determined pattern. Whether or not there were permanent villages at that time (c. 5000 years ago) in northern Colombia, however, remains to be investigated.

Mid-Holocene Sedentary Villages In Ecuador, the Middle Holocene saw the establishment of permanent villages. Beginning around 5500 years ago, villages were established in the small tropical valleys of the southwestern corner of the country. Farmers also settled the floodplains of the Guayas Basin about that time. The northern lowlands of Ecuador may have experienced similar settlement, but that evidence, if there was any, was buried several millenniums ago by layers of volcanic ash strewn over the region from eruptions in the Andes. These earliest recorded villages ranged in size from 2 to 12 ha in area. They were commonly situated on

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Figure 4 Sherds from the rims of early Valdivia ceramic bowls, Loma Alta site, Ecuador. (Photo by Gerald Newlands)

low hills. Like the Colombian site of Puerto Hormiga noted above, the settlements were arranged in an oval pattern, with huts distributed around a cleared central arena. In some instances, there was a break at one end of the oval, giving the settlement a horseshoe shape. Well-made ceramics of the Valdivia style occur in abundance at each of the sites. Again, like the Puerto Hormiga ceramics, a high percentage was decorated, suggesting that ceramic vessels played an important social role (Figure 4). For the first time in the archaeological record of South America, figurines, made of stone and slightly later of ceramic, also occur and in large numbers (Figure 5). Some were found in probable ritual contexts, but the majority come from domestic trash heaps, suggesting that they were mainly used in household rituals that occurred with some frequency. Judging by the varied locations of the sites, a variety of resources was exploited, but all of the village settlements are associated with rich valley bottom land, signaling a common reliance on agricultural produce. The warm wet conditions have not been conducive to the preservation of plant remains, but microscopic botanical remains have been recovered from the floors of the houses, from storage pits, from food-grinding tools and residues of pottery, indicating that maize, manioc, arrowroot, beans, and other

Figure 5 Valdivia stone figurines from the Loma Alta site, Ecuador. Thousands of these figurines have been recovered from early Valdivia sites. (Photo by Gerald Newlands)

tropical staples were being farmed. Those living in the interior parts of the valleys probably relied mainly on hunted game such as deer or peccary for their meat, while those living near the ocean ate more seafood. The presence of shells and fish bones at the interior sites, however, attests to the transport of some seafood inland, and it seems likely that commodities were being exchanged between communities up and down valley. Between 5000 and 4000 years ago, hierarchies emerged among sites within and between valleys. At some of the larger sites, for example, Real Alto, the central arena became a ceremonial precinct. Small mounds and other ceremonial facilities were constructed within the central plazas. Among the rituals conducted were funerary rites. Some individuals were still buried beneath house floors, but there was also community-wide veneration of some of the dead, who were buried in a funerary mound. Satellite hamlets have been discovered and were probably connected through a social network to the ceremonial centers. The relative size and patterned distributions of houses within the larger settlements suggest the existence of status differences associated with kinship and residence (see Social Inequality, Development of; Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites).

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Over the next two millenniums, there was a steady increase in population size and density throughout most of the western Ecuadorian lowlands. Efficient agricultural systems were established; craft specialization developed, and intraregional exchange expanded, as well as long-distance trade with populations in the highlands and along the coast. Prestige goods, including spondylus shells and obsidian, were among the goods traded over long distances. Monumental earthen mounds associated with fancy pottery hint at the rise of an elite class. Unfortunately, archaeology has only begun to explore the remains of these hierarchical societies, so we can only guess at their size and structure. The pace of change toward sedentary villages in Panama seems to have been slightly slower than that in Ecuador. Monagrillo, which replaced Cerro Mangote around 2500 BCE, is the only possible candidate for a sedentary village. Covering an area of 1.4 ha, it is 8 times the size of Cerro Mangote. Fishing nets were in use, enabling the fishermen to catch a range of fish species that were inaccessible to the Cerro Mangote residents. The presence of pottery suggests a degree of sedentism, but in contrast to the San Jacinto and Valdivia pottery, Monagrillo pottery was poorly fired and plain – clearly pottery played a different social and symbolic role in Panama at this time than it did in northern Colombia or western Ecuador. The sites in the hills continued to exhibit a pattern of small, temporary settlements, probably associated with the expansion of slash-and-burn agriculture. It was not until 500 BCE that settlement in the river valleys is evident, and then, based on research in the Santa Marı´a Valley, suddenly large sedentary villages were established, associated with well-made pottery and containing abundant carbonized remains of maize. The suddenness of the change may be more apparent than real, in that earlier, smaller settlements in the Santa Marı´a Valley may as yet lie undiscovered under the alluvial bottomlands.

Regional Development in the Common Era By early in the Common Era, a mosaic of polities ruled by hierarchies of local elites existed over most of northern South America in both the highlands and lowlands. Although details of this pattern varied through time, probably reflecting the waxing and waning of the power and influence of local lords, regional diversity and local political independence continued until the time of Spanish contact. There is no evidence that any of the polities developed state-level bureaucracies. Until the conquest of the Ecuadorian highlands by the Incas in the sixteenth

century, there were no conquest states. At odds with the pattern of local independence and diversity are systems of symbolic imagery and linguistic relationships that point to a common cultural heritage and persistent contact over a large part of northern South America and Lower Central America. Populations speaking Chacoan, Pae´zan, and Misumalpan languages occupied parts of Colombia and Panama, and Carib and Arawak speakers occupied northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela; however, Chibchan languages constituted the core and dominant language family of northern South America and their populations were distributed from Ecuador to Costa Rica at the time of Spanish contact. Bioanthropological studies also indicate that there was a high degree of genetic affinity among Chibchan speakers. There were no ‘great art styles’ or religious iconographies that linked the pre-Hispanic populations of northern South America. Beginning around 700 CE, however, the use of gold and tumbaga as a medium for representing symbols of status and power became common throughout the region. Many of the gold objects were body adornments such as necklaces, breast plates, and nose ornaments, which signaled the status of the wearer (Figure 6). Although distinct regional styles emerged around 900 CE, common themes are shared among all of the styles, many of which can be traced back to images formerly represented in stone and pottery. The wide distribution of common themes may be explained in part by a widely shared ideology derived from a common cultural heritage, but some ethnohistoric evidence from Colombia and Panama suggests that local lords traveled to distant locations to acquire knowledge and brought back golden images and other objects to symbolize their command of esoteric knowledge and strengthen their authority at home. Early Hispanic chronicles also report that the native lords of the northern Ecuadorian and southern Colombian highlands retained exchange specialists known as mindales, who traveled long distances to acquire goods of high prestige for their lords. Archaeology attests to widespread distribution of precious metals, shells, emeralds, and other gem stones throughout northern South America. The San Agustı´n culture of the upper Magdalena Valley in Colombia has long drawn the attention of archaeologists. San Agustı´n is best known for its megalithic carved images of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic creatures. Its iconography has been compared to that of the Chavin in Peru and the Olmec in Mexico, and sometimes used to support arguments that there was a direct historical connection between the two (see Americas, Central: The Olmec

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and their Contemporaries). San Agustı´n, however, seems to be a largely independent development in Colombia, and beginning no earlier than the last century BCE, it postdates the development of Olmec

Figure 6 A gold icon in the Tairona style of northeast Colombia. (Photo courtesy of Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin -Preussischer Kulturbesitz. V A 62459)

and Chavin by nearly a millennium. San Agustı´n comprised several polities in the upper Magdalena region. Populations were concentrated near the clusters of stone statuary and were associated with burial mounds. The veneration of ancestors is a familiar theme in northern South America, a practice, as noted earlier, that can be traced back to the Early Holocene. It seems that the elite of the polities legitimized their status through claimed descent from real or mythical ancestors. The Tairona culture, ancestral to the ethnographically documented Kogi of the Santa Marta Mountains in northeastern Colombia, exemplifies what some anthropologists have called theocratic chiefdoms. The Tairona built terraced sites interconnected with stone-paved pathways and stairways throughout mountainous landscape. Ciudad Perdida, hidden in the cloud forest, is the best known of the Tairona sites (Figure 7). Drawing on the studies of the Kogi, religion was probably the source of power and authority among the Tairona, and the leaders were probably priests. Ciudad Perdida and other similar sites would have served as ceremonial retreats managed by the priests and occupied only on ritual occasions. Among the most important technological achievements of the people of the northern Andes was the development of raised-field agriculture. Thousands of hectares of swampy wetlands were converted to agricultural lands in the lower Sinu´, Magdalena, and Guayas Basins through the construction of earthen ridges and platforms elevated above the floodwaters. Similar features were built in the Sabana de Bogota´

Figure 7 Ciudad Perdida, a site of the Tairona culture in the Sierra de Santa Marta, Colombia. Note the stone masonry and the terracing. (Photo by Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo)

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for the purpose of raising the level of agricultural lands and for draining inundated areas. These highly productive fields greatly increased the carrying capacities in their respective areas and account for concentrations of populations in those areas. There is little evidence of warfare in the archaeological record of northern South America. Some sites are situated on hilltops which would have served as good defensive locations, but evidence of fortifications or other hints of warfare is rare. We know from the early Spanish chronicles, however, that warfare was rampant within the region. Despite their common heritage and shared ideologies, many polities seem to have been engaged in almost constant competition and warfare; yet, there is little evidence of territorial expansion. It has been said that leaders use warfare to remind their subjects of the need for powerful leadership; perhaps the lords and chiefs of northern South America were using warfare as a political device, presaging the modern world.

ruler, were actively pushing their frontier into what is now southern Colombia. In previous years, they had succeeded in conquering several polities of the Ecuadorian highlands, some of which, most notably the Can˜ares, put up strong resistence. Possibly because the pre-Hispanic peoples of Ecuador were not accustomed to centralized rule, Paz Inca was difficult to sustain, and the Inca rulers found it necessary to put down frequent insurrections. Nevertheless, they established several administrative centers in highland Ecuador and extended the Inca highway as far north as present-day Quito (Figure 8). The largest centers were at Tomebamba, today mostly covered over by the city of Cuenca, and at Quito. Each center was constructed according to standard Inca settlement plans and built in their distinctive stone masonry. Although the Incas had relationships with some of the polities of the western lowlands of Ecuador, they did not succeed in conquering that region.

Conclusion Inca Conquest In the decade before the Spanish arrived, the Incas under the leadership of Huayna Capac, their eleventh

Nun˜ez de Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean in 1513 came after more than a decade of Spanish exploration of northern South America, and it initiated

Figure 8 Ingapirca, an Inca administrative/ceremonial site in the southern highlands of Ecuador. Note the dressed stone masonry distinctively associated with Inca architecture. (Photo by J. Scott Raymond)

ASIA, EAST/Southern Cone 417

an intensified exploration and conquest of the region. The gold ornaments and icons possessed by the natives had initially attracted the Spaniards to the region, but within less than two decades they turned their attention to Peru, where looting and pillaging was a much more profitable enterprise. Although the native societies of northwestern South America suffered dramatic declines and deculturation following the conquest, many have survived to the present day and represent a cultural continuity that extends back to prehistoric times. Ethnographic and historic data potentially constitute an important means of fleshing out the scant evidence derived from the archaeological record and some archaeologists have begun to carry out such research. Much more needs to be done, especially on the archaeological side. Despite the many decades of research, our knowledge of these ancient societies remains superficial. Looting continues to outpace archaeological research, and the native societies are mostly in rapid decline. Within a few decades, it will be too late. See also: Americas, Central: Lower Central America; The

Olmec and their Contemporaries; Americas, South: Early Villages; Image and Symbol; Phytolith Analysis; Plant Domestication; Pottery Analysis: Stylistic; Social Inequality, Development of; Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites.

Further Reading Helms MW (1979) Ancient Panama: Chiefs in Search of Power. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lathrap DW, Collier D, and Chandra H (1975) Ancient Ecuador: Culture, Clay and Creativity 3000–300 BC. Chicago: The Field Museum of Natural History. Oyuela-Caycedo A and Bonzani RM (2005) San Jacinto 1: A Historical Ecological Approach to an Archaic Site in Colombia. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Oyuela-Caycedo A and Raymond JS (eds.) (1998) Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Northern Andes. Los Angeles: UCLA, The Institute of Archaeology. Quilter J and Hoopes JW (eds.) (2003) Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Ranere AJ and Cooke RG (2002) Late Glacial and Early Holocene occupation of Central American tropical forests. In: Mercader J (ed.) Under the Canopy: The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests, pp. 219–248. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Raymond JS and Burger RL (eds.) (2003) Archaeology of Formative Ecuador. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Reichel-Dolmatoff G (1988) Goldwork and Shamanism: An Iconographic Study of the Gold Museum. Medellı´n, Colombia: Editorial Colina.

Southern Cone Gustavo Politis and Patricia Madrid, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary biface A two-sided stone tool, manufactured through a process of lithic reduction, that displays flake scars on both sides. bolas A throwing weapon similar to the surujin made of weights on the ends of interconnected cords, designed to capture animals by entangling their legs. They are most famously used by the South American gauchos, but have been found in excavations of pre-Hispanic settlements, especially in Pampa and Patagonia, where indigenous peoples used them to catch guanaco and n˜andu. hypsithermal period The period about 4000 to 8000 years ago when the Earth was apparently several degrees warmer than it is now. uniface A specific type of stone tool that has been flaked on one surface only. Such tools can be placed into two general classes: (1) modified flakes and (2) formalized tools, which display deliberate, systematic modification of the marginal edges and were often formed with a definite purpose in mind.

The Southern Cone The Southern Cone includes the territories of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and southern Brazil. This region was probably the last colonized by Homo sapiens at the end of the Pleistocene. Current evidence indicates a human presence in the region no earlier than the very end of the Pleistocene, at around 12 500 years BP. Late Pleistocene foraging societies evolved through the Holocene in different ways, producing distinct historical trajectories. Foraging was the main subsistence strategy until the arrival of Europeans in Patagonia, the pampas, and in most parts of the campos and Chaco. In some places, especially in the south and central Andes at around 5000 years BP, the domestication of plants and camelids occurred, producing important changes in demography, settlement patterns, technology, and social organization. Some of these societies reached a chiefdom level of sociopolitical organization and in the fifteenth century, became part of the Inca Empire. The cultural development of the Southern Cone societies is organized in this work following climatic, environmental, and chronologic criteria: Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene, Middle Holocene, and Late Holocene. In order to better understand the complexity and diversity of social processes that took place during the Late Holocene in certain geographic areas

418 Southern Cone

of the Southern Cone, this period is also divided considering significant cultural changes (i.e., Formative Period, Regional Developments, etc.).

The Environment The Andean mountain range runs the full length of the western side of South America forming the ‘backbone’ of the Southern Cone. To the west, there is a strip of land between the Pacific coast and the mountains. Rainfall decreases from south to north, reaching extreme aridity in northern Chile and southern Peru. East of the Andes there are extensive plains and a ‘plateau’ (the planalto) that reach the Atlantic coast, forming a mosaic of environments. Major uninterrupted South American grasslands stretch from southern Brazil through Uruguay and Argentina. There are two main subregions: the campos of southern Brazil and Uruguay (northeast of the Rı´o de Plata) and the pampas of Argentina (southwest of the Rı´o de Plata). Between the Andes and the campos is the region known as Chaco – a flat and dry forested landscape – and a gallery tropical forest of the Uruguay and Parana´ Rivers. In the lower portion of the Southern Cone is the Patagonian region, located between 39
and 55
south latitude. Most of this space is a treeless plateau which is deeply cut by several major rivers with courses flowing in a mainly west to east direction. The Straight of Magallanes separate continental Patagonia from Isla Grande of Tierra del Fuego. This island is the largest of an archipelago in the southern Chilean territory which is composed of hundreds of smaller islands. The southern Andes are part of the Andean Cordillera. They comprise several subregions: the subtropical forest (a narrow band which extends along the foothills of the eastern mountain ranges), the puna (a high altitude dry plain located between 3400 and 4500 masl), and the valleys and quebradas (located below 3000 masl). In the south, below 38
south latitude, the cordillera is covered by a dense forest of Notophagus (Figure 1).

Early Peopling The earliest secure evidence for human occupation of the region east of the Andes is the open-air site of Arroyo Seco 2 (Figure 2), where initial occupation dates to c. 12 200 years BP. A large number of sites have been detected in the pampas especially in the Tandilia mountain range (Cueva Tixi, Cerro La China, Cerro El Sombrero, etc.). These sites are small caves or rockshelters with an early component in association with fishtail projectile points (Figure 3). These sites have been consistently dated between 10 000 and 11 000 years BP. West of the cordillera, the oldest

evidence of human occupation is at the Monte Verde site, dated between c. 12 300 and 12 800 years BP. This component has been interpreted as a forestadapted economy, based primarily on the collection of wild plant foods and secondarily on the scavenging and/or hunting of large and small animals. Both Monte Verde and Arroyo Seco 2 sites indicate that humans were in the Southern Cone on both sides of the Andes reaching south of 38
south latitude before 12 000 years BP. Moreover, a number of sites in the pampas as well as in the Cordillera and in the Central Valley of Chile (such as Tagua–Tagua) indicate that humans were well established in this latitudinal belt between 10 500 and 11 000 years BP. In the Patagonian plateau, the oldest secure group of dates come from archaeological sites in rockshelters and caves the Rio Deseado basin (Los Toldos, Piedra Museo, El Ceibo, Cerro Tres Tetas, etc.). These sites indicate a human presence in the 47
to 50
latitudes around 11 000 years BP. At the end of the Pleistocene in the southern tip of Patagonia, the South American mainland and the island of Tierra del Fuego were connected and formed a continuous mass of land. This area was occupied roughly at the same time, indicating that humans arrived shortly after de-glaciations, at c. 10 500 to 11 000 years BP. In this area, fishtail projectile point was also a distinctive tool in many sites (Fell’s Cave, Palli Aike, Cueva del Medio, etc.). In the campos of Uruguay, the occupation of early hunter-gatherers has been dated c. 11 000 years BP. All reported sites are open-air sites located in three areas: the Uruguay-Cuareim River, the middle basin of the Rı´o Negro, and the Atlantic Coast. During the Late Pleistocene, the campos of Uruguay and the pampas of Argentina shared several common features, such as the fishtail projectile point technology and other technological traits (i.e., reduction sequences, type of lithic raw material). This suggests some kind of relationship or shared knowledge between these two sub-regions. In the Brazilian campos, the sequence of hunter-gatherer occupation known as the Umbu Tradition began with the Uruguaı´ Phase and dates between c. 10 800 and 8500 years BP. In terms of technology, small bifacial stemmed chalcedony projectile points associated with side and end scrapers, retouched flakes, and unipolar and bipolar (flaked in both ends) artifacts made on basalt, chalcedony, quartz, and chert are typical. During the Late Pleistocene and into the Early Holocene, a variety of herbivores were hunted by early foragers in the region. Among them, guanaco (Lama guanicoe) was the main resource in the pampas, Patagonia, and in the Andean Cordillera, while deer (Ozotoceros and Blastoceros) was principally

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hunted in the campos. Extinct megafauna such as giant ground sloth, ground sloth, extinct horse, and glyptodonts were secondary or occasional resources in the pampas and in Patagonia. West of the cordillera, mastodon and extinct species of horse were hunted and consumed. The timing and cause of Pleistocene fauna extinction are still part of an open debate, although increasing data from pampas sites suggest the survival of some species until the Early Holocene (between c. 7000 and 8000 years BP). It is likely that the impact of early foragers on large herbivores, not only by hunting but also by fires in the grasslands and forests, would accelerate this process of extinction. At the end of the Early Holocene, pampas huntergatherers began to exploit marine resources and to

occupy, at least seasonally, the Atlantic coast. The first evidence came from the La Olla 1 and 2 sites (i.e., seal processing loci) and the Monte Hermoso 1 site (with human footprints) which date between 6640 and 7920 years BP and are located on the Atlantic coast. At c. 6000 years BP, the first evidence of marine adaptation is recorded in southern Patagonia in the Beagle Channel (the Tunel site), where shell middens have been found.

The Middle Holocene Changes During the Middle Holocene period, significant environmental and cultural changes occurred. This period is characterised by climatic changes related to what is

420 Southern Cone Lípez

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Southern Cone 421

known as the Hypsithermal (a period when higher temperature and/or humidity are recorded): a time at c. 7000 years BP, when the sea level rose above the current level. However, there is no consensus on its magnitude (between 2.2 to 12 masl. depending on the author) and the chronology of the maximum ingression. During the Middle Holocene in both the cordillera and tropical lowlands, nomadic foragers reduced their mobility in many areas and started to cultivate domesticated plants. In the Andes, management of

Figure 3 Fishtail projectile points from the Tandilia hill range. Photo courtesy Nora Flegenheimer.

camelids may have started milleniums before, resulting in true domestication by this time. After the extinction of megafauna, guanaco continued to be the primary game-animal resource until the Late Holocene, especially in the pampas, Patagonia, and in the cordillera. Besides meat and fat, guanaco also provided excellent hide for making clothes and shelter, bone for tool raw material, bone marrow with high nutritional values, and even blood which might have been consumed during drought periods. The camelid was a fast and agile animal and these characteristics support the idea that a cooperative hunting strategy must have been employed. A variety of projectile points and the bola stone (boleadora) were the main hunting weapons. In the eastern campos of Uruguay and southern Brazil, the Middle Holocene human occupation is characterized by hunter-gatherers-fishers who specialized in exploitation of the palm fruit butia´ (Butia capitata) (Figure 4). On the Atlantic coast, subsistence was complemented by seal-hunting and the gathering of mollusks. The first evidence of a shell midden on the coast of Uruguay dating to the Middle Holocene (c. 4000 years BP) would suggest an incipient adaptation to the exploitation of marine resources. On the inland grasslands, hunting was oriented toward deer (Blastoceros and Ozoteceros) and complemented with coypo (Myocastor). Alochtonous siliceous raw material was used to manufacture distinctive mid-size stemmed triangular projectile points. During this period, the first evidence for mound construction comes from the eastern sector of the campos, mostly

Figure 4 Relict of a forest of Butia´ palm in the border of the Uruguay River.

422 Southern Cone

Figure 5 Typical cerrito in the Laguna Merim Basin (Uruguay) during excavation. Photo courtesy Jose´ M. Lo´pez Mazz.

in the Laguna Merim Basin. The mounds, locally called cerritos de indios (in Uruguay) or aterros (in Brazil), are circular or elliptical earth structures of about 20–40 m in diameter and up to 7 m high (Figure 5). Some occur alone and others are found in clusters with up to 50 in one locality. The function and construction process of these mounds are currently under debate. A few decades ago, Brazilian archaeologists proposed that mounds were some kind of platform constructed for habitation during seasonal flooding. More recently, Uruguayan researchers propose that the mounds were mainly funerary structures for complex hunter-gatherers due to the recurrence of human burials in several locations. For Lo´pez Mazz, the older structures (c. 4000–3000 years BP) seem to be oriented to mark and order territory as well as to legitimate the exclusivity of the resources, while after c. 2500 years BP. some structures began to specialize toward ceremonial activity and funerary practices. Iriarte and collaborators recently proposed that as early as 4190 years BP., the Los Ajos site became a circular plaza village which grew as a result of multiple overlapping domestic occupations associated with a wide range of activities. In some sites they found phytoliths and starch grains of squash (Cucurbita sp.), maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus sp.), and Canna sp. rhizomes. This evidence indicates an early domestication at c. 3600 years BP. In the rest of the campos, and in the southern planalto, the archaeological record of hunter-gatherers during the Early and Middle Holocene was subsumed under the Umbu´ Tradition. This concept encompasses a variety of lithic material which includes some distinctive projectile points

and an economy based on hunting, gathering, fishing, and collecting mollusks. Since the nuts of two genera of palms, Arescastrum and Butia´, have been consistently recovered in these sites, it is considered that these species would have been ‘managed’ by these populations. It was also proposed that the Humaita´ Tradition integrated a group of sites, basically located in the forest of the planalto, with a distinctive technology of big bifacial artifacts including the curved clavas. However, for some authors both traditions seem to be very similar and differences would be related to site functionality rather than to two different populations. In general terms, the archaeological evidence shows continuity between the Early and Middle Holocene population although there is some intraregional differentiation. Most researchers interpret the main changes that occurred in the Middle Holocene a result of the transformation that happened within the Early Holocene populations in several dimensions. This has been the explanation for the emergence of the cerritos and the continuity of basic adaptive patterns and technology of the hunter-gatherers of the pampas, the campos, and Patagonia.

The Late Holocene Diversification (c. 3000–500 BP) During the Late Holocene, the process of regional differentiation which began to become visible during the Middle Holocene produced a wide variety of historical trajectories and adaptive patterns. Moreover, several significant changes occurred, such as reduction in residential mobility and the development of

Southern Cone 423

wide intraregional interaction networks. Along with other important innovations, such as pottery and horticulture, this suggests the development of social complexity. This process is well exemplified in the cerritos of the eastern campos and in the Andes. During this time at least three main subsistence strategies can be identified among the pampas foragers: the hunter-gatherer of the xerophitic forest, the hunter-gatherers of the open grasslands, and the hunter-gatherers-fishers of rivers and lagoons. During this period, guanaco was the main food resource in addition to pampas deer, armadillo, and rhea. Plain and incised pottery is also present in this area at c. 3000 years BP although in low frequencies. During the Late Holocene, changes in mobility, subsistence, and technology would indicate a process of economic and social intensification. In Patagonia, the Late Holocene hunter-gatherers were heavily dependent on guanaco although on the slopes of the cordillera, the gathering of pin˜ones (the fruits of the pehue´n Araucaria araucana) from the forest was a significant, although seasonal, resource. In the Delta and in the lower Parana´ and Uruguay Rivers, the archaeological record shows some peculiarities in the basic hunter-gatherer-fisher adaptive pattern. In one way, it could be partially explained by the penetration of a ‘branch’ of the Dominio Amazo´nico, region which forms a subtropical forest in the delta and along shores of the main rivers. Plant resources, especially fruit of the pindo´ palm (Syagrus romanzoffiana), were exploited recurrently on the island of the Delta. Moreover, the historical record of the sixteenth century indicates that the lower Parana´ and Uruguay Rivers were occupied by several ethnic groups (Chana´, Chana´-Timbu´, Mbegua´, etc.) and some of them practiced small-scale horticulture. In the lower and middle Parana´–Uruguay region, several changes occurred during the Late Holocene. Between 2500 and 5000 years BP, pottery entered into the area and around 2000 years BP, the first canoe people are recorded in this fluvial area. It seems that horticulture also became a part of their subsistence during this time, probably in the last 2000 years and related to the expansion of the Tupi-Guarani people. In the lower Parana´-Uruguay region, a rich pottery tradition known as the ‘Goya–Malabrigo Culture’ appeared c. 1000 years BP. Well represented in many sites on the floodplain and islands, this pottery is characterized by abundant zoomorphic representations (i.e., mainly birds). Subsistence patterns were based on a mixed economy of small and medium mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, and products from the forest (i.e., especially palm fruits). Small-scale tropical horticulture might also have been practiced although archaeological evidence is still inconclusive.

In the southern planalto, several traditions have been proposed (Itarare´, Casa de Pedra, and Taquara) which would reflect the regional continuities of the Humaita´ Tradition as a result of the adoption of pottery, horticulture, the construction of pit-houses, and certain techniques of lithic polishing. However, the recent work of Noelli challenges this interpretation by proposing that this Late Holocene population was the southern expansion of the Ge´ linguistic family, being ancestors of the ethnographic Kaingang and Xokleng groups. The early Ge´ population of the area would have been displaced from the proximity of the main rivers to the higher and colder region of the planalto by the Guaranı´ Indians between 2000 and 1000 years BP. The Guaranı´ are a group of populations, well known in archaeological, historical, linguistic, and ethnographic terms, belonging to a Tupi cultural matrix. The origin of these populations would be in the Madeira-Guapore Basin, in the southwest of Amazonia. In a process of continuous demographic growth and territorial expansion, they spread through several regions of southeastern South America, including most of the campos and the planalto, part of Chaco, and the northeastern part of the pampas. They reached their southern limit, the lower Parana´-Plata Rivers, at least at c. 700 years BP. In terms of social–political organization and kinship, the Guaranı´ formed several nuclear families around a political/religious leader. The subsistence of the Guaranı´ population was quite generalized, based on horticulture, gathering of plants and insects, hunting, and fishing. They cultivated about 39 plant genera subdivided in at least 159 cultivars; among them were manioc (Manihot esculenta), sweet potato (Ipomea batata), maize, and beans. In spite of the great geographical expansion and the tendency to systematically incorporate non-Guaranı´ people, pottery maintains a great uniformity. The typically painted and corrugated pottery is found in distant locations, thousands of kilometers apart and with very little variation indicating that it was produced in the context of a rigidly stylistic and highly standardized pattern. The chronological span of dated Guaranı´ sites in the region is between c. 2000 and 200 years BP but it has to be taken into account that well-established Guaranı´ populations are still living in the region. The Guaranı´ expansion into the tropical and temperate lowlands of the Southern Cone produced significant cultural changes. They introduced several cultigens, and some technological and stylistic patterns, but overall, they spread a new mode of life among the local population. When the European Conquest began at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the life of foragers of the pampas, campos, and Patagonian foragers

424 Southern Cone

changed dramatically. Adoption of the horse, a new relationship with a neighboring group, and the disarticulation of the traditional economic cycle were some of the results of this asymmetrical interaction. When wild horses and cattle flooded the pampas, the Chilean Araucanos arrived as they were attracted to this new marketable resource. By then, the local foragers remained trapped between the well-organized Araucanian chiefdom and the slow advance toward the south of the colonial frontier. By mid-eighteenth century, the few campos foragers became extinct and the pampas foragers that still existed were integrated with the Araucanos and disappeared as a distinctive ethnic group. At the end of the nineteenth century, with military campaigns organized by the Argentinean government, the Patagonia Indians known as the Tehuelches, as well as the Araucanos, were either killed by the military or, after a period in prison, relocated to marginal and poor areas.

The Agricultural and Herder Societies from Southern Andes The first societies that began to domesticate plants and animals in the Southern Cone inhabited a diversity of environments in both the highlands and lowlands. In the highlands these environments include deserts, quebradas, river valleys, and the subtropical forest of the eastern slope of the Andes (the sierras subandinas). The first practice related to animal domestication is linked with camelids, medium-sized animals that are adapted to arid environments. This family has four South American species: two nondomesticated (guanaco (Lama guanicoe) and vicun˜a (Vicugna vicugna)) and two domesticated (llama (Lama glama) and alpaca (Lama pacos)). Recent genetic studies suggest that the llama descended from the guanaco and the alpaca resulted from an interbreeding between guanaco and vicun˜a. The llama had a central place in the Andes not only for its meat and wool but also for its capacity for carrying burdens. Related to this domestication process in the highlands, during the archaic period (10 000 to 3000–2500 years BP), important changes occurred: reduction in the range of mobility, the development of residential areas with the emergence of the first villages, and the adoption of new technologies. However, many societies, especially the llama herders, maintained some dimension of mobility in order to move their herds on a seasonal basis. The domestication of camelids in the highlands implied a long process of intensification which includes predation–protection–domestication before the full establishment of agro-pastoral societies. Some evidence

from northern Chile and northwest Argentina suggest an independent center of camelid domestication, between 5000 to 3000 years BP, probably earlier than in the Central Andes. In sites such as Quebrada Seca 3, Inca Cueva 7, Huachichocana III, Tula´n 52, Puripica 1, camelid bones, fibers, guano, and corrals for maintaining them in captivity, have all been found. Clear evidence of agro-herder societies in the puna and quebrada are dated at c. 2500 to 1200 years BP. However, the archaeological record of caves in the Argentine northwest suggests that the process started earlier at c. 5000 years BP in places with extreme aridity but with a diversity of microenvironments. In northern Chile there is also early evidence at sites such as Chiu Chiu 200 and Turi-Toconte which suggests a pastoral way of life with seasonal mobility between the high vegas and can˜adones, and the precordillera and puna. The incorporation of domesticated camelids produced important changes in settlement patterns which generated some degree of sedentarism although at the same time maintaining a high logistic dynamic. Hunting and fishing remained an important economic complement on the coast. While camelid domestication would have a local development in the southern Andes, plant domestication had a strong alochtonous influence since the first domesticated species are from the tropical lowlands east of the cordillera. The domestication of plants was a complex process which becomes visible archaeologically at around 4000 years BP in caves of the high quebradas. However, both the domestication of wild species and introduction of already domesticated plants appeared at different times in each region and they also included a variety of species. Evidence is found in sites such as Casa Cha´vez Montı´culo and Tebenquiche in the southern puna, and in Quebrada de Inca Cueva-IC c.7-(more than 4000 years BP) in the headwater regions of quebradas and valleys above 3000 m a.s.l.. Remains of squash (Lagenaria siceraria), which were used as containers, together with textiles and basketry were found at these sites. At the Huachichocana cave site, remains of chilli (Capsicum baccatum), beans (Phaseolos vulgaris), and maize (Zea mays) where found. In the Cuyo region (south central Andes) remains of squash (Cucurbita sp.) and quı´noa (Chenopodium quinoa) were dated at c. 4500–3700 years BP (i.e., sites of Los Morrillos, Agua de la Tinaja, and Gruta del Indio). Only around 2300 years BP did maize arrive in this region. In central Chile, there is evidence for Chenopodium sp. at around 3000 years BP. After this period, there are remains of domesticated plants on the Pacific coast, in the valleys, and within the cordillera.

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In the Pacific coastal valleys (Chile) between 9000 and 4000 years BP, there is certain continuity and stability in societies along with a clear maritime economy. This is represented by the world famous Tradition of Chinchorro, whose elaborated human burials are extremely well preserved due to aridity in this area. After 4000 years BP, these people began to slowly experiment with plants. In this context, there was a shift toward the settlement of valleys, suggesting a search for new residential space and better land for cultivation in a desert environment. Nu´n˜ez Atencio proposed that the first cultivars were adopted from primary domestication centers in the tropical lowlands and adapted to the narrow slopes of the mesothermic valleys west of the Andes. This is the case for bean remains found at the site of San Pedro Viejo de Pichasca dating between 8000 and 6000 years BP. However, other sites on the coast of Arica such as the cemetery Morro 2/2 (dated c. 2800 years BP) still maintained a subsistence based on marine resources. Around 1700 years BP, complex cemeteries are recorded in tumuli such as Alto Ramı´rez, in the Azapa valley, where several cultivated plants (squash, chilli, cotton, manioc, maize, and beans) are found placed as offerings.

The Formative Period in the Southern Andes (c. 3000–1000 years BP) At around 2000 years BP, there was a transition toward a settlement subsistence pattern related toagro-pastoral societies. Early villages integrated more complex systems linking settlement with different functions. This new organization is known as the Formative Period and was characterized by a high degree of sedentarism and intensive pottery production. Little is known about the causes which produced the emergence of pottery in the southern Andes. At around 3000 years BP, there was a diversification of pottery shapes and styles on both sides of the Andes. Pottery appears in sites with a maritime economy such as the Faldas del Morro site (northern Chile, ca. 2800 years BP.) and in agro-pastoral societies such as Inca Cueva-Alero 1 (northwest of Argentina, c. 2900 years BP). It is not clear yet if this is a technology of local origins, alochtonous, or both. Mun˜oz postulated that the origin of pottery is related to two different traditions; one on the coast and the other on the altiplano. Pottery with geometric designs and feline figures dates to between 3000 and 1700 years BP in northern Chile and shows strong similarities with the altiplano tradition from the north of the Titicaca Lake. These stylistic patterns along with other evidences show a major social interaction in the context

of these early villages. Toward the east of the cordillera in the tropical forest slope at around 2600 years BP, there is an intensive use of pottery known as the San Francisco Tradition. For Ventura, this tradition has a long local development and was utilized for early long-distance exchange between the valley of Tarija (Bolivia), the puna, and other eastern tropical valleys. Around 3000 BP, pottery occurred in the heads of the Quebrada de Humahuaca (in the northwest of Argentina) and in the neighboring puna. Pottery allowed new and more efficient modes of food processing. It also became a useful means for transport and storage which amplified the spectrum of the exploited resources, both wild and domesticated. Along with other technologies such as metallurgy, textiles, and basketry, which not only had a utilitarian function, but they were also used as bases for symbolic representations. Between 3000 and 1400 years BP, agro-pastoralist society, which favored more stable and complex villages, was established in many areas of the highland. Around 2500 years BP, pottery was associated with this village pattern and began to diversify in multiple decorative techniques (incised, painted, and modeled) and styles which where used to define archaeological sequences in several sectors of the highlands of the Argentine Northwest. In general terms, these groups had circular houses dispersed throughout cultivated fields as well as houses which aggregated around a central patio and typically included tombs and a granary. In the valliserrana area of the Argentine Northwest, several styles or cultural entities were defined: Saujil (2400 to 1300 years BP), Tafi (2100 to 1100 years BP) and in the mesothermic valleys, Condorhuasi (2200 to 1500 years BP) and Cie´naga (2200 to 1400 years BP). Among them, Alamito (1800–1500 years BP) stands out due to the distinctive pattern of its villages. This pattern contains mounds, platforms, and enclosures which were made on stone and adobe and situated around communal or ritual plazas. It is not clear yet if the Alamito sites are villages with a specific and complex pattern or cultic centers related to the Condorhuasi. Intense long- and short-distance trade of raw material, manufacture, as well as both ordinary objects and ceremonial items, characterize these village societies. This interaction favored information exchange and connected very distant groups from the Pacific coast to the sub-Andean hills and to the tropical forest. This exchange network was very ancient but during this period it became well established. The San Pedro de Atacama oasis in the puna of Chile, was probably the most important center of this network; from here llama caravans traveled widely across the

426 Southern Cone

south central Andes and Pacific coast. Exchange items included salt, obsidian, lithic shovels, pottery, as well as clay pipes and cebil (Anadenanthera sp.), a hallucinogenic drug from the tropical forest. Late Formative societies developed during the first centuries of the Christian era, when there was an increment in demography and in the exchange network. During this period, there was a clear development of ritual practices. Fine pottery (polished and painted like the Vaquerı´as Style) appeared in a variety of sites and in different environments associated with the llama caravans and with long-distance interethnic contacts. This pottery is associated with a cultic phenomena represented by the use of hallucinogens in association with ritual paraphernalia such as tablets, tubes, clay and stone pipes, and mortars with feline motifs. The use of arsenical bronze as a sort of technology of power at a grand scale can be seen in objects such as plates with high symbolic value. Between 1500 and 1000 years BP, there was a clear manifestation of social regional integration which included chiefdoms with increasing inherited social inequalities. A representation of this is found in the cultural group known as Aguada (c. 1600 to 1000 years BP) centered in the Ambato Valley (Catamarca, Argentine northwest), whose symbolic and ideological pattern expanded in the valleys of the Andes. Among this group, the feline complex plays a central role and was probably the expression of a shared pan-Andean cosmology. It has been proposed that the Aguada were linked with the Tiwanaku expansion, basically based on contacts – via the San Pedro de Atacama oasis – between these two areas. However, it seems that the Aguada cosmology is a local development related to the early cultic phenomena of El Mollar and El Alamito.

The Regional Developments and the Inca Expansion (c. 1000 Years BP to Hispanic Conquest) Between c. 1000 years BP and expansion of the Inca Empire into the southern Andes during the fifteenth century, many political centers in dense and conglomerate settlements, articulated with dependent villages, emerged. This process was associated with a high differentiation in the organization of the village pattern composed of residences, workshops, storage places, and formal areas for human burials (cemeteries). An intense production as specialization characterizes this period, which also resulted in multiple pottery styles (i.e., Santa Marı´a, Bele´n in Argentine northwest) (Figures 6 and 7). Between c. 900 and 1430 years BP, several sites of Quebrada

Figure 6 Pottery style Santa Marı´a, Ampajango (Catamarca, Repu´blica Argentina). Collection Mun˜iz Barreto, Museo de La Plata. Photo courtesy Marı´a Delia Arena.

Figure 7 Pottery style Bele´n, Azampay (Catamarca, Repu´blica Argentina). Collection Mun˜iz Barreto – Museo de La Plata. Photo courtesy Marı´a Delia Arena.

de Humahuaca (i.e., Estancia Grande, CAL-20, Los Amarillos, San Jose´, La Isla, Juella, Campo Colorado, Volca´n), the north-central Calchaquı´ valley (i.e., Borgatta-SSalCac 16-, Valde´z-SsalCac 12-), central Chile (i.e., Aconcagua Culture), and of the Norte Grande of Chile (i.e., Caserones 1, Pica-Tarapaca´) are representative of this period. Agricultural practice was intensive and included terraces or andenes in the mountain slopes and cultivated fields in the valley bottom. New varieties of maize, beans, and squash were introduced, which resulted in the production of a food surplus. Corporative enterprises developed in order to maintain larger populations with centralized and marked hierarchies. This period is known in the regional cultural sequence as ‘regional developments’,

Southern Cone 427

based on the existence of many political centers that emerged in this period having alliances and conflict between them. Some examples include Humahuaca, Calchaquı´ and Yocavil, Bele´n, Sanagasta, Angualasto in the Argentine northwest; Salar de Atacama in northern Chile and Lı´pez in southern Bolivia. The increase in size and number of settlements and the development of a settlement hierarchy produced social tension which in turn derived in conflicts that generate population displacement toward higher and better-protected localities. These changes are well documented at the quebradas and valleys in the Argentine northwest. As a result, defensive walls were built to create well-protected fortifications such as Quitor en el Salar de Atacama (Chile); Tucute in Casabindo, La Huerta in Humahuaca, and the urban center of Tastil in Quebrada del Toro (Argentine). Upon the foundation of these hierarchical societies, the Inca Empire expanded its domain during the fifteenth century and transformed their structure and organization as they became part of the southern province of the Tawantinsuyu, the name of the Inca Empire whose capital was in Cuzco (Peru´). The imperial expansion sought to increase their mineral resources, which were especially abundant in northern Chile. They also sought to add more local labor force which was needed by the estate during the expansion phase. The Inca created an infrastructure which integrated settlements specialized in the production of certain items (i.e., Potrero-Chaquiago),

Figure 8 Inca site Tolombo´n. Photo courtesy Vero´nica Williams.

defensive stone structures known as pukara (such as Pucara´ de Andalgala´, Fuerte de Tolombo´n-Argentina-, El Ta´rtaro-Central Chile-), waystations or tambos (i.e., Las Cuevas IV-Argentina-, Ojo de Agua-Central Chile-), administrative centers (i.e., Cortaderas, Shincal, Potrero-Chaquiago-Argentina-, Cerro la Cruz-Central Chile-), and a complex road system that crossed thousands of kilometers (Figures 8 and 9). They also re-used and rearranged previous villages imposing architectural traits such as the rectangular enclosure, trapezoidal entrance (vanos), and small niches (i.e., Casa Morada de La Paya, Guitia´n in Salta, Fuerte Quemado in Catamarca). The incorporation of the Inca throne – a platform known as ushnu – is a singular archaeological indicator not only of the Inca domination but also of the strategic importance of the site where it is placed. Some examples of ushnu are Vin˜a del Cerro and Chena in Chile, and Watungasta, Nevado del Aconquija, and Potrero de Payogasta in Argentina. Many objects, such as pottery, show the integration of local elements with Inca shapes and/or motifs (Imperial Inca style) and result in mixed styles, such as Inca Paya, widely distributed in northwestern Argentina, northern Chile, and southern Bolivia (Figure 10). During the sixteenth century, these populations were decimated by the Spanish Conquest and many were incorporated into a form of slavery known as the encomienda. Episodes of intense resistance from

428 Southern Cone

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Figure 9 Plan of Inca administrative center Potrero-Chaquiago. Courtesy Vero´nica Williams.

most of these people blended into the criollo populations and lost their ethnic identity. Only in some places, such as the high puna, do some groups still maintain their traditional way of life. See also: Americas, South: Inca Archaeology; Animal Domestication; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient; New World, Peopling of; Plant Domestication.

Further Reading

Figure 10 Aribaloide Inca, Aguada orilla norte (Catamarca, Repu´blica Argentina). Collection Mun˜iz Barreto, Museo de La Plata. Photo courtesy Marı´a Delia Arena.

local groups, such as the Quilmes, occurred in the early years of conquest, resulting in brutal repression by the Spaniards. In many cases, the surviving indigenous populations were relocated hundreds of kilometers away or placed in Reducciones. As a result,

Berberia´n E and Nielsen A (eds.) (2001) Historia Argentina Prehispa´nica, 2 vols. Co´rdoba: Editorial Brujas. Dura´n Coirolo A and Bracco Boksar R (2000) Arqueologı´a de Tierras Bajas Tropicales. Uruguay: Ministerio de Educacio´n y Cultura, Montevideo. Hidalgo J, Schiappacasse V, Niemeyer H, Aldunate C, and Solimano I (eds.) (1989) Culturas de Chile. Prehistoria. Desde sus Origenes hasta los Albores de la Conquista. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andre´s Bello. Kern A (1999) Prehistoria do Rio grande do Sul. Porto Alegre, Brasil. McEwan C, Borrero L, and Prieto A (eds.) (1997) Patagonia. London: The British Museum Press. Pearsall D (1992) The origin of plant cultivation in South America. In: Cowan CW and Watson PJ (eds.) The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective, pp. 173–205. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Politis G and Alberti B (eds.) (1999) Archaeology in Latin American. London: Routledge. Tarrago´ M (ed.) (2000) Nueva Historia Argentina. Tomo I. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.

AMINO ACID RACEMIZATION DATING 429

AMINO ACID RACEMIZATION DATING Rainer Gru¨n, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary amino acid Used for the synthesis of proteins. There are about 20 different amino acids in nature, consisting of four building blocks attached to a central carbon atom at angles of about 120
in respect to each other: a carboxylic group (COOH), an amino group (NH2), a hydrogen atom and a radical group (e.g., H in glycine, CH3O in serine or C2H3O2 in aspartic acid). chiral A three-dimensional form that consists in two configurations that are not superposable on their mirror images. chiral atom Central atom, onto which chemical groups can be attached to form isomers or stereoisomers. dextrorotatory Turning a plane of polarized light to the right. dromaius Extant emu. epimerization The process when a stereoisomer has two or more chiral carbon atoms but only one is changed in the conversion. genyornis Extinct giant flightless bird in Australia. isomer Consisting of the same elements in the same proportions, with the same molecular weight, but, as a result of a different arrangement of their constituents, forming different substances with different properties. lævorotatory Turning a plane of polarized light to the left. racemization The process in which one optically active stereoisomer is converted into a mix of lævorotatory and dextrorotatory forms. ratite Belonging to a class of birds with a keel-less sternum, such as ostrich, emu, and cassowary. stereoisomer Isomers differing in their spatial arrangement.

Amino acid racemization (AAR) dating is a technique that is based on chemical reactions. Amino acids occur in two chiral forms (they are not superposable on their mirror images, see Figure 1). Amino acids are optically active, which means that a plane of polarized light will be rotated while passing through the substance. The chiral forms are labeled L (lævorotatory: turning a plane of polarized light to the left) and D (dextrorotatory: turning a plane of polarized light to the right). The symmetries are similar to left and right hands and, informally, L-amino acids are called ‘left handed’ and D-amino acids ‘right handed’. Nearly all living organisms exclusively produce L-amino acids; therefore, in living tissues the ratio of D-amino acids over L-amino acids (¼D/L ratio) is zero. After the death of the organism, L-amino acids convert into D-amino acids by a reversible process called racemization. For some amino acids, the racemization process takes place over geological time frames. As a result, the D/L ratio can be used for dating until equilibrium is

achieved (usually D/L 1). In ideal circumstances, AAR dating may be applicable to samples as old as 1 million years.

Basic Principles Amino acids are formed from four basic building blocks, which are attached to a central carbon atom at angles of about 120
in respect to each other (Figure 2): a carboxylic acid group (COOH), an amino group (NH2), a hydrogen atom, and a radical group (in the simplest case of glycine this radical group is a hydrogen atom, others are CH3O for serine, C2H3O2 for aspartic acid, etc.). A given amino acid can occur in two, nonidentical mirror images (except for glycine, which has two H-atoms), in which the central carbon is a chiral atom. The two forms are called stereoisomers (Figures 1 and 2): they have the same composition and molecular weight but differ in their spatial orientation. Racemization is the process, in which one optically active stereoisomer is converted into a mix of lævorotatory and dextrorotatory forms. Epimerization is the process when a stereoisomer has two or more chiral carbon atoms but only one is changed in the conversion (see Carbon-14 Dating; Dendrochronology). The calcified tissues (bones, teeth, shells, egg shells, etc.) and proteins of living organisms are closely

COOH

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Figure 1 Amino acids contain four different building blocks linked by a central carbon atom: a carboxylic group (COOH), an amino group (NH2), a hydrogen atom, and a radical group, which determines the specific amino acid. Except for glycine, which has two hydrogen atoms, amino acids have two chiral forms, which are not superposable. They are stereoisomers, that is, molecules with the same composition and molecular weight, but different spatial orientations.

430 AMINO ACID RACEMIZATION DATING L-aspartic

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Figure 2 Racemization and epimerization of the two most commonly used amino acids in geochronology. a, L-aspartic acid changes into D-aspartic acid via an intermediate step, where the hydrogen atom is removed, forming a carbon anion (carbanion). The hydrogen atom can be re-attached in two near equivalent positions, if it is on the opposite side, the D-aspartic acid is formed. With time, the resultant solution will become a racemate, that is, contain an equal mixture of L- and D-forms. The solid lines present bonds lying in the paper plane, while the blue triangles connect groups projected forward and the red-dashed triangle groups behind the paper plane. b, Racemization and epimerization of L-isoleucine. The rate constants of the two directional epimerization reactions are different; therefore, the solution will equilibrate at an A/I (alloisoleucine/isoleucine) ratio of about 1:3. a, After Hare PE, von Endt DW, and Kokis JE (1997) Protein and amino acid diagenesis dating. In: Taylor RE and Aitken MJ (eds.) Chronometric Dating in Archaeology, pp. 261–296. New York: Plenum Press. b, After Miller GH and Brigham-Grette J (1989) Amino acid geochronology: Resolution and precision in carbonate fossils. Quaternary International 1: 111–128.

associated. There are about 20 different amino acids used in the synthesis of proteins. Virtually, all living organisms produce exclusively L-amino acids. Enzymic reactions during life prevent D-amino acids from forming in most tissues, with the notable exception of eye lenses and teeth. There has been some interesting work attempting to establish the time of death of people based on the degree of racemization in teeth in forensic and archaeological contexts. After the death of the organism, the proteins break down,

resulting in a mix of free amino acids, peptides (containing a small number of amino acids), and fragments of proteins. If the initial D/L, or A/I (alloisoleucine/isoleucine) ratio is zero (or close to zero; typically <0.02), and if the geological reaction rate is known, an age can be in principle derived until the reaction reaches equilibrium (usually D/L 1; for A/I 1.3). Like all chemical reactions, the racemization rate is temperature dependent; geological reaction rates can be deducted from

AMINO ACID RACEMIZATION DATING 431

high-temperature heating experiments. The general effect of the time/temperature dependence of the racemization of a geological sample is shown in Figure 3. Because of the nonlinear relationship between the D/L ratio and time, D/L ratios change rapidly in young samples and more slowly in older ones. This means that the precision of AAR, assuming more or less constant analytical errors, diminishes with the age of the samples. An additional problem arises with the fact that the temperature at a given locality may have changed dramatically over Quaternary timescales. This necessitates calibration of the AAR results by independent isotopic dating techniques (see below). On the other hand, if the ages of samples are independently known, AAR values can be used to reconstruct the climatic history of a geographical area.

Measurement Amino acids are quantitatively measured with chromatographical methods: there is a range of technical variants, such an ion-exchange high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), and more recently, reversed phase liquid chromatography (RPLC). Each method has specific advantages and disadvantages in sample preparation and measurement resolution. All measurement techniques have a fact in common that the analysis, compared to other dating techniques, is very fast and relatively inexpensive. This allows the analysis of a large number of samples within a reasonably short time.

different reaction rates and geographical areas with different temperature histories.

Errors Figure 4 shows the principles of error calculation for amino acid age estimations. It is assumed in this example that a sample with a D/L ratio of 0.3 and an independent age of 125 000 years was used as the calibration point, a certain time/temperature function was fitted to the calibration point and a temperature uncertainty of 1.5
C was assigned to the average storage temperature. A measured D/L ratio of 0.5 would result in an age of 350 000 years, a typical measurement uncertainty of 5% would result in an age error of 40 000 years. The error from the temperature envelope results in age error of about 60 000 years; the overall error would be in the 90 000 years range. The correct error may be significantly larger because of uncertainties in the measurement of the D/L ratio and independent age estimate of the calibration point. Because of the large uncertainties caused by extrapolations, it is usually advisable to produce several calibration points with different ages. This allows age interpolations, which are usually associated with significantly smaller errors.

AAR Dating of Bones During the 1970s a large number of papers were published reporting amino acid dating results on bones using either isoleucine or aspartic acid. Rutter

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If the racemization rates over time were precisely known, AAR could be used as an independent, numerical dating technique. However, the temperature at a given locality may have changed dramatically over its archaeological history. To address this problem, calibration points are obtained by dating samples with independent geochronological methods, such as radiocarbon or U-series. To minimize effects of the unknown temperature history, it is usually attempted to obtain a series of calibration points of different geological age (Figure 6c, below). It has to be noted that the calibration curves apply only to one species and to a limited geographical area with closely similar temperature histories. For dating or correlating samples of unknown age, it is usually assumed that these experienced the same thermal history as those samples of the calibration curve. Wehmiller and Miller discussed in detail how calibration data of one species and one geographical area may be transferred to other species with

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Figure 3 Principles of age and temperature dependency of the D/L ratio. At a constant temperature the D/L ratio is a function of time; on the other hand, if the age of the sample is known, the D/L ratio can be used for estimating the average storage temperatures. After Wehmiller JF and Miller GH (2000) Aminostratigraphic dating methods in Quaternary geology. In: Noller JS, Sowers JM, and Lettis WR (eds.) Quaternary Geochronology Methods and Applications, pp. 115–120. Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union.

432 AMINO ACID RACEMIZATION DATING T+∆

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Figure 4 Principles of error calculation of an amino acid age estimation. A sample with a D/L ratio of 0.30 and an independent age estimate of 125 000 years is used as calibration point. The data point is fitted with a kinetic model for the current mean annual temperature or estimate of the average temperature for the last 125 000 years. The kinetic equation may have been derived from heating experiments (in this case a parabolic function was applied). Errors of the age estimate arise from the analytical uncertainty of the D/L measurement and the uncertainty, in the average storage temperature (here ¼ 1.5
C). Additional random errors would arise from any uncertainty in the measurement of the calibration point, systematic errors from the application of alternative kinetic functions. After Wehmiller JF and Miller GH (2000) Aminostratigraphic dating methods in Quaternary geology. In: Noller JS, Sowers JM, and Lettis WR (eds.) Quaternary Geochronology Methods and Applications, pp. 115–120. Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union.

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Figure 5 The varying A/I ratios show that the epimerization in shells is influenced by structural differences. For site-to-site comparisons, samples have to be analyzed from exactly the same position within the shells. After Hearty PJ, Miller GH, Stearns CE, and Szabo BJ (1986) Aminostratigraphy of quaternary shorelines in the Mediterranean basin. Geological Society of America Bulletin 97: 850–858.

samples can be used for geochronological purposes. This may be due to the fact that samples from caves have experienced less temperature and humidity changes than those in open-air sites.

AAR Dating of Mollusk Shells and Blackwell provided a comprehensive compilation of AAR data, including a large variety of age estimates on hominids, for example, from Border Cave, Swartklip, and Eyasi and those of the palaeoindians from Laguna, Del Mar, San Jacinto, and Sunnyvale. In particular, the results from the palaeoindian samples with ages of up to 70 000 years caused some controversy, perhaps because other, independent dating methods yielded significantly younger ages for these samples. Hare et al. discussed in detail that AAR ages of bones are notoriously unreliable and may deviate from independent age estimations by up to an order of magnitude. This has been attributed to the porosity of bones, which allows for a number of chemical processes to interfere with the AAR process (leaching, algal and bacterial contamination, precipitation of secondary minerals, variable geochemical conditions in the surrounding matrix, inhomogeneity of D/L ratios in different bones from the same skeleton, etc.). Some newer studies on cave bear teeth seem to imply that the D/L ratios extracted from dentine

AAR of mollusk shells is complicated because shells contain different structural layers. While the amino acid composition of each layer may be constant, there are significant differences between structural layers. As a result, protein degradation and racemization may proceed at different rates for the structural layers of a single shell sample (see Figure 5). Nevertheless, when collecting and analyzing samples from specific locations of a single species, it is possible to discriminate amino acid zones for the various oxygen isotope stages. However, for samples older than the last interglacial (marine isotope stage 5, 125 000 years ago), AAR analysis is usually not able to distinguish one interglacial from another.

AAR Dating of Ratite Egg Shells The 1990s has seen a rapid expansion of AAR dating of ratite (a class of birds with a keel-less sternum, such as the ostrich, emu, cassowary, etc.) egg shells. This is due to the fact that these have been recognized as approximating a closed system, with respect to

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Further Reading

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the A/I calibration curve for both Genyornis and Dromaius eggshells (Figure 6c). The flat part of the D/L ratio between about 20 000 and 60 000 years as such would prevent any stand-alone AAR dating attempt in this range. However, Miller et al. went to great lengths to independently date the geomorphologically youngest units in the various areas of study, finding that independent ages on Genyornis eggshells were always older than 40 000 years. Ostrich eggshells are ubiquitous in African archaeological sites, from Egypt to South Africa, and their AAR dating analysis may provide a powerful tool to unravel African archaeology and palaeoanthropology. In a recent compilation of AAR data from Boomplaas, Apollo 11, and Border Cave, Miller et al. concluded that the age of the Howieson’s Poort industry was bracketed by limiting dates of 56 000 and 80 000 years and was most likely centered on 66 000 to 5000 years.

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Figure 6 a, Amino acid age estimates for the extant Dromaius (emu). The data spread over the last 120 000 years with peaks around the Holocene and 60 000–70 000 years. Superimposed are the number of independently dated sites. b, Amino acid age estimates for the extinct Genyornis. No samples independently dated to younger than 45 000 years were found. c, Calibration curve for the amino acid age estimates. After Miller GH, Magee JW, Johnston BJ, et al. (1997a) Pleistocene extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human impact on the Australian megafauna. Science 283: 205–208.

leaching/uptake of organic solutions. In one of the most elaborate AAR studies on more than 1000 different eggshell samples, Miller et al. showed that the giant bird Genyornis, a member of the extinct Australian megafauna, disappeared around 50 000 years ago. They found that samples of Dromaius (extant emu) from widely scattered sites yielded AAR ages of between 0 and 120 000 years (Figure 6a), whereas Genyornis yielded only AAR ages of >45 000 years (Figure 6b). The AAR age estimates were based on

De Torres T, Ortiz JE, Garcia MJ, et al. (2001) Geochemical Evolution of amino acids in dentine of Pleistocene bears. Chirality 13: 517–521. Hare PE, von Endt DW, and Kokis JE (1997) Protein and amino acid diagenesis dating. In: Taylor RE and Aitken MJ (eds.) Chronometric Dating in Archaeology, pp. 261–296. New York: Plenum Press. Hearty PJ, Miller GH, Stearns CE, and Szabo BJ (1986) Aminostratigraphy of quaternary shorelines in the Mediterranean basin. Geological Society of America Bulletin 97: 850–858. Miller GH, Beaumont PB, Deacon HJ, Brooks AS, Hare PE, and Jull AJT (1999) Earliest modern humans in southern Africa dated by isoleucine epimerization in ostrich eggshell. Quaternary Science Reviews 18: 1537–1548. Miller GH and Brigham-Grette J (1989) Amino acid geochronology: Resolution and precision in carbonate fossils. Quaternary International 1: 111–128. Miller GH, Magee JW, Johnston BJ, et al. (1997a) Pleistocene extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human impact on the Australian megafauna. Science 283: 205–208. Miller GH, Magee JW, and Jull AJT (1997b) Low-latitude glacial cooling in the Southern Hemisphere from amino acids in emu eggshells. Nature 385: 241–244. Rutter NW and Blackwell B (1996) Amino acid racemization dating. In: Rutter NW and Catto NR (eds.) Pleistocene Dating Methods: Problems and Applications, pp. 125–166. Geotext 2, Ottawa: Geological Association of Canada. Wehmiller JF and Miller GH (2000) Aminostratigraphic dating methods in Quaternary geology. In: Noller JS, Sowers JM, and Lettis WR (eds.) Quaternary Geochronology Methods and Applications, pp. 115–120. Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union.

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ANIMAL DOMESTICATION Hans-Peter Uerpmann, University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary animal domestication Adapting animals to close coexistence with humans for serving as pets or suppliers of animal products (e.g., meat, milk, wool, etc.) or for providing labor and other services. cultural anthropology The scientific study of the development of human cultures based on ethnologic, ethnographic, linguistic, social, and psychological data and methods of analysis. morphological character An aspect describing the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts. tameness Status of animal behavior where humans are conceived like conspecifics without fear or aggression.

Introduction: What Is Animal Domestication? In its proper sense, animal domestication means the process of transformation from wild to domestic animals. However, the term is also used to denominate the domestic status of animals. It derives from the Latin word for house – domus – and indicates that domestic animals are incorporated into the human household. This means that important aspects of their livelihood (like behavior, nutrition, reproduction, range of movements, life span, etc.) are under human control and that humans at their will can use domestic animals for whatever is possible. In contrast, wild animals are independent in all these respects. While freedom to us appears as a very important aspect of life, it should not be forgotten that domestic animals also have enormous advantages over their wild conspecifics. Human control also includes protection against predation, starvation, uncontrolled population growth, negative climatic influences, and so on. Well-managed domesticates can reach population levels far above those of their wild conspecifics using similar environments. In addition, they often can expand with human support to geographical regions and environments, which are not accessible for the wild forms. Therefore, within the biological system of concepts, animal domestication can be described as a special form of symbiosis between humans and certain animals, which has advantages for both participating species. Scientific explanation of the evolutionary processes leading to the development of symbiotic relationships is always a challenge for the biologist. In the case of

explaining the origins of animal domestication this is even more complex, because those who want to understand the domestication processes are themselves involved as ‘domesticators’. Therefore the biological system of concepts is not sufficient for a scientific approach to the historical understanding of animal domestication. Such an approach must be compatible with the concepts of cultural anthropology as well.

Animal Domestication in the Context of Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology Within the archaeological context, the term animal domestication is often reduced to the processes leading to the domestication of food-producing animals during what is called the Neolithic revolution. This is understandable, because the development of active food production had the most profound impact on the development of mankind after the invention of tools and the use of fire. The fundamental impacts of animal domestication on human history are today mainly dealt with by cultural anthropology, but were part of human self-awareness from early on. The distinction of herder and hunter as part of the dichotomy between ‘civilized’ and ‘wild’ is already found in the cuneiform literature of Mesopotamia. Indeed, the domestication of certain animals is part of the transition from a foraging life to that of farming, which also includes the domestication of certain plants. There is no doubt that questions of when, where, why, and how people first domesticated these particular plants and animals are central to the understanding of the history and development of mankind and have received the attention of scholars and philosophers throughout the formation of human self-understanding. The present contribution will, however, not concentrate on these anthropocentric aspects of animal domestication. It will instead deal with domestication as a series of processes between humans and specific animals, which strongly depended on particular environments and on special ways of biological interference between the two sides and which had different results depending on the involved animal species.

The Role of the Domesticator The role of humans as domesticators has to be addressed first, because it seems that this role is basically identical regardless of the animal counterparts involved in particular domestications. As a general attitude,

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many archaeologists consider animal domestication as a process consciously initiated by humans for special purposes. As a common notion, the domestication of meat-producing animals is considered as human reaction to a shortage of protein supplies provoked by a range of potential causes. The dog was domesticated as hunting companion, and the horse for pulling the chariot – just to mention a few examples of purpose-oriented reasoning for causes of domestication processes. The likelihood that such reasons initiated domestications is very low, however, because as a general rule the usefulness of a particular domestic animal could not be imagined beforehand, when that species was only known as a fugitive and in some cases even dangerous wild animal. When looking into the known details of actual domestication processes, and when taking into account the available knowledge about biology and behavior of the species involved, explanatory scenarios can be developed for specific situations, which lead to the domestication of particular animals without postulating a purpose. In plain words, this means that domestications may just have happened when a very particular set of circumstances allowed it. The specific usefulness of the respective domestic animal could then be recognized and would have been the reason for its further propagation. A major reason for skepticism against considering humans as active, purposeful domesticators should be the fact that so few animals were domesticated. Situations of protein shortages must have happened many times during all periods of early human history. Among the rich variety of African ungulates there would most certainly have been species which were appropriate for domestication. The argument that humans themselves first had to develop particular capabilities for managing domestic animals must be considered, but does not explain the actual observations. These questions will be taken up again when discussing the evidence for the earliest domestication of meat-producing animals. The alternative to purposeful domestication is the unconscious development of close man/animal connections leading to a symbiotic relationship. As humans are the only mammals who have domesticates, the basic behavioral features must be looked for on the human side. They can easily be found in a common attitude toward very young animals, which almost inevitably triggers nursing instincts in humans. The relevance of this feature for animal domestication has long been realized, but – in spite of more recent reconsiderations – has not really been recognized in its fundamental importance for animal domestications. Complete taming of animals usually can only be achieved when it starts very early during

their individual development. Together the nursing instinct on the human side and the potential for complete taming on the side of very young animals provide a starting point for a close man/animal relationship on an individual basis.

Basics of the Domestication Process Tameness is a fundamental precondition for domestication. Among the mammals exceptions are only found in some recent domesticates, like minks or other species bred for their pelts. In such cases, the necessary control over the animal is achieved by caging. Taming on the other hand provides mental control over the animal, which nevertheless must usually be supported by fencing or other suppressive means of physical control. However, many animal species can be tamed, but only a few of them became domesticates. Domesticates are different from their wild relatives. A tamed wolf is not a dog. This indicates that taming is only a first step in the direction of domestication. For its completion it is necessary that tame individuals start to reproduce and that their offspring remain and breed under human control over several generations. During this time, both the circumstances of living together with humans and the direct results of human control will more or less consciously influence reproductive success of particular individuals. Thus, a selection of special biological traits will soon become manifest in an animal population, which is breeding under human control. As soon as clear differences can be observed, the respective population can be recognized as domesticated. The domestication process thus requires the following steps: 1. gaining complete control over individual animals, preferably by taming; 2. assembling tamed (or otherwise controlled) groups of animals containing both sexes and keeping them together over periods long enough to start intra-group breeding; and 3. continued intragroup breeding of the tame (or otherwise controlled) stock and avoiding largescale cross-breeding with the wild population. The easiest way to achieve step 1 is the nursing of very young individuals taken from the wild population. The second step is the most difficult one, because it requires keeping the raised animals till sexual maturity and beyond. In addition these animals must be kept in a way, which allows for their repertoire of reproductive behavior to be performed successfully. Once these difficulties are overcome, the third step will become easier and easier with each successful breeding

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cycle, because there will be a very efficient natural selection for animals that are capable to survive and reproduce under these particular circumstances. In addition, human selection will favor particular external features, which help to distinguish domestic and wild stock – like aberrant colorations, hanging ears or twisted horns, etc. Early breeders will soon have realized that cross-breeding with wild animals is not desirable, because such crosses will have hampered the accumulation of those inherited behavioral features which are favorable for a close coexistence with humans. A widespread hypothesis of how step 1 might have been achieved during the domestication of meatproducing animals is based on the assumption of some kind of management of wild animal populations through human hunters. This has remained a theoretical concept, though, lacking reflections on the practicability of such management. Actually, specialized hunters must have had some sort of control over their favorite prey animals. This control, however, is achieved by monitoring, not restricting, the movements of a wild animal population. Selective pressures exerted by specialized hunters will have favored better avoidance on the animal side, not a mutual approach. Real physical control of hunters over a mature wild population is absolutely illusive in the case of wild sheep or goats in their natural mountainous habitats, because their ability to move in such terrain is by far superior to that of humans. Other animals, like wild cattle, are simply too strong as adults to be physically controlled. Only in theory, fencing would have been a way to obtain control over a mature population of wild herbivores, because a fenced area would either have been too small to provide fodder for a long enough period, or too large to sufficiently restrict the movements of the animals. In conclusion, it remains difficult to imagine realistic scenarios for a domestication process starting from a mature wild animal population within its natural habitat.

How to Identify Domestication? Research into the beginnings of animal domestication requires methods for a distinction between the remains of wild and domestic animals. These need to be orientated at detecting the changes, which differentiate the archaeological leftovers of hunters from those of early animal keepers. In principle, there are two sets of data potentially yielding information about the wild or domestic status of the animals, whose remains are found at an archaeological site. One of them are the data yielding information about morphological characters of the individual animals,

which are known to change during the domestication process. The other one concerns the whole population of animals, which was exploited for meat by those who left the bone finds behind. This last approach is based on the assumption that an accumulation of bone finds as leftovers of meals will reflect the demographic structure of the live animal population from which the consumed animals were taken. The Demographic Concept

For an explanation of the demographic concept of identifying domestication the following scenario should be imagined. A group of hunter-gatherers regularly exploits the wild ungulates living in their surroundings for venison. Whenever meat is needed or wanted, hunters leave the camp and shoot the first animal which comes into their reach. This kind of ‘hunting at random’ is repeated over and over again. After a larger number of cycles, every individual animal of the exploited wild population would have had the same chance to end up on the skewer over the campfire of the hunters. Those which actually did would presumably form a random sample of the whole population. The next assumption is that the dumped bone offal of these animals will still reflect their taxonomic identity and their ages and sexes. The archaeozoologist, who would later evaluate these finds, would then be able to reconstruct the species, age, and sex composition of the population of wild ungulates, which was exploited by the hunters and gatherers who left the bone-finds behind. The results would finally reflect the demographic structure of the exploited animal population. Thus, demographic results for the animal remains from archaeological sites at the verge of animal domestication can be compared with expectations based on the results from other sites of older or younger date, or with expectations based on the demographic features of modern wild animal populations from comparable environments. If the archaeological sample yields a demographic result, which does not seem compatible with that of a hunted fauna, one may argue for a pattern, which depended on slaughtering early domesticates. The application of this concept can be difficult due to the nature of the animal remains found at sites from the periods of incipient animal domestication. Often such materials do not provide samples large enough to obtain results of statistical significance. A more theoretical difficulty derives from the extreme plasticity of wild animal populations and the wide range of demographic changes which may occur naturally under the influence of predation, environmental change, or other natural causes. Attempts to prove domestication through the demographic approach

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need to demonstrate a deviation from the wild status in great detail. All the influences must be considered, which might have had an effect on the respective prehistoric animal populations. Particular difficulties are to be expected, when incipient domestication in the form of keeping some few tame animals cooccurs with ‘normal’ subsistence hunting (see HunterGatherers, Ancient). In principle, though, this is a valid approach, which also has a potential to identify domestication in its very early stages. The Morphological Concept

The other way to identify domestication is based on the changes which are caused by domestication in the respective animals. These changes will only become evident after the domestication process is well on its way. Depending on the nature of the changes implied, this may be a span of five to ten generations, for which the respective animal population must have lived under human control. In absolute time, this may be a span between 15 and 50 years, depending on the reproductive cycle of the species involved. Compared to the accuracy of the available methods for dating the archaeological contexts, from where the respective animal remains come, this time span is almost negligible. Therefore the temporal disadvantage of this approach seems less important than the increased security of the results as compared to the population approach. There are many characters in animals that change under the influence of domestication. However, most of them do not affect the skeletal system, which is the primary source of information with regard to archaeological periods. Nevertheless, there are a number of features that can be recognized in the skeleton as well. The skull for instance is very sensitive to changes in the neural system under the influence of domestication. The reduction in brain size recognizable in most modern domesticates also affects the skull and its proportions. But often skulls are not well enough preserved at early sites to provide the necessary evidence; and if a well-preserved specimen is found, it only represents one single animal and does not provide insights into changes at the population level, which are required as a basis for valid extrapolations. Horn cores, the inner bony support of the horns of sheep, goat, cattle, and other bovids, are more often preserved in numbers large enough to be of statistical significance. Under the influence of the human preference for individualistic characters among the animal companions, horns become variable in form and size during the domestication process. This is reflected in the horn cores as well. Twisted and medially flattened horn cores of Neolithic goats have often been used as evidence for their domestic status.

However, changes in the horns do not have a required function during domestication. They are accepted, both by the humans and the animals if they occur, but do not occur by necessity. Therefore, these changes can only be used as evidence for domestication in the positive case. The negative case does not exclude domestication. According to empirical observations, the overall size of animals is the best indication for their wild or domestic status, at least during the early stages of their relationship with humans. As a general rule animals become smaller during the initial phase of domestication. Many reasons have been discussed for this observation, but it must be admitted that the dependencies of body size at a population level are not yet fully understood by paleobiology. The major factors explaining size reduction in early domestication will be suppression of the natural selection of partners during reproduction and increased tolerance of smaller animals to temporary shortages in the supply of fodder. A preference of the humans for more docile animals may have acted in the same direction. In any case, a clear decrease in size during early stages of domestication is visible in dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and other animals. Later, after the herders and farmers had learned how to manage and breed their animals well, the size of domestic animals often increased, reaching the sizes of the wild ancestors again or even surpassing them. The initial appearance of domestic dromedaries in southeast Arabia will be used as an example for this kind of approach to identify domestication based on animal size. Columns 2 and 3 of Figure 1 represent the marked drop in the sizes of dromedary bone finds from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the respective layers of Tell Abraq, a stratified site in the United Arab Emirates. While the sizes of the finds from the Bronze Age levels correlate with the sizes of dromedary finds from Umm an-Nar (column 1), a slightly earlier site further south in the UAE, the finds from the Iron Age levels are comparable in size to the dromedary finds from Muweilah (column 4), another Iron Age site not far from Tell Abraq. It is obvious that the dots in columns 3 and 4 represent populations of smaller dromedaries than those in columns 1 and 2. The indicated shift in dromedary size from the Bronze to the Iron Age is interpreted as transition from hunting wild dromedaries before about 1200/ 1000 BC to using domestic ones in the period thereafter. Some further explanations are necessary to understand Figure 1. Dromedary sizes are indicated there in the form of size index values. The LSI or ‘logarithmic size index’ is calculated from bone measurements by relating them to the respective measurement of the

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0.1

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−0.1 Figure 1 Diminution of logarithmic size-index values for dromedary bone finds from archaeological sites in the United Arab Emirates at the shift from the Bronze to the Iron Age.

skeleton of a so-called standard animal. The skeletal size of the standard animal defines the zero line of the graph marked by the arrow on the right side. Symbols above the zero line indicate animals larger than the standard animal, and those below are from smaller dromedaries. Calculation of the size index is simple, because it is defined as the difference between the decadal logarithms of a measurement x of a bone find and the respective bone measurement s of the standard animal: LSIðXÞ ¼ log x
log s The advantage of using size indices for the evaluation of animal size as represented in archaeological bone finds lies in their comparability throughout the different skeletal elements. Otherwise individual bone measurements would only be comparable with their exact homolog in other series of measurements. It is important to use this method on a population base and not to overinterpret individual deviations – as for example the lowest value in column 1 of Figure 1, which might be considered to represent a domestic dromedary, but probably only represents an exceptionally small wild animal. The applicability of this method will of course always depend on the presence of a sufficient number of measurable bone finds and on a standardized way of measuring both the archaeological finds and the skeletons of standard animals.

A Short History of Animal Domestication Dog (CANIS)

The oldest domestic animal is the dog. Its wild ancestor is the wolf, Canis lupus. (The scientific nomenclature of domestic animals is not regulated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The system applied in this article is based on Uerpmann (1993).) There are indications for increasing approaches between humans and wolves at Upper Paleolithic sites in Central Europe. For instance, wolf bones are quite frequently found at mammoth hunter’s sites in Moravia. While hunting and killing animals does not appear to be an approach leading into domestication, it has to be assumed that hunting the adults would often have led to catching the very young ones alive. Wolf puppies are wonderful pets. As said before, raising young animals probably was the basic cause of animal domestication. However, domestication must not be seen as the inevitable outcome of this activity. At first, the raising of young ones only creates tame animals – animals that know how to behave in human society. Domestication may follow, but only if the adaptations to coexistence with humans are inherited to further generations. In the case of the assumed tame wolves of the Upper Paleolithic, reproductive isolation from the wild wolves does not seem to have been complete. Differences between tame and wild individuals,

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caused by human preferences for particular properties of the ‘pre-dogs’, will have accumulated but slowly. Therefore, it remains difficult to detect these differences in the fossil record consisting of scattered bone finds. Good osteological evidence for dogs is not available before the Mesolithic. On the animal side, this must have been due to increased genetic isolation between tame and wild wolves – an isolation which had to be due to changes in the relation between humans and early dogs. We may speculate that increased importance of tame wolfs or ‘pre-dogs’ for finding game in a more vegetated landscape was a reason for paying more attention to these hunting companions. There is evidence for early dogs from Britain, Denmark, and other parts of Europe, and from the Near East as well, where we also find indications for an affective relation between humans and early dogs. Skeletal remains of young wolves or dogs are sometimes found in human graves. Particular evidence for the process of domestication is also stored in the genetic code of animals. Comparative analysis of the DNA sequences of dogs and wolves yielded the most important information that – contrary to former assumptions – the North American wolves were not domesticated. PreColumbian dogs in America derive from animals which came from Asia together with the human population. Whether all dogs derive from East Asia, as also suggested from DNA evidence, remains questionable. The assumption that dog domestication should have happened in an area where the local wolves had a gene pool broad enough to contain most of the basic genetic variation of dogs would be plausible only if domestication was a natural evolutionary process. However, the primary cause for the approach between wolves and humans was the interspecific social capabilities of the latter. How would these people have been capable to realize which wolf population had enough genetic variability to encompass more than 95% of the respective variability of modern dogs? A polycentric or widespread origin of dogs throughout the former mammoth steppes of Eurasia would also be compatible with the DNA patterns of modern dogs (see DNA: Ancient; Modern, and Archaeology. From the fossil record, it is difficult to reconstruct what the very early dogs looked like. They were smaller than wolves, but may not have looked very different. The manifold differences between recent dogs and wolves will have evolved after this initial phase when it became important for dogs not to be mistaken for a wolf. Wolves became enemies when humans started to have other domestic animals than dogs. Domestic sheep and goats are easy prey for

wolves, but humans were not willing to share this base of their subsistence with the wolf. Sheep (OVIS) and Goats (CAPRA)

Sheep and goats were the next animals to become domesticated after the dog. Again, a lot of speculation is necessary to imagine a probable scenario for this process. The usual answer is that – for whatever reason – people at a certain point of their development needed additional or more secure sources of animal protein and that they therefore started to domesticate meat-producing animals. This answer is insufficient, however. Early hunters and gatherers experienced food shortages all the time, and – apart from the meat-‘eating’ dog – did not domesticate any meat-‘producing’ animals. The subsistence of the Magdalenian culture in western Europe, which flourished during the Late Pleistocene and created marvelous works of art found in the caves of southern France and northern Spain, was mainly based on hunting wild reindeer and horses. These large herbivores populated the open landscapes created by the cold and dry climate of the final Ice Age. The spread of forests at the transition to the Holocene dislodged these animals to the north and east. Severe shortages must have resulted for the Magdalenian hunters. They did, however, not react by domesticating reindeer or horse, although both species can be domesticated, as was proved much later when other conditions led to their incorporation into the human sphere. Looking at the long history of hunting and gathering as subsistence strategy, periodic shortages must have occurred many times and under many different sets of environmental conditions. Actually, the conditions which lead to the domestication of sheep and goats were unique and very special. The same changes of global climate, which brought an end to the Magdalenian base of subsistence, favored the expansion of grasslands in the part of the Near East which is called the Fertile Crescent. These changes were not only favorable for the grasseating animals of that area, which in turn could be used by human hunters, but also yielded direct profit for the humans, because among the grasses of that area were the wild cereals. Rich stands of wild barley, rye, and wheat provided enough corn not only for the harvest season, but also for storage through larger parts of the year. These provisions lead to increased sedentism, including the origin of villages and even larger agglomerations of more or less permanent houses. The house – being part of the domestication concept – came into existence. While the cereal harvest provided a carbohydrate base for human nutrition, animal protein still had to

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be obtained by hunting. The whole fauna of the area was exploited by the sedentary harvesters. Animal bones found in their settlements range from the large aurochs to turtles, fish, and even snails. The fact that even minor sources of protein were exploited is an indication that sedentism is not really compatible with efficient hunting. In particular, the larger and more fugitive prey would soon avoid the vicinity of permanent settlements. Nevertheless, these communities would also have brought back very young animals to the settlements when their mothers had been taken during a hunt. Actually, structured villages are much better for bringing up orphaned animal babies than ephemeral camps of hunters and gatherers. Particularly in the more mountainous and therefore more ecologically diverse areas of the Fertile Crescent, the Protoneolithic villages of the ‘hunting harvesters’ probably will soon have housed a veritable zoo of tame young animals. While growing older, their fate will have depended on their compatibility with humans. It should be reminded that young animals reared by hunters and gatherers are generally not considered as economic resources. Depending on their specific patterns of behavior, adolescent animals might leave their foster communities on their own – probably soon falling prey to carnivores or hunters of other communities due to a lack of knowledge about living in the wild. The more social ones might try to stay, but human tolerance for an adolescent aurochs or stag would have been limited. Thus the duration of time during which reared animals could stay with their foster communities depended on factors like size, aggressiveness, required food, etc. Among the animals taken by the hunting harvesters of the Fertile Crescent, sheep and goats are the ones which had the potential to stay long enough with their human foster communities to reach sexual maturity and to actually breed in this sort of deliberate captivity. The conscious observation of spontaneous breeding and proliferation of these herd animals within human communities must have been the trigger for the Neolithic revolution of human subsistence. While the above considerations only highlight the preconditions on the animal side of the domestication process, it is obvious that more or less conscious – but in any case complex – processes on the human side had to accompany the incorporation of beloved household animals into a revolutionary new subsistence strategy. A prolonged period of several generations of coexistence with tamed animals, where compunction hampered slaughtering and conscious exploitation, may have been necessary for these processes to develop. However, once the potential of controlled breeding of animals for meat production was recognized, a whole set of new social possibilities

and necessities had to be managed and adopted on top of the changes brought about by the prior adaptation to harvesting and incipient cereal cultivation. It is obvious, however, that a unique coincidence of particular biogeographical factors and climatic conditions was necessary to trigger these adaptations. Apart from the Fertile Crescent, similar situations seem to have existed at the Pleistocene/Holocene transition in parts of Southeast Asia and in Central America. There, however, the final step of animal domestication was less successful due to the local lack of suitable middle-sized animals. While in Southeast Asia the domestic pig became a provider of meat on the level of small communities, the little animals like guinea pigs and turkeys first domesticated in Central America and northern South America could only reach this position on a family level. Cattle (BOS) and Pig (SUS)

In the Near East, the incorporation of domestic sheep and goats into human subsistence economies was soon followed by the domestication of cattle and pigs. However, little is known about the actual processes leading to the addition of these animals to the livestock. One may assume that having domestic sheep and goats created the intellectual space for consciously adding other animals to the existing herds. Where this happened first within the Fertile Crescent is still unknown. The best available evidence for early pig and cattle domestication at present comes from the vertex of the crescent in the river systems of Euphrates and Tigris (Figure 2). When the Neolithic economy started to spread into Europe, a complete set of domestic animals consisting of cattle, pig, sheep, and goat provided a highly adaptable base of meat production, which could easily be adjusted to different local conditions and which provided the best possible insurance against catastrophic events, which rarely affect the different species to the same extent. It is interesting to read from the genetic evidence carried along by European livestock, that the European aurochs was not domesticated by the Neolithic farmers. Mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively carried along the maternal line of inheritance, reflects a Near Eastern origin of European domestic cattle. A separate domestication is suggested for African cattle, and well documented for the humped or zebu cattle in South Asia. For modern domestic pigs, there is genetic evidence for multiple domestications. It seems that the basic Neolithic stock of pigs in Europe was later replaced by locally domesticated animals. In South and East Asia, early pig domestications may have contributed to the independent development of food-producing economies.

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Donkey (ASINUS) and Horse (CABALLUS)

Based on cattle, swine, sheep, and goats, the subsistence economy of the Neolithic period flourished in Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa for several thousand years without other animals being added to the stock. In Europe, it is the appearance of the horse which marks the first important addition. This is different in southwest Asia and northeast Africa, because there the donkey initiated the expansion of the domestic squad. Apart from donkey and horse, these additions later also included the Bactrian camel and the dromedary. All these additional animals were mainly used as beasts of burden and for riding. The domestication of the donkey is still poorly understood. The wild ass, Equus africanus, occurred in arid to semi-arid regions throughout northern Africa from Somalia in the east to the coast of the Atlantic in the west, but also on the Arabian Peninsula including the dry parts of the Levant and Mesopotamia up to the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains. For a long time, palaeozoologists were not aware of the Asiatic part of the range of the wild ass, because its fossil remains were confounded with those of the socalled Asiatic wild ass, Equus hemionus. Therefore, the older literature considers Egypt as the only center of donkey domestication, and the donkey is sometimes seen as the only African species among the domestic mammals. However, up to now, the earliest finds of donkey bones are from the famous site of Uruk in Mesopotamia, where they are dated to the last quarter of the fourth millennium BC. This indicates

that Mesopotamia was one center of domestication of this species. The other one certainly was in the Nile valley (Figure 2), where ancient Egyptian sources also illustrate how donkey domestication might have taken place. Ancient Egyptian art gives insight into many aspects of the natural environment. Animals are quite prominent in all sorts of illustrations and the accuracy of animal depictions is most impressive. It is often possible to identify particular species of wild birds or fish from the pictures, and it is therefore not astounding that various wild mammals can easily be recognized. From such sources we know that the ancient Egyptians kept asses, ibex, Oryx antelopes, various gazelles, and other wild species in captivity. As these depictions usually belong to particular social contexts, it may be assumed that these motifs represent activities of outstanding members of the society. From Mesopotamia, there is evidence for special gardens where wild animals were kept. What can be inferred from depictions in Egypt and from texts in Mesopotamia might well be interpreted as a reaction to the alienation from nature at a time when villages started to become towns or even cities. Whatever the reason was to have captive wild animals at that time, it will in any case have had the potential to add new animals to the domestic stock, because breeding animals in captivity must inevitably always have been the first step toward their domestication (see above). However, with regard to domestication of the donkey, the last word has probably not yet been written.

442 ANIMAL DOMESTICATION

It seems most likely that the horse was domesticated after the example of the donkey. Wild horses did not exist in the centers of early civilization where the donkey was domesticated. Their natural adaptation to the continental steppes of the Northern Hemisphere gave them a huge range during the cold phases of the Pleistocene, reaching from the Iberian Peninsula through Central Europe to Russia and Siberia and even across the then existing Bering Land Bridge over to Alaska and farther into North America. The spread of forests in the Post Pleistocene confined the wild horses to areas which retained an open, grass-dominated vegetation. The extent of such areas varied quite a lot during the Holocene, and therefore it is still difficult to determine exactly where wild horses would have been available for domestication. Obviously, there is a core area of steppes from Eastern Europe into Central Asia where wild horses always lived until they were exterminated in recent historic times. But in addition to that, more or less isolated populations existed on the Iberian Peninsula, temporarily in France and Central Europe, but during cool and dry climatic phases also in the Danube Plains and in the highlands from Central Anatolia to Armenia and northwestern Iran (Figure 2). If the assumption is correct that the donkey was the example for the domestication of the horse, the area mentioned last is crucial for the beginning of this process. However, actual research has been very limited until recently. There is evidence for the presence of domestic horses in Armenia at the beginning of the last quarter of the third millennium BC (unpublished results of recent research by the author). It is still not known, however, whether these animals were domesticated locally or imported from an earlier center of horse domestication elsewhere. In any case, the domestic horse made its appearance in ancient Mesopotamia at the very beginning of written history at the shift from the third to the second millennium BC. In Central Europe, it arrived during the second millennium BC, while on the Iberian Peninsula an independent domestication may have happened before. These views are in contrast to the older assumption that the horse was domesticated in the east European steppes during the fourth millennium BC. However, the evidence for this assumption is now widely considered as insufficient. The Camelids: Bactrian Camel (BACTRIANUS), Dromedary (DROMEDARIUS), Llama (LAMA), and Alpaca ( ALPACA)

The Bactrian or two-humped camel is the most enigmatic domestic species with regard to its early history.

Assumptions about the beginnings of its close connection to humans reach back into the Neolithic period, but there is no real evidence available. Its wild ancestor, Camelus ferus, is still found in remote parts of the Central Asian deserts, but was formerly more widespread, reaching west to the shores of the Caspian Sea and into Iran. One of its earliest appearances as a domestic or at least tame animal is documented by a Mesopotamian seal-cutter, who carved a schematic animal with a curved neck and two cylinders on its back into a seal sometime before the middle of the second millennium BC. Two persons are sitting face to face on the two cylinders on the back of the animal, indicating that the animal, which the seal-cutter apparently had not seen himself, could be ridden. There are other indications in the glyptic tradition of southwest Central Asia and Iran which indicate that the Bactrian camel may have been domesticated in that part of the world, perhaps as early as the third millennium BC. For the time being, however, no biological evidence is available for this process. The dromedary or one-humped camel is slightly better known than the Bactrian camel. It appears in the historical record and art of the Near East toward the end of the second millennium BC. From the same time onward, its bone remains become more and more common among the faunal remains studied from the same area. The problem about this species for a long time was its wild ancestor. There are no wild dromedaries today. Assumptions went as far as to believe that the one-humped dromedary was but a domestic variant of the Asiatic two-humped camel. However, the lack of evidence for wild dromedaries is only due to the bad conditions for fossil bone preservation in the Arabian deserts, which were the ecological niche, to where wild dromedaries retreated during the final Pleistocene. In the Pleistocene, they occurred in a very large form (Camelus thomasi) not only in southwest Asia but also in North Africa. As a real desert animal, the wild dromedary lost a large part of its former habitat, when climatic conditions became moister toward the Holocene. Therefore, the better-explored areas of North Africa and the Near and Middle East, which are also the areas preferred by the human inhabitants, became void of wild dromedaries. With progressing archaeological research in some parts of Arabia, this gap in our knowledge has started to close. Apparently, the dromedary was the latest addition among the large mammals to the domestic stock. The historical, pictorial, and morphological evidence indicate domestication toward the end of the second millennium BC. Why and how this happened is still a matter of speculation. Apart from the general fact

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that this must have been on the Arabian Peninsula, the exact whereabouts are also still unknown. The morphological evidence, used as an example earlier (Figure 1), does not indicate a transitional period in the area of southeast Arabia from where the data come. Whether this indicates that domestic dromedaries arrived there fully domesticated, or whether their morphological changes happened too fast to be visible on the archaeological timescale, is not yet known. The domestic South American camelids llama (LAMA) and alpaca (ALPACA) were also quite enigmatic with regard to their domestication history for a long time. It seems fairly well established now that they originated from the two local wild species guanaco (Lama guanicoe) and vicun˜a (Vicugna vicugna), respectively. Their domestication may have started as early as the fourth millennium BC, but the circumstances of this process are not clear at all. The role of the camelids within the early prehistoric development of the human populations of the respective areas in the South American Andes is difficult to assess at a regional level. Changes observed at individual sites are difficult to interpret as long as it remains difficult to correlate them to the general environmental history of the area and to more widespread changes in human subsistence and settlement patterns. Nevertheless, the domestic South American camelids must have played an important role during the development of advanced civilizations in that part of the world. The Cat (CATUS) and Other Small (Semi-) Domesticated Carnivores

Among our domestic animals, the cat has remained the most independent creature till today. In particular, with regard to reproduction, human control over this species is not too efficient. This independence sheds some light on the process of domestication of this species as well. As young cats are very attractive pets, one may well assume that cat domestication started in the same way as the domestication of the dog. Rearing young wild cats would have created a tame population living within human settlements, but without genetic isolation from the wild population in the surroundings. Therefore morphological and other changes due to domestication would not have accumulated. This goes well with the observation that the many mummified cats found in old Egyptian contexts cannot really be distinguished from the North African wild cat, Felis silvestris libyca, although one may well assume that they lived tame among the humans. Transformation of the cat into a ‘real’ domestic animal will therefore have depended

on the disappearance of the wild cats within the range of the tame ones. This would have happened when human settlements became towns or cities and thus too large for the tame cats to reach the surrounding wilderness where the wild tomcats would have waited for them. Another important factor may have been the introduction of domestic fowl in human settlements. As a wild cat would not have hesitated to consider a chicken as prey, the tolerance for these animals within settlements will have disappeared quickly after the domestic chicken arrived in the Middle and Near East, from where it spread farther to the Mediterranean and Europe (see below). Taming of wild cats may have happened anywhere in the huge range of the wild cat. Cats will have been welcome in settlements because they act as control of rodent pests. Their domestication will, however, have depended on genetic isolation from the wild surroundings. Therefore the appearance of real domestic cats is fairly late in the archaeozoological record. For Europe, this is generally the time of the Roman Empire. Another small carnivore, the mongoose Herpestes edwardsi, lives in South Asia in a semi-domestic condition till today. There is no control over its reproduction. Therefore the animal has not developed domestic characters, but can be considered as a candidate for real domestication as soon as contacts will be lost between the tame and the wild population. The ferret is a domestic polecat (Mustela putorius), and has passed the line between tame and domesticated, because it displays obvious differences from the polecat, like a whitish color, and also has skull characters which can be interpreted as domestication changes. Its domestication seems to have occurred during the Middle Ages. Other members of the mustellid family, like the mink, are among the very recent domesticates. They owe their status not so much to conscious domestication, but simply to the fact, that these species were bred in captivity for the production of pelts. Captivity – not tameness – achieved genetic isolation from the wild population in these cases. The isolation produced changes in coloration which are sufficient to consider these animals as domestic, because they live under human control and they are different from their wild relatives. Domestic Fowl: Chicken (GALLUS) and Other Small Domestic Animals

The wild ancestor of domestic chicken, the Bankiva hen (Gallus gallus), lives in South Asia from India to Vietnam and southern China. Its domestication must have started in that area and is not yet really known. It must have spread from India to the west during the

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second millennium BC, because there is a historical document from the time of Tuthmosis III in Egypt, which mentions ‘‘the bird which lays an egg every day.’’ It is unknown how the domestic chicken reached Egypt so early, because the known harbor sites on the shores of the Arabian Peninsula have not yielded chicken bones among the faunal remains from the second millennium, although maritime contacts to the Indus civilization are indicated there in large style by all sorts of transported goods. Early in the first millennium BC, chicken spread from the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean to the Aegean and as far west as southern Spain. In Central Europe, it appears as indication of Mediterranean contacts during the final phase of the Hallstatt civilization soon after 500 BC. Obviously, it filled a niche at that time of transformation from rural to township life. As small animals, which can make their living on what remains as offal from the human table, chicken could even be kept in cities. Another small animal which could give a city dweller the feeling that he was in charge of some food production himself is the domestic rabbit (CUNICULUS). This is clearly a European addition to the domestic stock, because its wild ancestor, Oryctolagus cuniculus, occurred only in the southern and eastern coastland of the Iberian Peninsula and in southern France. Among the small wild animals kept in Roman times in so-called leporaria, it was the only one that started reproduction in captivity. Breeding under human control in isolation from the wild population was again the starting point of domestication. Like few other animals, the rabbit took enormous advantage from its close companionship with humans, because with human help it could spread its range almost worldwide. Recent Domestications

Since the beginnings of city life in the Near East and the wider Mediterranean, more small animals like the carp, doves, ducks and geese, and also the bee and the silk worm have entered the human sphere and more domestications are going on today. Quite a number of species have become domesticated under the eyes of modern science, but this is rarely verbalized. There is no doubt that the guppy fish and many other species which populate the fish tanks of the civilized world are now domestic animals. The same is true for budgerigars, canaries, and some other popular species of birds, and also for some small mammals, which have developed forms under human control, which do not occur in the wild. None of these domestications were planned. They just happened because people started

to keep animals for momentary reasons – not with the aim of transforming them into something that could not be foreseen. Those animals which were able to reproduce under the man-made conditions became domesticated. Others, which did not, have remained ‘wild’, because reproduction in isolation is the most important precondition of domestication. This is also the case for the largest animal, which lives close to humans: the Indian elephant is the best example, that tameness is not domestication. There are no domestic elephants, because breeding these animals in captivity is difficult. It is also not ‘necessary’ in the case of the elephant, because the tame females are easy to handle, have a long life expectancy, and up to now could easily be replaced by taming a new young wild elephant. It will be interesting to observe, if someone will have the idea to really domesticate the Indian elephant, when it becomes more and more difficult to find reproducing wild herds. The observation of modern domestications is an important reason for being sceptical about intentional domestications in the past. Favorable conditions of human life are a plausible reason for changing relations with particular animals in terms of keeping them alive for some time instead of eating them immediately. On the other hand, food shortages and the dubious human capacity to foresee what will be needed in the future – together with the fact that the economic success of domestication could not be predicted – are unlikely to have stimulated a process which in any case took too long to produce an immediate response for the individual who started it. See also: DNA: Ancient; Modern, and Archaeology; Plant Domestication; Hunter-Gatherers, Ancient.

Further Reading Benecke N (1994) Der Mensch und seine Haustiere. Stuttgart: Theiss. Cauvin J (1994) Naissance des divinite´s, naissance de l’agriculture. La revolution des symbols au Neolithique. Paris: CNRS. Clutton-Brock J (1999) A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis SJ and Valla FR (1978) Evidence for the domestication of the dog 12 000 years ago in the Natufian of Israel. Nature 276: 608–610. Galton F (1865) The first steps towards the domestication of animals. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London NS 3: 122–138. Levine M, Renfrew C, and Boyle K (2003) McDonald Institute Monographs: Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Lewis-Williams D and Pearce D (2005) Inside the Neolithic Mind. London: Thames & Hudson.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 445 Savolainen P, Zhang Y, Luo J, Lundeberg J, and Leitner T (2002) Genetic evidence for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs. Science 298: 1610–1613. Serpell J (1989) Pet-keeping and animal domestication: A reappraisal. In: Clutton-Brock J (ed.) The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, One World Archaeology 2, pp. 10–21. London: Unwin Hyman. Uerpmann H-P (1993) Proposal for a separate nomenclature of domestic animals. In: Clason A, Payne S, and Uerpmann, H P (eds.) Skeletons in Her Cupboard. Festschrift for Juliet Clutton-Brock, Oxbow Monographs, 34, p. 239–241. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Animal Remains

Uerpmann H-P (1996) Animal domestication – Accident or intention? In: Harris DR (ed.) The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, pp. 227–237. London: UCL. Uerpmann H-P and Uerpmann M (2002) The Appearance of the Domestic Camel in South-east Arabia. Journal of Oman Studies 12: 235–260. Vigne J-D, Dollfus G, and Peters J (1999) Les de´buts de l’e´levage au Proche-Orient, donne´es nouvelles et re´flexions. Note e´ditoriale. Pale´orient 25/2: 5–10. Zeuner FE (1963) A History of Domesticated Animals. London: Hutchinson.

See: Archaeozoology.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Patricia A McAnany, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary agency The ability of humans, operating singly or collectively, to shape their social circumstances and effect change in their social and physical environment. anthropology The study of humanity across space and through time. Throughout most of the Americas, archaeology is classified as one of four subfields of anthropology (along with sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, and biological/physical anthropology). archaeological culture A constellation of material remains across space and through time for which there is an observable redundancy in stylistic and technological characteristics. archaeological surface survey A systematic study of the distribution of archaeological materials across a landscape that generally is conducted by a team of archaeologists who traverse an area on foot and maintain a constant distance from each other. Chaco Canyon Located in the northwestern corner of the state of New Mexico, the canyon was occupied by Pueblo peoples around AD 1000 who built large multiroomed and multistory architectural complexes with associated great kivas (subterranean ritual structures). Colonial Period Era (roughly 1500–1900) of expansion of western European peoples around the globe and colonization of parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. direct historical approach Method of working back in time from ethnographically known groups of people to the archaeological past. This method was utilized widely in the United States by cultural historians, particularly in the Great Plains and the Southwest. gender The social construction of roles and tasks associated with a particular sex.

ideology Thought processes and beliefs materialized in ritual and social practices. indigenous peoples Generally but not always refers to colonized peoples with a demonstrably long history of occupation within a region and generally but not always with a language, dress, and traditions that are distinct from a politically and economically dominant culture also living within the boundaries of a single nation-state. Maya region The area in which Mayan speakers lived in the past and also today; includes southern Me´xico, Belize, Guatemala, and western Honduras. Mesa Verde Located in the southwestern corner of the state of Colorado, this region was occupied by Pueblo peoples who, between AD 1100 and 1300, often lived in compact villages constructed within large rockshelters. Mississippian ‘culture’ Term that refers to people living along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries between AD 800 and 1300 and who constructed massive platform mounds. The largest Mississippian site is located on the east side of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, Missouri, and is called Cahokia. pottery seriation The archaeological method of building a relative chronology by studying stylistic changes in pottery and correlating these changes with stratigraphic sequences observed through excavation. prehistoric archaeology The investigation of material remains from the time before written texts. scientific method The formal logic and methods of scientific investigation of phenomenon that generally emphasize empiricism and hypothesis-testing. sedentism The act of becoming sedentary; within archaeology it generally, but not always, is correlated with the transition from a lifestyle of hunting, gathering, and collecting that involves frequent residential moves to a pattern of residing in a more permanent residence for part or all of an annual cycle. social practice The full constellation of activities by which humans engage with each other and their material world. subjectivity Interpretation based on personal opinions or feelings rather than on external facts or evidence.

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Historical Background The codification of archaeology as a distinct field of study apart from history was established in Europe by the nineteenth century. Likewise, the discipline of anthropology – broadly construed as the study of humanity – can be traced to the post-Enlightenment period and the colonial encounters of Europeans with peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. But blending the broad theoretical issues of anthropology with the archaeological study of specific material remains of the past took place in the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout most of the Americas, archaeology is classified as one of four subfields of anthropology (along with sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, and biological/ physical anthropology). Likewise, within American universities archaeology generally is taught as part of the curriculum of a department of anthropology. Archaeology as practiced in Europe and many other parts of the globe has a less anthropological and a more historical bent. This proclivity is particularly apparent in classical and biblical archaeology where historical texts can play a large role in determining the location of archaeological research and often lead the interpretation of excavated materials. Even prehistoric archaeology (the investigation of material remains from the time before written texts) within Europe often is viewed as a tool with which to investigate the deep history of historically known cultural groups. The goals of this type of archaeology, therefore, tend to be historical and somewhat particularistic. In contradistinction, anthropological archaeology tends to focus on broad themes – such as social identity or the domestication of plants and animals – which are investigated with archaeological information from one or more parts of the world. Cross-cultural comparisons are encouraged within anthropological archaeology and are not thought to violate the historical uniqueness or singularity of a ‘culture’. Here, ‘culture’ is used to refer to a constellation of material remains across space and through time for which there is an observable redundancy in stylistic and technological characteristics that, by convention, allow archaeologists to refer to such a bundle of material things as a culture. An argument can be made that anthropological archaeology arose in the Americas because early scholars pursuing archaeological research in this part of the world largely were of European ancestry with insufficient appreciation for the deep history of indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Indeed, many American archaeologists/physical anthropologists of the early twentieth century – such as Ales

Hrdlicka – spent their entire career disputing evidence that indigenous peoples had a presence in the Americas for more than a few thousand years. During the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century, the monumental structures that had been built in the Americas before sixteenth century European incursions – the soaring pyramids of the Maya region or the massive platform mounds of the Mississippi Valley – were routinely credited to shipwrecked Egyptians or some other circum-Mediterranean classical culture. Cultural evolutionists of the Victorian era were of the opinion that civilization had arisen only in Europe and the classical world and so reasoned that evidence of colossal pyramids or elaborate palaces in the Americas must have been the result of ancient migrations from areas of acknowledged civilizations. Of course, we now know that the peopling of the Americas was well underway by the close of the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene, generally thought to have ended about 12 000 years ago) and that, over the course of the deep history of the western hemisphere, plants and animals were domesticated and civilizations merged and were eclipsed in a manner that was independent of events that took place in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Nevertheless, the earlier, erroneous notion of a shallow time depth to the first peopling of the Americas favored the investigation via archaeological techniques of broad comparative topics over the construction of deep and chronologically controlled local prehistories, such as were under construction in other parts of the world. Although anthropological archaeology germinated in the milieu of Colonial Period bigotry and racism, it soon outgrew its questionable origins. As knowledge of the temporally deep occupation of the Americas grew through the first half of the twentieth century, anthropological archaeologists began to refer to their study of the past as culture history and some employed an approach called the ‘direct historical approach’ to link ethnographically known groups – such as Southwestern USA Pueblo peoples – with earlier Pueblo ruins such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. In this way, archaeology in the western hemisphere came to be anthropological because of its use of ethnography as a starting point of inquiry. At the same time, this research was decidedly historical in focus, more particularistic in its goals, and employed and further refined many archaeological techniques, such as pottery seriation, that had been pioneered by European archaeologists. The flowering of a distinctly American anthropological archaeology that privileged broad research issues over historical sequences and embraced the scientific method began in the late 1950s and

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 447

continued through the 1970s. This brand of anthropological archaeology – often called processual or new archaeology – reengaged with the broad themes of cultural evolution but rejected the prejudicial, unilineal schemes of earlier evolutionists. Asking ‘why’ societies had changed, anthropological archaeologists of this era investigated remains of the past in order to test theories regarding mobility and settlement patterns as well as major social transformations such as the advent of sedentism, plant and animal domestication, social ranking within societies, civilization, and urbanism (see Processual Archaeology). Realizing that archaeological sites were a skewed sample of what had once existed, archaeologists concerned themselves with issues of sampling, designed their studies so as to minimize bias, and elevated archaeological surface survey to a recognized stage of field research. During this era, the emphasis on theorybuilding and quantitative techniques lent a tone of abstraction to archaeological interpretations. Moreover, in the search for explanatory theory priority was accorded to environmental and technological factors – the forces of production as per Marx – while ideology and religious beliefs (in Marxian fashion) were considered epiphenomenal and not central to social change (see Marxist Archaeology). Through the 1960s and the 1970s, social change within the USA – the rise of feminism as well as black and red power movements – began to infiltrate anthropological archaeology and had an impact on both contemporary practice and interpretations of the past.

Anthropological Archaeology at the Twentieth Fin de Sie`cle The excesses and trans-Atlantic impact of the processual brand of anthropological archaeology resulted in a critique of this approach beginning in the 1980s by more historically trained British archaeologists who argued that beliefs and symbol systems played a central role in structuring archaeological remains. Labeled postprocessualism, this type of archaeology tends to privilege the interpretation of specific archaeological contexts over cross-cultural comparison. Closer scrutiny of archaeological interpretations of the past from a feminist perspective also revealed a constructed past in which females were underrepresented and female-gendered labor somewhat denigrated. This critique gave rise to the study of gender within archaeology and more broadly to the study of the means and methods by which social identities were constructed and expressed materially. Likewise, there is a concern among contemporary anthropological archaeologists (regardless of whether

they self-identify as processualists or postprocessualists) to understand the past on more human and less abstract terms, to see the past as having been inhabited by a diverse array of persons with agency and social practices that are somewhat knowable. In effect, the archaeological definition of ‘culture’ has been socialized and can include a focus on practice, subjectivities, and human engagement with a materiality that colloquially is referred to as ‘the archaeological record’. Current research can be characterized as combining the strengths of both processualism and postprocesualism and to embrace a variety of topics such as hierarchy, trade, religion and ritual practice, economic and political forms, gender, identity, the human body, and landscapes (both experiential and reconstructive approaches). Methodologically, the role of scientific techniques (often called archaeometry) within anthropological archaeology continues to grow as DNA, chemical, and molecular techniques of analysis mature. The current atmosphere within which North American anthropological archaeology is conducted has been influenced greatly by the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This legislation mandated that museums curating Native American skeletons and associated grave accoutrements (and in receipt of federal funding) make a complete inventory of their holdings and notify descendant tribal leaders in order to initiate consultation and possible repatriation of the remains and artifacts to tribal jurisdiction. The effect of this law changed the balance of power between archaeologists and Native Americans and ushered in a new era of consultation and dialogue between North American archaeologists and the descendents of those whose artifactual and architectural remains are studied by archaeologists. This enfranchisement of indigenous peoples into the practice of archaeology, likewise, has led to an emphasis on less destructive techniques of investigation, an avoidance of mortuary contexts, and a concomitant emphasis on both the ethics of archaeological research and the preservation of cultural heritage. As self-appointed stewards of the past, many North American anthropological archaeologists have oriented their work towards preservation of the past through enhanced programs of public and community education. In this regard, anthropological archaeology as practiced within the milieu of twenty-first century globalism exhibits an ‘applied’ edge as archaeologists engage with descendent and local communities and also struggle to combat the adverse impact of rampant tourism, unstoppable looting of archaeological sites, and site destruction caused by urban and industrial expansion.

448 ANTIQUITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE LEGISLATION See also: Agency; Biblical Archaeology; Classical Ar-

chaeology; Culture, Concept and Definitions; Engendered Archaeology; Marxist Archaeology; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology.

Further Reading Binford LR (1962) Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity 28: 217–225. Dı´az-Andreu M (ed.) (2005) The Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity, and Religion. London: Routledge. Hodder I (ed.) (1982) Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hodder I and Hutson S (2003) Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kehoe AB (1998) The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. New York: Routledge. O’Brien MJ, Lyman RL, and Schiffer MB (2005) Archaeology as a Process. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Patterson TC (1995) Toward a Social History of Archaeology in the United States. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Scarre C and Scarre G (eds.) (2006) The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trigger BG (2006) A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf E (1997) Europe and the People without History, 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ANTIQUITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE LEGISLATION Don D Fowler, Reno, NV, USA

Introduction

ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ethical concerns in archaeology have become increasingly important since the 1970s. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ethics as ‘‘a set of moral principles ... rules or standards of right conduct’’ that define ‘‘a body of obligations and duties for individuals in a society or in a particular profession or area of life.’’ Archaeologists adhere to codes of ethics that define professional research standards and obligations and duties to the cultural heritage and all peoples associated with that heritage. After 1945, many nations developed new or additional heritage legislation. In archaeology, the focus was on ‘salvage’ operations – saving objects and data before destruction by largescale projects such as dams and highways. By the 1970s, a ‘conservation ethic’ became pervasive and new national legislation developed to reflect conservation principles. New archaeological codes were written to incorporate those principles. After 1990, the globalization of archaeology required that archaeological ethics be developed that are applicable in both international and national contexts. Contemporary archaeological codes of ethics may be considered in five contexts: (1) legal instruments, (2) relationships with indigenous peoples, (3) professionalism, (4) conservation principles, and (5) archaeology and partisan politics.

Glossary antiquities Archaeological objects from ancient cultures, e.g., stone tools, pottery vessels, metal objects, and items of personal adornment. architectural conservation The process through which the material, historical, and design integrity of mankind’s built heritage are prolonged through carefully planned interventions. cultural heritage (‘‘national heritage’’ or ‘‘heritage’’) The legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. indigenous peoples Cultural groups (and their descendants) who have a historical continuity or association with a given region, or parts of a region, and who formerly or currently inhabit the region. They maintain, at least in part, their distinct linguistic, cultural and social and organizational characteristics, and in doing so remain differentiated in some degree from the surrounding populations and dominant culture of the nation-state. salvage archaeology (sometimes called ‘‘preventive’’ or ‘‘rescue’’ archaeology) Archaeological survey and excavation carried out in areas threatened by, or revealed by, construction or other development, such as the building of a dam to flood an area where sites of interest might exist; or even before the onset of war. Unlike traditional survey and excavation, salvage archaeology must be undertaken at speed.

ANTIQUITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE LEGISLATION 449

Legal Instruments Archaeology is increasingly conducted in a global context defined by international legal instruments. These are promulgated by organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. The instruments provide a superstructure of public international law and ethics that functions on a consensual and confederate basis. The instruments relating to cultural heritage give organizational, procedural, and ethical guidance for developing heritage laws and policies at international and national levels. The codes of ethics and practice of most archaeological associations increasingly reflect international instruments relating both to cultural heritage and human cultural rights.

Relations with Indigenous Peoples International declarations, beginning with the 1948 UNESCO Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have set forth basic human rights. These include the right to full access to, and control by, the individual and her/his self-defined group over their cultural heritage and its expression in sites, buildings, structures, objects, rituals, and traditional knowledge (see Native Peoples and Archaeology). Archaeological ethical codes and standards of practice respect those rights. The World Archaeological Congress (WAC) 1991 First Code of Ethics: Members’ Obligations to Indigenous Peoples states that members are (see World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws): 1. to acknowledge the importance of indigenous cultural heritage, including sites, places, objects, artifacts, human remains, to the survival of indigenous cultures; 2. to acknowledge the importance of protecting indigenous cultural heritage to the well-being of indigenous peoples; 3. to acknowledge the special importance of indigenous ancestral human remains, and sites containing and/or associated with such remains, to indigenous peoples; 4. to acknowledge that the important relationship between indigenous peoples and their cultural heritage exists irrespective of legal ownership; 5. to acknowledge that the indigenous cultural heritage rightfully belongs to the indigenous descendants of that heritage; 6. to acknowledge and recognize indigenous methodologies for interpreting, curating, managing, and protecting indigenous cultural heritage;

7. to establish equitable partnerships and relationships between members and indigenous peoples whose cultural heritage is being investigated; 8. to seek, whenever possible, representation of indigenous peoples in agencies funding or authorizing research to be certain that their view is considered as critically important in setting research standards, questions, priorities, and goals. The WAC Code incorporates by reference the 1989 WAC Vermillion Accord on Human Remains: 1. Respect for the mortal remains of the dead shall be accorded to all, irrespective of origin, race, religion, nationality, custom, and tradition. 2. Respect for the wishes of the dead concerning disposition shall be accorded whenever possible, reasonable, and lawful, when they are known or can be reasonably inferred. 3. Respect for the wishes of the local community and of relatives or guardians of the dead shall be accorded whenever possible, reasonable, and lawful. 4. Respect for the scientific research value of skeletal, mummified, and other human remains (including fossil hominids) shall be accorded when such value is demonstrated to exist. 5. Agreement on the disposition of fossil, skeletal, mummified, and other remains shall be reached by negotiation on the basis of mutual respect for the legitimate concerns of communities for the proper disposition of their ancestors, as well as the legitimate concerns of science and education. 6. The expressed recognition that the concerns of various ethnic groups, as well as those of science, are legitimate and to be respected will permit acceptable agreements to be reached and honored.

Professionalism Archaeology as a science creates new knowledge about the human situation and how it came to be. New knowledge becomes part of the human commons, available to everyone. This requires the preservation of, and access to, knowledge in publications, documents, and records held in libraries and archives, and artifacts and associated documentation held in trust by public institutions for exhibit and restudy. Archaeologists have an ethical obligation to comply with this requirement, and current codes reflect this commitment. Public support of archaeology brings with it public scrutiny of expenditures of funds and expectations of professionalism. Thus, professional ethical

450 ANTIQUITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE LEGISLATION

concerns in archaeology center on expertise, integrity, intellectual honesty and accountability. The ethical codes of contemporary archaeological associations reflect these concerns. For example, the American Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA 2006) states, ‘‘Archaeology is a profession, and the privilege of professional practice requires professional morality and professional responsibility, as well as professional competence, on the part of each practitioner.’’ The RPA code and those in other countries go on to spell out what professional ethical responsibilities and levels of professional competence should be.

Conservation of Cultural Heritage The ethical concerns relating to conservation are how to avoid or minimize the loss of archaeological data in the face of land-altering developments, looting, or ideologically motivated destruction of sites and monuments. The conservation ethic states that, if at all possible, extant archaeological sites should be left intact and held in stewardship for future study. All the professional archaeological codes of ethics include statements about the corporate and individual responsibility to conserve the archaeological heritage. In reality, ethical judgments about what constitute ‘appropriate mitigation measures’ for each threatened site must weigh the financial and legal feasibility of achieving de facto long-term conservation against excavation costs. When an intact site is judged to be particularly at risk from looting, the decision usually is to excavate at least a significant portion and thus conserve the information.

Looting and Trafficking in Antiquities A major ethical, legal, and conservation problem is the looting of archaeological sites to satisfy the intense, worldwide demand for antiquities on the illicit antiquities market. Because looting destroys context and information, archaeologists have a professional and ethical responsibility to combat it. Since 1970, many museums and museum associations have promulgated codes of ethics stating that objects must have proper provenance before they are purchased. But, there is simply too much money and demand worldwide to stem the flow of artifacts and art objects to wealthy collectors and unscrupulous museums. UNESCO and various nation states have tried to slow or stop the looting and trafficking, but with little success. A basic ethical principle centers on archaeologists, museum staff members, or professional journals not providing authentication to collectors or antiquities dealers for objects lacking clear and uncontested provenance.

Archaeology and Partisan Politics Archaeology has often been used in support of nationalist ideological, or other partisan political agendas. Archaeological sites, objects, and data are used by partisan groups as evidence of prior possession of lands or as symbols for negotiation of conflict. There are many extant examples, for example, Israelis and Palestinians, and various minority groups in Europe, Africa, India and the USA. All use archaeology to advance their ideological, social, and political agendas, especially claims of precedence and prior occupation. Partisan politics pose difficult ethical issues for archaeologists. Archaeology has standards of acceptable evidence, and, like other sciences, is self-correcting. Data are collected and vetted, and hypotheses formed to account for them; as contrary data accumulate, hypotheses are changed. Data are not ‘objective’ or ‘value free’, but seen as ‘valid’ within a particular theoretical framework. Partisan political groups take archaeological data and transmute them into ‘true’ statements to support demonstrations of legitimacy, authenticity, autochthony, or other causes. In such situations, archaeologists’ first ethical responsibility should be to make their data, and interpretations thereof, as objective and accurate as possible within current archaeological practice and theory. Although archaeologists have an ethical responsibility to oppose egregious misuse of their data and interpretations, how those data and interpretations are used by others, once they enter the commons knowledge base, cannot be controlled. See also: Ethical Issues and Responsibilities; Illicit Antiquities; Native Peoples and Archaeology; World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws.

Further Reading Fowler DD, Jolie EA, and Salter MW (2007) Archaeological ethics in context and practice. In: Maschner H and Bentley A (eds.) Handbook of Archaeological Theory, pp. 31–48. Lantham: Altamira Press. Zimmerman LJ, Vitelli KD, and Hollowell-Zimmer J (eds.) (2003) Ethical Issues in Archaeology. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Brodie N, Doole J, and Renfrew C (2001) Trade in Illicit Antiquities: Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage. Cambridge: McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge. Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) (2006) Code of Conduct and Standards of Research Performance. http://www. rpanet.org/conduct.htm (see also for links to other professional archaeological codes of ethics. Scarre G and Scarre C (2006) The Ethics of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO (2006) Conventions and Declarations Relating to Cultural Heritage and Ethics. http://portal.unesco.org. World Archaeological Congress (WAC)(1990) First Code of Ethics. http://www.wac.uct.ac.za/archive.

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 451

Applied Archaeology

Archaeology.

See: Ethnoarchaeology; Forensic Archaeology; Interpretive Art and

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY David H Kelley, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary alignment Physical markers on the ground pointing towards a definable astronomical phenomenon. deity A supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force. archaeoastronomy The study of ancient alignments and other aspects of the archaeological record and their relationship to ancient astronomical knowledge and events. ethnography The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures. myth A story which has deep explanatory or symbolic resonance.

The Phenomena, Their Relationships to Events on Earth, and Interpretations of Their Meaning Life on Earth is conditional on and conditioned by the Sun. Perceptually, to those on Earth, we are at the center with Sun, Moon, planets, and fixed stars revolving around us with variations which are difficult to explain. The Sun maintains a fixed path relative to the stars, but seasonally different paths relative to the Earth. We can define the ecliptic, the horizon, the galaxy, and see how these vary relative to each other and to the planets. Eclipses of the Sun and Moon return with sufficient regularity to be predicted even without understanding the causes. Such erratic phenomena as meteor showers and comets nonetheless have some regularity. Meteorites, novas, and supernovas do not show such patterning. Weather patterns are geographically intermediate between heaven and earth, patterned both seasonally and geographically, yet notoriously difficult to predict in detail. Many human and animal activities are directly affected by Sun and Moon. No one ignores the alternation of day and night, and seasonal changes alternate rainy and dry periods, cold and warm periods, affecting plant growth, seasonal birth and mating patterns,

and even deaths. Light at night was provided in a changing pattern by the Moon, appreciated by poachers and other night life. The moon’s gravitational effects, especially tides, were important to marine life, shore dwellers, and mariners. Gravitational effects on plants have been little studied by modern biologists, but are a strong part of the belief systems of small farmers. Eleven-year sunspot cycles affect temperature and probably precipitation. Finally, those most noticeable of lunisolar phenomena, eclipses, have direct results. Solar eclipses are accompanied by temperature changes, often followed by cloud formation and rain; bird and animal behavior changes abruptly. People have also noted temporally associated phenomena – stars or planets becoming visible at sunrise or sunset mark different daily and seasonal activities. Even the correlation of the 60-year Jupiter cycle with 60-year peaks in rain activity may have been noted. Interpretations of the phenomena we are considering have been varied but important in many cultures around the world. A religious interpretation, attributing volition, personality, and wilful action to planets and stars (including Sun and Moon) was widespread. Visible phenomena were regarded as analogs of human behavior, carried out by deities, following all too human motivations. In an astrological approach, the movements of the heavenly bodies were regarded as entirely mechanical and predictable but causality was attributed to temporal association in many inappropriate ways, and it became far too particularistic in its application to individuals. Scientific studies try to determine which relationships are producing what behavioral effects including everything from physical damage to social pressures.

Relationships of Astronomy to Archaeologically or Ethnographically Determinable Activities and Beliefs There are three major problems in our knowledge of astronomy in much of the world. First, the knowledge

452 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

itself was often regarded as a secret which should only be imparted to those willing to abide by the rules and capable of learning. This was true in many parts of Africa, in some areas of inner Asia, in Australia, Micronesia, parts of Polynesia, and much of North and South America. Second, the ignorance of those who recorded the data, whether ancient Greeks and Romans, Jesuits in China, or modern anthropologists is often appalling. A third problem is that those geometrically or mathematically inclined individuals who would best understand a straightforward statement seem least equipped to recognize mythical statements of astronomical data, openly presented. Saturn, sleeping for a year with each of his 28 daughters, is regarded as a ribald tale or a moral warning against incest, rather than an account of the planet passing through defined segments of the sky in its sidereal revolution. When each of Saturn’s daughters is assigned an animal form, associated with a kinship group and a specified geographical location, the observer may deny that there is any astronomical intent possible. It is precisely such linkages of heavenly phenomena with earthly phenomena which provide the basis for archaeoastronomy. Kin groups are frequently related to specific stars of asterisms. They have acknowledged obligations to their communities in terms of ritual – sometimes related to myths about ‘their’ associated stellar group. Specific art forms may be produced only by specified kin groups and the iconography may identify figures of myths. The identification of deities may depend upon minor characteristics used in identifying their kin group. Such factors cannot be studied adequately except in the context of the social group which produced them, insofar as it is known. It is widely accepted that astronomy in the tropics was conceptualized differently than in more northernly areas. The horizon was more important and zenith passage was often noted. The nadir was sometimes calculated. The gegenschein was more obvious and rainbows were related to planetary phenomena. It is maintained that east and west were more important than north and south and that solstices were regularly observed while the equinoxes were less important or ignored. The rising and setting points of the planets both north and south of the equator were sometime incorporated into calendars. Some scholars maintain that interest in the stars was largely restricted to tropical stars. In terms of emphasis, these views have some validity, but tropical areas share most characteristics with nontropical areas. Archaeoastronomy started with the study of alignments. These may be recognizable either as repeated

phenomena or as occurrences in special situations – for example, forming an outline of an asterism such as the wall of Chang An, or in a defined camping situation such as that of some Siouans, or in connection with a solstitial ceremony, or a particular temple deity. Shapes in art and architecture may reflect patterned planetary movements or asterisms. At some periods in some areas the colors had clearly defined astronomical connotations. In other times and other areas, these may have been adjusted to other symbolic values of colors. Continuities in color associations may reflect either continuous knowledge of persisting astronomical conditions or acceptance of tradition. As we recognize particular connotations, we should be able to determine usages appropriate for specified times and places. This should indicate specifiable historical relationships and dates. Changes in color may have reflected either changes in the astronomical conditions or cultural differences in color connotations. All of these factors produce a potential for much better understanding of archaeological cultures, for recognizing cultural contacts, and sometimes for dating particular remains, occasionally with high precision.

Culture History Paleolithic

Although there have been a number of attempts to demonstrate that astronomy was associated with Paleolithic ritual and belief, none are fully satisfactory. Alexander Marshack showed that certain bones from Paleolithic sites were incised periodically at short intervals. His explanation was that nights were being counted, measuring lunations and ultimately determining ritual activities. The general interpretation seems plausible but the details lack adequate confirmation. A number of scholars, notably Michael Rappengluck, have claimed that cave paintings represent asterisms. Unfortunately, a substantial subjective element enters into such identifications unless there are very obvious arbitrary components which are hard to find in the paintings of hunting groups. Australia

In much of aboriginal Australia, there was a close linkage between art, myth, kinship, and astronomy, and it is the one place in the world where continuity from the Paleolithic is probable. Astronomical details are rarely attested and may differ between tribal groups but may usefully be mentioned as indicators.

Table 1 The World Chronology 4600 BCE to the Present N.B. Australia has nothing definitely datable in this time range. EuropeMesopotamia
4600


4500
4400
4300
4200
4100
4000
3900
3800
3700
3600
3500

Lacmariaquer Menhirs


3102 Kaliyuga era


2700
2600


2400
2300

Chinese Pole Star

Megalithic ‘yard’ Stonehenge, eclipses?


2100

Gnomon Gudea, of Lagasheclipse?

North America

South America
4600


4500
4400
4300
4200
4100
4000
3900
3800
3700
3600
3500


4500
4400
4300
4200
4100
4000
3900
3800
3700
3600
3500


3400
3300
3200


3400
3300
3200


3000

Medicine Wheels


2900
2800


2767: Sirius calendar, Pyramids stellar alignments


2500

Egyptian Sun Worship


2400
2300

365 day calendar


2200
2100


3100

Egyptian Lunar Calendar


3000


2700
2600

Inanna in Sumer Crucuno: Pythagorean Triangles all Tropical Year Points

Mesoamerica


4600


2900
2800

Early Stonehenge


2200

Africa


2700
2600

Cantograndeequinoxes, solstices


2400
2300 Fox Temple, winter solstice

Star Clocks


2500


2200
2100

Continued

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 453


2500

MicronesiaPolynesia


3100

Brugh-na-Boinne


3000
2900
2800

China-JapanKorea

Dissignac, Midwinter Solstice


3400
3300
3200


3100

India-Tibet, S.E. Asia

4600 BCE to the Present N.B. Australia has nothing definitely datable in this time range. EuropeMesopotamia

India-Tibet, S.E. Asia


2000


1900
1800
1700

China-JapanKorea
1952: Mass Conjunction

Mull and Argyll S. declination of moon


1600

28 lunar mansions


1500
1400

Enuma Anu Enlil


1200

astrolabes, culmination stars.


762: Solar Eclipse Eclipse prediction


400


200


100 0

Babylonian influence Eratosthanesmeasured sphere of the earth Hipparchos, Eudoxosepicycle precession system

Alexandrian Greek Techniques


433 Jupiter cycles, comets, star maps

Chang-An

Mesoamerica

North America

South America


2000


2000


1900
1800
1700


1900
1800
1700


1600


1600


1300

Extensive stellar mythology


700
600
500


300

Africa


1500
1400


1300


1100
1000
900
800

MicronesiaPolynesia


1321: Sothic Cycle (Sirius)


1500
1400

Alignments, Tropical Year,


1300

Zenith Passage
1257: Abu Simbel


1200


1200


1100
1000
900
800


1100
1000
900
800

Chavin-sculpture, light play, alignments.


700
600
500


700
600
500


400


400


300


300


200


100 0

Namoratunga alignments, lunar-stellar

New Fire Ceremonies

Siouan earth topography reflects sky and kin groups Hopewelliancardinal points, solstice shadowcasters


200


100 0

454 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

Table 1 Continued

100

Claudius Ptolemyeclipses,

200

planetary cycles, astrology

Ujain as the Tropic Observation Point; eclipse prediction, planetary cycles, epicycles, era count

300

Buddhist cosmology expanding

Izapa

200 Star maps?

Abu Ma’shar

Cosmological Temple Architechture

900
100 to present 1000

1054: Supernova

1100 1200

1400 Copernicus

650: MocheSaturn

400

500 600 700

Star Navigation

800

Xochicalco

800

Named lunar nights, eclipse prediction?

900

Tikal, Palenque

900

Haamonga-aMaui ChaucerAstrolabe

Tihuanacu

700 Borobudur and Angkor Wat

300

Nazca Linessolstices, equinoxes

500 600

Korean Observatory

800

Stellar alignments of temples

1000

1100 1200

‘Flying’ ceremony

1054: Supernova

Kogi-new fires, winter solstices, solar eclipses

Chichen Itza, serpent hierophany

1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

1000

1100 1200

1300 Aztec

Hopi

Pole-climbing with new fire. Rigel, Pleiades Inca

1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 455

1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

200

100

major and minor lunar standstills

400

500 600

1300

Planetary tables of mean motion, Eclipse calculation Ball-games

300

400

700

100

456 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

Names often cross linguistic boundaries. Paintings of supernatural figures in red, black, and yellow may go 40 000 years or more into the past but are being produced and renewed today. Repainting is regarded as vital in permitting a particular class of sprits to be reborn again as humans or related animals or plants. Only humans related to the particular spirit may repaint it. The land of the dead is a defined section of the Milky Way sharply divided into the Eagle– Hawk moiety (in Aquila, the Eagle) and the Crow moiety associated with Canopus (in Ursa Major). Crow stole fire from one of the Pleiades girls, or stole the missing Pleiad, herself, who became Alcor (in Ursa Major). The Rainbow Snake of daytime becomes the Milky Way at night, which may also be conceived as a river or (among the Tasmanians) a pathway. Brothers who are culture heroes ascended to the sky either by a chain of spears or a pine tree, which burned down. The brothers were forced to stay in the sky as alpha and beta of Gemini. One of the most remarkable sets of paintings of spirit beings are associated with a moon goddess, Wandjina, in the Kimberleys. The oldest paintings here include Pleistocene animals and may be as old as 30 000 years, but modern initiates can still identify many spirit people. Another version of the dualism of Eagle–Hawk and Crow maintained that they were chiefs among the birds who ruled the land before humans were present. European Megalithic

For more than 3000 years, seafarers of Europe built gigantic monuments with large stones (sometimes many tons in weight). These began with burial tumuli, with openings to the southeast, occasionally precisely aligned on the winter solstice. A passage grave at Dissignac in Brittany, about 4500 BC, contains grave goods and is decorated by designs of shepherds’ crooks and axes (Table 1). The chamber would have been lit up at the winter solstice. At Loc Mariaquer, around 3500 BC, two giant menhirs were created, the taller more than 600 high and weighing more than 340 tons. Such massive monuments had symbolic value, could have served as major navigational markers, and could have been used to measure the movements of anythng visible in the sky. Geometric figures (especially circles, near circles, stone lines, and rectangles) were common. Thom defined a measuring unit, the Megalithic Yard, on British evidence and found that it was used at Crucuno in Brittany to build a rectangle of 30  40 units, with a diagonal of 50 units. The diagonals marked the rising and setting points of the solstitial

sun, the 40 unit sides marked due east and west, and the 30 unit sides marked true north and south. This is the simplest of Pythagorean triangles, with alignments dependent entirely on the latitude. In terms of Thom’s ideas, this was ideal verification. The date was about 2600 BC. In Ireland, the Brugh-na-Boinne complex of about 3100 BC has three major burial mounds with a great deal of decoration, closely related to Brittany. A long window passage leads to the great interior dome of Newgrange, lit by the winter solstice rising sun. A quartzite covering makes a glittery palace for the reborn Sun God. Equinoxes and the summer solstice are also marked at the complex and a sun dial is present. Somewhat later, construction at Stonehenge continued from about 3000 to 1100 BCE. Summer and winter solstices are marked as well as major and minor standstills of the Moon. Whether there was an interest in predicting eclipses continues to be a disputed issue. The northern site of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides was buried deep in peat accumulating from about 1000 BCE. The monuments date from about 2200 to 1500 BCE. There is a very clear N–S alignment, with roughly cruciform angles extending from a central circle. Lunar extremes are more doubtful and claimed stellar alignments much disputed. Thom’s claims of very high precision in Megalithic sites are rejected by most specialists in Megalithic astronomy, but it is more widely accepted that the extreme positions of the Moon were being observed on the basis of independently studied Scottish sites. Similar results have been found with North European and Mediterranean sites; the range of phenomena is similar. The most distinctive of local Megalithic cultures is that of Malta (c. 3600–2600 BC) where large Megalithic temples show stellar alignments and numeracy was obviously central to astronomy. Charlemagne’s cathedral at Aachen (Aix) duplicates the dimensions and latitude of Stonehenge. The intended astronomy at either site is still poorly known. Neither do we know whether Aachen copies Stonehenge, or whether common astronomical interests determined comparable measurements. In either case, Aachen provides evidence which may eventually be crucial for interpreting Stonehenge and other Megalithic monuments. The Far East

In China, the earliest evidence shows that the North Pole and the equator were conceptually much more basic than the ecliptic. Several abandoned pole stars retain old names. The movements of the Moon were

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 457

tracked by the lunar ‘mansions’, unequal sections of the sky marked by asterisms, and roughly paired on opposite sides of the sky. The size of the pairs seems to fit best with the equator of about the twenty-fourth century BCE. Among the changes caused by precession, the complete elimination of the mansion of the Weaving Girl (Vega) is particularly noteworthy – long separated from her lover, the Ox Herd (Altair). Seven mansions together formed one of the four great directional animals, the Dragon (associated with blue, east, wood, Jupiter), the Bird (red, south, fire, Mars), the Tiger (white, west, metal, Venus), and the Turtle (or Black Warrior, north, water, Mercury). Monumental representations of Dragon and Tiger suggest the possibility that the entire system was present in pre-Shang times. In Chinese tradition, an ancient calendar began with a conjunction of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in the Great Square of Pegasus and Andromeda. There was such a conjunction on 3 March 1953 BC (Julian), indicating a genuine astronomical tradition. Another astronomical tradition says that the fourth Xia (Hsia) emperor beheaded the astronomers Hsi and Ho for failing to prevent a still unidentified eclipse. Their heads now appear as the double cluster in Perseus. During the Shang dynasty, the kings predicted both the lunar and solar eclipses (thirteenth and twelfth century BCE) involved in rituals, sacrifices, and warfare. Later, many eclipse cycles were in use, ranging from 23 eclipse seasons (3984 days) to 31 920 years (which incorporated eclipses, the tropical year, the 60 day cycle, and other phenomena). Planetary cycles were supposed to repeat in 138 240 years. The Chinese were using armillary spheres in the late centuries BC and a continuous tradition of putting star maps on tomb walls began about that time. The walls of the Han capital city, Xian (Chang-An), were a gigantic star map of parts of Ursa Major and Sagittarius, emphasizing the association of the polar region and imperial power. Tremendous observatories and measuring devices were used to improve precision. Marked western influence on Chinese astronomy came with Buddhist missionaries who introduced the western zodiac and Indian conceptions of time and space. Some Indian families joined the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. In Korea, the seventh-century Star Tower built of 365 stones and 28 rows of stones showed lunar interest. It is accepted as the oldest standing observatory. A Buddhist form of Chinese astronomy was introduced into Japan, also strongly influenced more directly by Chinese ideas from Korea.

The Middle East

The goddess Inanna, the Sumerian equivalent of Ishtar and Astarte, was the planet Venus in two guises – an armed warrior goddess in the morning, a tavern keeper in the evening. She is regularly depicted with Shumash, the Sun God, and with the Pleiades. The extent to which other planetary deities and constellations can be recognized in this material is still strongly disputed. There is also no agreement on the dates of eclipses before the one of 763 BC which played a crucial role in establishing the chronology of the first millennium BCE. However, Utu-hegal, King of Uruk, conquered the Gutian people at the time of a lunar eclipse, possibly 2163 BCE, or 2049 BCE. The Gutians particularly worshipped Inanna and Suen (Sin), the Moon. Astronomical depictions on Kassite boundary stones and some later monuments dating from the thirteenth to the seventh centuries BCE have still received little attention in terms of critical analysis of possible datings. Many of these depictions clearly correspond with later depictions of constellations and are often similar to earlier scenes which could refer to constellations. The Greek and modern zodiacs derive largely from Mesopotamian constellations. Early Mesopotamian texts differentiate the paths of Anu, Enlil, and Ea. The path of Enlil seems to approximate the Tropics, but a precise definition, chronologically, mythically, or astronomically, eludes modern scholars. Mathematical astronomy in the west is first attested in Mesopotamian documents from about 300 to 50 BC, including elaborate lunar tables and less elaborate planetary tables. The average motion of the planets was measured by two different techniques. The planetary tables emphasize horizon phenomena. The nature of the relationship of these documents to Greek astronomy and Euclidean geometry is vigorously disputed. It is generally supposed that the notion of the celestial sphere arose among the Greeks in the sixth century BC and led to ideas of concentric spheres. The idea that the circle was a perfect geometric figure and that heavenly bodies were, of necessity, perfect, was harmful to a proper understanding of astronomy, causing completely unnecessary problems for nearly 2000 years. The works of Hipparchus and Claudius Ptolemy established precession. The Earth was recognized as a sphere, and a reasonable approximation to its size was determined. The size of the Moon was substantially underestimated, and the Sun was grossly underestimated. However, a mechanistic understanding

458 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

of astronomy was introduced and nonpersonal astrology became largely acceptable. A few scholars argued for a heliocentric system. Descriptive refinement, especially by Islamic scholars, continued to modern times. Buildings were oriented to the cardinal points, and many churches were aligned so that the sun shone onto the high altar on the day of the patron saint. Egypt

Clearly, astronomy is crucial to understanding the story of the constant struggle between Osiris and his twin brother, Seth, the murder and cutting up of Osiris with his wife Isis putting the pieces back together and replacing his lost penis and resurrecting him; the birth of their son, Horus, who eventually killed Seth – and the resurrection of Seth and his reconciliation with Osiris. The actors are identified astronomically, sometimes inconsistently (Isis as Sirius, Osiris as the Moon, Seth as Mercury, Horus as the Sun, and sometimes Mercury), but the identifications do not lead automatically to an understanding of the astronomy. Neither are other myths much more understandable because of these and other identifications. Time measurement was very important in Egypt and water clocks were in use both of ‘inflow’ and ‘outflow’ types. These were used in astronomical contexts, and the night was early divided into 12 h. In the day, shadow clocks (including sundials) measured another 12 h. There was also an 8  13 grid used in observing stars at night. The sky was divided into a set of 36 decans, of ten [degrees] each, including named asterisms, largely unidentified. The Boatman in Orion, the Foreleg of the Bull identified as the Big Dipper, the Archer Goddess as Sirius are among the few accepted. This is surprising since star maps are well attested from the time of Hatshepsut to the Romans. The Sky Goddess, Nut, is prominently associated with death and rebirth, often appearing as a coffin lid. The Egyptian civil year consisted of 12 months of 30 days each plus five added days. No attempt was made to adjust for leap years. A Sothic year of 365 1=4 days based on the heliacal rising of Sirius was recognized and was valid from pre-Dynastic to Roman times. The degree to which it was recognized and formalized is much disputed. For this cycle to return to the same point of the Egyptian civil year took 1460 years. 1508 Egyptian years are equivalent to 1507 tropical years. This means that the sun shone into the Temple of Ra-Hor-Akhty at Abu Simbel on 1 Tybi of the Egyptian civil calendar for 4 years. Coupled with the evidence of the 25-year solar–lunar calendar, this identified the 34th year of Ramses II

as 1257 BC The 25-year lunar–solar cycle is attested in the only known document of mathematical astronomy from ancient Egypt. The winter solstice sun shown into temples of the Sun God, Amun, and stellar alignments are attested in inscriptions from some temples. There have been many preposterous claims in connection with Egyptian stellar alignments, often by people inadequately trained in either astronomy or Egyptology. However, some scholars competent in both disciplines are now working on these problems. India and Related Cultures

From Mongolia to Sumatra, a wide variety of cultures differing in language, economic base, clothing, and, often, religion, share related astronomical myths and rituals. Tibet, India, and Southeast Asia share massive elaborately decorated temples regarded as cosmograms and showing identified astronomical figures (often deities) acting roles known in recorded myths. Simple village sand paintings may depict such temples and gods. Star maps show most of the known sky and are found in temples. Literature describes the role of deities both in myth and in historical events; technical astronomy is described in great detail. This area has been a major originator of cultural ideas and a transmitter of Chinese ideas to the west and of Mediterranean ideas to the Orient. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Muslims share stories and representations. Astronomy in Sanskrit shows borrowings from Dravidian, including items related to the 28 sidereal lunar mansions. The world ages, trees, directions, birds, animals, and colors were widespread. Magic squares were sometimes associated. In some cases, the proportion of the ages was 4:3:2:1, and the last or Kaliyuga age began in 3102 BCE – a date probably back-calculated, regarded as a mass conjunction at a spring equinox. For astronomical purposes, a count by days from that base was in use. A Tamil scholar calculated an eclipse of 1825 by memorized tables combined with calculations using shells to mark numbers. The techniques were Babylonian of the second century BCE. The Khmer temple complex at Angkor Wat was built in the early twelfth century CE. It shows alignments to equinoxes, solstices, minor and major standstills of the Moon, iconography of planetary gods, and of the lunar mansions; measurements incorporate numbers of the local ‘cubit’ which are relevant to the World Ages and various astronommical units. Placements of the various scenes make them relevant to light and shadow plays. Our understanding of the

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 459

integration of iconography, visual alignments, measurements, and light and shadow play is probably greater at Angkor Wat than at any other site, but there is still much which is unknown. Micronesia and Polynesia

In Micronesia, the expert astronomers were navigators and their knowledge was secret. Training was done with 32 rocks either surrounding a model canoe or conceptualized as a canoe with the trainee in the center; these marked the rising and setting points of particular stars. Apparently, similar devices were used in Polynesia, and may be archaeologically recognizable. Micronesians also used maps made of sticks and shells, indicating geographic relationships of islands, reefs, and currents. In Micronesia and Polynesia, month names were derived from stars. In Eastern Polynesia, lunations were measured by the named nights of the Moon and associated with deities. In Polynesia, shared myths, astronomical names, navigational techniques, calendrical structure, and ideas about temples recorded by many different observers in different times and places mean that our understanding of the astronomy should increase substantially. We know that myths are tied to deities, to sacred features of the landscape, to astronomical geography, and to sacred constructions and alignments. Nearly all of the characteristics postulated for Megalithic astronomers in Europe are attested in one part or another of Polynesia with a wealth of accompanying myth. Maui’s canoe was in Orion’s Belt and his fishhook in Scorpio with which he fished up the Earth, identified with Mokoroa, Long Lizard and the Milky Way. The Tongan monument called Haamonga-a-Maui is the weight bearing pole with which Maui lifted the sky. It marks the equinoxes and possibly the solstices. All are attested in alignments at Easter Island; there are less certain lunar and stellar alignments. Stellar alignments can seldom be verified by repetition but are directly in rare cases in Polynesia. The Milky Way as the Talking Tree, identified as frangipani, was cut down by Maui to make his canoe. North America

Medicine wheels is a descriptive generalization for structures of heaped up stones laid out like megaliths, of a variety of shapes and possibly varied functions. Concentrated in Alberta, they were built between 2500 BCE and the eighteenth century CE. The most famous may have been aligned on calendrically important star risings. Some mark true north. The fullest collection of myths about Sun, Moon, planets, stars, and seasons are North American. Some

are widespread. Moieties and clans are related to asterisms and sometimes to astronomically based calendars. Descriptions are seldom astronomically comprehensive and often technically inadequate or wrong. Notable exceptions are our view of Arctic skies known to the Inuit, and the extensive data from the Navaho. Observational practices included widespread use of various types of shadow-casters, fixed observation points, and rarely, sighting tubes. The massive and precise use of geometrical patterns among the Hopewelliams included frequent marking of true north, but many claimed alignments are false. The Kern effigies of the Fort Ancient Culture (c. 1100–1200 CE) show two giant snakes, one aligned on the winter solstice rising sun, and the other on the summer solstice rising sun. The most sophisticated alignments recognized so far are from the Southwestern United States. At Fajada Butte, a single design is used to mark the equinox and both solstices. Massive evidence from Chacoan pueblos shows buildings and sites with reciprocal alignments demonstrating interest in equinoxes, solstices and the major and minor standstills of the moon. Among the Chumash, a Sun-Stick was raised by a priest and his 12 assistants, a pole symbolizing the center of the Earth, at the winter solstice. The poles had condor/eagle feathers above and crow feathers below. Common Californian mythical identities were Condor as Altair, Castor and Pollux as Twins (boy and girl), Orion’s Belt as Mountain Sheep. The Pomo kept bundle records, 13 sticks for a year; bundles marked 8, 64, and 512 years. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica was the only part of the New World which had a full panoply of all aspects of astronomy as a major factor in human behavior. The deities Sun, Moon, and Venus played major roles in society from birth to death. Human sacrifice in many forms, warfare, and imperial conquest, monuments, sculpture, and paintings all emphasized the constant interrelationship of human and astronomical actors. Above all, literary documents demonstrate technical knowledge of astronomy linked to divination. Crucial to the details of our knowledge is the Mesoamerican calendar. Cycles of 13 numbers and 20 days gave a 260-day sequence which provided birth date names to gods and humans. Eighteen ‘months’ of 20 days each supplemented by five other days provided a year of 365 days. The 260-day cycle and the 365-day cycle ran concurrently requiring 18 980 days (52  365) before a day of the 260-day

460 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

cycle repeated in the same position of the 365-day cycle. Among the Mayas, the 18 980-day cycle ran concurrently with an era count which years of 360 days counted from a specified base. The correlation of the Maya calendar with our calendar is defined by the number of days needed to be added to a Mayan era date to convert it to a Julian day number. Most Mesoamericanists prefer one of two proposals of Eric Thompson, 584 283 or 584 285. The Dresden Maya codex contains an eclipse table, a Venus table, a more disputed Mars table, and other probable planetary tables. Partly parallel tables are found in other Maya codices and in the Borgia group from central Mexico. Monumental alignments to Venus phenomena are generally accepted and the Temple of Kukulcan gives the illusion on the equinoxes that the giant carved Feathered Snakes are descending the stairs. An inner chamber at Palenque is illuminated at the winter solstice, and other solstitial alignments have been accepted by many scholars. Possible Jupiter alignments are more disputed. At Teotihuacan, an alignment on the rising of the Pleiades is probable. Other stellar alignments are more disputed. Direct identifications of Mesoamerican asterisms include the fire drill in Orion, the scorpion in Scorpio, and the tail of the Rattlesnake in the Pleiades. Finally, at Xochicalco, a tube drilled to a cave below provided sunlight in the cave at the zenith passage, also marked, less clearly, at Monte Alban. South America

A very important discovery for the history of astronomy in the New World is the alignment of the Temple of the Fox at Buena Vista in the Chillon Valley, Peru, excavated by Robert Benfer, dated at about 2200 BC. A painted Fox and Llama are aligned with the December (summer) solstice at dusk. In Quechua communities today, it is said that all foxes are born on Christmas Day and the Fox constellation is setting in the west marking the same alignment and the same mythic associations about 4000 years later. Interest in determining equinoxes, solstices, and zenith passage with high precision at about this date is attested by the lines of large boulders immediately to the south at Cantogrande, stretching for several kilometers. On the other side of the Andes is the temple of Chavin de Huantar of about 800 BCE. Here, a monument called the Lanzon, a monstrous figure with snake belt and mouth ornaments, is lit up by the rising sun at the December solstice. Imagery at Chavin includes conch shell trumpets from Ecuador and Amazonian jaguars, harpy eagles, anacondas, caymans, and monkeys. The Tello obelisk shows a Sky Cayman

(father) associated with agriculture including gourds, achira, peanuts, and manioc carried on the penis. This iconography is matched by a modern myth from Surinam telling of a Fishwoman who got manioc from her alligator father, who carried it on his penis. Another Amazonian tale tells how Star-Woman (sometimes Jupiter) introduced agriculture. The Moche culture of northern coastal Peru (particularly Phase V, c. 550–700 CE) contains specifically astronomical scenes, both from murals and ceramics. These include the Sun litter and Moon Fox. Mythic scenes include the Revolt of the Artifacts, an associated flood scene, the Spider Path to Heaven, and many others. Specific generally accepted interpretations are few. The site of Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) on the high plains of Bolivia includes the Akapana monument aligned to the equinoxes, dating from about the sixth century CE. Many other monuments seem to have astronomical connotations, but there are no agreed on interpretations. The famed Nazca lines include several plausible alignments of biomorphs with constellations, but none are definitive. Amazonian star myths and rituals are closely tied to kin groups, often divided into Sun and Moon moities. Venus, Jupier, and Rigel of the Sun Moiety, Mars, and the Pleiades brothers of the Moon moiety appear as actors in ritual and in myth. Fire is stolen from Jaguar. New Fire ceremonies involve climbing a pole, the ‘Road to the Sky’. In another group, the Pleiades are the eight red and black fire sticks. Recently an Amazonian ‘Stonehenge’ has been discovered at Calcoene, Brazil, from about the first century BCE. The diameter of the ‘circle’ is about 1000 and there are 127 stones. One casts no shadow at the December (winter) solstice.

New Perspectives The publication of the San Bartolo murals west wall supplies us with a wealth of new information which may be integrated with the Borgia group codices, Mayan codices and ceramics, Olmec sculpture and murals, and with other areas, especially Egypt (Table 2). The west wall shows a series of trees, birds, and sacrifices indicative of world ages, most closely paralleling the Borgia codex pp. 49–52. The last of the San Bartolo images is accompanied by the date 3 Ik. This is the day before Maya 4 Akbal, corresponding to 4 House, a name day for one of the Borgia World Ages. The associated tree of the Borgia is conceptually identical with that of San Bartolo, and the other trees also show similarities. This makes it

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 461

certain that the world ages are named for their beginning days and that the year names corresponded with Maya 1 Pop. The sequences of dates of the World Ages are separated by 13 years of 365 days and an unspecified number of Calendar Rounds. The structure is one-fourth of the 29 CR in which the ‘wandering year’ (365 days) returns to the same position of the tropical year (1508 ‘wandering years’ ¼ 1507 tropical years) (Table 3). If 3 Ik/4 Akbal is a World

Age date, one would expect it to be an equinox or a solstice. In continuity correlations, this is true of 3 Ik 5 uayeb/4 Akbal 1 Pop only at 23 June 182 CE, the summer solstice (n  1507 tropical years). It is not archaeologically feasible to place this date later at 7.19.4.12.2 (when early Maya were flourishing), so the 3 Ik date should go back at least one 52 year cycle to 7.16.11.17.2. This would put the end of the Classic Period at 1117 CE, 208 years later than the

Table 2 The San Bartolo 3 IK date and the Maya correlation dates Chiapa de Corzo ST.1 7.16.3.2.13 6 Reed 1784538 19 Oct 173 C.E. Tres Zapotes St. C 7.16.6.16.13 1 Reed 1785898 10 July 177 C.E. San Bartolo 23 June 182 C.E. ¼ 3 Ik [5 Uayeb] In Correlation: 679185 / 679183 Vaillant #1 7.13.19.4.2

660205 Wells 7.16.11.17.2

[16 Xul]

[16 Pop]

641225 7.19.4.12.2

584285 Thompson 8.7.2.15.2 909 C.E. ¼ 10.4.0.0.0

1168 C.E. ¼ 10.4.0.0.0

1065 C.E. ¼ 10.4.0.0.0

1117 C.E. ¼ 10.4.0.0.0

Table 3 The Tropical Year Cycle in the Mediterranean and Mesoamerica L.
2905, 17 July Sun 89 # 754 Tropical Years # M.
2151, 7 Oct Sun 177 # 2  1507 Tropical Years #

A.
2766, 16 July Sun 90 # 1507 Tropical Years # # B.
1259, 4 July Sun 90

D.
1325, 6 July Sun 90 # 1507 Tropical Years #

# G. 182 C.E., 24 June Sun 91 # 753þ Tropical Years # H. 936 C.E., 15 March Sun 360

I.
752, 21 April Sun 22 # 753 Tropical Years # J. 0, 26 December Sun 273 # 1507 Tropical Years #

# N. 863 C.E., 14 Sept Sun 175

# K. 1507, 15 December Sun 273 Continued

462 ARCHAEOASTRONOMY Table 3 Continued A.
2766 (2767 B.C .E.), 16 July (Jul.), 23 June (Greg.) J.D.N. 710973, Sun 90 , Mars 66 , Venus 73 , Jupiter 69 , Saturn 72 Heliacal rising of Sirius at Heliopolis, 1 Thoth. The Horoscope of Eternity. B.
1259 (1260 B.C.E.), 4 July (Jul.) J.D.N. 1261393, Sun 90 , 1 Thoth. C.
1256 (1257 B.C.E.), 31 Oct. (Jul.), 18 Oct. (Greg.) J.D.N. 1262608 Mercury 188 , Saturn 188 . Sun shone into the Abu Simbel Temple, 34th year, Ramesses II. D.
1325 (1326 B.C.E.), 6 July (Jul) J.D.N. 1237288, Sun 90 , 4.0.3.0.3 4 Akbal 1 Pop E.
1321 (1322 B.C.E.), 19 July (Jul) J.D.N. 1238763 Heliacal rising of Sirius. F. 139 C.E. 20 July (Jul) J.D.N. 1772028, The Phoenix Era ff. Censorinus (1460 Julian years after date E), heliacal rising of Sirius. G. 182 C.E. 24 June (Jul) J.D.N. 1787708, Sun 91 , 7.16.11.17.3 4 Akbal, 1 Pop H. 936 C.E. 15 March (Jul) J.D.N. 2063006, Sun 360 , 9.14.16.12.1 1 Imix, 9 Zec (a famous ‘beginning date’ of Mixtec chronology) (cf. 9.14.16.7.13 4 Ben, 1 Pop, beginning of a World Age subdivision, J.D.N. 2062918 18 December, 935, (Jul), Sun 272 ). I.
752 (753 B.C.E.) 21 April (Jul) J.D.N. 1446501, Sun 23 , Traditional date of founding of Rome, alleged planetary phenomena impossible. J. 0 (1 B.C.E.) 26 December (Jul) J.D.N. 1721418, Sun 273 , Mercury 276 , Mars 8 , Jupiter 189 . I had postulated that a mythico-astronomical date for the birth of Quetzalcoatl was at 12.8.10.2.13 with the Sun and Mercury in conjunction; Mars and Jupiter in opposition, with Jupiter also in conjunction with the Sun. This much later date shows the Sun and Mercury in conjunction and Mars and Jupiter in opposition. K. 1507 (C.E.) 15 Dec (Jul.) JDN 2271838. Sun 273 , Mercury 277 , Mars 268 . Aztec year 2 Reed, day 1 Reed (Mixtec year 1 Reed, day 1 Reed) (a traditional date for the birth of Quetzalcoatl.) Aztec 1 Acatl 20 Panquetzaliztli, equivalent to 11.3.16.10.13 1 Ben, 1 Mol was the date of the new Fire ceremony proceeding the first year of Moctezuma as Emperor. L.
2905 (2906 BCE) 17 Jul (Jul.) J.D.N. 660205 Sun 89 , 23 June (Greg.) 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 8 Cumku, Maya era base M.
2151 (2152 BCE) 7 Oct (Jul.) J.D.N. 935685 1.18.5.4.0 1 Ahau 13 Mac Sun 177 , Jupiter 33 , Saturn 39 (Sun and Venus in Conjunction 25 days earlier) Nine Wind descended (birth) 18 days earlier. N. 863 CE 14 Sep (Jul.) J.D.N. 2036525 9.11.3.2.0 1 Ahau, 13 Mac, Sun 175 , Venus 174 Implicit, year 52, of Pakal of Palenque; should be the 1 Ahau, 13 Mac date of the Dresden Venus table.

Thompson correlation. If 182 CE were put 52 years earlier in the Maya long count at 7.13.19.4.2, the end of the Classic Period would be 260 years later than the Thompson correlation which gives a very short Post-Classic period. The 660205 correlation is therefore correct, although it is nearly 400 years later than the Saturno interpretion of the radiocarbon dates. About half of the difference is due to the error of using the Thompson correlation. If one goes back 1507 tropical years from 3 Ik at the summer solstice (90 ), one reaches 1237387 5 July – 1325 (1326 BCE) with the Sun at 89 . The one-day shift is due to the inequality of the seasons. This puts the year beginning date at 4 Akbal 1 Pop at 4.0.3.0.3, July 6,
1325 JDN 1237288 at the summer

solstice and followed 14 days later by the enthronement date, 5 Caban 15 Pop partly equivalent to Egyptian 1 Thoth and the rising of Sirius (see Table 4). The Sothic cycle of 1460 years began with the 4 years, including 1322 BCE (
1321)and 1320 BCE (
1319). It might more appropriately according to Greek writers have begun in the preceding 4 years. They associate the summer solstice, the Nile flooding, and the rising of Sirius, which would have been together about 4000 BCE. They were still together in 2767 BCE (
2766) at JDN 710973, the heliacal rising of Sirius on 1 Thoth at the summer solstice. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus were within 7 . 1507 tropical years later, in 1260 BCE (
1259), 1 Thoth of the wandering year was again at summer

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY 463 Table 4 Correlation of one Egyptian day with one Mesoamerican day

Local time affected by longitude, latitude and altitude Julian Day Number Civil Day

Time of beginning of day

Egypt

Mesoamerica

Sunset Sunrise

1 Thoth (365) [(12  30)þ5] Thursdaya (7)

15 Pop (365) [(18  20)þ5] 5 Caban (260) (13  20)

Noon Midnight Local civil timeb measured from Greenwich

1237302 Julian Calendar 19 July (often used in back calculations)

Era


1325 1326 BC 1326 BCE

Gregorian Calendar 5 July (often used in back calculations) 4.0.3.0.17

a

Later began at midnight. Local civil time roughly approximates local time measured astronomically by the location of the sun or stars.

b

solstice and had shifted by 1257 BCE to 89 , 120 days before the sun shone into the Abu Simbel temple, dating the 34th year of Ramses II. At about 2000 BCE, the solstice and the flooding of the Nile were about 14 days before Sirius rising. This seems to be reflected in the Mesoamerican situation, with New Year’s Day on the summer solstice and the enthronement date 14 days later. According to the Aztecs, the inventor of the calendar was Cipactonal, or Crocodile-Sun. The consonants of this name, Spktn, correspond with Egyptian Sbktn as closely as is possible in Aztec which had no –b-. s-b-k is Egyptian ‘crocodile’ and t-n is Aten or Aton, the sun disk. Cipactonal is depicted in the Borbonicus associated with animal-headed staves. In Egypt, Crocodile-Sun was written sbkr (Sobek-Ra) and was one of the gods who carried the animal headed power staff. The first day of the Aztec calendar was Cipactli, Crocodile. The equivalent day of the Maya calendar was Imix, earlier *Imox, in some dialects Moxi, which occasionally has the meaning ‘beetle’. In Egypt, Kheperra was Beetle-Sun, associated with sunrise. The date 7.7.7.14.13 1Ben 1Mol (a date 1 Reed of a Mixtec year 1 Reed, an Aztec year 2 Reed) was December 26, 1 BCE (astronomical year 0). The sun was in 274 , 4 days past the winter solstice with Mercury in conjunction in 278 , Mars in 9 in opposition with Jupiter in 189 . I had suggested that an original One Reed Quetzalcoatl should have been born on a winter solstice with Mercury and Jupiter in conjunction with the Sun and Mars in opposition to Jupiter. This much later recurrence is a reasonable astronomical approximation which fits a Toltec tradition that Quetzalcoatl was born on a day 1 Reed of a year 1 Reed. Here Mercury was in conjunction with the Sun and Mars in opposition to Jupiter, but Jupiter was not in conjunction with Mercury and the Sun. One Reed was again nearly at the winter solstice 1507 years later on the 20th of Panquetzaliztli, the great New Fire

ceremony emphasized in the Aztec Borbonicus codex, the year before the accession of the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma. This was December 15, 1507 CE, JDN 2271838 with the Sun in 273 and Mercury in conjunction in 277 (3 days past the winter solstice). The relationship of the date for the birth of Quetzalcoatl in 1. BCE with Egyptian ideas of Horus and with the date for the founding of Rome is iconographically tied to Judaic representations of Iaw in the form of Egyptian deities. These include snake footed gods, the god holding a decapitated head, the snakeheaded feline, heads growing on a tree and a bird with a deity head on its breast. These are segments of a more general correspondence of the Mesoamerican and Egyptian pantheons. Many Mesoamerican gods are astronomically identifiable, and the meanings of associated iconography may be clear. The astronomy is sophisticated. The correspondences with the Egyptian pantheon are so extensive that a sophisticated astronomy must be equally involved in Egypt. The similarities between Mesoamerica and Egypt include more than 30 common deities. These include Crocodile-Sun; Monkey scribes; Frog Goddess of childbirth; Grain God as catfish and as acrobat; Direction Gods who support the sky; Vulture, Queen of Heaven, Mother, Sky-supporter; Human or Skull-headed Birds; The Star-Scorpion Deities; The Double-headed Node Passage Snake; The Infinity Snake; The Feathered Snake; and The Black God of Medicine. Representations of these gods include many shared artistic features. Among these are color bands and indicators that color was being used astronomically to indicate sky locations and temporal changes. Parallels for planetary deities and constellations appear with color coding from India to France. The western lunar goddesses of Mexico are similar in colors and associated symbols to those on the early Nazca textile from Peru. It has become apparent that many more small details united different archaeoastronomical traditions than anyone has suspected.

464 ARCHAEOLOGY LABORATORY, OVERVIEW See also: Image and Symbol; Ritual, Religion, and

Ideology.

Further Reading Brotherston G (2005) Feather Crown: The Eighteen Feasts of the Mexica Year. British Museum Publication No. 154. London: British Museum. Chamberlain VD, Carlson JB, and Young MJ (2005) Songs from the Sky: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions of the World. Bognor Regis: Ocarina Books with the Center for Archaeoastronomy. Davies, HA (1969) Those Annus Vague Calendar Mysteries Again. Roanoke, Virginia. Ms in the possession of David H. Kelley.

Archaeobotany

Faulkner RO (2000) The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, 2nd edn. rev. In: Andrews C (ed.) Austin: University of Texas and British Museum. Hart G (2005) The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Jairazbhoy RA (1974) Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America. London: George Prior. Kelley DH and Eugene FM (2005) Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encycloepedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy. New York: Springer. Wilkinson RH (2003) The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames and Hudson. Wirth DE (2003) Parallels: Mesoamerican and Ancient Middle Eastern Traditions. St. George Utah: Stonecliff.

See: Paleoethnobotany.

ARCHAEOLOGY LABORATORY, OVERVIEW Edward B Banning, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary arrangement A procedure that orders data into units, such as classification into categories. B72 An acrylic soluble in acetone that is used as an adhesive and consolidant for archaeological conservation. classification A set of abstract categories defined by rules for assigning membership in classes unambiguously, as well as the process of assigning items to those classes. condition monitoring Regularly scheduled checks on artifacts in a collection to document any changes that may have occurred in their condition, as well as to check on their environmental conditions (temperature, humidity). data:ink ratio A term coined by Edward Tufte to describe the extent to which a graphic emphasizes the data, rather than unnecessary decoration. diameter chart A chart with nested arcs or circles that archaeologists use to measure the diameter of rim sherds and bases of pottery. EVE Estimated vessel equivalent is a term coined by Clive Orton for a measure of pottery abundance based on the accumulated preserved proportions of sherds. Generally its use is restricted to rims, bases, or both, with preservation measured by the preserved circumference (thus ‘rim EVE’ or ‘base EVE’). flat-file database A type of database in which records are stored in a single file, much like a large table or a set of file cards. GHS Globally harmonized system of classification and labeling of chemicals.

graphical information language A set of conventions used in the illustration of items, such as artifacts, that encodes information in a standard way. Typically it includes rules for orientation as well as standard symbols for materials and other attributes. hazard labels Standardized warning labels for materials, such as chemicals, and equipment or activities that entail any risks to health or safety. They include those of ANSI and OSHA (in the United States), WHMIS (in Canada), and ISO and GHS (internationally). interval scale A measurement scale in which values are ordered and arranged at fixed intervals or units, but in which the ‘zero’ value may be arbitrary. The Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales of temperature are examples of interval scales. MNI Minimum number of individuals is a measure of abundance used most often for faunal assemblages that simply accounts for the absolute minimum number of whole entities (usually animals) that must have contributed bones or fragments to a sample. For fauna, it is equal to the number of the most abundant element. NISP Number of identified specimens is a simple count of identifiable items and fragments of a particular type, such as bones and bone fragments or sherds. nominal scale A measurement scale that consists simply of unordered categories, such as artifact types or raw material types. paradigmatic classification A type of classification in which categories or classes are defined by the intersection of ordinal- or nominal-scale dimensions, as in a table or a verb conjugation. ratio scale An interval scale that has a nonarbitrary zero point (i.e., zero indicates an absence of some quality). relational database A more complex type of database in which data of different kinds are stored in separate files but there are links, or pointers, between files to make information in linked files available at the same time.

ARCHAEOLOGY LABORATORY, OVERVIEW 465 structure chart A diagram that illustrates a database’s structure by showing files, their attribute’s names and types, and relations (attribute pointers) between files. systematics The methods or tools for defining classes or categories in a system of classification or the rules for creating groups.

Introduction Archaeological data are not ‘given’ or ‘received’. Nor are they simply ‘facts’. They are hard-won products of archaeologists working in the field and in the laboratory. This article briefly discusses the activities that archaeologists carry out and methods they use after fieldwork. Some of the individual activities are discussed elsewhere within the present encyclopedia.

Basic Lab Activities Archaeologists carry out many observations on their finds while still on-site. Once archaeologists have brought artifacts and other materials, such as sediment samples, back to the lab, however, they can usually carry out much more detailed work. The variety of laboratory activities ranges from simple cleaning, sorting, labeling, and counting of artifacts through water-separation of plant remains from sediments and microscopic examination of tool edges to chemical, metallurgical, and isotopic analyses. Many of these activities require specialized training or expensive equipment, leading archaeologists to send some of their materials to the laboratories of non-archaeological colleagues in geology, chemistry, or physics departments, for example. Despite this variety and compartmentalization, all participants in the archaeological enterprise, from lithic analysts to palaeoethnobotanists and archaeometrists, share a common set of analytical problems, methods, and vocabulary. These commonalities are not always obvious, in part because of the way universities train specialists, but they are still important. Archaeometrists specialize in what might seem to be highly technical aspects of dating deposits or analyzing the chemical and isotopic characteristics of artifacts, for example, yet they still rely on basic archaeological units of context and basic archaeological artifact types, and they are still contributing to the solution of basic archaeological problems. Here, the focus is on laboratories for this basic work.

Lab Organization The physical arrangement of space and facilities in an archaeological laboratory is important to the efficient use of staff and resources. Although academic and

private-sector archaeological laboratories differ in some respects, such as the need for teaching space in some of the former, they have many needs in common. General Space and Furnishings

A general archaeological lab, in both academic and CRM settings, needs to be spacious enough and have adequate facilities to accommodate a large variety of archaeological analyses and curatorial needs. In general, the lab needs to be dry, clean, and secure, with moderate and stable temperature and humidity. Storage and work areas should be away from major traffic but easily accessible by lab carts. The layout of the lab should be amenable to the work flow, minimizing the chance that lab carts or personnel will interfere with one another. Work areas should be well lit yet avoid excess direct sunlight, while storage areas should usually be dark or have low-UV lighting. Work and storage areas, and individual cabinets, should be lockable and only authorized lab personnel should have access to keys or combinations. The most critical furnishings for a general archaeological lab are tables or lab benches for working space and shelving, cabinets, or both, for both temporary and long-term storage. Many archaeological labs have benches identical to those used in chemistry or biology labs, with a smooth, washable work surface at a height that is suitable for working while standing (37–38 in), while seated on a stool (38–40 in), or while seated at a computer keyboard (c. 28 in). Cabinets and drawers beneath the work surface provide space for storage of small equipment and supplies, and sometimes also for the temporary storage of artifacts or other samples that are in the processing or analytical queue. To accommodate the legs of seated workers, the cabinetry needs kick spaces at intervals, while the fact that the benches are permanently fixed in place makes them unresponsive to changing spatial requirements. Other labs have tables in lieu of, or in addition to, lab benches. Tables have two principal advantages: they provide more leg room for seated workers, and one can move the tables around as needs change. However, they also have the disadvantage of lacking space to store items out of the way, except to stack boxes on the floor underneath. Consequently, many archaeological labs employ mixtures of benches and tables, of varying heights. Both benches and tables should be deep enough to accommodate the trays or removable drawers used in the laboratory storage cabinets without hanging over the table edge. Otherwise there is risk of bumping into a tray and upsetting the artifacts or other specimens on it. Since bench and table tops are hard, they

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should be equipped with padded sheets, such as thin sheets of polyethylene foam, both to protect their surfaces and especially to guard against breakage of fragile artifacts dropped on surfaces. Where cleaning very dirty artifacts is a substantial laboratory activity, some labs employ specially built tables or racks with heavy mesh in place of the table top. This allows loose dirt to fall through into a basin below during artifact cleaning, or facilitates drying of artifacts after washing. In some cases, compartmentalization of such mesh tables or racks by adding a raised grid of wood or metal both strengthens it and allows easy sorting of artifacts or prevents the mixing of artifacts from different bags or contexts. Since archaeological analysis is often timeconsuming and the quantities of material to analyze are often very large, the laboratory needs to be able to accommodate at least temporary storage of material waiting for, or in the process of, analysis. Storage systems should organize specimens in a way that facilitates their location, retrieval, and return; minimizes physical jostling and friction; discourages theft or unauthorized access; facilitates monitoring of contents and their condition; and maintains a stable, safe environment. One excellent means of accomplishing this is by equipping the lab with secure cabinets with numerous shallow trays. Particularly when the materials needing storage are sensitive to fluctuations in humidity and temperature, and also to minimize dust levels in the lab, the cabinets and drawers should ideally be of metal, with lockable doors that close and seal tightly. The contents of such metal cabinets will thus be somewhat isolated from the laboratory’s airspace. Wooden cabinets or shelving may be acceptable in some circumstances – for example, storage of chert and other very stable artifacts – where conservation issues are forgiving, but the acidic fumes that some wood and glues will slowly exude are particularly damaging to metal artifacts. Putting any wooden shelving in a well-ventilated area, rather than keeping it airtight as in the metal cabinets, will help prevent fumes from accumulating. Other things to consider in planning shelving or cabinetry for storage of artifacts pertain to both conservation and practicality. Repeated sliding of drawers or trays in and out shifts specimens so that friction and rattling can damage fragile artifacts and bone fragments. Lining the drawers or trays with a membrane made of an inert material, such as polyethylene foam, will help reduce this friction effect. Meanwhile, drawers or trays should be sturdy, easily removable, reasonably light (particularly given the weight of the specimens they will carry), and not unduly large. It is helpful if the cabinets allow very flexible spacing of the trays or drawers, to accommodate

both small and large specimens. Each tray or drawer should have drawer pulls, to facilitate withdrawal while also helping to orient the drawer on its return from a bench top. Trays or drawers should also have slots on front to hold labels that indicate their contents. In general, the storage system should make sense archaeologically and conservationally. Often, this means organizing collections in a way that separates specimens that we need to access frequently from ones in long-term (‘dead’) storage, and often it also means separating specimens by their various environmental needs. For example, very unstable materials, such as iron, need close environmental control and monitoring in sealed containers, while less sensitive materials have less restrictive but still real requirements. Each laboratory should have a wheeled table, lab trolley, or cart with which to move trays and boxes of artifacts. In order to minimize the chance of dropping and damaging artifacts, lab staff should always use this cart rather than carrying large or multiple artifacts by hand. For moving heavier boxes, it is also a good idea to have a decent dolly or hand-cart with good tires. Generally, the laboratory will need at least one large bookshelf unit to keep field notes, photo logs, slides, and other hard-copy documentation, as well as laboratory manuals and reference books. Stools and chairs are also essential furnishings. Given the long hours that some staff will spend seated, it is essential to take proper ergonomics into consideration. Make sure that the chairs’ heights are adjustable to make work comfortable at the particular tables or benches in the lab. Good lighting is also an essential aspect of laboratory furnishings, particularly considering the close and detailed work that lab staff must carry out. Typical fluorescent lighting is not very satisfactory, unless supplemented with many table lamps and with natural light from large windows. It is important to position the work spaces for particularly eye-straining work, such as drafting or lithic recording, close to such windows, both to ensure adequate light and to allow those carrying out the work to look out of the window periodically. Changing the focus of ones’ eyes from time to time in this way reduces eyestrain. Small, goose-neck table lamps with halogen bulbs make it easy to direct light onto small objects and to cast shadows that make it easier to observe small details of relief. Most archaeological laboratories also need at least one deep sink and faucet, which is useful for washing artifacts, washing up some of the tools, beakers, and pens used in the lab, and for lab staff to wash their hands. If artifact washing or sediment processing is among the lab activities, it is important for the sink’s drain to be equipped with a silt trap. Most often, the sink will be set into a cabinet to allow storage of

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basins and the like below. It is also good to have some wall shelving above the sink. Many archaeological laboratories also need some kind of refrigeration. Zooarchaeology labs that carry out skeletal preparation, for example, will either need several large deep-freezes or a walk-in freezer to store animal carcasses prior to their preparation. Others will instead need a cool-room or small refrigerator to store film, some kinds of specimens that would degrade faster at room temperature, or even archival photographs. Even though archaeological projects have been moving increasingly toward digital imagery, it is still almost essential for an archaeological lab to have at least one steel map cabinet. This serves to store oversized maps and drawings flat, which is generally preferable to the alternative of keeping rolled-up maps and illustrations in plastic tubes. Archaeological labs also sometimes have a drafting table (often still used at least to prepare preliminary drawings of artifacts for later digitizing) or a light table (useful for sorting slides and transparencies, as well as for object photography and tracing maps and drawings). Since most of today’s archaeological labs are thoroughly computerized, it is necessary to ensure that some of the cabinets or, alternatively, dedicated computer workstations are set up for data entry and analysis. These should be positioned in such a way as to minimize glare on the monitor, have chairs and keyboard surface set at ergonomically appropriate heights, and ideally have high-speed Internet access and their own, surge-protected electrical circuits or uninterruptible power supply. Where there are several computers, it is good to set up a local area network with a shared laser printer and scanner accessible to all users. Some archaeological laboratories, especially those that employ hazardous chemicals, require at least one fume hood and an explosion-proof chemical-storage cabinet. Small Equipment

Specialized archaeological laboratories have their own needs, but most archaeological labs require a number of basic tools and instruments. These include electronic balances with a variety of capabilities in terms of the maximum mass they can measure and the precision of measurement (e.g., up to 6 kg to nearest 2 g or up to 500 g to nearest 0.1 g). The lab should have standard brass weights with which to calibrate the balances. They also include several inexpensive manual calipers and usually at least one electronic caliper, preferably able to interface with a computer for automatic uploading of measurements. The ‘jaws’ of the calipers, if made of steel, could damage the surfaces of fragile artifacts, so plastic ones are

preferable. Putting masking tape on the jaws to cushion the hard metal is unacceptable because of the bias it causes, except in the case of electronic calipers that one can re-zero. Other small tools include dental picks and tweezers for fine work. Most archaeological laboratories also need at least one low-power binocular microscope and a number of hand lenses, such as jewellers’ loops. Table lamps, including swingarm lamps with magnifiers built-in, and a fiber-optic light source for each microscope are essential, even where there is fairly good natural light. A tripod and copy stand with a pair of strong lamps is very useful for object photography. Some labs will have a power drill, Dremel tool, or geological saw for removing samples from artifacts or bones for chemical analysis or thin sections. Munsell soil-color charts, standard mineral sets for determining hardness, and pH meters are also common items of small equipment in archaeological labs. Routinely, the lab will have at least one desktop computer, flatbed scanner, printer, backup (removable hard drive, CDs, flashcards), and fast Internet connection. Laboratory Supplies

The most common archaeological laboratories require a variety of basic supplies for the storage, cleaning, recording, and maintenance of collections, and safety of lab personnel (Table 1). Temporary storage, unpacking, and sorting When artifacts and other archaeological samples arrive at a lab, a first step is to move them into a space where lab workers can unpack them, do preliminary sorting, and carry out a kind of ‘triage’: deciding which items need immediate attention and which can be moved into longer-term storage. These activities require something like a staging area near the lab entrance, tables or lab benches where staff can open boxes, sort artifacts, and arrange them on trays. Either spacious and sturdy shelves or cupboards under the benches are essential for temporary storage and to help sort unopened boxes. Note that it is important, at this stage and throughout the analysis process, to minimize the chance of breaking or damaging artifacts as they are moved, sorted, or handled. Consequently, staff should always use a lab cart, rather than just their hands or arms, to move trays and artifacts from one part of the lab to another. Basic processing Apart from samples that can safely wait in longer-term storage, most materials that arrive at the lab require fairly immediate attention by way of sorting, cleaning, and labeling.

468 ARCHAEOLOGY LABORATORY, OVERVIEW Table 1 Basic supplies commonly needed in an archaeological laboratory Health and safety First-aid kit (esp. bandages) Dust masks Goggles or face shields Spill kits OSHA or WHMIS manual, material safety sheets, hazard labels Latex gloves (several boxes) Work gloves Lab coats and/or aprons

Measurement Diameter charts for pottery Measuring charts for lithics Recording forms pH litmus paper Calibrating tablets for pH meter

Collections management Polyethylene bags, various sizes Silica gel Humidity indicator strips Plastic boxes with see-through lids Polyethylene foam sheets Pens with stable ink Artists’ paint brushes Acryloid B72 and Acetone Stick-on labels Printed labels for cabinet drawers Staples Binders Archival photo pages Small brushes for cleaning artifacts Acetic acid for removing CaCO3 Distilled water

Office and Drafting Printer paper Printer toner Writable CDs or DVDs Writing pads Clear tape, masking tape Staples Pens, pencils, technical pencils Erasers Drafting vellum or mylar film File cards Manilla envelopes Rubber stamps and ink pads

Cleaning and labeling are critical in an archaeological lab. Archaeologists are well aware of the importance of archaeological context; consequently, any sorting that might separate an artifact from its original bag or label would be disastrous unless an accurate label accompanied it. In addition, while cleaning and labeling, staff will pay close attention to any adverse preservation issues associated with samples, so that they can send them for conservation before they proceed to analysis. Ideally, the ethics of artifact conservation call for us to alter artifacts only in ways that are reversible. At the same time, the priority on preservation of contextual information calls for us to ensure that any labeling we use is reasonably secure and permanent. We do not want labels that are easily separated from the artifact or likely to wear off. In order to balance these competing demands, a good practice is to apply a strong yet reversible base layer to a clean, dry surface on each artifact, apply a label on top of this surface, and then seal the label with another transparent layer. Traditionally, archaeologists used India ink and a crow-quill pen to apply the labels, but today they tend to favor fine-point commercial pens, whose ink composition is often unknown because of patent protections. A commonly used material for the base and cover layers is 10% acryloid (paraloid) B72

in acetone, which is soluble in acetone and therefore easy to remove. The main drawback to its use, especially for the top coat, is that most of the commercially available inks that archaeologists use to write labels on the base coat are also soluble in acetone, so that the labels tend to smear or get erased when we apply the top coat of B72. If we are unable to use suitable inks that are stable in acetone (India ink is one), possible solutions to this problem are to adhere small, printed paper labels to the bottom layer of B72 and seal them with the top coat, or to use a transparent top-coat that is soluble in mineral spirits instead of acetone. One of the reasons for cleaning at least a portion of the surfaces of artifacts is to ensure strong cohesion of the label. Cleaning is also necessary to allow some kinds of analysis, while, at the same time, there are also many circumstances in which analysis demands uncleaned and uncontaminated surfaces. During the ‘triage’ stage, lab personnel must separate out any items for which cleaning would not be appropriate, including ones that cleaning might damage, and ensure that each gets its own labeled polyethylene bag. A labeled bag is not as secure a labeling medium, since there is always the risk that the artifact and bag could be separated, or different artifacts get mixed up, but careful use of labeled bags is often our only reasonable alternative to direct labeling of artifacts and other samples. Furthermore, it is important to avoid condensation inside the bag. Where this is a possibility, pierce the bag with small pinholes to allow excess moisture to escape. Basic conservation and cleaning As mentioned above, it is not appropriate for all artifacts and samples to undergo cleaning. One of the most common reasons to avoid cleaning is to avoid contamination that would undermine chemical or isotopic analysis, including radiocarbon dating and analysis of chemical residues on lithics or in pottery fabrics. Another is to preserve microscopic traces for use-wear analysis. In addition, cleaning, especially cleaning that involves immersion in water or ultrasound, could damage or even destroy fragile specimens, and some artifacts, such as metal ones, should only be cleaned by trained conservators. Most artifacts, however, can withstand careful, gentle brushing to remove loose dirt, and many artifacts can withstand immersion in water and cleaning by gentle brushing. Lab personnel should avoid vigorous brushing, as it can erode artifact surfaces or even cause breakage. If they use water-washing, they should also take care to ensure that they do not leave some artifacts, especially smaller ones, at the bottom of the water basin. This is especially important if they

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reuse the basin to wash another batch of artifacts from a different context, thus risking contamination of one batch with artifacts from another. Note that there can be special requirements for the disposal of dirt removed from artifacts, notably if the artifacts are imported from another country. Rather than disposing of removed dirt down the drain or in regular garbage, preventing possible import of crop diseases requires its disposal by incineration or after baking in a kiln. Sometimes dripping a mild acid (e.g., 5% acetic acid) on the surfaces of artifacts that have calcareous encrustations will loosen these and make them easier to remove mechanically. Take care, however, not to damage the artifact’s surface below. Also make sure that you neutralize any remaining acid afterward or rinse the artifact thoroughly with distilled water. Some classes of artifacts that casual cleaning could severely damage include most metallic ones, such as coins, wood, textiles, and even bone tools. They almost always require consultation with a trained conservator.

Classification and Sorting As in any science, in the broadest sense of the term, archaeologists need to have meaningful categories for classifying and sorting the entities they study or searching for patterns in their observations (see Classification and Typology). We cannot even count things until we decide how to classify them. However, no particular system, or arrangement, for classifying phenomena or grouping similar phenomena is demonstrably ‘true’ or ‘natural’, and this sometimes leads to considerable debate among archaeologists about such things as whether the traces at a particular site belong to one or another culture or industry, whether a particular artifact is one or another kind of tool, and so on. Such disagreements can arise because archaeologists classify or partition their observations on the basis of some selection of characteristics or attributes among an infinity of attributes that they conceivably could record. They also vary in their strategies and methods for making use of these attributes in the construction of conceptual categories. Consequently, the resulting systems of groups or categories can differ and, in some sense, are arbitrary. They are arbitrary not because all systems are equally useful or justifiable but because different archaeologists, with different goals, different methods, or different sets of entities to organize, will likely come up with quite different groups or categories that nonetheless serve their purposes. It is also quite unlikely that the categories that archaeologists use are very similar to, let alone identical to, the categories that prehistoric

people would have used to describe their surroundings and material culture (their ‘ethnotaxonomy’). However, archaeologists also want to provide reasonable justification for the categories and groups they use to organize observations. They use a variety of procedures to help them devise observation units that are useful, practical, and reproducible. These specific procedures belong to the domain of systematics. As in other aspects of systematics, archaeologists often disagree about terminology or use terms inconsistently. To reduce confusion, the following discussion mainly follows the terminology of Dunnell. This section will leave aside those kinds of systematics based on grouping objects by their attributes in favor of the conceptual approach to systematics called ‘classification’. Because this involves defining mutually exclusive categories (‘classes’) of ideal phenomena by specifying the conditions or rules that dictate which phenomena belong, and which do not, to each class, we can create classification in advance of actually examining the artifacts, layers, sediments, or any other entities we want to classify. Not surprisingly, it is usual to have at least some idea what to expect before creating the specifications for the classification. We might, for example, study a pilot sample of our study group in the hope of identifying the attributes that we think might be useful in the classification. Archaeologists usually employ one of two different arrangements to create classifications. One of these involves defining classes by the intersection of two or more dimensions, while each dimension itself consists of a classification of a single attribute (such as color, shape, or size). This kind of classification, called paradigmatic, will be familiar to readers who have studied languages, as we often classify verb forms by the intersecting dimensions of gender, number, and tense. The other proceeds by the successive subdivision of major classes into subclasses, and is called taxonomic. Taxonomies are familiar to those who have studied biology. By establishing classificatory schemes and the rules for assigning artifacts to each class in advance, archaeologists can set up templates that help lab staff, including relatively inexperienced volunteers in some cases, sort artifacts quickly and accurately. Sorting

Sorting of artifacts is a common laboratory practice in archaeology, with archaeologists often doing at least preliminary sorting almost from the moment they remove artifacts and other materials from their archaeological contexts (e.g., deposit in a site). As this involves assigning items to preconceived categories, it entails use of classification.

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It is easy to set up the lab in ways that help lab staff sort artifacts properly. For example, many labs that need to sort lithic debitage dedicate a table to this process and mark the table surface with a grid of painted or taped lines to create a series of labeled rectangles, one rectangle for each class in a classification. A set of instructions taped to the table makes it clear how lab staff should decide where to assign each artifact by outlining the rules that dictate membership in each class. For example, one class in a paradigmatic classification could be marked on the table by the rules: ‘flake, incomplete, platform present, unretouched’. Alternatively, a similar class in a taxonomic classification can be clearly marked as a subset of ‘unretouched flakes’, which are in turn a subset of ‘unretouched debitage’ in a grid of nested boxes (Figure 1). Lab workers can then quickly place each artifact, as they remove it from a bag or tray, on its appropriate square. After they have placed all the artifacts from a given context, it is then easy to count the number in each category and enter that information on a paper form or in a computer database. Measurement

Sorting and typology involve a kind of measurement at the nominal scale, but archaeologists are often interested in measuring differences in magnitudes: for example, comparing the lengths of projectile points in millimeters, the densities of inclusions in pottery fragments, or the ratios of barium to aluminum in samples of pottery fabric. These involve measurements at the interval and ratio scales, which archaeologists can use to group artifacts, summarize the characteristics of groups, or define the rules for classes, among other purposes. Calipers and balances are among the most common tools they use to make such measurements (e.g., analysis of artifacts: lithic analysis).

Other common, simple tools are paper or acetate lithic recording charts, and diameter charts (see Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear).

Quantification As noted above, archaeologists use classifications whenever they want to count things, a process called enumeration. But what are they counting? Obtaining some reasonable estimate of the relative abundances of different classes of lithics, pottery, animals, or some other entities is one of the most common archaeological laboratory activities. However, it is not always obvious what the best measure of abundance is. The reason for this problem is that the things archaeologists would like to count are typically fragmentary, and counting bone fragments, for example, is not the same thing as counting live animals. Two different bone fragments could come from the animal, or even the same bone. So, if we are interested in comparing the percentages of caribou at two sites, or the proportions of red-slipped pottery, what do we do? Archaeologists have developed quite a variety of options for ‘counting’ things, but selecting the most appropriate one for a particular problem is not always easy. It depends on what indirect measurement is really of interest. For example, is our purpose in counting bone fragments to compare the relative frequencies of some species, among live animals, that the people at two different sites hunted? Or is it to estimate how much that species contributed to site occupants’ diet (in meat or calories)? Or is it to discover something about what they were doing with the carcass, in terms of butchering and selection of meat portions? Or are we just trying to learn something about site-formation processes by studying the degree of fragmentation of our faunal sample? Of course, we might be interested

Unretouched debitage

Incomplete Proximal

Figure 1 Example of a sorting table for a taxonomic classification of unretouched flakes and blades.

Distal

Length >5cm

Complete Length <5 cm

Fragments

Platform present

Random dorsal scars

Incomplete Radiating dorsal scars

Parallel dorsal scars

Complete

Blades

Medial

Flakes

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in more than one of these questions, but each calls for a somewhat different approach to quantification of abundance. How we answer them helps us decide among such measures as ‘number of identified specimens’ (NISP), ‘minimum number of individuals’ (MNI), or ‘estimated vessel equivalent’ (EVE).

Databases and Data Management Archaeologists employ many media to record and analyze their observations, including handwritten field notes, computer spreadsheets, videotapes, and digital images. However, the sometimes massive amounts of data that result from the sorting, grouping, and measuring activities of archaeologists today call for complex systems to organize them. Typically these consist of relational databases. In some cases, archaeologists use spatially referenced databases in geographic information systems (GIS) and, increasingly, they use hypermedia, including web sites, to organize and present their results. A flat-file database is a simple form of database that, like an old-fashioned card-file system, consists of a number of ‘records’, each of which, much like a paper form, is used to document various kinds of information in a set of ‘fields’. For example, in a file for recording information about stone tools, each record would be used to describe a particular tool, and each field would be used to record a different attribute, such as the tool’s length or position of retouch. A relational database similarly employs records and fields, but is more complex and useful because it also has connections, or ‘relations’, between files. By controlling redundancy, relational databases are more efficient than flat-file ones because information of different kinds (and therefore requiring quite different fields) is partitioned into different files, while the relations allow reference to information in two or more files at once. To illustrate with an example, it would be inefficient to document details of contextual information in a file describing stone tools. If, during excavation, we happened to find, say, 50 stone artifacts in a particular context (layer or pit), each of these artifacts would have identical contextual information. It would not make sense to record this information repeatedly on every artifact record. A relational database more sensibly records the contextual information in one file, the information on lithic artifacts in another, and uses a relation to tie the artifact records in the latter to the contextual records in the former. Figure 2 depicts a structure chart that illustrates this example. Both files have key attributes, here Context number and Artifact number, that uniquely identify each record. Each of the context records in the Context file, contains information about a particular context, organized among

Contexts Context no. Site no. Grid coord. Top elev. Bottom elev. Sed. texture Sed. color Context type Strat. below Strat. above

A N N C C C A A

Lithics Artifact no. Context no. C Type Completeness C B Retouch C Platform N Length (mm) N Width (mm) Thickness (mm) N A Material

Figure 2 Example of a structure chart for the files ‘‘Contexts’’ and ‘‘Lithics’’ in a relational database. The codes next to each field label indicate the data type (e.g., ‘A’ for alphanumeric, ‘B’ for boolean, ‘C’ for character, and ‘N’ for numeric fields).

a number of fields, such as ‘sediment texture’ and ‘grid coordinates’. Each record in Lithics similarly records information about a particular artifact in fields such as ‘length’, ‘width’, and ‘platform type’. In addition, the Lithics file has a special field, called an attribute pointer, that connects it to the key attribute, Context number, in the Context file. All of the records describing artifacts from the same context would have the same context number in their key attribute field. This allows the software to refer back to the Context file if we need information about the context of any of the artifacts, or want to search for all specimens with particular contextual characteristics. For example, we might want to find all the bone fragments that were found in pits, or all the lithics found below layer 6 (Figure 2). Today, archaeologists have a number of software options for their relational databases, and most of these have tools to help them design useful and efficient ones. However, a common mistake is to sit down in front of a computer and begin defining files and fields without giving adequate attention to the database’s design. It will save a lot of time and frustration in trying to fix inadequacies of the database if you instead think carefully about your database requirements in advance, and plan it out on paper.

Illustration and Object Photography Documenting artifacts and other archaeological objects is not only a matter of taking measurements and recording observations in a database. Typically some subset, at least, is documented graphically, and even computerized databases can include graphic

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documentation. Consequently, drawing, digitizing, and photography (both film and digital) are common activities in archaeological laboratories. Despite what most people think, archaeological images are not simply artistic or naturalistic representations of objects. Archaeological illustration in fact constitutes a graphical information language, with very standardized, and not necessarily ‘realistic’, conventions for representing the characteristics of artifacts and other archaeological phenomena. Illustrations, including even photographic images, are actually interpretations, not simply neutral representations of objects. The conventions for drawing artifacts allow archaeologists to encode information about objects, for example, their form, cross section, material, or surface texture, all attributes that might be obscured or distorted in a conventional photograph. Such conventions typically involve the orientation of the object illustrated, the number of distinct views, line thicknesses, stippling or hatching, cross sections or cutaways, and marks to signal manufacturing details, surface features, or colors. Furthermore, archaeologists attempt to show undistorted, scaled representations of artifact shapes in specific views, while most photographs, by contrast, distort these shapes unless they are corrected digitally. For pottery, glass, and other vessels, archaeological illustrators often use the evidence from individual sherds to reconstruct as much as possible of a whole vessel, showing its exterior on one side of a center line, and a radial cutaway view (interior of pot and cross section of vessel wall) on the other side (Figure 3). Various conventions signal slips, paints, incised or impressed decoration, and so on. Similarly, lithic illustrations are usually not ‘realistic’ pictures of flakes or cores; they are standardized representations of such things as flake shape, position of flake scars and retouch, position of burination, distribution of polish, and so on. There are conventions for the orientation of each piece, generally with flakes oriented platform-down, and curving lines on the flake scars give an impression of relief while, more importantly, indicating the direction of flake removal. Each flake or blade merits at least dorsal and ventral views, while some also have end-on views of proximal or distal retouch or side views. Aside from pottery, lithics, and other artifacts, the most commonly required archaeological illustrations are maps, plans, and stratigraphic sections. Important characteristics of good ones are clarity, simplicity, and consistency. In fact, all maps and plans are both standardized and highly simplified representations of spatial relationships, designed to emphasize some

Figure 3 A conventional illustration of a ceramic sherd, reconstructed to show the exterior, interior, and radial cross section in a cutaway on one side.

information at the expense of others. Things to keep in mind when drawing maps and similar illustrations are to ensure that there is a scale and orientation (usually a North arrow, sometimes a key map), that the features of greatest interest are clear and obvious (often by placement near the center of the illustration), that the line thicknesses have at least some variety and can withstand reduction of scale, that the labels are clear and large enough, and that the map is not too cluttered or ‘busy’. It is also useful, when preparing the map, to think carefully about how much accuracy and precision is really necessary; at some scales, an error of 10 cm in a site map, for example, will be less than a line thickness in the published version. For graphs and charts, key issues are making sure that you use the correct kind of graph for the pattern you intend to show and scale of measurement on which it is based, avoiding confusing or misleading features, and keeping things simple so as to keep the emphasis on the data. Tufte argues for maximizing the data:ink ratio, or using no more ink than necessary to present relevant results. Some guidelines are relevant to all line art that you will submit for publication. Lines should be bold enough that they will not disappear upon expected reduction, yet not so bold as to be distracting. Testing your line art by photocopier reduction to the expected published size is a good idea. Similarly, you should

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select a clear, simple font and a point size that will appear no smaller than seven points, but no larger than about 12 points, when reduced for publication. You should avoid the temptation to use busy fonts or too many fonts. Typically a simple hierarchy of point size and consistent use of a convention, such as the convention to label bodies of water in italics, is sufficient. Avoid distracting or overly ornate features on the graphic unless they have clear purpose. Although hand-drawing and hand-inking of archaeological illustrations is still common, increasingly archaeologists take advantage of graphical software to prepare artifact illustrations and maps. It is difficult to provide very detailed guidelines about this topic without risk of falling very quickly out-of-date. However, the key is to think carefully about what you want to accomplish with a computer graphic, and to use dedicated software, such as Adobe Illustrator, that is capable of tracing scanned drawings or the poorer graphical output of statistical software with smooth lines and curves, adding clear fills and hatching, and adding proper fonts (not the jagged text that some software outputs). Most archaeological publishers require hard copy, as well as electronic files of graphics in a small range of useful formats, such as PostScript (eps) and press-ready pdf. Ask editors about the file formats publishers support and how much resolution they require. Although most scale archaeological illustrations are accomplished through frequent, careful measurements and the use of some time-saving instruments, such as ‘formaguages’ with fine teeth that can trace the profile of an object, others use photography as an aid in the production of drawings. To eliminate the distortion and parallax that photography introduces, it is necessary to rectify the resulting drawings (now generally with software) by reference to some measured planimetric points. Some archaeologists also advocate a hybrid approach that combines photography with the best features of line drawings. Although technical drawings remain extremely important in archaeology, photographic documentation has long supplemented them. Artifact photography with film or digital camera has the advantage of showing tonal range and texture effectively, but sometimes the disadvantage of shadows or color differences that obscure details of form and outline. In the laboratory, a sturdy, vibration-free copy table with a pair of strong lamps, often tungsten, and preferably positioned near bright but indirect, natural light, helps archaeologists prepare photographs of individual artifacts and other objects. One lamp is the main light source, conventionally placed at top left, while the other and any natural light is diffused

or less intense, for fill-in illumination. The copy stand should be equipped with a variety of non-distracting background cloths, and clear, professional-looking scales. Eliminating harsh shadows is important, and either using a very dark background or photographing over a light box usually accomplishes this for artifacts that contrast with these backgrounds. Some archaeological photographers recommend placing artifacts on a clean sheet of glass suspended over the background, so that shadows do not appear and the background is out-of-focus and less distracting, with the artifact and scale appearing to float over it. The copy table may have a built-in mount for the camera, or be used with a tripod, and the camera should have a cable release (or you should use the timer) to keep the camera still during exposures. As surface mottling and color of artifacts can sometimes obscure the features that archaeologists want to show, it sometimes helps to eliminate this type of variation prior to photography. For example, lithic analysts sometimes dust lithics with powdered aluminum chloride or some other material or ‘smoke’ them with ammonium chloride fumes. This gives them a consistent color and thus makes it easier to see flake scars. Similarly, epigraphers use aluminum chloride on cuneiform tablets, and numismatists sometimes photograph plaster casts of ancient or mediaeval coins, rather than the coins themselves, to avoid reflection or the obscuring effects of patina and corrosion. Making embossing or other fine details on glass visible also requires special techniques. Aluminum chloride appears to be a relatively safe material, but smoking with Ammonium chloride can involve use of hydrochloric acid and ammonia, while aluminum powder is associated with Alzheimer’s disease (see the Health and Safety section ahead). Sometimes archaeologists want close-ups, or even extreme close-ups, of small details, such as use-wear, or need to produce enlarged views of small artifacts, such as beads or coins. To accomplish this, they use photomacrography or photomicrography. The former, which is suitable for magnification up to about 40, uses bellows or extension rings and supplementary lenses to increase the distance between the lens and the film (or digital scanner), at the expense of sharpness and depth of detail. It also requires increased exposure and is much more successful when a largeformat camera is used. Generally small, high-intensity lamps, such as microscope lamps, are preferable for close-up photography. Photomicrography involves use of a microscope to magnify the image, typically for images of thin sections or lithic use-wear. Another use of archaeological photography is the digital enhancement of faint or obscure images,

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such as those on cuneiform tablets or charred papyrus documents. Today, archaeologists are also increasingly experimenting with three-dimensional digital imagery. Because it is even possible to take accurate measurements from such digital representations, these preserve much more information about the form of scanned artifacts than traditional two-dimensional photographs or drawings. It is important to remember, however, that even these precise representations are models – interpretations – of complex entities with an infinity of possible attributes (see Pottery Analysis: Stylistic).

Curation and Condition Monitoring As mentioned above, adequate preservation of archaeological specimens requires storage under conditions that minimize the rate of processes which might cause them to deteriorate. Consequently, it is important to maintain a stable, moderate environment, to minimize mechanical impacts, and to monitor collections regularly to ensure that they are not deteriorating. Two of the environmental factors that need to be controlled and monitored are temperature and humidity. Higher temperatures accelerate chemical reactions, such as oxidation, so artifact storage should be in a climate-controlled space with temperature stabilized around 20 oC or 70 oF. High humidity is particularly damaging to metal artifacts, but frequent fluctuations in humidity are damaging to most kinds of archaeological specimens. Perforating any polyethylene bags that are used to contain artifacts prevents moisture from condensing inside. Specimens that require particularly stringent protection from humidity should be in sealed polyethylene boxes equipped with silica-gel, which absorbs atmospheric moisture until its micropores become saturated. It is necessary to reset the silica-gel every few months by heating it in a lab oven at 105 oC (220 oF) for about ten hours to drive off the accumulated moisture, then returning it to the sealed container after it cools. An indicator strip in the box will signal when the silicagel needs replacement, while putting a hygrometer in the container or sealed cabinet makes it easier to monitor humidity and make sure it stays within a safe range. For iron artifacts, for example, it is necessary to use enough fresh silica-gel to keep their relative humidity between 10% and 20%. However thorough the attempts to provide artifacts with acceptable environments, deterioration of their condition is always a risk. Condition monitoring is our tool for alerting us of such risks. It involves regular checks on archaeological collections,

recording any change in condition that artifacts may have experienced, changing silica-gel when needed, and ensuring that the artifacts’ environments are within acceptable ranges. The record that results is called a condition census. Note that having clear lids on any boxes used for artifact storage facilitates monitoring. It is important to note that archaeological laboratories must not only preserve their collections of artifacts and other specimens; they must also preserve the documentation of excavations and analyses, including the records of conservation itself. In addition to paper hard copies, such as archaeological field notes kept in binders and maps and plans kept in map cabinets or tubes, archaeological laboratories typically have substantial collections of slides, negatives, and digital data and images. Archiving these safely, including making sure that old digital files are transferred to new formats as these change, is very important. One important component of lab documentation is a ‘leave log’ to track any specimens or documents that anyone has removed from the collections for outside analysis, photography, copying, or teaching. Those borrowing specimens should sign them out and sign them back in.

Laboratory Health and Safety It may not be as obvious as in chemistry or biology, but laboratory work in archaeology requires basic precautions to protect lab workers’ health and safety. Most of these precautions concern hygiene, eye protection, respiratory problems, and avoiding cuts. Some kinds of archaeological laboratory work make use of chemicals that require additional precautions. Every archaeological laboratory should be equipped with a first-aid kit that contains the supplies, such as bandages, that are most likely to be needed in an archaeological accident. Everyone working in the lab should know where to find it. Hygiene

It is important to remember that artifacts, bones, and other objects that archaeologists collect and bring back to the lab were once buried in dirt, often in contexts that are far from sanitary. Consequently, they could be infested with bacteria, molds, or fungi that someone could pick up while handling them. While handling archaeological materials, whether in the field or in the lab, lab workers should wear latex gloves or make sure that they wash their hands with soap and hot water before handling food or eating. In addition, one should avoid rubbing one’s eyes or touching one’s mouth while handling artifacts.

ARCHAEOLOGY LABORATORY, OVERVIEW 475 Eye Protection

Getting particles and other small objects in the eyes is a potential hazard of some archaeological laboratory activities. Transferring dirt from artifacts and ecofacts to the eyes by one’s hands is a common, but easily prevented, hazard. More serious is the possibility of eye damage from flying flint flakes during experimental flintknapping and similar activities. Meanwhile, the close observation, long microscopic work, and careful drawing that some lab activities involve can cause extreme eyestrain. One should take steps to eliminate or minimize all these risks. Experimental flintkapping presents one of the greatest dangers to the eyes. Inevitably, small, sharp-edged flakes of flint, glass, or other raw materials fly in all directions after the impact of both hard and soft hammers. Consequently, experimental flintknappers should always wear safety glasses when flintknapping. Safety glasses will also provide some protection from dust particles while screening sediment samples. Flintknapping labs should post clear hazard labels for flying debris and the need to wear gloves and eye protection. A less obvious aspect of protecting eyesight is to avoid stress on your eyes through uninterrupted focus on short distances. Whether you are sorting plant macrofossils under a microscope, drawing artifacts at a drafting table, working at a computer, or making many close measurements on lithics, it is a good idea to place your work area in such a way that you can look up periodically and focus your eyes on something in the distance, such as the scene out of a window. Respiratory Protection

Dust particles and airborne fungi or molds that are frequently the by-product of archaeological work can wreak havoc on archaeologists’ lungs unless they protect them by wearing a dust mask. Some laboratory activities, such as flintknapping, recharging silica-gel, or dry-screening sediments, can also create unhealthy dust levels. In addition, some lab activities involve chemicals that exude potentially dangerous fumes. While screening sediments or even handling very dry soils or similar materials with small particle sizes, one should wear an adequate dust mask. At a minimum, the mask should fit the face properly so that particles cannot get around its edges. In order to fit properly, the mask will need to have two, not just one, pairs of straps (top and bottom) that hold it snugly against the face. If using acids or solvents (e.g., to clean artifacts), a dust mask will not give adequate protection

against respiratory damage. Such chemicals should only be used under the conditions specified by occupational safety and health administration (OSHA), in the United States, Canadian workplace hazardous materials information system (WHMIS), or the equivalent, which usually include a fume hood that extracts dangerous fumes from the laboratory environment. In some cases one can wear a respirator mask instead of a simple dust mask for protection against toxic gases. Hazard labels should be posted in lab areas where dust or respirator masks are necessary. Cuts and Burns

Some kinds of archaeological lab work can cause cuts or burns. Flintknapping, especially when obsidian or some other glass is the raw material, produces extremely sharp flakes and frequently calls for bandages. Some other kinds of experimental archaeology, such as firing or refiring pottery, and some kinds of sample preparation, such as boiling faunal specimens, present opportunities for burns. Lab workers should protect themselves from cuts and burns by wearing protective clothing, such as a protective apron during flintknapping, or insulated gloves when handling hot items. They should also make sure that they know the location of the nearest first aid kit (usually mounted on the wall somewhere in the lab), where they will be able to find disinfectant, bandages, and burn ointments. Biological Hazards

Processing dead animals to create comparative collections for faunal osteology can pose biological hazards, and no one should dispose of decaying animal parts in regular garbage. University zooarchaeology labs can check with their counterparts in biology departments or the faculty of medicine to find out the appropriate and legal procedures for disposing of the unpleasant by-products of skeletal preparation. Radiation Hazards

Most archaeological laboratories have no radiation hazards. However, some archaeometric laboratories employ X-ray fluorescence, instrumental neutron activation analysis, or other methods that require radiation protection and monitoring.

Handling Chemicals Most of the chemicals that archaeologists use routinely are relatively innocuous, but all chemicals entail some level of risk, and it is important for those who use them to know the safe labeling, handling, disposal, and cleanup of chemicals. They should consult

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the OSHA, WHMIS, or equivalent manual or material safety data sheets (MSDS) on each of the chemicals used in the laboratory (see below). Lab activities that involve potentially hazardous chemicals range from cleaning and labeling artifacts, changing and recharging silica-gel, through ‘digesting’ sediments for pollen or phytolith analysis. Keep chemicals away from children and hightraffic parts of the lab, and never leave unlabeled flasks or beakers around the lab. This is an extremely dangerous practice as the next person using the lab will have no way to know what they contain or how to clean or dispose of them safely. Use bilingual labels, where appropriate, and standard hazard symbols, such as those of the global harmonized system (GHS) of classification and labeling of chemicals (see ahead). Minimize the amount of acids and solvents in the work area by only taking what you need, and keep them away from the edges of counters or tables, or anywhere where someone might knock them over. In addition, ensure that you know the location of the OSHA, WHMIS, or GHS manual and how to interpret it. Never smoke or eat while using chemicals or allow others to do so. Some chemicals are flammable and others very toxic. Keep solvents away from flames and motors or switches that might cause sparks. Work in well-ventilated areas and avoid inhaling solvents and acids. Always wear protective clothing, such as gloves and apron or lab coat, and do not wear contact lenses when handling or using chemicals. Always wash your hands thoroughly afterward. Always wash out beakers or jars that you have used for chemicals, especially acids, immediately after use. One of the chemicals that archaeologists use frequently is acetone, a solvent. It is one of the key ingredients in some of the adhesives and consolidants used to conserve artifacts, such as B-72, an acrylic dissolved in acetone. At a minimum, acetone should be used only in an extremely well-ventilated space, but it is much better to use it under a fume hood, and you should try to keep your exposure as low as possible. Acetone is a significant fire hazard and a moderate explosion hazard and, if ignited, should be extinguished with a chemical or CO2 fire extinguisher and not with water. Acetone is stable under normal storage conditions. Other chemicals that archaeologists commonly use are acids, such as acetic acid (vinegar), citric acid, and hydrochloric acid (HCl). Generally, archaeologists use these acids only at very low concentrations, such as 5%, to remove calcareous encrustations from artifacts. If a flask of acid has been sitting around for a while, however, evaporation may have caused its

concentration to increase substantially over that stated on the label. Whatever the acid’s concentration, one should get into the habit of handling acids with respect. Always wear protective clothing, including gloves and chemical splash goggles, when pouring acids, and always have a source of running water nearby. When diluting acid, always pour the acid into water; never pour water into an acid, as it may sputter and splash. Some kinds of laboratory work in which archaeologists engage use more dangerous chemicals and procedures. For example, extracting pollen or phytoliths from sediment involves chemically digesting the sediment with rather aggressive acids, such as hydrofluoric (HF) and (HCl) acids and separating the silicates with tetra-bromide ethylene, zinc bromide, cadmium– potassium iodide, or sodium polytungstate, of which only the last is non-toxic. To prepare quartz crystals from pottery for a thermoluminescence date, similarly, may require use of HF acid and the even more dangerous aqua regia, which even eats through glass. One must have the material safety sheets on all the chemicals in use at work, post appropriate hazard labels for them, and consult the literature on their safe use. Chemical Storage

Store chemicals in well-ventilated, cool, locked cabinets away from most people. Never store acids and bases together, or oxidizing agents with solvents, as their respective fumes will chemically react with one another. Some chemicals that are particularly flammable should be in special cabinets that prevent explosions. All chemical-storage cabinets should be labeled on their doors to indicate which is for acids, which for solvents, and which for other materials, including use of standard hazard labels. The chemicals should be in sealed containers, preferably of plastic or plasticcoated glass and in safety carriers that minimize the chance of breakage. The containers themselves should also be labeled with their contents and concentration, along with appropriate hazard symbols. Avoid reusing old containers, but remove all old labels if it is necessary to do so. Chemical Disposal

Never pour laboratory chemicals down the drain. This is not only illegal in most jurisdictions and polluting, but also could lead to nasty chemical reactions in the drain, some of which might corrode through the pipes or even cause an explosion. It is best to have leftover chemicals removed by specialists in chemical waste disposal, as are found at universities and

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hospitals, but small amounts of less dangerous chemicals can sometimes be disposed as follows. When disposing of a small amount of acid, dilute it by adding it to a large volume of water and neutralize it with baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) or soda ash (sodium carbonate). The solution will give off heat and effervesce until the acid is neutralized, so be sure that it is in a large, open container. It is then safe to dispose of it on carbonaceous soil in an isolated area along with large amounts of water. Tissues or towels containing acid should be washed out with lots of water before disposal. Small amounts of solvent, such as acetone, can be left to evaporate in a shallow, labeled bowl under a fume hood, away from any source of flame or sparks. The solvent in resins and acryloid B72 can similarly be allowed to evaporate, leaving a container with a hardened block of resin or B72 inside. It can then simply be disposed of in the garbage. Preferably the container should be one that no one would be tempted to reuse, such as the cut-out base of a plastic water bottle or a damaged beaker. Tissues or towels that might contain traces of solvent should also be left in a glass container under a fume hood for evaporation before disposal. Any glass vessels that contained chemicals should be washed thoroughly before disposal, while plastic containers should be holed to prevent their reuse. Chemical Spills

Any lab that uses chemicals should have a spill kit. A spill kit is a set of labeled boxes containing material that you can use to absorb and neutralize spilled chemicals safely, each box meant for a different category of spill or a particular kind of chemical. If you spill an acid, you should wear rubber gloves and splash goggles, then spread the contents of the appropriate box from the spill kit, or soda ash or sodium bicarbonate over the spill to neutralize the acid. Slowly add enough water and mix it with a shovel or dust-pan. The effervescence will stop once the acid is neutralized. Mop up the spill using lots of water, and use a great deal of running water to rinse out the mop. If you spill acetone, alcohol or other chemicals that dissolve in water, shut off any potential source of flame or sparks and mop up the spill with large volumes of water. Ventilate the area thoroughly afterward to evaporate any remaining traces. If you spill a solvent that does not dissolve in water, such as toluene, again shut off any potential source of flame or spark, and sprinkle the appropriate box from the spill kit, or vermiculite, sand, or ‘kitty litter’ over the spill. Once this has absorbed the spill, shovel the mixture into a metal bucket and put it under a

fume hood or in an isolated, well-ventilated place where the solvent can evaporate. Ventilate the room where the spill occurred until all traces of solvent have evaporated and the smell is gone. Other Chemical Emergencies

Sometimes, in spite of protective clothing, you may splash a hazardous chemical on your skin or in your eyes, or accidentally inhale or ingest something dangerous. For splashes on skin, rinse the exposed skin with large amounts of running water until the chemical is completely removed. For chemicals that do not dissolve in water, use soap and water. Remove any clothing on which the chemical splashed and do not wear it again until it has been thoroughly washed. If the splash has caused burning or corrosion to your skin, you will need medical attention, and should inform healthcare workers what chemical was involved and what first aid was given. Splashes in the eye also require irrigation with large amounts of running water, and many labs have special eye-wash stations for this purpose. Hold eyelids open to wash the entire eye, and then seek immediate medical attention, providing information on the chemical and first aid to the healthcare workers. If someone in the lab inhales a dangerous vapor, you should remove the victim from the affected area, loosen his or her clothing and, if breathing stops, give artificial respiration. Seek medical attention and report the chemical involved and any first aid given. If someone ingests a chemical, rinse out the mouth with large amounts of water, which the victim should not swallow. If any of the chemical was swallowed, the victim should also drink a large amount of water to dilute the contents of the stomach. Do not induce vomiting. Get immediate medical attention and tell the healthcare workers the quantity, concentration, and type of chemical that was ingested.

Hazardous Materials Manuals Each laboratory that has chemicals should be equipped with a manual issued by OSHA (in the United States), WHMIS (in Canada), or the equivalent in other countries. This is a binder that contains descriptions of all the chemicals used in the lab, how they should be handled and stored, what lab workers need to know to avoid any health hazards associated with them, and how to clean them up if they are spilled. It has standard codes that indicate, for example, whether a given chemical is flammable, acidic, explosive, or corrosive, and lab workers should learn to understand these codes.

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Hazard Labels Standardized labels for hazardous materials, activities, and equipment, and for the need for protective clothing, should appear in the lab and on equipment or materials, including the doors of chemical-storage cabinets, that pose any risks to people in the lab. A large variety of standards exist for such labels, some of which are now obsolete. In the United States, current standards are set by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and OSHA. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 3864 sets international standards in labeling hazards. Relevant standards are set in Britain by British Standards Institution (BSI), and in Canada by WHMIS. For chemicals and other hazardous materials, the GHS provides standard symbols for international use and EU Directive 67/548/EEC for use in Europe. This no doubt seems confusing, but there is actually fairly widespread agreement over the main symbols that these systems use, such as skull-and-crossbones for toxic substances or a fire for flammable ones. Most of the differences lie in colors, shape of the symbol’s frame (triangle, diamond, circle), and accompanying text. Some icons used in labels, such as a glove to indicate the need to wear gloves, are fairly self-explanatory. Lab directors or administrators should consult the standards relevant to their own country or buy commercially available labels there, and make sure that employees, students, and volunteers working in the lab know how to interpret the labels. In universities, science departments or human resources offices generally offer training in laboratory safety that includes interpretation of these labels.

See also: Archaeozoology; Artifacts, Overview; Cera-

mics and Pottery; Classification and Typology; Conservation and Stabilization of Materials; Ecofacts, Overview; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear; Manufacture; Phytolith Analysis; Pollen Analysis; Pottery Analysis: Petrology and Thin-Section Analysis; Stylistic.

Further Reading Adkins L and Adkins RA (1989) Archaeological Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banning EB (2000) The Archaeologist’s Laboratory: The Analysis of Archaeological Data. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Bradley S (ed.) (1990) A Guide to the Storage, Exhibition, and Handling of Antiquities, Ethnographia and Pictorial Art. London: The British Museum. Dunnell RC (1971) Systematics in Prehistory. New York: Macmillan (The Free Press). Foster GV and Barker NJ (1996) Close-up photography of archaeological objects. Journal of Field Archaeology 23: 369–375. Howell C and Blanc W (1995) A Practical Guide to Archaeological Photography, 2nd edn. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California. Kenworthy MA (ed.) (1985) Preserving Field Records. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sutton MQ and Arkiush BS (1998) Archaeological Laboratory Methods, an Introduction, 2nd edn. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/ Hunt Publishing. Thompson JM (ed.) (1992) Manual of Curatorship, a Guide to Museum Practice, 2nd edn. London: Butterworth–Heineman. Tufte ER (1983) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press. US Department of Labor (2006) A Guide to the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS). http://www.osha.gov/dsg/hazcom/ghs.html.

ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY Kris Hirst, Iowa City, IA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary cultural resource management (CRM) The process of decision making that balances the needs of the public against the preservation of cultural resources, including buildings, sacred sites, archaeological sites, and documents, among other things. digital publishing The publishing of edited and reviewed articles and making them available for download, specifically on per-article fee basis. folksonomies An information retrieval system used on the Internet in which the user assigns keywords (called tags) for a given webpage, photograph, or other piece of data.

Geographic Information Systems A combination of computer hardware and software used to tie data to geographic locations. geophysical prospection Also called remote sensing, is any of several methods of seeing what is beneath the surface of the ground, without actually disturbing the ground. Global Positioning System A mechanical method of using combined satellite data to locate oneself on the planet. open source movement The general movement in sciences to freely publish and disseminate research data and results on the World Wide Web. Making Archaeology Teaching Relevant in the XXIst Century (MATRIX) A curriculum development project from the Society of American Archaeology and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), to produce course outlines and information for college-level archaeology classes.

ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY 479 repatriation The return of human remains, grave goods, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to the individuals, groups, or nations that represent the original owners. stable isotope analysis A method by which researchers measure isotopic ratios to identify the results of ecological processes, and then interpret them to construct a history of the animal, human, or plant.

Status of the Profession Recent past decades have seen vast changes in the study of archaeology, in its goals; in its methods and practices; in its practitioners; in the laws governing it; and in its relationship with the public. The profession has seen many theoretical developments since the mid-1970s, and there have been many new discoveries and much learned about the past. However, the most remarkable alterations in archaeology include the technological advances used in the course of field and laboratory research; the context of the research within the modern world of developing nations; and the gender, age, and ethnicity of those who conduct it. These changes have significantly altered the profession far beyond its content. As in the past, much field and laboratory research throughout the world continues to be conducted through academic field schools and government and university-funded projects. Long-running universityor museum-based projects are well situated to answer specific research questions and develop multidisciplinary international programs that press forward the field while at the same time training the next generation of archaeologists. Recent changes in the field affecting academic research have been by and large technologically driven, by improvements in communication and data collection and analysis. One significant change has been the increase in the frequency of joint international research projects; today it is expected that a university-based program working in a foreign country will partner with academics from that country. However, from a primarily academic and museumoriented profession of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the field of archaeology as a whole has begun to evolve primarily into a heritage management profession. This is not a result of the decrease of the number or complexity of academic projects, but rather the promulgation of non-academic-based research in the form of cultural resource management (CRM). The developed world has seen increases in population, education, and communication over the past 30 years. These increases have led people and governments in the developed countries to recognize both the importance of cultural heritage and the damage caused by continuing construction. As heritage

management tasks preserving archaeological and other cultural resources increase, they take in an ever-growing number of employed archaeologists, conducting an ever-growing number of excavation projects and absorbing an ever-increasing amount of funding. The shifting needs of the profession are increasing the demand for a different set of skills to operate in this new climate. Changes in pedagogy have been slower to develop but show some progress in recent years. In addition, the vast changes wrought in the world by the development of the World Wide Web and the Internet have also altered the profession of archaeology, including everything from how data is recorded to how information is shared with colleagues and with the public at large (see Internet, Archaeology on). These changes permeate the profession, not only making new demands on data storage but also changing how archaeology is perceived and practiced in ways both unforeseen and unforeseeable. Access to information previously kept within the walls of academe has empowered people outside the profession to affect archaeology, whether it is in funding, materials handling, or interpretation. Alternative viewpoints from underserved populations such as minorities and indigenous peoples in the developed world and governments and communities in the developing world have enriched archaeology. At the same time, these changes have posed great challenges to longstanding museum collections and the publication of created information streams.

The Growth of the Cultural Resource Movement The first heritage laws – laws placing the care of ancient monuments within the purview of the federal government – are thought to have been created at the end of the French Revolution, after a debate concerning whether it was best to obliterate or preserve the architectural evidence of l’ancien regime (see Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, heritage legislation included Britain’s Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 and the American Antiquities Act of 1906 (see Historic Preservation Laws). Current Employment Trends

Since then, the growth of CRM as an employer of archaeologists has been phenomenal. Only approximately 30% of all persons employed as archaeologists are in traditional academic positions. The remainder are either in governmental jobs, protecting government-owned resources, or in private sector

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positions, created by the market to complete investigations as part of state and national environmental impact studies. Private sector archaeologists are typically located in small businesses or as segments of larger environmental or engineering firms. As a percentage of the total archaeological employment, local and national government roles today account for approximately 25% in the United States and Australia. In the United Kingdom, a full 45% of the working archaeologists are currently employed by either local or national government. Another large percentage of employed archaeologists today are in private sector CRM roles. Private sector jobs account for approximately one-quarter of the archaeologists employed in the United States, one-third in the United Kingdom, and nearly one-half in Australia. Interestingly, studies continue to indicate that the majority of archaeologists working today would prefer to be engaged in teaching at the university level, even as the percentage of these roles in employing archaeologists decreases. Table 1 lists the percentages of employment identified by four recent surveys of professional archaeologists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Demographics

From the beginning, most archaeologists have been male. However, recent statistics indicate a steady increase in the percentage of women participating in the field. According to recent surveys, women are still overall a minority part of the archaeological population in the United States (36%) and the United Kingdom (35.5%). However, the younger generation appears to be leveling the field. In the United States, 51% of the students surveyed were female, and in the United Kingdom, survey respondents between the ages of 20 and 29 were 42% female. Contrary to this trend, in Australia gender balance is near equal (48% female and 52% male), and there is no difference between younger and older respondents, a fact Table 1 Results of employment surveys Employer

USA 1994

USA 2004

Academic CRM Government Museum Other Total

35% 18% 23% 8% 16% 100%

33.6% 27.7% 25.3% 4.8% 8.6% 100.0%

UK 1998 13.2% 32.3% 45.0% 9.5% 100.0%

USA 1994: Zeder, 1999. USA 2004: Association Research Inc., 2004. UK 1998: Aitchison and Denison, 1998. Australia 2005: Ulm et al., 2005.

Australia 2005 25.1% 47.9% 22.7% 4.3% 100.0%

researchers attribute to the relative newness of the field in Australia. Statistics indicate that the average age of an archaeologist working in the United States is approximately 50 years old, an average older than any of the other populations surveyed. Also evident in the data from these American surveys is a decrease in the number of archaeologists in each of the age groups younger than 50. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, the average age is 36 years old, and in Australia, 57.2% of the respondents in a recent survey were younger than 45 years of age. In addition, neither the British nor Australian surveys seem to indicate a sharp decrease in sheer numbers of archaeologists among younger cohorts. It is possible that, since the surveys were conducted of the memberships of professional societies, the demographic anomaly seen in the American statistics may be a function of the enrollment (or rather lack of it) in those professional societies. This should be a matter of concern to the SAA/SHA as they attempt to address its disaffected younger membership – if indeed that is what is being reflected, and not a true demographic problem. Certainly, the numbers of graduate degrees conferred increased throughout the 1990s – a point that is addressed later. The participation of indigenous and minority people in the conduct of archaeological studies appears to be growing, but very slowly. Ethnic heritage cited in a recent survey of American archaeologists indicated that 97.9% claimed European–American ancestry, 0.1% African American, 0.3% Asian, 1.0% Hispanic (including about one-third of the total from Latin America), and 0.7% stated they were Native American. Australian archaeology appears to be better at involving indigenous people; results report that 2.3% of working archaeologists designate themselves as indigenous Australians. It is possible to be involved in CRM without being an archaeologist, of course, and one measure of Native American participation in archaeology in the United States is the number of Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) which have been established. THPOs are government agencies established by Native American entities to manage archaeological, architectural, and cultural resources within their purviews. Of the 582 tribal entities listed in the Tribal Leaders Directory of January 2006, 59 (or 10.1%) have established THPOs, most of these within the past decade (see Native Peoples and Archaeology).

Archaeology of the Present The biggest change promulgated by the refocus of the profession toward heritage management is situating archaeology in the present. Research conducted in the

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field as part of CRM processes involves an underlying triage. Archaeology has always been a destructive process, and triage – deciding what is important to save during excavations and what is not – has always been part of that process. But today, the triage process must include decisions concerning whether to preserve large pieces or whole sites, based on their importance to the public at large. The value of a given archaeological resource must often be weighed against such things as public safety, improved transportation, private landowner rights, tourism dollars, environmental preservation, and in some cases, human lives. These decisions are not in the hands of the archaeologist alone – nor should they be. But the requirements of making such a decision have created a larger and more pressing need for public archaeology – for the communication of the value of the past. The relationships between indigenous peoples and archaeologists continues to slowly improve, with some sharp setbacks. While an increase in the number of indigenous archaeologists is in evidence over the past decade, these numbers are still comparatively few, as reported above. Although there have been experiments reported in the gray literature with collaborative or parallel indigenous and traditional scientific interpretations of archaeological events or elements, by and large these efforts are rare, and when they do occur are often not visible to the public. When such collaborations do escape the gray literature, they are often cloaked in secrecy, with names and places changed to protect indigenous people’s rights. It may be that the conflict between the archaeological urge to publish and the indigenous right to privacy will prohibit any truly collaborative studies. In Australia, aboriginal input into archaeological studies is more common, particularly since the resolution of the Hindmarsh affair of the 1990s, when the violation of the secrecy of a set of tribal activities led to a political disaster. Recent studies involving the direct input of aboriginal peoples in archaeological research include an ongoing cooperative project between archaeologists and Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation. In Africa, the Marothodi Institute for Archaeology has been created to provide scholarships and collaborative studies assisting African students to become involved in archaeological studies.

Education and Training The increase in heritage management roles as places of employment for archaeologists has not gone unnoticed in the profession. Traditional training schemes, which emphasize cultural history and field techniques, do

not include classes in heritage law or preservation management, not to mention budgeting and business skills. A movement toward providing the next generation of archaeologists with the set of skills necessary to succeed in this new form of career has become of interest to some leaders in the field. For the most part, education remains within the control of the university systems in each country, and this probably will continue to be the case. By and large, professional archaeology as a profession is taught at the graduate level (MA or PhD), and, not surprisingly, a professional career for the most part demands a post-graduate degree. Up until the prevalence of heritage management, a typical job in archaeology was a university position; most of these positions require a doctorate. However, today, most of the nonteaching archaeology positions in the world do not require a PhD. This situation may have resulted from the rapid rise of the CRM field, as the demand for these jobs initially took students out of their degree programs early. Two recent surveys conducted in the United States indicate a rise in the number of archaeologists holding master’s degrees vis-a`-vis those with PhDs; this is probably a function of the rise of CRM and the relative flatness in the growth of university positions. Vocational schools such as the Archaeological Technology Program at Cabrillo College has begun to create CRM degrees at the associate’s degree level; such programs may eventually impact educational requirements for future generations (see Careers in Archaeology). PhD Degrees and Degree Earners

In light of long-standing traditions about the purpose of a graduate school department, it is perhaps not surprising that surveys have concentrated on gathering information about PhD earners rather than MA students. A survey conducted for the American Anthropological Association indicated that the number of anthropology PhDs has remained static – at approximately 400 per year since 1974, with the number of archaeological PhDs constituting between 24% and 30% of that total. Graduate enrollments in anthropology departments have increased sharply, however, with enrollments in 1997 up more than 35.5% over 1987. Undergraduate enrollments in 1997 were up 78% over 1987. Minority representations in anthropology PhD programs was cited as 15% in 1997, with most of these in cultural anthropology; only 16% of the total minority PhD students were in archaeology. Gender representation in the 1997 cohort indicated that only 36% of archaeology PhDs were female.

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However, a 1994 survey of archaeologists in the United States indicated a huge growth in the number of PhDs granted over time, with the largest increase beginning in the 1970s with 244, in the 1980s with 321, and by the end of the first quarter of March 1994, 182 PhDs had been already awarded in the 1990s; these statistics also indicated a growing number of women in the programs.

for Professional Archaeologists. Membership currently stands at approximately 1800, primarily in the United States; membership is restricted to professionals meeting a specific level of experience and education. A code of professional conduct was first ratified by the membership in 1998; and a comparatively brief standards and practices guideline has been developed.

Training in CRM and Heritage Management

Curriculum Development Initiatives

While the creation of pedagogical training courses has not kept pace with the rapid rise of the heritage management movement, several master’s level programs in heritage management have been started at universities throughout the world. In the past ten years, Heritage Management MAs have been established at Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Leicester, York, Glasgow, and Lampeter in the UK, and New England and James Cook in Australia. Some directed CRM programs at the master’s level have been created in the United States – notably at Sonoma State University and Texas A&M – but since master’s degrees in North America are almost without exception research degrees, the movement has been very slow to develop. Specialized training, such as short courses in cultural resource laws and specialized field techniques, have been developed for online and classroom-based educational venues. Some of these such as the US National Park Service’s Section 106 training classes, are completely outside the university setting.

‘Making Archaeology Teaching Relevant in the XXIst Century’ (MATRIX) is a project developed by the Society for American Archaeology, funded by the US National Science Foundation, and was, according to the NSF grant, a

Professionalization of the Field: Standards and Practices

As the field of archaeology continues to expand away from the academic realm and into the business realm, many in the profession have sought to professionalize the discipline, through the creation of professional organizations and the development of codes of conduct and a mechanism for the policing of their membership. Based in the United Kingdom, the Institute for Field Archaeology was founded in 1982; it has five grades of membership based on experience and education. The IFA developed a code of conduct and ratified it in 1985; amendments have been made and accepted by the membership, and the current code was signed by the members of the IFA in 2002. An extensive standards and practices handbook developed for the IFA is unparalleled in the field. The current membership consists of approximately 2000 archaeologists, primarily working in the United Kingdom. The Register of Professional Archaeologists is the American equivalent of the IFA; it was established in 1998, as an outgrowth of the now-defunct Society

‘‘three-year pilot project to design, test, and evaluate core aspects of a new curriculum based on these principles at eight academic institutions across the United States and to produce a complete set of flexible course materials suitable to replace or implement extant curricula in any higher educational setting.’’

The result has been a store of lesson plans and course materials suitable for use in most colleges, including introductory courses to archaeology, museum studies, and fieldwork, as well as content courses in North and South American archaeologies. One of these courses was developed explicitly as an introduction to cultural resource management; at the moment, MATRIX resources are only available in English.

Ethical and Legal Issues Cultural Heritage and the Law

Many of the earliest laws in Western countries affecting archaeologists were created to protect monuments; the most recent have been passed to effect the repatriation of human remains, artifacts, and other pieces of cultural heritage to the countries of their origin and/or descendants (see Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation). As more countries continue to gain economic and political footholds in the global economy, many more today are in a position to create their own cultural resource programs, train their own archaeologists, and maintain their own museum collections. Academic research projects are today multi-institutional, with many more countries outside of the West originating projects or at least acting as equal partners with Western universities. Many countries now have legislation that limits foreign excavations or the ability for foreign researchers to remove artifacts from their home countries. One result is an increase in the number of scientific archaeological publications are appearing

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in languages beyond the traditional triumvirate of English, French, and German; some as required by host countries, others as part of public archaeology vehicles. Statistics on these new programs are not readily available today, but their influence is already readily apparent in entries within this encyclopedia today. One effect of the World Wide Web is that information about museum collections is now effectively public. The enormous stores of Western museums collected from around the world by nineteenth century explorers are now recognized on a global scale. In addition, the force of public opinion may be brought to bear on the behaviors and situations involving artifacts and archaeologists that in the past may not have been considered. Museums have been established in home countries, and they, not unnaturally, are lobbying for the return of their cultural heritage. Recent calls for the repatriation of artifacts to Greece, Egypt, Italy, and Peru have made international headlines and involved extended court battles. They are surely only a harbinger of things to come.

Human Skeletal Material

In the United States, the repatriation movement has been most successful with the return of human remains and artifacts associated with burials. Early application of the United States NAGPRA reburial laws has meant that scientifically valued human skeletal material has been reburied prior to complete investigation. Interestingly, the limits on testing in terms of time and the amount of material that may be destroyed in the process have been ameliorated by the use of new less-intrusive tests such as AMS dating and computer imaging, in which digital storage of information on human remains may be preserved long after the materials are reburied. To date in the United Kingdom and Australia, repatriation has been a matter of policy and negotiation, rather than legislation. Both countries are actively seeking input from indigenous communities to proceed (see Ethical Issues and Responsibilities; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). Protection of Monuments

Repatriation

After centuries of collecting, whether completed under the rubric of archaeology or not, museums and repositories in the developed world hold much of the cultural heritage of the developing world. While many of these collections were made under contract with the governments of origin, many were not; and developing governments would like these materials back as icons of cultural heritage. However, simply returning cultural materials is not a particularly straightforward process. Many collections were not completely recorded and thus require extensive negotiation and sometimes costly investigation assuring proper ownership rights. In addition, resistance to the return of the objects is strong in some areas, since much time and money has been invested in the repositories, and many museums rely on income related to the ability to exhibit objects which by rights belong elsewhere. Some legislation has been passed, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Act of 1982 in Australia, and the United States’ Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, and other countries are working on policy changes or laws. International conventions such as UNESCO’s Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects are also useful tools for assisting with the repatriation of artifacts to their native countries or people (see Illicit Antiquities).

Archaeological sites which have been deemed important to the world in general have been given World Heritage status since 1972, with the establishment of the international treaty called the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Between 1978 and 2006, the committee named 830 properties World Heritage Sites. Listing a property carries with it the benefit of technical advice and financial assistance to a member country to safeguard, repair, and develop historic and natural monuments. Unfortunately, naming a monument part of world heritage can also make it a target in the cultural wars of a member state. Recently targeted World Heritage Convention (WHC) properties include the Bamiyan Valley monuments of Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2002 (see World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws). Looting and the illegal antiquities trade The looting of archaeological sites around the world continues, despite the passing of several national and international laws, and the active involvement of Interpol and other national and international police systems. The reasons looting continues unabated largely lie within the economic factors inherent in the system: there is a large demand for authentic antique artifacts, from artifact dealers, collectors, and art museums. International borders are more porous than ever today, and the ready availability of international transportation coupled with political instability make trafficking in stolen artifacts a lucrative business.

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Unfortunately, technological advances which have made so many changes in the study of archaeological science have also assisted in the illegal antiquities trade. Internet auction sites are difficult to police, and the remote sensing techniques such as ground penetrating radar, satellite imagery, and metal detectors assist looters, as well as archaeologists. Thefts from museums and art collections are tracked by Interpol, which maintains a database of stolen objects. Estimates on the amount of money traded in the antiquities market are very difficult to make, since countries do not often track losses, do not pass on that information to Interpol, and are not necessarily aware of thefts until the objects appear on the market. One way countries have begun to fight back against illicit looting is the development of archaeological permitting processes. In some countries, archaeologists must present credentials to be permitted to excavate, negotiate whether they may take artifacts out of the originating country and for how long a period, and what tests may be accomplished. Additionally, many countries such as Egypt, Peru, and Italy have begun to sue museums for the return of artifacts taken illicitly (see Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation).

of computers has become de rigueur, collection of digital data has steeply increased in the field of archaeology, beginning with laboratory analyses, and more recently extending to locational data collected using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology, as well as increasing use of desktop research using online bibliographies and databases. Publishing of technical reports, brochures, websites, podcasts, and other vehicles of communication to colleagues and the public are also readily available from desktop applications.

Protection during armed conflict Armed conflict is prevalent in many places in the world today, and looting and the destruction of historic monuments is one of the costs. The United Nations Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was enacted at the Hague in 1954, in the wake of the massive destruction of cultural monuments seen during World War II. A protocol was set at that time to prevent the export of cultural property from occupied territory. In 1999, a second revised protocol was established to broaden the definition of cultural property and to help member countries take steps to prevent problems during peacetime. While the UN is aware that protecting cultural monuments is not of paramount importance during time of warfare, the convention was constructed because it was felt that ‘‘cultural heritage reflects the life of the community, its history and its identity. Its preservation helps to rebuild broken communities, reestablish their identities, and link their past with their present and future.’’

Computer-aided Research

Computing and Communications Technology Many of the changes in archaeology over the past few years have been driven by technological advances in computing and global communications. As the use

GPS/GIS Data Collection

Standard procedure in many archaeological surveys and excavations involves the collection of locational data using GPS equipment. Hand-held GPS receivers are used in conjunction with GIS networks in the mapping of sites within a landscape and features within a site. These maps may be used to interface directly with topographic maps and satellite imagery. Mapped data can then be used as an interpretive database, to better understand site layouts and resource patterning. The use of GPS/GIS has also greatly facilitated landscape archaeology, allowing multiple views of objects and features within a landscape.

As the Internet matures, computer-aided research continues to increase in its utility. Although the capacity to conduct archaeological background research solely online is not as yet feasible, in many universities in the developed world access to scientific journals and historic data has become far more simplified of late, a direct result of the growth in the use of keywords. Writers and editors embed keywords into the coding of their articles; these keywords are collected by search engines (such as Google and Yahoo). A researcher inputs keywords into a search engine, which then retrieves articles marked by those keywords. Keywords are problematic, as any librarian can tell you, because what a writer comes up with for keywords and what a reader searches for may not match. As a result, some modern search engines mechanically collect text from webpages (using different algorithms) for possible search strings. One very recent and promising development has been the introduction of folksonomies, in which the user may attach new keywords (known as tags) to a document written and produced by someone else. Folksonomies (word formation from taxonomies) are not as yet widespread. Many public and university libraries have their catalogs online for publicly available searches and these may be used to search for books and journals,

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although not generally for articles. Electronic library catalogs in general use traditional Library of Congress classification systems. Journal article access can be gained using keyworded searches; in fact a researcher may have wider access to articles in many more journals today than in the past. Enormous bibliographic catalogs, such as Academic Search Elite, ISI Web of Knowledge, and LexisNexis Academic by and large restrict access to paid subscriptions. Subscription costs are prohibitive to any but large city or university libraries. Primary online catalogs recently developed specifically for archaeology and anthropology include Anthropology Plus, AnthroSource, and the eHRAF Collections of Archaeology and Ethnology. In addition, specialized topical bibliographic databases are blossoming on the Internet, through the collaborative work of interest groups. These include the ABIA South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology Index, the British & Irish Archaeological Bibliography, and the Annual Egyptological Bibliography. Data Repositories

The reasons for adoption of electronic data collection are clear: an increase in efficiency in time spent mapping in the field and map accuracy; the ease of generation of summary tables and cross-comparison of analytical results; the ease and lowered costs of research and publication; and the ability to store data in an efficient manner. Although the collection of electronic forms of data has become a fairly common occurrence throughout archaeology, the reposing of that data explicitly for sharing by others is less common. The logical place to archive data generated during archaeological investigations might be with artifact repositories, historic preservation offices, and cultural ministries; however these offices are often government institutions that rarely have the funds to support the technology and personnel required to classify and store the data. Because in most of the world the data collection has been developed by each company or each individual archaeologist, standards have been slow to be developed and implemented at the regional, provincial, or state level. There are exceptions. The Archaeological Data Service (ADS) has collected archaeological data throughout the United Kingdom since the late 1980s. The ADS maintains a user-accessible catalog, and has developed a set of Guides to Good Practices which are invaluable as a model of progress in this area. The Archaeological Data Archive Project at the Center for the Study of Architecture was one of the pioneers of data archiving in the United States, but is no longer active. There are many other smaller project-oriented

data collection entities, too many to discuss here, but an example would include the Perseus Project Database, which maintains images and data on art objects, sites, and buildings from archaic and classical Greek history, from many of the largest museums in the world. Open Source and Digital Publishing

The Open Source movement has had a slow growth in archaeological sciences. The nonprofit Open Source Initiative was a project borne of the computer science industry, originally to allow free collaboration on software engineering projects – including coding methodologies – via the World Wide Web. The results of this collaboration were that no one owns the copyright on the code, and anyone can use it in whatever capacity they choose. The main vehicle for Open Source editing is a Wiki, an electronic database developed in the 1970s that may be added to or edited by any user given access; the Wikipedia is the best known Wiki application, although not the only one. In scientific publication, the Open Source movement promotes free access to the data and results of scientific research by way of the placement of articles and research data online and available for download for no or little cost to the user. While the Open Source movement has made some inroads into the hard sciences such as physics and biology, the cost of publication, the requirements of the review process, and the entrenched bureaucracy of long-standing academic journals have slowed the growth of the movement in archaeology. Most difficult, perhaps, are the struggles over copyright issues; a recent initiative called Creative Commons is attempting to resolve some of these issues. Digital publishing Digital publishing, where edited and reviewed articles are available for download, specifically on a per-article fee basis, has made some progress in archaeology. In addition to the electroniconly journal Internet Archaeology, the content of some long-established traditional journals, such as Antiquity, the Journal of Archaeological Science, and the American Journal of Archaeology, are presently available for download on a per-article basis. Many more physical anthropological journals, which are closer to the hard sciences, are at least a halfdecade ahead of archaeological journals. However, most journals now use electronic forms of prepublication; and this has made interscholar communications far easier, even if this data is not publicly available. Although most archaeological journals do not participate in Open Source publishing of their entire journals (called ‘Gold’ Open Access),

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permission is commonly given to individual authors to share and in some cases post their completed articles online elsewhere (called ‘Green’ Open Access). While limited, this does provide for communication among scholars. It is difficult to say why journals do not provide per-copy access to their contents; and it is quite possible that per-article downloads may proliferate in the coming years, particularly as university libraries continue to feel the pinch of budget cuts. Public Archaeology and the Internet

Until the last decade, mass communication of archaeological information to the public had been limited to the mainstream press or general public magazines such as Archaeology and Current Archaeology. However, in recent years, multiple venues providing public access to archaeological findings and political issues have opened. This stream of data has the potential to influence the public’s perception of archaeology for ill or for good, as a creator of relevant (or irrelevant) information, as a protector (or destroyer) of cultural heritage, and as proponent (or foot-dragger) in terms of repatriation of artifacts and skeletal material. Interaction with the public has become far more widespread than in previous eras, a change resulting directly from the popularity of the Internet. Archaeology-related e-mail discussion lists, newsletters, and usenet groups have been in use for over a decade. Websites for academic departments, professional associations, and cultural resource management firms have become the standard for groups in the developed world. Often these venues post public-oriented articles on current research. Podcasting, webcams, and online excavation diaries have become fairly common in the recent past. Most recently, weblogs and photo exchange sites such as Flickr have begun to provide day-to-day insights into archaeological investigations as they occur; short films, documentaries, and podcasts have gained a much wider audience for archaeology via The Archaeology Channel and similar programs (see Internet, Archaeology on).

Technological Advances Over the past few years, technological advances in laboratory analysis promise new pathways to learning many things about the past. Breakthroughs in DNA studies, in stable isotope analysis, and in remote sensing are but a few of the most recent methodologies readily embraced by the archaeological community. DNA and Molecular Studies

Molecular archaeology is the application of molecular chemistry to archaeological objects or investigations.

An outgrowth of the bioarchaeology of the 1970s, the study of molecules has included the examination of lipids and other organic deposits inside pottery vessels and other objects, blood residue analysis, and opal phytoliths, as well as the study of DNA, the main building block of life. The first attempts to identify intact fragments of truly ancient DNA appeared on the surface to be possible, and these tests became quite well known, including that of the insects trapped in amber used by Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Unfortunately, these materials proved unworkable, as ancient DNA is easily contaminated and decays within a maximum of 50 000–100 000 years. Although DNA does not survive longer than 100 000 years, the process of evolution can be used to discern more distant events by examining the molecular chains of modern DNA. Human, animal, and plant evolution occurs at extremely variable rates: diseases evolve faster than we can invent medications for them, while certain species of brachiopods have remained essentially unchanged for millennia. But at the molecular level, undetected morphologically, evolution occurs at a fairly fixed rate. An examination of DNA strands of modern-day beings can be used to determine the length of time since the last change. Important studies incorporating DNA include much new information about human evolution, including the recognition of the Mitochondrial Eve, and the relationship of Neanderthal to Homo sapiens. Other studies involving molecular DNA have included the search for location of the originating plants of the world’s first domesticated crops, including einkorn and emmer wheat, maize and rice. These studies also have identified elements of the process of domestication, how closely related strands of the current crops are and how many times and when the plants were domesticated. Animal domestications have also been examined using DNA, including searches for the original domestication processes of dogs, horses, goats, and camelids (see DNA: Ancient). Bone Chemistry and Stable Isotopes

Developed in the late 1970s by South African researcher Nikolaas van der Merwe and colleagues, the use of stable isotope research to investigate ecological processes in once-living tissue has mushroomed in the past decade. Stable isotope analysis measures the ratios of different forms of chemicals to identify the progress of ecological processes and interpret the processes, building a history of the living plant or animal. Chemicals frequently used in isotope analysis include carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, strontium, lead, and sulfur. Stable isotopes have been

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investigated in traces of organic residues found inside pots and on the edges of stone tools, and in animal bone, tooth enamel, and hair. Identified processes include dietary components, including the relative use of marine fauna such as seals, fish, and shellfish, domesticated plants such as maize and millet, cattle dairying, and age of weaning. Other studies have used stable isotopes to identify the geographic origin of plants, animals, and humans. Studies have examined nearly every time period including hominins, from Homo habilis and the Australopithecines to modern days (see Stable Isotope Analysis). Remote Sensing

Geophysical prospection, also called remote sensing, is any of the several methods of seeing what is beneath the surface of the ground, without actually disturbing the ground. Aerial photography of archaeological sites has been used since the first decade of the twentieth century. The first extensive aerial remote sensing project was carried out in the 1920s when French geographer Pierre Paris took aerial photographs of Oc Eo and Angkor Borei in the Mekong Delta of Cambodia and Vietnam, revealing an intricate network of canals in the floodplain. Since that time, in addition to aerial photographs and satellite photos, a huge range of technology-assisted methods have been used to search for crop marks, to identify buried structures, or to map chemical or electrical variances within soils. The use of aerial photographs and topographic maps has become a standard background research step on many if not most archaeological studies; these are today supplemented by satellite photography in most places in the world. Ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer surveys are used in many different venues as part of an excavation strategy to reduce costs, minimize damage, or amplify subsurface testing methodologies. Satellite imagery came of age as a result of the release of images produced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and LANDSAT in the 1980s. Today, five satellites regularly produce images of the Earth for NASA. The application of GIS and its vast mapping capabilities have come close to revolutionizing the field of archaeology, allowing the projection of accurately scaled maps over large distances. The first extensive projects to use large-scale mapping are now over 30 years old – Rene´ Millon’s Teotihuacan Mapping Project of the mid-1960s and Carole Crumley’s Burgundy landscape project of the early 1970s. Today, fairly high resolution satellite imagery is easily accessible to researchers via such tools as Google Earth, including large land surveys.

Several newer methodologies have become available for use on archaeological sites, many developed in other disciplines and adopted for use in archaeology. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is an outgrowth of medical diagnostic techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which was adopted by geophysicists to collect extensive electric current and electric potential data sets in multiple dimensions. ERT has been used successfully in several projects, including identifying structures and voids beneath the Temple of Apollo in Hierapolis. Geophysical diffraction tomography (GDT) involves burying a set of microphones in a grid across a site and firing 8 caliber shotgun shells at the earth, then using the soundwaves to identify buried masses. Lidar uses laser-driven pulses of light and multispectral cameras to scan and process digital information about a landscape. Used originally to map environments, lidar has been of demonstrable use in archaeological survey and mapping of monuments. Enhanced satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite contains both multispectral and panchromatic imagery which has enabled archaeologists to map crop marks with more precision (see Remote Sensing Approaches: Aerial; Geophysical). Computer-assisted Imaging

Akin to remote sensing are the advances in imaging. Like remote sensing, these techniques use methods developed from the medical and geographic fields of endeavor; but they are focused on enhancing artifacts rather than landscapes; since these objects are smaller they are more likely to use traditional methods, such as computer tomography (CT) scanning. CT scanning builds a three-dimensional image of an object from a series of two-dimensional X-rays established in a radial pattern. CT has been used to examine mummies and heavily encrusted artifacts prior to, or instead of, invasive procedures. Some initial tests have used geo-referencing of aerial photographs to map artifacts and features at the site and excavation unit level; combining these data with quantitative analysis has allowed some researchers to examine patterning of artifacts. Digital images of such fragile objects as rock art and ancient documents allow researchers to enhance images without endangering the objects themselves, such as the recent work on the Archimedes manuscript. Three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of ancient buildings have been undertaken as object studies, both to preserve fragile remnants, to consider different possible reconstructions, and to educate the public about what structures looked like in the past. Still a fairly expensive project, three-dimensional

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reconstructions have been successful in reconstructing buildings in Egypt and the American Southwest.

Toward a Relevant Archaeology Many problems face the world today: global warming and possible climate change, ongoing regional conflicts, manmade and natural disasters, endemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS and bird flu, crushing poverty and famine. In such a world, the study of archaeology and the preservation of cultural heritage can seem trivial when compared with human losses sustained by other pressing needs. However, many of these issues can be addressed with the assistance of archaeologists, whether by looking to the past for successes and failures of our ancestors or by applying the excavation methodology to modern problems. Global Warming and Climate Change

Adaptation to climatic change is in many respects archaeology’s stock in trade. Where early theoretical studies placed the causation of social changes perhaps too much on climatic fluctuations, more recent studies have emphasized archaeological evidence for climatic instability and cultural adaptations to it. Recent studies of cultural reactions to climate change include the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in England, the Middle Holocene–Late Holocene climatic change in the Great Basin, the Early/Late Natufian boundary in the Levant, Early Mesolithic settlements in northern Sweden, and the colonization of the island of Rapa Nui. Periglacial studies have examined the patterns of glaciers and ice patches in the Arctic, extended droughts in the Great Basin of the United States, and the impact of the El Nin˜o/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on Australia, Fiji, and South America. Speaking to the worldwide interest in global warming, several popular books by archaeologists and others have addressed this issue, most recently Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization and Steven Mithen’s After the Ice: A Global Human History 20 000–5000 BC. Disease Studies

Continuing studies in ancient epidemics promise to provide useful information about the progress and spread of disease, as discussed in The Archaeology of Disease, by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester. Investigations have included identifying the evidence of disease in human skeletal material, discerning mortality rates, and the regularity of disease outbreaks. Several recent studies have focused on the spread of smallpox resulting from its use as a chemical weapon in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries of North America. Recently, several papers have investigated leprosy in Medieval Europe; salmonella bacilli have been discovered as the cause of a pandemic in the fifth century BC Athens; and the onset and spread of the Black Death has also been traced archaeologically. The dietary component of diabetes was traced in historic period Omaha peoples of the American Midwest, and the prevalence of parasites has often been used in archaeological data to identify modern-day health situations. Other disease histories investigated by archaeologists in the recent past include syphilis, hantavirus, and tuberculosis. Agricultural Origins and Methods

Investigations into ancient methods of agriculture have the potential to assist in creating sustainable growth progress. Applied archaeology projects are exemplified by the Lake Titicaca project, where researchers worked with indigenous peoples to recreate raised field agriculture in highland Bolivia and Peru. Other studies include the use of differential techniques on fluctuating crop variability in central India beginning in the Chalcolithic period, and research into the origins of agricultural crops including rice, emmer and einkorn wheat, millet, and maize. Desaparecidos and Disasters

In the recent past, archaeologists have been called in to use their special skills in the wake of disasters, and in searching for evidence of genocide. The term desaparecidos is the Spanish term for the ‘disappeared’ and it has been used to refer to the thousands of Argentineans who were murdered under Pinochet’s military junta between 1976 and 1983. Studies of the desaparecidos of Argentina by Clyde Snow were the first of the genocidal events and mass killings studied by archaeologists; others have taken place in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. In addition, archaeologists have assisted at modern-day natural and manmade disasters such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, the World Trade Center bombings of 2001, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf Coast region of the United States in 2005. Tasks have included excavations, identification of the victims using DNA and other information, processing of massive amounts of data, and preservation techniques on damaged documents. See also: Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation; Careers in Archaeology; Cultural Resource Management; DNA: Ancient; Ethical Issues and Responsibilities; Historic Roots of Archaeology; Illicit Antiquities; Internet, Archaeology on; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; Native Peoples and

ARCHAEOMETRY 489 Archaeology; Remote Sensing Approaches: Aerial; Geophysical; Stable Isotope Analysis; World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws.

Further Reading Aitchison K (1999) Denison S (ed.) Profiling the Profession: A Survey of Archaeological Jobs in the UK. Council for British Archaeology, English Heritage, Institute of Field Archaeologists. Cornwall, UK: TJ Press. http://www.britarch.ac.uk/training/ profile.html accessed Mar 2007. Archaeological Data Services (1996–2006) Guides to Good Practices. http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/policy.html. accessed Mar 2007. Association Research Inc (2005) 2005 Salary Survey Conducted for the Society For American Archaeology in Cooperation with Society For Historical Archaeology. Association Research Inc., Rockville, MD. http://www.saa.org/membership/survey/ accessed Mar 2007. Fagan B (2003) The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. New York: Basic Books. Fforde C and Parker LO (2001) Repatriation Developments in the UK. 2001. Indigenous Law Bulletin 10. http://www.austlii.edu. au/au/journals/ILB/2001/10.html accessed Mar 2007. Givens DB, Evans P, and Jablonski T (1997) 1997 AAA Survey of Anthropology PhDs. American Anthropological Association, Arlington, VA. http://www.aaanet.org/surveys/97survey.htmaccessed Mar 2007.

Interpol (2006) Property Crime: Works of Art. 2006. Interpol. http://www.inte rpol.int/Public /PropertyC rime/Default.asp accessed Mar 2007. Jones M (2001) The Molecule Hunt: Archaeology and the Search for Ancient DNA. New York: Arcade Publishing. Roberts C and Manchester K (2005) The Archaeology of Disease, 2nd edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ulm S, Stephen N, and Dalley C (2005) Mapping the shape of contemporary Australian archaeology: Implications for archaeology teaching and learning. Australian Archaeology 61: 11–23. United States, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian, Affairs (2006) Tribal Leaders Directory. http://www.doi.gov/leaders.pdf accessed Mar 2007. United States National Park Service (2006) Archaeology Laws: A Guide for Professionals. http://www.cr.nps.gov/archeology/ tools/laws/index.htm accessed Mar 2007. United States National Park Service (2006) Tribal Preservation Program. http://www.cr.nps.gov/hps/tribal/thpo.htm accessed Mar 2007. Zeder MA (1999) The American Archaeologist: A Profile. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Relevant Websites http://creativecommons.org/ – Creative Commons. http://www.opensource.org/ – Open Source Initiative. http://whc.unesco.org/ – UNESCO World Heritage.

ARCHAEOMETRY Michael D Glascock, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary archaeomagnetic dating A dating method that relies on measuring the magnetic orientation of an object when heated by fire and comparison to the known movement of the Earth’s magnetic field. Bayesian statistics Bayesian statistics is a statistical method by which observations are used to infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true. correspondence analysis Correspondence analysis is a statistical analysis technique which measures the correspondence between the rows and columns of a table and allows one to explore the structure of the variables in the table. discriminant function analysis Discriminant function analysis involves the prediction of dependent variables by one or more independent variables. Egyptian blue A blue-colored pigment used by the Egyptians for thousands of years. The pigment was produced by grinding sand, copper, natron and heating the mixture in a furnace.

emission spectroscopy A spectroscopic technique which relies on discrete emissions of electromagnetic spectra radiated from each element. factor analysis Factor analysis is a statistical technique used to explain the variability of a set of measured random variables in terms of a smaller number of unobserved random variables called factors. fission track dating A radiometric dating method based on analysis of the damage trails left by fission fragments in certain uranium bearing minerals and glasses. geographic information systems (GIS) A geographic information system is used to collect, store, analyze, and manage data and associated attributes which have been spatially referenced to the earth. A GIS relies on a computer system capable of managing the data, displaying it geographically, and facilitating interactive queries. ground-penetrating radar Ground penetrating radar is a type of geophysical survey relying on radar signals to locate artifacts and structures below the surface of the ground. inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry An analytical technique based on combining an inductively coupled plasma as a method for producing ions (ionization of the sample) with a mass spectrometer as a method of identifying the ions (isotopes) through their masses. Samples for ICP-MS are usually analyzed following digestion into liquid form. A procedure using

490 ARCHAEOMETRY a laser to study solids is known as laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). lead-isotope analysis Analytical methods are used which measure the distribution of stable lead isotopes in a sample matrix and may link an artifact to a specific isotope. magnetic survey A magnetic survey is a type of geophysical survey relying on the contrast in magnetic properties between certain types of artifacts and their surroundings. materials characterization The application of physical and chemical analytical techniques to obtain information about the distribution and amounts of elements and minerals in the archaeological specimens. neutron activation analysis An analytical technique relying on bombardment of the sample by neutrons which causes the sample to become radioactive. Radioactivity is emitted in the form of gamma-rays which can be measured to determine the identity and amounts of elements present in the analytical sample. Each element has its own discrete suite of gamma rays. particle induced X-ray emission An analytical technique based on the emission of characteristic X-rays from a material that has been excited by bombardment with energetic charged particles (usually protons). Each element has it own discrete set of X-rays. petrographic analysis The detailed analysis of minerals by optical mineralogy in thin section. potassium–argon (or K–Ar dating) A radiometric dating method based on the decay of the radioactive isotope 40K which decays into 40Ar with a half-life of 1.26  109 years. Because the argon is a gas, it will escape from a molten rock. However, when the rock solidifies, the decayed 40Ar will be trapped in the crystal lattice. Mass spectrometry is used to measure the accumulated 40 Ar and atomic absorption spectroscopy is used to measure the amount of 40K. The ratio between the 40Ar and the 40K isotopes is related to the time elapsed since the rock was cool enough to trap the argon. principal components analysis Principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique for simplifying a dataset, by reducing multidimensional datasets to lower dimensions for analysis. By making a linear transformation of the original data, PCA leads to a new coordinate system which explains the majority of the variance in a dataset using a small number of variables. prospection The application of a wide range of scientific techniques to study the near-surface environment for the presence of artifacts and structures. provenance (also called sourcing) Determining the origin of an artifact or other archaeological specimen through chemical or physical analysis of its constituents. quantatitive analysis Measurement of the quantities of substances, elements, minerals, etc. in the object subjected to analysis. Quantities are usually expressed in concentrations with units by weight given in percent, parts per million, parts per billion, etc. radiometric methods Dating methods that rely on the knowledge of decay rates of naturally occurring isotopes are radiometric. resistivity survey A resistivity survey is a type of geophysical survey relying on the contrast in electrical properties between certain types of artifacts and their surroundings. Samian ware A kind of bright red Roman pottery also known as terra sigillata generally found in the eastern Mediterranean. stable isotope analysis The analysis of stable isotopes of oxygen and their relative abundances are used to obtain information regarding diet and migration of humans and other organisms.

thermoluminescence dating A dating method that relies on measuring the accumulated radiation dose in a material as a means of determining the time elapsed since the material was last heated. underwater sonar Underwater sonar is a type of geophysical survey relying on the detection of sonar signals to locate artifacts and structures underwater. uranium series dating A radiometric dating method that relies on the decays of isotopes from uranium and its daughter isotopes. X-ray fluorescence An analytical technique based on the emission of characteristic ‘secondary’ (or fluorescent) X-rays from a material that has been excited by bombardment with higher energy X-rays or gamma rays. Each element has it own discrete set of X-rays.

Introduction The term ‘archaeometry’ was invented in the mid1950s, by Martin Aitken and Christopher Hawkes at Oxford University, to assign a name to a publication of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. The first issue of Archaeometry was published in 1958, and it is now a well-recognized, international research journal. Today, however, archaeometry represents considerably more than the name of a journal. Archaeometry has become the umbrella term used to describe an interdisciplinary field of archaeological research in which techniques and approaches from the physical, chemical, biological, geological, and statistical sciences are employed to extract more information from the material record of past human activity. The range of research conducted in archaeometry is so broad that any attempt to describe the field in a comprehensive summary is difficult. A number of practitioners have suggested that archaeometry includes the following activities or themes: (1) materials characterization; (2) dating; (3) prospection; (4) conservation; (5) the study of man and his environment; and (6) the handling and modeling of data (Figure 1). Major developments within the field of archaeometry have relied on the development and improvement of new scientific techniques in conjunction with their application to significant archaeological problems. A history of archaeometry in relation to the above-mentioned themes is described.

Materials Characterization The first scientific discipline to engage in a study of artifacts was almost certainly chemistry. A history of chemistry’s early involvement in archaeology would not be complete without mentioning the names of famous chemists such as Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743–1817), Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), Michael Faraday (1791–1867), and Carl Christian

ARCHAEOMETRY 491

Chemistry Physics Geology Biology Statistics

Archaeometry

Characterization Dating Prospection Preservation Man and environment Data modeling

Figure 1 Archaeometry – the link between scientific techniques and archaeological applications.

Traugott Friedemann Go¨bel (1794–1851). The primary motivation for their work was curiosity as a consequence of their interest in studying and identifying matter and the changes induced by chemical reactions. The earliest recorded paper to describe a chemical investigation of antiquities was read before the Royal Academy of Science and Belles Letters of Berlin in 1795 by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Klaproth devised a procedure using gravimetry and used it to measure the compositions of several Greek and Roman coins. During the first half of the nineteenth century, about 25 reports were published on the quantitative analysis of copper-based coins, glass, and pigments. Among these were a paper by Humphry Davy on the examination of ancient pigments from Rome and Pompeii in which he identified a synthetic pigment later called ‘Egyptian blue’, formed by combining copper, silicon, and natron. Faraday was the first to identify lead as an intentional component in the glaze on ancient pottery. However, it was Go¨bel who first explicitly stated that the results obtained from the chemical analysis might be used to answer archaeological questions. Go¨bel’s results were published in 1842 in the form of a pamphlet with the very descriptive title: ‘‘On the power of chemistry in identifying peoples of ancient times, or results of a chemical investigation of metallic antiquities, especially those occurring in the Baltic provinces, for the purpose of identifying the peoples from which they came.’’ Because Gobel’s work involved analysis of statistically significant numbers of samples, he was also the first to establish chemical properties for a group of specimens, as opposed to reporting individual analyses. Another individual who contributed significantly to the characterization of archaeological specimens was the French mineralogist Alexis Damour. Through his studies of jade from different sources around the world, Damour came to recognize the differences between the sources. Damour also published an extensive investigation on the density and chemical composition of stones from known sources with the end view of providing fundamental data useful for

determining the place of origin of such objects. Thus, it can be inferred that Damour was the first to recognize the concept of sourcing – proof of origin through similarity of physical and chemical analyses. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the character of archaeology began to change from the discovery of buried treasure toward increasing scientific knowledge. This change led to increasing cooperation between archaeologists and chemists. Two individuals who stood out were Marcelin Berthelot and Heinrich Schielmann. Berthelot made it a point to analyze artifacts not only for their chemical identification but also to investigate their significance from the standpoint of the history of early technology. Schielmann, who is recognized for his excavations at Mycenae and Troy, frequently included the results from chemical analysis of materials in his archaeological reports. During the first half of the twentieth century, advances in the ability to characterize archaeological materials were beginning to gain recognition by archaeologists as useful for studying models of trade and exchange and explaining the changing distribution of materials over time and space. One of the pioneers was Anna O. Shepard who was active in the study of ceramics by petrographic analysis during the 1930s through 1950s. Many will agree that her classic book Ceramics for the Archaeologist set the standard and established a vocabulary for discussing the analysis of ceramics. During approximately the same period of time, Earle Caley was using emission spectroscopy to study the compositions of glass and metal artifacts. The discoveries of radioactivity by Becquerel in 1896, the atomic nucleus by Rutherford in 1909, and the neutron by Chadwick in 1932 set the stage for the development of several analytical techniques based on atomic and nuclear properties. In 1936, George Hevesy discovered the technique of neutron activation analysis (NAA). But the NAA technique was not ready for routine application in archaeology until 1956, when Robert Oppenheimer assembled a group of archaeologists and chemists at the Princeton

492 ARCHAEOMETRY

Institute of Advanced Studies to discuss the possibility of applying the method to the study of archaeology. Following the meeting, Edward Sayre and Robert Dodson, chemists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, conducted a study of Samian ware from different locations in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy using NAA. The results of the NAA investigation showed that trace element impurity patterns for the pottery within a region were correlated and that different regions could be distinguished from another. The project was judged to be such an outstanding success that it laid the foundations for chemical analysis of thousands of archaeological samples including pottery, obsidian, flint, marble, turquoise, and limestone by laboratories established at Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere. Although many of the original NAA labs no longer exist, increases in the use of automation are allowing more samples being analyzed by NAA today than ever. In addition to NAA, other techniques such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE), inductively coupled plasma (ICP), and lead isotope analysis have been employed in artifact characterization studies. Gradual improvements in the analytical techniques over the years have enabled the measurement of greater numbers of elements and isotopes with more sensitivity and better precision. By the 1980s, techniques from the biological sciences were being employed to analyze organic materials such as bone, waxes, resins, food remains, and textiles. And, during the past decade, surface analytical methods such as laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and scanning electron microprobe (SEM) have become popular techniques for examining glazes, paints, mineral inclusions, etc. Materials characterization studies have changed the way that archaeologists interpret how trade and exchange operated in the past. They also help to explain the distribution of archaeological material across the landscape, changes in distribution over time, and changes in the economies and organization of societies. It is not unreasonable to estimate that several tens of thousands of archaeological samples are being chemically characterized every year in laboratories around the world for studies of provenance, technology, and authentication.

Dating Use of dating techniques to determine the age of an artifact or dates of occupation for a site or dates for a sequence of events is one of the most fundamental

archaeometric activities conducted by archaeologists and is essential to organizing archaeological evidence. Prior to the twentieth century, archaeologists were limited to the use of relative dating techniques such as stratigraphy and seriation. However, the twentieth century saw the development of a number of absolute dating techniques, many of which have improved to the point that it is now possible to determine dates from fewer to hundred years back to several million years. The first absolute dating technique was developed in the 1920s by Andrew Ellicot Douglas who discovered that the widths of annual rings in trees from the American Southwest were related to the climatic variation during antiquity. Douglas applied his new technique to pine beams from a twelfth century building at Pueblo Bonito, thus giving rise to dendrochronology. Use of dendrochronology has been extended to other regions of the world, but each region is somewhat different due to climatic differences (see Dendrochronology). The development of radiocarbon dating by Willard Libby in the late 1940s has probably had the greatest impact on archaeological science. The technique is based on the premise that all living organisms have a continuous uptake of radioactive carbon-14 until they die (see Carbon-14 Dating). By measuring the amount of radiocarbon present in their remains, it is possible to estimate the time elapsed since the organism died. For the first time, chronologies for different parts of the world could be compared back to about 50 000 years. The impact of radiocarbon dating on archaeology cannot be overestimated. Libby was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1960, and radiocarbon labs were established around the world. Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, a number of other absolute dating methods were developed, including accelerator mass dating of carbon-14 which requires less sample and extends the range to about 100 000 years, thermoluminescence dating and archaeomagnetic dating which can be applied to materials that have been heated in antiquity such as pottery or stone, and radiometric methods such as uranium series, fission-track, and potassiumargon dating which can be used to date much older archaeological materials such as those associated with the formation of corals and stalactites or the occurrence of volcanic events, etc. (see Electron Spin Resonance Dating; Luminescence Dating). The suitability of an individual dating technique for a particular application depends upon the types of archaeological material available for dating, the range of ages, and other factors.

ARCHAEOMETRY 493

Prospection Curiosity about the past has long stimulated our desire to discover the remains of our past and has become a significant part of the archaeological endeavor. Archaeological prospection is the general term used to identify the collection of nondestructive methods used to locate and characterize the surviving evidence of human activity. Prospection began early in the twentieth century with the use of aerial photography to locate archaeological sites in Britain. From the 1950s up to the present time, geophysical prospection techniques employing magnetic and resistivity surveys as well as ground radar and underwater sonar have been popular. The techniques are used to locate hidden features such as kilns, hearths, pits, walls, roads, cemeteries, and shipwrecks. Geochemical methods have also been employed to analyze anthropogenic and geochemical signatures in the soil. The addition of satellite photography in the 1960s has enhanced our ability to study noninvasively almost any place on the face of the earth.

Conservation Conservation science encompasses restoration (activities that seek to return a damaged artifact to its original form) and preservation (activities involved in keeping an object from deteriorating further). Reconstruction of artifacts often uses knowledge from chemistry to understand how artifacts were made and how they undergo deterioration due to usage and exposure to the environment (i.e., corrosion, weathering, pollution, etc.) Preservation also involves knowledge obtained from chemistry to identify the materials most likely to protect artifacts and least likely to cause future damage.

Handling and Modeling of Archaeometric Data The expanded usage of archaeometric techniques and the ever larger amounts of data collected give rise to a greater need for data management and the need for ever more sophisticated mathematical and statistical techniques. Investigation and interpretation of data would be an extremely tedious exercise were it not for more powerful computers and software developed since the mid-1950s. Data sets are being examined to find patterns in bivariate plots, cluster analysis diagram, etc. Other methods such as correspondence analysis, factor analysis, principal components analysis, and discriminant function analysis have made it possible to examine ever larger data sets. Data modeling based on

geographic information systems (GISs) and Bayesian statistics are also being used more frequently.

Man and His Environment Environmental archaeology seeks to reconstruct the past flora, fauna, landscape and climates through the examination of animal, fish, plant, pollen, and insect remains. Other archaeometric research subsumed under this category includes stable isotope analysis to investigate ancient diets and the spread of agriculture and analyses of DNA to study the migration of modern man.

Future of Archaeometry Advances in science and technology over the past half century have given archaeologists access to unique insights into the social and economic development of societies through the identification of trade and exchange, as well as time depth. These advances have been supported by the development of institutional laboratories, the proliferation of journals, societies, and groups covering many different types of archaeometry. In addition to Archaeometry, several other journals and newsletters reporting archaeometric research were started including the Journal of Archaeological Science, Geoarchaeology, SAS Bulletin-Newsletter of the Society for Archaeological Sciences, etc. Although access to methods from the sciences has made it possible for archaeologists to seek answers for questions concerning past human behavior and development, not all applications of these methods over the past half century have produced relevant information. In some instances, archaeometric data may have been published journals, but no corresponding archaeological interpretation was presented, and, at other times, the data may have appeared in the appendix of an archaeological report with little or no comment on the reasons for which the analyses were performed. In most of the archaeometric studies where relevance is lacking, the cause has been due to poor communication between the archaeologists and the scientists. The reasons for performing the analyses were not adequately articulated, and, hence, the product failed to advance the field of archaeological science. In particular, this has been noted by archaeologists such as Robert C. Dunnell who were extremely critical of the proceedings volumes generated from conferences such as the International Archaeometry Symposium, Materials Research Society, and others. Discord and separatism between archaeologists and scientists have also surfaced, on occasion, in the

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literature and at conferences when evaluating one another’s contributions. The first step in repairing this situation is recognizing that the objectives of the specialists from different disciplines differ in more than just methodology. When archaeologists formulate a research question, their research objectives are often stated in the context of their archaeological discipline such that data and techniques are treated secondarily to cultural interpretation. On the other hand, scientists will emphasize the techniques and data but may be unfamiliar with the archaeological context. The second step is to encourage joint formulation of research design in order to give direction to the work to be undertaken. The research design must address the logic used in deciding the type(s) of data to be collected. Finally, the products of the research must give all involved parties recognition for their contributions such that the interdisciplinary research can be considered a success. Archaeometric studies should enhance our understanding of the archaeological record. It is clear that archaeometry depends upon close cooperation between the archaeologists and the scientists, with both learning about each other’s problems and limitations and the exchange of mutual respect. The future of archaeometry depends on the development of people who cross the traditional boundaries of science and archaeology such that they understand the rudiments of the techniques they are using and the purpose for conducting the analyses. Fortunately, some universities have been making progress (e.g., universities in Britain, Turkey, and Peru; the IGERT program at the University of Arizona) by working in this direction. The number of scientists interested in archaeological applications has grown, and the number of archaeologists interested in embracing methods and techniques from other disciplines has also

grown. Undoubtedly, the discipline of archaeometry has a very bright future.

Acknowledgments The author thanks the National Science Foundation for providing continuous support to the Archaeometry Lab at the University of Missouri Research Reactor since 1988. See also: Carbon-14 Dating; Chemical Analysis Tech-

niques; Conservation and Stabilization of Materials; Dating Methods, Overview; Dendrochronology; Electron Spin Resonance Dating; Luminescence Dating; Neutron Activation Analysis; Pottery Analysis: Chemical; Remote Sensing Approaches: Geophysical.

Further Reading De Atley SP and Bishop RL (1991) Toward an integrated interface for archaeology and archaeometry. In: Bishop RL and Lange FW (eds.) The Ceramic Legacy of Anna O. Shepard pp. 358–380. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press. Dunnell RC (1993) Why archaeologists don’t care about archaeometry. Archeomaterials 7: 161–165. Harbottle G (1982) Chemical characterization in archaeology. In: Ericson JE and Earle TK (eds.) Contexts for Prehistoric Exchange pp. 13–51. New York: Academic Press. Pollard AM (1995) Why teach Heisenberg to archaeologists? Antiquity 69: 242–247. Pollard AM and Heron C (1996) Archaeological Chemistry. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry. Shepard AO (1956) Ceramics for the Archaeologist. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Tite MS (2004) Archaeometry – an overview. In: Martini M, Milazzo M and Piacenti M (eds.) Physics Methods in Archaeometry, pp. 347–356. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Wagner GA and Schiegl S (1998) Age Determination of Young Rocks and Artifacts: Physical and Chemical Clocks in Quaternary Geology and Archaeology. New York: Springer.

ARCHAEOPARASITOLOGY Karl J Reinhard, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA Adauto Arau´jo, Escola Nacional de Sau´de Pu´blica, Fundac¸a˜o Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary acanthocephalan Any of various worms in the phylum Acanthocephala, also called thorny-headed worms, living in

intestines of vertebrates having a retractile proboscis covered with many hooked spines. anthelminthic A compound that affects and causes the expulsion of parasitic intestinal worms. archaeoparasitology The study of parasite evidence from archaeological sites. cestode Any of the parasitic flatworms of the class Cestoidea, including the tapeworms, having a long, segmented, flat body equipped with a specialized organ of attachment at one end. ectoparasite Parasites such as lice and flies that live on the body’s outer surface.

ARCHAEOPARASITOLOGY 495 endoparasite Parasites such as blood flukes and pinworms that infect the internal parts of the body. helminth Worm that is parasitic on vertebrates, especially roundworms and tapeworms, thorny-headed worms, and flukes. host An organism that provides food and shelter to a parasite. microparasites A microscopic organism of medical importance including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. infestation Parasites that are present on the outside of the hosts, such as ectoparasites, or the contamination of a habitat with arthropods such as mosquites, bed bugs, and ticks. infection Parasites that are present inside the host organism, including helminths and miocroparasites. nematode Any of phylum Nematoda of elongated cylindrical worms some of which are parasitic in animals and plants, and others of which are free-living in soil or water. parasite An organism that lives at the expense of its host by taking energy from the host and sometimes causing pathology in the host. prevalence Number of hosts in a population infected with a parasite at any one time. protozoa (parasitic) Single-cell organisms, some of which are parasitic and can only reproduce within a host organism. Malaria is caused by a protozoa, Plasmodium. Other protozoan parasites are Giardia and Toxoplasma. trematode Referring to flukes, phylum Trematoda, which are parasitic flatworms having external suckers for attaching to a host. vector An animal, usually a biting insect, that is responsible for the transmission of a parasitic organism.

Introduction Parasites are the major cause of ill health and early death in the world today. Malaria, sleeping sickness, amoebic dysentery, and hookworm infection are examples of commonplace parasitic diseases that are endemic in most parts of the world (see Health, Healing, and Disease). They were significant threats in prehistory, especially in cultures whose social complexity outstripped the development of effective sanitation, hygiene, and germ theory awareness. Parasites are organisms that live in or on other organisms called hosts. Parasites derive sustenance and shelter from their hosts and carry out reproduction in host tissues and structures. There is a wide amount of taxonomic diversity among parasites. They range from single-celled protozoa, such as amoeba, to multicelled arthropods such as fleas. Strictly defined, parasites do not include bacteria and viruses. However, some epidemiologists refer to bacteria and viruses as microparasites. There are two general types of parasites: ectoparasites such as lice and endoparasites such as intestinal worms. All types of parasites can be found in archaeological sites. Protozoa can be identified by traces of antigens and also by certain gross pathology they left in their mummified hosts. Helminths are parasitic worms including nematode roundworms, cestode tapeworms, trematode flukes, and acanthocephalan

thorny-headed worms. Helminth eggs from some species are laid in thousands within their hosts. Helminth eggs from humans and domestic animals contaminated ancient villages. The eggs are very durable and are easily retrieved from archaeological sediments, coprolites, and mummies. Fleas and lice can be found on mummies and also in archaeological sediments. Lice are especially important in mummy studies because the eggs are cemented on hair shafts. Therefore, examination of scalps from mummies provides a method of quantifying infestations between individuals and sites. The discipline that focuses on the relationships between behavior, environment, and parasite infection is archaeoparasitology. This field developed from the need for a fine-tuned analysis of prehistoric ecological and behavioral conditions to assess the factors that affected disease. Archaeoparasitology depends on archaeological information regarding community size, trade patterns, water sources, subsistence practices, social stratification, environment, medicine use, and many other lines of modern archaeological investigation. It also depends on biological understanding of complex parasite life cycles and other dimensions of parasite ecology. When broadly applied, archaeoparasitology defines the rise in parasitic disease associated with the development of complex societies and changes in subsistence strategies. In a more restricted application, archaeoparasitology sheds light on the health impact of urbanization and empire expansion. When tightly applied to a single burial or mummy, archaeoparasitology shows how habits promote disease on an individual basis.

History and Major Themes Aidan Cockburn explored the origins of disease and generated interest in archaeoparasitology. Cockburn theorized that there was a relation between human cultural development and the evolution of infectious diseases. In the first archaeoparasitological study, Reinhard compared Colorado Plateau Archaic parasitism to agricultural Puebloan sites. Reinhard verified Cockburn’s hypothesis that occasional huntergatherer infections became major agricultural health hazards (Figure 1). The reasons for the emergence of parasitic disease were many. Parasitism was limited in hunter-gatherer societies, called bands. Huntergatherer parasitism was limited by small band size, diffuse regional populations, high band mobility, and presence of natural anthelminthics in hunter-gatherer diets. The one factor that could have promoted huntergatherer parasitism was the consumption of uncooked vertebrate meat and insects. Parasitism was promoted in descendent agricultural Puebloan communities by

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Enterobius vermicularis (1%) Taeniid cestodes (2%) Moniliformis clarki (2%)

Hunter-gatherer incidence

Taeniid cestodes (0.6%)

Enterobius vermicularis (15%)

Strongyloides stercoralis (0.6%) Strongylate worm (1.4%)

Ascaris lumbricoides (0.02%)

Moniliformis clarki (0.08%) Agriculture incidence

Hymenolepidid cestode (0.2%)

Figure 1 The relative prevalence and diversity of parasite infections between archaic hunter-gatherers and more recent agricultural ancestral Puebloans on the Colorado Plateau. The archaic people were rare host to just a few parasites. Ancestral Puebloans hosted many more parasites species at higher prevalences (from Reinhard 1996).

contaminated water sources, concentrated populations, more sedentary life, apartment-style living, absence of effective sanitation, activities centered on water (agriculture), and activities that expanded wetlands including irrigation of all types. Reinhard recognized that the parasite variation between agricultural Puebloan villages nearly equaled the variation between agriculturalists and huntergatherers. This means that some settlements managed to control their parasite burden very effectively while others were simply overwhelmed by their pathogens. This topic was explored by a comparison of pinworm

(Enterobius vermicularis) prevalence in coprolites by a group of specialists in pinworm disease. Pinworm was chosen as an indicator of general infectious disease because it is transferred from person to person and by contamination of living quarters and food (Figure 2). Some ancestral Pueblo communities were extremely parasitized. In a clinical setting, only 5% of feces from pinworm-infected people are positive for pinworm eggs. The percentages of coprolites positive for pinworm from several sites exceed this and range up to 29% (Figure 3). The lowest prevalence was found in small cave sites not containing walled

ARCHAEOPARASITOLOGY 497

Eggs are transferred by direct contact between humans and also eggs in air currents are inhaled

Nocturnal egg laying results in retroinfection as some eggs hatch and larvae enter the same host used by the mother worm Eggs on air currents contaminate water, food, and general environment with infective eggs

Figure 2 Pinworm infection in ancestral Pueblo villages involved several basic modes of transmission: air contamination and inhalation of infective eggs, air contamination of the living area with infective eggs, person-to-person transmission of eggs, and retroinfection by larvas that hatch on or in the host and re-enter the same person that hosts the maternal worm.

0.45 0.40 Colorado

Utah 29%

10% 7%

0.30 0.25

0%

Arizona

0.35

19% 25% 8%

0.20

21%

0.15 New Mexico

Figure 3 The prevalence of pinworm infection varied greatly between ancestral Pueblo villages showing that lifestyle variation and population crowding influenced pinworm prevalence.

Small villages, no stone wall

Large, stone-walled villages in caves

0.10 0.05

Large, stone-walled villages

0.00 F2.14 = 5.883 (p = 0.014) Figure 4 This graph shows that village size, construction, and location inside or outside the caves influenced pinworm prevalence (modified from Hugo et al. 1999).

villages. The highest prevalence came from large, walled villages built in rock shelters (Figure 4). Hugot et al. concluded that poor air circulation in large populations living in complex apartment-style communities resulted in truly impressive levels of pinworm parasitism. In fact, some sites have the highest levels of pinworm infection recorded for ancient or modern peoples. The data indicate that pinworm parasitism was unavoidable and that in some villages people had heavy infections. In such populations, pinworm infection prevalence reflects serious health risks, when one

considers that other pathogens are spread by the same means. Reinhard showed that the prevalence of parasitism co-varied with porotic hyperostosis prevalence at ancestral Pueblo sites where both coprolite and skeletons were studied (Figure 5). Porotic hyperostosis is a general skeletal pathology indicator long used to assess maternal-infant health. In Brazil, the cultural transfer of parasites has been a focus for many years. The discovery of hookworm and whipworm in prehistoric South American

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% Pinworm prevalence in coprolites

30

Canyon de Chelly Chaco Canyon

20

Inscription House

10 Salmon Ruin

0 40

50 60 70 80 % Porotic hyperostosis prevalence in crania

90

Figure 5 Although pinworm does not cause significant disease, pinworm prevalence is a good gauge of the general level of infection with other parasites and microparasites. Therefore, it can be compared with skeletal evidence of infectious disease. In this graph, the pinworm prevalence in coprolites has a positive correlation with the skeletal frequency of anemia in ancestral Pueblo sites.

mummies and coprolites was sensational. These are human-specific nematodes that cannot parasitize humans in the Arctic and subarctic because they require warm, moist soils for maturation once the eggs are defecated. Therefore, the discovery of these parasites in prehistoric South America indicated that there was a nonarctic migration of humans from the Old World to the Americas. The most long-standing debate in archaeoparasitology revolved around the discovery of hookworms in prehistoric sites. One species of hookworm, Ancyslostoma duodenale, was diagnosed from examination of adult worms in prehistoric Peruvian mummies, and later larvas were discovered in coprolites and mummies from Brazil, and the United States. Hookworms are host specific, which means that one species of worm only infects one species of host. Ancyslostoma duodenale only infects humans. Hookworms require tropical or subtropical environments for their eggs to hatch and larvas to mature to infective stage. Finally, hookworms have their evolutionary origins in the Old World. Therefore, to reach the New World, they had to migrate with human populations from a tropical or subtropical environment (Figure 6). The conventional wisdom of the twentieth century was that hookworms arrived in the New World in historic times with European colonists and African slaves. This conventional wisdom has been so strong that over a dozen papers have appeared in anthropological and parasitological journals debating the validity and meaning of the hookworm finds.

Figure 6 The presence of hookworm and whipworm in the prehistoric Americas indicates a non-Beringean migration to the New World at some point in time. This could have been a coastal migration or an oceanic migration.

In historic archaeology, archaeoparasitology focuses on sociological and urbanization concerns. Historic archaeologists can define the ethnicity, economic level, and social status of people associated with archaeological features. Therefore, archaeoparasitologists have the opportunity to examine the effect of social differentiation on parasitism. The role of urbanization on the emergence of parasitic disease is a common theme in historic context along with the development of sanitation in controlling parasitism. Ascarid roundworms (Ascaris lumbricoides) and whipworms (Trichuris trichiura) are the main indicators for assessing the parasitic state of historic sites. These two species are most associated with fecal contamination, crowding, and poor sanitation. These parasites are used for comparative evaluation of the threat of parasitism between neighborhoods, villages, and cities. Other parasites, especially tapeworms and flukes associated with different types of meat, are useful indicators of ethnicity. In the twenty-first century, the discipline of archaeoparasitology became global. Researchers published parasitological finds from Japan, Korea, Germany, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and many other countries. The intellectual foci of these studies are diverse. In Japan, parasites were analyzed in context of the development of sanitation and food practices. They were also used to identify areas used by foreign ambassadors who hosted parasite species exotic to Japan but endemic to China. In Korea, archaeoparasitology

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was used to trace the origins of indigenous species, especially trematodes. The impact of the expansion of the Inca Empire was defined in Chile. There, the Inca compelled indigenous people to move from small, scattered communities to large towns, resulting in increased infection with certain parasite species. Also, parasitism of the oldest hunter-gatherers, the Chinchorro, was characterized. Chinchorro consumption of undercooked fish resulted in heavy cestode infection. Archaeoparasitology in Peru examines the diseases of humans and domestic animals, and especially the transfer of deadly protozoa from animals to humans via insect vectors. One theme that crosscuts the global diversity of modern archaeoparasitology is defining the distribution of parasites. In a Brazilian mummy, Sianto et al. discovered eggs of hookworm and of a trematode genus, Echinostoma. Echinostoma has never been found in people from the Americas and shows that an indigenous species has the ability to infect humans. This adds to the medical knowledge of the diversity of parasites infective to humans. On the Texas– Coahuila border, Reinhard et al. discovered the gross pathology of megacolon which is often associated with Chagas’ disease. Infection with Trypanosoma cruzi causes Chagas’ disease. Previously, Chagas’ disease was thought to have originated in the high Andes and then spread to lowland South America in historic times. The discovery of Chagas’ disease in prehistoric border of Mexico and Texas shows that the disease spread further and earlier than generally believed.

Figure 7 Moche ceramics depict facial lesions consistent with the pathology caused by one form of the protozoan Leishmania brasiliensis which is transmitted by a sand fly vector.

Data Sources and Methods Archaeoparasitologists find their data in a variety of archaeological contexts. Historical medical texts provide information about ancient parasitological knowledge and treatment. Artifacts provide rare glimpses of the pathology caused by certain parasites. For example, potters of the Peruvian Moche culture portrayed the facial disfigurement resulting from Leishmania infection (Figure 7). This protozoan parasite can cause destruction of the soft and hard tissue of the face. Skeletal remains can reveal hard tissue pathology caused by parasites. Calcification of soft tissue of the urinary tract often results from Schistosoma hematobium (blood fluke) infection. Cysts of the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosis calcify and are preserved in burials (Figure 8). Destructive bone lesions resulting from Leishmania infection are evident in skeletal remains from Peru (Figure 9). Sediments such as soil within burial pelvic girdles (see Burials: Dietary Sampling Methods) are an important source of

Figure 8 This is a drawing of hydatid cyst disease excavated from Medieval Denmark. Hydatid disease is caused by a parasitic infection by a tapeworm of the genus Echinococcus. The brown nodules are the mineralized cysts cause by the tapeworm larvae.

information about parasites. For example, German researchers were able to recover liver fluke (Fasciola hepatica) from the sediment of human and cattle pelvic girdles. This showed that this debilitating parasite was a threat to humans and their domestic livestock. Mummies preserve the hard tissue and soft tissue pathology caused by parasites as well as the parasites themselves. Ectoparasites such as fleas, head lice, body lice, and crab lice are easily recovered from

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Figure 9 This pathology from a skeleton in Peru could be the result of infection with Leishmania brasiliensis. (Reprinted with permission from Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz.)

to coprolites, mummies, and all types of archaeological sediments. So far, protozoa have been effectively diagnosed. This is very important because protozoa cysts are ephemeral in archaeological remains and are only rarely found with the microscope. Molecular biological characterization of ancient parasite DNA is very useful in making definitive diagnosis of ancient parasites and identifying genetic strains of a single species. The power of modern archaeoparasitology is based on its ability to quantify infections for comparative evaluation of disease. There are a variety of methods for quantification of eggs per milliliter or gram of archaeological sediments and coprolites. These include dilution methods derived from clinical techniques and concentration methods derived from palynological techniques. Quantifying eggs allows comparative evaluation of parasitism between sites and features within sites.

The Future of Archaeoparasitology mummies and the clothing buried with mummies. Parasites of the lungs, intestinal tract, liver, and urinary tract are evident. Molecular biological diagnosis can recover the DNA of ancient parasites from mummified tissue, even when the parasites themselves have decomposed. Therefore, each mummified corpse is extremely important in the analysis of parasitic diseases. Also, mummified animals are a wonderful source about parasites that may have threatened the vitality of domestic animals. In the twentieth century, coprolites provided most of the information about parasitic disease. The eggs and larvas of parasites that disperse their offspring are easily found in coprolites. However, Bain describes the increasing importance of analysis of domestic archaeological sediments in archaeoparasitology. Sediments from latrines, sewers, drains, streets, yards, and living floors contain parasite eggs. Parasites were so abundant in medieval and colonial villages that hundreds of parasite eggs per milliliter of house sediments are commonly found. In latrines, drains, and sewers, the numbers of eggs range into hundreds of thousands per milliliter of sediment. The analysis of sediments from domestic context will be increasingly important in the future. The microscope is the main tool of the archaeoparasitologist. Most diagnoses of helminths and arthropods have been made with compound or binocular microscopes. However, molecular biology and enzyme diagnostic methods have expanded the range of parasites identified from archaeological sites. Enzymelinked immunoassay is a new, proven method for the identification of parasite antigens that can be applied

Several trends in archaeoparasitology are evident by comparing the nature of studies in the last century and the current century. Many studies from 1960 to 1990 focused on the recovery and diagnosis of ancient parasites. With the exception of Brazilian research into migration and Southwestern research into epidemiology, few researchers answered behavioral questions with archaeoparasitological data. This preliminary stage is over. Now archaeoparasitologists place their data in behavioral context to reveal aspects of migration, food preparation, effect of social status on disease, cross-infection between humans and animals, and many other topics of anthropological interest. There is also a new interest in the influence of parasitic disease on the vitality of cultures and site abandonment. Finally, there is now a solid nexus between biological parasitology and archaeoparasitology in exploring questions of parasite biogeography and endemicity that have relevance to modern health. These areas will continue to expand as archaeoparasitology becomes a standard archaeological discipline. See also: Americas, North: American Southwest, Four

Corners Region; Burials: Dietary Sampling Methods; Health, Healing, and Disease; New World, Peopling of.

Further Reading Aidan CT (1971) Infectious diseases in ancient populations. Current Anthropology 12: 45–62. Bain A (2001) Archaeoentomological and archaeoparasitological reconstructions at ıˆlot Hunt (CeEt-110): New perspectives in historical archaeology (1850–1900). In: BAR International, pp. 153. Series 973, Oxford: Archaeopress.

ARCHAEOZOOLOGY 501 Fisher CL, Reinhard KJ, Kirk M, DiVirgilio J, and Miller TS (in press) Archaeoparasitology of Historic Albany, New York. Historic Archaeology. Gonc¸alves MLC, da Silva VL, de Andrade CM, et al. (2004) Amebiasis distribution in the past: First steps using an immunoassay technique. The Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 98: 88–91. Hugot JP, Reinhard KJ, Gardner SL, and Morand S (1999) Human enterobiasis in evolution: Origin, specificity, and transmission. Parasite 6: 201–208. Montenegro A, Araujo A, Hetherington R, Ferreira LF, Weaver A, Eeby M (2006) Parasites, paleoclimate and the peopling of the Americas: Using the hookworm to time the Clovis migration. Current Anthropology 47: 193–198. Reinhard KJ (1988) The cultural ecology of prehistoric parasitism on the Colorado Plateau as evidenced by coprology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 77: 355–366.

Reinhard KJ (1990) Archaeoparasitology in North America. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 82: 145–162. Reinhard KJ (1992) Parasitology as an interpretive tool in archaeology. American Antiquity 57: 231–245. Reinhard KJ (1996) Parasite ecology of two Anasazi villages. In: Reitz EJ, Newson LA, and Scudder SJ (eds.) Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology. New York: Plenum. Sandison AT (1967) Parasitic diseases. In: Brothwell D and Sandison AT (eds.) Disease in Antiquity: A Survey of the Diseases, Injuries, and Surgery of Early Populations, pp. 178–183. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas. Sianto L, Reinhard KJ, Gonc¸alves MLC, and Arau´jo A (2005) The finding of echinostoma (Trematoda: Digenea) and hookworm eggs in coprolites collected from a Brazilian mummified body dated of 600–1,200 years before present. Journal of Parasitology 91: 972–975.

ARCHAEOZOOLOGY Elizabeth J Reitz, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary commensal animal An animal that lives in a mutualistic relationship with people. dental cementum A hard tissue deposited in layers around the outer surface of some teeth and serves to hold the teeth in place. diversity An information theory measure that combines information about the number of categories present (such as the number of plants and animals) and the abundance of each category (the relative abundance of each plant or animal) to describe heterogeneity of a system. equitability An information theory measure based on the degree to which a category, such as a specific plant or animal within a list of several plants or animals, is equally abundant. medullary bone A calcified storage tissue found in bird bones; the calcium and fat are used during the period when eggs are formed. optimal foraging theory A theory proposing that humans develop subsistence strategies based on energy expenditures such as distance traveled, time spent, and the size of the items acquired. otolith A calcium carbonate structure, in the form of aragonite, located in the inner ears of fishes. These function in hearing and equilibrium. reciprocal exchange An economic exchange of goods or services in the form of a gift given to a person or group by another person or group. Acceptance of the gift bears the obligation to reciprocate at some future date. redistribution An economic exchange in which goods are collected from a group of people by a centralized administrative body. The goods are then reallocated throughout the group. scute A horny, bony, or chitinous scale such as the outer covering on a turtle shell.

utility index An index that ranks animal body parts according to the utility of each body part. Utility generally refers to the amount of fat and meat that can be obtained from various parts of a carcass.

Broadly defined, zooarchaeologists (also known as archaeozoologists) study animal remains from archaeological deposits. The field traces its roots to the nineteenth century when the major scientific questions focused on the antiquity of life. Thus, zooarchaeology shares research traditions with what subsequently developed into anthropology, archaeology, ecology, palaeontology, and zoology. The combination of theories, methods, and data from these and other fields focused on archaeological animal remains is the defining characteristic of zooarchaeology. Common interests include site-formation processes; subsistence strategies and human health; animal domestication and health; technical and social uses of animals; and palaeoenvironments. These topics are examined through time using animal remains from single sites and over space among sites, regions, and even globally. The diverse applications of zooarchaeology reflect shifts in prevailing theories, methods, and research interests in allied disciplines and within zooarchaeology itself. The development of zooarchaeology owes much to an awareness of the importance of environmental relationships on human behavior and of the human impact on the environment. Despite a diverse, global, and interdisciplinary heritage, zooarchaeologists share two related goals: to understand the biology and ecology of animals, especially humans, and to understand the interactions of humans with their

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biotic and abiotic environments through time and space. These topics are briefly reviewed here. To begin a more comprehensive study of zooarchaeology, the reader is referred to the references listed in ‘Further Reading’ section, The Journal of Archaeological Science, Environmental Archaeology: Journal of Human Paleoecology, and other entries in this encyclopaedia.

Methods Although research into the strengths and weaknesses of field and laboratory methods is not usually the primary objective of zooarchaeologists, most zooarchaeological results are quantified in some fashion. The scientific method requires that theories be testable, hypotheses be evaluated, and results be independently verifiable. Consequently, zooarchaeological methods should be scientifically sound, appropriate to the materials, compatible to the research questions, applied so as to avoid introducing further bias, and thoroughly described. For these reasons, critiques of archaeological and zooarchaeological methods are common in the literature. Field Methods

Quantification requires that all of the materials which might be used to address research questions should have an equal and random (in the statistical sense) opportunity to be recovered using a consistent recovery technique and that the samples be adequate in size. Only through adherence to these principles can it be argued, for example, that domestic mammals were more common in one context than in another or that warm-water mollusks were more common than were cold-water ones. Although the

number of biases that can be traced to poor field decisions appears infinite, many are related to the placement of excavation units and the size of the screen or sieve used to recover animal remains. The composition of animal remains from different activity areas (e.g., house floors, trash heaps, temple complexes, etc.) may be quite different. This bias is compounded by field protocols that use inappropriate screening methods. With few exceptions, animal remains should be recovered by passing the excavated soil through a screen with a mesh dimension suitable to sample the full range of animals formerly present at the site. Laboratory Methods

Zooarchaeologists primarily study the bones and teeth of vertebrate animals (other than humans) and the exoskeletons of mollusks, crustaceans (crabs and lobsters), and echinoderms (sea urchins). Other vertebrate tissues and other animals are less frequently studied because they either are uncommon in most archaeological deposits or are more common in samples studied by palaeoethnobotanists and soil scientists. These include skin, feathers, hair, eggshell, horn, fur, insects, foraminifera, and endoparasites. In most cases, zooarchaeologists study the remains of animals which are members of the modern environment. However, it is common to find animals which are extirpated from their former range or which are now extinct. The preliminary laboratory study involves recording primary data such as those in Table 1. Not all of these observations are available for all specimens and additional data may be required by some research designs. Primary data are used to estimate secondary data such as body size and conformation, age classes

Table 1 Primary data and attributes of animal remains which may be recorded during a zooarchaeological study Taxonomic identification of the specimen Element represented by the specimen Side (e.g., left, right, axial, unknown, or some other description) Portion (e.g., proximal, distal, anterior, lateral, medial, shaft, unknown, or some other description) Sex (description of morphological evidence for sex such as dental attributes, presence of sexually diagnostic features such as antlers or the shape of a turtle plastron, or other characteristics) Age (e.g., fused or unfused long bone, degree of wear on teeth, stage of tooth eruption, or other characteristics) Count (number of specimens referred to the taxon, often abbreviated as NISP) Weight (weight of specimens referred to the taxon) Minimum number of individuals (abbreviated as MNI) Modification (description of the modification(s) including: state of preservation; gnawed by a human, rodent, carnivore, or artiodactyl; evidence for passing through a digestive system; butchering marks such as cut, hacked or chopped, sawed; evidence that the specimen was burned, worked, trampled, weathered, or pathological; description of where the mark is located and evidence that the mark was made by a metal or stone implement; other characteristics) Measurements (definition of the dimension measured, or source of the description; actual measurement of the defined dimension) Other data as required by the research design (e.g., incremental growth patterns in dental cementum, or mollusk valves; stable isotopes; trace elements; DNA and molecular evidence, etc.) Explanatory notes

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and sex ratios, relative frequencies of animals, frequencies of skeletal portions, dietary contributions, and the cause and function of modifications. The success of deriving data is dependent upon sampling designs and sample size. The choice of which method to use is related to the research question and the materials being studied. Each method has serious flaws, and interpretations derived from one method should be verified with data obtained using other methods. Methods are inter-related and build upon each other. Thus, a single method is unlikely to serve all analytical needs. Identification is a multi-faceted procedure during which the animal and the element represented by each specimen is identified in terms of the part of the animal’s skeleton or exoskeleton represented and the animal’s taxonomic classification. Identification requires professional training and access to a good reference collection of modern skeletons. Skeletons in a reference collection should be from animals whose identification was confirmed before the skeleton was prepared. During identification, each archaeological specimen should be compared to the appropriate reference materials. Only in extreme cases should illustrations or archaeological specimens be used to identify materials. In the case of rare or extinct animals, it may be necessary to consult two or more reference collections. In addition to the reference collection itself, biological information about current and former ranges and zooarchaeological reports for similar sites occupied recently or in the distant past may be helpful. Some identifications are based on, or confirmed by, DNA and molecular evidence. Estimates of body size and conformation are based on measurements of dimensions defined in published protocols. Often one dimension of a specimen, such as greatest length, is plotted against another dimension, such as greatest width; or a ratio is established among dimensions. Body size or conformation may be estimated from measurements using formulas derived from modern animals or from descriptive biological data for animals whose size or conformation is known. Such estimates support interpretations about animals in the past and variation within populations but they require the consideration of individual, regional, and breed variations. A change in dimensions might suggest that the size or conformation of an animal, or of an entire population, had responded to changes in climate, predation, or food availability. Body size may also influence human choices about which animals to capture or avoid capturing, which habitats to exploit, or how and when to capture the animal. Changes in dimensions, body size, or conformation are the primary signs of early animal domestication.

Estimates of age-at-death and age classes are approached in different ways depending upon whether the animal has determinate growth (grows toward an optimal adult body size as in birds and mammals) or indeterminate growth (grows throughout its life as in mollusks, sharks, rays, bony fishes, amphibians, and reptiles). In animals with determinate growth, sequences in long bone maturation, tooth development and attrition, and growth increments such as those in dental cementum may indicate the age at which an individual animal died. In animals with indeterminate growth, age-at-death is estimated from body size and characteristics of growth increments in otoliths, vertebras, scutes, scales, and other hard tissues. If several members of a species are represented, these observations can be used to create age classes and to derive mortality or survivorship curves. As with body size, estimates of age-at-death and age classes require the consideration of other sources of variation. Shifts in age classes, particularly if they coincide with shifts in body size and sex ratios, may indicate a population-wide response to phenomena such as environmental change, predation rates, capture technologies, or domestication. Estimates of the sex ratios are based on sexually diagnostic features and the size of specimens. Sexually diagnostic characteristics include shape and the presence of features typical of a specific sex. These include horns and antlers in some male mammals, spurs in some male birds, medullary bone in female birds, the shape of horn cores in cattle, sheep, and goats, and the shape of the pelvic girdle in some mammals. In some animals, members of one sex may be much larger than members of the other sex. Body size or conformation may suggest the presence of intact males, castrated males, and females, thereby indicating domestic animals. As with body size and age, estimating sex ratios requires the consideration of multiple sources of variation. Changes in sex ratios may signal changes in environmental variables, predation decisions, or domestication, especially if a change in sex ratios coincides with changes in age classes and body size. Estimates of relative frequencies of animals are usually based on the number of different animals identified in the sample (richness), the number of archaeological specimens referred to a specific animal in the sample (NISP), estimate of the smallest number of individuals necessary to account for all of the specimens referred to a specific animal (MNI), or the weight of the specimens referred to a specific animal. Unlike NISP, which describes the actual number of specimens in the sample studied, MNI is an analytical product and the estimate should not be confused with actual individuals. To estimate MNI, it is necessary to

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consider not only the taxonomic identification and the elements represented for the animal in question, but also measurements, age, sex, and archaeological context. These measures or relative frequency may have little to do with human behavior or the environments in which people lived. Each method assumes that all animal remains are equally influenced by chance events, human behavior, site-formation processes, field techniques, laboratory methods, and analytical decisions, an assumption which is unlikely to be true. Rarely can the interdependence or independence of the specimens be assessed. Furthermore, it is unlikely that any of these variables are uniform among animals, between sites, between temporal components of the same site, or even among excavation units. On the other hand, changes or continuities in relative frequencies are associated with environmental and cultural phenomena which often can be evaluated in no other way. Estimates of relative frequencies can be used to assess diversity, equitability, optimal foraging strategies, social complexity, social identity, belief systems, political alliances, and environmental change. Frequencies of skeletal portions and utility indices are based on the identity of the elements represented in samples and their relationships to anatomical regions, body parts, or butchering units. Most methods quantify specimens in terms of the NISP from various parts of the skeleton, a ratio between the number of specimens observed and the number of specimens expected, rank order of body parts represented, and indices based on the utility of carcass portions. The specimens may also be evaluated in terms of the minimum number of elements (MNE). Such values distinguish between animals used for food and those that were not and between samples created by nonhuman scavengers and those created by humans. Differences in skeletal frequencies may indicate which animals were killed some distance from the excavated deposit and which were killed nearby, an important aspect of subsistence strategies and a way to distinguish between domestic and wild animals. This principle extends to the association of skeletal frequencies with distinctions between sacred and secular animals, site function, culture change (acculturation and assimilation), trade, as well as social hierarchies in complex societies and urban environments. Estimates of dietary contribution are used to assess social and economic systems. These estimates are most frequently based on ratios of skeletal weight to body weight, estimates of weight for whole animals multiplied by the MNI for that animal in the sample, estimates of body size derived from measurements,

or data from reference collections and the literature. Distinctions are made between whole animal weight, edible meat weight, and nutritional contributions measured as vitamins, minerals, protein, and fat. Dietary value guided decisions about which animals and resource areas to use most frequently, how much effort to expend in finding and capturing a particular animal, and which portions of a carcass to transport from where it was acquired to where it was used. Such studies are important when assessing human demographic and health potentials. The causes and functions of fragmentation levels, fracture types, and other modifications provide information on many aspects of human and nonhuman behavior. In combination with skeletal frequencies, fragmentation and other modifications may distinguish between human and nonhuman uses of animal parts or between food and nonfood animals. They also provide evidence for site function, the nutritional status of the human population, skinning, the ethnic identity of the butcher, the social affiliation of the consumer, butchery for household use instead of trade, and the presence of specialist butchers producing standard cuts for a discriminating market compared to a local householder intent on maximizing the amount of food and other products obtained from the carcass. Modifications also provide evidence for tools, ornaments, ritual sacrifices, displays, and other uses.

Interpretation Interpretations are based on the premise that an ecological relationship exists between humans and their environment, especially between humans and other animal populations, and that cultural, biological, and physical aspects of this relationship are reflected in animal remains. To study these relationships, however, one must appreciate that animals, including humans, are never random scavengers. Instead, animal remains in archaeological samples reflect a complex, systemic, selective relationship which balanced many interrelated components. These include the structure and function of the natural environment, resource management preferences, technology, material culture, site functions, settlement patterns, human biology, social institutions, value systems, and cultural history. It is due to this complexity that interdisciplinary collaboration, archives, ethnographic observations, and experimental archaeology are important to zooarchaeologists. Many interpretations rely upon similar observations in modern animal populations, which are likely different from those in the past for both domestic and wild animals.

ARCHAEOZOOLOGY 505 Site-Formation Processes

Much of what originally occurred at a site left no evidence and what is recovered is altered from what was originally deposited as animals are transformed from a living creature into a human resource, garbage, an archaeological deposit, and, finally, an archaeological specimen. Ironically, some of what is recovered may not represent human behavior at the time the site was occupied and some of the material may not represent human behavior at all. These concerns are broadly lumped under the heading ‘site-formation processes’, the processes by which an archaeological sample is formed. The primary outcomes of these processes are inaccurate representation of materials in relationship to their original availability and use compounded by changes in the relationships of the materials relative to each other and noncomparable samples. Such processes are not simply biases, they also provide information on former environments and on variations in the development, organization, and function of the site, and other aspects of human behavior. Many primary data are studied for information about this aspect of human behavior; chief among these are the identity and relative frequencies of specific animals, their age and sex, frequencies of skeletal portions, nutritional potential, and modifications. People make many decisions about where to collect, hunt, trap, or fish and how to manage the resources these actions acquire. After an animal is acquired, the carcass steadily disintegrates into smaller and smaller units due to food processing, manufacturing, and trade until the surviving specimens are discarded, and long afterward. The first decision regards what parts of the resource are worth the effort to transport from where they are acquired to where they will be used. This decision balances the cost in time and effort to transport all or part of the animal against its potential nutritional, economic, and social value. The outcome of these decisions is that some parts of the animal never reach the archaeological site. Food preparation and redistribution practices eliminate animal remains from the archaeological record. Most of this destruction occurs as carcasses are processed by removing invertebrate exoskeletons or fracturing bones to render fat or to make them fit into the available cooking vessel. Processing and cooking creates increasingly smaller, less diagnostic fragments. If small animals such as mice or insects were eaten, their remains may enter the archaeological record only in coprolites, or not at all. Some pieces of large or even small animals probably were distributed throughout the community, a pattern that

may not be observed if the excavation focuses on only one activity area. Additional scattering occurs if skeletal parts were used for tools, rituals, or other purposes. None of these practices was uniform for all animals, between sites, or through time. After use, humans play a role in determining which animal remains survive the ravages of time. People enhance preservation by burying refuse, thereby decreasing the amount of exposure to forces such as weathering, scavenging, and trampling. By discarding vertebrate bones with mollusk valves, the length of time vertebrate remains survive in acidic soils increases. Unfortunately, burial does not ensure that animal remains will be preserved where they were deposited or that they will survive at all. Other activities introduce animal remains into the archaeological record which were not used by people at all. Although some of these nonfood animals are discarded in contexts that indicate their nonfood uses, frequently the remains of nonfood animals are mixed with those of food animals. Scavenging and commensal animals are special types of nonfood animals to which the human-built environment offers ideal habitat. Samples from cave sites, rock shelters, and structures may contain remains of animals simply seeking food and shelter. Such animals are not just inadvertent inclusions in the archaeological record, but may be site-formation agents and important indicators of prevailing environmental conditions from the time the site was active until it was excavated. Subsistence Strategies and Human Health

Subsistence strategies are the products of dynamic interactions between people and their environments. They are the ways by which people obtain nutrients and other resources while ensuring that the costs required to find, catch, transport, process, distribute, and use them do not exceed their biological and social benefits. Subsistence strategies also encompass the manner of food preparation, the style of cooking, the social rules governing when, how, by whom they are prepared and eaten, and the circumstances under which they are eaten. People combine knowledge about the life histories of animals to develop strategies that are energetically efficient, provide a good return for effort, and balance return against risk. Food preferences, site functions, settlement patterns, human nutritional needs, the number of people available to participate in the effort, the means of capture, other benefits the resource might provide, and social obligations are also considered in subsistence strategies. Although some strategies are specialized and focus on one or a few resources, others are generalized or diffuse, using

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many different resources. Most strategies are characterized by flexibility within a range of resources defined as such by cultural standards. People develop strategies on the basis of daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual schedules and may alter the settlement size, location, and density in response to opportunities to acquire or manage resources at a given time and place using a particular technology. These resource choices may be interpreted from the identity of the animals used, the body size of animals with indeterminate growth, age classes and sex ratios, relative frequencies of animals, dietary contributions, and incremental growth structures. Of particular importance is supporting evidence from oxygen isotopes, which may provide information about the prevailing temperature when the animal died and support inferences about season of death. Season of death may, in turn, lead to information about the role of seasons in settlement patterns, exchange systems, and other activities. Methods of disarticulating animals often correlate with distance of the acquisition point from the consumption point, domestication, storage options, exchange systems, social or ethnic affiliation, ritual uses, and site function. Exchange might be through reciprocity, redistribution, or markets, but it influences how much of an animal and what portions were available to and used by a given household. Exchanges over greater distances, especially trade in food stuffs, raw materials, and finished products, may be difficult to determine at the site of origin but obvious at the endpoint in the exchange system. Both trade and storage require processing the meat source for long-term survival and this also may be evident. Such interpretations are derived from the identity and relative frequencies of the animals used, skeletal portions, dietary contribution, and modifications. Site function (e.g., ritual center, military outpost, trading post, hunt camp, farmstead, urban center) and evidence for colonization and migrations can also be interpreted from such evidence. Capture technology may be interpreted from the identity and body size of prey animals combined with knowledge of their preferred habits and habitats. The presence of animals which are active at night, live in deep waters, prefer solitary lives, have different strategies as young animals than they do as adults, raid gardens, or avoid traps all provide information about the techniques, schedules, and locations used by people to acquire them. Although part of the diet can be observed in the zooarchaeological record, ethnographic studies show that plant rather than animal foods are generally more frequently consumed. It is plant foods that provide the water-soluble vitamins that need to be

replenished daily. Therefore, a complete dietary study should include human, plant, and nonhuman animal remains. Human health is more typically studied by human biologists, but the information about human nutritional status, population size, age and sex ratios, trace elements, stable isotopes, and activity patterns is often critical to zooarchaeological interpretations. In turn, the identity and frequencies of the animals used (particularly if they might be ‘famine’ foods), unusual aspects of their size, age, and sex composition, skeletal portions used, dietary contributions, and some aspects of modifications augment interpretations of human health. Animal Domestication and Animal Health

The impact of taming, management, and domestication on animals, human society, and the environment was and continues to be great (see Animal Domestication). The study of animal domestication focuses on defining the multiple origins of domestic animals, identifying their wild progenitors, the processes and stages of domestication, the spread of animal husbandry, and the cultural conditions that promoted these economic changes. In some cases, close affiliation has resulted in an exchange of diseases between domestic animals and people. The characteristics of domestic animals which distinguish them from wild ones are reflected in their size, conformation, variability, social behavior, and the contexts within which they occur. Many of these features do not survive in the archaeological record, especially those associated with attributes of coat and behavior, although exceptions do occur. Instead, domestic animals are usually identified by virtue of being outside the known range of their wild progenitors, from their size and conformation, age and sex profiles, the relative frequencies of animals, the frequencies of skeletal portions, especially in the degree of skeletal completeness, and evidence of congenital abnormalities or diseases associated with domestication. Such evidence is augmented by DNA and molecular studies which provide important insights into their ancestry and affiliations (see DNA: Ancient; Modern, and Archaeology). Indirect evidence of animal domestication, such as corrals, harnesses, and artistic renderings, are also used. Tracing the routes over which early domestic animals spread from centers of domestication to other parts of the world also documents exchange routes, the spread of cultural influences, migration routes, and colonization. Technical and Social Uses of Animals

Animals also provide materials which may be used for clothing, shelter, containers, tools, ornaments, and

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many other purposes. The feathers, wool, hair, fur, hide, horn, and shell used for these purposes usually do not survive archaeologically, but when they do they greatly expand our understanding of the technical and social uses of animals. Some animals, usually domestic ones, also provided dung used for plaster, fertilizer, and fuel. The presence of some animals, even scavengers and commensals, may provide indirect evidence for animal husbandry if they are associated with habitat alteration, grazing lands, or animal fodder. Gender, social identity, social hierarchies, and ideology were undoubtedly major influences in the use of animals. High status in a ranked society may be signified by the use of rare or exotic animals, large animals, a diverse range of animals, or portions of the carcass that were more highly valued than were others. Animals serve as symbols of political authority, special skills, and sacred precincts or events. They also are totems of an age class, ritual society, or kin group. Many animals with symbolic meaning have a higher caloric cost or risk potential to capture, maintain, or process. Social distinctions may be reflected by the identity of the animals involved, their size, age, and sex, relative frequencies of animals, frequencies of skeletal portions, dietary contributions, and modifications associated with unusual butchering or food preparation techniques. Such interpretations are greatly assisted by indirect evidence such as figurines, murals, ancient texts, ethno-historic accounts, and ceramic motifs. Similar evidence supports interpretations of cultural attitudes toward animals and food. Cultural attitudes include definitions of animals as preferred foods, nonfoods, famine foods, funeral foods, feasting foods, and sacrificial foods. Pets are a form of ritual relationship with animals, but many other sacred uses of animals are known. Sometimes animal remains are associated with communal eating or feasting or ritual sacrifices and offerings. Sacred uses of animals are indicated by the presence of animals not found in other contexts, relative frequencies of animals, skeletal completeness, modifications, and archaeological context. Such interpretations are strengthened by burial offerings, association with ceremonial or communal structures, and by textual or graphic evidence. Food taboos are worldwide and may serve functional purposes in the communities where they are found, but they are difficult to verify because food taboos may result in the absence of the taboo animal from the archaeological site. In fact, all symbolic or ideological interpretations are difficult to confirm because they are the product of cultures and belief systems which are different from our own.

Palaeoenvironments and Environmental Change

The study of palaeoenvironments and environmental change is an important aspect of zooarchaeological research (see Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction, Methods). Humans are, in part, responsible for some environmental changes because their activities destroy, modify, and create habitats. People also overuse preferred resources and may force some animals to be extirpated from their range or to go extinct. In other cases, humans were not responsible for the changes but their responses to alterations in available resources are part of the environmental history of the site and the region. Evidence of palaeoenvironments and environmental change is primarily derived from the presence of indicator animals, relative frequencies of key animals, their size, growth habits, and age classes, incremental growth structures, and body part frequencies, all of which are also markers of changes in seasonal periodicity, site function, settlement patterns, capture technologies, and other cultural behaviors. Because these are archaeological materials, the product of human behavior, alternate cultural interpretations must be eliminated as an explanation before concluding that changes in animal remains are evidence for environmental change. Separating the evidence for cultural changes, especially those related to seasonal periodicity, from evidence for environmental change is particularly challenging. As with all other interpretations, the accumulation of evidence pointing to the same conclusions strengthens characterizations of former conditions, whether the changes occurred during or as a consequence of occupation, and whether changes were brought about by environmental conditions beyond human control or by people as agents of change. It is particularly important that interpretations of environmental change be substantiated by evidence from palaeoethnobotany, geomorphology, and soil science. Geochemistry, particularly oxygen isotopes, add the possibility of palaeothermometer proxies to the tool kit. As evidence for the impact of human behavior on the environment grows, zooarchaeologists are made aware that archaeological sites contain a record of Holocene environmental history that often is not available from any other source. Zooarchaeological data are used in wildlife conservation, heritage management, and policy decisions. These applications require that zooarchaeologists pay particular attention to methodological and interpretive flaws in order to avoid unintended political and economic consequences when their data are used by conservation advocates, resource managers, and other groups to support or refute policy decisions and political

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agenda. Such users are unfamiliar with the nuances of the field and easily may use zooarchaeological data inappropriately.

Ecofacts, Overview; Insect Analysis; Invertebrate Analysis; Organic Residue Analysis; Preservation, Modes of; Stable Isotope Analysis; Taphonomy; Trace Element Analysis; Vertebrate Analysis.

Conclusion This survey only touches the surface of this diverse field. Although the interpretive aspects of zooarchaeological analysis are exciting, the animal remains themselves and the pathways they followed to become part of the archaeological sample obstruct this goal. The choice of method should be guided by the research question. The forces which created the sample being studied and the methods used to study it must be considered when judging the merits of the interpretations. Changes begin to accumulate when the animal enters the cultural setting and increase as the animal becomes part of the archaeological deposit. Recovery, identification, quantification, and interpretation also introduce biases. In order to reach their full potential, zooarchaeological interpretations should be based on multiple lines of evidence and placed in their environmental and cultural contexts. Nonetheless, zooarchaeologists contribute important information to studies of former environments, relationships between humans and those environments, and the impact people have had on the world in which they live. See also: Bone Tool Analysis; Butchery and Kill Sites; Coprolite Analysis; Cultural Ecology; DNA: Ancient;

Art

Further Reading Bar-Yosef D (ed.) (2005) Archaeomalacology. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Claassen C (1998) Shells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies J, Fabis M, Mainland I, Richards M, and Thomas R (eds.) (2005) Health and Diet in Past Animal Populations. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Lauwerier RCGM and Plug I (eds.) (2004) The Future from the Past: Archaeozoology in Wildlife Conservation and Heritage Management. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Maltby M (ed.) (2006) Integrating Zooarchaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Miracle P and Milner N (eds.) (2002) Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Mondini M, Mun˜oz S, and Wickler S (eds.) (2004) Colonisation, Migration and Marginal Areas: A Zooarchaeological Approach. Oxford: Oxbow Books. O’Day SJ, Van Neer W, and Ervynck A (eds.) (2004) Behaviour behind Bones: The Zooarchaeology of Ritual, Religion, Status and Identity. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Reitz KJ and Wing ES (2008) Zooarchaeology, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruscillo D (ed.) (2006) Recent Advances in Ageing and Sexing Animal Bones. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Vigne JD, Helmer D, and Peters J (eds.) (2005) The First Steps in Animal Domestication. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

See: Interpretive Art and Archaeology.

ARTIFACTS, OVERVIEW Jane Balme, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary core In stone tool manufacture, the core is the stone nodule or fragment from which flakes are removed. Some of the removed flakes are then used as tools or modified further. The core may also be used as a tool.

flake In stone tool manufacture, a flake is a fragment removed from the core. blade In stone tool manufacture, a blade is a long thin flake usually defined as at least twice as long as it is wide. point In stone tool manufacture, a blade that has been created or modified to form a point at one end. Solutrean A term used to refer to a stone tool making tradition of the European Upper Palaeolithic existing from about 21 000 to 16 000 years BP. australopithecine A member of the genus Australopithecus, the oldest species of which lived about 4.2 million years ago and the most recent became extinct about 1 million years ago.

ARTIFACTS, OVERVIEW 509 knapper An individual who makes stone tools by percussion or pressure. Dong son A Bronze Age culture dating from about 800 to 200 BC. Originally centered on the Red River Valley in Vietnam, it spread to other areas in Southeast Asia and southern China. Lapita pottery A pottery type, some of which are distinctively decorated. Lapita pottery is associated with the eastward colonization of the Pacific from about 3500 years ago.

Introduction Archaeology is commonly defined as the study of the human past through the analysis of the material remains left behind. These include plant and animal remains as well as our ancestors’ bones, all of which can reveal much, for example, about our ancestors’ physical appearance, food choices, and the environment within which they lived. The other main kind of material remains studied by archaeologists are artifacts. The simplest definition of an artifact is anything that has been modified, made or used by humans or their ancestors. Thus an artifact can be string made from fibrous bark, a basket woven from the string, or simply a piece of unmodified bark that has been used, for example, to carry water. In combination with other archaeological evidence, the study of artifacts can provide information about many things including our ancestors’ technology (why things were made in the way that they were), their cognitive abilities, the kinds of activities they undertook, how they organized themselves socially, whether they traded with other groups, how they moved around their landscape, and some aspects of their ideology. The problem for archaeologists is how to get such information from objects that cannot speak for themselves.

Survival of Artifacts When considering the history of artifacts and their development at different times and in different places, it is important to appreciate how few of the artifacts used by our ancestors have survived to be found today. All artifacts are subject to decay, but the speed at which they decay depends on the materials from which they are made and the environment in which they are left. Some of the decay is caused by physical processes such as wind, rain, and sun exposure. Fragile items are particularly susceptible to these processes. Chemical processes also cause decay. For example, iron artifacts rust when exposed to oxygen and moisture and acids contained within surrounding soils dissolve artifacts made from plant and animal products. Biological processes actively decay artifacts made from plant and animal products that attract scavengers, insects, and bacteria.

Survival of artifacts in the archaeological record therefore depends on the extent to which they are protected from all of these elements. Bacteria thrive in moisture, and biological organisms depend on oxygen. Rapid burial or enclosed spaces such as caves, protect artifacts from physical processes (see Caves and Rockshelters; Sites: Mounded and Unmounded). Very dry sites without moisture and places that restrict access to oxygen, such as bogs and frozen sites (see Frozen Sites and Bodies; Sites: Waterlogged), protect organic artifacts. Sometimes artifacts survive because people in the past have taken steps to deliberately protect them from decay. Good examples of these are the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification of important people and the protection of their goods by building elaborate tombs. It is important to recognize, however, that such circumstances are exceptional and, although some of the situations mentioned above will protect artifacts for thousands of years, only those artifacts made of the most durable materials will survive for long periods. All of this means that, although our knowledge of the variety of artifacts made and used in the very recent past is relatively complete, the further we go back in time the less likely we are to recover the full range of artifacts made and used by people. In addition, the kinds of artifacts available to investigate the deep past is biased toward only the most robust materials, in particular those made of stone.

A Short History of Artifacts It is easy to think of technological change as evolving in unidirectional manner from simple stone artifacts to the complex variety present today. There is also the tendency to equate technological change with technological improvement. Neither of these two statements is true. Technological change has not been unidirectional as not all groups of people develop or make use of all technologies available to them and there are many examples where the use of specific technologies has ceased altogether or for long periods. Some of the reasons for people’s choices in the use of technology are discussed under the next section, but it is important to stress the role of ideology in the direction of artifact change. The use of particular artifacts is the result of people’s perceived needs, some of which may not lead to the use of the most efficient artifacts. For example, seeking strictly economic reasons for the cessation of pottery production despite its earlier established presence in some regions of prehistoric Britain and Ireland may not be fruitful. Having said all of that, it is possible to make the generalization that, over time, the variety of artifacts

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in the world has increased. The oldest recognizable artifacts are made from stone and were found at Gona, Ethiopia (Figure 1). They date to about 2.6– 2.5 million years ago. No fossils of human ancestors were found with these artifacts, and there are several possible candidates for their makers. The most likely is the early hominin Australopithecus garhi, the fossils of which have been found in contemporary sites elsewhere in Ethiopia. It is hard to know exactly what the artifacts were used for, because there is little associated archaeological material to provide clues. However, stone artifacts dated to about 2.5 million years ago from another Ethiopian site, Bouri, have been found associated with fossil animal bones that appear to have cut marks, suggesting that these artifacts may have been used to remove meat from bone. The Gona stones are recognizably artifacts because they have fractured in such a way that their deliberate modification is not in doubt (see Lithics: Manufacture). It is possible that stones were used as tools well before this time but that, because they were not modified, they are not recognizable as artifacts. It is also very likely that tools were previously made of

organic materials such as wood and have not survived to be discovered today. These oldest stone artifacts are simply either pieces of stone flaked from a larger piece (core) and the cores from which they derive. The flakes were made by striking a hand-held pebble against another piece to produce flakes that were then used as tools, although the core itself could also be used as a tool. Only a few flakes were removed from each core before it was then discarded. The resulting artifact assemblage is relatively unpatterned. Although it is not exactly clear which hominin species made the very oldest artifacts, it is almost certain that Homo habilis, a species that lived in Africa from about 2.4 million years ago to just after 1.8 million years ago, made stone tools because their fossils have been found in clear association with stone artifacts. These early stone artifacts may appear rudimentary and we cannot be sure what they were used for, apart from the removal of meat at some sites, but their presence nevertheless tells us many things about our ancestors living that that time. First, the artifact makers understood the different flaking properties

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Figure 1 The word’s oldest stone artefacts from Gona, Ethiopia. Reprinted from Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 27, Semaw S, The world’s oldest stone artefacts from Gona, Ethiopia: Their implications for understanding stone technology and patterns of human evolution between 2.6–1.5 million years ago, 1197–1214, Copyright (2000), with permission from Elsevier.

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of various stone sources available. The selection of raw materials to make artifacts was not random. Stones for making artifacts were selected because they were especially good for flaking to make sharp edges. Flaking also requires good hand–eye coordination. In addition, studies have shown that most of the artifacts from these old assemblages were made by right-handed knappers. Right-handedness is a uniquely human trait in the modern world, and appears to have been present in this early stage of our evolution. Other aspects of life are demonstrated by the fact that many artifacts have been found several kilometers away from the rock source suggesting that, rather than moving around the landscape randomly, activities were planned. Over time, and possibly associated with increases in brain size, our ancestors learned more about the properties of different types of rocks and developed new ways of modifying them, resulting in a great diversity in the kinds of tools created. For example, rather than concentrating on flakes struck with a single blow from a core, more blows were used to deliberately shape the core so that blades and points could be produced. New techniques, including pressing to remove very small flakes, began to be used to control the shape of artifacts producing tools such as the refined leaf-shaped Solutrean points made in Europe by about 20 000 years ago (Figure 2). Over time, these artifacts became increasingly diverse both between and within regions as new techniques for modifying artifacts were developed and as groups produced their own distinctive styles and techniques. Although there are no surviving artifacts made from plants at any of the early australopithecine and

Figure 2 Pressure-flaked Solutrean point.

H. habilis sites, some of the fossil animal bones present at these sites may have been used as tools in a relatively unmodified form. Perhaps the sharp point made on a broken bone may have been used to pierce skin, or a sharp edge may have been used as a knife. However, it is extremely difficult to identify wear patterns from use on such fragmented materials. Microscopic wear patterns on bone tools from the Swartkrans and Sterkfontein sites in South Africa, occupied between about 1.8 and 1.0 million years ago, resemble experimental bone used to probe termite mounds suggesting that Australopithecus robustus ate termites as part of their diet. The oldest surviving incontrovertible tools made from plant material are four wooden tools from 400 000-year-old sediments at Scho¨ningen in Germany, presumably made by Homo heidelbergensis. Three of these are long (1.81–2.25 m), slender poles and have a sharpened point at one end, suggesting that they may have been used as spears. The fourth wooden tool has both ends sharpened and is 78 cm long. As far as it is possible to tell, all artifacts made before the appearance of our own species, Homo sapiens, appear to be for obtaining food. As well as creating a greater diversity of these extractive tools in a variety of raw materials, H. sapiens began to decorate tools and to create artifacts such as beads, pendants, and carved objects that were not directly associated with food extraction. Some of the earliest have been recovered from Blombos Cave on the southern cape shoreline of South Africa. Artifacts excavated from this site include a group of 41 perforated (presumably so that they can be strung as beads) estuarine tick shells dated to about 76 000 years ago. Beads and pendants seem to be ubiquitous wherever modern humans have been found. They occur in western and eastern Europe from about 40 000 years ago and in Australia from before 30 000 years ago (Figure 3). Other early decorative objects include an incised piece of ochre from Blombos Cave dated to about 70 000 years ago and, from European sites, animal carvings dated to over 30 000 years ago. Particularly abundant in western and eastern Europe between about 25 000 and 23 000 years ago are small human figurines most of which appear to represent females (Figure 4). As people dispersed throughout the world, the artifacts that they made increasingly diversified. People who continued to move around the landscape undoubtedly used containers made from plant material such as bark or woven fiber and animal skin. Although very old examples of these have not survived, impressions of cordage and textile items on burnt clay were found in hearths from Upper Palaeolithic sites in Germany, Russia, and Moravia, some as

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Figure 3 More than 32 000-year-old beads from northwest Australia. Photo courtesy: Kate Morse.

Figure 5 Clay tokens suggested to be the earliest evidence for record keeping.

Figure 4 Figurine about 25 000 years old from Willendorf, Austria (height about 11 cm).

old as 27 000 years ago from Moravian sites. The plasticity of clay also made it a suitable material to fabricate bricks for structures by some societies that, from about 10 000 years ago in some parts of the world, began to stay in one camp for longer periods and, rather than hunting and collecting all their foods, began to produce some of their own food. In food-producing societies, the tasks associated with food production could be undertaken by fewer people, thus allowing greater specialization in craft production. Growing populations in these societies

placed new demands on technology. For example, soil tilling of a large field requires ploughs and growing villages require sanitation technology. The centralized production of food also instigated the production of new kinds of artifacts needed to symbolize the measurement of quantities of food for exchange. It has been suggested that small tokens (Figure 5) that occur from about 9000 years ago in public buildings on many sites in the Middle East may represent counters or symbols for particular quantities of materials such as grain. Writing, another symbolic development, required the fabrications of specific pointed tools (styluses) to make marks. Technology changes as human societies evolve. In societies with little economic change, there is often less pressure for technological change. Instead, technology changes to provide greater efficiency in already-established practices or as a response to social demands (which may or may not result in greater efficieny). Artifacts diversify as new technologies are developed and new materials and new ways of making traditional artifacts are created. Which artifacts are made reflect the histories and needs of the

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society making them. For example, fishing technologies are made and used by groups who live on the coast, and grinding technology by groups who rely on seeds. Once again it is important to recognize that the relationship between environment and technology is not always straightforward. A well-known example is the cessation of fish eating and associated technology by coastal Tasmanians about 3500 years ago. It is also important to recognize that the driving force for technology development is not necessarily directly linked to food collecting. For example, it has been argued that metallurgical technology in west Mexico between AD 600 and 700 was driven by the function of the artifacts as ritual and status items, so that qualities such as color and sound rather than utilitarian properties such as hardness and durability were the drivers of the technological development.

Explaining the Diversity of Artifacts Societies’ needs vary according to their economic bases and these in themselves are inextricably intertwined with their historical and social development. People who live near resource-rich coasts are likely (although not always) to make equipment to extract marine foods but which equipment they use to catch fish, for example, will depend on their other technologies (do they have a fiber technology needed to make nets?) and social decisions such as whether they want to catch large numbers of fish cooperatively with nets and traps or individually using spears or lines. But, clearly there are factors other than economy that influence the diversity of artifacts over time and place. Even artifacts made at the same time and for the same purpose vary – just think about the variety of corkscrew designs. Some of this variety is linked to the fact that different raw materials behave in different ways and so the shape of the artifact is affected by the raw materials from which it is made. Other variations are the result of different design solutions for the same functions and style differences, such as decoration, that are not necessarily associated with the function of the artifact. Artistic tradition may also play a role in the design of objects, and the creative philosophy of the culture affects the variety of designs made. In summary, artifact diversity depends on the functions for which the makers intend the object to be used (which is in turn dependent on historical and social circumstance), the raw material with which the artifacts are made, the technology associated with production, and the styles chosen by the artifact makers. Different raw materials have different physical properties that make them suitable for some designs and not others. An object made to contain water must be steep-sided to hold the water and should be made

of relatively nonporous material. Which nonporous material the artisan selects then depends on what is available (and at what cost), their skill at manipulating different raw materials, and ultimately how they want the artifact to appear. All of these factors are affected by the social context in which the artifact is made. Social context affects raw material use because it dictates fashions and because it influences access to raw materials through internal politics and through political associations with neighbouring communities that might provide access to specific raw materials in their region. Technology associated with production affects the final form of an object. There are some objects that can only be made when a particular technology is available but objects with the same function can be made using different technologies. A bottle can be made with glass, animal hide, or clay. A ceramic bowl can be shaped by hand, with a coil technique or by using a potters’ wheel. A potter’s decision about which technique to use will depend on not only the technology available but also on individual choice that will be influenced by their social situation. Within societies, individuals and groups also affect how objects are made. If they are the makers themselves, how the object is made is influenced by such factors as economic circumstances (what materials they have access to) and how they want to be perceived by others. Do they want to express their status or association within a particular subgroup in a society? Is the artifact being made for themselves or are they making it for someone else? In modern industrial societies, changes in technology, design, and fashion are in the interests of manufacturers. But the essential social influences on artifact design have not changed much since the emergence of H. sapiens. As in all human societies, the makers of objects are influenced by their teachers. Groups of people who interact frequently develop designs and ways of making objects that are characteristic of their own social circles. With the dispersal of people throughout the world, there are a great variety of approaches to the same technological problem but styles and motifs are often instantly recognizable. In addition to how artisans learn to make objects, there are circumstances in which they may choose to emphasize affiliations – for example, to demonstrate their belonging to a particular social group. Sometimes belonging might be expressed by the use of a particular kind of artifact. For example, the decorated bronze cast Dong Son drums of Southeast Asia (Figure 6) were first made probably in north Vietnam sometime before the sixth century BC and quickly spread (through local manufacture and trade) to south and southwest China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Indonesia. This dispersal

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in culturally different regions does not necessarily indicate that the drums were used for the same purpose but it does indicate a shared ideology between these disparate groups. Sometimes a shared ideology is expressed in the ways that people make a variety of artifacts. For example, about 3000 years ago, Chavin, a distinctive art style originating at the site of Chavı´n de Hua´ntar, spread across what had previously been highly regionalized valleys in what is now Peru. This style was apparent in many different types of artifacts in the region including pottery, sculpture, and textiles. The common style expressed a unification of disparate groups that made it possible to encourage trade between the various highland valleys. There are also circumstances where people choose to emphasize difference. This may be expressed by groups of people deliberately choosing to produce one artifact rather than another or deliberately spurning artifacts used by other cultures. Consider, for example, the use of Christian crosses and Buddha statues. With the advent of globalization, regional differences in artifacts are no longer as obvious. This is particularly so for industrialized countries where most people have access to the Internet and to material goods from all over the world. There seems to be an emphasis on unification between these countries.

Figure 6 Dong Son drum (height about 26 cm).

Figure 7 Viking comb made from antler.

In developing countries or isolated places, where this outside access is not readily available or where emphasis is placed on maintaining traditional customs, the cultural derivation of the artifacts is much more obvious.

The Challenge for Archaeologists Knowing why artifacts vary gives some idea of the kinds of questions about the past that can be answered from the artifacts. Perhaps the most common question asked is what was an artifact used for? Sometimes the answer is relatively easy because the artifact is similar to something used today. For example, the frequency of occurrence of items such as that in Figure 7 in Viking sites and their similarity to our hair combs means that such items can be convincingly argued to be used for the same purpose. However, the older the artifact, the more difficult it is to make such convincing analogies. Interpretation of the function of, for example, a stone artifact from the deep past depends on analogies made with modern stone tool using groups (see Ethnoarchaeology), experiments (see Experimental Archaeology; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear), and identification of residues on the artifact (see Blood Residue Analysis; Chemical Analysis Techniques). The context of the artifact, in particular its association with other materials, can also help identify its function. One of the difficulties in asking the ‘function question’ is that not all artifacts are used for a single purpose. A stone artifact may be made initially to remove the bark from a stick but it can be subsequently used in its initial form to do other tasks, or it may be remodeled to suit some other purpose. The more durable the raw material the more often it can be reused, either for its original purpose (such as modern recycling of roofing iron) or for a new use (such as the milk powder tin recreated as a child’s toy) (Figure 8). The display of excavated artifacts in museums today could also be considered another example of recycling (from their original function to an educational function). The recycling example highlights the importance of context in the interpretation of artifacts. An artifact

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Figure 8 Toy roller ‘truck’ made from sugar can, wire, and fabric collected at Balgo community by Peter Bindon and Moya Smith. Photo courtesy: Moya Smith, Western Australian Museum.

sitting on someone’s mantelpiece with no information about the context in which it was found says something about the person on whose mantelpiece it stands (why do they choose to place this artifact in this place?) but very little about the people who made the object. Context is important, then, not only because it helps provide information about artifact function, but because it is possible to say something about the people who made it. In addition, knowing where the artifact was positioned in a site can reveal its age relative to other artifacts (see Sites: Formation Processes). Spatial analysis can tell us what structures and other artifacts it is associated with (see Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites) and perhaps who it was used by. Artifacts found in the same context are referred to as an assemblage. For example, a silver bowl might be used for many purposes, but if the bowl is found with tableware it may be concluded that it was used for serving food or drink. If the bowl was found with objects of ritual, it might be concluded that the bowl was used as part of ritual behavior. Objects made of rare materials, especially when they occur in patterned contexts, and the presence of rare items whose only function is symbolic might suggest status. Knowledge of context in which the artifacts were found and the variables that affect the shape, style, and materials used in the artifacts are guides to the types of questions that can be answered. There are questions of cognitive abilities such as those associated with making the first stone artifacts, of technology available, and, depending on the varieties of technologies evident in an assemblage, whether

all technologies were available to the entire community. There are questions about access to raw materials as evidenced by the rarity or otherwise of high-quality materials and the use of recycling, and there are questions of social networks of which the Chavin art style and Dong Son drums are examples. Differences in status or roles within groups are determined by interpreting patterns in the types of artifacts found in association with each other. For example, societies with hierarchical divisions would be indicated by the presence of rare materials used especially in symbolical artifacts such as jewelry.

Analysis and Interpretation It should be clear that the first step in extracting a story about the past from artifacts is to think about what it is that you want to know from the artifacts – the research question. Examples of questions and approaches to extracting information from different types of artifacts can be found in the sections in this encyclopaedia dealing with different kinds of material remains. (see Bone Tool Analysis; Fiber Artifacts; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear; Pottery Analysis: Stylistic; Vitreous Materials Analysis). The main general point to be made is that questions are not really worth answering unless they are set in some kind of theoretical context. Different kinds of theoretical approaches account for differences between the questions asked by archaeologists and the way in which they go about answering them. Remember that, whatever your approach, there has to be a reason for asking the question.

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It is also important to remember that, although popular archaeology books often concentrate on spectacular and rare artifacts, it is often mundane and common objects such as stone tools and pottery that enable a more complete story to be told. One example is the suggestion that the apparently mundane change from haphazard to ordered rows in toothbrush bristle placement in the late eighteenth century reflects an increasing importance of discipline and order in Western society at that time. Using artifacts to answer a question almost involves all three steps of data gathering, analysis, and interpretation. Obviously, these are linked in that the data gathered and the analyses conducted have to be able to answer the question. Imagine you have an assemblage of pottery from a site and want to know about trade networks. You might divide the assemblage into pottery made locally and that made in other places. You need to select a series of attributes to distinguish different types in the pottery (see Classification and Typology). The source of pottery may be identifiable by style or raw material (see Pottery Analysis: Petrology and Thin-Section Analysis). The result would be a set of types based on one or both of these selected attributes. The proportions of each type present at the site could then be compared to answer the question. If only locally made pottery is present at your site, the people living there in the past did not trade (or at least not in pottery). The same assemblage could be used to answer a question about status. This time the assemblage would need to be sorted by attributes indicative of status. These might include the quality of clay (whether coarse or bone china), the maker, or possibly the design. Decisions about which attribute best indicates status will, of course, depend on the historical context of the site and your theoretical outlook but the principle is the same. Take note, however, that for most of our past it is very difficult to draw a direct analogy between what we might consider to be a style or object of high status. The analysis approach described above is a very simplified version of what actually happens. In practice, archaeologists use as much evidence as possible to answer their research question. A study of status will not rely on one kind of artifact but several analyses of the various artifacts represented at the site as well as analyses of other kinds of archaeological evidence represented at the site. For example, the timing of the settlement of the central Pacific has been suggested by analyzing the distribution of dates associated with finds of a finely decorated type of pottery known as Lapita.

Conclusion Our record of artifacts used in the past is far from complete, but it is our main source of knowledge about our ancestors. There are many reasons why artifacts have varied over time and place including differences in availability of raw material, technologies, and the choices people have made about what they want to make and how they want to make them. As individuals or groups of individuals ultimately make artifacts, their relationship within the society in which they live clearly affects the way in which they make objects. By themselves and out of context, artifacts can say little about the past. They can only ‘speak’ when they are analyzed and interpreted to answer questions asked in the present. Although we cannot have the same experiences as the artifact makers of the past, studying the variety of artifacts recovered from the past can nevertheless say a lot about how human culture came to be as diverse as it is today. See also: Blood Residue Analysis; Bone Tool Analysis; Caves and Rockshelters; Chemical Analysis Techniques; Classification and Typology; Ethnoarchaeology; Experimental Archaeology; Fiber Artifacts; Frozen Sites and Bodies; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear; Manufacture; Metals: Chemical Analysis; Primary Production Studies of; Pottery Analysis: Chemical; Petrology and Thin-Section Analysis; Stylistic; Sites: Mounded and Unmounded; Waterlogged; Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites; Vitreous Materials Analysis.

Further Reading Andrefsky W (1998) Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Balme J and Paterson A (eds.) (2006) Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses. Blackwell Publishing. Banning EB (2000) The Archaeologist’s Laboratory. Analysis of Archaeological Data. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Blackwell LR and d’Errico F (2001) Evidence of termite foraging by Swartkans early hominids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98: 1358–1363. Henshilwood C, d’Errico F, Vanhaeren M, van Niekerk K, and Jacobs Z (2004) Middle Stone Age shell beads from South Africa. Science 304(5669): 404. Hosler D (1994) The Sounds and Colors of Power: The Sacred Metallurgical Technology of Ancient West Mexico. Chicago: MIT Press. Loney HL (2000) Society and technological control: A critical review of models of technological change in ceramic studies. American Antiquity 65(4): 646–668.

ASIA, CENTRAL AND NORTH, STEPPES, DESERTS, AND FORESTS 517 Orton C, Tyers P, and Vince A (1993) Pottery in Archaeology. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Semaw S (2000) The world’s oldest stone artefacts from Gona, Ethiopia: Their implications for understanding stone technology and patterns of human evolution between 2.6–1.5 million years ago. Journal of Archaeological Science 27: 1197–1214. Shackel P (1993) Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

Soffer O, Adovasio JM, Illingworth JS, Amirkhanov HA, Praslov ND, and Street M (2000) Palaeolithic perishables made permanent. Antiquity 74(286): 812. Thieme H (1997) Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany. Nature 385: 807–810. Toth N and Schick K (1993) Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology. New York: Simon and Schuster.

ASIA, CENTRAL AND NORTH, STEPPES, DESERTS, AND FORESTS William Honeychurch, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Joshua Wright, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary absolute dating Any form of dating material remains that yields a calendar-based date range and as used here, usually refers to radiocarbon dating of organic materials. bit wear analysis Macro and microscopic study of the lower premolars of ancient horses to determine the presence of abrasion marks suggestive of bitting and therefore, use of horses for transport. Eneolithic A technology-based period of time between the terminal Neolithic and early Bronze Age when copper metallurgy was practiced. This period is also sometimes referred to as the Chalcolithic in western Eurasia and more broadly as the Early Metal Age in eastern Eurasia. kurgan Term associated with Eurasian steppe archaeology referring to an artificial mound made of earth or stone, or both, and covering a burial. mobile pastoralism Also known as nomadic pastoralism and defined as a subsistence economy based on the herding of animals by way of periodic residential movement. Scythian A term used to refer to a specific Iron Age group of steppe peoples in western Central Eurasia but also refers to a material culture horizon having artifact types, styles, and cultural and technological practices in common and found across Central Eurasia. steppe Diverse forms of grassland that characterize major vegetational zones across Central Eurasia ranging from forested or alpine steppe to desert or arid steppe.

Eurasia encompasses a majority of what archaeologists refer to as the Old World. Its heartland, known as Central Eurasia, is a broad belt of steppe grasslands fringed by tracts of coniferous forest to the north and to the south by high mountains and deserts punctuated

with inland seas. Beyond these mountains and deserts are the temperate regions of Eurasia that gave rise to pristine civilizations built upon intensive agriculture, urban centers, and aggregated populations. In contrast, Central Eurasia is arid and cold, having extreme shifts in seasonal temperature, low population densities, animal centered subsistence economies and cultures adapted to this harsh setting. With time, the first Central Eurasians adapted and prospered under these conditions, such that their descendants eventually epeopled the New World, forged roads of communication between Old World civilizations, and assembled some of the most impressive empires in human history. The sociocultural strategies that opened the Eurasian steppe lands to human habitation provide an underlying commonality to the prehistory of this diverse macro-region. We focus on the eastern flank of Central Eurasia, an area where pastoral nomads still drive their herd animals among grasslands, forests, and deserts today. The historical geographer, Owen Lattimore, used the term ‘Inner Asia’ for this area which overlaps the borders of several contemporary nations. For our purposes, Inner Asia comprises Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces of northwestern China, Eastern Kazakhstan, and the South Siberian regions of Altai, Minusinsk basin, Tuva, Baikal, and Buriatiia (Figure 1). When influential developments occur on the periphery of Inner Asia, we expand our discussion to include those regions.

Palaeolithic Adaptations of Inner Asia Major issues in the archaeology of the Palaeolithic in Central Eurasia concern the entrance and adaptation of hominid groups in the region. Foremost is the

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Figure 1 The geography and major archaeological sites of Inner Asia and peripheral regions, as numbered: (1) Ulalinka, (2) TeshikTash, (3) Obi-Rakhmat, (4) Denisova Cave, (5) Okladnikov Cave, (6) Tsagaan Agui, (7) Kara-Bom, (8) Mal’ta, (9) Shuidonggou, (10) Shabarak Us, (11) Tamsagbulag, (12) Ust’-Ida, (13) Budulan, (14) Botai, (15) Suchanicha, (16) Arkaim/Sintashta, (17) Zhukaigou, (18) Zuukh, (19) Atasu, (20) Qizilchoqa, (21) Karasuk cemetery, (22) Nanshangen, (23) Arzhan, (24) Pazyryk, (25) Issyk, (26) Uushigiin Ovor, (27) Xiaobaiyang, (28) Maoqinggou, (29) Khujir, (30) Egiin Gol/Burkhan Tolgoi, (31) Tebsh Uul, (32) Noyon Uul, (33) Tsaram, (34) Daodunzi, (35) Ivolga, (36) Tuzusai.

problem of the initial peopling of the cold grassland environment of Central Eurasia. At what point did human ancestors first appear in the region, from where, and what technologies supported their existence in this novel setting? Having arrived, how did they adapt and interact, particularly as evidenced by the lithic technologies they left behind? These are basic questions that concern early human mobility and its development, a topic critical to the archaeology of Central Eurasia during all periods.

Pleistocene pebble industries at the sites of Kuldara and Karatau represent the early evidence of hominid dispersals along the edges of Inner Asia. Early sites in Siberia at Ulalinka, Mokhovo I, and Diring Yuriakh have flaked stone assemblages thought to date prior to 300 000 years ago, however, whether these assemblages are actually human-made has been disputed. The current evidence for hominid entry into Siberia is younger than 200 000 years and is marked by Middle Palaeolithic technologies (see Siberia, Peopling of).

The Lower Palaeolithic

The Middle Palaeolithic

Discovery of early hominids at the site of Dmanisi (1.8 MYA) in the Caucuses and finds in Northeast Asia approaching 1 MYA has greatly strengthened the understanding and possible explanations of Lower Palaeolithic finds in Central Eurasia. With the exception of the skull fragment discovered at the site of Salkhit (northeastern Mongolia) in 2006 and now under intensive study, no other early homined fossils have yet been found in the steppe lands. However, the artifact sites of the earliest steppe inhabitants have been discovered, demonstrating that the range of early hominids expanded to include most of Eurasia. The artifact record is not without problems. Questions arise as to whether artifact assemblages claimed as evidence for Middle Pleistocene manufacture are not in fact the results of geological processes. In other cases, lithic assemblages may be indisputable, but were found from geological contexts which make their periodization uncertain. In south Tajikistan, Lower and Middle

The Middle Palaeolithic archaeological record of Inner Asia is more detailed. It is part of a Eurasiawide technological and cultural sequence. Three major divisions of stone tool technology have been identified at Middle Palaeolithic sites: Mousterian forms, Levallois type technologies, and incipient large blade industries with connections to Upper Palaeolithic technologies. These technologies form a chronological separation among sites, and also demonstrate the relationship of Inner Asia Middle Palaeolithic technologies with those of Western Eurasia where the same broad sequence has long been known. Further links to Western Eurasia were the discovery in 1939 of a Neanderthal sub-adult skeleton at the cave site of Teshik-Tash and the 2003 excavation of sub-adult teeth and cranial fragments from the Obi-Rakhmat rockshelter, which may also be related to Neanderthal populations. Both sites are located on the western slopes of the Tian Shan Mountains of Uzbekistan.

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Some of the most important Middle Palaeolithic sites of Inner Asia are those of the Anui River valley in the Altai Mountains. The principal Middle Palaeolithic sequence is found at the sites of Denisova Cave and Okladnikov Cave with the former providing the bulk of the record. The Denisova cave habitation dates back possibly as early as 130 000 years ago and covers the extent of the Middle Palaeolithic. Also recovered at Denisova Cave were teeth from a hominid identified as Neanderthal-like. This evidence and the skeletal finds from Teshik-Tash and Obi-Rakhmat, lend credence to the argument that much of this region was inhabited by hominids akin to the Neanderthals of Europe or other archaic human species, though this question is still controversial. Other cave sites such as Ust’ Kan, Kara-Bura, and Obi-Rakhmat, as well as open air scatters and flint quarries such as Kapchigai, located in the Altai and Tian Shan Mountains, testify to the effective adaptations of Middle Palaeolithic groups of the region. Middle Palaeolithic artifacts are found on the eastern flanks of the Altai and Tian Shan Mountains as well, though no sites of the depth and scale of the western Altai sites are known. The recently excavated cave at Tsagaan Agui in central Mongolia and the Tolbaga site near Lake Baikal represent the Middle Palaeolithic technologies of central Inner Asia. The transition to new stone tool technologies of the Upper Palaeolithic occurred by 40 000 years ago. Many major sites, such as Tsagaan Agui, Obi-Rakhmat, and Okladnikov Cave, contain continuous sequences from Middle Palaeolithic to Upper Palaeolithic materials. There are also new transitional sites such as Kara-Bom, the earliest Upper Palaeolithic site yet discovered at 43 000 BP. The Early Upper Palaeolithic

Upper Palaeolithic technology is based upon blade manufacture and prepared cores. Other finds include art objects and habitation structures. Typical Early Upper Palaeolithic sites are on terraces with good visibility overlooking the surrounding landscape. When these sites are large, they have hearths, pit features, and stone rings that supported structures. Smaller sites have unlined hearths and work areas, but few signs of long-term habitation. Cave sites continue to be used in this period, but are not the main focus of habitation. A number of cache sites, places where stone tools and raw materials were stored, have also been discovered. On the west Siberian plain, open-air sites with the remains of tundra and boreal megafauna including bison, reindeer, woolly rhinos, and mammoth are found, such as the mammoth-kill site at Tomsk. In Anui valley of the Altai Mountains, Okladnikov Cave continued to be

used during this time and contains Early Upper Palaeolithic layers dated to 42 000–33 000 BP, while the open air site of Ust’ Karakol nearby dates to 31 000 BP. In south central Siberia, Upper Palaeolithic sites date no earlier than 30 000 BP. The most famous of these sites is Mal’ta of the Angara river basin, which dates to 23 000 BP. A large area of this site has been excavated and tens of thousands of lithic and bone tools, and faunal remains were found along with organized habitation structures. The site is interpreted as a seasonal reindeer hunting camp that was used repeatedly. Other notable sites in the greater Baikal region include the stratified sites of Krasny Yar and the riverside bluff site of Kamenka in the Lower Selenge river valley. Farther afield, the cave site of Tsagaan Agui at the northern edge of the Gobi desert continued to be used. Shuidonggou, south of the Gobi and north of the Yellow River is the southernmost major site of the Inner Asian Upper Palaeolithic type. There are scores of Upper Palaeolithic sites recorded from Inner Asia and based on their chronology and distribution, it is possible to observe how Pleistocene climate fluctuation and glacial cycles created variable biogeographic conditions that affected when and where human groups lived. Expanding glaciers and cold regions pushed people southward while retreating glaciers re-opened formerly inaccessible areas. The final iteration of this long-term process followed the conclusion of the last glacial maximum (18 000 BP) and brought populations back into Siberia by 14 000 BP, and across Beringia to North America. The End of the Upper Palaeolithic

Following the last glacial maximum, the Holocene environment of Inner Asia stabilized close to the conditions we know today, initiating the terminal stage of the Palaeolithic. The final innovation in lithic technology across Inner Asia was the invention of microblade technology. Developing out of local Upper Palaeolithic traditions, this technology centered on interchangeable and easily replaceable lithic components in many types of compound tools. The material remains of microblade technology are distinctive core forms and very small bladelets (Figure 2). Also during the Holocene, site locations shifted to emphasize riverine valleys, river banks, and confluences. Site composition, the animals hunted, and artifact assemblages all suggest that these people were more mobile than their mid Upper Palaeolithic predecessors. Sites were inhabited for short periods and revisited repeatedly, rather than occupied for longer spans of time. Microlithic tool users began to inhabit high elevation regions such as the upper Altai and the Tibetan Plateau, and a notable fluorescence of habitation

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Figure 2 Prismatic cores for the production of microblades, north central Mongolia.

appeared around Lake Baikal in South Siberia and in the desert oases of the Tarim Basin, Xinjiang.

The Domestication of Inner Asia The Neolithic of Mongolia is dated from 8000 to 4500 BP and is best known from sites located in the Gobi desert and the eastern steppe where mixed microlithic assemblages and fragments of low fired, gray and red coarse ware ceramics are found, often with corded and painted decorations. The term Neolithic in the case of Inner Asia is not always defined by the

domestication of plants and animals as in most other regions of Eurasia, but instead by the advent of ceramic technology. The initial indication that hunter-gatherer groups began exploiting local environments in novel ways is the appearance of grinding stones at sites having typical Neolithic artifact assemblages, such as Shabarak Us (Bayanzag Culture), in the South Gobi of Mongolia. Shabarak Us is located in an area of playas and stabilized sand dunes subject to wind erosion that exposed 18 sub-sites having microlithic industries, ceramics, polished adzes, bifacial projectile points, and ostrich eggshell artifacts.

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The site is described in the Russian literature as an early to middle Neolithic temporary camp, probably inhabited by semi-mobile groups from 6000–5000 BP. Based on the evidence for grinding slabs and pestles, Shabarak Us is thought to represent either incipient agriculture or a greater specialization in the use of wild grains. In either case, the appearance of such artifacts at a number of sites in the Gobi region suggests an important investment in a broader range of subsistence activities. During the mid to late Neolithic of eastern Mongolia (5200–4500 BP), there is material evidence suggesting simple agricultural production, sedentism, and exploitation of large herbivores such as wild cattle and horse. The site that best characterizes Neolithic agricultural production is Tamsagbulag located in Dornod province on the eastern Mongolian steppe. Broad horizontal exposures at this site revealed a large number of rectangular pit-houses, the largest of which encompassed an area of 42 m2. Small pit burials with interred individuals positioned in crouching or sitting positions and covered with red ochre powder were discovered below the floor levels of these houses, along with composite tools and shell beads. The combined artifact assemblage of both houses and burials provides a unique perspective on a small-scale steppe group employing simple agricultural techniques to grow millet and specialized hunting to obtain large grazing animals. The artifact inventory from Tamsagbulag consists of wedge-shaped prismatic cores and a wide variety of blade-based implements, an advanced bone industry, and ceramic vessels. Tools related to agriculture are numerous and include grinding stones and pestles, circular quern stones, hoes, and weights for digging sticks. Indications of extensive and specialized use of wild animals are based on the faunal remains recovered from habitation deposits, including evidence for fishing. In addition to human interments beneath pit house floors, excavations also revealed pits containing large numbers of horse and cattle bones, including several conspicuously large bullhorns. Other intentional deposits of cattle bones are known from the eastern Mongolian steppe and have been interpreted as cult practices to ensure agricultural success. Tamsagbulag provides evidence that simple agriculture was practiced on the northeastern steppe, however, many contemporary areas have no such evidence. One example is Serovo period hunter-gatherer groups (6200–5000 BP) known from late Neolithic cemeteries such as Ust’-Ida, along the shores of Lake Baikal and the Angara river of Siberia. These groups included a specialization in seals as well as a number of ungulate species in their local hunting adaptation. Hunting and gathering subsistence practices also characterized the high Altai Mountain and Gobi-Altai regions

of western Inner Asia and seem to have been followed directly by simple herding economies. Southeast of Lake Baikal a pattern more similar to that of the Gobi Neolithic is present. Short-term campsites such as Budulan on the banks of the Onon river were inhabited during the fifth millennium BP by semi-mobile huntergatherers using a microlithic tool kit, thin-walled ceramics with rounded bases, grinding stones, stone pestles, and mortars. As in the case of Shabarak Us, archaeologists argue that the occurrence of grain processing stone assemblages at Budulan and other such sites may represent increasingly specialized gathering practices or experimentation with domesticates. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic groups of eastern Inner Mongolia experienced a substantially different subsistence trajectory from those regions described above. The traditional model for the rise of agriculture across China is one of diffusion outward from the Yellow River basin. This explanation for agricultural origins has been challenged by radiocarbon dates from Inner Mongolia and northeastern China where two indigenous agricultural traditions emerged at very early periods, the Xinglongwa (8000–6800 BP) and Zhaobaogou (6800–6000 BP) cultures. These cultures relied upon hunting, simple cultivation, and probably domesticated pigs. By the fifth millennium BP, when initial changes in food production are thought to have occurred on the northern steppe, Inner Mongolian groups of the Hongshan/Xiaoheyan (6500–4200 BP) cultures resided in permanent dispersed villages of one to two hectares having pit and surface dwellings along with numerous storage pits for grain. East Inner Mongolian subsistence at this time consisted of animal husbandry, especially of pigs, simple hoe-based agriculture, and deer hunting. Craft production included microlithic and polished stone industries as well as bone, ceramic, and impressive jade object manufacture.

The Eneolithic and Initial Forest-Steppe Herding By the fifth millennium BP, the Inner Asian steppe was characterized by substantial variation in subsistence and lifeways, from hunting-gathering-fishing groups to sedentary village communities relying primarily on domesticated grains and animals. Across this patchwork of Neolithic economies, more extensive forms of domestic animal use occurred gradually throughout the eastern steppe zone. The Eneolithic period is transitional between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Botai, an Eneolithic site in northern Kazakhstan, provides an important window on changing relationships between human beings and animals. The

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Botai culture (5600–5100 BP) developed a sedentary, village-based lifeway relying on the intensive exploitation of wild horses as game animals. Long-term use of and familiarity with horses may have resulted in both the domestication and possible riding of horses in order to track and hunt wild equids, though the evidence for this argument is still debated. The earliest credible evidence in Inner Asia for Eneolithic food producing economies involving herd animals is found in the Yenisei region of south central Siberia. Peoples of the Afanas’evo culture were originally thought to have entered the Russian Altai Mountains and middle Yenisei river valley from regions farther west, bringing with them the first herd animals as well as mortuary rituals and ceramic styles similar to those of the western Yamnaya culture (5100–4200 BP). Ceramics and burials of this culture have also been described from western Mongolia, the Russian Altai region, and from northern Xinjiang. A series of early absolute dates from mortuary contexts in Minusinsk has recently redefined the chronology of the Afanas’evo (5500/5100–4500 BP) and now casts doubt on the migration theory, perhaps supporting instead a model for indigenous development, though this is controversial. The economic and organizational character of Afanas’evo culture is quite different from cultures using domestic stock in western Central Eurasia. Afanas’evo peoples had an economy based primarily on hunting and the use of domestic sheep, cattle, and later on, horses, as well as simple copper industries. Only a small number of settlements are known from this period, one example being Tepsei-X. These habitations have cultural remains very similar to those recovered from Afanas’evo burial sites, such as Suchanicha, Afanas’evo Mountain, and Karasuk-III. Afanas’evo groups did not have well-developed techniques for herd exploitation and lacked many of the secondary resources that were to be used at later times, such as dairy production and animal traction. Burial inventories include artifacts with potential agricultural use, such as stone pestles and wooden mortars, though as mentioned above, such finds may also suggest increasingly specialized gathering of local grasses and plants. Afanas’evo subsistence was primarily a huntinggathering adaptation which included the keeping of domesticated animals, and is therefore often described as transitional in character between food acquisition and food production. These patterns were continued and intensified by the subsequent Okunev culture (4600–4000 BP) of the Minusinsk basin which had a different style of ceramics, new burial practices, and more elaborate metallurgy, including the limited production of bronze implements. The Okunev period

is also known for its striking repertoire of artistic iconography which appears on stone slabs used to construct tombs and on stone stelae, initiating a long tradition of standing stone monument construction across the eastern steppe.

The Mature Bronze Age: Inner Asian Mobility, Metallurgy, and Interaction The Middle and Late Bronze Age of eastern Central Eurasia is associated with the Andronovo cultural horizon dated in its entirety to 4200–3000 BP. Several regional variants of this extensive and diverse cultural complex appear initially in the southern Uralic mountain and steppe region and extend over time to the south and east as far as eastern Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, Altai, and the Minusinsk basin. Underlying similarities in material culture based upon ceramic styles, mortuary constructions, and bronze industries tie three major regional phases together: SintashtaPetrovka (4200–3800 BP, southern Urals, northwestern Kazakhstan); Alakul (3700–3300 BP, southern Urals, northwest and north central Kazakhstan, forest-steppe boundary up to the northern bend of the Irtysh river); Fedorovo (3500–3200 BP, northeastern Kazakhstan with later extension into southeastern Kazakhstan, the Russian Altai, and Minusinsk basin). These main phases were followed by a number of localized cultures during the terminal Bronze Age. The technological and organizational changes associated with the Andronovo cultures had impact across Inner Asia and as far as the early dynastic states of the Chinese Central Plain and the ancient Near East. Andronovo Subsistence and Settlement

The peoples of the various Andronovo subcultures are thought to have practiced settled agro-pastoralism during the early periods and gradually transitioned to a greater dependency on herd animals and increased mobility by later phases. Very little direct botanical evidence for agriculture has been discovered, though researchers believe agricultural production was practiced based on the presence of grain-processing toolkits having mortars and pestles and occasional finds of millet and barley, especially at larger habitations. The settlement record for the Mature Bronze Age in eastern Central Eurasia is substantial and lends support to the model of village-oriented lifeways, at least until the Fedorovo period when many settlement sites had intermittent occupations, possibly related to seasonal movements of peoples and herds. Interlaced with settlement sites are Andronovo cemeteries of monumental kurgan burials.

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Although much of the Andronovo period is characterized by small- to moderate-sized settlements located near water sources and having a number of rectangular house structures, large settlements up to 3 ha in size are known from the Sintashta-Petrovka phase. These settlements are clearly defensive sites with oval, circular, or rectangular layouts which were preplanned and comprised walled fortifications and cellular domicile arrangements. Several sites from the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains, called by archaeologists the ‘Country of Towns’, could be considered type sites, including Bersuat, Stepnoe, and the best known of the circular variety, Arkaim. In all, there are approximately 20 known fortified settlements in this region which stretches along the eastern base of the Urals for 400 km. A number of these settlements have extensive remains of smelting ovens, bronze slag, copper ore, crucibles, and molds, providing evidence for highly specialized and intensive bronze artifact and copper ingot production, leading some researchers to describe these settlements as Bronze Age industrial centers. Dispersals of Steppe Bronze Technology

Simple copper or small-scale bronze technologies emerged among peoples of the western Yamnaya culture, the Botai-Tersek cultures, Afanas’evo/Okunev cultures, and around Lake Baikal among Glazkovo hunter-gatherer groups (5300–3300 BP). During the course of the Andronovo cultural period, bronzemanufacturing techniques, arsenic and tin alloy formulas, and artifact types spread across much of Kazakhstan, Western Siberia, and Inner Asia. Regions where metallic ores existed were visited or occupied by diverse groups and heavily exploited, as with the copper mining sites of Kenkazgan, north central Kazakhstan, and Vorovskaya Yama in the upper Ural river basin. Other ancient copper and tin sources are known from the Altai Mountains, the Yenisei river basin, Xinjiang, and Uzbekistan. Due to the geographical dispersion of resources, manufacturing centers, and areas of bronze consumption, the social dynamics of bronze in eastern Central Eurasia necessitated cultural networks of exchange, interaction, competition, and movement. For example, long distance interaction was initiated between steppe groups and the urban oasis centers of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in the Kara Kum desert region (4200–3800 BC). Though somewhat controversial, current evidence suggests that cultural contact between the steppe and Xinjiang, Gansu, and Ningxia may have contributed to the appearance of initial bronze industries along the periphery of China. Such contacts are thought to have contributed a number of

implement types, alloys, and production techniques to this region by 4200 BP (e.g., Qijia and Siba cultures). These early technological developments from China’s northwest subsequently influenced the appearance of local bronze industries and exchange regimes in the Ordos region (early Zhukaigou) and eastern Inner Mongolia (Lower Xiajiadian) by 4000 BP. Across Mongolia archaeologists have found artifacts related to bronze work, such as two-piece stone molds, ore pounders, and crucibles as well as several copper mining and bronze production sites such as Zuukh (southwestern Mongolia), Oyu Tolgoi (South Gobi), and Erdenet (northern Mongolia). Metallurgical production during the Late Bronze Age became increasingly sophisticated in resource transport, alloying and casting, and in the wide diversity of decorative items, tools, and weapons created in bronze. The Seima-Turbino technological horizon of the Late Bronze Age marks the widespread adoption of a highly developed tin alloy bronze culture across eastern Central Eurasia that includes specific artifact types (curved dagger-knives, socketed axes and spearheads, and associated nephrite jade axes) and stylized depictions of steppe and forest animals. Though this highly refined bronze culture was practiced over a tremendously large region, it drew upon copper, tin, and jade sources located in the Sayan-Altai Mountains based on exchange networks between the Altai and production sites like Atasu in Central Kazakhstan and Rostovka on the Irtysh river. Dispersals of Transport Technology

The movement of material culture, its styles, and production methods across large geographical areas suggest both contact and interaction and the development of similar systems of symbolic meaning across dispersed communities. The mobility made possible by herd-based subsistence and supported with animal transport using wagons and carts probably played an important role in maintaining steppe interaction. Wagons pulled by oxen were initially employed as part of the steppe adaptation during the Yamnaya cultural period of western Central Eurasia. By 4000 BP, Andronovo-Sintashta period kurgan cemeteries have the earliest evidence for lightweight, spoked wheel carts or chariots, as well as the horses which pulled them and their harness equipment. This provides solid evidence for traction using domesticated horses and further suggests that the complex and labor intensive kurgan burials in which these vehicles were found, likely marked the differentiated social status of their owners. Beyond marking high status and having ceremonial or display value, chariots may also have been involved in the proliferation of warfare across the

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steppe. Evidence for a period of heightened conflict includes the heavy fortifications at early Andronovo sites and the widespread manufacture of specialized weapons, such as pick-axes and stone mace-heads, which have no function as tools. Chariots were the first rapid transport land vehicle and chariot technology using horse traction spread quickly from the northern steppe southward, and possibly as far as the ancient Near East. Between the Kazakh steppe and the Central Plain of China there is little direct evidence for chariot use during the Bronze Age, though by 3250 BP fully developed chariot culture appeared in the royal Shang dynasty tombs at Yinxu, Anyang. So far, only a corridor of Bronze Age petroglyph sites document knowledge of chariots in vivid images across the Russian and Mongolian Altai Mountains, the Tian Shan of Xinjiang, and the Inner Mongolian Yinshan range (Figure 3). Solid wooden wheels dated to 3200 BP have been recovered at the cemetery site of Qizilchoqa near Hami, Xinjiang and a spoked wheel is reported from the animal corral site of Nomhong in Qinghai (mid-fourth millennium BP). Neither of these contexts is associated with evidence for horse traction and these particular wheel specimens were probably designed for use with carts.

In addition to the emergence of chariot use, several archaeologists argue for the development of horseback riding during or prior to the Andronovo cultural period. It is notoriously difficult to archaeologically differentiate human groups practicing horse hunting from those who had domesticated horses and to date the most convincing evidence has been provided by bit wear analysis (the identification of beveling on horse teeth from metallic bit use), for example, at the Eneolithic site of Botai. However, there are good arguments questioning the reliability of bit wear evidence for indicating horse husbandry. One problem with this analysis is that soft material bits made from thong or rope do not cause reliably detectable beveling. Bit wear is a good source of indirect evidence for horse control when combined with other lines of supporting evidence. These include the identification of bridle equipment in contexts with horses, reconstruction of horse herd demographics, and high numbers of horses associated with other domestic herd animals. The best direct evidence for horse management is to be found in historical references or clear artistic depictions, the earliest of which date to the very end of the fifth millennium BP. Likewise, burial contexts in which horses are unmistakably associated with traction equipment, as at the Sintashta site, also date to the late fifth and early fourth millennium BP. Since the management of horse herds would be logistically difficult on foot or by vehicle, horse riding must have emerged prior to horse traction sometime before 4100 BP, though there exists no unquestionable evidence for this early practice as of yet.

Rise of the Steppe: Monuments, Art, and Politics

Figure 3 Pecked image of a spoked, two-wheeled cart or chariot from the site of Tebsh Uul, southwest Mongolia.

During the Terminal Bronze and Early Iron Age (3400–2300 BP), Inner Asia began to share in steppe-wide symbolic, ideological, and elite status systems referred to archaeologically as Early Nomad or Scythian culture. Significant features of this period were herd animal dependency, pervasive horse riding and specific styles of harness gear, a bronze weapon set that included short swords, three winged arrow points, and decorative craft goods with ‘animal style’ ornamentation. The Scythian horizon was first thought to have originated in western Central Eurasia spreading eastward through migration into Inner Asia. This model has been revised based on a series of radiocarbon dates from South Siberian kurgan sites suggesting that diagnostic Scythian (or ScythoSiberian) features probably emerged from local innovation, cultural diffusion, and migratory processes initiated in the east and elaborated across multiple

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steppe centers. Throughout the third millennium BP, regional cultural dynamics were driven by greater access to mobility, intra-steppe interaction, and increasing interchange with state societies on the periphery of the Eurasian grasslands. Herd Animal Dependence and Developed Horseback Riding

Subsistence related changes observed at Siberian and Mongolian sites over the Eneolithic, Bronze, and Early Iron Ages involved the initial appearance of stock animals followed by growing presence of cattle in forested regions and smaller stock (sheep/goat) in open grasslands. Both cattle and sheep/goat herding are found with increasing evidence for horse use. Increase in herd size generally correlates with increases in mobility since more animals deplete pasture at a greater rate and must move more frequently in order to feed. Such provisioning might be accomplished by an entire household and its herds moving every season to a new locale or just as well by a few members of a sedentary household moving the family animals to highland pastures for a limited time before returning to their settlement. In both cases, some degree of mobility was required to support larger numbers of cattle and small stock. Both patterns were employed in parts of Inner Eurasia, however, the availability of domesticated horses favored the first strategy on steppe grasslands. Horses are a source of meat and dairy products, but they also facilitate extensive mobile pastoralism through mounted herd management, traction and packing during residential movement, and by instinctive grazing behaviors which help to support other large and small herd animals, especially during winter. Combinations of evidence for horse use, horse riding equipment, cattle or small stock-based herd composition, and temporary habitation are used to support arguments for increased mobile pastoralism. For example, the Minusinsk basin along the middle Yenisei river was the center of the terminal Bronze Age Karasuk culture (3300–2900 BP) which had extensions into the Altai region, eastern Kazakhstan, and northwestern Mongolia. The Karasuk culture shows geographical variation, though it is primarily identified by distinctively styled and well-made bronze artifacts, stone slab and cist burial constructions, and hand-built, rounded pottery, with geometric incised decorations. Local groups of the Minusinsk basin exploited mountain pastures and rich soils of the river valley bottoms by farming and practicing seasonal transhumance to support cattle based livestock holdings. In the beginning of the first millennium B.C., there is a marked increase in the presence

of sheep and goats in Karasuk archaeological contexts as well as the first appearance of horse riding equipment that Russian archaeologists accept as evidence for increased pastoral investment and mobility which continued into the subsequent Tagar culture (2800–2100 BP). Similar faunal patterns showing marked increases in cattle and sheep/goat and horse occur at roughly contemporary habitation sites across South Siberia, from the Kulunda steppe of the western Altaiskii krai (e.g., Gridino and Kaigorodka-III) to the Shev’inskaia site on the Kuenga river of Chita province, eastern Zabaikal’e. Once again, the subsistence activities represented at these sites are diverse, but they do have in common a core subsistence strategy with herd animals as an emerging focus. Some areas have evidence for residential mobility in addition to pastoral investment. The stratified Dvortsy habitation of Chita province as well as several contemporary habitation sites in the region have multiple occupations from the fourth millennium BP. The later habitation strata at these sites show decreasing deposit depth and artifact densities over time, potentially related to increased seasonal mobility. The earliest dates for developed horse riding in most parts of Inner Asia are still relatively late. The best direct evidence is the discovery of preserved saddles in the frozen tombs of the Pazyryk culture (2550–2250 BP), Altai Mountains. Earlier evidence includes sacrificial horses in full harness gear interred in the Arzhan kurgan of the Uyok basin, Tuva, and dated to 2800 BP. On the Mongolian steppe, horse crania appear in ceremonial contexts as early as 3300 BP and a burial context in the Egiin Gol valley contained three horse skulls, antler cheek pieces, and evidence from the interred human skeleton for joint stress potentially related to riding at 2900 BP. The earliest direct material evidence for riding known from Inner Mongolia is bronze work with an artistic depiction of riders mounted on horses from the Nanshangen site, 2800–2700 BP. Horse riding was not adopted by Chinese state societies until 2350 BP when the need arose to compete militarily with the archer-horsemen of Inner Asia (see Asia, East: Chinese Civilization). Steppe Elite, Monuments, and Political Ideologies

The transition to more mobile lifeways was also associated with the emergence of differentiated political and economic relationships. These organizational changes had origins in the Andronovo period along with early chariots, specialized bronze work, and kurgan style burial mounds. Novel political relationships involved both the hereditary right to leadership

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and greater control over group labor, resources, and military activities. How and why these sociopolitical transformations towards institutional inequality and individualized leadership occurred among steppe peoples is still poorly understood, though the material indications for these changes are pervasive. During the Early Iron Age, leadership systems involving individual prestige and steppe-based cultural identities were increasingly expressed through material media such as monumental mortuary constructions and decorative artistic styles. The marking of elite status by mortuary wealth and great expenditures of labor on elaborate burial constructions grew from preceding burial practices that were often monumental in scale but may not have been associated with hereditary status. For example, the khirigsuur stone monuments of Mongolia required substantial labor, though it is still unclear why early communities created these massive sites. Khirigsuurs date from 3350–2800 BP and are large stone mounds with rectangular or circular stone enclosures surrounding them and multiple stone piles beyond these enclosures in the form of satellite features (Figure 4). These smaller stone mounds sometimes contain horse crania and vertebrae and occasional fragments of ceramics or bronze items. Approximately 40% of such monuments contain some evidence for human interment though in many cases they seem to be non-mortuary, ceremonial constructions which may have marked local landscapes, territories, and community gatherings. Khirigsuurs are related to the Central Eurasian tradition of building stone or earthen kurgan mortuary mounds and they have similarities to burial constructions in the Sayan-Altai region, Minusinsk, Tuva and perhaps as far east as Manchuria, though further work is needed on khirigsuur variability and dating. By the initial Early Nomad/Scythian period (2800 BP) a widespread mortuary emphasis on individual status occurs across much of Inner Asia. In Zabaikal’e and central and eastern Mongolia, individual interment in burials made of large standing stone slabs in rectangular arrangements replaces khirigsuur construction. Slab burials show great variation in size of construction, amounts of ceramics, animal bones, bronzes, and exotic items included in each assemblage and in this way suggest different ranks of status for those buried. However, this period of Inner Asian prehistory is best known for the impressive ‘royal’ kurgans, especially the Arzhan site, the Pazyryk kurgans, and the Golden Warrior kurgan of Issyk, southeastern Kazakhstan. Each of these Inner Asian mortuary sites is notable for size, labor expenditure, rich and exotic assemblages and their marked differences from burials of commoners, which are modest in comparison. The

Saka culture Issyk kurgan (2500–2400 BP), an earthen and timber mound of 60 m diameter and 6 m in height, is famous for a 16–18 year-old youth buried with an entire coat of gold discovered in an undisturbed southern side chamber. The Pazyryk cemetery kurgans (2300 BP) are known for their permafrost preservation conditions which have provided a spectacular record of wooden objects, textiles, the coat and skin of interred horses, and preserved human bodies with intricate tattoo designs. A number of recent discoveries and excavations of frozen tombs in the Altai Mountains are adding to our knowledge of the intermediate elite and commoners of the Pazyryk period. These include work at the sites of Ak-Alakha on the Ukok plateau and the 2006 excavation of a similar complex on the Mongolian side of the Altai Mountains at the site of Olon Guuriin Goliin Hondii. The Arzhan kurgan located in the Uyok basin of central Tuva is important evidence for monumental interment of an elite individual whose burial assemblage contained diagnostic material culture of the Scythian cultural horizon at an early period. The radiocarbon dates from Arzhan gave researchers the first indication that one of the earliest centers of the Scythian cultural horizon was in fact, Siberia. The kurgan is a circular stone mound, 120 m across and 4 m high with a complex internal timber construction dividing the feature into 70 chambers. Excavations revealed a central burial chamber with elaborate log coffins associated with the elite occupants, 160 harnessed riding horses, a number of accompanying human interments described as ‘attendants’, bronze weapons and tools, horse tack, early iron implements, items of personal adornment in gold and turquoise, examples of Scytho-Siberian ‘animal style’ bronzes, and fragments of ‘deer stones’. Archaeologists believe that the artistic motifs found at Arzhan are emblematic of a set of symbols associated with the ideology of elite leadership which eventually become part of the symbolic vocabulary of steppe peoples from Inner Mongolia to the Black Sea. Central Eurasian ‘animal style’ is an art form in which predators and ungulates of the forest-steppe are depicted in semi-abstract design emphasizing intertwinement and flows of movement (Figure 5). The designs are rendered in wood, bone, textile, metals, and stone, as well as on human skin in the form of tattoos, such as those known from the Pazyryk cemetery. Early examples of animal style are the ‘deer stone’ stelae known from Mongolia, Altai, Tuva, and Buriatiia which consist of a four-sided standing stone of up to 2.5 m height and carved images of stylized deer, belts with hanging weapons and recurved bows, and at the top, circular designs or very

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Figure 4 Schematic plan of a khirigsuur monument from the Egiin Gol valley, Mongolia and photograph of a khirigsuur complex at Tebsh Uul, Mongolia.

occasionally, a human face. One interpretation is that deer stone monuments are anthropomorphic representations depicting the head, deer tattooed body, and weapons of a high status individual. Current estimates date the beginning of deer stone construction on the eastern steppe at 3000 BP (Figure 6). Animal style was adopted rapidly across Inner Asia and further westward during the first half of the third millennium BP. Its geographical spread shaped the interaction sphere of the nomadic world at a time when distinctions between ‘steppe and sown’ became strongly emphasized. This process was particularly

notable in the regions north and west of the Chinese Central Plain, known as the Northern Zone. As early as 3400–3300 BP, bronzes in a style similar to the Karasuk of Siberia appear at the settlement and cemetery site of Zhukaigou in the Ordos Loop, Inner Mongolia. Zhukaigou is thought to be a copper trade and production center with contacts to both steppe groups in the north and the Middle Shang dynasty centers of the south. By the third millennium BP, these initial steppe contacts were radically restructured by groups of the Northern Zone who affiliated themselves with steppe cultural identity through the adoption of

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Figure 5 Bronze animal style decorative piece of a wild horned sheep from the Middle Gobi site of Baga Gazaryn Chuluu, Mongolia.

animal style decorations. These changes in burial practice are evident at the Upper Xiajiadian (3100–2600 BP) Xiaobaiyang cemetery, Chifeng region, and in western Inner Mongolia at the cemetery of Maoqinggou of the Ordos Bronze culture (2750–2250 BP). Mortuary sites of Gansu and Xinjiang also show the adoption of steppe material cultural assemblages. These transformations along the frontiers of Late Shang and Zhou period China have parallels in South Siberia. On the northwestern shore of Lake Baikal and on Olkhon Island, slab burial mortuary culture appears from the south and with it, the first evidence for domesticated herd animals in what was, until 3000 BP, a region of bronze producing huntergatherers (Glazkovo culture). Excavation of slab burial cemeteries on Olkhon Island at Khujir indicates either that indigenous peoples adopted the material culture and subsistence systems of neighboring pastoralists or that southern steppe groups entered the region. In either case, these interactions on the frontier of the taiga forest of Siberia may have been due to the valuable exchange opportunities that existed for taiga furs and medicinal plants, products with high exchange value to both steppe and Chinese groups. These observations from the Northern Zone and Siberia during the third millennium BP argue for relatively swift transformations in culture and identity among outlying groups choosing to be involved within the exchange, status, and ideological systems of the pastoral nomadic steppe. These long distance inter-connections among diverse groups having a variety of lifeways created the integrative foundations of the first nomadic states and empires in Inner Asia.

The Xiongnu Polity and Steppe Civilization

Figure 6 Deer stone complex at Uushigiin Ovor, Khovsgol province, northwest Mongolia.

material, ideological, and political cultures of the steppe nomads. Evidence consists of changes in burial structures and assemblages reflecting an emphasis on individual prestige through steppe artifact types (knives, daggers, arrowheads, buttons, and belt plaques) and

By 2200 BP, much of Inner Asia became integrated in large-scale nomadic polities having names such as Wusun and Xiongnu which appear in the historical documents of neighboring states. These historical records often portray steppe peoples as uncultured and predatory, an enduring stereotype that masks the intricacies of nomadic cultures across Central Eurasia. To the contrary, the rise of these regional polities, some would argue, initiated a distinctive ‘steppe civilization’ which became fully developed under the imperial Mongols (800 BP). The Xiongnu was a mounted, iron-, bronze-, and ceramics-producing, pastoral nomadic group under whose name the first nomadic state was organized during a period contemporary with the Qin and Han dynasties of China (2221–1800 BP). Chinese historical accounts have been the major source of information on the society, culture, and politics of the Xiongnu, though the

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process by which they founded their extensive polity is still little known. Two bodies of theory explain Xiongnu emergence as occurring either by way of economic and political dependence on Chinese states or through the creation of an indigenous political economy of internal agropastoral production and long-distance sources of trade and tribute. In either case, the Xiongnu polity was constructed from diverse political and economic traditions through the integration of distinctive Inner Asian peoples. Xiongnu archaeological culture has been identified from Manchuria to Kazakhstan, and from Minusinsk to Ningxia. The heartland of the Xiongnu state was most likely in north central Mongolia and Buriatiia, along the drainages of the Selenge, Orkhon, and Tuul rivers. This region holds the major Xiongnu cemetery sites and most of the known settlements. Based on recent absolute dating, the time-span of recognizable Xiongnu occupation in this area (2400–1850 BP) precedes and postdates their appearance in the Chinese historical sources. Xiongnu Mortuary Culture

From its beginning in the late nineteenth century, Xiongnu archaeology has consisted mainly of cemetery excavations. The mortuary perspective has provided evidence for the internal complexity of the Xiongnu state since burials reveal a hierarchy of different scales and mortuary styles. Xiongnu cemeteries range from a few burials to hundreds of graves ranging over various size groups. In Mongolia and South Siberia, these cemeteries appear to follow a four-level size/type hierarchy based on the kind of burials present and their numbers. The two main types, of Xiongnu burials are simple stone ring pit burials and large ‘dromos’ style burials distinguished by a sloping passageway used to furnish the mortuary chamber. Cemeteries can generally be grouped into four types, comprised of 5–30 ring burials, 65–110 ring burials, 200–400 ring burials, and one or more ‘dromos’ style burial having varying numbers of associated ring burials and unmarked interments. Recent DNA analysis of skeletal samples from the Burkhan Tolgoi ring burial cemetery (Mongolia), shows that these cemeteries were internally organized according to local lineage groups. In addition, variability in burial type, size, and assemblage seems to be related to a number of identity markers including gender, age, and individual status, though widespread looting in antiquity makes such analysis difficult. Ring burials are thought to be of local or intermediate level elite, and are identified on the modern surface by a ring of sedimented stones, 5–14 m in diameter, with a slight depression in the center (Figure 7). Below

this ring feature, an oval or rectangular burial pit descends to a depth of up to 2–3 m and houses one of eight varieties of internal construction. Among these, the most common contain a wood plank coffin, or a full wooden chamber and coffin, or a chamber constructed from stone slabs, with or without a coffin. The interred individual is commonly placed in a supine position and oriented to the north. Burials are often single interments, though there are also many examples of paired burials consisting of a female and child or a male and female adult interred within a double wooden chamber. Grave furnishings include three to four main types of slow wheel constructed ceramics, compound bow pieces, bone and iron tools, iron cheek pieces and bits, semiprecious stone beads, animal style decorations, and the remains of sheep/goat, cattle, and horses. Nonlocal artifacts include Chinese lacquer ware, bronze mirror fragments, and coins as well as items from northern Siberia and western Central Eurasia. Prominent ring burial sites include Tebsh Uul and Morin Tolgoi in Mongolia and the Derestui cemetery of Buriatiia. Royal Xiongnu burials are large structures and have long, sloping corridors or passageways known as ‘dromos/dromoi’, so-called because of their similarity to Black Sea Scythian kurgans which are thought to draw upon Greek designs. The sloping entryway is also known from Shang and Zhou tombs in China but was probably independently derived in each area as a functional way of provisioning a deep burial chamber. Several sites known to have these burials are Tsaram in southern Buriatiia, and Noyon Uul, Gol Mod, and Takhiltyn Khotgor cemeteries in central and western Mongolia. On the surface, these burials consist of a rectangular or trapezoidal earth and stone platform mound up to 30 m on a side and 1–2 m in height. The tombs are oriented north–south and on the south side appears the dromos entryway up to 22 m in length and often with internal wooden structures and artifacts included in the passage. The burial pits of these tombs reach 10 m or more in depth and the construction overlying the chamber consists of soil, stone, and wooden layers, as well as partitions built of articulated logs. The burial chamber includes an inner and outer wooden enclosure of hewn timbers and wooden planks. Within the innermost chamber, a wooden coffin holding an interred individual is found, though disruption from pillaging has often destroyed the internal contexts of these sites. The artifact assemblages of the Noyon Uul dromi burials, excavated in the 1920s, are exceptionally well known due to the preservation of organic materials by water seepage into burial chambers. The Noyon Uul tombs were richly furnished with large ceramic vessels, felt carpets, wooden carvings, clothing, silks,

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Figure 7 Plan of an excavated Xiongnu period ring burial with internal stone slabs, wooden coffin planks, and human skeletal fragments in disarray from early pillaging, Egiin Gol valley, Mongolia. Originally published in: T. Torbat, Ch. Amartuvshin, and U. Erderebat (2003) Egiin Goly sav nutag dakh’ arkheologiin dursgaluud. Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian Institute of Archaeology, p. 256.

jade objects, bronze mirrors, lacquer containers, and horse riding equipment. Animal remains included horse, cattle, camel, and deer, and domestic grain was recovered as well. Recent excavations at the Tsaram and Gol Mod cemeteries have both produced the complete remains of two-wheeled horse drawn

carriages of Han dynasty design. Such elite contexts provide important evidence for a high degree of status differentiation among individuals within the Xiongnu polity. The excavations at the site of Tsaram have provided further evidence for status differentiation in the form of eight individual male interments

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arranged according to age around a central dromos burial, suggesting a pattern of intentional human sacrifice. Such monumental burial sites have been discovered throughout central Mongolia and southern Buriatiia. The Inner Mongolian sites of Xigoupan and Budonggou, and Daodunzi of Ningxia are contemporary with, and share some affinities with, the Xiongnu mortuary culture of Mongolia and Siberia, though no sites similar to the royal Xiongnu tombs have been discovered. Xiongnu Settlement Archaeology

The geographic range of Xiongnu archaeological culture encompasses a great diversity of ecological environments including desert, oases, steppe, and the forest steppe regions of Siberia. Locales vary as to the availability of productive soils, water, protected winter pasture, and other critical resources for agricultural and pastoral subsistence alike. Historical texts describe the Xiongnu as specialized mobile pastoralists, however, the extent to which specialized herding, transhumance, and settled cultivation were combined as subsistence strategies within the larger state is still not clear. Nor is it clear how production varied chronologically or whether differences in subsistence were the result of adaptations to local environment or whether the Xiongnu economy was purposefully differentiated to support the needs of the state elite. The Xiongnu settlement record gives strong evidence that the productive economy within the Xiongnu polity was more complex and differentiated than historical accounts would suggest. Excavations of the Ivolga settlement, occupied from 2300–2100 BP, indicate that some portion of the Xiongnu population was settled and engaged in cultivation, craft production, and herding. Ivolga was a fortified settlement located on a terrace above an older course of the Selenge river in the foreststeppe of Buriatiia. A large cemetery of unmarked graves contemporary with settlement was found nearby. The settled area was approximately 7.5 ha in size and included a system of ditches, earthen ramparts, and a palisade. A portion of the settlement was excavated revealing 51 dwellings, a number of storage structures, and possible animal pens. Most of the dwellings were found to be semi-subterranean houses ranging from 9–46 m2 in area and having rectangular pits covered by a pitched roof with a sophisticated fireplace and heating system. A single structure near the center of the settlement was much larger in area (150 m2) and built on the ground surface, suggesting some differences in function or residential status. Ivolga inhabitants engaged in the cultivation and storage of grain and semi-specialized craft manufacture including iron

and bronze metallurgy and ceramic production. A range of Xiongnu material culture was recovered from the site such as metallic items, bronze mirror fragments, split bone arrow points, compound bow pieces, sickles, grinding stones, and digging tools. Archaeologists discovered millet, barley, and wheat grains and a faunal assemblage of sheep/goat, horse, cattle, yak, camel, and several wild species. These patterns of production are similar at the Dureny settlements in Buriatiia, south of Ivolga. Botanical evidence for wheat and millet use at seasonally occupied ‘pastoral’ campsites of the Xiongnu in the Egiin Gol valley appears at an early date and further supports the hypothesis of a more differentiated regional economy. Recent research on the Wusun period in southeastern Kazakhstan (2300–1800 BP) at the habitation site of Tuzusai shows a shift in agropastoral investment towards a greater emphasis on producing millet, wheat, and even rice. Researchers argue that this period of more intensive agriculture may have been linked to political consolidation under the Wusun polity and the need to increase and control critical resource production. In the Xiongnu case, such control may have been accomplished by the construction of walled centers, such as Ivolga. Recent reports of new Xiongnu walled settlements in Mongolia have increased the number of such ‘central places’ to between 15 and 20 sites. These settlements have rectangular earthen walls enclosing areas from 2 to 13 ha, traces of internal structures, and many are spatially integrated within networks of associated cemeteries. Though more work is still needed, the archaeological record shows a preliminary pattern across Inner Asia of large-scale political organization associated with regional economies involving both mobile and sedentary sectors. Steppe Civilization and Empires to Come

As the archaeological record shows, Inner Asian peoples, from a very early time, developed cultural traditions that functioned within an environment of movement and social diversity. The Xiongnu polity was the first experiment in applying these traditions to the creation of an extensive political organization across most of Inner Asia. This experiment was surprisingly successful, lasting almost 400 years before the first state itself dispersed across the steppe. The Xiongnu established a model for politics that would be remembered, emulated, and elaborated over the next two milleniums as numerous steppe empires mobilized their peoples and expanded across Eurasia. In the process of building their distinct empires, the Turks, Uighurs, Khitan, and medieval Mongols who

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followed upon the Xiongnu, integrated tremendous swathes of the Old World and created cultural, economic, and political innovations that would become the legacy of a genuine steppe civilization. See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, Central, Steppes; Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures; China, Paleolithic Cultures; Chinese Civilization; Asia, Northeast, Early States and Civilizations; Plant Domestication; Political Complexity, Rise of; Siberia, Peopling of.

Further Reading Boyle K, Renfrew C, and Levine M (eds.) (2002) Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Derevianko AP, Shimkin DR, and Powers W (eds.) (1998) The Paleolithic of Siberia: New Discoveries and Interpretations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fairservis W (1993) Archaeology of the Southern Gobi of Mongolia. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Honeychurch W and Amartuvshin C (2006) States on horseback: The rise of Inner Asian confederations and empires. In: Stark M (ed.) Asian Archaeology, pp. 255–278. Cambridge: Blackwell. Linduff K (ed.) (2002) Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Eurasia from the Urals to the Yellow River. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. Mei J (2000) Copper and Bronze Metallurgy in Late Prehistoric Xinjiang: Its Cultural Context and Relationship with Neighboring Regions. Oxford: Archaeopress. Rudenko SI (1970) Frozen Tombs of Siberia; The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shelach G (2008) Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China: Archaeological Perspectives on Identity Formation and Economic change during the First Millennium BCE. London: Equinox Publishing. Tsybiktarov AD (2002) Eastern Central Asia at the dawn of the Bronze Age: issues in ethno-cultural history of Mongolia and the southern Trans-Baikal region in the late third-early second millennium BC. Archaeology, Ethnology, and Anthropology of Eurasia 3: 107–123. Weber A, Link D, and Katzenberg MA (2002) Hunter-gatherer culture change and continuity in the Middle Holocene of the Cis-Baikal, Siberia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21: 230–299.

ASIA, CENTRAL, STEPPES Jeannine Davis-Kimball, American-Eurasian Research Institute, Ventura, CA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Achaemenid Persians Founded by Cyrus the Great (599–522 BCE) after uniting the Medes and Persian, two nomadic tribes who had originated in the Eurasian States. After his death east of the Oxus, at the hands of Tomyris queen of the Massagetae tribe, Darius the Great usurped the throne (522–486 BCE) and became the greatest Achaemenid ruler. Under Darius, the empire extended from Egypt to India. The last Achaemenid king, Darius III, was defeated by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. aimag The political and geographic equivalent of a state in Mongolia. aul A small village consisting of 3–5 yurts. Bactria A satrapy or province of the Achaemenid Empire located in present-day northern Afghanistan. balbal Anthropomorphic stelae belonging to the Early Turkic period. Bronze Age The period when people began manufacturing bronze items. The first bronzes were arsenical bronzes, smelted from the natural inclusion of arsenic in copper. True bronze is copper mixed with tin. The Bronze Age (4000–3000 BCE) did not arrive in Eurasian until c. 2000 BCE. Chalcolithic Age Also known as Eneolithic, this is the time of cultural development, c. late seventh millennium BCE, when the Neolithic (Stone) Age ended and people began to incorporate hammered copper objects into daily life.

Djungar Also spelled Jungar and Dzungar; also known as Oirat and Kalmyk. In the early 1600s, Khalka Mongols drove the Oirat Mongols westward into the Ili River region and Djungar Basin in western China. In the fifteenth century the Djungars controlled and plundered a huge territory stretching from the outskirts of Beijing to western Turkistan. Early Nomads The first Eurasian nomadic tribes, specifically the Scythians, Sauromatians, Sarmatians, and Saka, who practiced transhumance. Getae A Thracian tribe who lived in what is present-day Bulgaria. Golden Horde The Russian designation for the Ulus of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan. The Golden Horde attained its power and prestige under Batu, Jochi’s son. Batu founded his capital Sarai Batu on the lower reaches of the Volga River. Over time the Horde became Turkified, adopting Islam under Khan O¨z Beg. The population was composed of Turkic and Mongol tribes, with the latter being the aristocracy. The decline of the Golden Horde occurred with the outbreak of the Plague (Black Death) in 1346–1347. Hsiung-nu Confederacy of aggressive mounted warriors, possibly of Hunnic ethnicity, who maintained supremacy in Mongolia, north to around Lake Baikal, and southern Kazakstan into the Tien Shan Mountains beginning in the third century BCE, and whose pressure against the Chinese caused them to begin construction of the great wall. Later the Hsiung-nu confederacy split into an Eastern tribe, which submitted to China and a Western tribe, which ultimately was driven into Central Asia. Iron Age The time when iron was smelted into weaponry. This varies from 1200 BCE in Anatolia to c. 500 BCE in the Eurasian steppes. Kalmyks Oriat Mongols driven in the seventeenth century into steppe lands north and east of the Caspian Sea. Many returned to

ASIA, CENTRAL, STEPPES 533 pastures in the high Tien Shan Mountains in Xinjiang, western China. Khatun Wife of the Khagan, equivalent to a queen. Kazaks Also known as Khazaks, this confederacy was historically the Kirghiz-Kazaks. They were a huge tribe that separated from the Uzbeks c. 1465 and divided into three hordes. Until the advent of Soviet collectivization c. 1935, their homeland ranged over the modern territory of Kazakstan, into the Djungar Basin of western China from where, c. 1850, they migrated into the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia. Pockets of Kazaks also live in autonomous regions of Xinjiang, China. Khagan Highest-ranking Turkic or Genghis Khanite Mongol leader, equivalent to a king. khereksur A cultic monument composed of piled stone with additional stone features. Sometimes found in connection with olenniye kamni. kurgan Nomadic burial mound. Massagetae A Saka tribe living in the vicinity of the Aral Sea who under the leadership of their queen, Tomyris, defeated and killed Cyrus the Great, Achaemenid Persian king, when he tried to invade her lands in 530 BCE. Medes Nomadic tribes in Central Asia in the first millennium BCE. These, along with the Persians, formed the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the eighth century BCE. Neolithic Period New Stone Age. The stage of human development when stone tools shaped by polishing and grinding were used. Animals and plants were domesticated, people lived in permanent villages and developed pottery and weaving. This time period varies in different parts of the world. nomads Descending from Bronze Age sedentary population, small extended family groups who practiced transhumance while herding sheep, goats, horses, camels, and yak in the higher altitudes. olenniye kamni Large elaborated cultic stelae with anthropomorphic, zoomorphic (especially stylized images of deer), or floral motifs found primarily in north-central Mongolia. Paleolithic Period Early Stone Age. The stage of human development when people made and used rudimentary, chipped stone tools. The Stone Age is divided into three periods: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. Parthians A nomadic dynasty (c. 141 BCE–AD 224) in Iran and extending into southern Turkmenistan, famous for its combat cavalry and fine archers, and for breeding the Heavenly Horses highly sought after by the Han Dynasty emperors. The Parthians amassed significant wealth by controlling the Silk Route between Rome and China. Pazyryk The name given to the Saka confederacy that inhabited the region of the same name in southern Siberia from c. 450 to 300 BCE. Their frozen tombs, excavated by S.I. Rudenko in the 1950s, revealed an elaborate assortment of normally lost organic material including carpets, felt textiles, and wooden carvings, human remains, and sacrificial horses. Pokrovka An archaeological site in the southern Ural steppes in Russia that had many Kurgan cemeteries that were used over 800 years by Bronze Age people, but primarily by Early Iron Age Sauromatians and Sarmatians. phalerae Large breastplates, part of horse harnesses, carved from bone or cast from metal, including gold and bronze. Saka A loose confederacy of Early Iron Age nomads who practiced pastoral transhumance in the Tien Shan and Altai Mountains, the Ferghana Valley, and the Syr Darya delta region in Kazakstan from the eighth to third century BCE. The Saka were Caucasoids and spoke an Indo-Iranian language. Sarmatians Nomadic pastoralists, who between the fourth and sixth century BCE maintained summer pastures and kurgan cemeteries in the southern Ural steppes and along the Volga and

Don rivers. These Caucasoid people spoke an Indo-Iranian language and varied significantly in physical types. They are subdivided into Early, Middle, and Late Sarmatians. Sauro-Sarmatians An abbreviation for Sauromatians and Sarmatians. Scythians Caucasoid, Indo-Iranian speaking pastoral nomads who lived north of the Black Sea between the seventh and third century BCE. They developed a symbiotic relationship with the Greek colonists who had established cities in the same region. Over time some Scythians became agriculturists, producing grain for export to mainland Greece; other maintained the pastoral status. Shan-yu¨ Highest-ranking Hsiung-nu leader, equivalent of a king. Sogdiana Also known as Sogd and Sogdia. A satrapy or province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire located in the vicinity of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. sum A political subdivision of an aimag in Mongolia. transhumance The practice of following animals from pasture to pasture as required for feed and shelter. Tuvans A Turkic tribe living in the Tuva Autonomous Region in southern Siberia. A few Tuvans live in the Altai Mountain in western Mongolia. Uygurs Known in central Mongolia from the eighth century, they adapted their vertically written alphabet to the Mongol language and became the traditional scribes for the Genghis Khanite court. In the twelfth century, they migrated into the Tarim Basin in western China. The Uygurs are a Caucasian and Mongol admixture and speak a Turkic language. Uzbeks A tribe descended from the Golden Horde who took their name from Khan O¨z Bek (1312–1341). In 1428, Khan Abu’l Khayr led the Uzbeks from southern Siberia to the north bank of the Syr Darya, where many tribes broke away and took the name Kazak. In 1468, Abu’l Khayr was killed and the Uzbek were defeated in a battle with Djungars. By 1495, the Uzbeks had recovered and migrated to the territory known as Uzbekistan where they occupied Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva. During the next century, Uzbek hegemony extended eastward into the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan and into Turkestan and westward to Khorasan, Iran. Since their arrival in the fertile Amu Darya region they have been agriculturists. Yu¨ eh-chih Confederacy of nomads in southern Kazakstan and in the Tien Shan Mountains, who were driven from this region by the Hsiung-nu, and migrated into northern Afghanistan, and about a century later formed the Kushan Empire that was instrumental in spreading Buddhism into Central Asia, India, and China.

Geographic Ecology of Eurasia – The Steppes and Deserts The dominant feature of Eurasia is its steppes, the largest unified area of flat land in the world. The steppes stretch from the plains of Hungary eastward to Manchuria. The northern border extends to the tree line of southern Siberia, and the south is defined by massive mountain ranges including the Tien Shan and the high Pamirs. However, some mountain ranges such as the Tien Shan and Altai have at times been integral to current steppe societies so that these expanses, and those beyond, were culturally or politically allied with the steppe cultures. Thus, oasis villages adjacent to the vast Taklimakan Desert in

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western China came under the sway of mobile tribes while the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia provided rich summer grazing for nomadic herds. The flatness of the steppes, with the paucity of natural barriers had immense cultural and political effects on adjacent regions. From the small sedentary Bronze Age farming villages, beginning around 900 BCE, the earliest nomadic cultures exploded from all directions, developing discrete although economically similar lifestyles throughout the steppes. As these societies developed into confederacies toward the end of the first millennium BCE and in subsequent centuries, their powerful militaries allowed them to control multiple ‘Silk Roads’ that crossed Eurasia. Some centuries later the Genghis Khanite Mongol hordes were able, in a few short decades, to create one of the largest Empires ever that encompassed the vast territory from Manchuria to Hungary (see Asia, Central and North, Steppes, Deserts, and Forests). The steppes, although connected, are divided into three zones intersected by deserts and mountains (Figure 1). The western steppes extend through southwestern Russia, along the northern shores of the Black Sea, and east to the Ural River. In the southwest, the Karakum (Black Sand) Desert encircles the northern Caspian Sea. The central (Kazak) steppes extend through southeastern Russia to encompass northern Kazakstan, moving further southeast through the Djungar Pass that lies between the Tien Shan and Altai Mountains into western China. The eastern steppes begin in the northern Xinjiang province of western China skirting the fringes of the Taklimakan Desert, eastward into the Mongol steppe lands that border the Gobi desert, ending at the Khingan Mountains on the western borders of Manchuria. In southwestern Kazakstan, the steppes are semidesert. The northerly regions around the Aral Sea that once supported seminomadic animal husbandry populations, in recent years, have become wastelands as a result of the intense agricultural diversion of the Amu Darya (historical Oxus River) and the Syr Darya. Eurasian continental climatic conditions have always been extremely harsh. Without seas to moderate the vast expanses the temperatures can range from well above 100
F in summer and below 50
F in winter. Strong winds and sand storms, sudden flooding rainstorms, and burning sun are the norm. Plant life, however, had adapted to the climatic conditions so that the herds found adequate pastures that included the waist-high coarse steppe grass. In addition to the larger rivers, that is, the Don, Danube, Dniester, the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, the Volga, and the Ural, many smaller tributary rivers meander throughout the steppes. These provided ample protein in the form

of fish when small villages were established along their banks and water for herds when the nomadic herders appeared. Southern Siberia, although not included in the Eurasian steppes, has had significant cultural interaction and diffusion with steppe people and cultural evidence points to times of migration from the steppes into the taiga. The time divisions used in the following paragraphs are only approximations; they also differ from the similarly named divisions in Africa and Europe. Moreover, they diverge within the various ecological regions of Eurasia and are used here only as an approximate guide.

Palaeolithic and Mesolithic (750 000–7000 BCE) Although Homo erectus appears to have evolved in Africa about 1.8 million years ago and remains dating to 1.6 million years ago have been found in Georgia, the harsh climatic conditions in the steppes, and lack of significant nutritional sources, for example, the gathering-type foodstuffs, prevented permanent incursions into the Eurasian interior until much later. The earliest evidence for human habitation is found along the southern fringes of Eurasia. Although Oldowantype tools (c. 750 000 BP) were recorded in the Caucasus, and habitation sites dating to c. 250 000 BP were excavated in Tajikistan, during the early and middle Palaeolithic, human habitation in Eurasia was insignificant. About 130 000 BP, Neanderthal populations, with the ability to adapt to cold climate, appeared in Europe but had disappeared by 50 000 BP although they continued to flourish in Asia until 30 000 BP. Between 90 000 and 80 000 BP, in the only relatively benign Eurasian climatic region encompassing Uzbekistan, the North Black Sea territory, and along the Dniester River, Neanderthal habitation sites have been found. Following a colder period after 65 000 BP, a second wave of Neanderthals colonized the less-hostile areas between the great Eurasian rivers and the intermountain valleys. They hunted, gathered, and most probably lived in subsistence groups. Some burials indicate a limited ritual belief system. From c. 40 000 BP climatic conditions continued to deteriorate and the Eurasian steppes no longer entertained habitation until about 20 000 BP when the first evidences of modern humans appear. This society is defined by complex housing and refined utilitarian implements as well, drilled stone, bone- and animal-teeth pendants, and art, for example, Venus figurines, cave paintings, and petroglyphs. Hunting techniques became more complex, which signaled a higher

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Figure 1 Map of the Eurasian steppes.

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societal organization. Early in the Holocene Period, c. 12 000 BP, temperatures were similar to those of today, permitting postglacial communities to thrive in the southern Ural steppes where they hunted horse and elk. Emigrating from the south, sedentary fishing communities in the Volga, Dnieper, and Pontic steppes used huge nets for fishing. Such activity signals the beginnings of an organized society. Hissar Culture hunting camps, dating from the seventh to the fifth millennium BCE, were found along the base of the mountains ranges from the Amu Darya to Issyk Kul (lake). And the earliest signs of the Neolithic with the domestication of goats and sheep, appeared in caves east of the Caspian Sea.

Neolithic (7000–3500 BCE) During the Neolithic Revolution, societies banded together to build small villages supported by primitive agriculture and rudimentary animal husbandry that was based on goats and sheep. These societies developed primarily in oases, along the river deltas, and around the Aral Sea. Hunting–gathering communities lived in tandem with village farmers for hundreds of years, yet cultural centers rose and new ideas were disseminated. Horses, that play a great role in the development of the Early Iron Age cultures, were hunted first during the Paleolithic before they were later domesticated, not for riding but for their unusually high food value. Massive horse bone finds are known from Dereivka, belonging to the Srednyi Stog Culture in the Ukraine and Azov region north of the Black Sea as well as at Botai, in north-central Kazakstan. The earliest Eurasian agricultural communities, known as the Djeitun Culture, began to form in the seventh millennium BCE at the base of the Kopet Dag Mountains just south of the Karakum Desert. Houses contained hearths with niches that probably had a ceremonial function and courtyards were work areas and living spaces. Hand-molded pottery vessels were rudimentary; placing hot stones in the foodstuff rather than roasting over the hearth probably accomplished cooking. Ornaments were made from fired clay, carved from bone, and incorporated semiprecious stones including turquoise. There is evidence of communal participation in an egalitarian society. Grain crops required irrigation in the region but water was easily diverted from small rivers flowing from the Kopet Dag. Onager, gazelle, and wild pig were hunted for food; fox, wildcat, and wolf provided fur. Population geneticists noted a specific haplogroup (R1a1 defined by the M17) that indicated an eastto-west migration between the fifth and third millennium BCE in the western steppes as far east as the

southern Ural steppes. Known as the Yamnaya, Timber Grave, Pit Grave, or Kurgan culture (the latter because of their single burials in kurgans), the people are associated with the Proto-Indo-European language. They lived in settlements that became more advanced over time. In the rubbish heaps near the villages, bones of horse, cattle, sheep, goats, and occasionally pig have been found, indicating they practiced animal husbandry as well as farming. As the culture advanced they constructed hill-forts adjacent to the steep riverbank and used wagons with large wheels. Oxen heads have been found buried with wheels. In the fifth to fourth millennia BCE, metallurgical development, characterized by pure copper objects, spread to southeastern Europe and the most westerly steppe region.

Bronze Age (3500–1000 BCE) Many significant events took place in Eurasia at the beginning of the Bronze Age, which is marked by a general population expansion. By the early second millennium BCE metal objects of similar form and function in pure copper and mold-cast arsenical bronzes were produced in a Circum-Pontic metallurgical province extending from the Balkans around the North Black Sea into the southern Urals. The largest copper ore mine was located at Kargaly in the southern Ural steppes. The mid-second millennium BCE saw innovative metallurgical technologies that most probably originated east of the Ural Mountains and became known as the Seima-Turbino phenomena. Production included thin-walled casting of tin bronze, a technology that spread from the Altai Mountains to the Dnieper River. At the turn of the second to first millennium BCE, metallurgy was advanced and concentrated in the Ural Mountains, throughout most of Kazakstan into western Siberia and the Altai Mountains where production was surprisingly uniform. Iron technology was not introduced into the Eurasian steppes until around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Developing in the early second millennium BC, the Andronovo Culture was a loosely related sedentary population inhabiting the central steppes south to the Kopet Dag, the Pamir and Tien Shan Mountains, and extending north into Minusinsk Basin. Andronovo settlements were situated on the banks of small rivers and in low flood plains. Both small villages, with up to 20 houses, as well as larger ones with up to 100 timber-built houses are known from the earlier period. Settlements grew to accommodate the increasing populations and in the later development phase, houses were roomy, rectangular semi-dugout dwellings ranging from 100 to 135 m2 placed in line along

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a river. A particular feature of the Andronovo is the great mounds of ashes that accumulated as the settlements grew. The Andronovo Culture economy was based on animal husbandry supplemented by some agriculture, hunting, fishing, and gathering. Around the turn of the second to first millennium BCE, the settlement economy transformed from sedentary to nomadic, characterized by annual cyclical animal herding and a shared portable material culture. Dating between 2000 and 1600 BCE, the SintashtaArkaim Culture has been recently recognized in the central steppes and along the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains. The settlements were round or rectangular fortifications covering between 6000 and 30 000 m2 Village were protected by walls constructed from a wooden frame reinforced with unfired clay brick as well as ramparts and moats. Towers guarded the entrances and access to water. Within the fortification rectangular houses 25–130 m2 that contained pitstorage, open fire hearths, and wells faced an internal circular street but were abutted against the exterior fortification. Some buildings also featured furnaces for forging metals. It is assumed that cities such as Arkaim were administrative–ceremonial centers where up to 1000 aristocracy/metallurgists assembled periodically to perform specific rituals. Archaeological evidence has revealed that throughout the central steppes, west to the Don River and beginning around 1000 BCE, a severe drought occurred, at which time the affected populations withdrew – probably to the south – from the traditional

Figure 2 Kazak horseman in the Altai Mountains.

habitation centers. With the reappearance of a lesshostile climate c. 900–800 BCE, the economic lifestyle dramatically shifted from small village farming complemented by animal husbandry to developed pastoral nomadism in which animals form the basis of survival. This also marks the commencement of the Early Iron Age.

Early Iron Age (900–800 BCE to AD 300) As the drought receded in the steppes, villagers living along the rivers (where their burial mounds are found) returned and more or less simultaneously began experimenting with pastoral nomadism. This entailed driving their herds further into the steppes lands, a mode of life also precipitated by horse riding, which provided greater mobility (Figure 2). Thus, herders returned less frequently to the home base. Innovative portable housing culminated in the yurt (ger in Mongolia), a lattice structure covered on the exterior with heavy felt and lined on the interior walls with colorful carpets, which also covered the floor. By adopting this lifestyle, the population was no longer dependent upon hunting, gathering, and minimal agriculture but rather on their animals – goats, sheep, horses, camels, and, in the higher-altitudes, yak (Figure 3) Their diet consisted primarily of meat, generally sheep – but also horsemeat was prepared for ceremonial occasions – and dairy products, particularly sheep and yak milk, the ceremonial koumiss (fermented mare’s milk), and various cheeses that they

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Figure 3 Kazaks at summer pasture in the Altai Mountains with their yurts and herds.

produced. Tanned leather was fashioned into heavier winter clothing as well as horse accouterments. On the steppes, nomads may have migrated more than 1000 km during a single year, leaving their winter home in very early spring, moving to a clean, warm locale to lamb-out the herds. A short time later their migration began, generally northward across the steppes, reaching the fulcrum in late spring, and remaining there until the rains of autumn forced them to retrace their route to the winter home. This pattern is also consistent with nomads who migrate into the mountains for summer pasture although the trek may be much shorter – a few up to several hundred kilometers. It has recently been discovered that nomads buried in the Siberian Pazyryk region were infested with hookworm. The closest endemic zones to this infestation were along the shores of the Caspian and Aral seas or in Iran, indicating they had summer migrated over 1200 km. The shift from a sedentary lifestyle to one of nomadism is noted in the Chowhougou cemeteries located between the Tien Shan foothills and the Taklimakan desert in western China. The earliest rock-lined tombs, located closed to the oasis village, contained a single skeleton whose mortuary items included painted pottery and artifacts relating to a sedentary society. Later dated but similarly constructed tombs in the same cemetery were located closer to the foothills. These, however, held several skeletons. Pottery was coarser and undecorated while offerings now included bronze knives of the type from the Minusinsk Valley in southern Siberia as well as horse accouterments. It would appear that traders on

horseback from the northern reaches had made their way through the Tien Shan Mountains to encounter the oasis villages. There they traded bronzes, sheep, and wool for agricultural products and exquisite textiles woven by the oasis women. Before long the younger villagers realized the stress of herding was far less than that of planting and hoeing and soon emulated the northerner nomadism. Nomads normally buried their dead in the summer pasture; here in reverse, they returned to their winter home for the burial ceremony, now placing their deceased in communal pits and including objects from their nomadic lifestyle. The nomadic winter home and corrals were frequently constructed at the base of a great stone outcropping that provided solar warmth and also protected from the harsh northerly winds that swept the steppes of snow so that some grazing was possible throughout the winter. The home was also in proximity to a small river that provided water and stretches of tall grass along the banks for emergency feed. Nomads traveled in small support groups, known as auls made up of extended families. Clan and tribal auls commingled at summer and other rites of passage were performed. Tribal alliances were formed as needed for administrative requirements and military expediency as well as for apportioning grazing lands that were never personal property. Under charismatic leadership, confederacies composed of many clans and tribes controlled vast territories. Others, employing large-scale military migrations, created empires (e.g., the Genghis Khanite). Because of their mobility, military prowess, and ability to rapidly mobilize, nomads had a major

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impact upon bordering sedentary societies. The major tribal alliances of the first millennium BCE, known from Greek, Achaemenid Persian, and other sources, and further identified by Russian archaeology beginning in the late nineteenth century, are known as (1) the Scythians, occupying southeastern Europe, north of the Black Sea to the lower Don River; (2) the Sauromatians, whose burials are from the Kuban region east of the Black Sea, along the lower Don and Volga rivers, and throughout the Ural River system; the slightly later (3) Sarmatians, who congregated from the lower Dniester River east, particularly along the Volga and Ural interfluvials. Further to the east, (4) the Saka ranged from central Kazakstan through the Tien Shan Mountains and the Ferghana Valley, northeast through eastern Kazakstan into the Altai Mountains in present-day southern Siberia and Mongolia. All the Early Iron Age nomads spoke variations of Indo-Iranian languages and were ethnically Caucasoids until a Mongoloid admixture was introduced as noted in skeletal material in the central steppes dating from the fourth century BCE, and in southern Kazakstan in the third century BCE. The people now known as the mummies of western China, until at least the fourth century BCE, were also Caucasoids. The economy of Early Iron Age nomads varied within regions and was dependent upon several factors including climatic conditions as well as the extent of contact between the nomads and their particular sedentary neighbors. As an example, some Scythian tribes in direct contact with Greek colonies north of the Black Sea became sedentary, raising grain for export to the Greek mainland while the Sauromatians and Sarmatians, inhabiting vast stretches of steppe land, increased their wealth by controlling and/or raiding the northerly Silk Routes. The Pazyryk Saka in the Gorny Altai of southern Siberia lived a nomadic lifestyle with minimal migration yet increased their wealth through long-distance trade with the Achaemenid Persian satrapies.

Scythians (fifth to third century BCE) Most of the written history about the Scythians comes from Herodotus’ Histories, Book IV, written when he visited Olbia in the mid-fifth century BCE. The earliest mention of the Scythians, however, occurs in Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform tablets of the late seventh century BCE. At this time, as the Scythians grew powerful in the Ancient Near East they made alliances with the Medes, Manneans, and later with the Assyrians. A Scythian hegemony resulted in their ruling Asia Minor for 28 years.

According to Herodotus, they devastated everything through violence and overindulgence. Shortly thereafter, the Median King Cyaxares (625–585 BCE) annihilated the Scythian hierarchy in battle and the surviving Scythians were forced to return to their former lands north of the Black Sea. In 514 or 512 BCE, the Persian troops of King Darius I invaded the Scythian lands. Accounts of their battles by Herodotus (Book IV), Ctesias (Fr. 13 20–21), and Strabo (VII, 3, 14) vary but it is thought that the wars contributed to the consolidation and development of the Scythian national identity. The Scythians invaded Thrace (modern Bulgaria), which resulted in conflicts that were frequently resolved by dynastic marriages between Scythian chieftains and Thracian princesses. In the fourth century BCE before perishing at the age of 90, in battle with Philip II of Macedon, King Atheas united the Scyths from the Danube to the Don rivers. Hugely rich burials, such as Chertomlyk and Solokha, dating to the final third of the fourth century BCE indicate no significant weakening in the Scythian society after their defeat by the Macedonians. Moreover, in 331 BCE, they killed Zoppyrion, Alexander the Great’s vice-regent, and defeated his army (Justini, xii, I, 4). By the third century BCE the Scythians faced a continual crisis as massive Sarmatian movements pushed upon them from the Don River region, and Celts and the Getae (a Thracian tribe) assaulted them from the Danube. The Scythians were forced into the Crimean foothills and along the lower Dnieper River where they lived in fortified settlements until the fourth century AD at which time they were assimilated by the Hunnic tribes that came from the east during the era of mass migrations. Scythian Burial Customs

The first nomadic burials to be excavated by the Russians were those of the Scythians located in southeastern Europe and the Crimea. Great chieftains were buried with much ceremony and feasting in massive kurgans, often accompanied by retainers, horses, and a variety of portable art as well as less-portable items secured in trade with the Greek colonies along the north Black Sea. Portable art cast in bronze and precious metals included pole finials, a variety of horse accouterments, including phalerae (breast plaques), and belt plaques indicating status. Men were buried with complete defensive and offensive armament, which by the fourth to third centuries BCE included long swords as well as ceremonial akinakes (short swords) in gold sheaths. Women also held elevated positions in society, as illustrated by gold headdresses and plaques, exquisitely worked gold jewelry

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encrusted with semiprecious stones, and elaborate bronze cultic mirrors. According to the Soviet archaeologist E. P. Bunyatyan, 27–29% of the female burials contained armament. Greek craftsmanship is apparent in the luxury gold items as well as in amphorae, kantaroi, and kylix. Occasionally burials were marked with stone funerary sculpture.

Sauromatians, Sarmatians, Alans The Sauromatians, Sarmatians, and Alans have been differentiated archaeologically by burial artifacts and by the orientation of the deceased (Figure 4). The Soviet archaeologist B. N. Grakov defined four chronological periods for these tribes: . Sixth to fourth century BCE – Sauromatian (type site, Blyumenfeld) . Fourth to second century BCE – Sauro-Sarmatian (type site, Prokhorovskaya) . Late second century BCE to second century AD – Sarmatian (type site, Suslova) . Second to fourth century AD – Alan (type site Shipovskaya). According to Herodotus and Hippocrates (24), the Sauromatians, who were eastern neighbors of the Scythians, spoke an earlier version of the Scythic language. The Sauromatians maintained a nomadic lifestyle independent of sedentary cultures. According to Herodotus, social statuses of Sauromatian and Early Sarmatian women were different from those

Figure 4 Reconstruction of the skull of a Sarmatian woman.

of the Scythian women. Many of the former dressed like men, rode horses, shot bows and arrows, hunted, and took part in military campaigns. Based on archaeological data, Soviet archaeologist K. F. Smirnov, believed that the Sauromatian culture developed from the sedentary Bronze Age TimberGrave Culture (located in the Volga River region) and the Andronovo Culture (in the southern Ural steppes). Tribal units associated with the Sauromatians include the Issedones, Daha, and Massagetae. Although it is not clear where they wintered, their burials and, therefore, their summer pastures, were from the Don River to the southern Ural steppes. Before the turn of the fifth to fourth centuries, the Sauromatians in the Volga interfluvials maintained good relations with the Scythians. The balance of power soon changed in fourth century BCE as the Sauromatians pushed westward into Scythian territory along the lower reaches of the Don River. Sauromatian westward migrations were no doubt the result of impinging eastern migrations by different ethnic but still Indo-Iranian-speaking nomads. Greek authors referred to these tribes as the Sarmatians who probably originated in the forest-steppe trans-Ural region and northwestern Kazakstan. However, recent DNA studies have revealed that certain female Sarmatians in the southern Urals, in the fourth century BCE, introduced a Mongol admixture. The Sarmatians first asserted themselves in the southern Ural steppes, continuing to move westward into the lower Volga River region and the Volga-Don interfluvials. Sarmatian military burials of the third to second century found deep in Scythian territory indicate that their warriors had penetrated the Scythian territory along the lower Don-Dnieper interfluvials. The campaigns of Alexander the Great also undermined the symbiotic relationship that the nomads and sedentary populations had maintained, thus creating further turmoil. Sarmatian tribal unions mentioned in Geography of Strabo include the Rhoxolani, Aorsi, Siraki, and Yazigs. By the middle of the first century BCE, these unions had moved into the plains between the Danube and Tissa rivers as well as into the eastern Azov Sea region, the Kuban River area, and part of central pre-Caucasus. In AD 49, first an alliance and then further struggle over the Bosporus throne weakened the Siraki. Shortly thereafter this tribe as well the Aorsi disappear from written sources. Archaeological material indicates, however, that both the Siraki and the Aorsi lived in the steppes between the Don and Volga rivers until the late first century BCE. Around the middle of the first century AD the Alans, a large nomadic union, emerged from north of the Black Sea and conquered or assimilated the

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remaining Sarmatian tribes. From the mid-first century AD through most of the fourth century AD, the Alans constantly raided the trans-Caucasus and the eastern Roman provinces, keeping the sedentary populations in a constant state of terror. Diversity in burial customs indicates that the Alans of the second to third century AD were ethnically more diverse than those of the third to fourth century AD. In the late fourth century AD when Huns from the east swept into the Alan territory, some Alanic tribes were absorbed into the Hunnic union. Others settled in the North Caucasus while other unions became a component of new ethnic confederacies of the early Middle Ages. After the Hunnic invasion, independent unions of Indo-Iranian-speaking nomads no longer existed. The north Caucasus Alans migrated into the foothills and mountains and in conjunction with indigenous tribes established the land of Alania that existed to the twelfth century AD. Other Alans settled in the Don River region intermingling with the indigenous culture. The known Alan settlements that have been excavated were both fortified and unfortified. Along with their kurgan burials, they were constructed along the Kuban River, north of the Azov Sea delta, and along the Terek River in the north Caucasus.

be either in a pit, often with ledges along the side and dug to a depth of ca. 2 m.; in a deep catacomb; or in a podboi , a pit with niche along the side. The deceased, probably wrapped in a felt blanket, was often further protected from the earth with organic material, such as cane or wooden planks (Figure 5). Ritual artifacts in female burials signaled a rich spiritual life, noted initially in the Sauromatian burials. The role of priestesses became increasingly important on both the clan and the tribal levels as determined by their burial accoutrements. These included zoomorphic amulets in precious metals or carved from boar’s tusks, ritual stone-carved and fired-clay altars, bronze mirrors for divinations, and fossilized seashells serving as containers for painting or tattooing. Bronze arrowheads, swords, daggers, and armor elements were provided for both male and female burials. The latter social group, female warriors, was small but was still a prominent group among Sauromatians and earliest Sarmatians (Figure 6). The earliest use of spears is also attributed to the Sarmatians.

Sauromatian and Sarmatian Burial Rituals

Similarity in burial customs consolidated the Sauromatian and Sarmatian tribes in the Volga region and southern Ural steppes. In addition to some diversity in burial artifacts, Sauromatian burials, oriented east, differ from those of the Sarmatians that are orientated south. Nomads were buried at summer pasture after the ground thawed, permitting them to dig deep pits and catacombs, and to construct the kurgan overmound. In the southern Ural region, where cemeteries and kurgans were closely clustered, a few very large – 100þ m in diameter and known as tsar kurgans – reveal the nomadic societal hierarchy as they interred aristocracy. Because of their prominent profile against the horizon, the tsar kurgans were easily spotted from a great distance and, thus, were robbed, some shortly after the interment but many later during the Russian expansion in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The vast majority of the kurgans are relatively small, measuring from c. 1 to 30 m in diameter. Artifacts in these burials also provide insight into social rank within the society. Although the kurgan was constructed for the primary burial, it was often reused with the secondary burials being placed laterally around the central burial. Only occasionally were multiple Sarmatian burials encountered in a single tomb. The interment could

Figure 5 Pokrovka male with child in situ.

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Figure 6 Armament and cultic artifacts from an Early Sarmatian female warrior burial (Pokrovka cemetery 2, kurgan 8, burial 5).

Plaques incorporating the ubiquitous Animal Style functioned as amuletic decoration for the bearer while diverse types of psalia (cheekpieces), bridle bits, and belt hooks provided horse accouterments. As the Sarmatian tribes become militarily stronger and acquired greater wealth, a diversity and increased value of burial offerings is noted. A large kurgan at the Filippovka Cemetery in the southern Urals yielded several secret troves containing beads, a large bronze mirror, hundreds of gold plaques, and over 20 threedimensional carved deer covered with gold and silver foil (Figure 7). In the Don River interfluvials the jewelry worn by high-status women was fashioned from gold and semiprecious stones (Figure 8). Alan settlements as well as catacomb and podboi burials have been excavated along the Kuban and the Terek rivers. The entrance chambers to catacombs placed near the right bank of the Terek were orientated latitudinally while their chambers were placed meridionally. Grave offerings included bronze and silver fibulae, occasionally gold plaques, buckles, and arrowheads. Pottery containers are of the same shape as those of the earlier period but were wheelthrown, often burnished, and gray fired.

Figure 7 Plaque from the Filippovka tsar burial in the form of fighting camels.

Figure 8 Diadem from a high-ranking female burial, Khokh, Don River interfluvial.

Russian archaeologists. As the Saka had little direct contact with sedentary societies, there is a paucity of textual information and, therefore, their lifestyle is primarily deduced from burials and artifacts.

The Saka

The Tasmola and other Tribes in Kazakstan

The generic name Saka has been applied to Early Iron Age tribes that had common, yet distinct cultural affinities. They nomadized throughout Kazakstan, into the rich Ferghana Valley (now divided between Uzbekistan, Tadjikstan, and Kyrgyzstan), into the Tien Shan and Altai mountains. Although there were no known direct contacts between the Saka and the Scythians, the Early Iron Age culture in southern Siberia was termed ‘Scytho-Siberian’ by the early

In the steppes of western and central Kazakstan, Saka burials remained unchanged from the seventh to the third century BCE. This would indicate that the ethnic populations generically known today as Tasmola, remained relatively stable. M. K. Kadyrbayev theorized that Saka tribes could be equated with three that were known from historical sources: the Agrippeans in northwestern Kazakstan, the Issedonians in the central steppes, and the Arimaspians in eastern

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Kazakstan. The principal characteristic of Tasmola burials was the presence in the necropolis of a formation denominated ‘kurgan with mustache.’ Each burial consisted of one large and two smaller kurgans connected by a semicircular ridge of stones (Figure 9). The large kurgan contained a human burial, one, smaller, held a horse burial and the other pottery. Male burials contained a horse’s head wrapped in a horsehide, horse trapping, and meat offerings. Females were buried in pits that had niches blocked with stone slabs, an architectural structure lacking in male burials. The types of plaques and poletops indicate contact with Sarmatians in the northern Urals and the Siberian Saka. Mirrors and cultic altars reveal a spiritual belief system that may have paralleled that of the Sauromatians and Sarmatians.

Tuvinian sites extend north into the Sayan Mountains and west into Pazyryk and northwestern Mongolia in the Altai Mountains. The earliest known ‘Scythian’type burial (eighth to seventh century BCE) is the massive ‘tsar’ Arzhan Kurgan measuring 120 m in diameter, 4 m in height, and cylindrical in form (Figure 10). In the periphery, 70 burial chambers with c. 160 harnessed riding horses were found in separate cells. A log house in the center was constructed for two nobles, a man and women, who were placed in the central chamber. In the outer chamber of the log house, six riding horses and seven retainers, richly dressed and of the same elderly age as the nobles, were interred. Armaments including daggers, knives, and arrowheads. Horse tack and bronze phalerae in the form of coiled felines were included as accoutrements for the next world. Stone-carved stelae, known as the olenniye kamni (deer stones), are predominately found in the fareastern and northern Saka regions. In addition to deer, other animals including boar, horses, and felines as well as various plant forms are among the iconographic images on these large stones (Figure 11). Incising images on the surface of earrings, necklaces, and belts that display daggers and whetstones has anthropomorphicized many of the olenniye kamni.

Tuva and Eastern Kazakstan Kurgan burials in the northern regions, from southern Siberia to Kazakstan east of the Ural Mountains, reflected the Bronze Age Karasuk Culture, yet grave offerings are analogous with those in Central Asia. The physical appearance of the Saka was essentially the same as Bronze Age inhabitants although the northern and southern inhabitants were distinct. The northern Saka in the Irtysh River valley of Kazakstan gravitated toward the Altai regions while the southern populations intermingled with those from the Semirechiye region of southern Kazakstan and south into the oases of western China. Primarily Caucasoid, a Mongoloid admixture is noted particularly among the female skeletons beginning around the third century BCE.

Southern Kazakstan and Western China (Ancient Turkestan) In the Semirechiye (Seven Rivers) in southern Kazakstan, large stone-covered kurgans measuring up to 100 m in diameter are represented by those constructed in the Chilikta Valley and at Issyk just

5m

(c)

(d)

(a) 8m

10 cm

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(b) (e) Figure 9 Tasmola burials in western Kazakstan.

1m

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Figure 11 Various styles of olenniye kamni associated with the Arzhan Kurgan.

Figure 10 Schematic and details of the Arzhan Kurgan.

north of Almaty. These yielded prolific Animal Style iconography wrought in gold and frequently decorated with semiprecious stones. Women also played prominent roles in this nomadic society particularly in religious or cultic matters, an influence transmitted into western China (Figure 12). Burial rituals while constructing the large kurgans often included feasting, particularly on horsemeat cooked in large cauldrons. Bronze Age anthropomorphic fertility dancers recorded in stone at Kangjiashimenji in western China give way to sun gods and Early Iron Age Shamanic images of ritual horned horses and the ubiquitous zoomorphisms at sites such as Tamgaly near Almaty, Kazakstan, and Saimaly Tash in the Kyrghyz Tien Shan (Figure 13). Oases cemeteries at Chowhougou at the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert and the base of the

Tien Shan Mountains reveal that nomadism was introduced into the high Tien Shan c. 900 BCE when multiple burials replaced a single interment. During the Bronze Age the deceased had been placed on the right side in a flexed position but this custom soon changed to the typical Early Iron Age supine position. Horse harnessing, including snaffle bits of a type from southern Siberia, was added to the list of grave goods and crude pottery was substituted for the villagers’ fine painted ware. Bronze-casting techniques were introduced into western China at this time, probably from smithies known to have had workshops east of the Ural Mountains or in the southern Siberian Minusinsk Valley. The sophisticated castbronze artifacts from the Semirechiye and the Tarim Basin included altars and immense cauldrons, mirrors, knives, whetstone handles, and horse accouterments. Around 400 BCE, burials ceased at Chowhougou, possibly signaling that the Saka were being forced from their territories by the Hsiung-nu and Yu¨eh Chih confederacies. Burnished gray pottery from oasis cemeteries near Hami along the eastern Taklimakan Desert reflects

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pottery styles and techniques from northeastern Iran, suggesting population incursion from that region. Caucasoid mummies, dressed in finely woven woolen fabrics, have been excavated from cemeteries south of the Taklimakan Desert. The quality of the textiles suggests that the villagers traded wool from nomads living in higher elevations where the animals produce finer quality wool than they can in the intense desert heat. Artifacts associated with several female mummies also indicate a cultic belief system similar to that practiced by the Saka.

Pazyryk and the ‘Scytho-Siberians’

Figure 12 Contemporary Kazak nomads in their yurt in western China.

S. I. Rudenko’s seminal excavations in 1929 of huge frozen, but robbed, kurgans at Pazyryk in the Gorny Altai, Russia, revealed that these nomads followed a rich nomadic lifestyle. Finely carved wooden horse accouterments, multicolored horse blankets fashioned from felt, elaborated Animal Style motifs, and a wall hanging with a repeat motif depicting a woman of high status, probably a priestess, confronted by an male rider, all speak of a complex ritual life. Sacrificial horses masked and wearing horns imply cultural ties with Tamgaly in southern Kazakstan. From another Pazyryk kurgan a trade piece, a woolen carpet with a design that parallels the carved images of Medes bringing horses as tribute to the Great King at Persepolis (Iran), discloses the Pazyryks’ contact with the Achaemenid Persians. On the Ukok Plateau, Natalie Polosmak excavated a frozen burial containing a

Figure 13 A ceremonially horned horse with shaman, Tamgaly petroglyphs, Kazakstan.

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priestess wearing the nomadic high-pointed hat, caftan, and skirt. From another kurgan at Berel, located in the northeastern Kazakstan Altai Mountains, examination of the frozen remains of a high-ranking man and woman revealed the presence of hookworm infestation that could only have occurred on the shores of the Aral or Caspian Sea or in Iran, some 750 miles (1200 km) from the burial site. This confirms the practice of long-distance nomadizing during the Early Iron Age.

Early Medieval Nomadic Confederacies The Hsiung-nu, Yu¨eh-chih, and Tung-hu

Known to the Chinese in the fifth century BCE, the Hsiung-nu (also known as Xiongnu) were the largest of three Eurasian nomadic confederacies; the other two were the Yu¨eh-chih in the Chinese Gansu province and the Tung-hu in eastern Mongolia. The Hsiung-nu headed a powerful alliance of cattlebreeding tribes in the late third to the early second century BC, dominating eastern Central Asia for two centuries. They laid the foundation for the emergence of the powerful tribal alliances of the Middle Ages. The Hsiung-nu, as for all nomadic confederacies, were made up of various tribes, many with similar languages and traditions. Although some Hsiung-nu were reported to have red hair and big noses, it is unlikely that the ruling elite was Caucasoid or spoke an Indo-Iranian language. The tribes were noted for their deliberately deformed heads. By the middle of the third century BCE, the Hsiung-nu had formed a powerful confederacy and their leader was the great shan-yu¨. Pressure from the Chinese Ch’in emperor Shih-huang-ti in 214 BCE forced the confederacy from their traditional pastures in the Ordos region (northern loop of the Huang He River) and greatly weakened their force. Following the emperor’s death and the collapse of Chinese dynasty four years later, the Hsiung-nu regained the Ordos. At this time the continual Hsiung-nu pressure against the Chinese forced them to begin construction in Gansu of the Great Wall. Shan-yu¨ Tumen, had previously sent his son and heir, Motun, as political hostage to the Yu¨eh-chih. Chinese chronicles written by Ssu-ma Ch’ien reveal that Tumen attacked Yu¨eh-chih hoping that Motun would be killed, as the shan-yu¨ did not want this son to be his successor. Motun escaped during the battle, returned home, thus forcing Tumen to give him his military rank as heir as well as his 10 000 military forces. Motun began training his men to shoot at the exact same target that he shot at; if they failed to obey, they were executed. When his troops were completely loyal to him, Motun took his father on a

hunting expedition. He fired a whistling arrow at his shan-yu¨ as did his troops and Motun was assassinated. In 209 BCE, Motun became the new shan-yu¨ after executing his stepmother and any dissenters. Motun then attacked the Tung-hu, who tested Motun’s authority by demanding gifts. The shan-yu¨ granted their requests until they demanded territory in the Gobi, which overstepped their bounds. The Hsiung-nu attacked the Tung-hu, gained the advantage, killing the men, and taking the women and children prisoner before assuming their herds. The shan-yu¨ then turned westward, attacked the Yu¨eh-chih, taking traditional lands along the western loop of the Huang He River, before pushing into the Chinese Han defensive lines that crossed the Ordos. Moving northward, Motun dominated the Siberian fur trade and metals of the Mongolian Altai. Although he had considerable power, he still needed the vast wealth of the Chinese Han to fund a durable pastoral state. The Hsiung-nu and Han Chinese established a costly exchange of goods in which the Chinese obtained Heavenly Horses from the Ferghana Valley and the Hsiung-nu received foodstuffs, silks, and other luxury items. By the middle of the second century AD, following attacks by several rising tribal groups, the effective authority of the shan-yu¨ had collapsed both in the northern and southern regions and regional tribal chieftains regained power. It is assumed by some scholars that the Huns, located near the Black Sea as noted in Ptolemy’s geography c. AD 160, were remains of the Hsiung-nu who had integrated with local tribes. At Pokrovka in the southern Ural steppes, more than 100 kurgans with a very low profile contained skeletons with deliberately deformed skulls. These are dated post-Sarmatian (after fourth century AD). It is possible that these tribes may have been some of the Hsiung-nu who appear not much later in the Roman world as the Huns. Hsiung-nu archaeology Burials in southern Kazakstan with skeletons containing deformed skulls dating to c. 300 BCE reveal the incursion of Hsiung-nu from the Ordos region before the confederacy moved northward. In Buryatia (autonomous region in southern Siberia) the earliest Hsiung-nu archaeological monuments were discovered in 1896 by J. D. Talko-Grinzevich near the town of Kyachta. In 1924–1925, P. Koslov excavated the rich burials at Noin Ula in northern Mongolia that contained silver plates, nephrite carvings, silk textiles, and carpets. In recent years further excavations were undertaken at Noin Ula. In the same region fortresses at Huret-tov, Terelgiin, Gua-Dov, Bars-Hot, Haralty, and Gargalanty were explored, and cemeteries at Hunuy,

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Tebsh-uul, Edergol, and Darchan were excavated. The French-Mongol Archaeological Mission, commencing in 2000, located a cemetery of 400 burials at Gol Mod, 450 km NW of Ulaanbaatar. In 2001, the Mission excavated a funerary chamber 16 m deep in which they found rich artifacts, including a bronze mirror, rock crystal beads, and gold decoration suggesting that the burial belonged to a Hsiung-nu chieftain who died c. AD 40. In the Trans-Baikal region of southern Siberia, the Hsiung-nu Ivolga complex included a large fortress, smaller fortifications, and a cemetery. Other recent archaeological excavations in this region included the settlements of Dureny-1 and Dureny-2, Enchor, Hariatzk, and Bargay. In addition to the Bayan-Under fortress, the following cemeteries were excavated: Derestui, Ilmovaja, T cheremuchovaja, Enchor, and Zaoziornaja. Many small Hsiung-nu cemeteries are located south of Trans-Baikalia around Kyachta. Hsiung-nu skeletons are generally found supine but the burials vary in type as follows: (1) no inner grave or over-grave structure; (2) in a pit; (3) in a pit with a coffin and no over-grave structure; (4) in a pit with a coffin within a timber frame with no over-grave structure; (5) in a pit with a wooden coffin placed in a stone cist with an over-grave stone structure; (6) in a pit with a coffin placed in a timber frame and with an over-grave structure; (7) in a pit up to 10–15 m deep with a coffin, a timber frame, and a chamber several logs high enclosed in a square stone construction; the pit is partitioned by 4–5 stone walls. In the three latter groups, the coffin or the timber construction may be lined with stone slabs placed vertically. Change in the burial ritual within a given cemetery indicates the chronological development of Hsiung-nu customs and also implies increased wealth. The Derestui cemetery, investigated by Sergei Minyaev, has yielded the most important evidence relevant to Hsiung-nu social history. Each kurgan complex was composed of a central barrow holding a male, with satellite barrows in which were interred women and children, apparently sacrificed. Many funerary artifacts were placed in the burials; most common were belts, bronze plaques in the Ordos (often fantastic) animal style, ceramics, and beads. Decorative plaques, either solid bronze or metal over wood, adorned both women’s and men’s belts. The discovery and excavations of Hsiung-nu fortresses and settlements have given new insight into the Hsiung-nu that was thought to have been nomadic and completely dependent upon animal husbandry. However, because the Hsiung-nu Empire occupied a vast territory with a relatively large population, cattle-breeding alone could not sustain their lifestyle. Thus, in addition to the military strategies of

conquest and assimilation, agriculture, commerce, metallurgy, and other handicrafts were necessary to sustain the empire. The Yu¨eh-chih After being routed by the Hsiung-nu from Gansu, the Yu¨eh-chih confederacy pushed into western China. Chinese archaeologists excavated a Bronze Age stone house near Barkol, along the most northern Silk Route northeast of Urumqi. In addition to skeletal remains – probably those of nomads killed in a skirmish – artifacts abandoned on the floor of the dwelling included a large bronze cauldron of the Yu¨eh-chih type, indicating that they had celebrated feasts and burials while there. Yu. Zadneprovsky noted podboi burials in the Ili Valley and near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan. He tentatively identified these as Yu¨eh-chih on the basis of their similarity to other podboi tombs at the Gansu site of Haladun near Minqin. The Issyk Kul region is rich in nomadic burial sites; by 1960, 370 tombs had been identified. Of these, 80% were in pits attributed to the Saka, and 17% in podbois, tentatively identified as Yu¨eh-chih. As the Yu¨eh-chih moved westward, podboi burial are also noted in the Ferghana Valley where they may have wintered until they could continue their march westward through mountain passes to eventually arrive in northern Bactria (present-day Afghanistan). In the early first century AD, it appears that from the types and iconography of the some 10 000 gold artifacts found in six burials at Tillya Tepe (excavated by Afghan archaeologists and the Soviet archaeologist V. Sarianidi), the Yu¨eh-chih had interred high-status priestesses and a priest. By the turn of the millennium, the Yu¨eh-chih had become increasingly sedentary. One of the chieftains was responsible for establishing the Kushan Empire that ultimately spread Buddhism into India.

Mongolia in the Bronze Age Mongolia is a vast country situated in central Asia with changing geographical zones. Steppe lands are bordered by mountain chains: the high Altai in the west, the Hangai in the north central region that meets the Sayan in the east, and the Hentei that rises in the northeastern region. The northern Gobi, a semidesert/dry steppe land, covers the southern part of the country. In the west below the Altai Mountain, a great depression holds the salty Great Lakes that have no outlets. This area is the most northerly dry desert in the world (Figure 14). In spite of high altitudes and fluctuating continental temperatures, the vast steppes and highland valleys offer extremely favorable conditions for the early and successful development of animal husbandry,

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Figure 14 Stone-carved representation of a female, probably a priestess, wearing a pointed hat and holding a cup, standing adjacent to Uureg Lake in the Great Lakes Depression, Mongolia. Probably first millennium BCE.

which led to pastoral nomadism. The Bronze Age is represented by chance finds of cast bronzes of the Seimo-Turbino type, and bronzes with close affinities to the Karasuk Culture of Southern Siberia as well as the Chou Dynasty in China. The Late Bronze Age is identified with the Early Nomads who made extensive use of the bridled horse to forge contacts with neighboring tribes as well as more distant populations.

Early Turkic Empires The Turks were the first Inner Asian people whose language could be precisely dated. Their language also linked Turkic-speaking peoples throughout Inner Asia and beyond. Turkish-speaking nationalities in the Eurasian steppes and Turkestan today are many and include Kazaks, Kyrghyz, Uzbeks, Bashkorts, Tatars, Altais, Sakas, Tuvans, Uygurs, and Turkmen. The first Turkic Empire, that of the Go¨ktu¨rks, was established in Mongolia and dated from the sixth to eighth centuries AD. No doubt the Turkic state included nonspeaking as well as nonethnic Turks. In addition, not all ethnic Turks belonged to the ruling class and some probably also lived beyond the Turkish State.

Archaeologically it has been established that before AD 550 the Go¨ktu¨rks were nomadizing on the southern edge of the Altai Mountains, having descended from the northern Hsiung-nu. During this era they were vassals of the Mongol Juan-juans. Fomenting for independence, the Go¨ktu¨rks chieftain, Bumin, increased his military force by allying with the To¨les tribe, and gained prestige with the Chinese Emperor of the Western Wei by marrying his daughter. In 552 his forces defeated the Juan-juan and their khagan committed suicide. Bumin became Il Khagan and his wife took the title of Khatun. Bumin gave his brother, Istemi, the western sections of the country from Hami in Xinjiang Province, western China, to the Black Sea, territory that he ruled from 552 to 576 under the title of yabghu. The Go¨ktu¨rks, allied with the Sasanians and together they defeated the rival Turkish Akhuns in 545. The division of territories placed the Go¨ktu¨rks in control of much of Turkestan and Transoxiana as well as the Silk Road and the Sogdians came under the controls of Istemi. Go¨ktu¨rk influence within the Sogdian state is noted in the murals at their capital city, Afrosiab, near Samarkand. Continual wars and inner struggle within the Khaganate resulted in a split between 581 and 603 in which the Eastern Turkic and Western Turkic Khaganates developed. The Eastern Go¨ktu¨rks, under leadership of the charismatic Khagan Ishbara, developed diplomatic relations with the Chinese Chou and later with the Sui dynasties, becoming a vassal of the Chinese emperor in 585. By 593 the Go¨ktu¨rks having gained strength, refused to pay tribute to the Chinese. The Chinese retaliated; the influential Chinese princess Ch’ien-chin (also known as Ta’i), wife of Ishbara, was murdered. To maintain stability the majority of the tribes under the Eastern Go¨ktu¨rks sent thousands of horses, camels, and cattle to the Chinese as tribute. During the ensuing years Go¨ktu¨rk and Chinese relations continued to be stormy with factious intrigues, diplomatic intermarriages, and harsh military battles. In 630, Bagatur Shad, the last Il Khagan, was taken prisoner while on a hunting expedition in the northern Chinese mountains and died in China. Thus ended the Eastern Go¨ktu¨rk Empire. Beginning in 678, a second Turkish state was founded under the leadership of Khagan Kutlug, a descendant of the Eastern Go¨ktu¨rks, and continued under Khagan Qapghan who became the strongest emperor in Central Asia at that time. After Qapghan was ambushed and killed, Bilge Khagan, whose homeland was in Irtish River region, fought many battles with other Turkic tribes before ending this strife in 718. However, as he was an excellent administrator with wise advisors, the Turkic union prospered. After

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his death in 731, turmoil again arose among the various factional tribes. The Uyghurs left the khaganate, elected their own khagan, and founded their state in central Mongolia. Although Go¨ktu¨rks continued to be mentioned in Chinese annals until 941, the records indicate they never again regained their previous power. Turkic Political Structure

Upon formation of the Turk state, the person who embodied the state was the great khagan; his wife was khatun. Throne succession was from elder brother to younger brother or from younger uncle to older nephew. Waiting their turn, the prince’s received their own principalities and appropriate titles. The dispersal of power in nomadic states served two purposes: it provided stability of government and extended defensive powers. As nomads without a continuous habitation spot, their economic lifestyle was based on animal husbandry with each family allotted a specific grazing territory. Turkic Archaeological Monuments

The three earliest known monuments with Turkic inscriptions were erected in the eighth century near the Turkic homeland on the Orkhon River in Central Mongolia. Two were dedicated during the Khaganate of Bilge Khagan to Tonyukuk, his state advisor, Ko¨l Tegin, his beloved brother, and the third to Bilge Khangan after his death. The most ubiquitous Turkic monuments, balbals, are found throughout the steppes (Figure 15). These are stone carving representing a warrior who wears a weapon and frequently holds a bowl to his chest. Occasionally women are also characterized with similar accoutrements. These stelae are thought to be representative of the person whose burial they mark. Many other stone complexes, either cultic or burial, are found throughout the steppes, particularly in western Mongolia. These are only beginning to be archaeologically explored. Small finds from burials are primarily horse trappings, small decorative plaques, and undecorated pottery, typical artifacts of nomadic populations. Khans and khagans were buried with great ceremony and feasting but rarely have their burials been encountered.

The Genghis Khanite Era (Thirteenth Century) The Mongols are believed to have originated in the forest steppes of northeastern Mongolia, but ranged over what is now Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Then, as today, they spoke an Altaic language related to the Turkic

Figure 15 Turkic period balbal in western Mongolia.

language. For most of the twelfth century, a plethora of ethnic and linguistic Mongol and Turkic tribes, including the Tatars in east, the Keraits in the center, the Merkits to the north, the Naimans to the west as well as ¨ nggu¨ts, lesser tribes known as the Qonggirats, the O and Kirghiz tribes controlled the Mongolian steppes. The tribes were divided into the noble ruling clans and subordinates, the latter resulting from military defeat or the need for protection. Within the ruling clan (oboq) kinships were the principal means of organization, yet a provision for free choice also existed. Thus, chieftains were determined by their superb abilities while incompetence meant inevitable disqualification. The Mongol Empire established by Genghis Khan was not an autocracy determined by primogeniture. The Khagan (supreme khan) and successors were chosen or acclaimed at a quriltai, a great assemblage of Mongol notables held in the region south of Ulaanbaatar that Genghis Khan had declared his homeland. By 1206, the Turko-Mongol tribes were largely united and a quriltai was held that acclaimed Temu¨mjin Khagan of all these tribes. He took the title of Genghis Khan (Universal Ruler).

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When just a child, the Tartars had killed Temu¨mjin’s father, who was a minor chieftain. His mother, with her children, fled into the Hentei Mountains where, through great perseverance, they survived. These and other tales, some of bravery and others of treachery, are related in the Secret History of the Mongols commissioned by Genghis’ heirs shortly after his father’s death and written by the Uyghurs. As a charismatic and bold leader, successful in raiding, Temu¨mjin attracted like-minded warriors, many of lower status, who began to swear tribal allegiance to him. This group grew to become the nucleus of his imperial guard, the generals who led the raids across Asia and Europe. Continuing to use his strength and shrewd intelligence, Temu¨mjin’s power increased until he was finally able to marry his long-betrothed wife, Bo¨rte, and form an alliance with the Keraits, their greatest Tatar enemy. One by one, Genghis Khan subdued the remaining tribes and for the most part incorporated them into the Mongol military, ever increasing his strength. Unfortunately, the Merkits kidnapped Bo¨rte; nine months later she gave birth to her first son, Jochi. Although his paternity was never questioned, it remained to trouble the royal house. Many women, beginning with Genghis Khan’s mother, Ho¨’elu¨ U¨jin, and subsequently, Bo¨rte, held relatively high positions within the Mongol society. In the interregnums widows of the khagans ruled the Mongols. Perhaps the finest example was Khatun Sorqaghtani Beki, the strong and forceful wife of Tolui, Genghis Khan’s youngest son. In addition to her husband’s appanages that she managed even before his death, she owned two estates (small cities) in China that provided her with adequate wealth. Moreover, she held a vast orda, a summer encampment in the Altai Mountains, where her great herds of sheep, horses, and yak were maintained under an entourage of over a thousand families. Sorqaghtani Beki also controlled the military prowess of 12 900 soldiers. Other khans frequently lauded the Katun and her three sons as exemplary examples of honesty and loyalty. ¨ go¨dei’s wife, was de facto ruler for To¨rogene, O 12 years due to the fact that her husband, the Khan, was alcoholic. She was a Ma¨krit princess when Gen¨ go¨dei’ ghis Khan captured her and then gave her to O as his sixth wife. Due to her astuteness and extraordinary competence, she rose from this lowly position (outsider and sixth wife) to become regent following her husband’s death in 1241. She so earned the respect of lesser khans that she continued to command the empire for another four years, not permitting a quriltai to convene until she had formed the necessary alliances to have her son, Gu¨yu¨k, elected Khagan.

Karakorum Nomadic Turkic tribes had inhabited the area in the vicinity of Karakorum since the first century AD. In 1220, Genghis Khan established as his residence the large ger city of Karakorum. On a papal mission, Carpini visited the capital c. 1247. In 1267, the city was abandoned and later destroyed after Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, transferred the Mongol capital to Khanbaliq (modern Beijing). In 1889, the Russian explorer, M. Yadrinstev, discovered the ruins of Karakorum. (Yadrinstev also discovered the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions.) Karakorum is also the name of a nearby site that in the eighth to ninth century AD was the capital of the Uyghurs who later became scribes for the Mongol. In 1586, Erdeni Dzu, the large and currently functioning Lamaist monastery, was built in the vicinity of Karakorum.

The Empires of the Genghis Khan Descendants From Karakorum, Mongol hordes swept eastward into China and westward into Europe. By c. 1260 the Genghis Khan sons and grandsons ruled the farflung Eurasian empire that was divided into four khanates: the Great Khanate that comprised all of China and most of eastern Asia, including Korea and which, under Quibila¨i (Kublai Khan), came to be known as the Yuan Dynasty; the Chagadai Khanate in Turkistan under Genghis Khan’s second son, Chagadai; the Empire of the Golden Horde in southern Russia was founded by Batu Khan, with its capital at Sarai along the Volga River; and the Ilkhanate in Persia founded by Hu¨legu¨. Mo¨nke was elected khagan of all the Mongols and is considered the most astute of all Mongol leaders (see Figure 16).

Religions of the Mongols The Mongols’ religious beliefs began in ancient times as Shamanism and what we know of this comes from the Secret History as well as from observations by early European travelers, especially Giovanni Carpini ¨ go¨and Rubruck. Following Genghis Khan’s death, O dei’ called upon representatives of various religions to present themselves at his great tent at Karakorum. Ultimately, the Mongols embraced Lamaism, based on Tibetan Buddhism but with shamanic elements, in Mongolia and China. The Golden Horde and the Ilkhanates in Persia became Islamic. However, some tribes were Nestorian Christians or Manichaeans. Many Shamanic beliefs, such as the worship of high places noted in the Secret History, have come down

ASIA, CENTRAL, STEPPES 551 Genealogy of the Genghis Khanite Khans and Katuns Yes¨gei – Hö’elü Ujin Temümjin (Genghis Khan)

Jochi

Chagadai

Ögödei —Törogene Khan Regent 1229−41 1248−51

Tolui—Sorqaghtani Beki Khan Regent 1227−27 1232−1252

Güyük — Oghul Qaimish 1246−48 Regent 1248−51

Batu Golden Horde d. 1255

Mönke Quibiläi Hülgü Khans of Mongolia China Persia

Figure 16 Genealogy of the Genghis Khanite Khans and Khatuns.

through the centuries and are still practiced by contemporary nomadic Mongols.

A General Survey of Archaeology in Mongolia Under the direction of Roy Chapman Andrews, the American Museum of Natural History in New York conducted field expeditions in Mongolia during the 1920s investigating prehistoric remains. The material remains unpublished. In Western Mongolia in the Altai Mountains, burial mounds and other monuments relate to cultures from the Bronze Age through the Turkic period. The eastern border of the Altai Mountains along the Great Lakes Depression marks the western boundary of the seventh to third century BCE Slab Grave Culture, identified by vertical flat stone slabs that mark each grave. Burial rituals for the Slab Grave Culture were uniform with the dead placed supine in ground pits or in stone boxes. Although generally robbed, they occasionally contain tripod vessels, bronze knives, celts, and arrowheads. Personal adornment includes stone beads; bronze bosses were sewn on clothing. A grave in the Gobi yielded massive gold Siberiantype fibulae embellished with mountain goat heads and turquoise insets. In Uvs aimag, near the town of Ulaangom, Mongolian archaeologists excavated a Saka site in the 1970s. Animal-style carvings are noted nearby in the Chandamane Mountain as well as on rock outcropping throughout the Altai Mountains in the steppes. Since Mongolia’s return to autonomy following the breakup of the USSR, the country has attracted a plethora of international archaeologists (in 2002

over 100 international and Mongolian specialists participated). Also in 2002 the Mongolian government officially inaugurated the Institute of Archaeology which consists of the following research organizations: Palaeolithic Period, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and a research section of Ancient States period, a research team of the Mongolian Middle Ages period, an archaeological and anthropological laboratory, and a library and manuscripts fond. About 30 monographs and 600 scientific articles have been published with some having been presented at regional conferences. Currently the Institute of Archaeology houses over 5000 artifacts in its research laboratory, which is open to Mongolian and foreign students and scholars. Artifacts such as Palaeolithic stone tools from ‘Tsagaan agui’ (750 000 BP), funerary furniture from the Noin Ula Hsiung-nu aristocrats’ tomb, and decorative items from the Turkic Empire King Bilge’s burial are included in the holdings. The Institute has noted that gold and other mining is now extensively exploited in Mongolia and such activities are destructive to the ancient heritage. A major role for the Institute is to regulate the archaeological sites, together with international and other domestic institutions, in order that they are conserved.

Recent Joint Mongolian–International Projects Mongolian archaeological and historical research has always been fields of interest for both national and international scholars. One of the earliest, long-term Mongolian–Russian archaeological–ethnographical– historical expeditions was established in 1920. In

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1990, research cooperation broadened with various international scientific institutional participations that included groups from the US, Japan, Russia, Korea, Germany, France, Turkey, Belgium, and Italy. Between 1990 and 1993 the joint Mongolian–Japanese team ‘Gurvan gol’ researched a variety of archaeological sites, burials, and ruins dating from the Palaeolithic to Late Historic periods at Onon, Herlen, Tuul, the Tree River basin. In 1993, UNESCO sponsored the ‘Dialogue of the Silk Road’ in which 50 international and Mongolian scholars participated, traveling by land from Hovd in western Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar. The scholars presented lectures at each stop. The project culminated with an international conference in the capital city. Between 1992 and 1996 the Mongolian Institute and the South Korean Dankuk University conducted the Oriental Mongolia expedition that investigated ancient relations and interaction between these two nations. The research report was published in Mongolian, Korean, and English languages in five volumes. Among other accomplishments, the research indicated that the Mongolians were making paper in thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Beginning in 1997 the Mongolian Institute of Archaeology and the Korean National Museum archaeologists have organized the annual ‘Mon-Sol’ project with the object of understanding the interactions between culture and genealogy of both nations. Japanese archaeologists also have been consistently concerned about Mongolian history. In 1996, the American–Eurasian Research Project surveyed surface finds, kurgans, and other archaeological monuments in Bayan Ulgii aimag (Altai Mountains) while studying contemporary Kazak nomads in the region. In 1999, Mongol archaeologists and the American–Eurasian Research Project team excavated a khereksur, a large stone-covered cultic site, located at Beiram (Uvs aimag, Altai Mountains), probably dating to the Bronze Age. A cultic offering was found near the center top of the mound that included a wooden box containing a ceramic pot filled with wheat, a Djungar bronze arrowhead, and a thin piece of wood with an inscription that dated this find to shortly after AD 1645. Included in a wide variety of artifacts were carved-wood zoomorphic figures and more than 4000 astragals. After excavation, the mound was restored to its original configuration as local nomads continue to make cultic offerings as they cross the mountain pass. An undated iron smelter was also found in the vicinity of Beiram. Since 1995, the Mongolian, Russian, American/ The University of Arizona/ joint Palaeolithic expedition has unearthed evidence that c. 700 000–750 000

years ago early hominids lived in present-day Mongolia. Before this discovery Mongolian and Russian archaeologist dated the earliest hominids in northern Asia some 200 000 years later. The Altai Project, studying petroglyphs in the Altai Mountains since 1995, has discovered a substantial number of rock art sites, most notably those at Tsagaan Salaa and Baga Oigor. The remote Altai Mountains and valleys are also rich in surface archaeology: burial mounds dating to the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, khereksur, and olenniye kamni deer stones. The olenniye kamni sculptures have been divided into two groups: those with zoomorphic depictions and those without. Both groups display other iconography such as incised necklaces, fighting and festive belts, and the short Scythian akinakes (sword). The Altai Project also noted Turkic period ritual sites; and balbal, the Turkic anthropomorphic stelae. Extensive petroglyphs provide significant cultural and artistic value to contribute to the understanding of these ancient societies, particularly of the Bronze Age in western Mongolia and the Altai region. Beginning in 202, the Deer Stone Project was conducted by the Smithsonian Institution and various Mongolian government entities. Studies, including mapping, cataloging, scanning, and excavations adjacent to a number of the large elaborated olenniye kamni, have revealed varying iconographic styles. The stelae in this study are primarily in north-central Mongolia at the border of the steppe–taiga, although their distribution extends far westward in Eurasia. Preliminary results indicate that the monuments are thought to be the result of a transformation in religious and social changes, which took place after the first animal domestication and the development of new military technology. The iconography on the deer stones is probably the precursor of the ubiquitous animal-style art, a hallmark of the early Eurasian nomads. In association with the deer stone are khereksur, large stone mounds that have additional stone features incorporated into an extensive complex. Horse head burials, feasting ovals, and occasionally human burials are associated with these ritual complexes. Preliminary calibrated dates range from 3330 to 2150 BP, placing the olenniye kamni much earlier than previously believed. The Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education (SCMRE) has sponsored the Archaeological Conservation Program that included collaborations with three archaeological projects. In the spring of 2005, they were involved for the third field year with the San Bartolo Archaeological Project (Pete´n region, Guatemala). Primary conservation activities with the Deer Stone Project in Hovsgol aimag were followed by a short stint with the Khanuy

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Valley Project on Early Nomadic pastoralism in Arkhangai aimag. One of the most important joint emergency surveys and excavations, the Egiin Gol Project, was conducted in the Egiin River valley in north-central Mongolia. Work began prior to 1997 and the project has registered and excavated whole archaeological heritages in the zone. Further north in Mongolia, the University of Michigan excavated a Bronze Age funerary complex. In the same valley the Mongolian Institute of Archaeology, in conjunction with the Regional Archaeological Center of the French Ministry of Culture, conducted Palaeolithic surveys, discovering eight new Palaeolithic sites in the area. Since 1999, the Mongolian Institute of Archaeology, the German Archaeological Institute (KAVA), and the University of Bonn have managed the Karakorum Project located near the Orkhon River southwest of Ulaanbaatar. In addition to archaeological excavations, they also conducted Geomagnetic and Geological surveys. Since 1992, under the direction of William Honeychurch, American–Mongolian collaboration has conducted surveys and small-scale excavations in order to test ideas concerning the emergence of nomadic sociopolitical complexity at Baga Gazaryn Chuluu in the desert-steppe zone of the Middle Gobi. Bioarchaeological excavations are planned for this region. The Mongolian Institute of Archaeology and the Muse´e Guimet in France are also studying the Hsiung-nu Period. Since 2000 they have excavated tombs in Arkhangai aimag. The study and conservation of Turkic stone statues in Mongolia is being conducted in conjunction with the Turkish International Cooperating Agency (TICA). Their research has been successful in the Orkhon River valley at the Bilge Khaan and Kultigen sites. The Mongolian Institute of Archaeology and the University of Pittsburgh Anthropology Department conducted multidisciplinary collaborative research

in the Khannui River basin, Undur-Ulaan sum (county), Arkhangai aimag. Recently, the Richard Lug Foundation and Belgium Chinese Study Institute began the Mongolian Iron Age Project. The Italian National Research Institute has also commenced a GeoArchaeological study of the Gobi. From 2001 to present the multiparty project, New Century, have excavated at the Aurag site, dating to the Genghis Khanite era. See also: Asia, Central and North, Steppes, Deserts,

and Forests; Asia, West: Achaemenian, Parthian, and Sasanian Persian Civilizations.

Further Reading Baratova LS (2002) Turkic Khaganate in middle Asia (VI–VIII Centuries A.D.). In: Gu¨zel HC (ed.) The Turks, Vol. 1, p. 357– 363. Ankara: Yeni Tu¨rkiye. Barber EW (1999) Mummies of Urumch. New York: WW Norton. Christian D (1998) A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Vol. I: Inner Asia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Davis-Kimball J (ed.) (1995) Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age. Berkeley, CA: Zinat Press. Davis-Kimball J and Mona Behan (2002) Women Warriors: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner Books. Fitzhugh W (2005) The Deer Stone Project: Anthropological Studies in Mongolia 2002–2004. Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute and Ulan Bator: National Museum of Mongolian Hisory. Mair VH (1998) The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age People of Eastern Central Asia, Vol. 1. Archaeology, Migration, Nomadism, and Linguistics. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. Morgan D (1986) The Mongols. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Rosenthal JM (1957) The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rudenko SI (1970) Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sarianidi V (1987) The Golden Hoard of Bactria: From the TillyaTepe Excavations in Northern Afghanistan. New York: Harry N Abrams. Wood F (2002) The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

554 ASIA, EAST/China, Neolithic Cultures

ASIA, EAST Contents China, Neolithic Cultures China, Paleolithic Cultures Chinese Civilization Early Holocene Foragers Historical Archaeology Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers

China, Neolithic Cultures Anne P Underhill, The Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary flotation Use of water to process soil from features to recover plant remains or tiny artifacts. lacquer A coating made from resin for wooden and other objects, often to create a more polished appearance. phytoliths Particles of silica formed in leaves, roots, and other parts of plants. radiocarbon dating A radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring isotope carbon-14 to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60 000 years. tapa cloth Pounded bark cloth traditionally made in the Pacific islands. urbanism The study of cities – their economic, political, social, and cultural environment, and the imprint of all these forces on the built environment.

Introduction The Neolithic period of China encompasses several thousand years over a large, diverse area including mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This area is within the current political boundaries of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; including Hong Kong and Macau) and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Distinct cultural traditions developed in north and south China. Beginning c. 8000 BC, Early Holocene era peoples developed diversified subsistence practices, including initial steps toward domestication of plants and animals (see Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication). Varied subsistence technologies, crafts, and housing styles continue to characterize these regions.

At the same time, similar technological and social changes took place in different regions. Some settlements began to be occupied for longer periods of time, rather than on a seasonal basis. People used different kinds of material items to express both group and individual social roles. Striking ceramic traditions emerged, and ground stone tools began to be used. There is material evidence for early ritual practices and belief systems. During the Middle Neolithic period after c. 5500 BC, numerous farming cultures developed all over China. Permanently occupied villages became common, and craft production became more diversified. Social status was symbolized in burials and in residential remains. There are striking remains of public rituals and artifacts intended to display group ideology. During the Late Neolithic period after c. 3000 BC, marked social changes took place. These include the development of settlement hierarchies, the emergence of regional polities, more labor-intensive craft goods (pottery, fine stone) produced by specialists, and greater emphasis on display of individual social status in burials. During the final Neolithic period, c. 2600–1900 BC, these trends intensified. Regional polities became larger, urbanism began to develop, there was more intercommunity violence, and social differentiation increased. Incipient states may have formed in more than one region. The subsequent Early Bronze Age is known for its powerful states, large-scale bronze metallurgy, the first known writing system, rigid social stratification, and urban centers. Archaeology in China

Archaeology is a well-established field in both the PRC and Taiwan. Active field research is being carried out in diverse areas, including research and rescue excavations. Every year, numerous, well-illustrated reports of excavations and surveys are published as monographs and in archaeological journals. On the

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mainland, professional archaeologists can be found in history departments at universities, the National Institute of Archaeology in Beijing, provincial institutes of archaeology, in museums, or in city government units. In Taiwan, archaeologists work at universities (including anthropology departments) and the key research institution called Academia Sinica (in Taipei). Collaborative fieldwork with foreign archaeologists has taken place in Taiwan for decades, while it was first permitted on the mainland during the mid-1990s. On the mainland, rescue excavations have become particularly important during the past 20 years as economic development has intensified. Hundreds of Neolithic sites are found each year when new roads and buildings are constructed. The largest-scale rescue project has been in the Three Gorges area of the central Yangzi river valley. Archaeological teams from all over the PRC are excavating numerous Neolithic, Bronze Age, and later sites in advance of the rising water levels in association with the massive new dam being built at Sandouping in Hubei province. Several reports on these excavations have already been published. In addition, considerable government funding is devoted to museums at the national, provincial, and local levels in the PRC and Taiwan. Another priority is the protection of archaeological sites. On the mainland, for example, there are Bureaus for the Management of Cultural Relics at the local, provincial, and national levels of government.

Environmental and Cultural Diversity in China An important characteristic of historic and modern China is environmental and cultural diversity. It is likely that this diversity characterizes the prehistoric period as well. As a point of comparison, mainland China is roughly the same size as that of the United States, with similarly diverse environmental and climatic zones. Most scholars refer to the areas north of the Yangzi (Yangtze, or Changjiang) River as northern China. Millet agriculture is more common in the north, while rice is grown more extensively in the south. Archaeologists have focused their research in three areas of north China: the northeast, the central Yellow River (Huang He) valley, and the lower Yellow River valley. Increasingly, more fieldwork is taking place at Neolithic sites in mountainous areas further west. Northeast China, formerly referred to as Manchuria by some, is environmentally diverse. There are deciduous forests, steppes, mixed conifer and hardwood forests, and boreal forests. In comparison to areas further south, the growing season is short, with harsh winters. Northeast China includes

the modern provinces of Liaoning, eastern Inner Mongolia (Nei Menggu), Jilin, and Heilongjiang. The central and lower Yellow River valley areas have deciduous broadleaf forests, fertile loess soil (yellowish silt), and a temperate climate. A distinctive topographic zone where intensive archaeological research has taken place is the North China Plain (including parts of eastern Shaanxi, southern Shanxi, southern Hebei, Henan, and western Shandong provinces). Many archaeologists refer to a distinct cultural area called the Central Plain, focusing on Henan, where the early Bronze Age states developed. They contrast the Central Plain area with the Haidai (eastern seaboard) area (including Shandong, northern Jiangsu, and northern Anhui). In recent years, however, stunning discoveries have been made in several areas of China, showing that diverse cultures contributed to the development of early Chinese civilization. Research has been conducted primarily in three areas of south China: the central Yangzi River valley, the lower Yangzi River valley, and southernmost China (here, including Hong Kong and Taiwan). The Neolithic cultures of mountainous southwest China are not as well known at present. Judging from the major discoveries of Palaeolithic and Bronze Age sites there (see Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures), the area will provide more information on life ways during the Neolithic period. The Yangzi River valley has both mixed deciduous broadleaved evergreen forests and subtropical broadleaved evergreen forests. There is more rainfall than in the north, and the climate is warmer. Other distinctive features include bamboo forests and large, freshwater lakes. The central Yangzi River valley includes the modern provinces of southern Hubei, northern Hunan, and northern Jiangxi. The lower Yangzi River valley includes the modern provinces of southern Anhui, southern Jiangsu, and northern Zhejiang. Southernmost China is characterized by subtropical broadleaved evergreen forests and striking limestone mountains. The climate ranges from subtropical to tropical, and crops can be grown all year. Taro is an important root crop that is not found further north. There is abundant rainfall, and typhoons are common in the summer months. In these areas of south China and the Yangzi River valley, fishing is particularly important. The Republic of Taiwan includes the island of Taiwan, as well as other small islands. The largest ethnic group of mainland and insular China is referred to as the Han. Several ethnic minority groups have been known to reside in all areas since the early historic era. These historically known ethnic minority cultures are similar to those in neighboring countries to the north, west, and south. On the

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mainland, most ethnic minority peoples live in western areas. Many of these peoples have had nomadic lifestyles, moving seasonally with their herds. In several areas, ethnic minority peoples still speak their own languages, while written languages have been recorded for some. It is likely that diverse peoples, languages, and cultural traditions characterized the Neolithic period as well.

The Early Neolithic Period The term ‘Neolithic’ commonly refers to cultures with the following traits: farming as the main method of subsistence, fully sedentary communities (occupied all year round, rather than seasonally), and the production and widespread use of pottery vessels and ground stone tools. As elsewhere, the archaeological record of China shows that these traits did not develop at the same time during the Early Holocene period. Research during the next decade no doubt will reveal more variation in subsistence practices and community organization, partly due to more systematic recovery of plant remains through flotation and the collection of animal bones. Evidence is accumulating to show that the transition from a hunting and gathering subsistence economy to domestication of plants and animals took place in both north and south China. The earliest phases of the Holocene, beginning c. 8000 BC, are not well understood at present. By the end of the Early Neolithic period, defined here as c. 5500 BC, an agricultural economy was firmly established in more than one area. There also is evidence for increase in size of settlements and development of craft production (see Craft Specialization). Northern China

There is more than one area of interest for the incipient Neolithic period in northern China. The earliest site is Nanzhuangtou, located in central Hebei province (Figure 1). Radiocarbon dates place the occupation of this open-air site during both the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene periods, with a span from c. 10 000 to 8000 BC. No plant remains were recovered, but the appearance of grinding stones in this early context probably indicates growing reliance on plant foods in northern China. Another significant finding was low-fired pottery, with a variety of surface decorations (plain, incised, and cord-marked). It is likely, then, that pottery vessels were produced prior to the first cultivation of plants. The excavators also report the presence of the domesticated dog at

this early date, before any evidence for cultivation of plants. The early date for the domestication of dogs may represent a change to a more sedentary lifestyle. Dogs would have been useful for protection of residential areas and for hunting. Reports mention the discovery of another early site in the vicinity called Hutouliang. More research at northern sites dating to the critical Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene period is needed in order to trace the origins of millet agriculture in China. Millet clearly was a mainstay of the diet throughout the later Neolithic and historic eras. There is more evidence for plant cultivation at later sites in northern China dating from c. 6200–5500 BC. There are undisputed domesticated millets (foxtail, broomcorn varieties) at Peiligang culture (c. 6200– 5000 BC) sites in Henan and at sites from related cultures such as Cishan in southern Hebei. Large quantities are reported for this site, indicating considerable reliance on the crop. Early reports for Cishan mention evidence for domesticated chicken, in addition to dog and pig. Clay models of pigs also have been found. The excavations at Cishan yielded evidence for a mixed economy, from bones of wild animals and seeds of wild plants and nuts. There are other relatively early sites further west, such as Dadiwan in Gansu. There were well-established, at least semi-permanent communities in these areas, judging from the presence of numerous houses, pottery kilns, burial areas, and a variety of pottery vessels. Painted pottery is evident at more than one site from this phase. At this point, another key pattern is evident that characterizes later phases of the Neolithic in several areas – elaboration of individual burials. In comparison with the few known Late Pleistocene burials, the changes are substantial and probably represent stronger beliefs about territoriality, kinship ties to land, and the importance of ancestors. Differences in status between families were minimal, judging from the quality and quantity of grave goods at the Peiligang site of Shuiquan. Other material evidence for rituals from this era has been found in northern China. At the Beifudi site in Hebei, archaeologists found pottery masks of humans and animals with numerous pottery vessels and ornaments. These objects may have been used when people made sacrifices to their ancestors. There is mostly indirect evidence for agriculture at early sites in other parts of northern China. At Houli sites in north-central Shandong (c. 6300–5600 BC), plant-processing tools were recovered, possibly for millet, as well as bones of domesticated pig and dog. These too were substantial settlements, judging from the presence of houses, pottery kilns, and burials. At Xinglongwa sites (c. 6200–5400 BC) in Inner

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Figure 1 Early Neolithic sites in China. 1, Nanzhuangtou; 2, Peiligang; 3, Cishan; 4, Dadiwan; 5, Shuiquan; 6, Beifudi; 7, Houli; 8, Xinglongwa; 9, Yuchanyan; 10, Xianrendong; 11, Diaotonghuan; 12, Zengpiyan; 13, Pengtoushan; 14, Jiahu.

Mongolia, chestnuts and bones of domesticated pig were found, as well as possible agricultural tools. There is new, direct evidence for early millet at the site of Xinglonggou, dated to c. 5700 B.C. Remarkable settlement remains were found during excavations at the Xinglongwa site, including a surrounding ditch and several well-preserved houses. The houses were situated in neat rows, indicating planning. The ditch, the earliest known of its kind, could have served to contain domesticated animals or protect residents

from wild animals. Another significant aspect of Xinglongwa sites is the presence of a few large structures (over 100 m2) that may have been communal in function. The jade ornaments from the Xinglongwa site are the earliest known in China, and perhaps in the world. At Xinglongwa, some graves were found in houses, rather than in formal cemeteries. Important ritual remains were found here as well, especially a human skull with a design of a face made by carving, drilling, and incising.

558 ASIA, EAST/China, Neolithic Cultures Southern China

Cave sites in southern China are providing intriguing clues about the origins of rice agriculture. Given the tremendous importance of rice in historic and modern Asia as a whole, considerable research has been undertaken. One of the most intriguing sites is Yuchanyan in Hunan province. The deposits span the period from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene period, c. 12 000–8000 BC (and possibly later). A number of wild plant and animal species (fruits, mammals, birds, fish, shellfish) have been identified. Notably, remains of cultivated rice are reported, in the form of rice grains and phytoliths. Although the specific date of these remains is not known, the site is likely to produce more key information about the origins of rice farming. The dating of the low-fired, cord-marked pottery there also needs to be clarified. Several kinds of bone tools and ornaments were recovered, too. More research is needed to reveal the variety of subsistence methods during this period and possible causes for the onset of rice cultivation in some areas. Other important cave sites where archaeologists have sought to find evidence for early rice cultivation are Xianrendong and Diaotonghuan (or Wangdong) in northern Jiangxi, and Zengpiyan and Miaoyan in Guangxi. Phytoliths of wild and domesticated rice have been reported for Xianrendong and Diaotonghuan. These sites also span the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, roughly c. 12 000–8000 BC, and later. The dates of the domesticated rice need to be clarified. Plant-processing tools such as grinding stones have been found. At Zengpiyan, there were early reports of domesticated pig. A recent, comprehensive reanalysis of the site indicates that the prior interpretation about pig domestication was wrong. Fishing and hunting are evident from these four sites, judging from the recovery of bone harpoons and bones of wild animals. Hopefully future researchers will devise methods to recover evidence in southernmost China for the origins of root crop agriculture, given the historic importance of taro in these areas. Low-fired and relatively thick pottery was recovered at these other early sites. Here too the early vessels exhibit a range of surface treatments, including incisions, linear impressions, and smoothing. At Miaoyan, the pottery is said to date to c. 13 000 BC, or older. According to the most recent report, the earliest pottery at Zengpiyan dates c. 9000–10 000 BC. There are other preliminary reports of early pottery in southern China, providing more evidence for the conclusion that hunting and gathering peoples began making and using pottery vessels, prior to the onset of plant cultivation, as in northern China. The use of

pottery also probably indicates longer occupation periods at sites. This shift toward increased sedentism would have fostered more ties to land and rituals for ancestors. At Zengpiyan, mourners placed red ochre on the bodies of the deceased. Later sites provide better evidence for rice cultivation. Rice grains inside pottery sherds were found at the Pengtoushan site from deposits dating to the earlier Pengtoushan culture (c. 6900–6200 BC) in Hunan near Lake Dongting. The grain was identified as wet rice. The people probably planted rice in fields that could be flooded naturally. The Pengtoushan settlement was relatively large, including several houses, burials (mostly secondary), and pits. The houses are pile-dwellings (raised houses on wooden posts), illustrating how people adapted to an aquatic environment. Another site called Jiahu, classified as a Peiligang culture site, is located in southern Henan and dates from c. 7000 to 6000 BC. In addition to domesticated rice, archaeologists found remains of an extensive settlement with numerous houses, pits, burials, and stunning artifacts. The unusual preservation of organic remains in the wet deposits yielded several items of ritual significance. These included bone flutes in burials (Figure 2) and modified turtle shells (some with incised symbols) containing pebbles – possible divination tools. Music may have been an important part of rituals (see Ritual, Religion, and Ideology). The graves contained a variety of goods, revealing evidence for mortuary ritual and multiple social roles of the deceased. The different phases associated with the several styles of burial (primary vs. secondary, multiple vs. single) should be examined further. Pottery production was well established, judging from the discovery of painted vessels and what appears to be the earliest kiln in China.

The Middle Neolithic Period Hundreds of sites from the Middle Neolithic period, defined here as c. 5500–2500 BC, are known from most areas of China, signaling population increase and occupation of a greater range of environmental zones. Excavations have shed light on farming villages illustrating diverse cultural traditions with respect to housing styles, crafts, and rituals in both residential and mortuary contexts. There were dramatic social changes. One change was the development of social inequality, such that a minority of individuals had privileged social position or status (see Social Inequality, Development of). At the same time, there is evidence for the continued importance of group rituals. In some regions, individual social position was not expressed to the same degree as in other

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Figure 2 Bone flute from Jiahu. Adapted from Henan Province Cultural Research Institute (1989) Henan Wuyang Jiahu Xinshiqi shidai yizhi di er zhi liu ci fajue jianbao (Short report of the 2nd to 6th excavations at the Neolithic site of Jiahu in Wuyang, Henan). Kaogu 1: 12, figure 28.

regions. Another change was that regional polities began to develop, indicated by the emergence of regional centers (see Political Complexity, Rise of). Northern China

Three areas in northern China illustrate these changes well: northeast China, the central Yellow River valley, and the lower Yellow River valley. There is direct evidence for millet farming at Xinle culture sites in Liaoning province c. 5500–4800 BC in addition to pig domestication (Figure 3). Other cultures developed after the Xinle culture in northeast China, but the Hongshan culture is the most intriguing. The remains from the Late Hongshan culture, c. 3500– 3000 BC, provide large-scale evidence for public ritual and skilled craft production, most likely involving specialists. At present, few settlement areas have been identified, so little is known about daily life. At the huge ritual complex of Niuheliang (roughly 8  10 km2), there are numerous stone platforms

interpreted as altars and stone foundations of structures interpreted as temples. Apparently some walls were plastered and painted as well. Excavators were amazed to find a large clay head depicting an adult female with inlaid jade eyes. They hypothesize this head was originally mounted on a wall (Figure 4). Parts of large animals in clay also were found. In addition, workers found large quantities of unusual, painted pottery cylinders. At another Hongshan site called Dongshanzui, there were smaller clay figurines of obviously pregnant women. A distinctive feature of both sites is several forms of jade animals, both real and mythical (some dragon-like), and a few depicting humans. The ritual areas include rich graves for individual adults – many of which seem to be male – with finely made jade items. There are many debates about the significance of these sites. Some scholars argue that rituals were centered around females, thus indicating relatively high social standing of women at the time. Others emphasize the special burials containing jades as evidence for hereditary social inequality and for a complex society. Public rituals involving people from more than one community in the region would have been an important means for social integration. Most archaeological research in northern China has focused on the central Yellow River valley. The first Neolithic culture to be investigated was the Yangshao. Now it is realized that the Yangshao culture persisted over 2000 years and encompasses considerable regional variation. Early (c. 5100–3700 BC), Middle (c. 3700–3500 BC), and Late Yangshao (c. 3500–2800 BC) sites are located over an extensive area, especially Shaanxi and Henan Provinces. During the Early Yangshao period, the basic pattern of agricultural villages based on millet and animal husbandry became established. Subsistence practices included hunting and gathering, given the remains of animal bone, fish bone, and wild plants. Early Yangshao villages such as Banpo were quite extensive, with evidence for many circular house foundations, a wide variety of ceramic vessels (fine painted wares and plain wares), and spindle whorls, probably for preparing cloth from hemp. Yangshao sites have provided considerable information about social organization and ideology from both residential areas and burials. At early settlements like Jiangzhai, clusters of houses faced a central plaza area within a circular, protective ditch. Scholars speculate that these clusters represent social groups such as lineages. At these sites, residential areas were separated from burial areas and kilns. During the later Neolithic period, there were increasingly more villages surrounded by ditches. It is likely that protection of resources was an increasing concern.

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Figure 3 Middle Neolithic sites in China. 1, Xinle; 2, Niuheliang; 3, Dongshanzui; 4, Banpo; 5, Jiangzhai; 6, Xipo; 7, Dahecun; 8, Baligang; 9, Yuanjunmiao; 10, Xishuipo; 11, Xishan; 12, Beizhuang; 13, Wangyin; 14, Dawenkou; 15, Lingyanghe; 16, Jianxin; 17, Dazhujia; 18, Yuchisi; 19, Bashidang; 20, Hemudu; 21, Dapenkeng; 22, Chengtoushan; 23, Yaoshan, Mojiaoshan, Fanshan, Fuquanshan; 24, Zhuangqiaofen; 25, Shixia; 26, Fengbitou.

At more than one site such as Jiangzhai, there are a few unusually large structures. Given their central location, they probably were used by the community as a whole. Two have been discovered in middle Yangshao deposits at Xipo. The one excavated structure there is exceptionally large, over 200 m2, with traces of a red pigment on the flooring. The hearth inside is located close to the entranceway. This too may have served as a locus for communal rituals.

Some houses from relatively late contexts at Dahecun in central Henan have more than room. Yet another house form was discovered at two other Yangshao sites. Excavators found row houses, some with more than one room, in Early Yangshao contexts at the Dahecun site in north-central Henan. This same house form was also found in later Yangshao contexts at the Baligang site in southwestern Henan. There, archaeologists discovered row houses of roughly

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Figure 4 Clay head from Niuheliang, hypothesized original mounted appearance. Adapted from Liaoning Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics and Cultural Bureau of Chaoyang City (2004) Niuheliang yizhi. Niuheliang Site, p. 18, figure 15. Beijing: Academy Press.

equal size with separate rooms, each containing tools of stone and bone as well as pottery vessels. This style of structure seems to emphasize group status rather than individual social status. Early Yangshao sites contain more than one form of burial, generating much debate. One debate concerns the meaning of a few individual graves of young girls at Yuanjunmiao. These graves contain relatively large quantities of stone ornaments and pottery vessels. Rather than symbolizing wealth, such graves may symbolize some aspect of gender instead. Multiple burials of adults are more common at early Yangshao sites. These may have been opened up as needed to bury people from the same kin group. More

burials for individuals are found in later Yangshao sites such as Dahecun in central Henan. A desire to mark individual social position is more clearly evident for the later phases, when greater variation in grave goods, especially ceramics (some painted), is evident. A very unusual Middle Yangshao phase burial was found at the site of Xishuipo in northeastern Henan. Situated around the grave of an adult male were skeletons of three youths (both males and females) that have been interpreted as sacrifices. On either side of the adult were life-sized images made from shells that seem to represent a tiger and a dragon (Figure 5). It has been suggested that the animals represent features of constellations. It is likely that the deceased was a ritual specialist whom the ancient people believed could communicate with the heavens. Furthermore, this ritual specialist was highly regarded and was a kind of village leader. Only a few sites in the central Yellow River valley from the middle and Late Yangshao periods have material evidence for increase in social inequality. In comparison with other areas, differences in the quantity and quality of grave goods among graves are not dramatic. Numerous fine, painted pottery vessels are known from residential areas. It appears that a wide range of households had access to these vessels. The site of Xishan in central Henan, however, represents a new form of settlement. This Late Yangshao settlement was surrounded by a wall of rammed earth – a form of settlement that became more common during the final Neolithic period in northern China. Here archaeologists excavated over 200 houses and a central plaza, along with two burial areas. The surrounding wall would have served to protect the inhabitants and their resources from raiding. A number of fine, painted vessels were found. During the later Yangshao period as well, some settlements that were much larger than others nearby, signaling the emergence of settlement hierarchies. Although the functions of the regional centers remain to be investigated, they indicate the emergence of inequality at the community level and the emergence of regional polities. There were similar changes in the lower Yellow River valley. Millet farming and domesticated animals formed the basis of the subsistence economy in Beixin culture communities, c. 5300–4100 BC, in several areas of Shandong Province. There were primarily individual graves, exhibiting little differentiation. During the subsequent Dawenkou period, c. 4100–2600 BC, there were significant changes in both settlements and burials that reveal variation in social organization. A much larger area was occupied, and boat travel was known, given the extensive settlement found at Beizhuang on an island off

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Figure 5 Xishuipo burial. Adapted from Puyang City Cultural Management Bureau, Puyang City Museum, Puyang City Cultural Relics Work Team (1988) Henan Puyang Xishuipo yizhi fajue jianbao (Short report on excavations at the Xishuipo site in Puyang, Henan). Wenwu 3: 4, figure 5, and Yang XN (2004) New Perspectives on China’s Past. Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, Vols. 1 and 2, p. 23, figure 19. New Haven and Kansas City: Yale University and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

the Shandong coast. Surveys in Shandong reveal evidence for the emergence of settlement hierarchies. The most telling evidence for social differentiation, though, is found in the striking burials. In contrast to burials from the central Yellow River valley, they reveal increasing efforts to display individual social status. There is little differentiation among Early Dawenkou period (c. 4100–3500 BC) burials in Shandong, as seen from the site of Wangyin. There were both multiple and individual burials at this site. The single graves exhibited minor differences in the nature of grave goods on the basis of age and sex, rather than individual status defined by wealth or power. During the Middle Dawenkou period (c. 3500–3000 BC), more differences in mortuary treatment for individuals emerged. At more than one site, a few graves, for

both females and males, contain greater quantities of finely made objects than others. For the Late Dawenkou period (c. 3000–2600 BC), differences among graves are dramatic. The Dawenkou site is the most famous, with a minority of burials containing finely made pottery vessels, symbolic jade tools (no sign of use), ornamental objects of elephant ivory, and pieces of alligator hide that probably were used to fashion drums. The rare materials would have been acquired through exchange networks. Many of these goods probably were made by craft specialists, and some were made just for burial. In addition, some grave pits were more elaborate than others, with special earthen ledges to hold artifacts, and with wooden coffins. A common feature of most cemeteries is a tremendous quantity of pottery as grave offerings. At the Dawenkou site, one grave for an adult female

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contains 90 vessels, and one grave at Lingyanghe in eastern Shandong contains 160 pots. Different functional types are included, for cooking, storage, serving, and drinking. Drinking cups in rich burials are common, although there are interesting differences among contemporary cemeteries. At Jianxin, some rich graves contain large quantities of small jars called ‘ping’ instead. Some scholars argue that particular vessels in Late Dawenkou graves were the result of funeral feasts, while others were intended for use by the deceased in the afterlife. A funeral feast seems particularly likely for one grave at Dazhujia in eastern Shandong. This grave contains a large ‘zun’ jar on the ledge, and several finely made, stemmed cups, carefully laid out on the chest of the deceased. Remains of pigs, notably the skulls, are other common features of Late Dawenkou period graves. For other areas, however, symbolizing social position with material goods may not have been a priority. At the Late Dawenkou site of Yuchisi in northern Anhui, archaeologists found row houses similar to those from Dahecun and Baligang. Some contained over 40 rooms, including many objects used for daily life (pots, tools). As at Baligang, there was excellent preservation of the clay house walls, since they were burnt. It appears that the burning was a deliberate construction technique to harden the walls. Another intriguing finding was the large jars called ‘zun’ with incised symbols (some covered in red pigment). Some of these symbols (including the sun and moon) are very similar to those found at late Dawenkou period sites in Ju county, Shandong, to the northeast. Unlike those found in Shandong, however, a few of these vessels served as burial jars for children. The row houses seem to emphasize group membership, as elsewhere, although differences in wealth may have begun to emerge, judging from the fine ceramics (some with red pigment) and jade ornaments found in a few graves. Protection of the whole community was a concern, since a moat was discovered around the entire settlement. Excavations at Yuchisi, located in the southern extent of the Dawenkou culture area, revealed a diet based on rice as well as millet. As noted for Jiahu, the historic dividing line between rice-growing areas and those for millet does not always characterize the Neolithic period. Initial studies show that the environment during parts of the Neolithic period was warmer and moister than at present. Southern China

There is abundant evidence for fully sedentary communities that relied on rice farming in more than one area of southern China during the middle Neolithic period, c. 5500–2500 BC. Large quantities of rice

grains have been recovered from sites in the central and lower Yangzi River valleys. Late Pengtoushan culture (c. 5500–5100 BC) deposits at the Bashidang site in the central Yangzi river valley also yielded a surrounding ditch interpreted as a moat and traces of a small earthen wall. This tradition of surrounding residential areas with protective walls increases over time in China, especially in the north. At Zaoshi culture sites in Hubei (c. 5500–4500 BC), bones of water buffalo, an animal commonly used for plowing in southern China, were found. Huge amounts of rice were recovered from the Hemudu site (c. 5000– 4500 BC) in the lower Yangzi river valley, thanks to the waterlogged deposits there. Other aquatic domesticated and wild plants as well as wild animals were also found, providing a fuller picture of the diet at the time. The excellent preservation conditions enabled archaeologists to find a variety of craft goods, too. These included wooden artifacts, a boat oar, fragments of reed mats, bone whistles, and the earliest known lacquer container. Other, well-preserved sites from the Hemudu culture have been discovered recently with equally impressive remains. Different subsistence practices developed during the Dapenkeng period in coastal areas of Taiwan, c. 5000–2500 BC. Similarities to the cultures of the Pacific islands are evident, from the discovery of artifacts for fishing and grooved stone beaters for making tapa cloth. These peoples probably grew root crops such as taro, but at present there is no physical evidence. Sites in the central Yangzi River valley provide evidence for important changes in settlement organization and in craft production during the Middle Neolithic period. As in the north, there is evidence for increase in social inequality. The site of Chengtoushan in Hunan demonstrates that a new form of settlement emerged during the Daxi period (c. 4500–3000 B.C.). This site continued to be occupied during part of the subsequent Qujialing (c. 3000–2500 BC) period. Like Xishan in the north, this settlement was surrounded by an earthen wall and moat. The size and remains inside the walled enclosure make it likely the site was a regional center. Some houses were built on rammed earth platforms, a labor-intensive style of housing associated with elites during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods in more than one part of China. The settlement exhibits planning, with a pottery production area in the west and cemeteries to the northwest. The excavators identified a ritual area, where they propose sacrifices were made, anticipating practices known from the historic period in more than one area of China. Other Daxi and Qujialing period sites in the central Yangzi River valley demonstrate significant development of ceramic technology.

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A variety of labor-intensive ceramics were produced, such as elegantly shaped, thin-walled, and finely painted vessels. These relatively rare vessels have been found in both residential areas and burials. At present, little is known about residential areas at later sites in the lower Yangzi River valley. Numerous burials have been found near Shanghai from the Majiabang (c. 4500–3700 BC) and Songze (c. 3700– 3300 BC) periods. Songze period ceramics include finely decorated (painted, incised) jars and serving stands. Mourners also displayed the social position of the deceased by placing jade ornaments in a minority of graves. The most elaborate graves discovered in the lower Yangzi River valley, without a doubt, are from the Liangzhu (c. 3300–2200 BC) period. Although these graves contain finely made pottery vessels (elegant shapes, some black and polished), it is the jade objects that have received the most attention. There is an amazing variety of finely made jade ornaments, with respect to size, shape, and color. Many have no known function. The intriguing ‘taotie’ (‘animal mask’) design on some jades (Figure 6) also appears on later, historic period bronze vessels in the Yellow River valley to the north. A few rich graves at sites such as Fanshan contain large jades; large size may be another symbol of high social status. Other jade objects include symbolic weapons (no signs of use) that probably once were hafted with wooden handles. These probably served as symbols of power and authority.

Figure 6 Liangzhu jade from Yaoshan. Adapted from Zhejiang Province Institute of Archaeology (2003) Yaoshan, p. 216, plate 13. Beijing: Wenwu Press.

Jade is an extremely labor-intensive rock to work with, requiring extensive grinding and polishing. In addition, many pieces are very finely incised. The quantity and variety of pieces, in addition to the material itself, point to production by specialists. The sheer quantity in some graves (often over 100 pieces) might have necessitated production before an individual died. Little is known about how individuals used these items during their lifetimes. The difficulty of workmanship, the necessity for exchange networks to acquire the raw jade, and the quantities in graves all point to the high social position of the individuals in these graves. Several of the interred skeletons have been identified as males, but there is not always sufficient preservation to identify the sex of the deceased. Typically, a large quantity of jade items is distributed from the head to the foot of the deceased. The highest concentration of Liangzhu sites is found near the Lake Tai area in Zhejiang. Many cemeteries, such as Yaoshan in Zhejiang, only contain a dozen or so graves, each very rich in terms of interred goods. In addition to large quantities of jade, the burials include fine lacquer items, some inlaid with jade. Items made from elephant ivory have been found in more than one Liangzhu grave as well. Sites such as Yaoshan and Fanshan have been interpreted as elite cemeteries, with the location of graves of commoners unknown. An important exception is the recently excavated site of Zhuangqiaofen in Zhejiang. At present, this is the largest known Liangzhu cemetery, with over 200 burials, representing a wider range of the community. Yaoshan and other elite cemeteries from the Liangzhu period were first constructed as humanmade, earthen platforms several meters high over the floodplain. Many Liangzhu site names end in ‘shan’, meaning ‘mountain’ or ‘hill’. This would have provided a dramatic setting for funeral ceremonies. It is likely that ceremonies continued to take place periodically after burial of the deceased. At Yaoshan and the Fuquanshan site closer to Shanghai, archaeologists found altars made of earth and stone. At Fuquanshan, they also found sediments that they believe resulted from sacrificial offerings with fire. At the Mojiaoshan site in Zhejiang, the large platform construction has an area of over 3 ha, with a height of 10 m. In addition, there were remains of smaller rammed, earthen platforms and a large structure. Some of these platforms were constructed partially by fired adobe bricks, indicating even greater labor expenditure. Large structures also could have been used for public rituals around the graves of individuals who were important ancestors to the whole group. If additional excavation of the site reveals

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more of these structures, the structures may have been elite residences. The entire site covers an area of nearly 40 km2. It is likely to be a regional center for the numerous Liangzhu sites in the Lake Tai area. In southernmost parts of the mainland, Neolithic communities (c. 3500–2500 BC, and later) relying on rice farming and fishing have been identified, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian provinces. The best-known culture is Shixia, located in southern Guangdong. This culture developed c. 3000 BC and is represented primarily by burials. Like Neolithic cultures further north, there was a tradition of producing prestigious goods such as fine ceramics and jade items, in addition to items for daily use. Some of the same forms of pottery and jade items were found in the Shixia burials. Fieldwork at sites in Fujian thus far indicates similarities with cultures to the east in Taiwan. The Dapenkeng culture continued in coastal areas of Taiwan, and other cultures become evident such as Fengbitou in the south. In Hong Kong, a number of rescue projects have taken place during the past decade in advance of construction projects. They also have uncovered rice farming and fishing villages, a cultural pattern that has persisted in southern China for millennia.

The Late Neolithic Period The Late Neolithic period is characterized by marked social changes that paved the way for the subsequent era of powerful Bronze Age states. Major changes in the nature of settlements took place. Clear settlement hierarchies developed in several regions, revealing the presence of regional polities. The kind(s) of regional polities that developed is under debate. There also were changes in the form of individual settlements. A minority of settlements became much larger in size, and increasingly more were surrounded by walls and moats. Emerging urbanism is evident from changes such as increase in the density of sites on a regional basis. Intercommunity violence took place, but the extent of warfare is not known. Burials indicate more rigidly defined positions of social status. High social status is marked by different kinds of laborintensive, prestigious goods including thin-walled pottery vessels and jade items. Traces of metal at Neolithic sites indicate experimentation with metallurgy, but the process is not perfected until the Erlitou state era, after c. 1800 BC. Most archaeological research has taken place in the north, particularly in the Yellow River valley. The final Neolithic period here, c. 2600–1900 BC, is referred to as the Longshan period. Ever year, however, stunning discoveries take place in other areas. It is clear that more

than one area contributed to the rise of early Chinese civilization. Northern China

Regional surveys have been indispensable for identifying the presence of settlement hierarchies in the Yellow River valley. Longshan period sites range in size from a few hectares to c. 300 ha. Large centers supported by networks of smaller settlements have been identified in several regions in the central and lower Yellow River valley. Few traces of elite architecture, such as palaces, that could be identified from surveys survive in the area. In most cases, however, surveys and excavations reveal concentrations of labor-intensive, prestige goods such as thin-walled pottery and jade items in the relatively large sites. Thus far, systematic, regional surveys have taken place primarily in two areas: the Yi-Luo river valley in central Henan, and the Rizhao area in southeastern Shandong. This method of survey, systematically checking for traces of settlements over the entire landscape, provides a more complete picture of settlement patterns than traditional reconnaissance methods. The traditional method, however, has provided valuable clues for the existence of settlement hierarchies in several other areas during the Longshan period. These areas include northern Henan, southeastern Henan, southern Shanxi, western Shandong, and north-central Shandong. Much research has focused on the numerous sites from the Longshan period that have surrounding walls of rammed earth. This method of making a solid wall from the silty soil prevalent in northern China is very time consuming, requiring excessive pounding and compressing with wooden tools. Although it is often assumed that elites supervised construction of such walls, there could have been cooperative work teams managed by kin groups like lineages. Sites with rammed earth walls (Figure 7) have been found in northern Henan (Mengzhuang, Hougang), central Henan (Wangchenggang, Guchengzhai), southern Shanxi (Taosi), eastern Henan (Haojiatai, Pingliangtai), western Shandong (Jingyanggang), north-central Shandong (Dinggong, Chengziyai, Tianwang, Bianxianwang), and southeastern Shandong (Dantu, first built during the Late Dawenkou period), and northern Jiangsu (Tenghualuo). Although it is often assumed that these sites are regional centers, some are relatively small in size. In order to ascertain the role of a site within its region, other methods such as systematic survey and excavation are needed. It is intriguing that no Longshan period sites surrounded by walls of rammed earth were found in the Yi-Luo region where the first undisputed state, Erlitou, developed.

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Figure 7 Late Neolithic sites in China. 1, Wangchenggang; 2, Guchengzhai; 3, Pingliangtai; 4, Haojiatai; 5, Mengzhuang; 6, Hougang; 7, Baiying; 8, Jiangou; 9, Taosi; 10, Xinhua; 11, Chengziyai; 12, Dinggong; 13, Tianwang; 14, Bianxianwang; 15, Zhufeng; 16, Jingyanggang; 17, Yinjiacheng; 18, Liangchengzhen; 19, Dantu; 20, Tenghualuo; 21, Dadianzi; 22, Karuo; 23, Sichuan basin sites; 24, Shijiahe; 25, Beinan; 26, Lajia.

In southeastern Shandong, Dantu is clearly not the largest settlement; Liangchengzhen is much larger. The presence of a surrounding, earthen wall at a Longshan site is often regarded as an indicator of a city. Scholars have argued that cities in more than one historic era of China are large, walled settlements. Abundant archaeological research in other areas of the world has shown, however, that the rise of urbanism cannot be understood simply by the presence of

a single feature such as a wall. For one thing, occupation debris has been found beyond the extent of the walls at some sites. Urbanism is a process involving changes in the distribution of settlements within a region (see Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of). Nucleation of population occurs in certain areas, while other areas may experience a decline in population. Although features such as ceramic drainage pipes and moats (at Pingliangtai, for example) point

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to a new form of settlement, regional survey data are needed to trace the rise of urbanism in China as well. In addition, the possible economic, political, or ideological reasons for population nucleation need to be investigated. This can only be investigated by identifying all the contemporary settlements within a given region, not just the ones with walls. The social, political, and economic relations between the walled sites in each region (Wangchenggang, Guchengzhai, for example) cannot be investigated adequately without more survey or excavation data. The variation in settlements and supporting data from excavations demonstrate that several regional polities developed in the Yellow River valley during the Longshan period. Although more excavations are needed to identify the nature of these polities, some important aspects of these polities can be noted. The presence of more powerful elites than during the Middle Neolithic period is evident from striking variation in housing, craft goods, and burials. There are clues that more than one form of competition between elites took place during the Longshan period. Some valuable information comes from excavated sites with no surrounding walls. More projects focusing on regions, not just individual sites, are needed to understand key social changes from the early phases of the Longshan period to the late. It is important to keep in mind that each walled site was occupied for at least 200 years. Interpretations about social change need to refer to specific phases of the Longshan period. Rammed earth platforms that formed the foundation of structures used by elites have been found at several sites, including Wangchenggang and Jingyanggang. These would have included elite residences and structures for public affairs managed by elites such as rituals. The most convincing elite residence has been found at the site of Guchengzhai. Archaeologists uncovered a unique structure for the Longshan period. It is large in size (c. 380 m2), with traces of a long corridor along the entranceway that would have ensured more privacy for the activities inside. It appears that large, rammed earth platforms at Jingyanggang were used for ritual activities such as feasting. As seen for the Middle Neolithic period, elites had key roles in ritual activities for the welfare of their communities (see Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects). Similarly, at Taosi in Shanxi, remains of a structure interpreted as a palace were found. Another major discovery was an earthen feature interpreted as an astronomical observatory and locus for sacrifices to the gods. More labor-intensive goods have been found in burials than in habitation areas. The Longshan

period is famous for its rare, extremely thin-walled, ‘eggshell-thin’ pottery vessels. The thinnest of these vessels are found in Shandong province and represent the epitome of labor-intensive production. Probably these were made for burial, since they were too fragile to use in life. They have been found in burials at sites such as Yinjiacheng and Zhufeng, along with other highly polished, black, thin vessels. Fewer quantities of vessels were buried with the deceased at Longshan sites, although there still was an effort to include more than one functional type of vessel for use in the afterlife. In the Shanxi area, elites valued other kinds of pottery vessels. At the Taosi site, elite burials contain beautiful painted vessels with various designs, including a dragon. In each area, it is likely that elites sponsored the production of fine wares in some way. It appears that some elites attempted to find new methods of displaying status with material goods. Traces of copper or bronze were found at a few sites, indicating efforts to produce bronze items – vessels, tools, or both. Jade also was highly valued during the Longshan period. Jade items are relatively rare and found mostly in burials. Specialist crafts people made a variety of ornaments, but symbolic weapons such as long, thin knives (no traces of use) are predominant. These likely served as symbols of power. Unfortunately, many such jade weapons were recovered without proper excavations. Thus more specific information on dating and use cannot be obtained. A variety of beautiful jades were found in high-ranking burials at Zhufeng, Yinjiacheng, and Taosi. An exceptional array of jade symbolic weapons (knives, scepters, ‘battle-axes’) and ornamental items was found recently at the Xinhua site in Shaanxi. Most of the jades were found in a pit within a cemetery area, probably a ritual offering pit. The variation in the nature of sites, housing, craft goods, and burials provides a picture of increasing social stratification during the Longshan period in comparison to preceding periods. The excavated cemeteries such as Yinjiacheng and Taosi show that the majority of graves were small and contained few, if any, items, in contrast to a minority of graves with wooden coffins and exquisite, prestige goods. At the same time, a few sites, such as Hougang and Baiying, show that a range of households had access to some prestigious ceramics (thin-walled, polished). More research is needed to identify how craft production was organized for prestige goods versus utilitarian goods. It is likely that part-time specialists made both kinds of goods. Little is known about the nature of exchange systems during the Longshan period. Styles of pottery vessels and jades reveal

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interactions between regions. These stylistic similarities might be explained by the movement of peoples, local production imitating foreign styles, or exchange of finished products (see Exchange Systems). Competition over resources (such as land, agricultural labor, food, raw materials for prestige goods, or finished prestige goods) probably was one factor driving social change during the Longshan period. Although the increase in walled sites during the Longshan period prompts many scholars to argue for a high prevalence of warfare, more evidence is needed. At least occasional raiding took place, given the walled enclosures and potential weapons in residential areas (projectile points). One walled enclosure, Pingliangtai, has features interpreted as guardhouses. The specific evidence for warfare in individual regions needs to be assessed, including careful consideration of dating within the long Longshan period. Physical evidence for violent death is rare. One convincing case is the remains at Jiangou in southern Hebei. There excavators found jumbled bodies in a pit, and a few skulls bearing signs of scalping. The next decade promises to be an exciting one, as archaeologists uncover more evidence for the development and nature of regional polities that developed in northern China during the Longshan period. Scholars are divided as to whether these polities represent chiefdoms, or early states. There is no consensus among those who argue for early states, either. Both city-states and larger, territorial states have been proposed as appropriate models. Given the prevalence of warfare during the historic period, many scholars expect that warfare was a key factor in state formation during earlier periods. Prowess in warfare was a characteristic of leaders in Early Bronze Age states and was no doubt valued during the Late Neolithic period. At present, however, there is much more evidence for warfare in northern China after known states developed, rather than before. Other Areas of China

It is clear that complex societies developed during the Late Neolithic period in other areas of China, too. In northeast China, a number of post-Hongshan, walled sites made from stone were built at the time of the Late Dawenkou and Late Yangshao periods, and occupied through the equivalent of the Early Longshan period. Late Neolithic cultures in some regions here persisted after early states had developed in the Yellow River valley. Recent research on sites such as Dadianzi from the Lower Xiajiadian period (c. 2200–1600 B.C.) has identified high-ranking

burials on the basis of intricately painted pottery vessels and jade items. Thus, there were similar values about prestige goods in mortuary ritual from distant, and very different areas of China during the Late Neolithic period. This also is evident from excavations at the Beinan site in southern Taiwan. Here, beautiful jade ornaments were included in the graves of high-ranking individuals. An interesting local feature was the use of stone coffins instead of wooden coffins as seen on the mainland. Excavations of settlement areas in other southerly areas of China point clearly to the development of complex societies. In the central Yangzi River valley, archaeologists have defined a ‘Hubei Longshan’ culture c. 2500–2000 BC that is similar in many respects to the more northern variants of Longshan culture. Excavations at the large, walled settlement (including moats) of Shijiahe have revealed some unusual remains. Within the walled enclosure, excavators found thousands of small, red pottery cups in the Sanfangwan area to the south, probable remains of ritual activities. In the Dengjiawan cemetery to the north, there were over 1000 small clay figurines of people and animals (domesticated and wild) in two pits. These also probably were used in rituals. Some large structures at the site appear to be elite residences. As seen elsewhere, a common theme in more than one area is the association of ritual activities with elites. Management of ritual was an important aspect of leadership, probably providing individuals the authority to rule. The enormous area around Shijiahe actually includes several separate sites, many of which were first occupied during the Late Qujialing period. In the Xiaojiawuji cemetery, numerous jade items were found, including some stunning pendants with finely carved human faces (Figure 8). Most recently, there have been discoveries of late prehistoric, walled sites in the Sichuan basin as well. These are important because they indicate the likelihood of a local complex society before the spectacular Sanxingdui Early Bronze Age culture developed. At the same time, excavations in more westerly areas of China are informing us about different kinds of lifestyles during the Neolithic period. Excavations at the Karuo site in eastern Tibet uncovered a small, farming village with a variety of tools and pottery vessels not seen in other areas. Jade items were found, though, indicating some shared values with more easterly areas. More excavations in westernmost China ought to reveal traces of nomadic peoples, as known from historic times. Lastly, the findings that reveal the lives of ordinary people during the Late Neolithic period of China are

ASIA, EAST/China, Neolithic Cultures 569 See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, East: China,

Paleolithic Cultures; Chinese Civilization; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Craft Specialization; Exchange Systems; Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects; Plant Domestication; Political Complexity, Rise of; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Social Inequality, Development of.

Further Reading

Figure 8 Jade from Xiaojiawuji. Adapted from Shijiahe Team (1999) Xiaojiawuji, Vols. 1 and 2, plate 2.1. Beijing: Wenwu Press.

equally as important as the remains of elites. Recently, one bowl of preserved, millet noodles from a Qijia culture site in Qinghai province called Lajia, dated to c. 2000 BC, captivated the world. Before this discovery, the Qijia culture was better known from burials in the upper Yellow River valley. This famous site demonstrates the value of archaeology for informing us about the full range of lifestyles in prehistory.

Conclusions The rich archaeological record of the Chinese Neolithic period is providing valuable data about the origins of Chinese civilization. A diversity of life ways has been revealed, but there are common threads from area to area. Clearly, early Chinese civilization stems from multiple areas. At the same time, Neolithic sites provide an extraordinary opportunity to investigate key social changes such as the development of an agricultural way of life, social ranking, specialized craft production, urbanism, and regional polities. Comparative studies about early civilizations will continue to require inclusion of the important results from the extensive fieldwork in the PRC and Taiwan.

Acknowledgment The author thanks Jill Seagard, Department of Anthropology at The Field Museum, for preparing Figures 1–8.

Guojia Wenwu Ju (National, Bureau of Cultural Relics) Editorial Group (2005) Zhongguo zhongyao kaogu faxian. Major Archaeological Discoveries in China in 2004. Beijing: Wenwu Press. Henan Province, Cultural Research, Institute (1989) Henan Wuyang Jiahu Xinshiqi shidai yizhi di er zhi liu ci fajue jianbao (Short report of the 2nd to 6th excavations at the Neolithic site of Jiahu in Wuyang, Henan). Kaogu 1: 1–14. Li WX (2000) Zhongguo shi nian bai da kaogu xin faxian. Top 100 New Archaeological Discoveries in China, Vols. 1 and 2. Beijing: Wenwu Press. Liaoning Provincial, Institute of Archaeology, Cultural Relics, Cultural Bureau of Chaoyang, City (2004) Niuheliang yizhi. Niuheliang Site. Beijing: Academy Press. Liu L (2004) The Chinese Neolithic. Trajectories to Early States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lu HY, Yan XY, Ye ML, et al. (2005) Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China. Nature 437. 967–968. Puyang City Cultural Management Bureau, Puyang City Museum, Puyang City Cultural Relics Work Team (1988) Henan Puyang Xishuipo yizhi fajue jianbao (Short report on excavations at the Xishuipo site in Puyang, Henan). Wenwu 3: 1–6. Shijiahe, Team (1999) Xiaojiawuji, Vols. 1 and 2. Beijing: Wenwu Press. Stark M (ed.) (2006) Archaeology of Asia. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Underhill AP (2002) Craft Production and Social Change in Northern China. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Whitfield R and Wang T (eds.) (1999) Exploring China’s Past. London: Saffron Books. Wu JM (2004) The Late Neolithic cemetery at Dadianzi, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In: Linduff K and Yan S (eds.) Gender and Chinese Archaeology, pp. 47–91. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Yang XN (2004) New Perspectives on China’s Past. Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, Vols. 1 and 2. New Haven and Kansas City: Yale University and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Zhao ZJ (2005) New data for the study of the origins of agriculture in China. In: Institute of Archaeology CASS (ed.) Chinese Archaeology in the New Century Papers in Honor of Professor Wang Zhongshu’s 80th Birthday (Xin Shiji de Zhongguo Kaoguxue: Wang Zhongshu Xiansheng Bashi Huadan Jinian Lunwen Ji), pp. 86–101. Beijing: Science Press. Zhejiang Province, Institute of Archaeology (2003) Yaoshan. Beijing: Wenwu Press. Zhejiang Province, Institute of Archaeology, Pinghu City Museum (2005) Zhejiang Pinghu shi Zhuangqiaofen Liangzhu wenhua yizhi ji mudi (The site and cemetery from the Liangzhu culture at Zhuangqiaofen in Pinghu City, Zhejiang). Kaogu 7: 10–14.

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China, Paleolithic Cultures Chen Shen, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary acheulean A term referring to an archaeological industry of stone tools, represented by bifacial handaxes, created by hominids in the Lower Palaeolithic across Africa, much of Europe and Asia, bifacial technology A special flintknapping technique to manufacture stone tools by sequentially flaking two sides of a block or a large flake. A final produce through this core reduction technique shows extensive flake scars on both sides. ESR Standing for Electron Spin Resonance, as a spectroscopic technique, for use of dating application, that enables trapped electrons within bones and shells to be measured without the heating that thermoluminescence requires. flake tools Stone tools that were made on flakes removed from a prepared core, and then by retouching or modifying work edge of the flake. lithic technology In study of human prehistory, lithic technology refers to adaptive behaviors that specifically involve in production and use of stone tools. microblade technology A special flintknapping technique to produce a series of small blades (normally less than 50 cm in length) from specially prepared core such as wedge-shape or boat-shaped core. This lithic technology was invented by modern hunter-gatherers around 30 000 BP, and wildly spread across Northern Asia and Northeast North America. OSL Standing for Optically Stimulated Luminescence, a dating technique by measuring doses from ionizing radiation (commonly known as radioactive radiation), based on the principle that electrons trapped between the valence and electron band in the crystalline structure of matter. palaeomagnetic dating A dating technique based on the principle of Palaeomagnetism that study the record the Earth’s magnetic field preserved in various magnetic minerals through time. palaeolithic Referring to the period of old stone tool cultures created by human beings, also called the ‘Old Stone Age’. It began with the introduction of the first stone tools by hominids such as Homo habilis (around 2 000 000 years ago) and lasted until the introduction of agriculture. pebble-core tools Stone tools that were made on pebble blocks or cores by chopping large flakes off around the edges. Pleistocene Referring to a geologic timescale is the period from 1 800 000 to 11 550 years BP, followed by the Holocene epoch of today. The Pleistocene is a period when hominis created archaeological cultures that is usually referred to Palaeolithic. refitting analysis An application of stone tool analytical method that entails attempting to put stone tools and flakes back together again, and provides invaluable information on core reduction procedures and site formation. use-wear analysis An application of stone tool analytical method that examine, under either lower power or high power microscopes, microfractures and abrasions on the working edges of stone tools for determination of tool functions.

Introduction In the history of Chinese archaeology, the foreign scientists Emile Licent (1876–1952), Pierre Teihard de Charlin (1881–1955), Johanson Andersson (1874– 1960), Davidson Black (1884–1934), and Henri E. Breuil (1877–1961) are indisputably regarded as the pioneers of Chinese Palaeolithic study. Their investigations in the Ordos area of the Upper Yellow River, excavations at the Shuidonggou site, and discovery of the sensational Sinanthoropus pekinensis fossils at the Zhoukoudian (also spelled as Cho-KouTien), all in the 1920s, marked the beginning of Palaeolithic research in China. These early discoveries were published in Le Paleolitque de la China in 1928, the first book on Chinese Palaeolithic cultures. Research prior to 1949 focused solely on the excavations of sites at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing. The international collaboration at Zhoukoudian trained the first generation of Chinese Palaeolithic archaeologists: Dr. Pei Wenzhong (also known as W. C. Pei, 1904–1982) and Jia Lanpo (also Chia Lan-po, 1908– 2001). Today, their students, including Lu Zen’er, Zhang Senshui, Wei Qi, and Huang Weiwen, among others, are leading scholars active in the field. They are responsible for the discovery of hundreds of Palaeolitihc sites between the 1950s and 1980s (Figure 1). The findings from these discoveries are summarized in an edited volume Paleonanthropology and Paleolithic Archaeology in the People’s Republic of China published by Academic Press in 1985. The book became a major reference tool for western scholars and students studying Chinese Palaeolithic in the following decades. By the end of the last century, Chinese Palaeolithic study entered a new era when a new generation of Chinese archaeologists, who received their training in the West, started evaluating old data, applied new techniques in field investigations, and offered alternative interpretations on human evolution in China. International collaborations, after a half-century long hiatus, once again played a vital role in the development of Chinese Palaeolithic framework. This article summarizes our current knowledge of Palaeolithic cultures based on the data sets accumulated over the last two decades.

An Overview: Palaeoenvironment and Chronology The uplift of the Himalayan mountains, along Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and appearance of Eurasian steppe deserts had a unique and significant impact on the palaeoenvironment on East Asia. These environmental changes inhibited the direct interaction of

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Figure 1 Major Palaeolithic sites in China. 1, Shuidonggou; 2, Sjara-osso-gol (Ordos); 3, Zhoukoudian (Locality 1, Locality 15, the Upper Cave, Tianyuandong); 4, Yuanmou; 5, Longgupo; 6, Xihoudu; 7, Lantian; 8, Nihewan (Goudi, Majuangou; Donggutuo, Xiaochangliang, Banshan, Cenjiawan, Maliang, Youfang); 9, Quyuanhekou; 10, Jinliushan; 11, Guanyindong; 12, Dadong; 13, Sanming Lingfengdong; 14, Dali; 15, Luonan (Longyadong); 16, Baise; 17, Maozhushan; 18, Hexian; 19, Tangshan; 20, Dingcun; 21, Ranjialukou; 22, Gaojiazheng; 23, Jingshuiwan; 24, Jigongshan; 25, Maba; 26, Liujiang; 27, Ziyang; 28, Zhijidong; 29, Shiyu; 30, Xianrendong; 31, Xiaonanhai; 32, Xiachuan; 33, Xueguan; 34, Hutouliang; 35, Shizitan; 36, Jiqitan; 37, Qingfengling; 38, Fenghuangling; 39, Wanghailou; 40, Lingjing; 41, Dongfang Plaza.

hominids on both sides of the Old World. Nevertheless, these geological and environmental barriers did not prevent early African hominids from entering East Asia as early as 1.7–1.6 million years ago. The earliest occupations were distributed in the central China between 25 and 40 N latitude. During the Lower Pleistocene (1.8–0.78 million years ago), the palaeoenvironment in central-northern China was much warmer and moister than today, similar to the subtropical climate that comprised early hominids’ living habitats. Most of these earliest hominid settlements were found in open-air sites near water sources in what is today a hilly environmental setting. The lithic technology of these early hominids in the new

land was noticeably different from their counterparts in the West. Geological tectonic movements and temperature fluctuations during the Middle Pleistocene started to create a geological boundary through what are today the Qinling Mountains. Northern China became drier and colder, resulting in temperate–prairie zones, while southern China retained the same subtropical climate as before. By this time, Asian hominids seemed well adapted to different environments, and Early Palaeolithic sites have been found almost everywhere across the vast landscape of China. Their decision to locate in cave sites and open-air sites was probably based on survival strategies. During this

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time, there is evidence for intentional use of fires, and the formation of two different technologies (flaketool industries in the North and pebble-core tool industries in the South) occurred. During the late Middle Pleistocene to early Upper Pleistocene, Mousterian industries (represented by Neanderthal cultural remains) dominated the western side of the Old World, but had little impact on cultural changes in China. Here, the cultural remains of the early Upper Pleistocene show a continuous development from its preceding cultures. Thus, the term ‘Middle Palaeolithic,’ once used to identify Palaeolithic sites dated to this period, now seems irrelevant when discussing lithic industries that have little difference from the early period. For the purpose of comparison, however, our summary of these sites will still be under a separate heading, but designated as late Early Palaeolithic. The most significant environmental event that occurred during the Upper Pleistocene was the climate change from the Last Inter-Glacial to the Last Glacial period. The climatic influence was once again greater in North China than in South China, and as a result, the northern flake-tool industries were pushed southward, replacing the pebble-core tool industries in Middle-Lower Valley of Yangtze (Changjiang) River. This transition, or cultural interaction between the North and the South, was evinced by the Palaeolithic remains recovered in recent investigations in the Three Gorges area. Another environmental change was the quick accumulation of Malan Loess across northern China, which resulted in the northern lithic industries being more adaptive to loess environments. The Malan Loess is the best chronological indicator, and provides Palaeolithic researchers with an opportunity to examine the human behavioral changes of the late Early Palaeolithic in response to environmental changes, although such studies in China are still in its infancy. By 40 000–35 000 BP dramatic cultural changes occurred in China, evinced by the sudden appearances of blade technology, bifacial technology, and especially microblade technology. These new technologies mixed with the indigenous lithic industries, thereby forming unique Late Palaeolithic cultures. These cultural changes were directly related to the migration and subsequent spread of anatomical modern humans in China. Whether or not modern humans also originated independently in East Asia is still open to debate; nevertheless, the spread of modern humans from the West via the vast Eurasian Steppe and Eastern Siberia undoubtedly contributed to the complexity and variability of Late Palaeolithic lithic industries. Clearly, China, especially northeastern China, at the end of Pleistocene was part of a

cultural intersphere that eventually reached the New World during 20 000–11 500 BP.

Early Hominid Occupations of the Lower Pleistocene (1.8–0.78 Million Years Ago) It is claimed that the oldest stone tools in China date to more than 2 million years ago and came from Renzidong site, Fanchang County, Anhui province in southern China. But whether these so-called stone tools were caused by nature or by hominids is highly debated among Chinese archaeologists. The abundance of Pliocene/early Lower Pleistocene faunal remains indicates that this site could have great potential for hominid living habitats. The well-known Yuanmou Shangnabang site in Yunnan province and Longgupo site in Chongqing Municipality, where Homo erectus teeth and questionable Homo habilis (or more likely Fufengpithecus) lower jaw were recovered, respectively, also have controversial dates older than 1.8 million years ago. Identified in 1960, Xihoudu site in southern Shanxi province was reported as one of the oldest sites dated to before 1.8 million years ago, but the nature of stone tools is still in doubt due to the heavy abrasion on the artifacts by hydrodynamic forces at the site, and a recent palaeomagnetic study redated this site to 1.27 million years ago. Other sites of such antiquity include Lantian Gongwangling in Shaanxi province and Yuanxian Quyuanhekou in Hubei province. At both sites hominid fossil remains were recovered in association with a few stone tools. While identifications of Longgupo and Yuanxian fossils are still under debate, the oldest fossil skull of Asian Homo erectus found in China (dated to 1.1 mya by palaeomagnatic dating) is from Lantian Gongwangling. These aforementioned sites have very limited cultural remains like stone tools. However, the Nihewan Basin has yielded a number of Lower Pleistocene sites with abundant cultural materials, and is no doubt a prime focus for study of early hominid behavior in East Asia (see Modern Humans, Emergence of). The Nihewan Basin

The Nihewan Basin, located in Hebei province, about 300 km northwestern Beijing, is a large extinct lacustrine basin with extensive Pliocene and Pleistocene deposit containing hominid activity sites with associated faunal fossils and stone tools. These sites are indicative of the earliest hominid occupations in East Asia researching 40o north latitude landscape. So far more than a dozen sites dated to the Lower Plesitocene, concentrated on the eastern ends of the basin, have been identified within a 5 km radius of the Donggutuo village, Yangyuan County. The number will likely increase as the investigation is ongoing,

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and suggests that the region was the most populated area for the earliest hominids in East Asia. Recently, a series of palaeomagnetic studies took place in the region, establishing the following relative chronology: Goudi (also named as Majuangou III) has magnetostratigraphic age of 1.66 million years, Majuanagou site 1.55 million years, Xiaochangliang and Dachangliang (also reported as Xuantai) 1.36 million years, Banshan 1.32 million years, and Donggutuo and Cengjiawan 1.1 million years (Figure 2). The most recent exciting discovery at Nihewan is the Goudi site, first excavated in 2001 by the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (the IVPP). Three additional field sessions were carried out by Hebei archaeologists in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Researchers from the IVPP named the site as Goudi, while latter Hebei scientists refer to this site as Majuangou III based on the fact that the site sediment was directly below the later 1.55 million year old Majuangou site. Goudi is located about 1.5 km from Donggutuo village at an elevation of 821 m above sea level. Faunal remains from the reported earliest excavation include fragmentary bones identifiable as birds (including ostrich), rodents, cainivores, elephantids, Equus sp., rhinocerotids, and cervids. Later excavation sessions revealed a floor of elephantids foot imprints. The cultural remains of hominid activities are evident from lithic artifacts that include cores reconstructed by refitting pieces of flakes discovered in the surrounding area (Figure 3). According to use-wear examination, flakes were used without retouching. This evidence suggests that the Goudi site, dated to close to the onset of the Olduvai subchron, is the earliest archaeologcal site where hominids activity can be unambiguously identified. Identified in 1978, Xiaochangliang was the first known Lower Pleistocene site in the basin. At the time of discovery, the site attracted great attention from international scientists (including archaeologists, geologists, and palaeontologists) because of its great antiquity, but no systematic excavation was carried out until the 1990s. Research based on site survey and surface-collected materials indicated the site to be a hominid activity area. In 1998, a SinoCanada research team excavated the sites exposing 16 m2. The study of the faunal taphonomy suggests that the distribution of artifacts was the result of a jumble of hydraulically processed lithics and fauna. The evidence indicates that the site was located on the shoreline of an Archaic lake. Microscopic examination of lithic artifacts for tool functions reveals that Xiaochangliang hominids employed unmodified flakes as expedient tools, the use-wear of which suggests that they were used in scavenging of

dead animals for food and potentially other uses (see Dendrochronology). Following the discovery of Xiaochangling, the Donggutuo site was identified in 1981 and excavated during 1981–1985 at five testing localities (T1–T5). Donggutuo is the only known Lower Pleistocene site with multiple layers (layers A–E). The cultural deposit at the site is about 3–5 m thick. Between 2000 and 2001, the Sino-Canada term carried out two field sessions, excavating one 2  3 m2 unit at T1 and one 2  2 m2 unit at T4 (Figure 4). A total of 2412 artifacts including faunal remains were recovered from the five layers, although the greatest proportion of material came from Layer C. Distribution of patched artifacts concentrations on site indicates minimal disturbance. Detailed study of these recently recovered materials is still in progress, and includes spatial analysis, taphonamy study, and use-wear examination, among other studies. The preliminary observations on the lithic assemblages suggest that Donggutuo occupants produced flake tools for expedient tasks by employing a bipolar reduction technique, similar to those at Xiaochangliang. Like its precedents (Goudi, Majuangou, Xiaochangliang, Banshan), Donggutuo hominids employed poor-quality quartzite raw materials which are abundant locally. However, many flake tools were modified by secondary retouch, indicating a purposeful manufacturing of tools at this site. The Cenjiawan site, located northeast of the Donggutuo site, was previously considered an early Middle Pleistocene site but a recent palaeomagnetic study redated the site to be contemporary with the Donggutuo site. Cenjiawan was excavated in 1986 and 1992, and a total of 1383 lithic artifacts were recovered. Cenjiawan assemblages yield a number of modified flake tools including end-scrapers, sidescrapers, and notches, although unmodified flakes were still predominant. An international team carried out a refitting analysis of Cenjiawan lithic artifacts, and the results show a clear pattern of skillful flake removals with continuous rotation of cores. Cenjiawan cores were utilized efficiently and effectively to obtain maximal flakes by employment of multiple platform reduction (Figure 5). Another implication of the high refitting rate is that it suggests minimal postdepositional disturbance of the site, particularly in the light of the fact that refit artifacts were plotted in close distance. The data undoubtedly point to on-site core-reduction activities, as well as the primary context of site formation. Archaeological evidence from the Nihewan Basin clearly points to continuous development of Asian hominids in northern China starting 1.7 million years ago. These hominids utilized local recourses of lake water sources and raw materials for tool making.

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B Figure 2 Lithostratigraphy and magnetostratigraphy of the Nihewan Basin. A, Palaeomagnetic diagram of the Donggutuo and Maliang sites ((a) lithostratigraphy; (b) low-field magnetic susceptibility; (c) delination (Dec.); (d) inclination (Inc.); (e) maximun angular deviation (MAD); (f) virtual geomagnetic pole (VGP) latitude; (g) magnetic polarity zonation; and (h) geomagnetic polarity time scale (GPTS)). B, Palaeomagnetic sampling at the Xiaochangliang site.

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Figure 4 Excavations at the Donggutuo Site, the Nihewan Basin, in 2000–2001.

Use-wear of tools suggests that the occupants engaged in various activities for survival. Regional variation of the Lower Pleistocene hominids is also evident through comparisons with other early Early Palaeolithic lithic industries in southern China. Lithic assemblages from the Lantian Gongwangling, Yunxian Quyuanhekou, and Longgupo

sites are represented by large choppers and points (Figure 6), indicating that the inhabitants at these sites clearly adapted different strategies from those at the Nihewan Basin. Overall, the Lower Pleistocene lithic technology in China is different from its counterparts in the West that are represented by the Acheulean industries.

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different environments are reflected by regional variations in the lithic industries. During this period, cave sites were significant settlement locations for hominids, and important cave sites are often found in central-northern, northeastern, and southwestern China. Open-air sites along river valleys and lake shorelines, like those in the Nihewan Basin, were continuously occupied. The most important innovation for the Middle Pleistocene hominids was the intentional use of fires. Cave Sites

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Figure 5 Reconstructed cores through refitting from the Cenjiawan site.

Figure 6 Choppers from the Yunxian Quyuanhekou site.

Early Palaeolithic Settlements of the Middle Pleistocene (780–120 Thousand Years Ago) Cultural remains, along with a few hominid fossils, dating to the Middle Pleistocene are found in most parts of China, although they are concentrated on lowlands and river plains. Hominid adaptations to

Major cave sites during this period include Zhoudoudian Locality 1 in Beijing, Jinliushan and Miaohoushan in Liaoning province, Longyadong in Shaanxi province, and Panxian Dadong in Guizhou province. These cave sites yielded some of the most important evidence of hominid behavior, technology, and settlement pattern. Located southwest of Beijing, Zhoudoudian Locality 1 is famous for the discovery of five Homo erectus skulls in 1929. At one time it was the most celebrated Palaeolithic site in the world and still is a national monument in China. After three-quarters of a century, the cave site is still the Palaeolithic site that yielded the most abundant Homo erectus fossils remains in China (more than 40 individuals). Considered as a home base, the cultural deposition in the cave is over 30 m thick, and is divided into 13 layers (Figure 7). Investigations of its cultural chronology suggest that the cave was at least repeatedly occupied for at least three different phases, the first from 500 to 400 thousand years ago, the second 400 to 300 thousand years ago, and the third from 300 to 200 thousand years ago. Faunal assemblages from occupations in the cave and dating to different times, indicate climatic changes in the region throughout the Middle Pleistocene period. There is rich evidence of fire ash deposits within the cave; however, whether the fire was caused intentionally by hominids or was the result of natural fires is currently under debate. The lithic industry at the Zhoukoudian Locality 1 cave may be characterized in general as having small flake tools (most less than 40 mm in length) produced by the bipolar technique. However, lithic assemblages from the Early, Middle, and Late occupational phases clearly differ: large-sized tools like choppers and points decreased in number over times, while the number of small tools like scrapers, burins, and notches increased through time. Tool-making technique was also changed with bipolar flake removal being replaced with direct percussion at the Middle Phase. Noticeably, good-quality local raw materials like chert were used in increasing quantities at the Late Phase, although

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Figure 7 The Zhoukoudian Locality 1 Cave site with deposit stratigraphy (right).

Figure 8 The No. 9 ash patch in Layer 8, Level 7, at Jinniushan. The scale is in centimeters.

quartz and quartzite were still predominantly selected by Zhoukoudian hominids. During the Late Phase of Zhoukoudian occupations, hominids with different biological features, namely Archaic Homo sapiens, are found to have lived at the Jinniushan cave near Dashiqiao city in southern Liaoling province. Identified in 1978, the Jinnuishan Locality A cave, measuring roughly 13.5 m long east–west and 9 m wide north–south, was excavated completely over the course of a multiyear field project that ran from 1986 to 1994 by the Peking University. The site is exposed with 11 layers of sediments with geological age dated to the Middle Pleistocene. Jinnuishan cultural remains were found in Layer 8, and included more than 200 lithic artifacts, 9789 faunal remains (nearly 200 with burnt marks), and

nine well-preserved fire-use ash features (Figure 8). The most important discovery was more than 50 specimens of hominid fossils, all found within 2 m of the southern wall of the cave. These fossils belong to a single female, approximately 20–22 years old, now known as the ‘Jinnuishan hominid’ (Figure 9). Uranium-series dating suggests a date range of between 300 and 230 thousand years ago, with an average date of 263 thousand years ago. The Jinnuishan hominid cultural remains suggest that two different hominids coexisted in northern China during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. The associate fossil faunal remains of rhinoceros and macaque suggest a warmer and wetter environment. The Jinniushan hominid might have lived in small groups (of probably less than a dozen), inhabited caves seasonally, and used as well as preserved fire.

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Figure 9 Fossil remains of the Jinnuishan Archaic Homo sapiens.

The discovery of Guanyingdong cave in 1964 was a breakthrough in that for the first time Asian hominid cultural remains were well represented in the Southwest where Early Palaeolithic sites were still limited. Rich cultural materials recovered from the cave indicate a southern lithic industry different from the Zhoukoudian industry during late Middle Pleistocene to early Upper Pleistocene. Hominid fossil remains recovered from this area include a few teeth from cave sites of Tongzi Yanhuidong and Panxian Dadong. These teeth show biological features more closely related to Archaic Homo sapiens than to Homo erectus. Dadong is a large karst cave located 50 km southwest of Panxian city, at an altitude of 1630 m above sea level. The cave’s main chamber with an average of 35 m width and extending over 200 m in length covers roughly 8000 m2 in area. Several field excavations were carried out in the 1990s, yielding a large number of lithic artifacts as well as faunal remains that represent the Ailuropoda–Stegodon faunas of Middle Pleistocene southern China. Uranium-series dates and electron spin resonance (ESR) dates of tooth enamel place the majority of the archaeological deposits between 130 and 250 thousand years ago (see Electron Spin Resonance Dating). Studies of lithic assemblages suggest that Dadong hominids utilized poor quality but locally available

limestone for tool-making, while basalt and chert were increasingly used in later times as hominids extended their explorations of the area. It is suggested that an anvil-chipping technique was possibly employed as a mode of core reduction to make flake-tool blanks, evident by large limestone blocks in the cave. Dadong hominids might have modified and used animal teeth of suitable size and shape as working tools as an alternative to the poor-quality local limestone. Taphonomic study of faunal remains from the cave yields a high quantity of large-bodied animal teeth, especially those of rhinoceroses. These must have been intentionally selected and transported to the cave by hominids for functional purposes. Hominid fossils, associated with abundant faunal remains, are also recovered from caves in southern China (especially along the Middle and Lower Reaches of Yangtze River) such as Hexian Longtangdong and Chaoxian Yingshan in Anhui province, and Nanjing Tangshan in Jiangsu province. These archaeological deposits of Homo erectus (Hexian and Nanjing fossils) or Archaic Homo Sapiens (Chaoxian fossils) are roughly dated as contemporaneous to the Zhoukoudian occupational period. The recent discovery of Sanming Lingfengdong in Fujian province has proven to be the largest and richest late Middle Pleistocene cave occupation in southeast China, although no hominid fossil was found.

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In the Nihewan Basin, the Middle Pleistocene sites are represented by Maliang, Qiuergou, and Qingciyao. A study of Maliang lithic artifacts, recovered from the 1984 excavation session, suggests that Maliang hominids have developed more skills in tool-making skills than their predecessors, an example being the increased sophistication of multidirectional core reduction. Flake tools were modified into standard shapes of scrapes and notches, which are not seen in other earlier assemblages (Figure 10). They learned to select finequality chert which is available but rare in the region,

Open-air Site

One of the important open-air sites during this period is Lantian Chenjiawozi site where the famous Homo erectus lower jaw was recovered in 1963. In general this jaw, together with the skull recovered from Gangwangling, have been identified as Lantian hominids. But the Chenjiawozi jaw is dated to 700–600 thousand years ago, later than those fossils from Gangwangling. Another open-air site, Dali in southern Shaanxi province, yielded a well-preserved skull belonging to a 30-year-old Archaic Homo sapiens individual.

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suggestive of developing hominid cognition and their procurement strategies. Use-wear analyses indicate that tool use at Maliang probably emphasized on bone scraping/shaving functions (Figure 11) (see Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear). Most open-air sites are usually found in clusters along river valleys. Some are located on upper lands, at the third to fifth terraces of mountainous regions, such as those in the Luonan Basin in southern Shaanxi province and in the Baise (or Bose) Basin in Guangxi province. In the past two decades, a large number of Early Palaeolithic sites are found at lower elevations on river flood plains in southern China. The important Early Palaeolithic complexes include those from Hanzhong Basin in Hubei/Shaaxi provinces, the Lishui Valley of Middle Yangtze River in Hunan

province, and the Shuiyangjiang Valley of Lower Yangtze River in Anhui province. Within each of these complexes, dozens of open-air sites are found in close proximity, embedded within the same geological deposit, and share similar features of lithic assemblages. These complexes present a unique local industry adapted to river valley settlements over the time of the Middle Pleistocene. Recent investigations in the Shuiyangjiang Valley have identified more than 20 palaeolithic sites, representing the earliest Palaeolithic settlement concentration in the Lower Reach of Yangtze River. These sites have a date range between 817 and 126 thousand years ago based on ESR dating. Within the complex, the discovery of the Maozhushan site in 1996 revealed an important open campsite, with a pebble

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Figure 11 Use-wear of Miliang lithic artifacts. (a) ML085, 14. Heavily rounded edge with used polish along the working edge, scattered scars are moderate to large in size with stepped and hinged termination, unifacially distributed on the dorsal surface. The wear type is indicative of scraping hard bone. (b) ML001, 28. Moderate to large scars bifacially distributed along the edge of 10–15 mm. Scars are directional but most are vertical to the edge, heavy rounding and rare polish. Interpreted as cutting/sawing hard bones use-wear. (c) ML060, dorsal side, 56. small-to-moderate-sized feathered or hinged scars, unifacially distributed along the edge on dorsal side. (d) ML060, Ventral side, 28. Heavy rounding and polish along ventral-sided working edge (opposite to that in previous photo). A few striations parallel or perpendicular to the edge are noted. The combination of wear patterns is suggestive of scraping wood use-wear.

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semicircle structure that could be the earliest structure created by early hominid in China (Figure 12). The Maozhushan site is located 4.5 km northwest of Ningguo City, Anhui province, on riverine terrain about 65 m above the sea level. The settlement lies on the second terrace of the Shuiyangjiang River covering a hilly landscape of nearly 4000 m2, of which an

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Figure 12 Plan view of pebble semicircle at the Maozhushan site.

area of 13  15 m2 was exposed in the 1997–1998 field season. The stone structure is made of more than 1100 pebbles, featuring a semicircular shape with a 10 m long east–west axis and a 6 m north– south axis. What is more interesting about this structure is that 20 small pebble circles, ranging from 20 to 30 cm in diameter, were found on the edge of the pebble semicircle (Figure 13). Although the current evidence is insufficient for identifying the function of this structure, it is suggested that all of the pebbles for the semicircle structure were purposefully collected by hominids elsewhere, and those pebble stones also served as raw materials for tool making. It has been speculated that some small circles together with stone artifacts could be evidence of the use of post molds, thus a possible implication of the earliest wooden shelter known in China. However, lack of faunal remains and the organic components of the sediment are due to acid earth in the study region of southern China. A total of 154 stone artifacts were recovered from the pebble semicircle at the Maozhushan site. They were scattered evenly throughout the structure and no patterned clusters of lithic artifacts could be identified. Typologically, the lithic assemblage primarily consisted of chunks, cores, and flakes. Tool types included scrapers, hammers, choppers, points, picks, spheroids, and drills. Some tools showed traces of possible use. The pebble semicircle might have been a seasonal living structure where tool-making activities were conducted; however, the specific function of this structure needs further investigation. Judging from the evidence at present, the Maozhushan site may have been a central campsite of the Shuiyangjiang River Paleolithic complex. Palaeolithic Settlements at the Luonan Basin

The Luonan Basin is located in the Qinling Mountains which form a geographic boundary between northern and southern China. The basin contains caves

Figure 13 Examples of small pebble circles at the Maozhushan site.

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and open-air sites that date to at least 350 000– 180 000 years ago, distributed over the second to sixth terraces of the river valleys. Archaeological surveys for Palaeolithic sites started in 1995, and by 2004, a Sino-Canada research collaboration identified a total of 268 open-air sites and one cave site of Early Palaeolithic (Figure 14).

Excavated between 1995 and 1997, the Longyadong cave is relatively small, about 20 m2 in area. The cultural deposits are about 3.5 m in depth, and contain three cultural layers. Fired ash remains were clearly identified on these layers. Artifacts from these ‘living floors’ were in substantially high density (the average 1000 pieces (>10 mm) per m3), and over 77 000 lithic

Figure 14 The Luonan Basin landscape (upper) and the Lower Palaeolithic sites.

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artifacts were recovered from the cave. Cores, nodules, anvils, and other breccia rocks were arranged along the circumference of these ‘floors,’ while numerous flakes and fossil remains were concentrated in the center. Refitting study was successful in conjoining thousands of artifacts within the cave to document site formation and hominid spatial use of the cave (Figure 15). The difference between the open-air sites and the cave sites are analyzed in terms of the raw materials and tool-making technology. The study shows that stone tool types from Longyadong cave site are dominated by small modified flake tools like scrapers, points, and burins. Large choppers made on pebble stone are present but in a very low number. In contrast, 13 581 pieces collected from 268 open-air sites consists of large tool types that are not seen from the

cave sites, such as hand axes, picks, cleavers, spheroids, and choppers in relatively high numbers. It is implied that the Longyadong cave may have been one of the central sites of occupation where early hominids visited repeatedly over a long period of time, while the open-air sites were loci of their temporary activities. The differences in tool assemblages show that there might have been different site functions between the cave and open-air sites. Lithic Technology

During the Middle Pleistocene, two main lithic technologies were established as strategic adaptations: flake tools in northern China and pebble-core tools in southern China. Flake tools were produced with directly percussion or bipolar percussion by expedient core reduction. Based on the current data, no

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standard core platform preparation has been detected as yet. Predominant flake blanks were modified into scrapers, notches, and burins. Raw materials mainly consisted of poor-quality quartz and quartzite which were common locally available resources. Goodquality cherts were also selected during the later period at some sites. The majority of pebble-core tools were found at riverside sites in southern China, and were made by either freehand percussion or anvil-chipping methods. The difference between pebble-core tools and flake tools is that the former were bifacially or unifacially made on cores or large flakes. These types of tools often included large cutting implements like choppers with either bifacially or unifacially chipped edges, large bifacial or unifacial points, and other heavy-duty tools like spheroids. However, differences between the two lithic industries were also observed in comparisons of cave sites and open-air settlements, especially in southern China. Some caves, like Dadong and Guanyindong, yielded primarily flake tools that contrasted with the lithic assemblages from contemporaneous sites in adjunct areas. These differences could be direct reflections of site functions, as representations of hominid behavior. In fact, the difference between the lithic assemblages of the Longyadong cave and other open-air sites, as mentioned above, could also be explained as the result of cultural interaction between southern and northern hominids, particularly in light of the fact that the location of the Luonan Basin was on the boundary where the two lithic technologies could have met. Clearly, further study on the Luonan lithic assemblages in terms of dating and chronology, site formation, stone tool functions, will shed new lights on the diversity of hominid behaviors in the Middle Pleistocene China. Handaxes in China

Another important aspect of the Luonan Basin Palaeolithic is the discovery of over 200 handaxes from open-air sites (Figure 16). This is one of the largest clusters of so-called Acheulean-like handaxes in China. The other areas yielding a large number of handaxes are the Baise Basin in Guangxi province and the Danjiangkuo Reservoir area in northern Hubei province. A few handaxes are also reported, in lower numbers, from other open-air sites, in both northern and southern China. At present well-known handaxes assemblages are reported from Baise, where the Palaeolithic complex consisted of nearly 100 sites and localities, distributing mainly on the fourth terraces of the 100 km-long Youjiang River valley. About 25–100 m above the

present river level, the artifact-bearing deposits of the fourth terraces are associated with tektites dispersed across the basin. The age of these large cutting tools were established by 40Ar/39Ar analyses on collected tektite samples, and yielded an average age of 803 thousand years ago. Thus, Baise handaxes are claimed to be the oldest large cutting tools in East Asia. It is suggested that the both Luonan and Baise handaxes exhibits all the traits of the Acheulean technology from western Eurasia/Africa. These handaxes were made of pebble cores, bifacially chipped to straighten the working edge towards the tip, but leaving cortex and rough working surface near proximal (butt) end. It is also evident that handaxes with similar morphological traits to Chinese tools are found in Chongokni, Korea. Compared to the classic Acheulean handaxes in the West, these eastern versions seem to be crudely made prototypes. However, technologically, they share similar attributes of human modification to those in the West. The difference in their appearance may be caused by use of different raw materials, and possibly by different functions as a result of adaptive behaviors to the East Asian environment. The discovery of handaxes has always stirred sensational discussion focusing on the concept of the ‘Movius Line’ that drew developmental differences between elaborate handaxe culture in the West and crude chopper-chopping culture in the East. Since the first identification of handaxes from the Dingcun site in southern Shanxi province in 1954, Chinese scholars were trying to claim that Palaeolithic cultures were not from the cultural backwaters as implied by H. Movius’ syntheses in the 1940s. Today, it is clear that Chinese hominids produced cultures quite different to those of their counterparts in Europe and Africa. Regardless of whether the large cutting tools (including hand axes, cleavers, and picks) are similar or dissimilar to those in the West in terms of measurement or attributes, the reasons why handaxes in such form appeared in China would be of interest to Palaeolithic research for years to come. For example, archaeologists working on the Baise assemblages believe that production of handaxes could be a behavioral adaptation to an episode of woody plants burning and widespread forest destruction due to tektite events that resulted in local cobble outcrops becoming available.

Palaeolithic Cultures of the Early Upper Pleistocene (120–35 Thousand Years Ago) Northern China

Entering the Upper Pleistocene period, northern China continues to be an area of favorable settlements

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Figure 16 Examples of handaxes collected from Luonan open-air sites.

for hominid living. The number and scale of archaeological sites, in forms of both caves and open-air sites, are greater than that in previous periods, indicating expansion of hominid activities. In some regions, materials cultures were developed continuously from early occupations, such as in Zhoukoudian and Nihewan. Located about 70 m southeast of Locality 1, Zhoujoudian Locality 15 is one of the most important Palaeolithic sites during this period. The site was identified in 1932, and completely excavated between 1935 and 1937. More than 10 000 stone artifacts and abundant faunal remains of at least 33 mammalian species were recovered over the course of the excavations, but due to historic reasons, these artifacts were never studied until the 1990s. Recent examination of these lithic assemblages suggests that the lithic technology of the hominids at Zhoukoudian Locality 15

was more developed than that of their predecessors at Locality 1. The Zhoukoudian hominids in the early Upper Pleistocene effectively mastered sophisticated core-reduction modes, represented by multidirectional flaking and alternate flaking. Compared to earlier occupants at the Zhoukoudian Locality 1, these later hominids were able to successfully employ free-hand percussion to craft quartz flakes tools, which previously at Locality 1 could have been done only by bipolar flaking. However, the lithic industry of Locality 15 is suggested to continue the technological traditions of the Locality 1. The majority of tool types are scrapers of various different types (including straight sidescraper, convex sidescraper, concave sidescraper, endscraper, thumbnail scraper, double-edged scraper, and multiedged scraper), which together account for 93% of

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the 1283 total tool assemblage. Although overall the tool kits are similar to those found at the Locality 1, retouched tools were more elaborate at the Locality 15. Some specimens do exhibit well-controlled fine retouch, evidenced by even and parallel modification scars and sharp, regular, smooth, or denticulate cutting edge. Overall, the Zhoukoudian Locality 15 industry clearly is still a part of the flake tool technocomplexes of northern China. Archaeological investigations suggest the Zhoukoudian Locality 15 was once a cave site, but during the period of hominid occupation, the roof of the cave appears to have collapsed and the inhabitants were therefore living in conditions better described as a rock shelter. Faunal and palynological evidence suggest that the local environment was probably characterized by warm-temperate and forest-steppe conditions. Archaeological deposits were associated with geological formation dated to later Middle Pleistocene and early Upper Pleistocene, which were dated by Uranium-series and ESR methods to establish an age range between 140 and 110 thousand years ago. During this transitional period, the Nihewan Basin continued to be an important area for late Early Palaeolithic open-air settlements. Among these sites in the basin, the Xujiayao site has been a focus of study. Located on the northern side of the Nihewan Basin, by the Liuyi Creek, a branch of the Sangan River, the site yielded over 20 000 lithic artifacts and included cores, flakes, and various retouched tools. Within the lithic assemblages, spheroids (numbering in the thousands) are the most characteristic artifacts recovered from Palaeolithic sites in China. The most important materials recovered from the site were 18 pieces of human fossil fragments. The identity of the human remains, or so called ‘Xujiayao Man,’ is still under debate, has been determined as either Archaic Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens sapiens. One skull fragment showed evidence of healed hole, 9.5 mm in diameter. Specialists suggest that this is the earliest evidence of ‘human brain surgery.’ The date of the remains is determined to be roughly 104 000–125 000 years old. The Dingcun complex is the largest open-air site cluster known in northern China that dates to this period. These sites are located at the east side of Fenhe River in southern Shanxi province. Identified in the 1950s, the Dingcun complex is comprised of 14 localities (namely site 54:90–103), 11 of which yielded substantial cultural materials. Later investigations recovered a few more site locations. The common elements of the lithic assemblages of this complex are represented by large-sized core tools including choppers, picks, unifaces, and bifaces in most sites. Unifacial points were made on thick and large-size flake blanks,

and were retouched abruptly on the ventral side along both working edges toward the tip, to form the so-called ‘triangular-sectioned points’ of Dingcun lithic industry. Recent studies also suggest that a few sites within the complex also represent the flake-tool industry of northern China, with its standardized notches and denticulates. The coexistence of large pebble-core tool and flake-tool industries at Dingcun is again seen at the Beiyao site near Luoyang of Henan province. The lithic assemblages from this multiple-component site reveal a general trend in which large pebble tools were gradually replaced by small flake-tools throughout the region. Southern China

In recent years, the most important field investigations of Palaeolithic cultures in southern China was undertaken in the Three Gorges area of the middle Yangtze River. The existence of Palaeolithic settlements remained uncertain until the early 1990s when the Three Gorges Dam project (the world’s largest reservoir) began. Archaeological surveys conducted in 1993–1994 identified 24 palaeolithic sites below 175 m above sea level within the area to be inundated. Most sites are located in the second and third terraces along the 75 km long riverbank stretch in the western part of the gorges. The ongoing salvage excavations revealed rich cultural materials, especially at Gaojiazhen, Jingshuiwan, and Ranjialukou, all in the Fengdu County of the Chongqing Municipality. Ranjialukou is located on the upland fourth terrace, whose geological age is dated to about 125 thousand years ago, thus marking it the oldest Palaeolithic site in the reservoir. The study of Ranjialukou lithic assemblages, especially from the results of the 2005 field session, suggests a ‘throwing technique’ of tool-making at the site. The technique, now claimed as the ‘Yangtze Technique’ by its excavators, is to acquire large tool blanks, which exhibit characteristics of a semirounded and fully cortex dorsal surface and a pointed striking platform, by throwing a flat river cobble at anvil stones. This kind of technique has been recognized as a common practice in making large chopping tools in southwestern China, as well as at the Baxiandong Cave site in Taiwan. If the date claimed for Rojialukou is reliable, then it is the oldest site where this tool-making technique has been recognized. A similar technique was recognized from lithic assemblages from the Shuicheng Xiaohuidong cave site in southwestern China that dated to 50 thousand years ago. The cultural deposits at both Jingshuiwan and Gaojiazhen were at the lower strata of the third terraces, dating to before 40 thousand years ago. Five sessions of field excavations at Jingshuiwan

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uncovered thousands of artifacts dominated by modified flake tools and debris as well as possible hearths, indicating on-site multiple-facet living activities (Figure 17). The Gaojiazhen site, about 17.5 km down the riverbank from Jingshuiwan, yielded a distinctly difference artifact assemblage that was represented by large chopping tools made from cobbles. The function of Gaojiazhen may be that of a tool-making location given a large number of nodule and core occurrences. Difference of lithic technologies between both sites could be related to the different functions of the sites. Recent field investigations have increased the number of open-air sites in southern China to several hundreds; however, only a few of these sites have been excavated. Jigongshan, excavated in the early 1990s, is the most representative site of this period in southern China. The site is located 5 km northeast of the ancient city of Jingzhou, Hubei Province, on a small earthen mound on the second terrace of the north bank of the Yangtze River. The site clearly reveals two cultural strata in which an abundance of lithic artifacts were recovered. Layer 4 in the lower stratum dates to the end of Middle Pleistocene, and its lithic assemblage is similar to those from the older Quyuanhekou site in the same region, which is represented by large pebble-core tools like choppers, picks, and spheroids. Notably, Layer 2 in the upper stratum, dating to the late Upper Pleistocene, reveals a lithic technology different from previous period, one that is characterized by small flake-stone tools such as scrapers and drills. Most importantly, a living floor was identified from the Layer 4. Measuring roughly 30  20 m2, it consisted of five stone rings intentionally constructed

using cobbles and pebbles as well as stone artifacts. Tens of thousands of lithic were found scattered on the living floor, and the area of the densest artifacts concentration was in the center and to the north of the site. The sterile areas associated with the stone circles are also circular with diameters of 1.5–2.5 m surrounded by unmodified stones about 1 m wide (Figure 18). Clearly these stone circles are related to human activities, but more research is needed to determine their functions. However, current evidence suggests that they might have been used as tool-manufacturing areas, given the concentrated distributions of byproducts associated with discarded retouched tools, hammerstone, stone anvils, and other artifacts. The evidence from the Jigongshan lithic assemblages suggests a new, previously unidentified, cultural development in southern China. During the early Upper Pleistocene, southern China, especially in the area around the middle of Yangtze River, underwent changes in lithic technology – the traditional pebblecore tool industry was replaced by small flake-tool industry. Concurrent with this technological shift, some degree of cultural changes also took place. Use of cave settlements during this period increased whereas open-air sites decreased, probably as a result of colder temperatures. Site distributions and use of landscape were greatly expanded, with many more sites being discovered in surrounding mountains, suggesting an enhanced ability in human adaptation during this period. There is no difference between lithic assemblages from caves and that from open-air sites, but cave site deposits are very thick, possibly as a result of longer occupations or repeated use, or perhaps also due to the better preservation of archaeological deposits in cave sites.

Figure 17 Excavations at the Jingshuiwan Site in the Three Gorges area.

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Most cave sites were located in the southwestern plateau as well as in the southern mountainous areas, as in both regions karst formations were well developed. Notably, human remains were recovered from two small caves in southern China (Maba in Guangdong province and Liujiang in Guangxi province), both of which became well known to the world in the years following their recovery in 1958. These fossil remains include well preserved and complete skulls and other measurable fragments. Maba fossils were identified as Archaic Homo sapiens, morphologically closest to Dali fossils in northern China, and dated to around 120 thousand years ago based on Uranium-series dates. A recent study suggests that while most features of Liujiang fossils fall within a range of modern human variations, they retain a few Archaic characters. Before the new century (see below), this male (Liujiang) individual was once regarded as the oldest example of modern human in China, dated to about 50 thousand years ago in age.

Origins of Modern Humans in China From a global perspective, biological, archaeometric, and genetic evidence together appear to support the ‘out-of-Africa’ model for the origin of anatomically modern human. This model suggests Africanevolved modern humans arrived in East Asia and replaced Asian hominids around 40 thousand years ago. However, the last decade of investigations revealed

new data from southern China that continues to encourage some scholars to advocate a model of independent modern human evolution in China, namely the ‘multiregional model.’ Clearly, no matter which origin theory one ascribes to, the Upper Pleistocene fossil remains recovered in China are of critical importance. At present, there are up to nearly 40 archaeological sites in China where fossil remains of anatomically modern humans have been recovered, among which fossils from the Zhoukoudian Upper Cave, Ziyang, and Liujiang are the most important. Conventionally, modern humans from the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian were once believed to be continuously evolved from the Zhoukoudian Locality 1 Homo erectus. Although this notion has been long discarded, some scholars still insist that Asian modern humans shared some biological features of their precedent Homo erectus, such as mandibular torus, shoveling upper incisors, and nasal breadth, which are usually considered to be part of the physical identity of today’s Asian Mongoloid race. Liujiang fossils present more features that can be related to Homo erectus, while fossils from both the Upper Cave and Ziyang are regarded as the best examples of Homo sapiens sapiens in China. The new discovery of modern human fossils including a lower jaw was made at Tianyuandong cave about 6 km southwest of the Zhoukoudian Locality 1, and the Uranium-series dating gave the age of cave deposit at 25 thousand years ago contemporary with that of the Upper Cave. However, the problem is that so far most of these fossils are incomplete causing difficulties in statistical comparisons. As almost all of these well-known fossils under study are younger than 50 thousand years ago, the lack of fossil samples dated to between 100–50 thousand years ago in China is a critical weakness in the indigenous development theory. In other words, current fossil data point to discontinuity of local human evolution (see Paleoanthropology). However, this situation may change in the near future. Over the past decade, full-scale field investigations and extensive fieldworks have been undertaken in the western Hubei province and in the Three Gorges area as part of cultural heritage management associated with the Three Gorges Dam Reservoir and the subsequent South-to-North Water Transfer Project. As a result, dozens of Pleistocene faunal locations as well as human cultural remains were identified. Today, central-western China, with 16 locations, has become the richest area for recovering hominid and modern human fossils in East Asia, most of which are in western Hubei (Figure 19). These fossils range from possible Lufengpithecus, to Homo erectus, Archaic Homo sapiens, to Homo sapiens sapiens.

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What is more significant is that for the first time modern human fossils dating back to around 100 thousand years ago are being recovered from four newly identified sites. At present, Yunxian Huanglongdong site yielded the earliest examples of modern human fossils. The site is a limestone cave more than 100 m deep and 10 m tall (Figure 20), with Palaeolithic deposits more than 2 m. In 2004, five teeth (left second upper incisor, canine of upper jaw, third molar of upper jaw, right second molar of mandible, and left third molar of mandible) were recovered from Layers 4–6, in association with stone tools and faunal remains. The teeth belong to different individuals, all well preserved with clear features of the crown and root. The excavators believe that the morphological features of these teeth fall in between Archaic Homo sapiens and modern Chinese. The faunal assemblage features the South China giant Panda–Stegodon fauna indicative of the late Middle Pleistocene, in conjunction with a calibrated date of Uranium-series date that suggest the rather antique age as early as 94 thousand years ago or at least within the range of 103–44 thousand years ago in age based on uranium-series and ESR samples. The Xinglongdong cave at the western end of the Three Gorges also yielded four modern human teeth embedded in Stegodon fossil deposits that point to geological dates of late Middle Pleistocene (c. 150– 120 thousand years ago). According to the excavators conducting the 2002–2004 fieldwork session, cultural remains at the site are rich and include rare stone animal figurines. These could be the earliest examples of Palaeolithic art in China. The other two

new sites, Migongdong and Leipingdong, both in Wushan County, retain well-preserved late Middle Pleistocene (or early Upper Pleistocene) deposits in the caves where skull fragments as well as teeth were recovered. All of these fossil remains have yet to be studied as the ongoing research continues, but they will undoubtedly shed new light on the study of early modern human in China. New archaeological findings near Zhengzhou city of Henan also seem to suggest cultural continuity in central China. Identified in the 1980s, Xingyang Zhijidong is a rock-shelter type cave with deposits more than 20 m deep and covering periods from Early Upper Pleistocene to Early Holocene (see Asia, East: Early Holocene Foragers). The site was excavated in the early 1990s, and then again in 2001–2004 by Peking University (Figure 21). A series of AMS 14 C date and OSL dates taken from Layers 2–7 suggests an occupational age ranging from 50 to 35 thousand years ago, when the cold and dry climate during the Last Glacial Period took place. Cultural remains tends to be continuous in terms of technological development, although a trend of small flake tools in the later occupational time, possibly developed from pebble-core tools in early times, is observed from lithic assemblages. The archaeologists working on the materials suggest that such transitions could be adaptive to climate changes. Continuous occupations of the cave retain evidence of modern human behavioral such as hearths, activity floor, and procurement strategies. The raw materials used for stone tools are dominated by quartzes and chert that had to be transported from long-distance sources. Toolkits are represented by side-scrapers and burins, which are clearly the same

Figure 20 Images of the Huanglongdong cave site in western Hubei province and associated modern human teeth and stone tools.

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Figure 21 The Zhijidong Cave near Zhengzhou City, and its deposit (insert).

cultural manifestation as small flake tools of northern China in early periods. Therefore, while there is not yet enough evidence to refute the ‘out-of-Africa’ theory for the origin of modern humans in East Asia, new data accumulated over the last decade, both biological and archaeological, suggest that the possibility of independent evolution cannot be ruled out. New findings from China will continue to stimulate what hopes to be a fruitful debate on the issue of human origin. Chinese archaeologists and anthropologists regard this evidence supportive of a new model, namely the ‘continuity with hybridization,’ originally proposed by palaeoanthropologist Wu Xinzhi in the middle 1990s as a variation of the ‘multi-regional origin’ theory.

Late Palaeolithic Technologies at the End of Upper Pleistocene (35 000–10 000 BP) Until around 35 000 BP, traditional lithic industries continue to be present in areas where cultural manifestations were well developed. After this point in time, a number of new lithic technologies (including blade technique, bifacial technique, microblade technique, as well as wide-employment of bone tools) appeared to blend together to create the Late Palaeolithic cultures. This technological diversity resulted from cultural interactions when waves of human migrations from Western Europe spread out across Eurasian. The impacts this had on Chinese Late Palaeolithic cultures were enormous. Diversified technologies clearly replaced the conventional homogeneity in most parts of China during this period; the results may be regarded as

a southward intrusion of cultural manifestations from the North and Northwest. Similar technological diversity is also observed in the northwestern coast of North America as a result of the peopling of America around 20 000–11 500 BP (see New World, Peopling of; Siberia, Peopling of). Small-flake-tool Technology

During this period, flake tools from northern Late Palaeolithic sites tend to be small in size but delicately made mostly on fine quality cherts. Small flake industries of northern China were well represented by the Shiyu site in Shanxi province, the Xianrendong cave site of Liaoning province, and the Xiaonanhai cave site of Henan province. Compared to previous flake-tool technology, these lithic assemblages produced flake tools that show better designed and standardized forms. Toolkits included scrapers, burins, small projectile points, drills, notches and denticulates, which were made from various raw materials and by different techniques including hard-hammer and soft-hammer percussion. Pressure technique was also developed for making tools that required intensive surface retouching such as bifaces and projectile points. Standardizing toolkits were clearly adapted to northern hunting strategy that mobilized human societies. Shiyu, identified and excavated in 1963, yielded thousands of flake tools predominated by various shapes of scrapers: most of them were between 20 and 30 mm in length. Their working edges were finely retouched, probably by soft-hammers. Most flake blanks were also observed to be of regular size.

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A large quantity of faunal remains was recovered from the site, animal teeth alone counting for roughly 5000 pieces. Faunal analysis suggests most animal species are adapted to a prairie environment – there were at least 200 individuals of wild horses and wild donkeys. It seems that the Shiyu occupants, who lived around 29 000 BP, were wild horse hunters. Flake-tool industries became more frequent in southern China; but typologically and technologically these flake tools were distinctive from these in northern China, suggesting a local technological innovation. The development of this trend is well documented from the Three Gorge assemblages, through the Ziyang Locality B assemblage, to the Tongliang lithic assemblages. The best examples of the southern flaketool industry are from the Hanyuan Fuling site of Sichuan province, as well as two cave sites, Maomaodong and Baiyandong. Flake-tool blanks were made from large pebble/cobble raw materials by anvilchipping or throwing techniques, and then altered along the working edge by retouching in order to make them into suitable tools. However, flake-tool modification was not as extensive as those in northern China, and the toolkits there were not as diverse. Blade Technology

Blades were occasionally reported or cataloged from the lithic assemblages of early sites, but they were likely a by-product of flake production. During this period, blades as primary products of a special

reduction technique appeared in northern China, but archaeological sites with blade production were very limited in numbers so far. The origin of blade technology in China is difficult to trace to local flake-tool technology, thus it is probably derived from western influences. There are nearly two dozen sites where blades have been reported, all of them situated in northwest and north-central China. However, true presentations of blade technology are from only two sites, Shuidonggou and Youfang. Shuidonggou, located at southwestern part of the Ordos area about 18 km east to the Yellow River, was the first Palaeolithic site excavated in China by French palaeontologists E. Licent and P. Teihard de Chardin. They reported five locations at the site and excavated the Locality 1 in 1923. Because of classical blade production, the findings from Shuidonggou made an immediate connection between remote Chinese cultures to the western ones; thus, the site has been a focus of study and most of the collection is now housed in western institutes and museums. Follow-up excavations at the site took place in 1960, 1963, and 1980, and produced a large quantity of lithic artifacts and faunal remains. Unfortunately, like many of other sites investigated prior to 1990, this site was not systematically studied with a multidisciplinary approach until 2002. Recent surveys reported that the site complex consisted of 20 localities. Excavations during 2003–2004 were concentrated at Localities 2, 7, and 8 (Figure 22). Besides lithic artifacts and faunal remains, the site also yielded

Figure 22 The landscape of the Shuidonggou Site and ornaments (insert) recovered from the 2003–2004 excavations.

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fired clay floors and ash deposit indicative of purposeful fire use. Most importantly, dozens of finely polished ostrich shell ornaments (rings) were recovered from Localities 2 and 8. A skull fragment, found at Locality 4, was identified as Homo sapiens sapiens. The Shuidonggou lithic assemblage is dominated by blade cores and blades, made on local cherts and quartzite. Core platforms were well prepared before blade removal indicating standard reduction procedures. Notably, 21.9% of cores recovered from the 1980 excavation session were classified as Levallois cores, which were also found from other excavation sessions. Although Levallois-like products were reported from the Panxian Dadong cave, the true Levallois technique seems to be only from Shuidonggou. Unfortunately, there is no detailed study on these Levallois cores and flakes yet, but their appearance at the Shuidonggou site is a clear indicator of western influences. Most of the retouched tools, represented by side-scrapers, were made on long narrow blade blanks. Samples of Uranium-series dating and conventional 14C dating indicate the age of Shuidonggou fall in between 38 000 and 15 000 BP, but recent AMS 14C dating suggests a narrower range of between 29 000 and 24 000 BP. According to faunal analysis, pollen, and sediment studies, Shuidonggou was a part of cool and dry semi-steppe and prairie environment during this time, thus the site might have served as a base camp for a group of specialized hunters. Shuidonggou blade technology seemed to remain the sole manifestation in China until the middle of the 1980s, when the Youfang site was excavated. The site is located in the east side of the Nihewan Basin, and slightly later in age than Shuidonggou. Youfang blade technology coexisted with microblade technology; however, most of the flake tools were made on classic blade blanks. Single platform cores display parallel long and narrow blade flaking scars, some with evidences of direct percussion. The discovery of the Youfang lithic industry suggests that such blade technology continued to spread eastwards in northern China at the end of Pleistocene. However, the lack of detailed study on Chinese blade technology keeps scholars from understanding statistical data that might be able to assist in a comparative study with western assemblages. Until then, how blade technology was developed and why its distribution was so limited remains unknown. Microblade Technology

The Youfang lithic assemblage is to date the only example in China, where both blade and microblade technology were employed within a given

hunter-gatherer society. Archaeological evidence suggests that early microblade industries were found in the southern Shanxi province, about 500 km south of Shuidonggou, suggesting an independent emergence from the blade technology. Both Dingcun 77:01 and Xiachuan sites were regarded as the earliest examples of microblade technology, dated to around 26 000 BP and 24 000–16 000 BP, respectively. The later microblade industries are represented by the Shizhitan site in Shanxi province and Hutongliang site in Hebei province. At present, there are over 50 sites reported to be associated with microblade technology. They were distributed over three microregions: the north-central plain, the northeast and northern steppe, and the southeastern plateau, but the majority of the microblade sites were located in north-central China. Current knowledge of Chinese microblade technology is derived only from a few well-known sites such as Xiachuan, Xueguan, and Hutouliang. Hutouliang is an archaeological complex consisting of a number of the Upper Palaeolithic sites, located in the east side of the Nihewan Basin, about 35 km west to the Early Pleistocene site Donggutuo (see above). Nine localities were excavated between 1972 and 1974, and yielded a large quantity of lithic artifacts. Based on a series of 14C dates the sites were dated to around 11 000 BP. Analyses of these microblades identified four microblade techniques at the site, which have corresponding Japanese counterparts known as Yangyuan (or Togeshita), Sanggan (or Oshorakko), Hetao (or Yubetsu), and Xiachuan (Saikai). A recent study indicates that two types of wedge-shaped core technology existed as by-products of the modes of production at the Hutouliang site. Studies on microblades from both Xiachuan and Xueguan in southern Shanxi province were based on limited excavated and surveyed materials, and suggested technological differences existed in the manufacture of microblade between Xiachuan and Xueguan. The Xiachuan industry is represented by conical microblade cores while the Xueguan microblade industry is dominated by boat-shaped and wedge-shaped cores. It is proposed that microblade technologies at both Xueguan and Hutouliang were developed directly from the Xiachuan technology, implying that Xiachuan may be responsible for the origin of Chinese microblade technology. Data from other excavated sites like Shizitan, Dingcun 77:01, Youfang, Jiqitan, and especially Qingfengqing and Fenghuangling in Shandong province would have merits that may challenge traditional views on microblade technological development. For instance, microblades from the East Coast like Shandong

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Peninsula display distinct technological characters so that it may be possible to recognize regional microblade variation. Unfortunately, materials from these sites have not been systematically studied yet. Microblade technology in China is still poorly understood in terms of its origins and spread throughout northeastern Asian. Most Chinese scholars tend to favor a ‘north China origin’ model. Data from the region clearly indicate technological similarities between northern China industry to those from Eastern Siberia, Japan, and Korea. A recent study suggests an eastward spread of microblade technology that originated at Xiachuan, through northern and southern routes, but the hypothesis is not yet tested. It is worth noting that some scholars have started to hypothesize that wedge-shaped core microblade technology might have first emerged in Siberia and spread southward into northern China. Bifacial Technology

Bifacial technology appeared in northern China as a result of cultural interactions with northern huntergatherer societies during the peopling of the Americas. Northern China lithic assemblages produced tools that were made through bifacial-thinning techniques; but again, this technological catalog unfortunately has not yet been recognized in Chinese Palaeolithic studies. Bifaces and projectile points, a major component of stone toolkits in the North American assemblage around 11 500–10 000 BP, also appeared in the Xiachuan, Xueguan, and Hutouliang sites, but their significance has not been yet given much attention. A recent study on Upper Palaeolithic sites in Shandong Peninsula shows that biface products have high frequency in lithic assemblages at the Fenghuangling, Qingfengling, and Wanghailou sites, suggesting bifacial techniques existed as a technological innovation at the end of Pleistocene. These three sites (Fenghuangling, Qingfengling, and Wanghailou) are located in southern Shandong province, near the Yi-Shu Rivers valley. Both Fenghuangling and Qingfengling were floodplain sites and were excavated in 1984. The Wanghailou site, located in the hilltop about 68 km south of Fenghuangling, was surveyed in 1984, and excavated in 2001 by a Sino-Canada collaborative team. The three assemblages belong to two Shandong microblade industries. Lithic analyses of the assemblages suggest that bifacial thinning flakes from Fenghuangling, Qingfengling, and Wanghailou may serve as a kind of index-fossil of by-products of bifacial techniques, and account for 30.3%, 20.3%, and 14.7% of all lithic artifacts recovered, respectively. Bifaces and biface performs as types in the toolkits comprise

Figure 23 Bifaces from the Wanghailou site in Shandong Peninsula (scale in mm).

between 5–20% of shaped tools. It is possible that Shandong microblade cores were primarily produced through bifacial techniques – the wedge-shaped cores were made on small bifacial splits that also occurred in the assemblages. Large-sized projectile points, finely made on quartzite were distinct at the Wanghailou site (Figure 23), while bifaces and projectile points were relatively small at the other two sites. During an investigation in 2004, a special point (one where a channelled flake was purposefully removed from the bottom so as to be called as ‘fluted point’) was identified from the Qingfengling site. Fluted points had never been identified previously in China; however, fluted Clovis points are well known as an early industry in North America. The fluted point industry was clearly associated with wedge-shaped microblade core industries in British Columbia, Canada, at the end of the Ice Age. If a true fluted bifacial technology is proven to have existed in northern China, the technological connection between the Old World and the New World can be explored in addition to the microblade technology. Bone Tool-making Technology

Another technological innovation in the Late Palaeolithic cultures is bone tool-making. In fact, bone tools must have appeared during the Middle Pleistocene, or much earlier, as they were seen in Jingliushan, Zhoukoudian Locality 1, and Xujiayao sites. However, only at the end of the Pleistocene did using animal bones (including antlers) as raw materials for

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manuacturing various tool types appeared widely and bone tools became one of the major components of hunting-gathering toolkits. The bone tool industries were well represented by following sites: Shiyu in Shanxi province, Xianrendong Cave in Liaoning province, Lingjing in Henan province, and Dongfang Plaza in Beijing. The Dongfang Plaza site was identified in 1996 when the Plaza complex was under construction in downtown Beijing, and excavated in the following year. The site is approximately 2000 m2, and yielded thousands of artifacts including bone tools. According to the excavators, 411 bone tools were cataloged and classified into various manufacturing stages. Shaped types, indicated by retouched working edges, included scrapers, point, burins, and spades. Most of the tools were made from the long bones of large mammals. The stone and bone tools were associated with floors with evidence of fire-use. Some bone tools and by-products displayed burnt marks, indicating that the site might have served as a homebase camp for late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. Carbon-14 dates suggest that the site was occupied for two phases between 25 000 and 24 000 BP. Recent excavation at the Lingjing site near Zhengzhou city yielded significant bone-tool assemblages that previously have been rarely seen. The Lingjing site was first identified in 1965 during local water-storage construction, and the survey collection included an assemblage of wedge-shaped microblade cores. As a result, the site was referred to as the ‘Mesolithic’ period in northern China in many publications, but full-scale investigations were not able to be carried out due to underwater inundation until 2005. The 2005 field session recovered 2452 lithic artifacts and over 3000 faunal remains. However, no microblade products were recovered from excavated layers; most lithic artifacts were typical of the flake tools from northern China, and made from quartzite and quartz. At present, according to the excavator’s observation, this site represents a Late Palaeolithic occupation. Some bones display clear secondary retouch for modification. Samples were taken for use-wear examination, and the preliminary study suggested a number of possible use-wear features that may be differentiated from natural abrasion. Similar to use traces of stone tools, the use-wear on Lingjing bones were likely that of cutting, scraping, and penetrating. The use-wear also shows traces of soft, moderate, and hard-worked materials. Mostly importantly, 3 of 11 samples were determined to have hafting wear, suggesting that these objects had been used as composite tools. However, study of Palaeolithic bone tools in

China is still very poor, and caution needs to be taken in understanding how to distinguish purposeful usewears from fracture/abrasion marks caused by natural agencies at sites. The fact that bone tool-making technology existed in Upper Palaeolithic assemblages has merits to provide new directions of research in the future (see Bone Tool Analysis).

A Summary: Cultural Continuity and Interactions The last two decades of investigations have enriched our understanding of Chinese Palaeolithic cultures, which used to be based solely on the Zhoukoudian and a few other sites well known in the early days. Before 1985, the focus of investigations was to discover the nature of site distributions in order to establish a Chinese Palaeolithic chronological framework. Today, the accumulated data are sufficient for us to begin interpreting issues of Palaeolithic technology and cultural materials. Until recently, studies of Palaeolithic technology in China have been limited to generalizations about the nature of lithic industries in comparison to European or other Old World localities. From the ‘chopper-chopping tools tradition’ to the ‘simple core–flake technology,’ these broad characterizations emphasized the non-Acheulean features of Early to Middle Pleistocene lithic industries in East Asian, and now seem no long valid for characterizing Chinese materials. New data suggests that the Chinese Palaeolithic technology, starting with arrival of the first hominids in East Asian around 1.7 million years ago, formed its own unique characteristics as a result of adaptive strategies to local environment. Continuity of technological development was persistent throughout the Pleistocene age until the emergence of modern humans in East Asia. The Nihewan Basin, given its resourceful landscape, was a homeland for both hominids and modern humans during the entire Pleistocene era. Although nearly 50 Palaeolithic sites were distributed across the basin, all of Early Pleistocene sites were located in clusters at the eastern end of the basin, suggesting that explorations were expanded as adaptive technology was enhanced. The technological development continued slowly but steadily; however technological variations over time can be observed in examples from Xiaochangliang and Dongguotou of the Lower Pleistocene to Shiyu and Hutouliang of the Upper Pleistocene. The similar technological continuity is suggested from lithic assemblages of Locality 1, to Locality 15, then to Upper Cave, at the Zhoukoudian area. Cultural continuity of the Chinese Palaeolithic can also be seen in examples from southern China. Given

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the increasing numbers of archaeological sites with human fossils found in the Three Gorges/western Hubei mountainous region, this area has become a focus of research on the local evolution of anatomically modern human in East Asia. Overall material cultures from southern China remained more homogenous than in any other region. Cultural interactions throughout the time, on the other hand, gave way to regional variations in Palaeolithic technology, as we have seen in the examples from the Luonan Basin and the Three Gorge region. In these regions, the two distinct technocomplexes between northern China (flake tools) and southern (pebble-core tools) were employed at given times but their cultural impacts were surely beyond the areas under investigation. The most significant cultural interactions took places at the end of the Pleistocene, when western cultures penetrated into northern China and resulted in the complexity of technological manifestations. The influence of cultural interactions was expanded to parts of southern and eastern China. Our investigations in the Shandong Peninsula suggest that the Late Palaeolithic industries were more complex than we previously thought (Figure 24). Within this region, two microblade traditions (Fenghuangling and Wanghailou), one flake-tool tradition (Helongtan), and one small-tool tradition, coexisted in the region and there probably appeared a few large pebble-core industries at the southern end. Although we cannot at presently

ascertain whether the Shandong microblade industry was an indigenous development or a foreign invention, the current evidence may be in favor of a migration mode because the Shandong microblade traditions seem to represent cultural manifestations from both the northern and southern regions. Therefore, the formation of the Palaeolithic technology overall appears to reflect two aspects of material cultural development throughout the Pleistocene era: continuity and interaction. However, this explanation may be reinterpreted and enhanced as field investigations are ongoing. Certainly, we have much more to expect from the research results on Chinese Pleistocene archaeology in the years to come. Joint projects conducted between Western and Chinese colleagues will raise more serious questions and hopefully stimulate future investigations that, in turn, will lead to in-depth examination of the data relating to human origins and behavior in East Asia. See also: Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures; Early

Holocene Foragers; Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, South: India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South; Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, Southeast: Preagricultural Peoples; Asia, West: Paleolithic Cultures; Turkey, Paleolithic Cultures; Bone Tool Analysis; Electron Spin Resonance Dating; Europe: Paleolithic Raw Material Provenance Studies; Lithics: Analysis, Use Wear; New World, Peopling of; Paleoanthropology; Siberia, Peopling of.

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Further Reading Aigner JS (1981) Archaeological Remains in Pleistocene China. Munich: CH Beck. Fang YS, Huang YP, and Shen C (2004) Pebble semicircle structure from a Lower Paleolithic site in Southern China. Eurasian Prehistory 2(2): 3–12. Lu LD (1998) The microblade tradition in China: Regional chronologies and significance in the transition to Neolithic. Asian Perspectives 37(1): 84–112. Olsen JW and Miller-Antonia S (1992) The Palaeolithic in southern China. Asian Perspectives 31(2): 129–160. Shen C and Keates SK (eds.) (2003) Current Research in Chinese Pleistocene Archaeology. BAR International Series 1179. Oxford: Archaeopress. Shen C and Wei Q (2004) Lithic technological variability of the Middle Pleistocene at the eastern end of the Nihewan Basin, northern China. Asia Perspectives 43(2): 281–301. Tang C and Gai P (1986) Upper Palaeolithic cultural traditions in north China. In: Wendorf F and Close AE (eds.) Advances in World Archaeology 5, pp. 339–364. New York: Academic Press. Wu RK and Olsen JW (eds.) (1985) Palaeoanhropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology in the People’s Republic of China. New York: Academic Press. Zhu RX, An ZS, Potts R, and Hofman KA (2003) Magnetostratigraphic dating of early humans in China. Earth Science Reviews 61: 341–359.

Chinese Civilization Yun Kuen Lee, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Erligang culture (1600–1400 BC) The term used by archaeologists to refer to a Bronze Age archaeological culture in China. Erlitou culture (2000–1500 BC) A name given by archaeologists to an Early Bronze Age society that existed in China. The culture was named after the site discovered at Erlitou in Yanshi, Henan Province. Longshan culture A Late Neolithic culture centered on the central and lower Yellow River in China. It is dated from about 3000 to 2000 BC.

Civilization is understood as entailing a high level of social complexity, marked by the division of people into a ruling class and the ruled, and a state-level organization backed by coercive force. All of the six pristine civilizations of the world share these characteristics; however, each of them exhibits particular patterns in the political, social, economic, and cultural fields. This chapter is about the processes leading to the formation of the most distinctive patterns that

structured the Chinese civilization, which include a robust lineage system, an institution of ritual and the vast continuum of a tradition of writing.

Unique Characteristics of Chinese Civilization Kinship is an important feature of all human societies. However, Chinese kinship is exceptionally robust. During the early periods of Chinese civilization, kinship was integrated into the political system. Clearly by the late Shang (c. 1250–1050 BC), and most likely much earlier, access to power and wealth was regulated by a kin-based system. This system continued to structure the Chinese society until the modern times. All civilizations used ritual, especially religious ritual, to legitimate and maintain social order. However, ritual in Chinese civilization is remarkably secular. Although sacrifice to heaven and earth was seen as an obligation of the state to maintain the cosmological order, the most frequently practiced ritual was offerings to the ancestors. In fact, ancestral ritual in Chinese civilization was an apparatus to maintain the kinship system and thus the social order. Writing is a symbol system that enables communication in the absence of face-to-face interaction. Messages and memories can be stored and retrieved across space and through time. Although writing seems to have emerged in the Longshan era of the third millennium BC, examples have been found in small numbers only and are not yet deciphered; indicating that they have no connection to modern Chinese writing. On the contrary, the writing of late Shang by the end of the second millennium BC was immediately deciphered after its discovery, because the writing system of modern Chinese is its direct descendent. The continuity of a writing system, in effect, sustained the development of lineage organization and ritual institutions. Wealthy lineages compiled geneology books to precisely specify their relations through patrilines. In any particular time, people could refer to the ideal forms of ritual advocated by Confucianism, which had been elevated to the stature of state ideology since the second century BC. These gave rise to a unique feature of Chinese civilization: an uninterrupted civilization from the first day of its formation to the modern era (see Writing Systems).

Interface of Written History and Archaeology The simultaneous availability of both written and archaeological information is a luxury in the study of an early civilization, though each has its own

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biases. When these two complementary classes of data are used together, it allows a reconstruction of the past fuller and richer than which can be achieved with either body of information alone. Early written materials from China can be partitioned into three broad classes of information: (1) the original documentation of the time, which includes the divination record on bone and turtle shell and passages cast on bronzes; (2) the oral traditions, legends, and myths recorded in transmitted texts at a later time; and (3) the historical texts started from the first millennium BC. Each of these three classes of information has its own biases; therefore, a critical perspective on the source material is a prerequisite in using the written evidence. The prevalent traditional perspective based on the written texts is that civilization first developed in the Central Plains of the middle Yellow River valley and diffused into the other regions of modern China like ripples in water. The ripple model, albeit oversimplified, is not without merit. Neolithic archaeology indicates that modern-day China could be partitioned into several historic-cultural regions that each had its own unique characteristics and continuities (see Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures). Many of these regions sustained the emergence of complex societies; however, many of these declined and even disappeared altogether prior to the beginning of the Bronze Age during the early second millennium BC. The cultural traditions in the Central Plains, on the contrary, became increasingly complex and supplied the clearest evidences of the emergence of state societies. Moreover, the three distinctive Chinese patterns in kinship, ritual and writing also first became highly developed in the Central Plains. The archaeological findings of recent years supply much information to enrich this model and to help us unravel the complexity of the processes.

Prelude to Chinese Civilization The third millennium BC witnessed the emergence of highly complex societies all over the landscape of modern China. For instance, the Taosi tradition was represented by a group of smaller settlements aggregated around a large walled settlement at Taosi in modern Shanxi. The site yielded a large-scale semicircular structure, probably related to astronomical observations, and several graves were richly furnished with lacquer wares, stone charms, crocodile-skin drums, lavishly embellished painted pottery, etc. One of these graves is even designated by archaeologists as that of the ‘king’. However, one after the other, these highly complex societies were extinguished. The large structure of Taosi was sacked and some of the rich

graves were plundered. These early regional centers were replaced by villages and hamlets. The causes of the decline and collapse of these complex societies are not clear. Because the decline occurred within the span of a few hundred years, an increasingly popular hypothesis is that the deterioration of climate – lower temperature, drought, frequent flooding, and aggression of the coast line – brought them down. Yet, this model cannot explain why the first states emerged in the mid-Yellow River valley. In fact, studies in other parts of the world indicate that these pre-state, ritually organized societies were inherently unstable; therefore, their collapses are predictable. State formation involves a series of experiments in the building of an internally specialized government that can effectively rule a large subject and territory, levy tax to sustain the government, and build a coercive force to back the ruling. Not all complex societies were successful in this pursuit. According to the traditional historic scheme, the development of early Chinese civilization was punctuated by the linear succession of three dynastic states – Xia, Shang, and Zhou – in the Central Plains, as the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ changed hands. Guided by this overly simplified scheme, Chinese archaeologists have concentrated on finding the corollaries of the seats of the sage kings of the Xia and the Shang (the Zhou has more reliable written records). The archaeological information of the early Chinese civilization, therefore, is a biased representation in favor of the three dynasties, and lack in information of other polities in the mid-Yellow River valley. The archaeological search for Xia first started in 1959. After much works and debate, it has become increasingly clear that the Erlitou tradition in the YiLuo valley was in the right place at the right time. More importantly, it yielded evidence indicating that it has developed into a state society.

The Core of Early Chinese Civilization The core of early Chinese civilization was located in the mid-Yellow River valley. Its development contributed to the formation of particularities of Chinese civilization. Later Chinese states often claimed to be the legitimate descendents of the mid-Yellow River civilization. First State in the Yi-Luo Valley

The Erlitou site, dated to 1800–1500 BC, is located in the center of Yi-Luo valley (Figure 1). It occupies some 400 ha of rich alluvial field. The focus of the site is a walled precinct of several hectares, which contained some 30 large spatially discrete compounds

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built on rammed earth platforms. Half a dozen of them have been completely or partially excavated (Figure 2). The first excavated compound, referred to as palace I, occupied nearly 1 ha of area (Figure 3). The whole compound was built on a 0.8 m raised rammed earth terrace. The main feature was a large raised rectangular hall facing a large courtyard. The compound was then surrounded by walls with roofed corridors. The main gate was located on the south. The large open courtyard and the raised hall platform suggest observances of public functions. In addition, the walls not only delimited the dimensions of the structures, they also indicate differential access to the activities performed inside. Most likely, only privileged individuals were allowed to enter. The nesting of walls suggests the secrecy of decisionmaking within the walls. Some of the rammed structures had different plans. Palace III was built on an elongated rammed platform

of about 150 m50 m, partitioned into three equalsized courtyards and room blocks compartments. This architectural complex was very likely the residence of elite family households. Two small clusters of the most richly furnished burials at Erlitou were found in rows in the courtyards. The graves showed traces of wooden casket and cinnabar-lined floor. Grave goods included rare handicrafts made of bronze, jade, lacquer, turquoise, shell and white pottery, and scores of cowrie from the ocean. Rare materials of bronze and jade were made into sumptuary ritual objects at Erlitou. In addition to small utilitarian tools and weapons, the bronze technology was also used to cast vessels by using the piece-mold technique for the first time. They included a variety of drinking vessels, which were important ritual paraphernalia in the Shang and Zhou at a later time (Figure 4). In the jade assemblage, there was the zhang, a large blade-like artifact with no apparent utilitarian function (Figure 5).

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Figure 2 Excavation at Erlitou (Institute of Archaeology, CASS, with permission).

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Figure 3 Plan of Palace I, Erlitou (adapted from Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 23: 178, Figure 2, with permission).

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Figure 4 Bronze drinking vessels of Erlitou (Institute of Archaeology, CASS, with permission).

resources to sustain the urban population, craft and administrative specialists, as well as the luxury lifestyles of the elite. The Erlitou site shows traits of an early civilization that were never seen in earlier sites. To build the walled precinct, public resources were levied. However, the nesting of walls suggests that the general populace was being excluded from access to the structures they built. The burials not only show a high degree of social stratification; they also indicate the presence of institutionalized violence. The Erlitou people were clearly divided into the rulers and the ruled, and this order was supported by coercive force. The rows of burials in the walled precinct indicate the elite used the occasions of death to further cement their kinship ties. The differential distribution of sumptuary ritual objects suggests that ritual was organized according to class. Finally, the placement of local centers in the countryside indicates that the Erlitou elite had started to build an administrative system to rule a polity much larger than any polities seen before in China. Polity Competition and Regime Change

Figure 5 Jade zhang, Erlitou (Adapted from Zhongguo kaoguxue Xia Shang juan: Plate 13–2, with permission).

In contrast to the elite graves, about 20% of the other interments bore signs of violent death. Five burials were deposited in the rammed terrace of palace I; they were likely ritual-related human sacrifices. These burials lacked furnishings. The interments were tied up with ropes, and limbs were severed in one case. Other examples of violent death were scattered around the site. They were usually found in trash pits, and sometimes several individuals were interred together. Moreover, isolated human bones were also found in the cultural layers and ash pits. Postures of the skeletons suggest that they were being restrained by ropes and even buried alive. Decapitation and dismembering were common. Violent institutions were evidently pervasive. To sustain the construction and daily operation of the political center at Erlitou, the elite mobilized the population in the countryside by placing local controlling centers on strategic locations. A recent full-coverage regional survey to the east of Erlitou has found a secondary and a tertiary centers (Figure 6). These control nodes were systematically placed on the landscape so to effectively levy the material

By the end of the sixteenth century BC, the once grandiose palatial structures at Erlitou, one after the other, were abandoned. The occupation of Erlitou dramatically shrunk to the size of a large village. At this critical juncture, a large fortification enclosing 200 ha emerged in Shixianggou of Yansi county, just 6 km northeast of Erlitou. This site was later named as Yanshi Shangcheng, literally the Shang walled settlement at Yanshi. It tells a story of the competition between the state of Erlitou, or Xia, according to many Chinese archaeologists, and the state of Shang. The most astonishing characteristic of Yanshi Shangcheng is its nested walls (Figure 7). The whole site was enclosed by an outer circumferential wall, which was in average 20 m thick, and an inner circumferential wall of 6–7 m thick. Inside the inner circumferential wall, there were three rectangular walled complexes. Walled complex I was the largest, occupying about 5 ha of land, was the palatial-temple precinct (Figure 8). It underwent several episodes of expansion and rebuilding. Nonetheless, at least nine large rammed earth structures were contemporary at any particularly time. The plans of the large structures were different, suggesting they had different functions. For example, Palace IV had a large hall and more than a dozen of smaller rooms, was most likely a residential quarter of an elite household (Figures 9). Palace II was a cluster of several features (Figure 10). The

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Figure 10 Plan of Palace II, Yanshi Shangcheng (adapted from Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 23: 183, Figure 7, with permission).

main structure was a 75 m long nonpartitioned rammed terrace. Three other component features had evenly-spaced rows of postholes but no trace of living floor, making some to argue that the stilts were used to shore up above-ground structures like pile-buildings. One of these structures was connected to a rammed earth terrace in the open area in the south. Palace II was more likely a ritual facility. To the north of the rammed structures were two rectangular pits. The silt deposit on

the northern pit indicates that it was once filled with water. The unusual high density of pollen grains found in the pond suggests that it was a landscaping project. The other pit was possibly used for open-air sacrificial activities. Complex I was the political and ritual centers of the polity and the residential area of the high elite. The functions of Complex II were different from that of Complex I. Close to 100 rammed earth terraces were organized in six rows in the 4 ha of

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cultural tradition. For instance, the predominant cooking pot of Erlitou was the ding, three independently made legs were attached to a semi-globular jar (Figure 12). The predominant cooking pots of Yanshi Shangcheng were the li, tripod vessels, but the legs were somewhat hollowed-out. This was a typical Shang-style cooking ware found in the contemporary Shang site at Zhengzhou. In addition, the large structures, including the circumferential walls, the palaces and temples, of Yanshi Shangcheng and other Shang sites faced southsouthwest. On the contrary, those of Erlitou faced south-southeast. The difference in the preference of

occupation. In between the rows was a grid of shallow ditches, probably used for the drainage of runoff. Only 15 of the terraces have been excavated; but these features had almost identical plans. They were rectangular buildings with two partition walls inside (Figure 11). It is not entirely clear about the functions of these homogeneous structures; some argue they were storehouses of critical resources and some argue they were barracks for soldiers. In any event, they show the organizational capacity of state society. Yanshi Shangcheng yielded a ceramic assemblage different to that of Erlitou; it represents a different

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Figure 12 Typical cooking wares of the Erlitou and Shang traditions (adapted from Erlitou Jicui: Figures 264, 293, with permission).

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orientation was attributable to the difference in their religious beliefs. It is increasingly clear that these two regional centers in the Yi-Luo valley pertained to two different polities. The decline of Erlitou and the concurrent rise of Yanshi Shangcheng perhaps are the corollaries of the first regime change depicted in written texts, the overthrow of the Xia by the Shang. They also indicate that more than one polity coexisted and competed during the period of early civilization in the mid-Yellow River valley. Erligang and Zhengzhou Shangcheng

Zhengzhou Shangcheng was a regional center contemporary to Yanshi Shangcheng. Geographically, the site was located at where the rolling hills of the loess formation and the flooded plains of the Yellow River met. The modern city of Zhengzhou is one of the busiest transportation depots in China. Its strategic location allows Zhengzhou to regulate the traffics

between North and South China, and along the Yellow River. Unfortunately, modern urbanization has limited archaeological study. The discovery of the Shang city at Zhengzhou is inseparable from the discovery and excavations of the Erligang locality. Erligang, located on the southeast corner of the site, was the first Shang locality ever excavated at Zhengzhou. The ceramic seriation derived from the Erligang assemblage became the yardstick of the relative chronology of early Shang, which spanned from the sixteenth to the fourteenth centuries BC. Therefore, the early Shang period is often referred to as the Erligang Phase. The Shang site at Zhengzhou was a walled settlement like that of Yanshi (Figure 13). The center of the site was an area of about 300 ha enclosed by a rectangular circumferential wall. A palatial complex was located in the northeastern corner of the enclosure. An outer wall was found about 1000 m south of the enclosure, but the two ends of the outer wall did not

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join. Some archaeologists argue that the marshy and swampy land to the northeast of the site already formed a natural barrier sheltering the Shang settlement.

Figure 14 Excavation of the bronze cache pit H1 at Nanshun Street locality, Zhengzhou (adapted from Zhenzhou Shangdai Tongqi Jiaozang: Color plate 1, with permission).

Industrial localities, including bronze foundries, ceramic and bone tool workshops, were located outside of the inner city. The Nanguanwai foundry locality was situated in between the south inner wall and the outer wall. It occupied slightly less than 1 ha of area. Findings include a mold-baking kiln, a casting locality with storage pits, many copper ore and lead nuggets, fragments of crucibles, bronze slag, charcoal, pottery molds, and tools made of bronze, pottery, stone, bone, and shell. The distribution of these material remains suggests an industry of large-scale operation with a division of labor. The scale of bronze production of the early Shang can be illustrated by the increased volume of bronze artifacts found in archaeological sites. The Erlitou bronze production was limited. To date, dozens of small bronze objects were recovered, and they were exclusively found in the Erlitou site. The early Shang bronze industry adopted the moldcasting technique of Erlitou, but the quantity, quality and variety of the bronze ritual objects increased through time. Bronze artifacts as well as foundries were found in multiple sites. The vessel walls became thicker and had multiple layers of embellishments. More than a dozen types of ritual vessels were available by the end of the Erligang phase. In Zhengzhou, three separate caches of bronze artifacts found in between the inner settlement and the outer wall (Figure 14). Each of the three caches yielded considerable amounts of bronze artifacts, both in number and total weight (Figure 15). The biggest assemblage was the one located in the construction site of the Xiangyang Muslim Food

Figure 15 Bronzes yielded from the upper level of bronze cache pit H1 at Nanshun Street locality, Zhengzhou (adapted from Zhenzhou Shangdai Tongqi Jiaozang: Color plate 2, with permission).

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Yin was the capital of the late Shang. Chinese scholars knew about Yin from the transmitted texts. Bones used for divination by the Shang royalties at Yin were sold as an ingredient of herbal medicine for years. From this link, archaeologists located Yin. The site is called Yinxu, literally the ruins of Yin. Yin was built along the banks of the Huan River. The entire site covers an enormous area of 3000 ha, which consists of a 70 ha palace-temple complex, a royal cemetery, many residential precincts of various ranks of elite and commoners, lineage cemeteries, and industrial workshops (Figure 18). The study of Yinxu is qualitatively different from the study of the other Shang sites because it yielded the written texts of the time. They were the divination records inscribed on animal bones and turtle shells (Figure 19). Modern Chinese writing is the

descendent of the late Shang writing; so deciphering them was never a problem, albeit debate among scholars is common. The more than 160 000 inscribed pieces reveal a late Shang world from the twenty-first king Wu Ding to the twenty-ninth and the last king Di Xin (c. 1250–1045 BC), which could not possibly be monitored with archaeological data alone. One of the many aspects of the Shang civilization revealed by the oracle inscriptions is its religion. The pantheon of the late Shang was comprised of many gods, spirits, and the royal ancestors. Dead kings and their consorts became powerful supernatural figures who had influence on the outcome of every aspects of life. Through offerings the Shang kings monopolized the communication with the royal ancestors (Figure 20). This was a representation of the idealized order of the social world that power distribution was based on kinship proximity to the royal line. The kings gained the jurisdiction over other people, especially their competing kin lines, by claiming they were the direct descendents of past kings. The royal ancestors became increasingly so important in the Shang religion that rituals for them became calendric but divination to the other gods became increasingly rare and finally disappeared altogether.

Figure 16 Bronze lei-vessel recovered found in the construction site of Xiangyang Muslim Food Processing plant, Zhengzhou (adapted from Zhenzhou Shangdai Tongqi Jiaozang: Color plate 15, with permission).

Figure 17 Bronze rectangular-bodied ding-vessel found in the construction site of Xiangyang Muslim Food Processing plant, Zhengzhou (adapted from Zhenzhou Shangdai Tongqi Jiaozang: Color plate 11, with permission).

Processing plant near the outer southeast corner of the inner circumferential wall. Thirteen bronze vessels weighing 210 kg were recovered from the cache (Figure 16). The largest was a rectangular-bodied ding vessel, which measures 81 cm in total height and weighs 75 kg (Figure 17). Yin: The Late Shang Royal Capital

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Figure 18 Plan of Yinxu, the late Shang capital site (adapted from The Formation of Chinese Civilization: Figure 6.19, with permission).

Upon death, proper funeral treatment was required to transform the royal persons into living ancestors. The funeral rite mirrored the idealized secular world of segregation and conspicuous consumption of wealth and resources. The royal cemetery, occupying an area of about 11 ha, was located on the north bank of the Huan River (Figure 21). All the large tombs had been plundered in antiquity (Figure 22); however, the discovery of the tomb of Fu Hao shed some light on the magnitude of wealth consumption. Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding, was previously known in the oracle inscriptions. She was quite important in the politics of late Shang, was involved in several military campaigns and conducted ritual ceremonies. Her tomb was located 200 m to the west of the palace-temple complex and had never been looted. Her identity was positively confirmed on the inscriptions of some of the bronze offerings (Figure 23). The offerings included 1600 kg of bronze and the largest assemblage of jade ever unearthed. The inventory consisted of nearly 2000 artifacts, including 210 bronze vessels, 130 bronze weapons, 590 jade artifacts, and handicrafts made of bone, shell, and ivory. In addition, some 7000 cowry shells were found. Sixteen humans had been sacrificed to the tomb.

Figure 19 A cache of oracle bones at Yinxu (adapted from The Formation of Chinese Civilization: Figure 6.32, with permission).

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The number of human sacrifices in Yixu was shocking. Some of them seem to be loyal entourage who followed their master in death. The majority of human sacrifices, however, were found in the fills of the

Figure 20 Divination records inscribed on an ox scapula (adapted from The Formation of Chinese Civilization: Figure 5.7, with permission).

tombs. No grave offering was associated with them, their hands were often tied on the back, and their bodies dismembered or decapitated. In addition, about 2500 sacrificial pits organized in rows were found in the royal cemetery (Figure 24). These were collective burials of up to dozens of individuals, mostly males between the ages of 15 to 35. These pits confirm the descriptions of sacrificial activities recorded on the oracle inscriptions indicating that they were offerings to the royal ancestors at calendrically prescribed intervals. The human sacrifices were very likely captives taken in raids against the nonShang people, mostly the Qiang. The divinations of late Shang refer to various kin groups. Archaeology at Yinxu yielded bronze ritual artifacts with the emblems of their names distributed in spatially discrete clusters of tombs. Each of these tomb clusters was associated with a residential cluster. The power structure of late Shang was based on the kinship system. On the apex of the pyramid of power was the king, who was not only the head of the state, but was also the head of the royal lineage. The first son of the king succeeded to head the royal line; wherein the other sons became the heads of the collateral lines. The several collateral lines and the affinal lineages of the king were located at the second level of status. Each of these collateral lines had their own estates and they were actively involved in the king’s sacrificial ceremonies, military campaigns, and hunting expeditions. The collateral lines of the collateral lines occupied the third level of status, and so on and so forth. Theoretically, the access to

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Figure 21 Plan of the royal cemetery, Yinxu (adapted from The Formation of Chinese Civilization: Figure 6.21, with permission).

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Figure 22 Excavation of royal tomb 1001 at Yinxu (adapted from Cambridge Illustrated History of China: 23, with permission).

Figure 23 Ink rubbing of inscriptions of the glyphs of Fu Hao (adapted from Kaogu Xuebao 1977(2): 65, Figure 5, with permission).

power was based on the kinship proximity to the king, or the number of generations removed from the royal line. In practice, it would also involved intensive negotiation and charismatic capabilities of individuals. Succession to the throne was governed by two rules: from brother to brother and from father to son. Thus, the paramount power was altered between first collateral lines of the royal line. However, by the 25th king Kang Ding, a succession based in primogeniture seems to have become established. One of the major characteristics of Chinese civilization, that kinship is inseparable from power and

wealth, developed no later than the late Shang, and possibly much earlier.

The Greater Mid-Yellow River Civilization Sphere Early civilizations, more precisely, early state societies, supported by their superior organizational capability, could easily expand into the territories occupied by pre-state polities. In China, the civilization of the Central Plains rapidly spread into neighboring areas, creating a larger sphere controlled by a network of related states. Sites in this broader sphere were comprised of

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Figure 24 Headless interments of human sacrificial victims in tomb 1001 at Yinxu (adapted from Cambridge Illustrated History of China: 24, with permission).

the regional sub-traditions of Erlitou, Erligang, and Yinxu. On the one hand, they were political entities transplanted from the core civilization so that they were unmistakably Erlitou or Shang. On the other hand, interaction with the local indigenous traditions made them increasingly different from the core civilization. This greater sphere of societies with a common organizational pattern should not be viewed as a continuous geographic zone; they were mostly nodes and routes in a landscape otherwise occupied by simpler indigenous groups. The responses of indigenous groups varied from cooperative to hostile. Nonetheless, the expansion created an environment in which cultures of different origins made direct contact. Their interaction forged an increasingly homogeneous cultural entity within the bounds of modern China. The rulers of the states of the core civilization do not seem to have had jurisdiction over the people in the greater civilization sphere. Bone inscriptions indicate that the late Shang king had direct control over a considerable number of people, who he could command to do many tasks. However, political authority of the king was heavily based on the allegiance of leaders of the various lineages. The area directly controlled by the king and the loyal lineages was the area within which the late Shang king could move with safety and was not particularly large. Beyond that limit, the settlements bearing Shang cultural characteristics acted like independent polities and may not have had regular relationships with the

Shang kings. This contention of limited jurisdiction can be further demonstrated by the history and archaeology of the early Zhou. Military Colonization of Early Zhou

The Zhou was an agricultural group distributed in the Wei valley (Figure 1), 600 km west of Yin. By 1050 BC, the Zhou army had won a decisive victory over the Shang. Facing a vast terrain of over 1000 km stretching from the Wei valley to the east coast, the Zhou employed two strategies to rule: military colonization and forced relocation of the Yin people. After the conquest, the Zhou king created 71 new fiefdoms in strategic locations along the Yellow River. As many as 53 of these polities were governed by the heads of the collateral lines of Royal Zhou. These kin fiefdoms were relatively autonomous entities, although they had certain obligations to the Royal Zhou house. To quell the resistance of the Shang people, the Zhou uprooted the Shang lineages residing in Yin and allotted them to the new fiefdoms. The fief-building process in the new land involved the erection of a walled settlement, which was called ‘guo’: the people who lived inside the walls called themselves ‘guoren’, or citizens. The vast territory outside the walls was mostly occupied by the indigenous population; they were called the ‘yeren’, or countrymen. The relationship between the citizens and countrymen was sometimes hostile. For instance, the Qi fiefdom was constantly threatened by the

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Laiyi group, so that during a period of five generations, they had to send the bodies of the deceased dukes back to the Wei valley for burial. The people of the Yan fiefdom seemed to have faced a more friendly reaction from the indigenous people. At least they were not concerned with burying deceased dukes outside the walls. In fact, the archaeology of the walled settlement of the Yan at Liulihe, 40 km southwest of Beijing, indicates that the relationship between the groups of different origins was often collaborative. Material remains of the Zhou and Shang origins were about equally represented and were often found in the same ash pits within the settlement. In addition, excavations also yielded small numbers of artifacts of the indigenous style. The patterns of material remains indicate that early citizens of the Yan comprised the Zhou people from Wei valley and the Shang people from Yin. They were either residing side-by-side within the walls, or engaged in intensive collaboration in the cultural and economic fields. The rare, but nonetheless present, indigenous material remains indicate that they traded material resources with the local population. As predicted by the written texts, the countryside of the Yan was occupied by the indigenous population. However, in their settlements the material remains bearing Shang-Zhou traits increased through time. It is observed that during the early Western Zhou period, artifacts of Shang-Zhou styles were found only within a radius of 30 km from Liulihe. This area expanded through time and could have reached a radius of 70–90 km in the late Western Zhou. For instance, three wood-chambered burials were excavated in Baifu Village, Changping County, about 60 km north of Liulihe. The structures and furnishings of these three graves are comparable to the mid Western Zhou elite graves at Liulihe. They were either burials of elite figures from Liulihe, or of indigenous elite figures highly acculturated by the Liulihe group. Textual and archaeological studies of colonization by early Zhou rulers painted an ambiguous picture of territorial occupation and control of the expansion of early civilization. According to the Zhou texts, all the land to the coast was the land of Royal Zhou. In reality, Royal Zhou and its kin fiefdoms had limited jurisdiction over this vast territory; they shared it with the indigenous groups. Moreover, Royal Zhou’s control over the kin fiefdoms was based on the kinship ties and charisma of the Zhou king. Because of the difficulty in communication and the weakening of kinship ties with time, the kin fiefdoms acted more and more like autonomous states. Eventually the Royal Zhou house lost all but a token title. After

Shihuangdi (the First Emperor) conquered all the other states, he levied immerse labor forces to build a network of roads in a campaign to unify China Proper. Before an effective communication system was established, the decrees of the kings in China could have reached only a very limited core area. Offshoots of the Central Plains Civilization

The evidence of the early Zhou expansion shows that the relationship between the budding polities in the greater civilization zone and the core polity was mainly a loose alliance and became increasingly weakened. However, there is indication from the written texts that Dixin, the last Shang king, was concerned about the eastern territories and raised a military campaign against an indigenous polity called Tufang that lasted for 200 days. Campaigns like that would have renewed the tie between polities in the greater civilization sphere and the core polity. The archaeological record in Shandong complements these written texts. In Shandong, some large sites show strong late Shang characteristics in many aspects, while some sites yielded only small numbers of late Shang bronzes. Subutun was one of the typical Shang cemetery sites. The sites had been looted for decades before archaeological excavation. Only ten tombs of the Yinxu phase were found, but three of them had ramps like those of the Yinxu’s royal cemetery, albeit the ramps at Subutun were shorter. Tomb M1 was a four-ramped tomb (Figure 25). Despite being looted, it still yielded two large ceremonial bronze axes (Figure 26), one inscribed with the emblem of ‘Ya Chou’ (Figure 27). Fragments of other bronze artifacts also bear the same emblem. Of the 48 human sacrifices, nine of them received proper burials in caskets in the floor of the chamber and the ledge. The remaining sacrifices were mostly young males in their teens, many consisting of skulls only, were buried without offering on the floor of south ramp. If the standard of Yinxu burials could be applied at Subutun, M1 was the burial of a ruling family member, who was probably the head of the Ya Chou collateral line. Subutun seems to share similarities with the Yin in ideology, social organization and material culture. Yet, it is located some 400 km east of Yinxu. The expansion of the early Shang civilization reached as far south as the Yangzi basin, over 600 km from Zhengzhou. The southward expansion was very likely motivated by the opportunities of copper trade. The Wucheng tradition was one of these early Shang offshoots. It was distributed in the lower and middle reaches of Gan River and the drainage of Poyang

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Ceremonial ax

N

Looter's hole

South ramp

Figure 25 Partial plan of tomb M1, Subutun (Shandong Provincial Museum, with permission).

Lake. The pottery and bronze assemblages of Wucheng shared startling similarity with those of the Central Plains of the late Erligang and Yinxu phases, indicating that the formation of Wucheng tradition was strongly stimulated by the civilization of the Central Plains. The political entity embodied by the Wucheng tradition very likely had strong political tie to, or was a fiefdom of the Shang. However, the Wucheng tradition became increasingly strong in its local cultural characteristics so that it developed some unique features by the late phase. Nevertheless, the

overall similarities between the material culture of Wucheng and Shang suggests that contact with the Central Plains had not been interrupted. The most spectacular findings of the Wucheng tradition were yielded from the large tomb at Dayangzhou, Xin’gan (Figure 28). The Dayangzhou tomb, yielded more than 1900 artifacts made of bronze, jade and pottery, is the second richest Early Bronze Age burial ever excavated, surpassed only by the Fu Hao tomb. The 50 or so bronze vessels are dated from the Erligang phase to the Yinxu phase, indicating

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Figure 26 One of the two ceremonial bronze axes yielded from tomb M1, Subutun (Shandong Provincial Museum, with permission).

the tomb was used in the late Shang period. The earlier bronzes must have been treasured for generations before being placed in the tomb. The earliest bronzes are almost exact copies of those found in Zhengzhou. Later bronzes show the gradual emergence of local stylistic features. For instance, one of the rectangular-bodied ding is, in most respect, similar to that found in the caches of Zhengzhou, but it differs by the addition of a pair of tigers standing on the tops of the handles (Figures 29 and 30). This is a local feature repeated on at least ten other bronzes from the tomb. The tomb also yielded a unique bronze mask not seen in the mid-Yellow River valley (Figure 31). Among the bronze offerings were more than 100 specimens of bronze utilitarian tools, such as farming and woodworking tools, which were seldom used as grave offerings in the Central Plains. The Wucheng civilization was sustained by a copper mining industry. Some 120 shafts and galleries

Figure 27 Ink robbing of the ‘‘Ya Chou’’ emblems on bronzes believed to be looted from Subutun (adapted from Kaogu Xuebao 1977(2): 24, with permission).

Figure 28 Excavation of the Shang tomb at Dayangzhou (Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with permission).

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Figure 29 A rectangular-bodied ding-vessel found in the Shang tomb at Dayangzhou (Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with permission).

Figure 30 Close-up of the tiger motif of Dayangzhou (Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with permission).

were found in Tongling, a copper mine operated from the Shang to the Warring States period. The site also yielded remains of two smelting furnaces, indicating an industry included mining and smelting on the site, and the shipping of copper ingots at a later time. It is not clear if the copper ore mined from Tongling was one of the sources of the bronze industry of the midYellow valley; but it is almost certain that it was used

Figure 31 Front and side view of the Bronze mask found in the Shang tomb at Dayangzhou (Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with permission).

locally. Copper slag, molds of utilitarian tools, and bronze weapons were found in the Wucheng site. The Wucheng civilization shared the Poyang basin with an indigenous group represented by the archaeological tradition of Wangnian. The pottery assemblage of Wangnian tradition was rooted in the earlier indigenous Neolithic traditions and was different from that of the Wucheng. For instance, the li was the major pottery kitchenware of Wucheng; but the ding was the typical cooking pot found in the Wangnian sites. Nonetheless, some Wangnian pottery and bronze vessels were decorated with the spiral pattern typical of the Shang. Interaction between the Wucheng civilization and the indigenous Wannian tradition certainly occurred.

Civilizations Independent of the Mid-Yellow Civilization The early Bronze Age civilization that originated in the mid-Yellow gained considerable success in the expansion into the south and the east, but was not as successful into the north and the west. In fact, Bronze Age civilizations that arose in the northwest and southwest matched the level of sophistication

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of the mid-Yellow civilization. These civilizations stemmed from sources different from the mid-Yellow civilization. They maintained low interaction intensity with the mid-Yellow civilization, and contributed little to the formation of the later Chinese civilization. Sanxingdui

The Sichuan Basin, being locked in by towering mountains, was the home of unique cultural entities in prehistoric and historic times. A poet compared the road to Sichuan to the road to heaven. However, the basin was not entirely isolated from the rest of the world. Communication through mountain passes was limited but possible. The discovery of Sanxingdui tradition demonstrates that as early as the second millennium BC, Sichuan had contact with the civilization of the Central Plains or its offshoots. The pre-Sanxingdui Neolithic traditions show evidences of increasing complexity through time. Their people built large walled fontifications and their smaller settlements aggregated around these newly emerged centers. The Sanxingdui tradition developed from these indigenous Neolithic traditions and reached a new level of cultural complexity. The political center of Sanxingdui society was the Sanxingdui site, located on the western edge of the Chengdu Plain. The center of the site was a walled and moated area of about 360 ha, but smaller occupations sprawled to a wider area of about 1200 ha around the center. Three connected 10 m high oval mounds, stretching 400 m from one end to the other, were located in the southern part of the walled area. They were structures built for public observance. The most spectacular findings of Sanxingdui were found in caches. Caches 1 and 2 are two of the richest caches among the ten excavated (Figure 32). Together, they contained more than 1100 artifacts made of bronze,

gold, jade, pottery, and bone. Large numbers of elephant tusks and animal bones were also found. The animal bones, as well as some of the sumptuary artifacts, had been burned before disposal. Reasons for their disposal were perhaps religious. Most of the sumptuary artifacts are unique, having no parallels outside of the Sichuan Basin. For instance, the bronze assemblage included life-size standing statues (Figure 33), masks with protruding eye-balls (Figure 34), human heads with gold foil covering (Figure 35), and models of altars, shrines and trees. The Sanxingdui people used the casting technology to produce artifacts different from those of the midYellow valley, and they seem to have practiced a different religion. Although most of the sumptuary artifacts were developed locally, a handful of them show similarities with artifacts found in the Central Plains. They included bronze vessels in the shapes of zun and lei (Figure 36) similar to those of the late Shang. The site also yielded some five dozens jade zhang (Figure 37) bearing similarities to that of Erlitou. The material culture assemblage of Sanxingdui tradition indicates that communication with the midYellow valley civilization did occur, but on a limited basis. It seems that the elite members of the Sanxingdui society monopolized the contact as an additional means to legitimize their status. On the contrary, the domestic pottery from Sanxingdui maintained its indigenous identity. Most of the ceramic vessels had very small bases or pointed bases, a unique feature of the pre-Bronze Age traditions in Sichuan. The commoners did not seem to have directly involved in the cultural exchange with civilizations outside of Sichuan. Previous archaeology of the Sanxingdui tradition has yielded sumptuary handicrafts of extremely

Figure 32 Excavation of cache pit 2, Sanxingdui (Sanxingdui Museum, with permission).

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Figure 34 Bronze mask with protruding eye-balls, Sanxingdui (Sanxingdui Museum, with permission). Figure 33 Bronze life-sized standing statue, Sanxingdui (Sanxingdui Museum, with permission).

complex technology and skill. Nonetheless, we lack evidence of the organization of the government and the presence of a coercive force. Whether the Sanxingdui society was organized as a state needs to be demonstrated by future archaeological work. The Northern Zone

The land north of the Great Wall has mixed economy of farming and pastoralism in modern China. The northern zone, therefore, is a cultural frontier where farming and nomadic groups interact. The nomadic lifeways of pastoral groups enabled the northern zone to maintain regular contact with cultural groups farther north and west through the steppes. By the second millennium BC, people of the northern zone had established a material culture recognizably distinct from that of the mid-Yellow River civilization. Their bronze industry is often referred to as the ‘Ordos complex’. The Ordos bronze assemblage comprises of a large number of utilitarian artifacts, such as mirrors, ladles, daggers, knives, axes, etc. The Ordos daggers and knives are distinctive in that the blade and hilt were cast in one piece, and had hollowed-out hilts and ringed pommels. Tubular sockets were cast

Figure 35 Bronze head with gold-leaf mask, Sanxingdui (Sanxingdui Museum, with permission).

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Figure 36 Bronze lei-vessel, Sanxingdui (Sanxingdui Museum, with permission).

for the hafting of tools; wherein flat tangs were used in the mid-Yellow bronze technology. Only a few bronze vessels were found in the northern zone, and they bear a striking resemblance to the mid-Yellow River vessel styles, indicating that they were imports from the mid-Yellow River valley. On the other hand, a few Ordos bronzes were found in the mid-Yellow sites, such as the mirrors and knives found in the tomb of Fu Hao (Figure 38), and the daggers found in the Zhou tomb at Baifu (Figure 39). It is uncertain whether the bronze technology of the northern zone and the mid-Yellow River valley had the same origin, but it is unequivocal that they used the technology to fulfill different social goals. One of the well-studied cultural traditions of the northern zone is the Zhukaigou tradition. The core of Zhukaigou tradition was distributed between the Great Wall and the large Ordos bend in the Yellow River in modern south-central Inner Mongolia. The Zhukaigou tradition is said to appear by 2000 BC, developed from the local Longshan tradition. It abruptly ceased about 1200 BC, which is a prehistoric puzzle. South-central Inner Mongolia had been settled by farming groups from farther south, no later than the fourth millennium BC. Sedentary village communities farming millet with Miaodigou and Longshan style

Figure 37 Jade zhang, Sanxingdui (adapted from Zhongguo kaoguxue Xia Shang juan: Plate 31–1, with permission).

Figure 38 Diagnostic Northern style bronze knife and mirrors found in the tomb of Fu Hao, Yinxu (adapted from Studies of Shang Archaeology: Figure 51, with permission).

pottery appeared. Throughout the course of the development of Zhukaigou, it continued to be strongly influenced by the various traditions of the midYellow River basin. The Zhukaigou people maintained the sedentary adaptation living in permanent settlements, practicing farming and burying their dead in cemeteries. However, they had contact with the nomadic groups of the steppes. Ordos style small

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high-collared, deep hollow-legged li tripod cooking ware: many of them have decorative applique´ around the orifices. Two of these li were found in the Erlitou site. Although the Zhukaigou tradition disappeared in south-central Inner Mongolia by the twelfth century BC, its diagnostic artifacts were then widely dispersed in the northern zone, as far north as the Lake Baikal area in Russia. The Forging of Chinese Identity

Figure 39 Diagnostic Northern style bronze daggers found in the Zhou tomb at Baifu (adapted from Studies of Shang Archaeology: Figure 49, with permission).

bronze objects, such as daggers, knives, armlets, finger rings, started to appear in the early phase of Zhukaigou occupations. By the late phase of the Zhukaigou tradition, small numbers of Shang style artifacts, such as the typical Erligang style pottery li, dou and gui vessels decorated with the spiral pattern, and bronze ding, jue, ge and arrowheads, appeared. Most intriguingly, a burial at the Zhukaigou site yielded a unique set of Erligang style ceramics and a bronze ge halberd. It is apparent that south-central Inner Mongolia was a cultural frontier during the 2nd millennium BC where people of different cultural traditions met and interacted. It is interesting to see that the exotic artifacts of Ordos and Erligang origins in small proportions co-occurred at the same site. This suggests the mid-Yellow River civilization gained access to the Ordos nomads through the Zhukaigou communities. Perhaps more extensive trading activities occurred. One of the commodities that the mid-Yellow River civilization badly needed was horses for chariots, which were widely available in the steppes. The Zhukaigou tradition itself was not a one-sided recipient of influence from other civilizations. One of the unique pottery vessel types of Zhukaigou is the

The processes leading to Chinese civilization also led to the formation of a Chinese identity. The later Chinese civilization was characterized by an uninterrupted written tradition, a ritual institution of ancestors and kinship organization. These cultural features were all formed in the early mid-Yellow River civilization. This civilization itself was not a monolith; three ethnic groups took turns as the hegemonic political and cultural powerhouses. The dynamics of interaction between them eventually erased their differences and identities. By the mid-first millennium BC, the distinction between Shang and Zhou was in name only. The expansion of early civilization also incorporated indigenous groups outside of the mid-Yellow River basin into a greater civilization sphere. This sphere was a melting pot of people of different origins and cultural practices. After centuries of interaction with the offshoots of the mid-Yellow River group, and in the face of the military conquest of Qin and Han Empires, they gradually became Han Chinese. See also: Asia, Central and North, Steppes, Deserts,

and Forests; Asia, Central, Steppes; Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures; Asia, Northeast, Early States and Civilizations; Cities, Ancient, and Daily Life; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects; Political Complexity, Rise of; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Social Violence and War; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Allan S (ed.) (2005) The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chang KC (1980) Shang Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chang KC (1986) The Archaeology of Ancient China. 4th edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chang KC (ed.) (1986) Studies of Shang Archaeology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hsu C and Linduff KM (1988) Western Chou Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Keightley DN (1978) Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

620 ASIA, EAST/Early Holocene Foragers Keightley DN (2000) The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang, China. Institute of East Asian Studies and Center for Chinese Studies, Berkeley: University of California. Liu L and Chen X (2003) State Formation in Early China. London: Duckworth. Loewe M and Shaughnessy EL (eds.) (1999) The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaughnessy EL (1991) Sources of Western Zhou History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Early Holocene Foragers Mark J Hudson, University of West Kyushu, Kanzagi, Saga, Japan ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Chulmun A Postglacial hunter-gatherer and agricultural culture of the Korean peninsula. Holocene Period of time between the present and 10 000 years before present. hunter-gatherer A member of a people subsisting on food obtained by hunting and foraging. Jomon Late glacial and postglacial culture of hunting and gathering in Japan (14 500 to 400 BC). microliths Small stone flakes, normally used as part of a larger tool such as a sickle.

Since the end of the Pleistocene, East Asia has been a world with China at its center. Two major developments in China had profound affects on the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of East Asia and surrounding regions. These developments were the emergence of farming societies at the beginning of the Holocene and then the rise of states and Chinese dynastic civilization after 2000 BC. Agriculture began initially along the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers by about 10 000 years ago, but quickly expanded across much of central China. For many scholars of China, the history of Chinese civilization begins with these early agricultural societies and their gradual evolution into the ancient Shang state of the second millennium BC. For this reason, there has been comparatively little research on hunter-gatherer populations in China during the Holocene. Huntergatherers were, however, present in the northern and southern peripheries of China up until recent times. These ‘peripheral’ areas, also comprising modern Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East, provide the main evidence for East Asian hunter-gatherers during the Early Holocene.

During the Pleistocene, large areas of East and Southeast Asia that are now under the ocean were exposed by lowered sea levels. As well as the huge Sunda shelf that connected mainland and island Southeast Asia, the present Yellow Sea between northeast China and the Korean Peninsula would also have been dry land. The Late Pleistocene archaeology of East Asia is characterized by a widespread microlithic technology that is thought to have been used in hunting large and medium-sized mammals. With the onset of a warmer climate in the Holocene, however, microliths disappeared in most regions and human populations seem to have shifted to a broader spectrum subsistence pattern that included a range of fish, shellfish, and plants. Early Holocene coastal foraging became most developed in the Chulmun and Jomon cultures of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Islands, respectively (see Asia, East: Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers). Ceramic containers were developed very early in East Asia. Pottery is known from sites of the terminal Pleistocene in Japan, China, and the Russian Far East. At present, it is not clear if this pottery began independently in each of these three areas or spread from one original source. From a world perspective, however, this early East Asian pottery is remarkable not only for its great antiquity but also for its association with hunter-gatherer societies. In Southeast Asia, in contrast to East Asia, pottery arrived much later in the Holocene with the spread of farming. In Russia and Korea, the term ‘Neolithic’ is applied to early Holocene foraging cultures with pottery. The Jomon cultures of Japan could also be classified in this way, though Japanese archaeologists rarely use the term ‘Neolithic’. In China and Southeast Asia, ‘Neolithic’ refers to agricultural societies (see Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures).

China and the Russian Far East Although north China had been settled by Homo erectus, the cold, dry interior of Siberia was only occupied much later by modern humans after about 40 000 years ago. Despite its harsh climate, much of northern Siberia comprised a productive tundra– steppe biome that supported large herds of mammoths, reindeer, and other animals. The microlithic technology of the Upper Palaeolithic cultures of this region seems to have been designed for hunting these mammals, but the warmer conditions after the Last Glacial Maximum led to a growing emphasis on marine and plant foods. Pottery has been reported in sites of the Osipovka culture along the Amur River by about 14 000 cal BC. In China, early pottery has been reported from several sites,

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including Miaoyan in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region where pottery has been radiocarbon-dated to before 16 000 cal BC. Although many of the early pottery sites in China are from the south of the country, recent excavations at Donghuling in Beijing and at Nanzhuangtou and Hutouliang in Hebei Province have shown that early ceramics also exist in the north. While debate continues over the precise chronology and cultural context of such early ceramic sites, there seems little doubt that pottery began in Late Pleistocene contexts in several areas of East Asia. In central and especially north China, microblades continued well into the Early Holocene, showing that hunting still remained an important economic activity even for societies that were engaged in farming or livestock herding. Microlithic technology seems to have been associated with a northward spread of settlement in northeast China (Manchuria) in the Early Holocene. In the mountainous coastal areas of the Pacific Russian Far East, Holocene huntergatherers engaged in river and ocean fishing, hunting of marine and terrestrial mammals, and gathering nuts and other plant foods. In later periods, trade in animal furs was also of great importance in this region. Salmon fishing was probably one of the earliest Holocene adaptations, as in Korea and Japan. Evidence for shellfish gathering and seal hunting is known from the Boisman sites near Vladivostok at about 5000 cal BC. Cultivated foxtail millet (Setaria italica) makes its first appearance in the southern Russian Far East after 3000 cal BC. Except for a few sites in Yunnan Province, microliths are rare in southernmost China where Early Holocene stone tools were part of the Hoabinhian pebble tool industry that extended into Southeast Asia. Rice farming spread widely in south China during the Early Holocene, but the hunting and gathering of wild resources also continued to be of great importance in many areas. Fishing groups along the coast of southeast China are known from sites such as Hungguashan in Fujian Province. Upland societies such as the Dulong of Yunnan, who combined hunter-gathering with swidden cultivation, continued in southwest China until the twentieth century.

Korea and Japan Unlike in China, where hunting and gathering was often combined with farming, in Korea and Japan specialist foraging societies with only small-scale cultivation or management of wild plants developed in the Early Holocene. These societies are usually called

‘Chulmun’ in Korea and ‘Jomon’ in Japan. Both terms mean ‘cord-marked’, referring to a widespread type of pottery decoration. Chulmun (c. 6000–1500 BC) and Jomon (c. 14 500–400 BC) cultures share many features, such as villages with semi-subterranean pit houses, maritime adaptations evidenced by numerous shell midden sites, and sophisticated ceramic traditions. The long duration and broad geographical distribution of these cultures, however, also means that they were characterized by considerable internal diversity. On the Korean Peninsula, sites from the Pleistocene–Holocene transition are relatively scarce. This has been interpreted as evidence that hunters followed game north with the climatic warming, the peninsula then being resettled by new Neolithic migrants. While some such population movements may have occurred, many earlier coastal sites were probably inundated by rising sea levels. Neolithic sites become much more common on the peninsula after about 8000 years ago. In Japan, sites of the Incipient Jomon phase (c. 14 500–8000 BC) are sometimes seen as representing an intermediate stage before the establishment of ‘typical’ Jomon culture in the Initial phase (c. 8000–5000 BC). The Odai Yamamoto I site in Aomori has produced the earliest pottery from Japan with dates of around 14 500 cal BC. However, pottery is relatively rare in Jomon sites until the Initial phase. Shell middens only become common in the Initial phase, but evidence of salmon fishing is known from the Incipient phase Maedakochi site in Tokyo. The Jomon tradition tends to be marked by much more elaborate artifacts and sites than those found in the Chulmun cultures. This may reflect greater social complexity in Jomon Japan, though further work on this question is needed. Large Initial Jomon sites are known at Uenohara in Kagoshima and Nakano B in Hokkaido, but most of the evidence for Jomon complexity comes from the Late Holocene (i.e., after 5000 BC). In Korea, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was replaced by farming in the Bronze Age that began on the Peninsula around 1500 BC. In Japan, this transition occurred after about 500 BC in the Metal Age Yayoi period. In the northern island of Hokkaido, however, foraging by the Ainu people continued until Japanese colonization in the late nineteenth century, although from medieval times the Ainu had also been heavily involved in trade and other economic contacts with Japan and China. See also: Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures; China,

Paleolithic Cultures; Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers.

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Further Reading Aikens CM and Rhee SN (eds.) (1992) Pacific Northeast Asia in Prehistory: Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers, Farmers, and Sociopolitical Elites. Pullman: Washington State University Press. Barnes GL (1993) China, Korea and Japan: The Rise of Civilization in East Asia. London: Thames and Hudson. Habu J (2004) Ancient Jomon of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuzmin YV (2002) Radiocarbon chronology of Paleolithic and Neolithic cultural complexes from the Russian Far East. Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3: 227–254. Lu TLD (1999) BAR International Series 774: The Transition from Foraging to Farming and the Origin of Agriculture in China. Oxford: Archaeopress. Nelson SM (1993) The Archaeology of Korea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shnirelman VA (1999) Introduction: North Eurasia. In: Lee RB and Daly R (eds.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pp. 119–125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shnirelman VA (1999) Archaeology of north Eurasian hunters and gatherers. In: Lee RB and Daly R (eds.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pp. 127–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Historical Archaeology Gwen P Bennett, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary East Asia The eastern end of the Eurasian continent, comprised of territory occupied by the present-day nation-states of China and Korea on the mainland, and the island archipelago of Japan. Koguryo A state that straddled the present-day China–Korea border region during the protohistoric and historic Three Kingdoms period (c. first century BCE to 668) on the Korean Peninsula. Kyongju, Kyongsang province, South Korea Location of pre-Silla (Saro), Silla, and Unified Silla capital cities. Nara A capital city from the time period of the same name (710–794), located in the Kinai region of the island of Honshu, Japan. oracle bones Prepared turtle plastrons and oxen scapulae whose cracks, resulting from subjection to fire, were interpreted as oracles. Use started in northern China by c. 4000 BCE; by late Shang period c. 1200 BCE, they were inscribed with both question and answers. Paekche A state in the southwestern corner of the Korean Peninsula during the protohistoric and historic Three Kingdoms period. protohistory The time period when only secondary or extremely fragmentary primary sources are available. Silla a state in the southeastern corner of the Korean Peninsula during the protohistoric and historic Three Kingdoms period, it defeated Paekche and Koguryo to unite the Peninsula in a state known as Unified Silla (668–935).

the Yinxu site, Anyang, Henan province, China Location of important late Shang Dynasty settlement with royal tombs, palaces, workshops, and ‘oracle bone’ cache. Yamato Protohistoric polity on Japanese archipelago, noted in Chinese historical sources. Location as yet undefined.

Introduction Definitions of historical archaeology range from the archaeology of literate societies, of societies with written records, of historically documented cultures, and the branch of archaeology that supplements written history to create a more complete account of the past. Each definition has nuances that allow slightly different understandings and approaches, and all are applicable to practice in East Asia, where archaeology is, in general, characterized by its historiographical approach. Written records are generally regarded as the key factor dividing the historic period from the prehistoric, yet where this division falls is anything but clear in East Asia. Literacy may have been achieved by c. 2000 BCE in the Yellow River Valley of China, and unquestionably attained by c. 1200 BCE in the same region by a few elite members of society. Slowly, writing spread to other areas of East Asia, to different levels of society, and was used in the service of broader goals. Within the modern nation-state of China, there are areas that were not mentioned until very late in the historical record, as well as regions that, while being mentioned earlier in the records of their neighbors, took considerable time to produce their own. Korea and Japan first appear in Chinese records before they themselves adopted the Chinese writing system sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries CE. Later, both developed sophisticated writing systems of their own while also retaining use of Chinese characters. While it is clear that the regions of East Asia entered the historic period at very different points, many scholars tend to take the beginning of the historic period as the first textual mention of a region, regardless of where or when the document was produced. The concept of protohistory, or the period when a region is known through secondary sources or extremely fragmentary primary sources, is resisted in many instances, partly due to tradition, but also to nationalistic desires to extend a historical presence back in time. Further complicating both the interpretation of the historical record itself and its use in archaeology is the complex interweaving of ancient myth and oral tradition into the historical record. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese historical traditions all incorporate ancient mythological and supernatural origin stories, written by early ruling clans to legitimize their emergence and right to power. Again, traditionalism and nationalism

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contribute to some scholars’ resistance to recognizing both the mythological strains in accepted history and the inability of archaeology to recover evidence of these phenomena. This complex historical background in tandem with many recent or ongoing historical events gives historical archaeology its particular approach in East Asia. Twentieth-century East Asia has seen episodes of militarism, aggression, colonization, humiliation, modernization, and nationalism. These events have greatly affected the region’s historical archaeology, its goals, and the interpretation of results. While the nature of East Asian historical archaeology has changed much over the course of the twentieth century and continues to do so in the twenty-first, Fumiko IkawaSmith’s statement that East Asian archaeology is not a generalizing and comparative discipline such as anthropology, but is ‘‘national history or it is nothing’’ still rings true.

Theoretical Orientations in East Asian Historical Archaeology The search for ancestral roots is common to the historical archaeologies practiced in Korea and Japan where each population views itself as racially homogeneous. Questions of archaeological interest include where the Korean and Japanese ‘peoples’ came from (a question that has led to the sponsoring of archaeological work in Mongolia, Central Asia, and in Northwestern China along the Silk Roads); how their unique cultural practices came into being; and the formation of the states that they consider ancestral to their present-day nations. While they have disagreed on the direction and timing of cultural transmission and influence between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago, they share a common striving to better understand their pasts by using archaeology to invalidate the layers of foreign interpretation imposed through their earliest recording in Chinese histories, and in Korea’s case, Japanese colonial-period interpretations. The deep time depth of Paleolithic remains in China precludes concern over where Chinese ancestors came from, but archaeology’s early twentiethcentury discoveries ensured the discipline’s historical approach. Lothar von Falkenhausen has called archaeology in China ‘‘a handmaiden to history’’, and much effort is spent on locating and investigating the remains of historically documented locations, events, and people (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; Methods). The historical archaeology of all three nation-states shares one common characteristic: while its use to investigate the distant historical past is now recognized

and its discoveries of previously unknown texts have revolutionized understandings of these early periods, textual approaches are still the preferred avenue for study of the later historical periods. In the search for earlier deposits, historical remains from more recent periods are commonly stripped from archaeological sites without thorough examination, except where finds are spectacular in nature. Because of their perceived ubiquity, remains of the recent past will be endangered in the future.

Sources of Historical Evidence Sources utilized by East Asian historical archaeology have affected its interpretations and conclusions. Written sources vary from transmitted texts such as the second century BCE Shiji (Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian) that have circulated since first produced, to archaeologically recovered records such as wooden slips dating to the seventh and eighth centuries and discovered in twentieth-century excavations of ancient Japanese capitals (Figure 1). How literary sources have come through time and the material on which they are recorded affects their reliability and completeness, and therefore their uses by historical archaeologists. Before the development of mass

Figure 1 Wooden tablets recovered from excavations at Nara Palace, Nara, Japan.

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printing techniques, hand-copying ensured that circulating texts existed in different editions or were altered through copyist’s error, while cast bronze inscriptions have survived without distortion. In China, the First Emperor of Qin’s destruction in 213 BCE of all philosophical works and histories not sanctioned by the state drastically reduced the availability of pre-Qin records. Without a doubt, scientifically excavated archaeological finds in twentieth and twenty-first century have greatly supplemented the quantity and character of historical data available for consultation throughout East Asia. Chinese written sources are the oldest in East Asia. Marks on Yangshao period pottery (c. 5000 BCE) in north China are not considered true writing, but at several sites in eastern China, including Taosi in Shanxi, Dinggong in Shandong, and Longqiuzhuang in Jiangsu, pottery of c. 2000 BCE bears strings of character-like marks that, while still undeciphered, more closely resemble true writing and may represent the beginnings of literacy. East Asia’s first decipherable writing comes from late Shang period (c. 1200– 1045 BCE) eastern China. ‘Oracle bones’ – prepared turtle plastrons and cattle scapulae – used for divination by the late Shang kings were found at the Yinxu site in Anyang, Henan (Figure 2). These bear characters incised prior to pyromantic divination which cracked the bones. Of the 5000 characters identified to date, 40% can be read, and record the divination and its response. Names and brief inscriptions are also cast onto bronze ritual vessels of the same period. In the Western Zhou period (1145–771 BCE), such inscriptions become longer and more frequent, producing what Jessica Rawson has called ‘‘memorials of political events and social relationships essential to the structure of Zhou government and society’’. Some Shang jades also bear brush-written characters, implying other unpreserved media and tools of writing for the Shang and Western Zhou periods. The first surviving examples of brush-writing on bamboo and wooden slips come from archaeological contexts of the Eastern Zhou period (770–222 BCE), primarily tombs. Inscribing records on stone and brushwriting on silk also began during this time. Written documentation multiplied with the bureaucratically organized government of the Han Empire (202 BCE– CE 220), but texts are still fragmentary. Paper was invented in the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220) and used for writing, painting, and making rubbings of inscribed stone tablets, which was the earliest form of copying before invention of woodblock printing during the Tang Dynasty (618–907) allowed mass production. While the keeping of dynastic histories started in the Han, it was not until the

Figure 2 Turtle plastron ‘oracle bone’ with incised characters from excavations at Yinxu, Henan Province, China.

Song Dynasty (960–1276) that preservation and commercial developments conspired to provide an explosion in the amount of source material for the historical record. The first textual references to either Korea or Japan come from Chinese histories, the Wei Shu (Wei History), a section of the Sanguo Zhi (History of the Three Kingdoms) dated 280, and the Hou Han Shu (History of the Later Han), compiled between 398 and 445. These accounts are limited, but as Gina Barnes writes, they are ‘‘intentional ethnographic reconnaissance by embassies of the Han court’’, and provide much information about cultures and peoples that can complement the archaeological record of development and change. Korea’s earliest extant records consist of archaeologically recovered wooden tablets used for recordkeeping in the Silla period (c. 300–668) and two transmitted texts, the twefth-century Samguk Sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms) and the thirteenthcentury Samguk Yusa (Memorabilia of the Three

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Kingdoms), both compiled from earlier records no longer extant. Traditional historical understandings rest on the Samguk Sagi’s dates for the formation of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche in the first century BCE, but archaeology is challenging this view. A new text, the purportedly eighth-century Hwarang Segi (Annals of Hwarang), was recently discovered, but scholarly debate continues about its veracity. Japan’s earliest extant records are also archaeologically recovered wooden tablets used for recordkeeping in the early capitals in the Kinai region, and two transmitted texts, the eighth-century court chronicles, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Things), dating to 712 and the Nihon Shoki (The Chronicles of Japan) of 720. These two books, also complied from earlier nonextant documents, are the sources for the idea of an unbroken historical succession of divine emperors extending back to the mythological past. Excavated and transmitted artifacts, such as images on bronze, pottery and porcelain vessels, tomb walls, pottery figurines and models, sculpture, textiles, and later ink and watercolor paintings with images of the court and daily life; cosmology; clothing; and even leisure activities also supplement written texts with very important evidence for the understanding of past activities and beliefs in China, Korea, and Japan.

Historical Archaeology in China The first scientific excavations in China led by Chinese scholars occurred in 1928 at the late Shang (c. 1200–1045 BCE) site of Yinxu, Anyang, Henan Province. Intellectuals recognized early Chinese

Figure 3 Li Ji at Yinxu excavations, Henan Province, China.

characters on inscribed ‘dragon bones’ sold in late nineteenth-century Beijing pharmacies and traced them to Anyang, spurring excavations by Li Ji, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, considered to be the father of Chinese archaeology (Figure 3). Excavations continued intermittently in the 1930s and 1940s because of war, but uncovered ‘oracle bones’ inscribed with the names of the last nine Shang kings. At a time when many intellectuals blamed blind adherence to tradition for China’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century humiliations, the correspondence of the kings’ lists in ‘oracle bones’ to the names documented in the transmitted histories was considered a welcome indication of the truthfulness of tradition. This coincidence is largely responsible for archaeology’s historical approach throughout much of the twentieth century and its attempts to find places, people, and events named in the texts. At the end of the 1970s and 1980s, when economic reforms gave the provinces greater independence, more archaeological effort was directed outside the Central Plains, but the royal tombs, palaces, and workshops found at Yinxu still kept archaeological attention and resources focused on the Central Plains region for much of the twentieth century. It remains a major research center producing new and exciting finds. Recently, the 5-year Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project concluded. Funded by the Chinese government, the multidisciplinary project aimed to improve the accuracy of dates related to the first three historical dynasties in the Central Plains (Shang and Zhou are known from their own records; the Xia Dynasty is first recorded in the second century BCE Shiji). Although criticized as politically motivated, the

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project did much research, including archaeological work, and its results are now being published. Dynastic capitals have also been a major focus of archaeological exploration. The Xi’an region of Shaanxi Province is the location of many capitals, including the Western Zhou period Feng and Hao centers (c. eleventh century BCE), mentioned in descriptive poems from the period; the Qin (221–206 BCE) city of Xianyang on the north bank of the Wei River; and the Han (202–220 BCE), Sui (581–618), and Tang (618–907) capitals on the south (Figure 4). Xi’an’s economic development has driven much of this archaeology over the past 30 years, and the general plans for the Han, Sui, and Tang capitals are now known. Walls, building foundations, residential quarters, roads, gates, and markets have been identified and excavated. Xianyang, the First Emperor of Qin’s (Qin Shi Huang’s) capital city, is eroded on its south by the river, but the purported Afang palace foundation has been uncovered along with other building remains. Capital cities for other dynasties have also been excavated including those of the Eastern Zhou period Qi and Lu states in Shandong; the Eastern Zhou and Eastern Han capital of Luoyang; the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng; and the Yuan (Mongol), Ming, and Qing capitals at Beijing. Several northern walled cities of non-Chinese dynasties have

also been excavated including the Liao Dynasty (907– 1125) Middle Capital in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, and the Mongol Yuan Dynasty’s (1272–1368) summer city at Shangdu (Xanadu), in Zhenglan Banner of Inner Mongolia. Mortuary archaeology is dominated by royal and elite tombs. China’s first large-scale tomb excavation was that of Ming Emperor Wanli, in the cluster of royal Ming tombs north of Beijing, undertaken in 1957 at the start of the Communist era and now an important tourist site. In Xi’an, the 1974 discovery of the pit containing the First Emperor of Qin’s ceramic army brought Chinese archaeology to the world stage, with figures and replicas traveling in goodwill exhibitions around the world (Figure 5). Ongoing excavations have uncovered two more pits with smaller armies of figures, and improved conservation and preservation techniques have retained some of the original pigments on their surfaces. The First Emperor’s tomb still awaits investigation, but Han and Tang period royal tombs in the Xi’an region have also been excavated. Legions of smaller ceramic figures also standing in rank were found in the Han Emperor Jing’s tomb of Yang Ling, and one Tang princess’s tomb contained well-preserved wall murals. Many tombs of nobility have also been excavated; including the 433 BCE mausoleum of Marquis Yi of

Figure 4 Plan drawing of the Tang period capital of Chang’an, Shaanxi, China.

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Figure 5 Excavations on figures guarding the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin, Xi’an, China.

Zeng in Hubei Province, who was buried with a full set of bronze bells and other court musical instruments, and the Han period Mawangdui tombs in Changsha, Hunan Province that contained numerous silk maps and documents and painted lacquer ware with cosmological representations.

Historical Archaeology in Korea Archaeology in the Korean Peninsula (and Manchuria) was introduced by Japan after its victory in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, and intensified after victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05. In the course of annexing and finally colonizing the Peninsula in 1910, much anthropological, archaeological, ethnological, and historical work was carried out, aimed at manifesting the Japanese ancestral claim to this territory. Interaction between the polities of Koguryo, Paekche, Silla, and Kaya on the Peninsula during the Proto-Three Kingdoms period (c. firstcentury BCE–CE 300) and then between these states and Yamato/Wa, the dominant kingdom on Japan during the Three Kingdoms period (c. 300–668), led each to develop increasingly complex forms of organization. Japanese imperialist goals supported the idea that Japanese influence on the Peninsula was responsible for the kingdoms developing into complex states. Much archaeological effort was expended by Japanese scholars in the colonial period to prove this theory, and then by Korean scholars in the postcolonial period to disprove it. Nevertheless, Japanese

researchers were responsible for many major excavations and surveys on the Peninsula where fieldwork and documentation set a standard for scholars following them. Japanese investigations include Torii Ryuzo’s 1905 excavation at a Koguryo hill fort in the Tonggou, Ji’an region on the Yalu (Ch)/Amnok (Kr) River (now in Jilin Province, China), and his 1911 survey of the third Koguryo capital at Pyongyang. Other scholars conducted excavations at Wunushan (Ch)/Onyeosan (Kr), the first Koguryo capital (now in Liaoning Province, China), and in 1911 at the Koguryo tombs in the Pyongyang region. There was also meticulous excavation and documentation of the tombs at Lelang (Ch)/Nangnang (Kr), a Pyongyang region commandery established by the Han Dynasty in 108 BCE and lasting until 313. In the south, many other important Silla, Paekche, and Kaya remains were also unearthed, and by the end of colonial rule, over 2000 sites had been recorded and several hundred dug. While colonial-period archaeology aimed to further Japan’s imperialistic goals, it did record and preserve many sites which otherwise would have remained undocumented. After colonization ended in 1945, Korea’s intellectuals largely subscribed to a nationalist historiography and aimed to use historical, archaeological, and anthropological data to demonstrate Korean identity, purity, and state legitimacy since antiquity. With the North–South split imposed on Korea in 1945, archaeology in the DPRK North and ROK South has followed different theoretical orientations, but both were still conducted in line with nationalist historiographical goals. South Korean Three Kingdoms period archaeology has focused on Paekche and Silla simply because most Koguryo ruins are in the DPRK. While both North and South agree that the Three Kingdom period states are ancestral to Korea, their restricted access to predominantly Koguryo remains in the North and Silla remains in the South has resulted in differing interpretations as to which state was more important for the formation of modern Korea. Unified Silla (668– 935) has also been an extremely important focus of research. Important ongoing excavations are being done at the pre-Silla (Saro), Silla, and Unified Silla period capital at Kyongju in southeast Korea. They have included excavations of several royal and noble tombs, which were not looted due to their construction; the burial chambers are covered by large mounds of boulders capped with earth (Figure 6). Several gold crowns and belts have been recovered here, as well as a painting of a flying white horse on a birch bark mudguard (Figure 7). A gridded city based on Chinese models was laid out in the seventh century, just north of the earlier settlement at the

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Figure 6 Silla tomb park, Kyongju, Korea.

Figure 7 Gold crown recovered from excavations of royal Silla tomb, Kyongju, Korea.

asymmetrical, walled Panwolsong. Within the gridded city the foundation stones of several large buildings all conform to the grid layout (Figure 8). To the northeast lies the Anapchi Garden Pond, where excavations have contributed many unexpected objects, including wooden slips with writing, that have rounded out the picture of life at the Silla court. The Kyongju capital region is a World Heritage Park. Paekche period archaeology is more limited than Silla because of the destruction that followed its many battles with Koguryo, Silla, and Tang China. This period’s architecture is best known from Japan, where many Paekche artisans were sent to practice their craft. Paekche horizontal chamber tombs were easily looted, but tomb styles were not unified. Square or keyhole-shaped mounded tombs were common in Kofun period Japan (c. 300–710), but the numerous early examples in the southwestern Korean Peninsula suggest this may be where this style of burial originated. The unlooted royal Paekche tomb of King Muryong and his queen was discovered in 1971, and contained gold floral ornaments that were described in the Chinese text, the Old Tang History (Jiu Tang Shu). Koryo Dynasty (918–1392) prominence in East Asian celadon porcelain production has directed much archaeology towards excavations of several Koryo period porcelain kilns in Cholla Province, especially at Kangjin and Puan and along the southeast coast. Another important project has been the excavation and reconstruction of the Choson period (1392–1910) walled fort at Suwan, an excellent, complete example of this type of construction and now a World Heritage site.

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Figure 8 Foundation stones of Silla period Hwangyongsa Temple, Kyongju, Korea.

North Korean efforts have focused on the numerous Koguryo, Koryo, and Choson dynasty remains in the Pyongyang and Kaesong regions. Excavations include Koguryo tombs and remains of its third walled capital in Pyongyang, along with tombs from the Lelang/ Nangnang Commandery. Tombs from both periods contain numerous wall murals showing a mixture of Chinese and indigenous influence and have provided much information for the relationship between China and people on the Peninsula. Koryo royal tombs near Kaesong have also undergone excavation.

Historical Archaeology in Japan Studies of ancient court traditions and etiquette by Edo period (1603–1868) literati provided the foundation for the introduction of modern archaeology to Japan during the late nineteenth century by E. S. Morse. Even before this the concentration of ancient capital remains in the Kinai region (the Nara–Osaka–Kyoto region) of Honshu led interested Edo scholars to conduct studies there, ranging from the measurement of tombs to the topographic reconstruction of the Heijo Palace site. The subsequent development of protohistoric and historic period archaeology in Japan uses a historiographical approach like that of Korea and China. Post-World War II Japan saw the de-mythologizing of the imperial house, which gave Japanese scholars new freedom to question the textual picture of Japan as having been ruled by a single dynasty from the start of time. However, ideology still influences archaeology, as seen in the current enforcement of the late eighteenth-century ban by the Imperial Household Agency

Figure 9 Tortoise and snake tomb murals from (top) the Great Tomb at Kangso, near Pyongyang, North Korea, early seventh century; (bottom) from the Takamatsu Tomb, Nara Prefecture, Japan, late seventh to eighth century.

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on the excavation of over 100 tombs predating the eighth century because they may contain the remains of emperors or other once-sacred royals. Japan’s rapid postwar economic development in tandem with strong archaeological protection laws ensure that much data pertaining to the historic period has been, and continues to be recovered. William Farris has noted several topics that dominate historical archaeological research in Japan: the question of Yamatai, the relationship between ancient Japan and Korea, the influence on Japan’s urban development of the adoption of the Chinese city model in the Nara period (710–794), and the general influence on indigenous Nara period culture of adopting many Chinese political and economic institutions. Yamatai, a protohistoric polity ruled by Queen Himiko known from the Chinese Wei Shu, has been the focus of scholarly debate for centuries. The Wei Shu gives directions to Yamatai, but different interpretations lead to locations either on Kyushu or in Kinai, each with its own camp of supporters and distinctive political overtones. Before 1945, the Kinai position signified acceptance of the ancient origins for the imperial family with its ties to the Kinai region, while the Kyushu position signified rejection of these origins. Yamatai’s entry into general public discussion

and the various overtones it has taken on there have made many scholars retreat from the debate. Although textual evidence for this debate is exhausted, and no conclusive archaeological evidence has yet come to light, the archaeological work done in the quest to answer this question has significantly contributed to knowledge of late Yayoi period (c. 400 BCE–CE 300) society. Since late prehistoric times Japan, Korea, and China have interacted with varying intensity and directions of influence. Many elements that contributed to Japan’s early development were introduced from China via the Korean Peninsula after first undergoing Korean acculturation. Japan has always admitted its cultural debt to China, but the extent of its debt to Korea did not gain acceptance until the later twentieth century (Figure 9). The traditional view of early Japan based on the Nihon Shoki and fueled by imperialistic goals was that Yamato (c. fourth to seventh century) played a dominant role among the Korean states from its outpost in Mimana, a colony established in the southern Peninsula. Critical postwar re-interpretation included Egami Namio’s ‘Horserider theory’ in which the islands were suddenly invaded by militaristic, horse-riding nomads from North Asia in the fourth century, who crossed

Figure 10 Plan drawing of the Heian period capital of Heian (Kyoto), Japan.

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the Korean Peninsula, entered Japan, and established kingdoms in both. Postcolonial and civil war Korean reaction to these theories was intense and included many archaeological investigations. This work, along with much by Japanese archaeologists, indicates the extent of cultural imports from the Peninsula to the Archipelago, such as iron and improved pottery technology, horses and mounted warfare, new burial methods, use of gold and silver ornaments, writing and mathematics, silk weaving, advanced

bureaucratic methods and organization, Buddhism and Buddhist architecture, and Chinese-style law. It has also shown that Yamato presence on the Peninsula is not indicative of a colony, and that the horse trappings contained in fourth-century tombs forming the foundation for the ‘Horserider theory’ date to the end of the century, later than the phenomena the theory is meant to explain. Excavation of early capital cities and palaces in the Kinai region such as Fujiwara, Nara, Naniwa,

Figure 11 Overview of Nara City and the Nara Palace, Japan.

Figure 12 The Second Great Imperial Hall and Residence at Nara, Japan.

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Nagaoka, Heian, and several smaller ones, as well as of their associated Buddhist temples and other remains has been an important focus of historical archaeology. New textual materials – wooden slips used in bureaucratic record-keeping – were found at many of the sites and have shed much light on the nature of pre-Nara and Nara period society and government (see Figure 1). Research has also shown the Japanese adaptation of the Chinese gridded-city model for their own needs, and clarified chronological sequences of capital-city building and developments in infrastructure (Figure 10). Architectural features, facilities, or wooden slips have even identified several structures by their function, such as the Sake Bureau compound at Nara. Details in the palace layouts indicate the organization of rule, and transportation and field systems have also been identified (Figures 11 and 12). While these investigations are not politically charged like the debates on Yamatai and Korean influences, archaeology has uncovered the dissonance between the grand images of the royal courts found in the texts and the reality of imperial rule and its ability to organize labor and finances for its projects. These circumstances are seen in the re-use of roof tiles and beams from the old palaces and capitals in new buildings, and the phased or even unfinished nature of some construction due to labor shortages. See also: Asia, East: Chinese Civilization; Asia, North-

east, Early States and Civilizations; Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; Methods; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Barnes, GL (1988) Protohistoric Yamato: Archaeology of the First Japanese State. Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies, No. 17; Anthropological Papers Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan No. 78. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. Barnes GL (1999) The Rise of Civilization in East Asia: The Archaeology of China, Korea and Japan. London: Thames and Hudson. Farris WW (1998) Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures: Issues in the Historical Archaeology of Ancient Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kim WY (1986) Art and Archaeology of Ancient Korea. Seoul: Taekwang. Loewe M and Shaughnessy EL (eds.) (1999) The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murowchick R (ed.) (1994) China: Ancient Culture, Modern Land. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Pai HI (2000) Constructing ‘Korean’ Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean StateFormation Theories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Portal J (2000) Korea: Art and Archaeology. New York: Thames and Hudson. Tsuboi K and Tanaka M (1991) The Historic City of Nara: An Archaeological Approach. Hughes DW and Barnes GL (trans.). Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies.

Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Aira-Tanzawa One of the most famous Japanese tephra, first identified by Machida and Arai in 1976. Resulting from a massive eruption that occurred sometime between 26 000 and 29 000 years ago at the southern end of the island of Kyushu, the distinctive pumice is found all over the archipelago as well as in the adjacent parts of the continent. Japanese Palaeolithic A series of cultures that end with the first appearance of pottery about 15 000–10 000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years ago in the late glacial period. Tephra Air-fall material produced by a volcanic eruption regardless of composition or fragment size. Tephra is typically rhyolitic in composition as most explosive volcanoes are the product of the more viscous felsic or high silica magmas.

Until the excavation in the fall of 1949 of the Iwajuku site, about 90 km north of Tokyo (see map in Figure 1), the Palaeolithic cultures of the Japanese archipelago was not a subject of serious inquiry by professional archaeologists. Even though reports of discoveries were made from time to time by enthusiasts, the evidence brought forth was not convincing, either in terms of artifactual nature of the specimens, or the stratigraphic contexts from which they were recovered. Since much of the Pleistocene soils of the archipelago were of volcanic origin, it was believed to have been unfit for human and animal existence during the Pleistocene due to constant volcanic eruptions and falling ashes and volcanic debris. The situation changed entirely when a team of archaeologists from Meiji University, prompted by a report by a young amateur archaeologist, recovered some 160 pieces of stone, unmistakably modified by human hands, from two different levels of Pleistocene deposits at Iwajuku (see Figure 2). Once it was established that the Pleistocene formations do contain cultural remains, discoveries

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Figure 1 Map showing the sites mentioned, the extent of Aira-Tanzawa Tephra Fall, and the area exposed during the Last Glacial Maximum.

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Figure 2 Artifacts from the Iwajuku Site. A: Retouched blades and flakes of agate and obsidian from the upper level: B: Ovate axe with polished edge and blades of shale from the lower level. After S. Sugihara, The Stone-age Remains found at Iwajuku, Gumma Prefecture, 1956.

were made at a very rapid rate: nearly 100 sites were identified in the 10 years following the Iwajuku excavation, and now over a half century later, there are over 5000 Palaeolithic sites in the archipelago.

Search for the Earliest Evidence of Human Presence Two of the stone tools recovered from the lower layer of the Iwajuku site were bifacially flaked oval axes (Figure 2b). These were first described as ‘hand axes’, with the implication that they may be

comparable to Lower Palaeolithic specimens elsewhere. As the Palaeolithic research progressed, and quaternary geology of the archipelago was studied in greater detail, it became clear that the Iwajuku hand axes were situated in a layer of buried humus, representing a period of volcanic acquiescence, not older than 30 000 BP. In fact, the overwhelming majority of some 5000 Palaeolithic assemblages known today are from Late Pleistocene formations, dating to what is now known as oxygen isotope stage 2 (OIS2). Nevertheless, the search for the oldest evidence of human occupation of the archipelago continued. After

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all, humans were in northern China (see Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures) by about 1 million years ago, if not earlier, and land bridges connecting the archipelago with the continental Asia existed during the Middle Pleistocene OIS16 (about 0.63 million years ago) and OIS12 (about 0.43 million years ago) allowing the passage of large mammals like Stegodon orientalis and Paleoloxodon namadicus naumanni. Excavations were conducted during the 1960s at such sites as Sozudai in northern Kyushu and Hoshino near Iwajuku (Figure 1), north of Tokyo, but the large number of lithic specimens meticulously recovered from formations dating to 40 000–130 000 years ago at these and other sites failed to meet general acceptance as artifacts. Starting about 1973, a series of sensational finds, purporting to attest to a very early presence of humans in the archipelago, were made, mostly in the area of the City of Sendai in northern Honshu. It was sensational, because, in Japan, as in most other countries in Asia, archaeology contributes to construction of national history, and the evidence for the early human presence in the archipelago translates as the answer to the question, ‘How long have our ancestors been living on these islands?’. In this social context, front-page treatments of Early Palaeolithic discoveries in the mass media reflected the avid public interest in the subject. Unlike the finds made in the 1960s, these artifacts were clearly products of human activity, and they were sometimes unearthed in front of witnesses by an amateur archaeologist, Shin’ichi Fujimura, from layers whose ages can be unambiguously determined in relation to welldated horizon-marker pumice deposits. As Fujimura’s reputation for his uncanny ability to spot Early and Middle Palaeolithic localities increased, so did the antiquity of human occupation of the archipelago, the oldest finds being the bifacial tools recovered from the lowest layer at the Kamitakamori site, dated to be between 0.58 and 0.60 million years old. Archaeologists began talking about the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in Japanese Palaeolithic studies, when in November 2000 Fujimura was caught on video burying artifacts at Kamitakamori. He has since confessed to having manufactured the evidence by placing genuine, but later, stone tools from his collection in much older geological layers at 42 sites. The actual number could very well be larger. Discounting all the assemblages in whose excavations Fujimura participated, we are back to what we had before 1973, when there was a handful of assemblages which were thought to date to the earlier part of the Upper Pleistocene (OIS 5 and OIS 4), and whose artifactual nature remains controversial. New additions in recent years include the stone tools and bone flakes, associated with fossils of

P. namadicus naumanni and Sinomegaceros ordosianus yabei, from sediments in Lake Nojiri in central Honshu (Figure 1), dated to be 41 516 radiocarbon years old.

Late Palaeolithic Assemblages Almost all of the Palaeolithic remains from the archipelago date to the latter part of OIS3 and OIS2, from about 35 000 BP until the appearance of pottery about 16 000 BP. Morphology, production techniques and spatial distribution of stone tools, and their by-products are the major clues in reconstructing human activities, because the nature of the soil is not favorable for preservation of human fossils and other organic material, such as animal bones and plant remains. It is convenient to divide the Late Palaeolithic of the archipelago into three parts: Late Palaeolithic I, from 35 000 to 28 000 BP; Late Palaeolithic II, from 28 000 to 20 000 BP; and Late Palaeolithic III, after 20 000 BP. The earliest segment is represented by a small number of assemblages. They typically consist of long flakes of ‘blade’ proportions with minimum retouch, amorphous flakes, perforators, heavy duty tools with partial polish on one end (‘edge-ground axes’), and sometimes grinding stones. The assemblage recovered from the lower level of the Iwajuku site in 1949 (Figure 2b) is a good example. The occurrence of the edge-ground axes in Palaeolithic context is an unusual feature of these assemblages. More than 300 of these tools have been recovered from over 30 sites, and they often occur in clusters and circles near lakes and springs. At about 28 000 years ago, there was a massive volcanic eruption at the southern end of Kyushu, which sent forth ashes and pumice that fell all over Japan as well as on the adjacent parts of the continent (see the extent of AT fall in Figure 1). The distinctive pumice, called Aira-Tanzawa Tephra (or A-T for short), is the horizon marker, dividing Late Palaeolithic I and II of the archipelago. The complete disappearance of the artifact clusters with the edge-ground axes probably indicates the shift in subsistence strategy after the environmental disaster. There was also an indication of a temporary thinning of human population, as indicated by a decrease in the number of archaeological sites, followed by a dramatic increase soon thereafter. These growing populations were equipped with new kinds of stone tools. Tool blanks were produced by the ‘blade technique’, by which regularly shaped, parallel-sided pieces of stone were systematically detached from a carefully prepared core. These were then made into a variety of tools to perform specific functions. In addition to functional variability, there was a large range of what appears to

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Figure 3 Late palaeolithic artifacts from Shirataki, Hokkaido, Japan. Wedge-shaped micro-blade cores (Nos. 2 and 4); core preparation tablet (No. 1); burin (No. 3); micro-blades (Nos. 5 and 6); shaft-smoother (No. 7), bifacial foliate (No. 8), end-scraper (No. 9). All made of obsidian. After M. Yoshizaki, in Minzokugaku Kenkyu, 26(1): 17, 1961.

be stylistic variability in the stone tools. Several style zones could be distinguished by the ways tool blanks were retouched into backed blades. As the Late Palaeolithic II was the time of cooling climate, and the depressed sea level made the Japanese archipelago into a long peninsula projecting southward encircling a much reduced Sea of Japan, the increase in the number and the diversity of assemblages may be due in part to the population shift out of the continental Northeast Asia, where some scholars detect indications of depopulation. The new arrivals would have brought their own tool-making habits, and, being pressed into the narrow oceanic margin, human groups would have developed ways to increase productivity and maintain group identity. The predominant artifact types of the Late Palaeolithic III, after the last glacial maximum (LGM) of about 20 000 years ago, were microblades slotted into shafts made of bone or antler, used as spear heads. Recent excavation results, supported by a large suite of radiocarbon determinations, suggest that the complex reduction sequence for producing microblades from wedge-shaped cores such as those found at the Shirataki site in Hokkaido (Figure 3) had been present in this outer margin of the continent before the LGM, to continue through the Late Palaeolithic III.

Several different types of microblade cores and detachment methods have been distinguished. Bifacial leaf-shaped points were also present, sometimes in association with microblades. To this assemblage diversity is added the baked clay vessels. The linear-relief pottery of Fukui Cave in Kyushu, associated with microblades and radiocarbon dates which calibrate to about 15 300 years ago, have been known for several decades. Since then, radiocarbon dates older than 10 000 years have been obtained from over 80 early ceramic sites. The oldest one so far comes from the Odai Yamamoto I site at the northern tip of Honshu. Determinations obtained on carbonized remains adhering to fragments of plan pottery averaged to a calibrated age of about 16 000 BP. Since similar pottery is often found with very different stone tools through the archipelago, the ceramic technology, wherever it was first invented, seems to have been introduced to the archipelago, to be adopted by some of the Palaeolithic groups of the archipelago with different tool-making traditions. The ceramic use for the first few thousand years was sporadic. Although the appearance of pottery about 16 000 years ago heralds the beginning of the end of the Palaeolithic in the archipelago, it was not until about 10 000 years ago that the pottery use became

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widespread and well established, ushering in the fully ceramic Jomon Period of Japan. See also: Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures; Early Holocene Foragers; Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers; Asia, South: Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, Southeast: Pre-agricultural Peoples; Pseudoarchaeology and Frauds.

Further Reading Bleed P (1977) Flakes from Sozudai, Japan: Are they man-made? Science 197: 1357–1359. Bleed P (2002) Cheap, regular, and reliable: Implications of design variation in Late Pleistocene Japanese microblade technology. In: Elason RG and Kuhn SL (eds.) Thinking Small: Global Perspectives on Microlithization, pp. 95–102. Arlington, Virginia: American Anthropological Association. Ikawa-Smith F (1986) Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene technologies. In: Pearson RJ, Brnes GL, and Hutterer KL (eds.) Windows on the Japanese Past: Studies in Archaeology and Prehistory, pp. 199–216. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. Ikawa-Smith F (2004) Humans along the Pacific margin of Northeast Asia before the last glacial maximum: Evidence for their presence and adaptations. In: Madsen DB (ed.) Entering America: Northeast Asia and Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, pp. 285–309. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kaner S (2002) Trouble in the Japanese Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. Before Farming 2: 1–23. http://www.waspjournals.com. Matsumoto N (2002) Update on the Japanese Early and Middle Palaeolithic problem. Before Farming 2: 24–25. http://www. waspjournals.com. Matsu’ura S (1999) A chronological review of Pleistocene human remains from the Japanese archipelago. In: Omoto K (ed.) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese, pp. 181–197. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies.

Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric HunterFisher-Gatherers Gary W Crawford, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada Hiroto Takamiya, Sapporo University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Epi-Jomon The last manifestation of the Jomon found only in northeastern Japan dating to about 200 BC to AD 500. Fukui Cave One of the sites of the Jomon Culture, located on the southern island of Kyushu, Japan (Yoshii-town, Nagasaki),

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Jomon The time in Japanese pre-history from about c. 14 000 to 1000 BC in most regions of Japan and to AD 500 in the northeast. Okhotsk Culture A continental culture that migrated to Hokkaido about AD 500 with a predominately coastal orientation, and a subsistence based on maritime resources, a few crops and pigs. Satsumon The decedents of the Tohoku Yayoi who eventually spread throughout most of Hokkaido, established dry-field millet, wheat, barley, and other crop production there and who became the Ainu people who still live in Hokkaido. Shellmidden Period In Okinawa, instead of Jomon and/or Yayoi periods commonly used for the mainland Japanese prehistoric chronology, some archaeologists prefer to use this term in order to stress the uniqueness of the prehistoric culture developed on the islands. The Shellmidden periods are the Jomon through the Yayoi-Heian Periods. Tohoku Yayoi The Final Jomon in northeast Japan that had taken on most aspects of Yayoi culture, including agriculture but mainly only dry-field production, and whose populations were not replaced by migrating Yayoi people. Yayoi-Heian Period The period in Okinawa between c. 300 BC to AD 1100 is tentatively called the Yayoi-Heian period. The subsistence economy was gathering, fishing, and hunting. This period seems to be a continuation of the Jomon. Thus some have suggested that this period be called the Epi-Jomon of the Southern Islands.

The Jomon refers to the period of time from c. 14 000 to 1000 BC in southwestern Japan and to about AD 500 in northeastern Japan (the Jomon period) as well as to the Jomon culture in the Japanese archipelago. As a culture the concept refers to a set of material traits rather than a shared belief set; nevertheless, the Jomon is a heterogeneous entity. The generally agreed upon shared trait set consists of low-temperature fired pottery (none is kiln-fired or wheel-thrown) that is often cord-marked (Jomon translates as cord pattern), clay figurines, stone tools, and pit house communities. A minority of sites, probably fewer than 5%, is associated with shell mounds but these mounds are usually garbage heaps associated with hamlets and villages. Monumental architecture such as large earthen circles called kanjodori are part of the Jomon landscape, particularly in south-central Hokkaido.

Definition The Jomon is difficult to define because the traits used to characterize it are not unique to the archipelago, nor are they unique to a particular period in Japan. The range of styles encompassing Jomon pottery designs through time is unique, however. Even so, some attributes such as cord-wrapped stick impressions and rouletting are found on pottery in many settings throughout the world. Furthermore, aspects of technology shared by most Jomon sites include bone fishhooks, net sinkers, tanged stone knives, as well as grinding stones and manos, indicating a

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generally shared set of subsistence practices that included the use of inland and coastal resources. Dogs and a narrow suite of crops were raised in addition to hunting and collecting a wide range of other plants and animals. A number of specialized items such as jadeite, asphalt, salt, and lacquer were extracted or produced in some regions. Sites are found throughout what is now modern Japan from subtropical Okinawa through temperate latitudes including Hokkaido and many offshore islands. The Jomon did not spread beyond Okinawa to the Sakishima region, the southernmost part of modern Japan.

Chronology The chronological subdivisions are generally found throughout Japan (Figure 1). Northeastern Japan and Okinawa have subdivisions that deviate from the general pattern. The earliest pottery appears during Cal. years AD 1000

Hokkaido Northern SW Japan Tohoku Ainu Satsumon Nara-Heian Okhotsk

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the Incipient Jomon, an Upper Palaeolithic assemblage in all other characteristics. Radiocarbon dates associated with the earliest pottery range from 13 800 BP at Odai Yamamoto I in northeastern Japan to 12 700 BP at Fukui Cave in Kyushu (15 000– 13 000 cal. BC). Archaeologists debate whether the pottery was a local invention or whether it diffused from the mainland. The diffusion question may not be resolvable. Nevertheless, pottery was coming into use throughout East Asia by 12 000 BC indicating a rudimentary knowledge of technology. More fruitful questions relate to the impact this new technology had on the final Upper Palaeolithic cultures. The round and pointed-based pottery of the Initial Jomon was superseded by the Lower Ento flat-based pottery of the Early Jomon (Figure 2–4). Pottery in northeastern Japan is normally cylindrical. Similar forms of pottery are found in northeastern China at the same time but the context and decorative styles bare little resemblance to those of the Early Jomon. The similarities are probably coincidental, although some archaeologists view the similarities as evidence of direct contact between the regions. The subsequent Middle Jomon pottery is extremely diverse, the earliest being elaborated Early Jomon pottery. Upper Ento (Middle Jomon) pottery in Hokkaido is substantially identical to Lower Ento (Early Jomon) but has castellated rims and applique´. Other noncylindrical forms mark a period of extreme variation throughout Japan including the fire-flame pottery of central Japan. At least six style zones are recognized throughout the archipelago during the Middle Jomon indicating zones of habitual interaction or communication. The number of significant spheres of interaction is reduced to 2 by Late to Final Jomon times indicating more integrated interaction compared to earlier periods. One is in northeastern Japan and the second is in southwestern Japan where Late and Final Jomon pottery is simplified and quite plain, mirroring developments in the adjacent Korean Peninsula.

9000 10 000 11 000

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Figure 1 Chronology of the Japanese archipelago illustrating the main periods and cultures. Dashed lines indicate unclear boundaries. The Okinawa Jomon and Yayoi are referred to by some as the Shellmidden period.

The Final Jomon in southwestern Japan ended as a result of immigration and diffusion from the mainland marking the beginning of the Yayoi culture. The Yayoi brought intensive wet rice-, wheat-, barley-, millet-, and soybean-based agriculture, metallurgy, and a new sociopolitical organization from the mainland. Studies on human bone indicate clear differences between the migrant Yayoi and native Jomon populations. Still under debate are new radiocarbon dates of residues on Yayoi pottery are pushing back the

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Figure 2 Excavation of an Early Jomon pit house at the Yagi site, Minamikayabe, Hokkaido.

Figure 3 Pit houses at the Early Jomon Hamanasuno site, Minamikayabe, Hokkaido.

earliest Yayoi pottery to about 1000 BC from 500 BC. This means that the Yayoi began only a few centuries after similar changes in the Korean Peninsula had taken place. Recent research disproves that rice was introduced to Japan from the south through Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands. Current evidence is for a route from the mainland through Kyushu. The demise of the Jomon was not synchronous throughout the archipelago. While the Yayoi

developed quickly in the southwest where Jomon populations were not particularly dense, it continued in the northeast. Final Jomon people made adjustments in the face of developments on their margins and experimented with a southwestern style of agriculture that included wet rice production at locales such as the Tareyanagi site in Aomori prefecture. Rice production was not successful but they continued to grow crops such as barley, wheat, millet, and hemp.

640 ASIA, EAST/Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers

Figure 4 An Early Jomon cylindrical pot (Ento Kaso phase) showing prominent cord-marking.

Ultimately, cultures in the northeast that adopted agriculture became the Tohoku Yayoi, a descendent of the Final Jomon rather than a substitution of it by migrants. The Emishi, a people mentioned in early historic documents in Japan as foreigners in the northeast, likely refers to the Tohoku Yayoi, the nascent Satsumon, and perhaps even the Epi-Jomon cultures. Supporting this view are data demonstrating that the Ainu are physically similar to the Jomon people rather than the Yayoi. The Ainu ancestors are known as the archaeological Satsumon culture. At the northern extremes of Honshu and in Hokkaido, the Jomon lasted until at least AD 500 when the ancestral Satsumon people moved into Hokkaido from northern Tohoku, displaced by political events to the south. The post-Final Jomon cultures in Hokkaido contemporary with the Tohoku Yayoi are the Epi- or Zoku-Jomon. Epi-Jomon life appears to have been relatively simple compared to that of earlier Jomon periods. Most known sites such as the Sapporo Eki Kita-Guchi site (Sapporo Station, North Entrance) consist of cemeteries and short-term occupations (Figure 5). The Fugoppe cave site is an important spiritual space with nearly every rock surface covered in art. A few crops have been recovered from Epi-Jomon sites but they were likely obtained through exchange with the Tohoku Yayoi. Similar population movement might have taken place in the Ryukyu archipelago either at during latter part of the Yayoi-Heian or immediately prior to the Gusuku period. Linguistic and osteological data suggest population movements from mainland Japan. Finally, the

Figure 5 Earthen ridge forming part of a circular enclosure (kanjodori) around a cemetery at the Kiusu site, Hokkaido.

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Okhotsk culture occupied the northern coast of Hokkaido, having emigrated from the continent sometime around AD 500. This culture had a maritime adaptation but also grew a few crops as well as raised pigs. They appear to have been absorbed by the Satsumon culture.

Subsistence Jomon resource procurement strategies included hunting, gathering, fishing, and some food production. Food production was not as intensive as it was in cultures contemporary with the Jomon in China but may resemble that of the earliest agricultural peoples in northeastern China. Despite similar Upper Palaeolithic and Epi-Palaeolithic heritages on the mainland and on the Japanese archipelago, cultures in the two regions diverged dramatically by 7000 BC when people in what is now China were making a commitment to agriculture. The Jomon made no similar commitment. However, to call Jomon people strictly hunter-gatherers does not adequately characterize their economic system that lies partway along a continuum of hunting-gathering through agriculture. That is, they had a mixed economy of lowlevel resource production, hunting, gathering, and fishing. Some archaeologists believe that the Jomon were indeed agricultural. Nevertheless, Jomon people were able to call upon a variety of strategies to subsist depending on the habitats in which they were living. Identifying the specifics through time and region in Japan is difficult because most archaeology in Japan is a civil service endeavor meant to rescue ancient material ahead of modern development projects. In regions where techniques such as flotation have been carried out to recover charred plant remains, a rich plant resource procurement regime is evident. In Hokkaido, for example, flotation has been conducted since the mid-1970s. Nuts are prevalent in the Initial Jomon subsistence but Early Jomon people collected fewer nuts. Instead small-grained seeds of grasses and annual plants were utilized, much as in Early Neolithic cultures in China and elsewhere. Several plants such as barnyard millet were planted in gardens. Bottle gourd, buckwheat, and azuki bean may also have been crops. By 1000 BC millets and rice from China were present as far north as northern Honshu at the Kazahari site. Most important plants for the Jomon

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flourished in human impacted and modified habitats by the Early Jomon period. Familiarity with plant management and gardening likely facilitated the adoption of Chinese cultigens and their rapid incorporation into the economy. The Satsumon and their descendents, the Ainu, had a substantially agricultural economy that was derived from the Tohoku Yayoi agricultural system. Similar interdisciplinary research in Okinawa, at the extreme southernmost end of the Japanese archipelago, shows that the island was first successfully colonized by people through the latter part of the Middle and Late Jomon periods. Archaeobotanical data so far indicate that they succeeded there with a strictly hunting-gathering-fishing economy. It is quite rare for people to colonize small islands such as Okinawa without agriculture. They were able to adapt successfully by exploiting coral reef fish and probably nuts. This subsistence economy lasted for at least three thousand years. See also: Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures; Chinese Civilization; Early Holocene Foragers; Japanese Archipelago, Paleolithic Cultures.

Further Reading Aikens CM and Higuchi T (1982) The Prehistory of Japan. New York: Academic Press. Crawford GW (1983) Paleoethnobotany of the Kameda Peninsula Jomon. Ann Arbor, MI: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Crawford GW (1997) Anthropogenesis in Prehistoric Northeastern Japan. In: Gremillion K (ed.) People, Plants, and Landscapes: Studies in Paleoethnobotany, pp. 86–103. University of Alabama Press. Crawford GW and Takamiya H (1990) The origins and implications of late prehistoric plant husbandry in northern Japan. Antiquity 64: 889–911. Habu J (2004) Ancient Jomon of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanihara K (1990) Dual structure model for the population history of the Japanese. Japan Review 2: 1–33. Imamura K (1996) Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives on Insular East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kidder JE and Esaka T (1968) Prehistoric Japanese Arts: Jomon Pottery. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Pearson RJ, Barnes GL, and Hutterer KL (eds.) (1986) Windows on the Japanese Past: Studies in Archaeology and Prehistory. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. Takamiya H (2001) Introductory routes of rice to Japan: An examination of the southern route hypothesis. Asian Perspectives 40: 209–226.

See: Siberia, Peopling of.

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ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS Sarah Milledge Nelson, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Lower Xiajiadian culture An archaeological culture in Northeast China, found mainly in southeastern Inner Mongolia, northern Hebei and western Liaoning, China. Upper Xiajiadian culture A Bronze Age archaeological culture in Northeast China derived from the Eurasian steppe bronze tradition, and roughly contemporaneous to the Western Zhou Dynasty. Yayoi period An era in the history of Japan from about 300 BC to AD 250.

Northeast Asia includes the Chinese northeast, or Dongbei (formerly known as Manchuria), eastern Inner Mongolia, the Russian Far East south of the Amur river, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands (Figure 1). This region is varied in geology, but connected by long coast lines, and much early contact was probably by boat. Japan was completely cut off by the Holocene period, and its largely volcanic islands were somewhat isolated but never completely out of touch. The Korean peninsula is a block of tilted granite, with a relatively steep eastern side with few bays but many small islands on the south and west (Figure 2). The sea between Korean and Japan was probably a meeting ground of cultures, especially the southern end where islands are visible from the peninsula to Kyushu Island of Japan. The Dongbei and its surroundings are more continental. Chonji, the Heavenly Lake, occupies a large crater in mountains called Changbaishan (Ever White Mountains) in Chinese and Paektusan (Whitehead Mountain) in Korean. Lower mountains separate northeastern China from the Russian Far East, and eastern Inner Mongolia from the Dongbei. None of the mountains made impenetrable barriers. Due to the long tradition within China of recording not only their own history but geographic and cultural information about surrounding polities, the archaeological record sometimes can be enriched by contemporaneous accounts. Distinctive polities and perhaps states formed earlier in Dongbei roughly at the same time as the Xia dynasty in central China (c. 2206–1550 BCE), then contributed bronze metallurgy and domesticated horses to groups to their east,

south, and north. Each state had its own form of organization, and each civilization its unique culture; nevertheless common threads ran through them, making a rich tapestry of related cultures.

Complexity in Inner Mongolia and Liaoning Province Social and political complexity emerged in the northeastern part of the Asian continent first in Inner Mongolia and Liaoning Province. The Hongshan period demonstrates early social stratification, followed by a little-known culture called Xiaoheyan, and the better studied Lower Xiajiandian and Upper Xiajiadian. These are followed by Bronze Age societies in Liaoning and Jilin Provinces, including the Liaod ong peninsula, containing some high status burials but no known central places. Hongshan (4000–2500 BCE) is best known for its ritual building with life-sized statues in an elaborate ceremonial area, another ritual area featuring smaller pregnant figurines, and elite burials containing no burial goods except highly polished jades. The jades take specific shapes, such as pig-dragons, clouds, birds, and tortoises, suggesting that they might mark ranks or craft specialties. The pig appears to have been venerated, suggested not only by pig-dragon jades, but also by a life-sized pig statue in the ritual building, and a hill which, viewed from the Goddess Temple, resembles a pig head, with pointed ears. Several archaeologists describe the leaders of Hongshan to be wu, a Chinese word which describes shaman-like characteristics and duties. Xiaoheyan (2800–2100 BCE) overlaps with Hongshan, but its distinctive pottery assemblage sets it apart. Lower Xiajiadian (LXJD) and Upper Xiajiadian culture (UXJD) were named from a single stratified site where both were first discovered. Since that time, many sites of each period have been located and excavated, and the distinction between them is clear, both in terms of time and cultural characteristics. Lower Xiajiadian is dated 2300–1600 BCE, almost contemporaneous with Erlitou on the Yellow River in China, which is thought by many to be the remains of the Xia, China’s earliest dynasty. Although a gap appears in C-14 dates between the Hongshan period and LXJD, some Hongshan jades have been found in LXJD burials, and some LXJD sites directly overlie Hongshan layers.

Russian Far East

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CHINA Pacific Ocean Figure 1 Northeast Asia, with archaeological cultures located.

Because Xia was described as the first dynasty in China in Chinese histories, the discovery of a contemporaneous complex society far to the northeast was surprising to Chinese archaeologists and historians. Polychrome pottery from LXJD contexts, withpainted designs that appear to be forerunners of the decoration on Shang dynasty bronzes, was another surprising discovery (Figure 3). Baggy-legged tripods are new in LXJD, comprising most of the cooking pots. Small tripod pitchers are also new in the region, but otherwise LXJD continued to produce and use many of the same stone tools and much of the same types of pottery as before, in spite of having some small bronze artifacts. LXJD remains are found mostly in Inner Mongolia, although a few sites have been found to the south and east in Liaoning Province. The most conspicuous sites loom on ridges above major rivers, marked by still extant extensive stonewalls and fallen towers, with stone circular footings for buildings inside the walls on the hilltops. In addition to these high sites, unwalled villages have been unearthed. Sites of three sizes are distributed in a central place type hierarchy, suggesting political centralization. A burial site with about 800 graves was completely excavated at Dadianzi, displaying conspicuous

gradation of ranking by both the depth of the burials (the richest are up to seven meters deep) and the richness of the grave goods, including small bronze objects. Wooden coffins were used for the larger and richer burials. Red and black lacquer layered on bamboo and wooden artifacts, as well as abundant seashells, may well indicate trade with the south. Animal scapuli prepared by boring holes were used to divine the will of the spirits and ancestors according to the way cracks formed in the fire. Such ‘oracle bones’ with inscriptions are well known from the Late Shang, around 1250 BCE. However, uninscribed oracle bones are a Dongbei development dating back some two millennia earlier than LXJD north of the Xilamulun River, and presumably continuously used for about 4000 years (see below). Although the rich graves belong to both men and women, a gender distinction in placement is evident. All the burials are flexed and on their sides with their heads to the northeast, but the males face the village and the females face away from the village. Another gender difference is that women tend to be accompanied by spindle whorls while men are more likely to have stone axes. It has been argued that LXJD is just as complex as Erlitou, in terms of economy, ranking, extent of the

644 ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS

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Figure 2 Korea and Manchuria, with sites located.

polity, craft specialization, and intensive agriculture. Certainly it seems that the two polities were directly or indirectly in contact.

Upper Xiajiadian By 1600 BCE UXJD appears, with apparent connections with the archaeology of the Eurasian steppes, especially in the styles of small bronze artifacts. The locally cast bronzes include knives with upward points and handles cast with rings or animals, and small horse trappings. The large stone constructions of LXJD were no longer built. UXJD depended on herding sheep and goats in addition to agriculture. Ridden horses may have been an aid to herding. Slab

graves near the surface are characteristic of UXJD. The burial style suggests steppe affiliations, as well as shapes and motifs on the bronzes. In Jilin Province, Bronze Age archaeological remains are labeled the Xituanshan culture (1200–400). Although there are no central places, large villages with cemeteries imply more than a simple agrarian society. Each person is buried in a stone slab burial with a few pots, stone tools, and heads or other bones of pigs and dogs. Elite burials are not in cemeteries, but found singly. Typically they contain a bronze dagger with a blade in the shape of a pair of curly brackets ({}), having a T-shaped handle constructed of different materials. Mirrors of geometric design are frequently found in elite burials, along with

ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS 645

stone cists magnified many fold. In the few dolmens that escaped total pillaging, it seems that these giant constructions were used for burials of the high elite. No complete burial has been excavated, but a composite picture would suggest that contents typically include two polished small red jars, a bronze or polished stone dagger, and a necklace consisting of tubular stone beads, sometimes with a single curved bead (called gogok in Korean, magatama in Japanese) in the center. It is reasonable to suppose that the gogok is a symbol of authority at this time, since it was abundantly associated with later elites in Korea and Japan.

Bronze Age Korea Figure 3 Painted pottery from Lower Xiajiadian.

Figure 4 Liaoning dagger and bone with chariot drawing.

necklaces of green tubular beads. An etched bone clearly depicts a chariot with driver being pulled by two horses (Figure 4).

Eastern Dongbei and the Korean Peninsula In southern Jilin and on the Liaodong and Korean peninsulas, dolmen-like constructions are conspicuous on the landscape. They probably date to as early as 1000 BCE. Made of stone slabs weighing several tons, they have been suggested to reflect the concept of

The Bronze Age in Korea has some large population aggregates, which are often interpreted as chiefdoms. Bronze Age pottery styles in the Korean peninsula vary by region, but they are essentially similar – consisting of jars with relatively plain exteriors, flat bases, and wide mouths, called Mumun. They also resemble pottery of the Dongbei and the southern Russian Far East. Rice pollen, phytoliths, and grains impressions, as well as evidence for millets and barley, have all been found in the paste of Mumun pottery, confirming that this was a fully agricultural society. Houses are roomier than those of the Neolithic, and grouped into larger aggregates. Instead of being placed in river valleys, Bronze Age villages were built on hill slopes, presumably to allow for terracing of rice paddies with water diverted from small streams. Agricultural fields have been uncovered in several southern Korean sites, with rice, barley, and millets identified as dominant crops. In the southern part of the Korean peninsula, most dolmens consist of only a large monolith lying on the ground, covering a burial. The burials are most often in stone cists, but sometimes they are in pits with or without wooden coffins, and sometimes large jars contain the bodies, especially in the southwest. Daggers are often made of polished limestone instead of bronze, but Liaoning-style bronze daggers have been found all over the Korean peninsula, especially in the southeast and southwest. The bronze daggers appear in Korea at least by 800 BCE. The nature of the society in Bronze Age Korea has been a subject of much discussion, but no consensus has formed. Most would propose that they were small polities with local leaders who are buried under dolmens, which are often glossed as chiefdoms.

The State of Old Chosun Histories of the Han dynasty in China relate the establishment of a state called Chosun (Chaoxian) in the northern part of the Korean peninsula. Some

646 ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS

Korean historians claim an earlier state in this region which they refer to as Kija Chosun, founded around 1000 BCE by a relative of the last Shang king who was conquered by the Zhou. No archaeological evidence supports the interpretation of such a state in the Korean peninsula. According to later Chinese historical writings, the state of Chosun was founded by Wiman in the location of a walled city, and archaeological evidence suggests complex society in northern Korea by the fourth century BCE. For example, knife-shaped coins from the Warring States period in China (450–221 BCE) are found in clusters and sometimes hoards from the Yalu River to the Taedong River. In addition, some burials near Pyongyang contain artifacts with Chinese inscriptions, including dates in the third century BCE, contemporaneous with the Chinese Qin dynasty. These discoveries confirm the literacy in Chinese of some inhabitants of Chosun. Han dynasty documents describe the battles through which Wiman, who himself was from Liaoning, became the leader of that state of Chosun. Later when both an army and navy from the Chinese Han dynasty conquered his grandson Ugo’s city, Chinese documents provide corroborating detail for the existence of such a state, including the lengthy siege and strong armies that were needed for the conquest. Archaeological evidence includes a walled city across the Taedong River from Pyongyang, which possibly is the remains of the original capital of Wiman Chosun, since it has the irregular walls of a Korean city rather than the rectangular shape of a Chinese city. Shortly after the Han conquest a census recorded the population, with many locations having the name of Tosong, or earthen fortress, suggesting walled towns. Many of these have been located by archaeological survey. The Han leadership was not content with merely conquering Chosun; it set up governing commanderies in the northern part of the peninsula, using both native and Chinese administrators, some of whose tombs have been excavated. The longest lasting of these commanderies was called Lelang (Nangnang in Korean). The Han interest in the peninsula was partly a matter of protecting Chinese borders, but trade was also an important impetus. The Han had declared a state monopoly on both salt and iron, and may well have been seeking these commodities in Korea. The presence of Chinese officials and local nobles during the Lelang period is reflected in the burials, with both local and imported artifacts.

Korean States after Nangnang Some Chinese documents referred to the southern regions of the peninsula contemporaneous with

Nangnang as Samhan, or three Han states (a different character from that of Han China). However, multiple ‘states’ are named as part of each of the three Hans, suggesting that the term meant something like a walled and possibly self-governing city with an agricultural hinterland. To confuse posterity further, one Chinese document refers to the whole south of the peninsula as the Chin State. Archaeological discoveries demonstrate that the south was developing under the stimulus of Nangnang. For example, a burial in the first century CE in the coastal region where one of the Kaya states was founded contained a writing brush, suggesting that literacy was known in the south of the peninsula during the Chinese Han dynasty. Other archaeological discoveries include southern coastal sites containing Chinese Han dynasty coins and oracle bones without inscriptions. Korean histories refer to the time period from 57 BCE to CE 668 as the Three Kingdoms Period. The three kingdoms are Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla. In addition six city-states were called Kaya, and coexisted with these warring kingdoms before being conquered or absorbed by Silla. Archaeological discoveries do not entirely confirm the early beginnings of the southern states of Paekche and Silla, although a large city has been unearthed in the southwest, and early rich burials were found in Silla territory. Whenever each crystallized into a state, polities of some sort were forming in the north, southwest, and southeast of the peninsula respectively. Koguryo was probably the earliest of the Korean kingdoms to become a true state, as we would now employ the term. The kingdom of Koguryo arose first in valleys of northern tributaries to the Yalu (Amnok) River. In Chinese writings Koguryo is described as an offshoot of Puyo, a polity in northern Manchuria and the Russian Far East, described in Qin dynasty records as the result of an expedition to that region. Archaeologically, Koguryo is characterized by large stone tombs. They are mostly in Ji’an, although many contemporaneous burial sites are also found across the river on the North Korean side. As Koguryo expanded by conquest, a large walled city defended by a hill fort was constructed in Ji’an, in presentday China (see Asia, East: China, Neolithic Cultures; China, Paleolithic Cultures) on the north bank of the Yalu River. Within Ji’an, the development of large burials begins with stone-mounded tombs, followed by one unique tomb with monolithic stones shaped like a stepped pyramid, to tombs made of stone slabrooms covered with earthen mounds. These last are the famed painted tombs, providing a wealth of information about the lives of the elite. Several murals depict a couple, presumably the tomb occupants, sitting side by side on a raised and covered platform.

ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS 647

In one such painting, servants prepare a feast, and wrestlers and dancers perform. A scene of hunting tigers and deer from horseback using the ‘Parthian shot’, twisted in the saddle to shoot with a long bow, is well known. An inscribed stele found in the vicinity of Ji’an boasts of the exploits of King Kwanggaeto. The stele details the conquest of many towns in the fourth and fifth centuries. Kwanggaeto extended his realm far into the Dongbei, including sites in the current Liaoning and Jilin provinces. It is thought that the stone pyramid tomb, noted above, was his funerary monument. Buddhism and literacy were well established within the reign of King Kwanggaeto. Later Koguryo kings drove the Han dynastic overlords from the Korean peninsula, and moved the capital to present-day Pyongyang. Painted tombs are found in large cemeteries, with Chinese influence visible in the style of the tombs, as well as in the use of the four seasonal animals (blue dragon, red bird, white tiger, and black tortoise). Both Buddhist and shamanic images are found painted on the walls of tombs (Figure 5). Korean histories relate that Paekche was founded by two brothers who were younger sons of a Koguryo king. The archaeology near Seoul seems to reflect this tale, as stone mounded graves in pyramidal style have

Figure 5 Tomb painting – ox cart, armored horse, and noble ladies.

been excavated along the Han River. Unsuccessful battles with Koguryo forced Paekche farther and farther south, while Koguryo occupied the Han River from the current location of Seoul to its mouth at Inchon. The kingdom of Paekche is known archaeologically from early fortresses at Inchon on the Yellow Sea coast and along the Han River in central Korea, and from later tombs and Buddhist monuments farther south, at Kongju and Puyo. Near the final Paekche capital at present-day Kongju, an enormous Buddhist temple is under excavation, as well as part of a large palace and its extensive grounds. Several pagodas still stand, as well as miruks, which are life-sized human stone figures with a flat hat made from a separate stone. Although the name indicates they represent the matreiya, the Buddha of the future, they are unlike other Buddhist sculpture and probably antedate the adoption of Buddhism in the region. A group of earth-mounded royal tombs occupies an area outside Kyongju. Inside they resemble small late Koguryo tombs, sometimes with faded painting on the stone-slab walls. They were all looted in antiquity, but a brick tomb was concealed underneath, and was entirely intact when it was discovered in 1971. This was the tomb of King Munyong and his wife, complete with inscriptions giving their names and the years of their deaths. Each wore a gold headdress of cut-out floral design, and gilt-bronze burial shoes. It is interesting that although Buddhism was flourishing at the time in Paekche, the burial has little Buddhist iconography. However, the tomb was constructed of bricks impressed with lotus designs, with a barrel vault ceiling and flame-shaped wall niches, reflecting Chinese styles. The Silla kingdom developed around the city of Kumsong (meaning Gold Fortress), which is presently known as Kyongju. The history/mythology of Silla describes six tribes in the valley joining forces for strength against ‘enemies nearby’. The main city arose within a plain surrounded on three sides by rivers, protected by a hillfort on the southern river and fortresses ringing the higher mountains on all sides. The archaeology of Silla can be divided into three periods. Remains of some hilltop fortresses may partly derive from the earliest era, and documents would include the hill fort known as Panwolsong, or Half Moon Fortress. During the early period the polity was known as Saro. It may not have been yet a monarchy, although the king lists, based on a lost history of Silla, contain names of kings and queens as well as their parents, continuously from 57 BCE to CE 9xx. The era of huge mounded tombs (fourth to sixth centuries) is well published, for the mounds were not easy to rob, and when first excavated in the 1930s

648 ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS

Figure 6 Gold crown from Silla.

they were found to contain rich grave goods. Most spectacular were the royal tombs, each of which included a gold crown, gold belt, and other gold jewelry such as necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and in some cases finger and toe rings (Figure 6). On the south mound of Tomb 98 in Kyongju, the gold weighed almost five kilograms. Horse trappings are prominent in these burials, especially bronze saddlebows with cut-out and gilded decoration. The crowns are tall, with uprights in the shape of antlers and stylized trees. Many scholars have related these shapes to shamanism, and indeed one of the early titles applied to the ruler is thought to mean shaman. The crowns are covered with dangling birch-leaf-shaped gold pieces and jade and glass gogok attached with twisted gold wire. Burial goods include artifacts made of birch bark, having painted designs including white horses and the red bird of the south. Exotic goods, such as Mediterranean glass containers, Central Asian silver bowls and an inlaid dagger also came to Silla from afar. Trade must have been conducted both over sea routes from the south and across the silk road through Central Asia. Although Silla is mentioned in Chinese writings of the time, Chinese artifacts are rare, consisting of only one small glazed bottle. As the kingdom farthest removed from China within the Korean peninsula, Silla resisted Chinese influence longest. This is particularly evident in the burial style, for both Koguryo- and Paekche-built Chinese

style tombs with entry passages intended to be reentered for postmortem ceremonies, which made them inviting to loot, while Silla tombs were impossible to re-enter, covered having several meters of boulders topped by more meters of earth. Silla society was divided into endogamous groups called bone ranks, and sumptuary rules applied to each group, with restrictions specified for men and women separately. Only members of the Holy Bone were eligible to rule, but women could be selected as rulers as well as men. The largest and most spectacular of the mounded burials belonged to a queen. The True Bone were high nobles, with three other ranks of lesser nobles below them. Interestingly, the common people, both men and women, were allowed to own and ride horses, but they were restricted in the amount and kind of saddles and horse trappings they could display. Buddhism was accepted in Silla by the fifth century, and burials became less lavish, as cremation became more commonplace. Mounded tombs were often surrounded by the 12 zodiacal year-signs of China, and some even had spirit paths leading up to them, guarded by life-sized stone animals and warriors. As in Paekche, enormous Buddhist temples were endowed, and the hills around Kyongju became filled with Buddhist carvings on stone boulders, which are still objects of pilgrimage. Kaya is the name given to a group of city-states that never coalesced into a larger polity, and they were gradually conquered by Silla. They are often seen as allied with Paekche because of the written history, but in terms of artifacts such as pottery and weaponry they are closer to Silla. Six Kaya polities were distributed along the Naktong River valley and along the southern coast. The Kaya region was extremely rich in iron. Almost all cemeteries contain iron armor and iron weapons, and the richest burials have iron ingots laid out for a floor. It is likely that the large iron ingots were an important export. One Kaya tombs is reminiscent of multiple interment tombs in Liaoning, with a central burial and others radiating around it, separated by stonewalls. One burial hill has overlapping double mounds, in which one person’s head points north and the other northeast, suggesting that the husband and wife came from groups with different burial orientations. The stonewares from Kaya are closely related to those of Silla. Kaya stoneware vessels in the shape of everyday objects allow unusual insights into the material culture. They include houses, carts, sandals, boats, and drinking horns. Three of them depict men on horseback, showing their complete clothing and the rigging of the horses, including stirrups. Of two found together, one is thought to be the noble, and the

ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS 649

other the servant, due to differences in clothing. The third one is a soldier and horse both in armor. After Silla conquered the Kaya states and other unaffiliated towns in the southeast, inscribed boundary stones that are still extant were set up on the mountain ridge dividing Silla from Paekche, in the region of the Han River, and far to the north on the east coast. Silla was able to conquer first Paekche and then Koguryo with the aid of the Tang Dynasty. In CE 668, all but the northernmost part of the peninsula was ruled by United Silla, with its capital still at Kyongju.

Yayoi and Kofun Periods in Japan In the meantime, in the Japanese islands, other complex polities developed, reflecting local changes as well as contact from the peninsula, Lelang, and mainland. After the long period known as the Jomon, which was characterized by cord-marked pottery, new plainer pottery ushered in a period known as Yayoi, although more important in the distinction between Jomon and Yayoi is the intensive growing of rice. A series of AMS dates, as well as tree rings, confirm that Yayoi is much earlier than was once thought. Yayoi appeared first in Kyushu, the major island nearest to the Korean peninsula, as early as 900 BC, and spread eastward and northward. The earliest Yayoi pottery is related in both shapes and manufacturing technology to Mumun in Korea, but it is not identical. Whether this represents migration of peoples from the Korean peninsula or diffusion of ideas, or some combination, is the subject of debate. The consensus among archaeologists who work in Japan is that some migration from the peninsula occurred, but the previous Jomon inhabitants also contributed to the continuing population. The new dating of the elaborate Final Jomon of Kamegoaka in northern Honshu and the Initial Yayoi in Kyushu are contemporaneous. While rice is a hallmark of Yayoi, some rice is found in Jomon sites as early as Early Jomon: it does not appear that Jomon sites practiced agriculture as their subsistence base. On the other hand, large rice paddies, with remains of wooden clogs, hoes, and spades, have been excavated in the Yayoi period. Domesticated pigs were raised, and one site even contains evidence of chickens. Bronze technology and bronze weapons derived from those of the Korean peninsula are characteristic of the Yayoi period. Although both iron and bronze were imported, they were used as prestige goods and for dedication to the gods. Bronze swords, mirrors, and bells were developed from Korean prototypes, although models developed in the islands diverged dramatically from those of the peninsula. Large daggers and swords appear to be ceremonial, since they

are too unwieldy to have been used in battle. Bellshaped objects called dotaku must have had ceremonial functions as well, as they are found in caves and other isolated places, as if they were ritual deposits (Figure 7). Mirrors were also important, both the fine-lined geometric type developed in the peninsula and Chinese-style mirrors. Sword, mirror, and curved jewel became symbols of the emperor. The presence of megalithic burials in Japan suggests another cultural connection with Korea. Southern style dolmens (large capstones lying on the ground) are found in Kyushu, as are jar burials, sometimes under dolmens. Polished stone knives are found in such burials, as well as tubular beads with a single curved bead. The 25 ha site of Yoshinogari on Kyushu is surrounded by a ditch, and the periphery is guarded by watchtowers standing on gigantic posts. A fortified inner area contained a burial mound in the center. A burial in two large jars joined at the mouths was furnished with tubular blue beads and a bronze sword. Han dynasty chronicles describe a queen in Kyushu named Himiko, who lived in a defended compound. The Yoshinogari site is too early to have been the domain of Himiko, but she is described as living in just such a place. However, queens ruling alone and as co-rulers were known in the subsequent Kofun period, the time of mounded tombs.

Figure 7 Dotaku – bronze bell from Yayoi period.

650 ASIA, NORTHEAST, EARLY STATES AND CIVILIZATIONS

Figure 8 Haniwa of shaman from Kofun period.

The Kofun, or Old Tumulus period, is characterized by large and elaborate tombs. The most spectacular and largest are shaped like old-fashioned keyholes, with a high circular mound and a foursided lower platform. Often the entire construction is surrounded by a moat. The tumuli vary in size, with the largest being 486 m long. Hollow terracotta figures encircled the grave mounds on the outside. These haniwa depict warriors, shamans, farmers and other livelihoods, as well as houses, boats, horses, and even a quiver full of arrows. Some indicate tattooed faces, and many depict ear-spools and bead necklaces. The houses resemble Shinto shrines, which are rebuilt every twenty years but retain the ancient architecture (Figure 8). Groups of kofun are found in several places, and are interpreted as rival centers of power, with evidence of highly stratified societies. They include northern Kyushu, Izumo on the southwestern coast of Honshu, Kibi in the southern part of Honshu, the main island of Japan, on the north side of the Inland Sea, and Yamato east of the Inland Sea. The very large tombs that define the Kofun period demonstrate the existence of leaders who commanded an enormous amount of labor, and documents show that a division of labor by family and village was firmly in place. The appearance of horses, horse-trappings, and armor has led to a theory that ‘horse riders’ suddenly

appeared from ‘the continent’ to form a new warrior culture in the Late Kofun period. Horses were not native to Japan, but they are not the most significant element in the changes in the Late Kofun. However, it is clear from many lines of evidence that a close relationship existed between parts of the peninsula and the islands, and that elite as well as artisans from Korea’s Three Kingdoms were involved in the establishment of the state in Japan. Artifacts from the Kofun period are very similar to those of Korea. In the Fujinoki tomb, the use of gold is lavish. It was used for crowns, sword hilts, burial shoes, and saddlebows, in much the same style as those found in the Silla Kingdom. The tomb of Takamatsuzuka near Nara contained wall murals with women dressed like some of those in Koguryo tombs, suggesting that styles for elite women were widespread. In spite of these correspondences, the strongest impact on the Kofun period came from the Paekche kingdom. The early Buddhist art and architecture of Nara is acknowledged to be made by artisans from Paekche. This relationship between the peninsula and the islands intensified with the introduction of Buddhism from Paekche. Koguryo in the fourth century was the first of the Korean Three Kingdoms to accept Buddhism, but it was followed within the century by Paekche. Although Paekche was destroyed in 668 by the combined forces of Silla and Tang China, much of Paekche art can still be seen in the early Buddhist sites around Nara. Capital cities were laid out in a grid pattern like that of Chang’an, the Tang capital. The growing states of East Asia became more similar to each other as China became the model for government and culture. However, they were never identical. Each polity developed and maintained individual styles of material style and governance, while participating in trade and interaction throughout northeast Asia. See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, East: China,

Neolithic Cultures; Japanese Archipelago, Prehistoric Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers; Asia, South: Buddhist Archaeology; Plant Domestication; Political Complexity, Rise of.

Further Reading Aikens CM and Rhee SN (eds.) (1992) Pacific Northeast Asia in Prehsitory; Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers, Farmers, and Sociopolitical Elites. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press. Barnes GL (1999) The Rise of Civilization in East Asia: Archaeology of China, Korea and Japan. London: Thames and Hudson. Barnes GL (2001) State Formation in Korea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Hudson M (1999) Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

ASIA, SOUTH/Baluchistan and the Borderlands 651 Imamura K (1996) Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives on Insular East Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Nelson SM (1993) The Archaeology of Korea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson SM (1995) The Archaeology of Northeast China: Beyond the Great Wall. London: Routledge. Nelson SM (2003) Korean Social Archaeology. Seoul: Jipmoon Press.

Shelach G (1999) Leadership Strategies, Economic Activity, and Interregional Interaction, Social Complexity in Northeast China. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Takamiya H (2002) Introductory routes of rice to Japan: An examination of the southern route hypothesis. Asian Perspectives 4092: 209–226.

ASIA, SOUTH Contents Baluchistan and the Borderlands Buddhist Archaeology Ganges Valley India, Deccan and Central Plateau India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South Indus Civilization Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier Megaliths Neolithic Cultures Paleolithic Cultures Sri Lanka

Baluchistan and the Borderlands Ute Franke, DAI, Berlin, Germany ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Baluchistan An arid region located in the Iranian Plateau in Southwest Asia and South Asia, between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Indus Civilization The Indus Valley Civilization (c. 2600–1900) was an ancient riverine civilization that flourished in the Indus and Ghaggar–Hakra river valleys in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. urbanization The increase over time in the population of cities in relation to the region’s rural population.

Introduction Baluchistan is a huge landmass that extends from western Pakistan into southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan and separates the open alluvial plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Iranian Plateau (Figure 1). It is the largest part of the Indo-Iranian borderlands which also include parts of the NorthWest Frontier Province, Kandahar, and Hilmand Provinces in Afghanistan, and Sistan/Baluchistan in Iran.

These regions formed, at times, a cultural landscape linked through traits such as architecture and artifact styles, interpreted as evidence for exchange, shared technologies, values, and ideas. In Baluchistan, human development from the seventh millennium BC onwards, from mobile food hunters and gatherers to sedentary communities based on farming and animal husbandry, has been uncovered. Increasing levels of complexity in economy and technology, social and political organization, accompanied by a population growth and settlement expansion, fostered the development of villages, towns, and cities and provided the basis for urbanization and state formation. Throughout, this tradition maintained a distinctive character, notwithstanding regional differences and changing patterns of interaction. The purpose of this paper is to outline this development, with a focus on Baluchistan. In order to understand the preconditions and to assess its role, we will first discuss the natural conditions that govern human life and then look at the cultural communities that formed the conceptual landscape.

Natural Environment Baluchistan can be divided into three main landforms plus a small coastal belt: (1) inland basins, (2) deserts, and (3) mountains rising to 3500 m in the north. Dissected by narrow river valleys, the mountains

652 ASIA, SOUTH/Baluchistan and the Borderlands

Bamyan

KABUL Mardan

Herat

Peshawar ISLAMABAD

Birjand

Mundigak

Yazd

Kandahar

Shahdad

Kerman

Multan

Quetta

Shahr-i Sokhta

Nausharo Bam

Zahedan

Mehrgarh Surab

Tepe Yahya

Jiroft Sohr Damb/Nal Mohenjo Daro

Bampur

Khasab Shimal Ras al-Khaimah Lima Umm al-Quwain Ajman Sharjah Masafi Dubai Fujairah Mleiha Sohar Hill

Jodhpur Turbat Shahi T., Miri Q. Hyderabad Gwadar

Pasni

Karachi

Figure 1 Map of the region with sites. Ute Franke. Map: H. David. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

run in parallel north–south folds along the western fringe of the Indus plain and turn west near the sea, making access to the Indus plain and the shore difficult. The northerly movement of the Indo-Pakistani Plate and its collision with the Eurasian Plate shifted the coastline southward for up to 25 km during the Holocene and lifted the whole shore. These geographical barriers direct communications and the hydraulic system. In the east, large perennial rivers, such as the Hab, Porali, and Hingol/Nal, drain the mountain flow-off into the sea, while the western river systems often discharge into deserts and salt pans. The mountains comprise several ecological zones that vary greatly in terms of climate and availability of soil and water. Climate is, in general, arid with a precipitation of c. 100 mm yr
1 in the south and 400 mm in the north. Agriculture depends on irrigation and the availability of soils but less than 4% of Baluchistan is arable. The mountains are barren and valley floors built with gravel. Only in wider valleys did a fertile alluvium composed of silt and sand accumulate. In dealing with diversified ecological conditions, flexible subsistence strategies were developed: while cultivars and domesticated animals remained much the same throughout, their stake and supplementary dietary measures varied. The need for irrigation has prompted channel building at an early stage, but the most remarkable human response to environmental conditions are the sophisticated dam systems (gabarbands) of southeastern Baluchistan. A prehistoric

population density that exceeds present figures attests the success of these adaptations. Baluchistan is rich in mineral resources (copper, lead, zinc, barite), stones (gray chert, lime- and sandstone, alabaster, marble), and semiprecious stones (agate, vesuvianite-grossular, lapislazuli).

History of Research After an intensive post-war period of research in Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and elsewhere, work in Pakistan focused on the Indus plains (Sindh, Punjab) and its fringes (Gomal, Bannu). Virtually all archaeological information on interior Baluchistan was collected between 1880 and 1965. Surveys conducted by A. Stein, B. de Cardi, W. A. Fairservice, R. Mughal, and others produced regional data sets that to date form the basis for settlement analyses, while soundings at Kile Ghul Mohammad (hereafter: KGM), Quetta, and Anjira provided a typological and comparative framework. R. Mughal’s restudy of this material supported the concept that an Early Harappan horizon existed in the Greater Indus Valley, thereby implying the autochthonous development of the Indus Civilization, notwithstanding interaction. Research carried out in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and southeastern Iran, particularly excavations at Mundigak (J.-M. Casal), Bampur (B. de Cardi),

ASIA, SOUTH/Baluchistan and the Borderlands 653

Tepe Yahya (C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky), Shahr-e Sokhta (M. Tosi), and Shahdad (A. Hakemi), widened cultural horizons and introduced new research perspectives. By 1970, the Indo-Iranian Borderlands had emerged as a region with distinctive cultural patterns and new models on human development and interaction were developed. Foreign fieldwork ended in 1978–79, but Iranian teams continued excavations and both Afghanistan and Iran have reopened their borders recently. In Pakistan, the French Mission working in the Kacchi Plain at the foot of Bolan Pass proved the hypotheses of an indigenous cultural development in Pakistan and particularly in Baluchistan to be truer than anticipated. At Mehrgarh, Nausharo, Sibri, and Pirak, a sequence from the aceramic Neolithic Period through the first millennium BC excavated under the direction of J.-F. Jarrige, produced new sets of information that carried cultural complexes beyond mere pottery styles and facilitated the development of a wider chronological scheme (Figure 2). In southern

Baluchistan, work was more limited and only now is the region gaining its proper place in history, mainly through the French Mission working in Makran since 1985 (R. Besenval, Miri Qalat, Shahi Tump, Dasht plain) and the German Mission to central (Sohr Damb/Nal) and southeastern Baluchistan, established in 1996–97. This research is now gradually facilitating the building of models of past life on a more solid footing, but it also reveals the limits of such an endeavor: too many areas remain unexplored, too much information is inadequately published, and too many questions cannot be answered by the old data. However, no matter how much further information is needed, Baluchistan is crucial for understanding cultural development within the Indo-Iranian Borderlands until the abandonment of settled life in the second millennium BC and for assessing its role in the wider interaction spheres: was it a border, frontier, or an intermediary?

The Cultural Landscape through Time

Figure 2 Mehrgarh: Bolan section with Neolithic levels (with J.-F. Jarrige, M. Tosi and M. Vidale). Photo: Ute Franke 1983. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Considering the geographical barriers described, the question arises as to whether they went along with cultural isolation. At a first glance, the number of archaeological assemblages, mostly pottery, supports this idea. The wide distribution of certain styles, however, points to a different direction. Its implications are difficult to assess since unlike ‘imported’ exotic commodities and materials, such as sea shells, semiprecious stones, and metals which were exchanged, looted, or paid as tribute, and even unlike the copying of new technologies, the adaptation of pottery designs, figurines, or other artifact styles inherits a semantic dimension which is difficult to assess (see Pottery Analysis: Stylistic). With regard to the amount and nature of archaeological data, we have to define descriptive units. The Balochistan Tradition is the overarching geographically and temporally continuous heuristic system composed of multilinear archaeological entities which are linked in space and time. ‘Eras’ are developmental stages, such as food-producing and regionalization. A ‘phase’ combines a number of cultural complexes within a broadly defined region and time trajectory. ‘Cultural complexes’ or ‘horizons’ are recurrent configurations of features within archaeological assemblages, at present mostly pottery styles. Per definitionem they reflect human abilities, requirements, stylistic, and technological choices and preferences, but are not a priori considered to represent particular social or even ethnic groups. Their

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distribution patterns form the cultural landscape and outline ‘mental’, or conceptual, maps. Recent research has shown that these styles and horizons are still badly defined and dated which makes the reconstruction of these processes through time and the assessment of interaction and its impact on development difficult. Accordingly, we refrain from merging styles and horizons into larger units that have little analytical value, but rather discuss the smaller entities, paying tribute to regional stylistic diversity notwithstanding shared features. Early Food Producing Era: First Settlements (Mehrgarh I, II, KGM I, II, Anjira I, II, Miri I?)

After around 7000 BC in northern Baluchistan, mobile hunters and gatherers had gradually settled down. The adaptation of einkorn, emmer, wheat, and barley as staple crops, and a successful animal husbandry (cattle, goat, sheep), facilitated the development and growth of villages (see Animal Domestication; Plant Domestication). Mehrgarh is the type site for understanding the formation of a tradition that was to last for nearly seven millenniums (Figure 2). Sevenmeter high deposits and nine building levels for the Neolithic Periods reveal alternating shifts of the habitation and cemeteries over a long time. Altogether, 77 well-planned houses with two, four, and later six rooms and separate communal storage facilities were excavated (Figures 3 and 4). 320 burial chambers contained ochre-covered bodies of all sexes and age classes (Figure 5). On 11 out of 225 examined bodies, signs of ancient dentistry were found. Elaborate shell, stone, and copper ornaments, lithic objects, sometimes bitumen baskets, human figurines, and goat sacrifices accompanied the dead. While in Period I, heat-treated steatite, turquoise and lapis lazuli beads, and shell bangles probably arrived as finished objects, several workshops and wasters indicate an intensive local production during Period II, marking the beginning of technologies that remained characteristic throughout time. Pottery appears for the first time in Period II, along with stone vessels, but it is in Period III that these technologies were greatly advanced. Incipient farming and animal husbandry, and the first introduction of pottery were also noted at KGM near Quetta and, albeit at a later stage, further south at Anjira. The oldest settlements in southeastern Baluchistan date to the later fifth millennium. While in northern Baluchistan an interaction network developed, the picture in Makran is different. The lowermost aceramic levels at Shahi Tump I and a few other sites are, if at all, related to the Iranian Plateau. The faunal material indicates a change in

subsistence strategies after Period I, and further research will show whether this site belongs to the Early Food Producing Era. Incipient Regionalization: The Expansion of Settlements. The Kile Ghul-Mohammad/Togau Horizon (Mehrgarh III, KGM III, Anjira II, Sohr Damb I?, South Eastern Baluchistan I, Makran: Miri I?, II, Mundigak I–II)

The time of Mehrgarh III (late fifth and early fourth millennium) was marked by a considerable rise in the number of settlements in northern Baluchistan. Many were new foundations, indicating a population growth that reflected the success of subsistence economies. Settlements now also appeared in central and southeastern Baluchistan (Adam Buthi, Niai Buthi). Some sites are small (<1 ha), others, including Sheri Khan Tarakai in the Bannu Basin, are 16–21 ha large. At Mehrgarh, Period III pottery (Figure 6) was scattered over about 100 ha, but the area was probably not inhabited at the same time. This development was accompanied by a marked increase in the manufacture and varieties of goods produced. The raw materials processed in a bead workshop in Mehrgarh III include resources that are not locally available, such as turquoise, lapis lazuli, agates, jasper, marine shells, and copper. Despite an increased production, the number of grave goods decreases further, particularly in male burials, a shift that, along with the absence of ochre treatments and partial or secondary burials, reflects a change in the conception of death and afterlife. The introduction of the potter’s wheel and high temperature updraft kilns predate the first appearance in Central Asia by almost 1000 years. Large quantities of a very well-fired, thin-walled, red-slipped and black-painted pottery were now produced. These KGM, Togau, and related types are truly amazing in terms of technology. Their distribution extends from northern and central to southeastern Baluchistan, the Bannu Basin, Mehrgarh, Mundigak I, and Amri in southern Sindh. One motif of the Togau painting style as defined by B. de Cardi characterizes stylistic development from c. 4000 BC to the mid-third millennium: a row of stylized caprids (Togau A), subsequently reduced to the forepart (Togau B), a hook (Togau C, D) and, in southeastern Baluchistan, to a mere stroke (Togau E). Recent excavations at Sohr Damb/Nal have shown, however, that its use as a chronological marker is problematical. The tombs of Period I at Sohr Damb contain remains of multiple fragmentary burials, accompanied by pottery vessels, carnelian, agate, lapis lazuli,

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Figure 3 Mehrgarh, Plan of MR3 Periods I-IIB. Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige. ã 2007 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Figure 4 Mehrgarh, view of houses (MR3, levels 4–9). Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

Figure 5 Mehrgarh IB: burial , with basket. Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

Figure 6 Mehrgarh: bowl from Period III. Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

and steatite beads, shells with red pigment, grinding stones, and stone weights (Figure 7). Togau D bowls are standard inventory, but they are associated with Togau A–C and even Togau E bowls, KGM, and Kechi Beg (hereafter: KB) vessels (Figures 8 and 9), styles previously considered to represent development through time. The use of white pigment provides a link to the Bannu Basin and Punjab, but the chronological frame for this ware is not well established. C14 dates are not yet available, but parallels with Mehrgarh III–IV and Miri II–IIIa point to a date from c. 3800 to 3300 BC. The dancers on the small bowl from Sohr Damb (Figure 10) have a close parallel at Mehrgarh III, but also resemble the Sialk III painting style from the Iranian Plateau (late fifth/early fourth millennium BC).

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Figure 7 Sohr Damb/Nal: tomb 739/740, Period I. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 8 Sohr Damb/Nal: pottery from tomb 711, Period I. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In Makran, the settlement and cemeteries of Miri Period II date to the first half of the fourth millennium BC (Figure 11). The bodies were treated with ochre, buried on a mat or wrapped in cloths. Grave goods include stone and a remarkable variety of metal objects, for example, axes, spearheads, mirrors, and tools, some of them made of pure copper. The use of almandine garnet for bead making indicates advanced craftsmanship since it is a very hard material to work and elsewhere attested only at Mehrgarh III. Likewise exceptional are objects made from sea shells and fish bones (Figure 12). The graves have

no pottery, but the assemblage from the habitation is still rather isolated from the rest of Baluchistan. Terracotta bulls with and without humps match the faunal record that shows a predominance of cattle and caprines. This occupation is compared to chalcolithic Iran, Susa I, Tall-I Bakun, Sialk II, Tappe Hissar IA-C, and Susa I, while links to Tappe Yahya V are few. The wide distribution of objects, goods, and technologies witnesses the movement of people through a large area. Whether styles traveled with or without their semantic value is open to question.

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Figure 9 Sohr Damb/Nal: KB beakers from tomb 740, Period I. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 10 Sohr Damb/Nal: Bowl with ‘dancers’, Tr. IIIb, l. 749, Period I. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Notwithstanding expanding interaction, differences in style, economy and, for example, burial customs imply persistent local patterns. Widening Horizons in a Patterned Landscape (Mehrgarh IV–VI, KGM IV/Damb Sadaat I–II, Anjira II–III, Sohr Damb I–II, South Eastern Baluchistan II, Makran Miri IIIa, Shahr-e Sokhta I, Tappe Yahya IVC, Mundigak II–III)

The subsequent period corresponds to Mehrgarh IV–VI, dated to c. 3500 – 2900/2800 BC. At the beginning of this time, the habitation was moved for the last time. A significant change was the abandonment of communal in favor of individual storages

within now larger houses. Irrigation channels facilitated an intensified cultivation of wheat and other plants needed to feed a growing population. The shift from cattle to sheep and goat keeping possibly indicates the integration of larger grazing areas and wider seasonal movements of people. At Sohr Damb/Nal, Period II is marked by many changes. The typical Period I pottery is replaced by the buff Nal ware, although highly fired, blackslipped KB white-on-dark slip bowls, which form c. 15% of the inventory, reveal that firing technology survived a hiatus evident in stratigraphy, architecture, and burial customs. These vessels carry the earliest graphemes known in this region, one or two engraved or painted in white signs. The houses are small, but

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Figure 11 Shahi Tump Tr. IV, period II architecture. Courtesy, French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

Figure 12 Shahi Tump, period II, mother-of-pearl fish. Courtesy, French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

well equipped with kitchen utensils and installations for food preparation. Among these tools, simple bull clay figurines and personal ornaments are most frequent. The tombs contain just one skeleton in a flexed position, and the grave goods comprise of only a few pottery vessels and personal ornaments. The same

tendency toward lower-status objects in tombs was observed at Mehrgarh III. The only later cemetery found at that site was devoted to infants and had almost no grave goods. In Makran, the Shahi Tump Period IIIa, dated to 3500–3000 BC, yielded a rich funerary culture with pottery, shell containers with ochre, stone vessels, beads, and copper seals, associated here, as elsewhere, predominantly with female bodies, and a 15 kg copper weight inlaid with shell and carnelian, similar in shape to stone weights from Sohr Damb/Nal Period I (Figure 13). The appearance of Togau and Bichrome sherds and the use of white pigment reflects links with the rest of Baluchistan. Still, comparisons with sites in Iran (Susa IIIa, Sialk IV.2, Tall-e Iblis IV–VI) are stronger. Shell bangles with a ridged decoration have almost identical counterparts in a late fourth/early third millennium tomb at Sarazm in Tadjikistan. Forty thousand heat-treated steatite beads made with a technology known in Baluchistan since early Mehrgarh were also found in that tomb, showing that interaction started earlier and was much more extensive than previously thought. At the same time, the discovery of beveled-rim bowls from layers just above manifests the presence of features that hallmark the proto-Elamite horizon in Iran (see below). The expansion of settlements, their further growth in number and size, the emergence of monumental architecture, perimeter walls, platforms, seals, and first graphemes, advanced technical diversity and craft specialization indicates an increasing economic, cultural, and social complexity. A similar development is witnessed in the eastern lowlands, where the spread of certain pottery types and other features – first the Hakra and Ravi wares in Punjab and, from c. 3000 BC onward, of the Kot Diji horizon – indicates an increased mobility between the highlands and the plains. Another hallmark of this time is the appearance of a large variety of pottery styles, such as KB, Togau C/D, Quetta, Nal, and gray wares. They link Baluchistan (Kacchi Plain, Quetta, Zhob, Loralai, Pishin, central and southern Baluchistan) with the Bannu Basin, Sindh, and beyond. Yet, the lack of stratified assemblages that are large enough to account for functional variation, hampers patterning their temporal and spatial distribution, a preposition to the formulation of generic relationships. The ‘Kechi Beg horizon’ comprises a number of pottery styles discovered by Fairservis and de Cardi between Quetta and Kalat, and subsequently at Mehrgarh. Three of the nine wares are considered to be horizon markers. KB black-on-buff slip (MR V) shares many motifs with KB bichrome that has a very

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Figure 13 Shahi Tump, period IIIa: burial with copper weight. Courtesy, French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

delicate black design and a red band or infill painted on buff (Figure 9) , while the additional use of white is only attested at Mehrgarh (Figure 14). At Mehrgarh (IV, V) and KGM (IV) it occurs stratigraphically later than KGM and Togau A–C pottery, but these types overlap at Surab (Surab II.i ¼ Anjira III). Despite differences in fabric, the fine brush painting and patterns such as hatched lozenges and ‘ladders’ link this pottery with Amri Period I in Sindh. The typological and chronological range of this type is not defined well enough to understand its genesis and spread, not to speak of regional variants and their development through time. At Sohr Damb, it co-occurs with KGM-pottery in Period I, but is absent in Period II, although KB white-on-dark slip vessels are common, indicating that not all KB types are contemporary. Although, as discussed above, the Togau C/D ‘bowls’ with the stylized hook pattern appear already in Sohr Damb Period I, they are nevertheless a significant marker of the early third millennium sites. They were found at Mehrgarh V–VI, at most sites in central and southeastern Baluchistan (Anjira II–III, Balakot IA/B), in the piedmont area in eastern Sindh, at Amri I, and Miri Qalat IIIa. Most probably, this ware originated in the central highlands and spread from there to, for example, Kirthar Piedmont. There, it co-occurs with Nal and late Quetta pottery, but it was not found at the Quetta sites and Sohr Damb II. The ‘Quetta horizon’ as defined by Piggott and Fairservis is marked by a buff or red ware painted in black with a fine brush with complex geometric patterns based on black–white contrasts and arranged in friezes that cover large parts of the body (Figures 15–17). This ‘geometric’ pottery occurs at Damb Sadaat in Periods II and III, together with

Figure 14 Mehrgarh, period V, polychrome beakers. Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

figurative and floral motifs, simple linear designs, and unpainted vessels. It is the hallmark of a horizon that extended as far as Gumla II, Namazga III (handmade), Mundigak III, and Shahr-e Sokhta I. The use of red and yellow pigments noted at Namazga and Shahr-e Sokhta is unknown in Quetta, but provides a link to polychrome Nal pottery. Simple lines and the bracket motif are hallmarks of the later stages (late Quetta, late Damb Sadaat III ¼ Sadaat). Although the criteria for a proposed stylistic development from Damb Sadaat I–III are far from clear and the excavations at that site were small, in Mehrgarh typical Quetta ware appears in Period VI and late Quetta pottery in Period VII/Nausharo IA–C,

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Figure 15 Mehrgarh, period VII, Quetta ware. Courtesy French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

Figure 16 Mehrgarh, period VII, Quetta ware. Courtesy, French Mission to Mehrgarh, C. Jarrige.

a distribution that supports this scheme. At Sohr Damb II, few typical ‘Quetta’ sherds were found, but Sadaat types are common in Period III (Figure 18, lower left). The bracket motif is particularly common in southeastern Baluchistan, where it overlaps with Early Harappan wares. A date into the later third millennium can thus be ruled out. Since its discovery just after 1900, ‘Nal pottery’ has been divided into an earlier polychrome ware, marked by the application of yellow and turquoise after firing in addition to black and red, and a later monochrome series. Both share complex geometric patterns characterized by multiple contour lines, geometric designs with stepped borders, arranged in friezes and metopes, but the designs are more elaborate on the polychrome vessels (Figure 19). Realistic or abstract figurative motifs such as felines, bulls, birds, and hybrid creatures, and floral ornaments are also common (Figure 20). Despite the occurrence of repetitive designs, their composition and execution reveals many individual traits, and hardly two pieces are identical in detail, betraying artistic freedom and craft specialization of the potters, and probably a

highly symbolic meaning. Some of these motifs and structural principles can be seen on Quetta ware, but the polychromatic nature, the particular addition of structural elements into complex patterns, and the figurative motifs underline its originality. Recent excavations at Sohr Damb/Nal, where this pottery occurs exclusively in Period II, have finally placed it into a cultural and chronological context. As a result, the notion of the polychrome ware as older and of its use a funerary ware has to be abandoned: it was found in vast numbers in domestic contexts, along with monochrome pottery. It appears fully fledged in Period II, but stylistic evolution is apparent. The discovery of a late Nal assemblage in 2006, marked by the lack of turquoise, a more careless execution and the use of a wider brush, confirms this impression. The new motifs and design are closely linked to Mehrgarh VII, Balakot, and other sites of the late Early Harappan Period in southeastern Baluchistan. Nal pottery, or similar types, occur at Mehrgarh VI, Miri Qalat IIIa-b (Figure 21), Shahr-e Sokhta I–II (Figure 22), Tappe Yahya IVC1, and in the Kandahar region, where it was probably intrusive. Considering this wide distribution, its lack at the nearby Quetta sites, and vice versa, indicates the persistence of distinctive cultural zones. A similar pattern is reflected by painted gray wares. The Faiz Mohammad and the Emir Gray Ware share the distinctive technology of high temperature firing in a reduced atmosphere, but have distinctive shapes and motifs, and are rather localized with exclusive distribution patterns, notwithstanding overlaps. While the Emir Gray Ware predominates in the southwest, Shahr-e Sokhta I-III, Tappe Yahya VA–IVB5 (few), and Makran (Miri IIIb), the former was mainly found at Mehrgarh VI–VII and from Quetta to Surab, but rarely further south. At Sohr Damb, one vessel was found in a Period II tomb, carrying a pattern identical to that on a buff ware pot from Mehrgarh VII (Figures 16 and 17). The

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Figure 17 Sohr Damb/Nal, period II: gray ware beaker, tomb 768. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. Photo: A. Lange.

Figure 18 Sohr Damb/Nal, period III, pottery from Trench 9. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

co-occurrence of both gray ware types at Mundigak III–IV.1 revealed continued links of this site with both regions. These patterns reflect the presence of two larger cultural regions within Baluchistan, a southern one which has connections with northern Baluchistan, but is also still oriented toward Iran, and a northern one that extends from Khuzdar to the Kachi plain and has affinities with southern Afghanistan and the western fringes of the Indus plains. Before we discuss

the final centuries predating the rise of the Indus Civilization, we will have a look at southeastern Iran, where these horizons intermingled and urban centers developed.

Baluchistan and Its Neighbors: Shifting Relations The third millennium BC is a time of strong cultural dynamics, evident in archaeological record from

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Figure 19 Sohr Damb/Nal, period II: polychrome pottery from Trench II. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 20 Sohr Damb/Nal, period II: polychrome pottery from Trench II. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 21 Makran Miri IIIb: polychrome bowl. Courtesy, French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

Sistan, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, and Turkmenistan. In southeastern Iran, urbanity emerged around 3000 BC. In addition to borderland interactions, the appearance of proto-elamite features, such as inscribed tablets, seals, and sealings, as well as diagnostic pottery types (beveled-rim bowls, nose-lug jars, Djemdat Nasr pottery types) signals that political entities in Khuzestan and Fars extended their economic and political interest to the east, as far as Shahr-e Sokhta (I), Tappe Yahya (IVC2), and even Miri Qalat (late Period IIIa, beveled-rim bowls only). Whether the moving force behind this development was economic and/or political, it marks the beginning of a new, very dynamic era in human interaction at the very beginning of the third millennium BC. Shahr-e Sokhta, located in an inland basin in Iran– Sistan at a seasonal lake, is the central place in a settlement chamber that was occupied for more than 1000 years. It has 11 phases divided into four periods. Starting from a 10–15 ha site around 3000 BC (Period I.10–9, then destruction), it reached c. 115 ha during Periods II (Phases 8–5) and III (Phases 4–2) when it developed into an urban center with monumental architecture, nucleated residential areas, craftsmen’s quarters with alabaster, semiprecious stone and metal workshops, a 20 ha graveyard, and a hinterland with more than 75 sites. At Shahr-e Sokhta Period I, a strong affinity with Central Asia and Baluchistan is present alongside these western elements: 40% of the painted pottery at Shahr-e Sokhta carry geometric patterns that also characterize Namazga III, Mundigak III, and the Damb Sadaat II horizon in the Quetta Valley. Human figurines and compartmented seals confirm these links and indicate that this style was more integrated into the local repertoire than the western features. Nal pottery occurs in Periods I and II and is

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Figure 22 Chronological chart. Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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probably intrusive, but its patterns were copied to local shapes. Following a destruction, new pottery types and simple figurative motifs appear in Period II, especially the pear-shaped beaker that remains a diagnostic type throughout the sequence. Simple geometric patterns continue, but the complex Quetta pottery is not present any more. However, an increasing number of compartmented seals and certain pottery types (e.g., imported Faiz Mohammad Gray pottery (SiS III,5b-4)) reveals that links with Central Asia (Namazga IV) and Baluchistan continued. Many features of the pottery from Period III.5 to 2 and Rud-e Biyaban 2 are also well known from Mundigak IV.1–3, northern (Mehrgarh VIIA-C, Nausharo IA-D, Sohr Damb III) and southern Baluchistan (Miri IIIc), linking these sites just before the formation of the Indus Civilization. In Period IV.1, the site was already small and urbanity had come to an end. Pottery from the Burnt Building shows close links with Bampur V/VI, Miri IIIc, and across the Persian Gulf. The latter region actually owes its pottery tradition to Sistan, and Potts has recently suggested that both formed the ancient kingdom of Marhashi, a land referred to in Mesopotamian cuneiform documents after 2400 BC. Following another destruction and a gap before Phase 0, it was abandoned at c. 1800 BC. Tappe Yahya, a mound in the Soghun Valley close to the Bampur Valley and Makran, is a small, but important site. Period V dates to the fifth millennium BC, Periods IVC–A to c. 3000 – 1900 BC, following a gap of unknown length. In Period IVC2, the protoelamite horizon is present, but it lacks the strong Namazga III/Quetta affiliation of Shahr-e Sokhta I. It has rather become known for its production of intercultural-style chlorite vessels, a commodity in high demand in Early Dynastic II and III Mesopotamia, although – with a peak of production at the very end of Period IVB – the workshops were rather late. Period IVB is, in general, contemporary with the Indus Civilization and Shahr-e Sokhta III-IV. The relative isolation of Tappe Yahya has become even more apparent through the discovery of the Jiroft civilization. Following illegal excavations, recent research brought to light a large city, Konar Sandal, center to more than 200 settlements and cemeteries, which contained hundreds of elaborately carved and inlaid chlorite vessels with a figurative iconography amalgamates local, Central Asian, elamite, and Mesopotamian features. Along with seals and sealings, pottery and alabaster vessels, as well as metal artifacts, they represent a highly symbolic iconography, superb craft specialization, and wealth. Konar Sandal dates back to the earlier third millennium

BC, but the majority of objects belong to the second half of the millennium. Whether Jiroft is the ancient kingdom of Aratta, mentioned in the Sumerian cuneiform texts, or ancient Marhashi, the discovery of this civilization is certainly crucial for understanding political, cultural, and economic relations and developments. Two hundred kilometers further north a similarly profuse culture was discovered at Shahdad. Little is known about the earliest occupation with an extensive copper working area and bead workshops (late fourth and early third millennium BC), but objects from almost 400 tombs mirror a highly advanced complex society with a profuse art and iconography that reflect its integration into the horizon that during the second half of the third millennium BC linked Susa, Sistan (Yahya IVB, Shahr-e Sokhta IV, Jiroft, Bampur V–VI), southern Baluchistan (Miri IIIc–IV, Mehi), the Arabian Peninsula (e.g., Tell Abraq, Hili Tomb A), Central Asia (Namazga IV–V, Mundigak IV.2–3, BMAC), and northern Baluchistan (Quetta hoard, Sibri, Mehrgarh VIII). With the rise of the Indus Civilization after 2600 BC, a centralized state emerged in the Indus Valley that extended its sphere of interest to the resourcerich areas in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and Oman. The cuneiform documents reflect episodes of contact and conflict between Agade Meluhha, and the lands in between, but archaeological traces are rare, both in southeastern Iran and at the Indus, notwithstanding mutual links with southern Baluchistan (Miri Qalat IIIc–IV, Kulli). Considering the large-scale exposures at Shahr-e Sokhta, in Jiroft, Shahdad, and in the Indus Valley, this negative evidence cannot be adduced to the randomness of the archaeological record. It rather evokes the picture of directed encounters, at least as far as the Indus Civilization is concerned. While the comparative chronology of the horizon that links Shahr-e Sokhta (Phases 5–1), Miri Qalat IIIb–IV, Mundigak IV, Mehrgarh VIIB–C, Nausharo IB–D, and Sohr Damb III is relatively well established, the absolute chronological framework of this particular time, and thus that of the end of urbanization, is controversially discussed, with implications on questions such as which entities participated in these cross-cultural relations, what impact did that have on their development, and how long did these cities exist. If the end of the urban phase at Shahr-e Sokhta dates to the late third millennium BC, as suggested by the Italian mission, it overlapped with the Indus Civilization and the Akkadian empire. If dated to the mid-third millennium, as suggested by the French Missions, this horizon ended at the very beginning of the Indus Civilization, and thus before

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the rise and expansion of the Akkadian empire. The – rather few – radiocarbon dates from Shahr-e Sokhta are not very helpful, despite the recent reassessment. However, new evidence from Baluchistan, particularly Miri Qalat IIIc–IV and Sohr Damb III–IV, throws new light on this question, in favor of the later dating (Figures 23–26).

Figure 23 Miri Qalat IIIC: incised gray ware. Courtesy. French Mission to Makra, R. Besenval. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 25 Miri Qalat IV: black slipped Indus jar. Courtesy, French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

Figure 24 Miri Qalata IV: painted black-on-red Indus ware. Courtesy. French Mission to Makran, R. Besenval.

Figure 26 Sohr Damb/Nal, period III, necklace from Trench IX. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. Photo: A. Lange ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Figure 27 Sohr Damb/Nal, period III and IV (2nd from right, lower row), pottery from Trenches IV and IX. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. Photo: A. Lange. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Early Harappan Horizon: Prelude to Civilization (Mehrgarh VIIA-C, Nausharo I, Damb Sadaat III, Anjira IV–V, Sohr Damb III, southeastern Baluchistan, Makran Miri IIIb–c, Shahr-e Sokhta II–III, Tappe Yahya IVC-B?, Bampur I–IV, Mundigak IV.1–3)

Although some of the cultural horizons described above continued to exist to c. 2600/2500 BC, these centuries also witnessed the appearance of new styles, technologies, and an increasingly complex economic, social, and political organization, just before the rise of the Indus Civilization around 2600/2500 BC. This development is very clear in the Indus plains, especially in Punjab (see Asia, South: Indus Civilization). The gradual replacement of Balochi features at Harappa 2 (2800–2600) and the appearance of Kot Diji traits, the major Early Harappan lowland cultural complex, in Baluchistan and the borderlands seems to signal the expansion of this horizon. However, as already noted by Mughal, some ‘Kot Dijian’ features are known from Mehrgarh V and Siah Damb II.i, that is, from levels that predate the type site and Harappa 2. Therefore, these discriminatory cultural traits also need to be better defined and dated before the directions of ‘movements’, and their implications, can be assessed. At Mehrgarh VIIA–C and Anjirah IV, Nal and Faiz Muhammad Gray wares are still present, but not Togau D pottery. Sadaat ware, mainly represented by the bracket and simple linear designs, is now widely distributed. Mehrgarh was abandoned after Period VIIC, but occupation continued at the nearby site Nausharo to the Indus Period and beyond (Nausharo

Figure 28 Sohr Damb/Nal, period III, bowl from Trench 1. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I–IV). In Period IC, the gradual replacement of Balochi through Kot Dijian features was also noted, foreshadowing the integration of the site by the Indus Civilization in Period II, after a short transitional period (ID). A similar development was observed at Miri Qalat, where in Period IIIc new technological and stylistic features were introduced (Figure 24). Many of the new and old elements continued into Period IV, marked by the arrival of a Harappan occupation (Figures 25 and 26). Typical for the former horizon are flat basins, painted pipal and fish patterns, dishes with raised cordons and painted wavy lines, as well as incised, burnished, and painted gray wares (Figure 23). This horizon links Mundigak IV, late Quetta, Nausharo IC–D, Miri Qalat IIIb–c, Shahr-e Sokhta III.5–2, and now also Sohr Damb III.

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Figure 29 Sohr Damb/Nal, period III, cylindrical pot with caprides, Trench I. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. Photo: A. Lange. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

There, Period III marks the building of a new settlement at a time when the previous buildings were already in ruins and covered with sand or ashes. Sixmeter high deposits revealed four building phases. The architecture, artifact styles, and technology once more reflect many changes. Tombs have not yet been found, but the houses and rooms grew larger, walls were more solid, with a foundation of gravel and beams. In the largest building, the Burnt Building (AK6), hundreds of vessels and objects, such as grinding stones, pestles, tools for leather working and potting, unbaked and baked clay figurines, mostly of humped bulls, and beads were found (Figure 27). Miniature clay vessels, crucibles, and moulds as well as lead cores indicate metal working, but finished objects are rare. The Nal pottery is replaced by more simple and plain shapes and motifs. Pear-shaped storage jars with linear decoration, similar to Complex A pottery from Quetta, footed beakers, s-shaped vases and shallow bowls reveal a change in pottery technology: bodies are more thick, lower bodies often molded and bases string-cut (Figure 28). Designs include linear and simple geometric patterns, pipal leaves, bulls (Figure 29), and caprines, which have identical counterparts in Mundigak IV.1 (Figure 30). The few surviving Nal motifs, most prominently the omega, are present in a ‘degenerated’ form (Figure 31). Stylistic development is present, but a great deal of variability is related to spatial distribution and function. From Sohr Damb III, 59 radiocarbon dates that are relevant to the chronological problems discussed above are available now from well-stratified deposits. They show a clear cluster from c. 2700 to 2400 BC, leaving no doubt that the terminal phase of Period III falls to the very early rather than the later Indus Period (Figure 22). This date also leaves room for the subsequent Period IV, a very eroded occupation which belongs to the Kulli–Harappan horizon, the

Figure 30 Sohr Damb/Nal, Period III, stand from hoard, ‘degenerated’ Nal motif. DAI, Eurasien, Ute Franke. Photo: A. Lange. ã 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

hallmark of southern Baluchistan during the later third millennium BC. The Kulli Complex developed as a regional style around 2600 BC and was later marked by a strong Harappan ‘touch’, which reflects the westerly expansion of this civilization and its merger with local

ASIA, SOUTH/Baluchistan and the Borderlands 669

Figure 31 Table showing shared artifact styles during the second half of the third millennium BC. Ute Franke. ã 2008 Dr. Ute FrankeVogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

traditions after 2400 BC. This dating is supported by C14 dates which range from 2500 to 2300 BC. This evidence also corresponds well with the sequence and dates from Nausharo, where the transitional horizon ID is followed by an earlier (Period II) and a later Indus settlement (Period III). At Miri Qalat, the early date of the Indus occupation (Period IV), which shares many local features with Period IIIc, is mainly based on stylistic criteria. The assemblage from Miri Qalat IV reveals that local and Kulli features were absorbed and that a style is present during the second half of the third millennium was found not only at Bampur, Shahdad, Jiroft, Susa, northern Baluchistan, Bactria, and on the Arabian Peninsula, but also at Shahr-e Sokhta IV, then already a small site (Figure 22). In short, the review of the evidence indicates that the horizon attested to at Sohr Damb III, Nausharo IC–D, Miri IIIc, and Shahr-e Sokhta III dates to the time that ended just when or shortly after the Indus Civilization began to rise. After 1900 BC, the political constellations changed again. Magan lost its importance as supplier of copper to Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization disintegrated as a centralized state, and large regions in southeastern Iran, Baluchistan, and Sindh were abandoned for almost 1000 years for reasons as yet unknown.

Conclusion It has become evident that human development is manifested in Baluchistan from the seventh millennium onward. While this development was, in general, continuous, regional differences and changes in the material culture through time were present. The emerging picture does not reflect a ‘monocultural’ region, but a patterned landscape, marked by the appearance and disappearance of particular cultural styles. Looking at the cycles of growth, expansion, and abandonment, it becomes clear that in cultural terms, prehistoric Baluchistan was neither a border nor a frontier, but a dynamic interaction zone. Nevertheless, the communities that made the processes described above happen did not become integrated into a large scale, coherent entity, notwithstanding the fact that smaller regions, such as southeastern Baluchistan and Sindh Kohistan, were closely interrelated during the early third millennium BC. One likely reason why a large-scale merger did not happen probably is the rugged topography. The importance of terrain as determining factor becomes clear when we look at the region’s more recent history. As in Afghanistan, expanding conquerors and empires, be it Dareios or Alexander the Great, nomadic tribes

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from the north, or the British army, had their hold on Baluchistan because it was important as a trespass. But they never ruled it for long – and they left very few archaeological traces. Whenever possible, preference was given to the maritime route and waterways, or the open plains. Only then, it was considered a barrier and it never regained the economic and cultural prosperity of its prehistoric past when it was a center in its own right which participated in and contributed to regional development processes. See also: Animal Domestication; Asia, South: Buddhist Archaeology; India, Deccan and Central Plateau; India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South; Indus Civilization; Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier; Megaliths; Neolithic Cultures; Paleolithic Cultures; Sri Lanka; Asia, Southeast: Pre-agricultural Peoples; Pottery Analysis: Stylistic; Plant Domestication; Spatial Analysis Within Households and Sites.

Further Reading Besenval R (1997) Entre le Sud-Est iranien et la plaine de I’Indus: le Kech-Makran. Recherches arche´ologiques sur le peuplement ancien d’une marche des confins indo-iraniens. Arts Asiatiques 52: 5–36. Besenval R (2005) Chronology of Kech-Makran. In: Jarrige C (ed.) South Asian Archaeology 2001. Paris: ADPF E´ditions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Fairservis WA (1975) The Roots of Ancient India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Franke-Vogt U (2000) The Archaeology of Southeastern Balochistan. http://www.harappa.com/baluch. Franke-Vogt U (2005) Sohr Damb/Nal, Baluchistan, Pakistan. Ergebnisse der Grabungen 2001, 2002 und 2004. In: Archa¨ologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan Band. 35–36, 2003– 2004, 83–141. Hakemi A (1997) Shahdad – Archaeological Excavation of a Bronze Age Center in Iran. Rome: IsMEO. Jarrige C, Jarrige J-F, Meadow RH, and Quivron G (eds.) (1995) Mehrgarh Field Reports 1975 to 1985 – From the Neolithic to the Indus Civilization. Karachi: Dept. of Culture and Tourism, Govt. of Sindh, and the French Foreign Ministry. Kenoyer JM (1991) The Indus Valley Tradition of Pakistan and western India. Journal of World Prehistory 5/4: 331–385. Mughal MR (1971) The Early Harappan Period in the Greater Indus Valley and Northern Baluchistan (c. 3000–2400 BC). PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Possehl GL (1999) Indus Age. The Beginnings. New Delhi: Oxford and IBH. Potts DT (2001) Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967–1975: The Third Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Musuem Press. Potts DT (2005) In the beginning: Marhashi and the origins of Magan’s ceramic industry in the third millennium BC. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 2005 16: 67–78. Salvatori, S, Vidale, M (1997) Shahr-e Sokhta 1975–1978: Central Quarters Excavation. Rome.

Shaffer JG (1992) The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand traditions: Neolithic through Bronze Age. In: Ehrich R (ed.) Chronologies in Old World Archaeology 3rd edn., pp. 441–464. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tosi M (ed.) (1983) Prehistoric Sistan. Rome: IsMEO. Wright RP (1984) Technology, Style and Craft Specialization: Spheres of Interaction and Exchange in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, Third Millennium B.C. Ph.D. Dissertation. Ann Arbor.

Buddhist Archaeology Janice Stargardt, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary aksara A letter in one of the Indian systems of writing, it may combine the values of consonant and vowel. ayaka A platform projecting from the base drum of the stupa at or near the cardinal points, facing the gateways in the stupa railing. Especially common in Southeast India. Also – pillars, inscribed and or decorated pillars installed on the ayaka platforms. bodhisattva Variously, a being destined to be a Buddha in a future existence; an enlightened being [Buddha] who delays his extinction to help other beings progress towards that state. chakravartin Literally lord of the wheel (of the law), that is, world ruler. chattra Umbrella, with multiple tiers a symbol of status : 1–3 for a minister, 7 for a king, 9–11 for a chakravartin, an infinite number for a Buddha. dakshinapatha The southern trade route leading from the Ganges–Yamuna basin into the Deccan. dhamma [also dharma] Literally law, symbolized by a many-spoked wheel, but in Buddhism denotes the whole system of Buddhist thought and rules for righteous living. harmika Quadrangular structure on top of stupa dome and below the umbrella or spire. karma Sum of actions and inactions influencing the states of rebirth of all beings. Nibbana [also Nirvana] State of extinction after death when the chain of rebirth is broken; attainable only by enlightened beings – Buddhas and bodhisattvas. sangha The community of monks in both Buddhism and Jainism. samsara The cycle of existences, of births and rebirths. sikhara A tower of multiple stories and bearing architectural ornaments on each storey in a diminishing scale, developed as the superstructure of Buddhist temples in the second half of the first millennium CE. sima Boundary of the consecrated land of a Buddhist establishment, that is, of an individual monument or a complex of associated structures. triratna Literally three jewels, in Buddhism, the Buddha, dhamma, sangha. uttarapatha The northern trade route leading from the Ganges–Yamuna basin to the Indus Valley and Afghanistan.

ASIA, WEST/Buddhist Archaeology 671 vinaya The rules of conduct for Buddhist monks and nuns, of which several traditions survive. The Pali tradition is thought to be the oldest. yasti The wooden pole implanted on the summit of early stupas and, in the northern tradition penetrating into the solid core of the stupa with its base resting on the relic chamber. The part of the pole emerging from the top of the stupa could be decorated with flags and the tiers of umbrellas – both symbols of high status.

Introduction The geography of early Buddhist archaeological sites is in general associated with rivers, ancient coastlines, and trade routes by land and water. There is also a more nuanced geography, economic, political, and religious aspects of which will be discussed in the following sections. A fundamental feature of its economic geography will, however, be mentioned immediately: Buddhism has always been associated with societies which, through agricultural intensification or through trade, possessed enough surplus food to be able to support the variable, but sometimes considerable numbers of men who formed its monastic communities. Buddhist monks were required by their disciplinary rules (the vinaya) to refrain from providing for their own food and other material needs, and instead to offer the laity the opportunity of making merit by supporting them. Originating in Northeast India, the geography of the spread of early Buddhism was particularly associated with sites belonging to the developed Iron Age, undergoing urbanization and the crystallization of states in the Ganges–Yamuna and Indus Valleys, and along the valleys of the Mahanadi, Godavari, and Krishna Rivers and their tributaries which drained a central area of peninsular India from the northwestern Deccan, all the way to the coast of Southeast India. Thus the geography of Buddhism in the five centuries following the Buddha’s death (his nirvana), encompassed a wide spatial extent but was very uneven in its intensity (Figure 1). The life of the historical Buddha – also known as the Sakyamuni, sage of the Sakya people – provides some of the earliest dates in Indian history. Towards the end of the twentieth century there were controversies and downward revisions of these dates which have major implications for Indian historical archaeology and ancient history as a whole and in particular for the apparent discontinuities in early Buddhist archaeological evidence. A combination of archaeological and cross-textual evidence does indeed suggest that the Buddha’s birth and death took place approximately 100 years later than previously supposed, that is, that he was born in the first half of

the fifth century BCE and died eighty years later between c. 400 and c. 380 BCE. The importance of these revised dates will become evident when we consider below the typology and chronology of early Buddhist monuments in India. This article will not consider Buddhist thought, but will focus on those aspects reflected in the material remains of Buddhist sites. Aspects of Buddhist thought have antecedents in earlier, Upanisadic traditions. They concern concepts of central importance to the three great Indic religions: Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Two of these are, karma (which loosely equates to destiny) and samsara (the chain of birth and rebirth). Karma is not conceived as an indifferent, impersonal fate but rather as an individual fabric woven out of the accumulated actions (especially merit-making) of a being over many past existences – samsara – which will determine the level and fortunes of that individual’s future incarnations. The desire of all sincere Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus is to be released from the chain of existences and to become united with the Universal force. The many differences among and sectarian divides within these three Indian religions concern how that release may be achieved, as an individual or as a group, and how both the agents of release and what one is released into are conceptualized: in the form of many gods or god-like beings and multiple heavens, as a void or as a universal force. Of these three great Indian religions, only Buddhism has become a powerful, enduring influence outside India. Hinduism was adopted in parts of Southeast Asia for a limited period in the late first millennium CE, only to be merged with Buddhism (in Bali, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos) or Islam (in most of Indonesia and Malaysia). Buddhism is said to be the fastest growing religion in the West today and is enjoying some resurgence in China. The historical Buddha was contemporary with Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Thus the revisions of the chronology of the Buddha’s life and death affect Jainism equally. Both lived and taught in the Ganges Valley during the fifth to fourth century BCE, in the area that became the state of Magadha in the fourth century BCE (mainly present-day Bihar), whereas the collection of Indic beliefs and practices known as Hinduism crystallized some centuries later and is still evolving. Buddhism became distinctive for its focus on the three jewels (triratna) of its teaching: the Buddha, dhamma (rules for righteous living), and sangha (the monastic community). All three elements played a central part in the strength of Buddhism in South Asia, c. fourth century BCE to twelfth century CE, and are the foundations of Buddhism’s continued appeal to large populations outside India in the world

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14

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I Magadha II Gandhara III Western Deccan IV Andhra-Kalinga V Pyu Kingdoms of Burma VI Suvannabhumi Mon kingdoms of Burma

A Ganges R. B Yamuna R. C Five Rivers (Indus) D Narmada R. E Godavari R. F Krishna R. G Mahanadi R. H Kaveri R. I Irrawaddy R.

1 Lumbini 2 Kapilavasthu 3 Kusinagara 4 Vesali 5 Pataliputra 6 Rajagrha 7 Nalanda 8 Sanchi 9 Mathura 10 Kalsi

11 Taxila 12 Urasa 13 Puskalavati 14 Bamiyan 15 Sagaram 16 Nasik 17 Jaggayapeta 18 Nagarjunakonda 19 Gummadidurru 20 Amaravati

21 Bhattiprolu 22 Guntupalli 23 Vengi 24 Thotlakonda 25 Sankaram 26 Ramatirtham 27 Salihundam 28 Tamralipti 29 Sri Ksetra 30 Pagan

Figure 1 Early Buddhist sites of India and Burma.

today. It has often been argued that, by the time of Buddhism’s eclipse in India, such long processes of reciprocal assimilation between Hinduism and Buddhism had taken place that it was possible

for Buddhists to become Hindus without abandoning key concepts and practices of their religion. One must also consider however that, in the face of the Muslim invasions of the sub-continent from the twelfth and

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thirteenth centuries onwards, religious identities on both the Islamic and anti-Islamic sides hardened in the process and the pressures on Buddhists to support the Hindu and Sikh kings leading the resistance to Islam probably became irresistible. Throughout its history, Buddhism has been equally dependant on the patronage of rulers and the loyal adherence of the lower classes of every society it has touched.

The Chronology and Geography of Early Buddhist Archaeology There are no specifically Buddhist archaeological remains contemporary with the Buddha’s lifetime. It is possible, however, to sketch some contextual archaeological features. There was an archaeological period of between eight and five hundred years between the Mohenjo Daro-Harappan civilization (c. 2400–1800 BCE), which spread along the Indus River Valley and into a considerable area of Northwest India and the rise of Gangetic sites in Northeast India. At present this period can only be characterized by phases of material culture – for example, the Chalcolithic and Iron Ages – and by specific pottery types. Two of these, in particular, are of great importance to India’s Iron Age and early historic archaeology to which early Buddhist archaeology belongs: the Painted Grey Wares [PGW] of western India c. 800–350 BCE, and the slightly later Northern Black Polished Wares [NBP]. Magadha in Northeast India was probably the core area in which NBP developed as an elaborate and highly distinctive form of early historic pottery. The production techniques and use of this ware gradually spread to all of northern India during the Mauryan period. Although there is at present no universal consensus among scholars about NBP chronology, the majority view assigns it to the period from c. 500–200 BCE. Thus it is a pottery associated with the developed Iron Age and early urbanization of Northeast India. In his lifetime, the Buddha would have used utensils made of both NBP and simpler ceramics, along with those of metal and wood. The processes of cultural contact, transport, and trade whereby NBP spread over the whole of northern India in the fourth and third centuries BCE are probably linked to the spread of Mauryan power at this time and of Buddhism from the third century BCE onwards. If the early history of Buddhism was deeply imbedded in Magadhan territory and the vicissitudes of Mauryan power, it later struck deep roots in other territories and polities inside and outside India. All but one of the urban sites closely associated in the Discourses of the Buddha with his life and death have been identified and at least to some extent excavated: Lumbini (where he was born), Bodh Gaya

(where he attained Enlightenment), Sarnath (where he began to teach the dhamma), Rajagrha, Sravasti, Kausambi, and Vaisali near or in which he sojourned and Kusinagara where he died and was cremated. Only Kapilavasthu (the capital of the Sakya oligarchy to which he belonged) lacks certain identification. All these sites lie within a fairly confined area of Northeast India, in territory that became the Magadha state. There are several reasons for the dearth of direct archaeological evidence from the time of the Buddha’s life: firstly only rammed mud, mud-bricks, timber, and thatch were in use as construction materials at this time (possibly also stone rubble in a mud matrix). These materials do not survive as a welldefined archaeological horizon, although future refinements of archaeological analyses may make it possible to trace them. Meanwhile, the presence (or absence) of NBP is often a valuable indicator of the age of a layer but provides only indirect evidence on Buddhist archaeology itself. The second reason for the rarity of direct evidence on the earliest phases of Buddhist archaeology is that all the sites associated with the Buddha’s lifetime became sites of renewed veneration and monumental construction as a result of the upsurge in Buddhism under the reign of the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (273–232 BCE) if not before. Archaeologists have generally been reluctant to disturb remains of the Ashokan era in order to investigate what may lie below them. The third reason is that in the period between the death of the Buddha and Buddhism’s resurgence under the Emperor Ashoka, it (like Jainism) was only one of several traditions of wandering ascetics in Northeast India, all of whom left no trace or only very faint traces in the archaeological record. Before the revisions of the dates of the Buddha’s life and death already mentioned, there seemed to be a very long hiatus of some two centuries between the Buddha’s death and the earliest known archaeological remains of Buddhist sites. The revised dates, however, narrow the gap between the Buddha’s death in Magadha territory, c. 380 BCE and the beginning of the Mauryan power there in c. 328 BCE to some fifty years. Candragupta, the first Mauryan emperor, consolidated the nascent state forms of Magadha. The Mauryans probably learnt from the well-articulated state institutions of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which included territories on the northwest frontier of South Asia. In 330 BCE, Alexander of Macedon defeated Darius III, the last Achaemenid Emperor and pursued his conquests into these Achaemenid territories. Thus the newly powerful Magadhan state – so significant for Buddhism – took shape under the challenges presented by the momentous events reshaping the history of the Eastern Mediterranean

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and Western Asia. Greek Satrapies established in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests renewed and redirected the long traditions of commercial and cultural exchange between South Asia, Western Asia and the Mediterranean that had existed since the Mohenjo Dara-Harappa civilization some two thousand years before. In Gandharan Buddhist art, these several traditions – Persian, Greek, and Indian – merged to produce some remarkable regional art styles.

The Impact of Ashoka on Early Buddhism Ashoka was the grandson of Candragupta Maurya. He violently seized the throne of Magadha in 273 BCE, and eventually extended some kind of Mauryan overlordship to most of India. He also decisively defeated Greek attempts to regain their colonies in the northwestern territories. After a brutal campaign against Kalinga (Orissa and northern Andhra), Ashoka became a Buddhist in 262 BCE and from that time on exercised a decisive influence on Buddhist history by extending his powerful patronage to its teachings, renewing its institutional structures and supporting its spread. The Buddha himself had commanded that his remains be cremated, and a stupa be erected over them. In fact his cremated remains were divided into eight parts and given to eight rival claimants in authority at the following towns and cities on the territory that was to become the Mauryan state of Magadha: to Ajatasattu at Rajagrha, the Licchavis at Vesali, the Sakyas (the Buddha’s own clan) at Kapilavasthu, the Bulis at Allakappa, the Kolis at Ramagama, a Brahman at Vethadipa, the Mallas at Pava, and the Mallas at Kusinagara. The Brahmin, Drona, who divided the corporeal remains kept the urn and the Moriyas at Pipphalivana who arrived late on the cremation site received some ashes from the funeral pyre. All of these objects were treated as sacred relics over which stupa mounds were heaped up. The multiplicity of claimants to the Buddha’s remains in c. 380 BCE throws light on how weak and localized power was on Magadha territory at the time of the Buddha’s death. Only some fifty years later this situation began to change under Candragupta with the creation of the Mauryan state, while just over a century later, Ashoka, as the unchallenged ruler of the most powerful state in India, exercised an undisputed right to open up the stupas containing the Buddha’s cremated remains and make further distributions of his relics. At Kusinagara – the place where the Buddha died – a huge stupa called the Cremation Stupa still exists and, if the attribution is correct, it may be the earliest surviving Buddhist monument. While it is extremely likely that it has been enlarged and rebuilt many times – a common occurrence in Buddhism – it may

indeed contain a mud or mud-brick core with relics dating back to the time just after the Buddha’s death. Ashoka’s purpose in opening the original stupas was to subdivide the relics and distribute them as sacred objects in conversion missions to the regions of his empire, as well as to those outside it. Ashoka’s stone inscriptions record missions to the Middle East, Egypt, and Macedonia, as well as to Sri Lanka and Suvannabhumi (probably the Mon kingdoms of Lower Burma). Ashokan-era conversions to Buddhism at the last two are supported by local chronicles and legends but not as yet by firm archaeological evidence. The monuments of Ashoka’s reign associated with Buddhism fall into the following categories: about twenty magnificent stone pillars and pillar fragments (out of some forty mentioned in texts); his imperial edicts inscribed on these pillars, on caves, rock shelters and rock faces; a flat stone throne base now at Bodh Gaya; the mud core of a stupa at Vesali containing a reliquary; the core of the Dharmarajika stupa at Sarnath, and possibly some small votive stupas at Lumbini. In addition there are fragmentary structural remains – fortifications and other non-religious monumental remains-at Pataliputra (Candragupta’s capital), Rajagrha (Ashoka’s capital), Ganwaria, Sonkh, and Sravasti that are Mauryan (some possibly pre-Ashokan) in origin but not directly related to Buddhism. Many of Ashoka’s stone pillars were provided with lotus and animal capitals which contributed enduring symbols to the iconography of early Buddhism: the lion, bull, elephant, deer, lotus, wheel, and the pillar itself. If, as seems likely, this last represented a link between the realms of the Earth and the sky, it prefigured the yasti pole going from the pinnacle of the stupa in the northern Indian and Nepalese traditions, through its core with its base resting on the relic chamber. A distinguishing characteristic of Mauryan stone artifacts is that the stone has been brought to a fine polish that still survives. The very concept of erecting imperial pillars and inscribing imperial edicts on stone, the format and style employed in these inscriptions, the technique of stone polishing, as well as some of the sculptural styles (especially in the lions) all appear to be practices of the Achaemenid empire adopted and thoroughly assimilated by the Mauryan rulers. From this time onwards, these symbols entered the mainstream of Indian Buddhist art. As a powerful ruler, Ashoka would certainly have patronized the other religions practiced within his empire, but his own statements in the edicts reveal that his commitment to Buddhism was profound. During the some hundred years that elapsed between the Buddha’s death and Ashoka’s conversion, Buddhism was merely one of several loosely structured ascetic movements in the Magadha area. Internal

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dissensions arose quite quickly which the Second Buddhist Council, held in this interval, failed to resolve. Ashoka summoned the Third Buddhist Council (c. 250 BCE) which had a lasting impact on the development of the religion. While it is believed that the vinaya rules governing the structure and life of the monkhood (the sangha) were laid down by the Buddha, it may well be that the clear codification of the vinaya, its systematic adoption and, perhaps most significant, the creation of disciplinary procedures within the sangha to enforce it were the result of the work of the Third Buddhist Council. A codification of generally accepted versions of the Discourses of the Buddha began, which were then rigorously committed to memory. Numbers play a recurring role in this core of early Buddhist texts. Concepts, objectives, rules, attributes, people, spirits, actions, and heavens are listed in this way. Numbers are a mnemonic device which effectively supported the accuracy of the oral tradition. As we shall see below, Pali texts inscribed on gold and deposited in a relic chamber in Burma in c. the fifth century CE do not differ significantly from those transmitted orally and collected in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century by the English founding members of the Pali Text Society. After the Third Buddhist Council but possibly also before, it became obligatory for monks to be resident in one place at least during the rainy season every year and, in practice, communities of monks who were largely sedentary can be traced in the rock shelters and cave shrines of the Vidisha area from the second century BCE and perhaps from the time of Ashoka himself. Similar claims have been made on the basis of the palaeography of very early Buddhist inscriptions on the drip ledges of monastic cave sites in northern Sri Lanka. Thus the three jewels of Buddhism – Buddha, dhamma, sangha – emerged as profoundly renewed and mutually reinforcing influences in Indian society from the third century BCE as a result of the powerful patronage of the Emperor Ashoka and the activities of the Third Buddhist Council. In particular it seems that the strong, self-regulating structures of the sangha became the central prop to the effective preservation and propagation of the meaning of the Buddha and his dhamma. The further history of Buddhism inside and outside India is ineluctably bound up with the forms and fortunes of the sangha in the various sects of Buddhism that emerged after the first century BCE. In turn, these relied on the patronage of rulers and the devoted support of the people.

The Links between Buddhism and Trade The impact of the Emperor Ashoka on Buddhism may serve as a paradigm of its dependence on the

patronage of rulers and the loyal devotion of ordinary people throughout its history. The geography of Buddhism sketched above shows that its links with traders also deserve attention. The Discourses of the Buddha preserve many instances of his accepting converts, close disciples, and merit-making gifts from all classes and castes of ancient Indian society, many of them traders. Thus itinerant merchants moving along the early Indian trade routes mentioned, and later making much longer journeys by land and sea, had no fear of becoming isolated from the Buddhist sources of religious inspiration as their Hindu counterparts may have done in the early centuries CE. The Emperor Ashoka himself had sent proselytising Buddhist missions to the limits of the then known world. Still other links existed at times between sangha and traders. Merit-making gifts to support Buddhism were not usually spent. They were invested and the proceeds from the investments were used to support the sangha and its activities. Since the vinaya rules precluded monks from handling financial affairs, there were councils of the laity to do this on their behalf. Members of the whole social spectrum supported Buddhism: short donatory inscriptions show that kings, queens and princesses, royal treasurers, bankers and their families, generals, royal scribes, superintendents of water houses, caravan leaders, heads of renovation works, artisans, stoneworkers, village leaders, farmers, leaders of the cowherds, sandalmakers, carters, and traders (including foreign traders) made gifts for the monumental and monastic buildings and the upkeep of the monastic communities. Similar people also served on the lay committees administering the gifts. Traders, in particular, had a specialized knowledge of how and where best to invest donations on behalf of the sangha. Thus the guestrooms of the monasteries dotted along major trade routes provided safe places where traders, their goods and their animals could stop on their journeys, affording them simultaneously with shelter, opportunities to make merit through donations or services to Buddhist foundations and also, on occasion, to receive loans from their committees to support their trading ventures. This draws attention to the particular character of the economic geography of Buddhism, which accounts in many ways for both the pattern of dispersal of ancient Buddhist sites and for many of the variations in their density.

The Geography of Early Buddhist Sites in India As Figure 1 shows, early Buddhist sites occurred in distinct clusters along ancient trade routes following rivers and coasts. The densest cluster of early Buddhist archaeological sites is on the territory that was to

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become the Magadha Kingdom – the Ganges–Yamuna basin. From this starting point and moving northwest along the uttarapatha (the northern trade route) leads one to the Gandhara cluster along the upper reaches of the Indus and Jhelum Rivers with a linked cluster over the Khyber Pass in what was once Achaemenid and Greek Satrapy territory in Afghanistan. These clusters include Taxila (whose name became synonymous with a university in many languages of South and Southeast Asia), Bimaran (where one of the earliest depictions of a Buddha image was found on a golden reliquary of c. first century BCE) and Begram. Returning to the Ganges–Yamuna basin of Magadha and moving southwest along the daksinapatha (the southern trade route) brings one to the early Buddhist stupas, railings and relief sculptures of Bharhut, Sanchi, and the cluster around Vidisha, on the tributaries of the Vetravati River, itself a tributary of the Yamuna. Further still to the southwest, are the cluster of Buddhist rock-cut shrines and monastic cells of the western Deccan at Ajanta, Nasik, Karle, Junnar, and Kanheri among others inland from, but parallel to, the West Coast and its trading kingdoms. Going further south and crossing to the East Coast, one reaches the Andhra clusters of sites that rival Magadha in density and have produced some of the most prolific and beautiful Buddhist art in India as a whole. They are grouped along both the great trading arteries of peninsular India, the Krishna and Godavari Rivers and their many tributaries that rise close to the western Deccan sites and flow down to the East Coast, as well as along the Andhra coast up to the delta of the Mahanadi River in Orissa. The apparently isolated site of Tamluk (Tamralipti) in Bengal is in fact also associated with trade sites on the Ganges Delta. This greater Andhra area includes Kalinga, the kingdom conquered by Ashoka immediately before his conversion to Buddhism. The distribution pattern of early Buddhist sites in Andhra reveals a striking congruence with late prehistoric Megalithic burial structures, suggesting that, in this region at least, there may be a sacred geography with prehistoric origins working together with the economic geography already mentioned (Figure 2). Claims have been made that Buddhism in Southeast India goes back to the Buddha’s lifetime and that it was established there as a result of his visits and teaching. The area is well away from the Magadha territory known to be associated with the Buddha. Evidence generally to support this claim of conversion during the Buddha’s lifetime is not secure. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that the area received missions during Ashoka’s reign since fragments of his pillar inscriptions with Mauryan polish have

been found at Amaravati, Erragudi, Rajulamandagiri and the palaeography on some of the relic caskets of the Mahachaitya at Bhattiprolu appears to date back to the Ashokan era. Moreover there is also a possibility that Buddhism was established in this area ‘before’ Ashoka’s efforts to spread Buddhism, as suggested by the presence of NBP sherds in the foundations of many early Buddhist structures in Andhra. The names of some of the early rulers of territories (preAshokan and Ashokan era) along Andhra’s coast and rivers have been recovered in the past two decades in Buddhist foundation inscriptions together with silver Mauryan punchmarked coins: Gobhada, Kamvayasiri, Samagopa, Narana, and Raja Kumariyya Sammliya who was probably responsible for the third to second century stupa at Amaravati before the powerful Satavahana dynasty of the Northwest Deccan established itself in Andhra from c. the first century BCE to the late second century CE. Andhra’s numerous and well-endowed Buddhist sites confirm the existence of a political as well as an economic geography of Buddhist archaeology: while the two great river basins, the Krishna and the Godavari provided the highways where the cloths and metal artifacts of the Deccan were assembled and transported to the East Coast, the East Coast ports themselves were pivots where multiple movements took place: for the landing of the spices, incenses, and metal ores native to Southeast Asia as well as the exit of Indian goods and above all, Indian ideas to the ports and kingdoms further south and east. Whoever controlled Andhra had access to immense economic resources. They are reflected in the density and beauty of its Buddhist remains and its key role in the transmission of Buddhism to Burma and Thailand from c. first to sixth century CE, after which other regions of India, notably Bihar and Orissa as well as Sri Lanka, developed deep reciprocal relations with parts of Southeast Asia.

The Origins and Forms of the Stupa As a commemorative earth mound heaped up over the cremated remains of an outstanding individual, king or hero, the stupa may have had pre-Buddhist origins. It may also have sometimes had non-funerary commemorative functions. However, the Mahaparinibbanasutta (26–31) makes it clear that the Buddha ordered his disciple Ananda to arrange for the cremation of his mortal remains and the creation of a stupa mound over them which should be venerated as the point of direct contact with his teaching and example. Significantly, he instructed him to follow the same procedure as for a Universal Monarch (cakravartin). In the extension of this tradition, many stupas seem

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themselves to have been regarded as reliquaries – whether they contained corporeal remains in reliquary containers of various types or not – and to have been offered the same veneration. While the

earliest stupas were simply mounds of mud, perhaps stabilized by compression, they were succeeded by mud brick, fired brick, and stone-faced mounds – and by combinations of all these components.

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The architectural elements of the Buddhist stupa are the following: the circular – later also squared – base (the drum), the dome (the egg); the pole (yasti) protruding from the top which might bear flags or the superimposed rings of the umbrella (both symbolizing high status and perhaps also the dhamma). The pole was surrounded by a small square railing on top of the dome and later by a box (harmika) of similar size. The height and bulk of the original pole on top of a stupa became greatly elaborated in the course of time into huge umbrellas (chattra), towers (sikhara) and other ornaments. It was essential that the sacred territory around the stupa be defined by a railing with entrances. The railing was originally of wood, later of stone, and it enclosed a lower paved devotional pathway running between the railing and the drum of the stupa. The impressive sculptures on the stone gateways and railings of early stupas like Bharhut and Sanchi (second to first centuries BCE) as well as the shapes of the gateways and railings themselves, are all adaptations from still older traditions of railings, gateways and sculptures made of wood (Figure 3). As such, they throw a precious light further back in time onto the high artistic achievements of wooden ceremonial gateways and sculptures for cities, palaces, and stupas that have themselves rotted away. Many stupas (e.g., at Sanchi) also had an upper devotional pathway running on top of the drum around the dome. Regional variations were numerous. In the north and northwest, many stupas contained small hollow chambers. These were spaces carefully reserved in the otherwise solid structures of drum and dome, which often contained reliquaries with relics, but which sometimes contained inhumation burials. In the rock-cut shrines and monasteries of the Northwest Deccan, the principal object of devotion was a small, completely solid rock-cut stupa. Sometimes these rock-cut spaces faithfully reproduce, carved into stone, the appearance of timber rafters, bindings and thatch of still earlier monuments built of organic materials. In the highly developed Buddhist cultures of the southeast, in Orissa, Andhra, and Tamil Nadu, stupas with relic chambers were less common but reliquaries were installed in many locations of the stupa, pathway, and railings. Some southeastern stupas were constructed over wheel-shaped foundations, sometimes with sacred symbols in the hub of the wheel. Stupa drums were built both with and without rectangular projections (ayaka platforms) at approximately the cardinal directions, facing each entrance in the railing. Ayaka platforms became a main focus for Buddhist art and the installation of reliquaries. In the

Figure 3 Eastern gateway of the Great Stupa at Sanchi. By courtesy of the British Museum, second–first century BCE.*

late twentieth century, numerous reliquaries containing relics and offerings were found in early Andhra stupas near these ayaka platforms, where they had remained undetected even in sites like Amaravati that had been worked over many times. Donatory inscriptions were carved on the railings, or on stone pillars set up on top of the ayaka platforms. These pillars, reinscribed over centuries, thus provide a long and precious record of the range of donors supporting the stupas (Figure 4). In all its variations, the stupa is a commemorative structure worthy of veneration because it symbolizes the life and teaching of the Buddha. When it contains relics (or is believed to do so), it possesses still greater sanctity and commands still greater devotion.

Stupas and Relics The objects deemed suitable to be treated as relics included, the cremated remains of the Buddha (especially tooth and hair relics); the objects of his personal use (robe, begging bowl); somewhat later, texts representing his teachings; bodhisattvas (future Buddhas) and the cremated remains of his principal disciples were also treated as relics. Later still c. third century

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Buddhist Art Buddhist art in South and Southeast Asia has produced some of the masterpieces of the region. Here it is only possible to list some of the most important traditions and times before moving on to a more detailed consideration of the Buddhist art of Andhra.

Figure 4 Stone slab carved in high relief showing an Andhrastyle stupa with decorated areas, ayaka platform and pillars (from the drum of the Amaravati stupa. By courtesy of the British Museum, c. third century CE.

CE, the cremated remains of distinguished abbots and monks were deemed suitable. This last remains a living tradition in Thailand today, where most of the cremated remains of particularly venerated abbots or monks are interred as relics in stupas of medium size – c. 4 m high – in conspicuous locations within the sacred sima territory of the monastery (e.g., beside the Ordination Hall). A part of the ash and bone, however, is set aside to be mixed with clay and fired, forming terra cotta votive tablets identified with that monk, which are worn and venerated by the laity as protective relics. The cremated remains of the laity, by contrast, are interred in quite small stupa-shaped urns – c. 50 cm high – arranged along the perimeter of the sima territory. Pairing this information with the evidence from early stupas in Northwest India and Afghanistan and slightly later ones in Andhra, it becomes clear that in Buddhism at certain times and places, there has been a long and permeable boundary between relics and burials, whether in stupas or other sacred places.

. The Sunga second to first century BCE, Sanchi and Bharhut, stupas, carved gateways and railings; Bhaja and Pitalkhora, rock-cut shrines and monastic cells with relief sculptures; . the Satavahanas second to first century BCE, Western Deccan Nasik and other rock-cut shrines, and cells, first century BCE to third century CE, Andhra, enlarged and decorated the Amaravati Great Stupa, numerous stupas, monastic complexes and highly developed art; . the Saka-Kusana age late first century BCE to third century CE, numerous Gandharan sites of Northwest India, major built complexes containing stupas and monasteries, stone reliefs and votive objects in gold, stone, and ivory; North India beginnings of splendid Mathura tradition of stone statues of Buddha; also rock-cut shrines of Karle and other sites of Western Deccan; . the Iksvaku and Vakatakas third to sixth century, Andhra, Nagarjunakonda, Amaravati (cont.), Ajanta painted and rock-cut caves, Vengi – strong influences on Pyu Buddhism in Central Burma; . Imperial Gupta fourth to sixth century CE, centered in North India influenced most areas of India and mainland Southeast Asia. Sanchi (cont.), superb Buddha images of Mathura (cont.), Sarnath (cont.); post-Gupta, numerous local kingdoms under influences of late Gupta style – Aurangabad and Ellora rock-cut shrines, cells and statuary; . Pala-Sena eighth to twelfth century CE, North and Northeast India, peak of late Buddhist culture in India, Nalanda, Paharpur, Sultanganj, Tapandighi – very strong influences on Borobodur, Sumatra, and Pagan, and received endowments from Southeast Asian as well as Indian kings, for example, for monasteries at Nalanda and repairs to the Mahabodhi temple. Pagan became the largest ancient city dominated by Buddhist stupas and temples (Figure 6).

Andhra Buddhist Art A great mastery of the peculiar properties of stone in early Indian art is found in the Buddhist relief sculptures of Amaravati. The stone carvers’ yard at this site must have been an art academy where leading sculptors practiced and taught apprentices during the successive phases of construction, enlargement and

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renewal, c. second to first century BCE – third to fourth century CE. The soft contours of Andhra art style can be seen at numerous Buddhist sites along the East Coast and up the great river valleys, at Nagarjunakonda, Ghantasala, Jaggayapeta, Ramatirtham, Salihundam, Sankaram. Bavikonda. Thotlakonda, and many others. While high aesthetic levels were achieved at a number of Andhran Buddhist sites, especially Nagarjunakonda (third to fourth centuries), at Amaravati in the second to third centuries CE quite exceptional levels of stone carving skills were paired with dynamic visions of iconic incidents from the Buddha’s life. They have been compared with the highest aesthetic levels reached in classical Greek relief sculpture (cf. the Alexander sarcophagus, now in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul or the side panels of the Pergamon altar, in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin). Typically the main figure or object in an Amaravati sculpture in high relief is depicted on a larger scale but off-center in the scene, while supporting figures move in a clockwise swirl around that focal point (Figure 5). The concentration on the focal point is emphasized by the orientation of each member of the scene and the angles their bodies present to the viewer, by many graceful contrasts among arm and leg positions and by draperies in movement. At their best, the Amaravati sculptors produced elegant solutions to the perennial challenges in relief sculpture. For example, worshipping figures are presented partly, largely and entirely from the back following the rhythms of this sweeping circular vision; persuasive depictions are made of human anatomy and its relative proportions;

Figure 5 Amaravati Buddhist sculpture carved in high relief (from the inner face of the stupa railing). By courtesy of the British Museum, second to third century CE.

there is strikingly effective foreshortening of the feet of humans and animals, linked technically with an extraordinary mastery of the diminishing scale of the bodies of horses, elephants and humans emerging from the stone at a three-quarter angle in high relief; in crowded scenes, bodies and objects are skillfully superimposed in varying depths of relief while individual components are in movement. Figure 4 is one of many surviving drum slabs which, though not identical, nonetheless give a general idea of the appearance of the Great Amaravati Stupa at its peak, c. second to fourth century CE, and of its principal decorative elements. This monument of some 49 m in diameter and perhaps some 16 m in height, together with its railing, was the focus of an immense amount of superb Buddhist sculpture in high relief as well as (from c. the third century onwards) some standing Buddha figures in the round. Relief sculptures were placed on the outer and inner surfaces of the railings; on the drum, especially on the four ayaka platforms projecting from the drum opposite the gateways; and on the lower half of the dome-shaped superstructure. There is an unresolved debate among art historians as to whether there was an aniconic phase in early Buddhist art, succeeded by an iconic one and whether this marked a change in Buddhist thought and the worship addressed to the person of the Buddha as reflected in his images. Meanwhile, it can be noted that depictions of the Buddha go back at least to the first and possibly second century BCE (e.g., the Bimaran reliquary) and that such representations overlap in time with sculpture in which his presence was denoted symbolically through his footprints, an empty throne, the Bodhi tree, and the stupa itself. At Amaravati there are many such sculptures of the second to third century CE showing veneration being offered by monks and laity to these symbols of the Buddha’s presence, while standing Buddha figures carved in the round appear there c. early third century CE. On a reduced scale, the decorative scheme of the Amaravati Mahachaitya was reproduced on the very numerous smaller stupas nearby extending over the plain on the south bank of the Krishna River. The royal city of the Satavahanas, Dhanyakataka lay close by with a wharf on the riverbank testifying to the linkages between royal patronage, Buddhism and trade. The deeper roots of Amaravati and many other Andhra Buddhist sites in prehistoric and protohistoric sacred geography also reveal themselves in the presence of numerous megalithic burials within and close by the stupa area. Evidence at other Andhra sites indicate that megalithic-type burials continued to be practised up to c. third century CE, clearly

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overlapping with and at least in some cases interacting with Buddhism. A total of 214 megalithic burials sites have been identified in Andhra – some of them containing hundreds of individual locations – and c. 118 early Buddhist sites were established there before the third century CE. There appears to be a striking correlation between these sacred geographies (Figure 2). Earlier scholars noted the occurrence of megalithic sites within such iconic Buddhist sites as Amaravati, Nagarjunakonda, Yelleshwaram, and Jaggayapeta and some linear cultural continuity has been proposed from late prehistory into the early historical era. This is well founded and important. But this article argues that is even more significant to recognize the ‘contemporaneity’ of megalithic burial practices and early Buddhism in Andhra over c. a further four centuries and that there are sites where there is evidence of their interaction, as in the megalithic burial chambers and their art at Chagatur (Mahaboobnagar District, Andhra) as well as the burial chambers inside stupas of Northwest India. Such evidence compels one to consider anew the complexities of cultural assimilation and change taking place in early Buddhist societies to which late prehistoric and early historic archaeology, art and inscriptions provide the only doorways.

Pyu Buddhism in Burma The Pyu civilization of Central Burma was one of the earliest in Southeast Asia to adopt Indian alphabets and Buddhist thought. Pyu archaeological evidence shows a complex union and interaction of preBuddhist and Buddhist ritual similar to that of Andhra. The earliest Pyu fragmentary inscriptions show a knowledge of Indian palaeography from c. first century CE mixed with letter (aksara) types that date from the third century. From at least the first century BCE, however, there had been Pyu technical

borrowings from India, revealed especially in brick making of Mauryan and Sunga types, without any sign of the adoption of Buddhism. Instead the earliest ceremonial buildings in the cities of the Pyu were large brick and timber halls devoted to multiple burials, probably of rulers and their consorts, cremated and installed in groups in urns that replicated in terra cotta the shape and often the de´cor of bronze drums. From the third century CE onwards there is abundant evidence of the adoption of Buddhism among the Pyu and the construction of monumental complexes of stupa, shrine, and monastic cells that reveal the influences of Andhra assimilated to a local style. At the same time, the Pyu tradition of urn burials inside and in direct proximity to brick monuments persisted in the context of a flourishing Buddhist civilization up to the ninth century and possibly longer. Indeed Buddhist archaeological finds in the major Pyu urban sites, Beikthano, Halin, and Sri Ksetra, have contributed precious insights to our understanding of the history of Buddhism in general. For instance, a complete replica of a palm leaf manuscript in solid gold (Figure 7) was found in the relic chamber of a ruined stupa mound (the Khin Ba mound) in Sri Ksetra, dating from c. mid-fifth to early sixth century CE. This relic chamber also contained one of the largest reliquaries ever found, made of silver partly gilded, and decorated in high relief with some of the earliest Buddha images of Southeast Asia (Figure 8), and the largest treasure of gold and silver objects ever found in a relic chamber in South or Southeast Asia, The manuscript consisted of 18 gold leaves inscribed with excerpts of varying lengths from eight core texts of the Pali canon, two end covers in gold and the whole was bound together by gold wires. These samples of canonical Pali are considered to be the oldest and certainly the most extensive surviving examples in the world so far known. They have

Figure 6 Panoramic view of Pagan, the largest ancient Buddhist city, tenth to thirteenth century CE.

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Figure 7 The golden Pali manuscript from Sri Ksetra. By courtesy of the Archaeological Department Myanmar, fifth–sixth century CE.

the additional value of a securely identified archaeological and chronological context. For these reasons, they not only provide a privileged glimpse of the extent of Buddhist knowledge outside India in this non-Indic city at this time, but the characteristics of the palaeography indicate that the Andhra coast was the hearth of the Buddhist learning of all but one of the monks who inscribed their chosen excerpts on the gold leaves. The exerpts also provide a unique basis for assessing the integrity with which the same Pali texts were preserved in the largely oral tradition in Sri Lanka and elsewhere and collected in the nineteenth century. Pali texts in Thailand of c. sixth– seventh century age, which reflect the existence of early Buddhist cultures there as well, are short and fragmentary inscriptions. Though valuable evidence, they cannot provide such extensive insights into the state of Buddhist culture in Thailand at that time. It is arresting to note that the wider context of Sri Ksetra reveals the largest burial fields of pre-Islamic Southeast Asia and includes urn burials placed inside major Buddhist shrines inside the city, buried under their paved courtyards, as well as thousands of urn burials encased in small funerary stupas and large stepped burial terraces outside the city walls. Thus in its spread outside the area of its origin in Northeast India, Buddhism appears to have preserved its precious core message while presenting porous boundaries to the pre-existing cultures it encountered. Locally specific styles and practices emerged early to diversify and enrich the appeal of the Buddhist eucumene. See also: Asia, South: Ganges Valley; Indus Civilization;

Megaliths.

Further Reading

Figure 8 The great silver reliquary from Sri Ksetra. By courtesy of the Archaeological Department Myanmar, fifth to sixth century CE.

Bechert H (ed.) (1991) The Dating of the Historical Buddha. Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht. Huntington S (1985) The Art of Ancient India, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. NY: Weatherhill (with contributions by John C. Huntington). Lamotte E (1988) History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era. Trans. from French by Sara Webb-Boin under the supervision of Jean Dantinne Louvain-la-Neuve: Universite catholique de Louvain, Institut orientaliste. Mahaparinibbanasutta. (from the Dighanikaya). Trans. From Pali by SisterVajira Francis Story (1998). The Last Days of the Buddha. (Rev. ed.) Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society. Misra BN (1998) Nalanda. 3 vols. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp. Schwartzberg J (ed.) (1992) A Historical Atlas of South Asia. NY: Oxford University Press. Rea A (ed.) (1894 repr. 1969) Archaeological Survey of India, New Imperial Series: South Indian Buddhist Antiquities, Vol. 15. Madras: Superintendant Government Press and Varanasi: Indological Book House.

ASIA, WEST/Ganges Valley 683 Stargardt J (2002–03) City of the Wheel, city of the ancestors: spatial symbolism in a Pyu royal city. Indo-Asiatische Zeitschrift (6/7): 144–67. Stargardt J (2005) Death rituals of the late Iron Age and early Buddhism in Central Burma and Southeast India – whose norms, whose practices? In: Schalk P, Deeg M, Freiberger O, Kleine C, and van Nahl A (eds.) Im Dickicht der Gebote; Studien zur Dialektik von Norm und Praxis in der Buddhismusgeschichte Asiens. [In the thicket of the rules; studies in the dialectics of norm and practice in the history of Asian Buddhism.] Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Historia Religionum 26. Williams J (1982) The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province. Princeton: University Press.

Ganges Valley Nayanjot Lahiri, University of Delhi, Delhi, India ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary alluvium Sand, clay, silt, etc., gradually deposited by moving water, as along a river bed or the shore of a lake. Sunderbans At the mouth of the Ganga river and spread across areas of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, the largest mangrove forest in the world. doab A tract of land between two confluent rivers.

Introduction The crescentic alluvium that constitutes the Ganga valley is the dominating topographical feature of north India, in much the same way as the Ganga river is of special significance in the lives and traditions of the inhabitants of India. (Readers should here note that both Ganga and the Ganges refer to the same river, with the former term used traditionally in India.) The lie of the land is deceptively simple: the river flows through and across an immense plain, a stretch of alluvium that covers more than a million square kilometers from the Yamuna river in the west to the Bay of Bengal towards the east. Although its topography appears to be fairly homogeneous, in fact, the valley is marked by physiographic and historical complexity. Some preliminary issues may be clarified at the outset. First, a clarification about terminology needs to be offered. Much of the Ganga valley, so called because it represents the infilling between the Himalayas to the north and the central peninsular revetment to the south, is low and flat. For this reason, it is frequently described as the Ganga plain. The terms ‘valley’ and ‘plain’ will be used interchangeably here. The Ganga valley itself, in terms of geology, structure, relief, and

physiography forms part of a larger macrodivision – the Great Plains of India. This seemingly featureless plain covers some 700 000 km2 with the Ganga and Brahmaputra forming the main drainage axes and a physiography that varies from the semi-arid landscape of the Rajasthan plain to the humid Assam valley in the east (Figure 1). The flat terrain of the Ganga valley, in turn, has generally been subdivided into three segments made up of the upper Ganga plain, the middle Ganga Plain, and the lower Ganga plain. No marked physical breaks which would provide a rational basis for its demarcation into these tracts can be identified in the Ganga valley. Generally, the upper Gangetic plain which includes the Yamuna–Ganga doab (land between two rivers) has a drier climate with a greater concentration of wheat cultivation while rice predominates in the middle Gangetic zone. The humid lower Ganga valley extends from the foot of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling area to the Bay of Bengal, with the bulk of it forming a deltaic plain that extends across eastern India and Bangladesh. There are also differences in the nature of the soil. Although this is alluvium-based throughout the valley, more loam and clay can be observed in the upper Ganga plain. The loams increase and the sands decrease in the central plain, while further east, the soil is marked by finer textural sequences – from loams to very fine silty clays – with some tracts of the old alluvium in the Bengal delta having lateritic clay. These three tracts are further subdivided into smaller units. For instance, in the lower Ganga valley, the Mahananda plain is marked by old alluvial formations and historical links with Tibet and the Brahmaputra valley. This makes it a different subregion from the coastal and related estuarine regions that dominate the lower Ganga tract, through which the whole of the Ganga plain was open to the traffic from the coast. It is perhaps unnecessary to delineate all these subregions in a geographical overview of this nature. What needs to be remembered is that regional divisions and subdivisions within the valley have been based on a variety of factors that include landforms, climate, and location. Second, the cultural gradients that make up the archaeology of the Ganga plain can be as varied as the physical subdivisions. For one, its various segments were colonized at different points of time and by groups occupying diverse subsistence and cultural niches. In the middle Ganga segment that stretches from Allahabad to Banaras, the first settlement clusters were those of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Early Holocene, while further north and south, the pioneer colonizers were advanced agricultural communities. In the case of the Yamuna–Ganga doab, a broad-based subsistence pattern coincides with the

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presence of sites related to the Harappan tradition of the late third–early second millennia BC. On the question of the evolution of a productive iron technology as well, the chronological spectrum is fairly wide. In the upper Gangetic plain, iron was present in an early second millennium BC context while in the lower Gangetic valley, iron-bearing horizons become visible from c. 1200 BC and later. Similarly, the evolution of early historic cities was uneven. In the Indian state of Bihar, the antiquity of urban sites along the Ganga in the south, going back to c. sixth century BC if not earlier, seems to be much clearer than for those that are clustered north of the Ganga. This archaeological complexity does not make for a straightforward, unified picture; on the contrary, there are multilineal lines of development. The variety and depth is impressive and amply documented in the relevant archaeological literature. It is also one which cannot be seamlessly integrated into what is known from the earliest stratum of Indian literature. The Ganga valley and its colonization figures prominently in what are described as the texts of the later Vedic tradition. The large corpus is poorly dated (suggested dates range from c. 2000 BC to 600 BC) but it certainly goes back to the time period of many advanced agricultural communities that will be described here. The problem is that Vedic images of early colonization and agriculture cannot be satisfactorily integrated into what is known about the archaeology of this region. So, for example, while there are allusions in the Satapatha Brahmana (c. 700 BC) about agriculture being carried to the banks of the Gandak river in Bihar by the putative Aryans in the first half of the first millennium BC, excavations have revealed that in the third millennium BC itself, there were rice-cultivating agricultural

communities in that area. For understanding the ancient settlement geography of the Ganga valley, it is better to focus on the various features of the archaeological column and its various branches, rather than seek ‘confirmation’ for religious texts.

Geography and Environment The Ganga river, which gives the valley its name, emerges from the icy Gaumukh cave in the central Himalayas and is known at that point as the Bhagirathi. In its early course, it resembles a mountain torrent, which assumes the name Ganga after its confluence with the Alaknanda river at Devaprayag. After crossing Hardwar, the river flows out of the mountains into the plains that it has helped to create. These plains stretch for hundreds of kilometers and become deltaic in the east of the Indian subcontinent, where the Ganga’s waters enter the Bay of Bengal, combined with those of the Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers. Along the way, the meager river which emerges into the plains becomes majestic and swollen as it receives the waters of major and minor rivers across north India: the Yamuna, Ramganga, Tons, Gomati, Ghaghara, Gandak, Sai, Kali Nadi, Sarayu, Kosi, and their numerous tributary systems. More than 60 percent of the water flowing into the Ganga plains comes from Himalayan sources, while 40 percent comes from the peninsula. Unlike the Indus system where the five Punjab rivers combine to form a united stream, the Ganga system is constantly enriched by tributary rivers as it flows towards the direction of increasing rainfall. The deeply entrenched river that today makes its way across the north Indian plains is a Late

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(a) 12−8 ka

(b) 6−4 ka

(c) 2−0 ka Figure 2 Evolution of the Ganga plain (after Singh 2001–02): (a) 12–8 ka; (b) 6–4 ka, marked by the creation of lakes; (c) 2–0 ka, drying out and siltation of lakes and depressions.

Pleistocene–Early Holocene development (Figure 2). This was when the Late Pleistocene pattern of weak summer and strong winter winds witnessed a shift towards a vigorous southwest monsoon bringing summer rain. Consequently, the Ganga river which used to be a low-sinuosity, shallow braided drainage line, developed its present high-sinuosity meandering channel, cutting deep into its present bed. An important hydrographic feature of the middle Ganga plain is the large number of horseshoe lakes or marshy depressions known locally under the name of tal. Apparently, as the Ganga started cutting its bed and receding further south of its present bed, in the course of its withdrawal, many of the meanders of the old courses were converted into oxbow lakes. It is along the edges of such lakes, rich in aquatic fauna and marked by wild grasses including those with edible grains, that the locales of early Stone Age settlements in the valley have been identified (Figure 3). Today, a large number of these lakes have been filled up and converted into farmlands, although their morphology still allows them to be identified as extinct lakes.

There have been major shifts in the configuration of the drainage lines as well. The course of the Ganga itself, for instance, has undergone major alteration, especially marked in the lower section of its valley. Presently, the Ganga meets the sea in two channels: the Bhagirathi–Hoogly in the west and the Padma in the east. The Padma is the major channel of the Ganga, receiving the waters of the Brahmaputra and the Meghna rivers which carry between themselves the entire drainage of the northeast. However, till the twelfth century, the Padma was only a spill channel of the Bhagirathi–Hooghly. Between the 12th and 16th centuries the significance of the two flows was more or less even, but from the sixteenth century onwards, the flow of the Padma became more significant. Along with climatic and hydrographic shifts, the vegetational history of the Ganga valley has also been a shifting one. Today, forests and woodlands have practically disappeared but till the 1840s, a large part of the area was densely forested. Pollen analysis together with archaeozoological evidence for the presence of wild boar, a number of species of deer,

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elephant, rhinoceros, and water buffalo in the middle Ganga valley suggest an environment made up of forests, grasslands, and marshes. The magnitude of the ecological shift can be gauged in relation to the Rhinoceros unicornis, which lives in open country, well adapted to a swampy habitat. This animal was present at archaeological sites in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, underlining the existence of a conducive climate and vegetation cover. Changes in the forest cover extend into the deltaic region. The immense estuarine Sunderbans forest, named after the Sundari (Heritiera formes) plant which is endemic in the region, has a shifting history. Palynological investigations of a series of profiles have shown that a forest resembling the current mangroves of the Sunderbans extended up to Calcutta about 2640 and 7030 years ago. The general picture of the area in and around Calcutta is that of a landscape frequently transgressed by sea water but also getting fresh water from rivers. Finally, a general point about the minerally poor character of the Ganga valley needs to be addressed. Geographers and historians have frequently emphasized this as a permanent disability of this large stretch of alluvium. What has not been sufficiently highlighted is that this lack of resources is compensated by the presence of resource-rich highlands towards the north and the south. The Chhotanagpur

plateau, for instance, provides a kind of backdrop, from the Gaya region till the western section of the Bengal delta. This mineral-rich plateau has always been the most important source of raw materials to the protohistoric and historic Gangetic segments that are adjacent to it. Similarly, a large area of the middle Ganga valley is marked by the presence of the Kaimurs and the Sonabhadra plateau on its south. The interaction of the stone-devoid riverine plain with the southern plateau goes back to the Early Holocene when Mesolithic settlements using microliths and other stone objects become sharply visible. Again, the use of iron in the Lucknow region of the upper Ganga valley in the early second millennium BC has to be understood in relation to the rich iron ore-bearing area at the fringe of Banaras. There seems to have been a distributive network in place which articulated the supply of smelted bloomery iron from the southern hill fringe to a section of the Ganga plains. So, even though the Gangetic alluvium lacks stone and metal ore, it could and did easily access resources from the hilly outliers that fringed it.

Archaeological Geography A great deal of archaeological research has been done on the sites and sequences in the various segments of

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the Ganga plain. This section provides a broad overview of the geographical distribution of the sites, dates, and associated artifacts from the Palaeolithic till the early historic period. Upper Ganga Valley: Palaeolithic Presence

The Gangetic alluvium is fringed by hills and plateaux where Palaeolithic sites and long stratigraphic sequences are fairly common. The Ganga valley, however, has only one documented Palaeolithic site. This is Kalpi which lies on the right bank of the Yamuna river, in the southern segment of the upper Ganga plain. There is nothing specifically noteworthy about the flora or fauna of Kalpi. Its importance is locational; the town of Kalpi guarded a main crossing of the Yamuna and was the starting point for expeditions from the valley section towards the north into central India and the Deccan. The lithological succession recorded in the Kalpi section of the Yamuna river is composed of three units or events which reveal a changing Palaeo-environment. Event I (76 þ 11 ka to 69 þ 13 ka) was marked by a moderate to dry climate. It does not contain any humanly modified material, although the calcrete conglomerate at the contact of Events I and II contains quartzite pebbles with broken faces and worked-bone artifacts. The sediments of Event II (mid-point dated to 45 þ 9 ka) underline humid conditions. They have yielded rich vertebrate fossils – an elephant tusk and its shoulder blade, molars of Equus, Bovids, Bos, elephant, hippopotamus, and skeletal remains of crocodiles and turtles. Several specimens of human femur have been retrieved and humanly modified bone pieces – with flake scars and sickle-shaped edges, and a bone splinter with black patina and three parallel lines – which are Event III sediments (basal section date 43 þ 7 ka) reveal that, towards the upper part, the climate had become increasingly dry. The Event II lithic and bone industry seems to be Middle Palaeolithic; pebble tools comprise 79.4 percent of the total lithic assemblage. Similar fossil-rich horizons have also been recorded at Phaphamau in the Allahabad area, in the cliff section of the Ganga river near Banaras, and in a well section of a bridge near Bhagalpur in Bihar. These horizons, however, did not yield human artifacts. Kalpi, for the first time, has revealed Palaeolithic artifacts in association with such fossils, and has added a new dimension to the distribution of Palaeolithic sites in northern India. Specialized Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers

Mesolithic clusters in and around the Ganga plains are mainly in the Allahabad–Banaras zone. There are a large number of contemporaneous open air and

rock shelter occurrences on the eastern fringe of the Kaimurs/Vindhyas, but since these are not in the valley itself, they cannot be treated as part of the Ganga sequence. In the Ganga alluvium, there are around 200 open-air sites, generally small and marked by a handful of microliths. There are, however, some larger settlements – Damdama, Mahadaha, and Sarai Nahar Rai – which have provided extensive evidence of a deep-rooted Mesolithic occupation of the central Ganga alluvium. These are not temporary camp sites but settlements that were continuously inhabited. Three separate areas have been demarcated at Mahadaha: a burial-cum-settlement area occupying the central position within the settlement, a butchering area between the settlement and the western margins of the lake where it was situated, and a lake area where excavations have revealed a significant amount of occupational debris in what was once the bottom of the lake. Several circular and oval hearths were found inside the burial-cum-settlement section; the excavated hearth yielded charred bones. The butchering area was used for butchering animals like cattle, hippopotamus, pig, turtle, and most frequently, deer. It was also used for making bone tools and ornaments. That the lake area yielded thousands of bones suggests that the debris was pushed deliberately into the lake. Damdama is located at the confluence of two branches of a drainage line called the Tambura Nala. Like Mahadaha, it has yielded various species of animals, with as many as six varieties of deer. There are plant remains from the site as well, mostly of different wild varieties, with a recent analysis also suggesting the presence of domesticated rice. Hearths, in addition to their use for cooking, were also connected with the manufacture of stone and bone tools. Extensive evidence of burials containing skeletons of males, females, and children has been revealed from within settlements. Those at Sarai Nahar Rai are in the form of shallow, oblong pits with tapering sides, with microliths as grave goods. A microlithic arrowhead was also found inside the rib bones of a skeleton, indicating in this case, the cause of death of the individual. Osteoarthritis was the major pathological feature of these skeletons; stress markers indicate activities like spear-throwing, stone-throwing, and using sling shots. The Mahadaha graves are shallow and elliptical and the grave goods fairly extensive. These comprise arrowheads, animal bones, pieces of hematite, necklaces, ear ornaments, and bone rings. There are two double burials, a male and female together, and a young adult male and an adult male in another. There are many more double burials at Damdama, as many as six, of which five contained a male and female together. The sixth grave provided skeletal remains of two males and a female.

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Incidentally, year-long burial and habitation has been assumed on the basis of the occurrence of bandicoot rats at Mahadaha and Damdama, and on the basis of the study of the orientations of these graves in relation to azimuth. The Ganga Mesolithic, as has been pointed out, is geographically concentrated around meander lakes and streams which were formed around 8000 and 6000 BP. It is likely that large-scale Mesolithic habitations coincided with the formation of these lakes. The C-14 date from Mahadaha and the TL date from Damdama of the sixth and fifth millennium BC support this hypothesis. At the same time, the beginnings of the Mesolithic can go as far back as the beginning of the Holocene. Damdama, for instance, is situated on a rivulet which must have been a flowing channel at the time of occupation. Such channels are known to have ceased by 8000 BP. If this is correct, then Damdama had to be occupied much before this date. The dates from the central Ganga plain have important implications in relation to the early evidence of agriculture from the same geographical zone. This evidence will be discussed in detail below. At this point, it may be underlined that there are indications that it is not a stagewise evolution that is witnessed here with incipient agriculturists replacing hunter-gatherers. On the contrary, Mesolithic huntergatherers and the first agricultural communities were coexisting in this tract, with the former marked by a degree of sedentism and an intensive exploitation of plants that is usually associated with groups practicing agriculture. Early Agriculture

An early transition from food gathering to food production has recently been established in the middle Ganga plains, around the Sarayu valley of Uttar Pradesh. This concerns the early cultivation of rice but before spelling out the nature of the evidence, related issues concerning the beginning of food production in the subcontinent in general and the Vindhyan edge of the Sarayu and its contiguous alluvial plains in particular, need to be clarified. South Asia saw the emergence and evolution of agriculture and animal domestication in multiple zones. The earliest center for the cultivation of wheat and barley (and the independent domestication of the latter) from c. eighth millennium BC onwards, is at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan (see Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands). The possibility of an early transition from hunting-gathering cultures to agriculture and pastoralism in certain other areas may also be considered, although the evidence is ambiguous. For instance, in the Ladakh region, the Neolithic site of Giak is as early as the sixth millennium BC

(calibrated radiocarbon date), although another site of the same cultural complex has yielded a c. 1000 BC date. Another such case is that of Rajasthan, where several salt lakes have yielded a ‘cerelia’ type of pollen in a c. 7000 BC context, along with comminuted charcoal pieces. This is apparently indicative of forest clearance and the beginning of some sort of agriculture. However, to archaeologically confirm the lake evidence, food-producing cultures of similar antiquity will have to be discovered in Rajasthan. In the case of the Ganga valley, it was the peninsular edge of the central plains, marked by the sites of Koldihwa and Kunjhun which showed earlyNeolithic stratums representing rice-producing communities. There were problems, though, concerning the chronology of cultivation since, of the nine radiocarbon dates of Koldihwa, only three go back to the seventh and sixth millennia BC. However, there is now much clearer evidence from recent excavations at Lahuradeva (Sant Nagar district) in Uttar Pradesh which, importantly, suggests that such early rice cultivation was not confined to the Vindhyan hills but extended into the Gangetic alluvium. The microcharcoal recovered from the 2.8 m thick sediment succession of the lake on the edge of which Lohuradeva’s mound is situated, suggests fire caused by slash-and-burn cultivation in the area from 10 000 BP. The lowest archaeological deposits of the site have yielded domesticated rice a little later; these are dated to 8259 BP (calibrated). This occurs in the lowest level in association with both wild rice (Oryza rupifogon) and foxtail millet (Setaria sp.). Husk marks of rice are also embedded in the core of a number of potsherds in this earliest phase of cultural occupation there – IA-which is marked by coarse red ware and blackand-red ware, with cord impressions on its exterior. The beginning of food production in the Indian subcontinent is a multihued tapestry in which the early presence of rice in the central Ganga plains forms an important strand, underlining that this zone was part of an early nuclear center of agriculture. Advanced Agriculturists

The first stage of sustained village growth in and across the Ganga valley is chronologically later than the beginning of agriculture witnessed in its central segment. Generally speaking, there is widespread growth of agricultural communities in the upper and central Ganga plains from the late third millennium– early second millennium BC, while in the lower Ganga valley, the radiocarbon dates are squarely in the second millennium BC. The term used to describe these cultures is ‘Neolithic– Chalcolithic’. This is not a particularly logical classificatory label but has been extensively used in Indian archaeological literature to

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describe early village cultures in areas that are outside the geographical ambit of the Harappan civilization (see Asia, South: Indus Civilization). The term includes pure Neolithic communities with a predominantly stone technological component and those groups that are ‘Chalcolithic’ , in the sense that they use both stone and copper. Additionally, early iron-using advanced agricultural communities and groups are also discussed here. In many instances, the use of iron entered into the productive system without producing any major changes in those early contexts. In eastern India, for example, the Chalcolithic black-and-red ware culture became iron-using towards the end of the second millennium BC. Bahiri, Mangalkot, and Pandu Rajar Dhibi in Bengal are examples of this and, as we know, the birth of cities in that zone was several centuries later. Moreover, there is remarkable continuity in terms of crop patterns and settlement locales. Therefore, it is logical to discuss Neolithic– Chalcolithic and ironusing agricultural societies as part of the same protohistoric agricultural horizon. The impact of the use of iron on the Gangetic valley was slow and steady; it does not seem to have had consequences that are visible in the archaeological record. On the contrary, there is a gap of more than a thousand years between the appearance of iron in this region and the emergence of urban horizons. Multiple regionally distinctive archaeological cultures dominate the Ganga valley; their presence can only be mentioned in passing here. In Bengal, a primarily rice-cultivating horizon of black-and-red ware sites – roughly 70 Chalcolithic and iron age blackand-red ware sites – spread across valleys west of the Bhagirathi. The river valleys are several, from Dwaraka to the Kasai as one moves north to south, where the rivers flow from the west to the east into the Bhagirathi. Moving along the Ganga into Bihar, in its southern segment which is known to have a long prehistoric segment, no early Neolithic or farming community is known. On the other hand, in the alluvial plains of northern Bihar there are several such sites – Chirand, Chechar-Kutubpur, Senuar, Maner, and Taradih are some of the important ones. These are riverbank sites with Chirand, Maner, and Chechar-Kutubpur on the Ganga itself. Their cultural deposits indicate a secure, long presence. Chirand is an example of this; its Neolithic stratum (Period 1) is 3.5 m thick. It is marked by Neolithic axes, bone and antler implements, along with a rich microlithic industry. The ornaments are equally diverse – in bone, ivory, agate, carnelian, jasper, steatite, and faience. The farming pattern is a broad-based one with the remains of crops like rice, wheat, barley, and lentil while the animal remains include domesticated cattle

as also wild animals like elephant and rhinoceros. Most importantly, this represents pre-metallic agricultural villages that largely thrived in the late third millennium BC, possibly continuing into the first century of the second millennium BC. Subsequently, they were to become metal-using cultures marked by black-and-red pottery. Towards Uttar Pradesh, in its eastern segment, Lohuradeva which marked, as we saw, a very early rice-cultivating site, in this phase (Period 1B, late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC) saw a profuse occurrence of black-slipped ware, which has been described as the hallmark of the developed farming phase of the central Ganga plains. In the middle of the second millennium BC, the southern segment of this region saw the emergence of a long archaeological sequence at places like Imlidih, Narhan, and Sohgaura marked by preNarhan, Narhan, and black-and-red ware horizons. Basically, what one witnesses is the consolidation of a broad-based plant regime which includes rice, barley, varieties of wheat and millet, and also other cultivars like lentil and gram. Further west, in the upper Ganga valley and the Yamuna–Ganga doab, it is again late third millennium BC cultures which mark the beginning of long archaeological sequences that eventually evolved into a phase marked by urban centers (Figure 4). These cultures are: the late Harappan culture, ochre-colored pottery culture, black-and-red ware culture and the painted gray ware culture (the last two are iron-bearing horizons). The ochrecolored pottery culture is possibly a late manifestation of the same complex in the Rajasthan plain. A clarification about the plethora of cultures that are mentioned here is necessary. These are cultures that have been named in a number of ways: the designation of ‘late Harappan’ suggests successor groups that devolved from the mature urban Harappan tradition; others are designated on the basis of the sites where they were first discovered (Narhan is an example), while a few are named after the pottery that is typical of the said culture (painted gray ware and ochre-colored pottery are some such cultures). In the case of cultures that are named after a pottery type, this does not mean that this was the only type of pottery that was used and manufactured by such a society. For example, painted gray ware that gives its name to first millennium BC Iron Age culture of the upper Gangetic plain, in most cases, constituted less than 15% of the total ceramic assemblage and coexisted with plain gray, black-and-red, black-slipped, fine red-slipped and unslipped and coarse red wares. But the reason why it has been used to designate this cultural phase is because it is its archetypal pottery. On the question of pottery cultures, a clarification about one of them – the black-and-red ware

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culture – is necessary. On the one hand, black-and-red ware gives its name to a specific culture of the upper Gangetic plains, as also to a culture in the middle and lower Gangetic plains. This does not mean that the protohistoric farming cultures that used this pottery were a homogeneous cultural entity. The shapes and designs are different as is the time range. For instance, the black-and-red ware culture of the upper Gangetic plains is an early second millennium BC phenomenon while the black-and-red ware culture of Bengal is a second–first millennia BC phenomenon. The picture is one of great diversity made up of Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and iron-bearing farming cultures. This is a diversity which has important implications for understanding the evolution of the agricultural geography of the Ganga valley. It clearly underlines that that no one culture or one society can claim to be the harbinger or pioneer in the creation of a strong agricultural base there. The situation in the doab is qualitatively different from that in eastern

Uttar Pradesh. Again, the communities in the latter region, in their trajectory of cultural development are qualitatively different from the manner in which village cultures in Bihar evolved. What is common to them is that, in more ways than one, they represent a kind of watershed for the advent of stable agricultural societies in their respective tracts. It is from this period onwards that long columns of archaeological cultures become visible and the fact that there are few gaps in the sequence also means that we are looking at fairly continuous occupations. One aspect that emerges clearly from the archaeology and geography of the Neolithic– Chalcolithic and Iron Age farming communities is the growth in population and the evolution of a complex settlement pattern. In the Kanpur district (Uttar Pradesh), for instance, whereas there were only nine black-and-red ware sites, the number of sites of the succeeding painted gray ware culture is 46. Moreover, there is a clear hierarchy in the settlement sizes. While

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as many as 38 of them can be considered as small villages, four seem to be large villages while four of them would be considered as regional centers. Generally speaking, this kind of multi-tiered settlement hierarchy with settlements that range below one hectare to a few that are around five hectares or so is considered as a reliable index of the evolution of a complex society. From this base, eventually cities and state structures would emerge. Another key variable that one sees emerging in this period is an organized articulation of trade networks which brought various kinds of resources to the Gangetic plain. This can be clearly seen in the painted gray ware phase. The painted gray ware phase, incidentally, provided the base for the emergence of urban centers in the upper Gangetic plains. An important site which reveals the kind of raw materials that were used in this period is Atranjikhera. Here, there are agate, carnelian, quartz, and marble beads; also objects of ordinary stone like pestles and whetstones of red sandstone and limestone; a shell fragment; almost two dozen copper objects; as many as 135 iron objects including iron slag (which shows local metalcrafting/smelting); and chir pine (Pinus Roxburghii) . None of these – stone, metals, pinewood – is locally available. It is likely that there was already a class of traders that was procuring such raw materials so that local manufacture could be sustained. Territorial States and Urban Centers

Till now, this essay has used modern geographical and political designations to describe the different units and subunits that make up the Gangetic valley. What, though, were the ancient names of the geopolitical orbits in this vast tract, and how can they be delineated? This is essential for understanding the political geography of the Ganga valley. Ancient territorial designations are mentioned in Indian literary sources ranging from later Vedic to Buddhist literature. Their presence coincides with the process of early historic growth which can be dated from c. 700 BC onwards. In the archaeological record, the marker of the advent of the historical period in the Gangetic plains is the Northern Black Polished Ware which appears after the painted gray ware in the upper Ganga valley and after the black-and-red ware in the middle Ganga valley. Early historic city sites have been identified across the valley as have been the communication lines and networks that connected them with each other and the valley as a whole. In the first phase of state formation in India (c. sixth century BC), multiple states called ‘janapadas’ can be identified in this valley. As many as 16 early states are mentioned in Buddhist sources, an overwhelming

number of these situated in the Ganga plain. These are: Kasi, Kosala, Anga, Magadha, Vajji/Vrijji, Malla, Vamsa/Vatsa, Kuru, and Panchala. While sacred geography cannot be explored here, it is worth remembering that this is also where religions like Buddhism and Jainism established early roots and in the same time period, under their founders Gautama Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira respectively. Substantial support for them came from the urban centers of the Ganga valley and the mercantile prosperity that marked them. In all these polities, urban centers have been identified, several of which were also political capitals of their respective states. Kuru and Panchala were firmly entrenched in the upper Ganga plain marked by cities like Indraprastha, Hastinapura, and Ahichchatra. The city of Kasi is identified with the area of modern Varanasi on the left bank of the Ganga and would have been situated between the Varuna and Asi streams. The Kasi region extended from the Ganga towards the east up to the Ghaghra, and on the north up to Jaunpur and (part of) Sultanpur. Kosala’s successive capital cities were Ayodhya/Saketa and Sravasti., while the state covered both banks of the Ghaghra/Saryu river. Malla janapada lay to the west of the Gandak river, with its capital in Kusinara, and included the modern Padrauna and Deoria areas as well. The territory of Vatsa was focused around cities like its capital Kausambi on the right bank of the Yamuna, ancient Prayag or Jhusi on the left bank of the Ganga, and Bhita and Kara on the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga respectively. Magadha radiated in a linear fashion between the Kiul and Karamanasa rivers which separate modern Bihar from Uttar Pradesh as far as the point where the Hazaribagh area begins. Its earlier capital was Rajagriha and later Pataliputra. Anga janapada lay spread between Rajmahal in the south and Kiul/ Lakhisarai in the north with Champa on the northern outskirts of Bhagalpur as its capital. Finally, a conglomeration of republican janapadas, known as the Vajji or Lichchhavi confederacy, dominated the modern plain of north Bihar with its capital at Vaisali. From a geopolitical perspective, the primary focus of early state formation was the middle Gangetic valley. It was a middle Gangetic state, that of Magadha, which eventually become the nucleus of an empire under the Nanda dynasty . Its first king Mahapadmananda (c. 355 BC) ruled virtually all of north India up to the Yamuna–Ganga doab on the one hand, and the Deccan on the other (see Asia, South: India, Deccan and Central Plateau). Again, under the Mauryan dynasty (c. 324–187 BC), with their base in Magadha, a pan-Indian empire extending from south Afghanistan to the Chittagong coast and from Kashmir to peninsular India was established. The

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subcontinental domination of an empire with a Gangetic valley power base did not survive the end of the Mauryan dynasty. Subsequently, the Sunga dynastic orbit shrank back to the earlier orbit, from Magadha to central India. In the early centuries AD, the Gangetic valley was brought within the empire of the Kushanas, as they extended their Oxus–Indus base. By the beginning of the fourth century AD, the focus shifted back to a middle Gangetic power base, with the advent of the Gupta dynasty that was based in Magadha (Figure 5). Political units and urban centers also extended beyond the upper and middle Ganga valley. The ancient geographical units there ranged from Samatata and Pundravarddhana in the trans-Meghna area of Bangladesh and the Barind northern tracts respectively to Vanga and Suhma in the deltaic coastal tracts of Bangladesh and Bengal. In the estuarine and coastal belt, there were around ten urban sites; their general configuration was largely riverine. Chandraketugarh appears to be the largest among them, a fortified settlement measuring one mile square, with occupational remains outside it as well. Going back to the Mauryan period, the most spectacular antiquities from this city are its thousands of terracottas marked by erotic, religious, and narrative themes. Chandraketugarh’s location in relation to a river is not obvious, although the general area itself is crisscrossed by numerous drainage channels. Among the drainage lines, it was along the old channel of the Ganga, known as Adi Ganga or the original Ganga, that settlements dating to the Mauryan period were clustered (Figure 6). The sites are mainly riverine. Boral, near the Adi Ganga in the southern section of the Calcutta area, yielded

antiquities from the late centuries BC till the end of the first millennium AD. It is at Gangasagar that the Ganga pours into the sea, with such force that her muddy waters are distinguishable for six hundred kilometers into the Bay of Bengal. Naturally, this area has an ancient and modern significance. Where the original Ganga joined the sea, is Mandirtala (on the Sagar island) which has yielded antiquities that go back to early centuries AD. Again, there is a modern temple at or near the spot where the Ganga was supposed to have entered the sea where, annually on the day of winter solstice, pilgrims from all over India gather to worship. This temple has had to be shifted from time to time in response to the encroachment by the sea but the sanctity attached to this place of confluence is abiding.

Concluding Observations Three issues emerge from a study of the ancient landscape of the Ganga valley. First, the Ganga plain, from the time when pioneer settlers first occupied it, has been integrally linked with the zones that fringe it, from the Rajasthan plain to the Chhotanagpur plateau. While the cultural ramifications of those links become much sharper during the historical period, this was an expansion of the preexisting connections that were established during the protohistoric phase. Second, in terms of agricultural geography and settlement archaeology, a secure village base across the Ganga plain was created by Neolithic–Chalcolithic farmers. In several instances, the crops that continued to be cultivated in the various areas till recently, were first farmed by third–second millennia BC cultivators.

Figure 5 Gupta period sculptures on the Jahangira rock in the middle of the Ganga river.

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Figure 6 Distribution map of urban sites in the lower Ganga plains, especially around the old channel of the Ganga river.

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The nucleated village form is also a legacy of that phase, with continuous occupation at a large number of settlements which were first occupied by these advanced agriculturists. This does not mean that the successors of the people who first inhabited these spots continued to live there for centuries on end. All that it means is that new groups of people came and settled in the very areas, and frequently at the same sites, where farmers had first established their villages in the third and second millennia BC. Finally, political authority has location. The cartography of the political landscape of ancient India reveals the centrality of the middle Ganga plain in the process of early state formation. Eventually, political unification and the first subcontinental empire of India also came to be based in the Magadha section of that tract. See also: Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Buddhist Archaeology; India, Deccan and Central Plateau; India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South; Indus Civilization; Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier; Megaliths; Neolithic Cultures; Paleolithic Cultures; Sri Lanka.

Further Reading Bose S (2003) Forests and Fields in the Middle Gangetic Plains. MPhil. Thesis Delhi: Department of History, University of Delhi. Chakrabarti DK (2001) Archaeological Geography of the Ganga Plain. Delhi: Permanent Black. Chakrabarti DK (2006) The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Saith S and Kesavan M (1989) A Journey Down the Ganga. New Delhi: Lustre Press. Tewari R (2001–2002) Excavation at Lahuradeva, District Sant Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. Puratattva 32: 54–59. Singh IB (2002) Late quaternary evolution of the Ganga Plain and proxy records of climatic change, neotectonics and anthropogenic activity. Pragdhara 12: 1–25.

India, Deccan and Central Plateau Dorian Q Fuller, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary ashmounds Large mounds of ash resulting from Neolithic cattle dung accumulation and burning, which are characteristic of parts of South India. Buddhism A historical religion of ancient India which remains an important religion in many parts of Asia today.

Deccan A plateau of south-central India between the Eastern Ghats and the Western Ghats. Dravidian languages A large family of languages spoken especially in southern India and northern Sri Lanka that includes Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. historical linguistics The study of language change over time in a particular language and the relationships between languages and reconstruction of ancient ancestral languages. hominin Evolutionary ancestors and relatives of humans. Jainism A historical religion of ancient India. palaeoenvironmental records The record of the prehistoric environment of an archaeological site, using the methodologies of geology, botany, palynology, and archaeozoology.

The term ‘Deccan’ derives ultimately from the ancient Sanskrit dakshina, which referred to ‘the South’. By the colonial period it came to be used to refer to the Indian Peninsula, south of the river Narmada, as opposed to ‘Hindustan’ for the regions north of the Peninsula. Sometimes it is used to indicate the interior plateau of the peninsula as opposed to Concan or coastal plains. Authors will sometimes include Central India in the Deccan and anything separated from the northern Ganges plains by the Vindhya hills and demarcated from the west by the Aravalli hills of Rajasthan. Central and peninsular India can be distinguished on the grounds of cultural and physical geography. Central India and the Peninsula are often considered together as the Deccan region. The core of the Deccan then is the modern states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, while some consideration will be given to adjacent Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Chattisgarh in the north, and Tamil Nadu in the southeast. This peninsular region, south of the Tapti River, and Central India between Tapti River and the Vindhya hill ranges, that fringe the Ganges basin, is geographically distinct from the wide alluvial plains of the Indus and Ganges. In terms of culture history the peninsular region is dominated by languages in the Dravidian family distinct from the Indo-Aryan (Indo-European) languages of northern and northwestern South Asia (Figure 1). Even in Central India (Madhya Pradesh) and the northern peninsula (Maharashtra), where Indo-Aryan languages are spoken today there is evidence from place names, vocabulary, and marriage traditions to suggest the former presence of Dravidian languages. On the northeastern part of the region is the center of diversity of the distinct Munda language family. Geologically, it differs in being composed of ancient metamorphic rocks together with the large volcanic bedrock of the northern Deccan Traps. This geology forms hills with plateau areas between in the south (Karnataka and Andhra) and the north (Madhya Pradesh), and in middle the Deccan Traps

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Figure 1 A map of South Asia showing the recent distribution of non-Indo-European languages, including the subfamilies of Dravidian languages that dominate the Deccan and the Munda languages found mainly in eastern India. The important geographic boundaries of the Aravalli and Vindhya hills are indicated.

(mainly Maharashtra) have produced a plateau in which rivers have carved out their valleys. Central India and the southern and eastern Deccan are dominated by Archaean (Pre-Cambrian) granites and gneisses, while in between the Maharashtra region is mainly Cretaceous basalt (the Deccan Trap) (Figure 2). In general, the Deccan Trap has decomposed into clay-rich, thick, black soils, while the granitic zones are dominated by red and brown sandy soils. The granitic zones are broken up by other smaller geological regions, such as The Dharwar Schists in the southwest, which contain exploitable deposits of iron, and sporadic siliceous rocks favored for prehistoric flaked lithics. Other schist belts in Karanataka contain deposits of gold. A group of important geological regions are the Purana basins, or Gondwana formations. These geological zones are characterized by sedimentary rocks, especially limestones, sandstones, and shales, with some quartzites and igneous intrusions. The resulting soils are patchy, but with generally more water-retentive clays forming over shales and limestones, and sandier patches

around quartzitic sandstone. They are locations of rich Palaeolithic archaeological records, probably in part due to the favorable local conditions that they engendered, such as springs and raw-material availability. They also are good sources for favored raw materials for lithic tool production, including quartzite and limestone used in the Lower to Middle Palaeolithic and finer siliceous materials such as chert favored from the Late Palaeolithic through the Neolithic. The climate of the Deccan is determined by the Indian Ocean monsoon cycles and regional topography. During the summer months moisture-laden air flows from the Indian Ocean to the southwest, dropping rainfall over most of India (the Southwest Monsoon). Rainfall (Figure 3) is heaviest along the west coast which is characterized by steep hillslopes and cliffs of the Western Ghats, which separate the interior Deccan Plateau from the coastal plain. Along the Western Ghats tropical rainforests occur (Figure 4). Further east the Western Ghats create a rainshadow making the interior of the Deccan

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Deccan traps Gondwanas Vindhya system (including Kurnool supergroup) Cuddapah system Dharwar system Basement complex, including granites

Figure 2 Simplified geological map of peninsular India, showing the distribution of the younger volcanic Deccan Traps, which produce fertile black soils, and the very ancient granites and gneisses of the southern and eastern peninsula, which produced sandy soils. Some of the smaller formations are found in basins which have been foci of Palaeolithic finds.

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Figure 4 Western Ghats rainforests view towards coastal plain near Amboli, Sindhudurg District, Maharashtra.

Plateau semi-arid and characterized by scrub-savanna vegetation in its driest tracks and open deciduous woodlands elsewhere (Figure 5). Trees in these woodlands are deciduous due to the long, hot dry season from February to June. Toward the eastern side of the peninsula, rainfall again increases favoring more woodland than scrub. East of the Western Ghats the interior plateau has gradual eastwards drop in elevation indicated by the drainage of all the major rivers towards the eastern side of the peninsula. The archaeological record of South India goes back to the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic (see Asia, South: India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South) (Figure 6). While this may represent as much as 2 million years, which is argued to be the case for the Lower Palaeolithic in Pakistan, current dating evidence for the Deccan region normally puts back the earlier Palaeolithic about 250 000–350 000 years, although one important site, the Isampur quarry, has been suggested to be 1.2 million years old. The only hominin fossil

yet found in India is a cranium from Hathnora in the Narmada Valley, suggested to represent Homo heidelbergiensis at about 250 000–300 000 years ago. This find could suggest a separate dispersal from Africa, associated with middle Acheulean tools, as opposed to the earlier Acheulean of Isampur that is presumed to have been made by Homo erectus. Recognition of a distinct Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition remains problematic but can be argued to have occurred probably in the past 75 000 years. Some authors have preferred to call these industries the Middle Stone Age and Late Stone Age, as comparisons with African materials are generally closer than those of the European Palaeolithic. A biological transition from early humans to anatomically modern humans is inferred to have occurred between 70 000 and 100 000 years ago as a result of immigrant populations from Africa, although archaeological evidence to document this evidence is still lacking. Throughout these long periods archaeology suggests low human

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Figure 5 Typical Acacia scrub of interior Deccan with pastoralists, Cuddapah District, Andhra Pradesh.

(or hominin) population densities and economies that are likely to have been mainly extractive rather than transformative of the landscape. The Deccan region boasts some of the most important Lower Palaeolithic sites in India. Focused Palaeolithic surveys have found high site densities, such as those in the Hungsi and Kaldagi valleys of Northern Karnataka as well as the Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh. Among important excavations is the 1.2 million years-old Isampur site in northern Karnataka, which represents a quarry and manufacture site for early Acheulean tools, in which all stages of production from bedrock quarrying can be detailed, and from which average transport distances of finished tools can be estimated from regional survey. Transport distances are surprisingly low with most tools apparently being discarded within 3.5 km of the quarry. Another important site is Attirampakam in Northern Tamil Nadu, where excavations in recent years have situated the Acheulean in stratigraphic context and environmental context. Late Pleistocene sites in peninsular India are significant for having Microlithic tool technology. While Microlithic industries found in surface survey have often been called Mesolithic with reference to European tradition, there is perhaps more to suggest comparison with later Pleistocene (Late Middle Stone Age) Africa. Finds from excavation in Sri Lanka, such as Badatomba-lena cave, indicate microliths and beads back to c. 30 000 BP. Recent excavations of a rock shelter at Jwalapuram (Kurnool District, western Andhra Pradesh) similarly indicate Microlithic industries beginning before 25 000 BP. Similar material was previously found further north at Patna. Such

industries are presumed to be associated with anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), although skeletal finds are few. Studies on genetics of modern groups, including indigenous populations of south India, suggest that some of the most ancient and diversified genetic lineages outside of Africa are to be found in the Deccan region, suggesting that modern humans had dispersed from Africa to southern India 50 000–100 000 years ago. In general, global palaeoenvironmental records suggest that it is in the Late Pleistocene and later Palaeolithic when humans began to use fire to modify the landscape, as suggested by various sedimentary records of microcharcoal. Evidence from the Sandynallah swamp in the Nilgiri Hills of South India suggests anthropogenic burning of vegetation from at least 35 000 BP, but a marked increase at c. 3500 BC, associated with late Mesolithic. Similarly, evidence from lakes in the Thar Desert (Rajasthan) suggests that anthropogenic burning peaks in the Early Holocene period, associated with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. With the Neolithic the advent of four important changes in technology and land use took place: animal herding, plant cultivation, sedentism, and pyrotechnology (initially ceramics). The earliest archaeologically recognized villages on the Indian Peninsula provide evidence for an economy incorporating domesticated animals and plant cultivation. They have tended to be studied as two distinct traditions, one in the northern Deccan, focused on Maharashtra and adjacent Madhya Pradesh, called the Deccan Chaloclithic, while the other focused on the Southern Deccan, mainly Karnataka and adjacent Andhra Pradesh and northwest Tamil Nadu, which is labeled

ASIA, WEST/India, Deccan and Central Plateau 699 Raisen Bhimbetka Hathnora fossils

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Figure 6 The general distribution of Palaeolithic sites or sites groups, with selected sites labeled.

as the Southern Neolithic (see Asia, South: Neolithic Cultures) (Figure 7). In terms of settlement pattern and aspects of cultural tradition, these are indeed distinct manifestations, with the Deccan Chalcolithic sites focused on the upper courses of rivers and their tributaries, while the core portion of the Southern Neolithic (Figure 8) tends to have sites placed away from the major rivers, and often on hilltops. The Southern Neolithic of India has long attracted attention as an early food-producing village culture in South Asia. Thanks to its distinctive ashmound sites, and the pioneering fieldwork of the geologist R. Bruce Foote, it was the first-documented Neolithic culture in South Asia, from the 1860s. Sites of this culture provide the earliest pastoralism in peninsular India, from c. 3000 BC. This early pastoralism is associated with the distinctive ‘ashmounds’, which are the sites where animal dung accumulated at

ancient penning sites and was episodically burnt, leading over a period of several decades to a few centuries to sometimes massive mounds, which have been discussed by some as Neolithic monuments. Within this tradition there are additional sites of human occupation with archaeobotanical evidence for a recurrent agricultural package based on two small millets (Brachiaria ramosa and Setaria verticillata) and two pulses (Vigna radiata and Macrotyloma uniflorum), all potentially domesticated from wild populations in South India. This Neolithic tradition continued to develop through the second millennium BC, during which time the first evidence for new crafts, including copper and textiles, and increasing evidence for trade occurs. Evidence of historical linguistics suggests that the Southern Neolithic and perhaps adjacent cultures can be connected to the ancestral speakers of South and Central Dravidian languages.

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Figure 7 The distribution of Neolithic/Chalcolithic sites in peninsular India indicating the distinct cultural zones, and foci of research, of the northern Deccan Chalcolithic and the Southern Neolithic. Within the Southern Neolithic the dashed line demarcates the distribution of the Ashmound Tradition, characterized by burnt dung mounds.

Further north in the Deccan Traps zone of Maharashtra and southwest Madhya Pradesh, early village sites show a somewhat different character and a different agricultural basis. Early sites occur on the lower Narmada and Tapti Rivers and date to 2300– 2000 BC. These archaeological cultures, such as the Kayatha, are often linked or thought to derive from earlier developments in Rajasthan connected with the Ahar tradition which can be taken back to before 3000 BC at the site of Balathal. In the second millennium BC sites become much more widespread, over a wider part of western Maharashtra, especially during the Malwa phase (1700–1500 BC)

and subsequent Jorwe period (1500–1200 BC). On sites of these phases, where systematic archaeobotany is available agriculture shows a mixture of summer crops, including those of the Ashmound Tradition to the south and winter crops, such as wheat, barley, and lentils, which had been the staple crops of the Indus Valley to the northwest. On the eastern side of the peninsula, along the northern Andhra Pradesh coast and in Orissa, a distinct Neolithic tradition is known from the second millennium BC, which has a different agricultural combination that included rice. Important social and technological changes occurred across the peninsula between 1400 and 800 BC. This

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Figure 8 South Deccan granitic landscape near Piklihal Neolithic site, Raichur District, Karnataka.

Figure 9 Denuded megalithic cemetery surface near Patupadu, Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh, 2004.

period is associated with the emergence of the Megalithic tradition, in which impressive stone-built burial monuments were constructed for selected individuals, probably elites (Figure 9). It is also during this period that iron metallurgy became established, with its new demands on extracting mineral resources and charcoal from woodlands. The construction of Megalithic may have emerged first in northern Karnataka and eastern Maharashtra (Vidarbha). In the South there is clear continuity from the Ashmound Neolithic tradition, whereas in Maharashtra Chalcolithic village sites toward the western part of the state appear to be largely abandoned, while new village sites emerge in the east together with Megalithic

burials (Figure 10). The Megalithic transition needs to be seen in the context of the development of political economies with new systems of wealth creation including craft production, and long-distance trade increased. This period provides the first good evidence for ‘cash crops’ such as cotton, flax, and seasonal tree fruits. In addition, the period witnessed the spread and adoption of rice by some groups on the peninsula. It may only be during this period, with the spread of rice agriculture, that settled agricultural communities emerged in the far South, including coastal and southern inland Tamil Nadu. In addition, rice agriculture went to the island of Sri Lanka during this period.

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Figure 10 Remnents of Megalithic cist and outer circle, Kodumanal, Tamil Nadu.

The Megalithic of South India is really a mosaic of local cultural traditions that shared traditions of constructing burial monuments from large stones and the use and production of iron tools and weapons. Earlier megaliths consisted of circles of large boulders (pit circles), while later forms included quarried and worked stone slabs that often lined a central cist. Burials were most often secondary, indicating the collecting together and depositing bones represented the end of a long and elaborate death ritual. Bones were sometime placed in a ceramic sarcophagus or on a bed and were normally accompanied by quantities of ceramics, mostly necked jars and bowls, suggesting association with larger-scale drinking, as well as iron weapons. The weapons, including swords, as well as some parts of bridles indicate associations with a warrior ideology. One important excavated site is Brahmagiri in Karnataka, where Mortimer Wheeler first placed the megaliths in clear chronological context. Megaliths are too few to account for most of the population and thus must represent monuments associated with elites and the emergence of more complex social hierarchies. In social evolutionary terms, many scholars have suggested that the Megalithic period represented ‘chiefdoms’. The Early Historic Period marks the beginnings of historically documented state polities, the emergence of selected urban centers in parts of South India, and the connected process of a more widespread hinterland of agricultural villages. This period can be defined as starting c. 250 BC, since during the reign of the emperor of Ashoka (of the Mauryan empire focused in the Ganges Valley, 273–232 BC), conquered parts of the peninsula, and left behind numerous edicts inscribed in the Brahmi script in parts of the Deccan (Figure 11). These include a pillar at

Amravati in the Godavari basin, and numerous rock inscriptions in northeastern Karnataka and adjacent Andhra Pradesh, such as those at Sannathi, Maski, and Brahmagiri – the latter two near significant Neolithic and Megalithic sites. North Indian sources at this time refer to regions in the south and suggest emergent polities. The first local dynasty documented on the Northern Peninsula with the rise of the Satavahana kings may date to c. 100 BC. In the far South, where later historical sources refer to the states of the Pandyas, Cholas, and Cheras, it might be suggested that these kingdoms emerged also around this time, and began to utilize their own Tamil–Brahmi script to write an early form of the Tamil language. It is during this period that North Indian religious traditions get established in the South, including Buddhism, Jainism, and some elements of Hinduism (which are mingled with local traditions). This period is also characterized by a significant level of longdistance trade across the Indian Ocean toward the West, which included the trade with the Roman Empire. Forest products, including the spices and lac (produced by scale insects feeding on certain tropical deciduous trees), were in demand as well as cotton textiles, pearls, and semiprecious stone beads. Black pepper and cotton in particular were major imports of the Roman world obtained from South Indian or West coast (Satavahana) ports, obtained in turn from interior areas. Finds of Roman coins, including hoards, are common from the first century AD in South India. Mostly, black pepper was probably traded from rainforest hunter-gatherers in the Western Ghats, while cotton was grown in the interior of Deccan. In subsequent centuries the volume of trade and interconnections with Southeast Asia also increased, as indicated by the appearance of Buddhist

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Figure 11 A map of early historical South India, indicating evidence for Ashokan inscriptions (of the Gangetic Mauryan Empire), representative finds of Roman coins or coin hoards, and carved cave shrines. A few important city sites are labeled. Names of some important early polities are indicated. The location of the much later Vijayanagara (fourteenth to sixteenth century) is indicated.

iconography and architectural styles in Southeast Asia. While there have been some important settlement site excavations from the early historic period, archaeology from that period onward focuses more on the study of monuments, their architecture, art history, and inscriptions. A widespread type of small monument is the hero-stone (Figure 12), an engraved slab commemorating the hero of a battle, often involving cattle-raiding. While some of these include inscriptions, many are simply figural. The Satavahana dynasty (focused in Maharashtra with a capital at Paithan on the Godavari River) began the northern Deccan tradition of carving shrines in caves. These may have begun already by the second or first century BC at Karla, while many more temples were created

out of rock in the early centuries AD, as at Nasik. Some of the best-known complexes of cave shrines date from the fifth to eighth century, including the painted caves of Ellora and the carved and heavily sculptured shrines of Ajanta near modern Aurangabad. These early cave shrines were largely Buddhist and sometimes Jain, in religious inspiration, although these religions were to decline and largely disappear from the sixth century. Free-standing temples also began to be built of stone or brick in the Early Historic period, although many of the better-known and preserved temples date from the eighth or ninth century onwards and are dedicated to Hindu gods and goddesses. Major Hindu temple building was also carried out in the South between the fifteenth and eighteenth century, when the Hindu-ruled South was culturally

704 ASIA, WEST/India, Deccan and Central Plateau

Figure 12 Three early hero-stones, Shimoga District, Karnataka, 1998.

opposed to northern India, which was under a series of Islamic rulers (especially, the Delhi sultanate and the Mughals). Of particular note is the evidence from the Vijayanagara kingdom, with its center at Hampi in Karnataka near modern Hospet. Founded in 1336 and lasting until the sack of its capital in 1565, the Vijayanagar kingdom has left a legacy of remarkable architecture and sculpture. Its capital city was described in glowing terms by an early Portuguese traveler, Domingo Paes, who visited in 1522. Architectural and epigraphic research on the monuments of its urban core and immediate hinterland has been, and continues to be, a major focus for research, while in the late 1980s and 1990s this was complemented by a large-scale intensive regional archaeological survey, studies of land use and ceramics. The trends of increased agricultural production, including that for craft, and extraction of wild products from woodlands for trade continued into the subsequent medieval periods and indeed into the colonial era. States throughout this period tended to encourage the creation of new settlements and the conversion of wooded ‘jungles’ into agricultural land, as indicated in land-grants and irrigation works (such as tank building). In the later medieval period, marked by the Delhi Sultante in northern India (from the thirteenth century), and Vijayanagara centered near Hospet in central Karnataka (from the midfourteenth century), urban centers and their craft producers grew as more efficient systems for the extraction of agricultural resources (through taxation) were devised, in addition to use of more intensive agricultural techniques. Such systems paved the way for the taxation and commercial organization of the Mughal empire and later colonial powers including British India. Through the medieval period there is increasing textual evidence for the establishment of

orchards. The process of converting wild woodlands into plantations increased greatly during the colonial period with demands for cinnamon, pepper, and later coffee and tea. Subsequently, especially from the nineteenth century, this plantation approach to wooded areas was extended to the production of key timber species, such as teak, for use in nineteenth-century British ship-building. For most of the last 2000 years, archaeological research in the Deccan has more of an art-historical, epigraphic, and architectural bent, with the notable exception of the work on the Vijayanagara capitol’s hinterland. For earlier prehistoric periods, excavation, survey, and artifact studies are the norm. In some areas important rock art concentrations are associated with the Mesolithic (e.g., in Kurnool District) and the Neolithic (e.g., in the Bellary and Rachiur areas). It should be noted that Neolithic and Iron Age cultures are often called ‘Protohistoric’ although there are no indigenous written sources.

See also: Africa, South: Late Pleistocene and Early

Holocene Foragers; Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Buddhist Archaeology; Ganges Valley; India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South; Indus Civilization; Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier; Megaliths; Neolithic Cultures; Paleolithic Cultures; Sri Lanka.

Further Reading Allchin FR (1963) Neolithic Cattle Keepers of South India. A Case Study of the Deccan Ashmounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allchin FR (1995) Early cities and states beyond the Ganges Valley. In: Allchin FR (ed.) The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia. The Emergence of Cities and States, pp. 123–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South 705 Asouti E and Fuller D (2007) Trees and Woodland in South India: An Archaeological Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Champakalakshmi R (1996) Trade, Ideology and Urbanization. South India 300 BC to AD 1300. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fuller DQ (2005) Ceramics, seeds and culinary change in Prehistoric India. Antiquity 79: 761–777. James HV and Petraglia MD (2005) Modern human origins and the evolution of behaviour in the Later Pleistocene record of South Asia. Current Anthropology 46(S): S3–S27. Korisettar R, Venkatasubbaiah PC, and Fuller DQ (2001) Brahmagiri and beyond: the archaeology of the Southern Neolithic. In: Settar S and Korisettar R (eds.) Indian Archaeology in Retrospect I. Prehistory, pp. 151–238. Delhi: Manohar. Michell G (1997) The Blue Guide: Southern India. New York: WW Norton. Petraglia MD (2005) Hominin responses to Pleistocene environmental change in Arabia and South Asia. In: Head MJ and Gibbard PL (eds.) Early–Middle Pleistocene Transitions: The Land-Ocean Evidence, pp. 305–319. London: Geological Society of London. Ray HP (2003) The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South Shanti Pappu, Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, Chennai, India ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Acheulian The name given to an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture associated with prehistoric hominins during the Lower Palaeolithic era across Africa and much of Asia and Europe. burin A special type of lithic flake with a chisel-like edge which prehistoric humans may have used for engraving or for carving wood or bone. chopper Pebble tools with an irregular cutting edge formed through the removal of flakes from one side of a stone.

Introduction India is rich in Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic sites, situated in diverse environmental contexts, and spanning the Middle to Late Pleistocene. The Indian Lower Palaeolithic is generally thought to consist of two technological traditions; viz. the Acheulian, which has bifacially flaked tools (handaxes and cleavers), along with others; and the Soan tradition comprising predominantly unifacial or bifacial pebble tools; and which is concentrated in northwest India and the adjoining region of Pakistan. The

Acheulian, distributed widely over Peninsular India concerns us here; and is generally bracketed between >350 kyr to around 150 kyr BP. This is succeeded by the Middle Palaeolithic (150–30 kyr BP), marked by an abundance of scrapers, points, and borers, along with the appearance of specialized flaking techniques. The Upper or Late Palaeolithic (30–10 kyr BP) in the Terminal Pleistocene, is marked by a technology dominated by blades and tools on blades and burins. This section focuses on South India, an artificial political division (a distinct geocultural region), comprising the modern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala (Figure 1). The first stone tool to be identified in the subcontinent (a Lower Palaeolithic artifact) was found at the site of Pallaveram, near Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by the British geologist Robert Bruce Foote in 1863. Foote discovered more than 400 prehistoric sites in southern India, documented their stratigraphic contexts, classified artifacts, and proposed hypotheses on prehistoric behavior. Discoveries by Foote (with his son, H. B. Foote) led to documentation of bone artifacts in the karstic cave complex of Kurnool in the state of Andhra Pradesh, which he believed resembled the ‘Magdalenian’ of France, and which were later classified as belonging to the Upper Palaeolithic phase. The first systematic attempt to place these industries in an environmental and chronological framework was initiated in the 1930s, by L. A. Cammiade and M. Burkitt. Working with artifacts from sites along the southeast coast of India (in the modern state of Andhra Pradesh), they divided the Indian Palaeolithic into four series (series I to IV) or cultural phases; roughly corresponding with the Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic; and associated these with climatic cycles of pluvials and interpluvials. Around the same time, H. De Terra and T. T. Paterson, working in northwest India as part of the Yale–Cambridge Expedition, placed Stone Age cultures within stratigraphic sequences associated with a sequence of river terraces, which in turn were correlated with Alpine glaciations. This scheme was later extended to the Kortallaiyar River basin, Tamil Nadu, among others, and Paterson chose to term Acheulian industries in this region as constituting the ‘Madras Palaeolithic’ after the city of Madras (modern Chennai) located nearby. Around the same time, V. D. Krishnawami’s studies in this region led to a clear distinction between the Lower Palaeolithic ‘Acheulian’ or ‘Madrasian’ industries, found over most of India; as compared to Soan traditions of northwest India. Later workers such as F. E. Zeuner, K. V. Soundara Rajan, and B. Allchin contributed further to understanding these cultures. The systematic study of various river basins was carried forward

706 ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South

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11 6

10

Hyderabad 7 R.Krishna 8 9 Andhra Pradesh 5 4 3 R.Koratallaiyar 12 Chennai R.Palar Tamil Nadu

Key 1. Hunsgi–Baichbal complex 2. Malaprabha–Ghatprabha complex 3. Rallakalava complex 4. Nellore complex 5. Cuddapah complex: Sagileru & Gunjana complexes 6. Kurnool complex: Kurnool complex; Giddalur complex 7. Nalgonda complex 8. Nagarjunakonda complex 9. Paleru complex 10. Vishakhapatnam complex 11. Krishna–Tungabhadra complex 12. Palar complex: Kortallaiyar/Arani/Coom complex 13. Kerala complex

SRI LANKA 75

90

Figure 1 Some important site complexes of southern India.

by H. D. Sankalia and his students trained at the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, and ongoing research is being carried out by the next generation of scholars. Theoretical and methodological studies of the Palaeolithic in South India include at one level the discovery of sites, documentation of culture sequences, and typological studies. At another level, in the

Hunsgi-Baichbal basins of Karnataka, K. Paddayya initiated settlement pattern studies using ecological and processual approaches, while subsequent work along with M. Petraglia focused on studies of siteformation processes, cognition, and behavior. Studies by M. L. K Murty in the Kurnool complex of sites also involved adoption of regional perspectives along with ethnoarchaeological and ecological approaches.

ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South 707

Geomorphological and settlement pattern based approaches were also adopted by R. S. Pappu in parts of Karnataka. S. Pappu’s work in the Kortallaiyar river basin, Tamil Nadu, involved studies of site formation processes, palaeoenvironments and prehistoric behavior. In recent years, large-scale excavations by S. Pappu at Attirampakkam; K. Paddayya and M. Petraglia at Isampur; and trenches taken by R. Korisettar and M. Petraglia at Lakhmapur; are utilizing advances in scientific techniques of excavation, along with multidisciplinary approaches involving new dating methods, palaeoenvironmental investigations, and lithic analysis to understand prehistoric behavior (Table 1).

The Lower Palaeolithic Lower Palaeolithic sites are distributed almost all over South India, with the exception of Kerala and the extreme southern portion of Tamil Nadu. In these regions, environmental constraints and paucity of raw material are considered factors detrimental for occupation. Acheulian industries predominate, with the exception of a few sites in Kerala, Nittur in Karnataka; and Rishikonda in Andhra Pradesh, where predominantly pebble tool assemblages were discovered. A few chronometric dates are available for the Indian Lower Palaeolithic, of which only five come from South India (Table 2). These range from around

Table 1 Principal site complexes of South India Some important site complexes

Cultures and excavated sites

Hunsgi–Baichbal complex, Gulbarga district, Karnataka

Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Acheulian: Hunsgi Localities V, VI; Isampur

Upper Palaeolithic: Salvadgi, Meralbhavi Ghataprabha–Malaprabha complex, Belgam, Dharwar, and Bijapur districts, Karnataka

Rallakalava complex, Chitoor district, Andhra Pradesh Sagileru complex, Cuddapah district, Andhra Pradesh Kurnool complex, Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh

Giddalur complex, Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh Nalgonda complex, Nalgonda district, Andhra Pradesh Nagarjunakonda complex, Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh Nellore complex, Nellore district, Andhra Pradesh Gunjana complex, Cuddappah district, Andhra Pradesh Paleru valley, Prakasam district, Andhra Pradesh Vishakhapatnam complex, coastal Andhra Pradesh Krishna–Tungabhadra complex: Mahbubnagar, Nalgonda, and Kurnool districts, Andhra Pradesh Palar river basin including the Kortallaiyar, Arani, and Coom river basins, Tamil Nadu

Kerala complex

Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Acheulian: Anagwadi Middle Palaeolithic: Kovalli Acheulian and Middle Palaeolithic: Lakhmapur East and West Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Lower Palaeolithic: Nandipalle and Vadamanu Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic: Kurnool caves: Muchchatla Chintamanu Gavi, Billa Surgam, and Kottala Polimera Gavi Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Lower, Middle Palaeolithic Lower Palaeolithic, possible Middle Palaeolithic Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic: Vodikallu Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Non-Acheulian pebble tool complex: Rishikonda Middle Palaeolithic: Ramayogi Agraharam Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Middle Palaeolithic: Moravakonda Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic: Attirampakkam Lower Palaeolithic: Vadamadurai, Srikrishnapuram Lower and Middle Palaeolithic: Poondi, Neyvelli, Gudiyam along slopes. Middle Palaeolithic: Gudiyam rockshelter Non-Acheulian Lower Palaeolithic

Table 2 Summary of Lower Palaeolithic dates from South India (after Misra 1989; Mishra 1995; Petraglia 1999) Site complex

Material dated 230

234

/U

on travertines

Kaldevanhali in the Hunsgi basin (Acheulian assemblages overly travertine

Th

Sadab in the Hunsgi basin (in association with Acheulian assemblages) Teggihalli in the Hunsgi basin (in association with Acheulian assemblages) Teggihalli in the Hunsgi basin (in association with Acheulian assemblages) Yedurwadi in the Hunsgi basin in association with Acheulian assemblages) Isampur, in the Hunsgi basin (in association with Acheulian artiefacts)

Th230/U234 Elephas sp. molar Th230/U234 Bos sp. molar Th230/U234 Elephas sp. molar 230 234 /U on calcretes ESR heribivore teeth

Age 174
35 166 þ 15/13 290 þ 21/18 287 þ 27/22 >350 >350 1.2
0.17 mya

708 ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South

166 and 174 kyr to >350 kyr. In general, the Indian Acheulian is bracketed between 150 kyr and >350 kyr, with a few dates from Isampur and Bori exceeding this. Relative dating based on stratigraphic sequences along river terraces and laterites has also been used to provide a chronological framework. Fluorine/phosphate ratios (which assign relative ages to fossil faunal remains) revealed that f/p of fossils associated with the Early Acheulian show ratios of 6.8 while Late Acheulian bones revealed a ratio of 5.6 in Karnataka. On grounds of artifact technology and assemblage composition, the Acheulian has been divided into Early and Late phases, while some scholars also used degrees of artifact abrasion/rolling and patination to establish a relative chronology. Thus, Attirampakkam and Vadamadurai in the Kortallaiyar basin, sites in the Rallakalava valley, as well as the Paleru and Gunjana complexes are attributed to the Late Acheulian. However, recent excavations at Attirampakkam indicate a sequence of evolution within the Acheulian (Figure 2). Similarly, excavations at Hunsgi and Isampur place these sites within an Early phase, while Lakhmapur is categorized as very Late Acheulian and transitional to the Middle Palaeolithic. Although palaeoecological data is sparse, geomorphological studies point to regional variability in site location and sedimentary contexts. Taking into consideration settlement patterns it is seen that Acheulian sites are distributed in a wide range of environmental contexts, along the Eastern coastal plains, the Eastern Ghats, and the Deccan Uplands (see Asia, South: India, Deccan and Central Plateau). No Acheulian rock shelter has been documented in South India. Investigations in the Hunsgi–Baichbal valleys in Karnataka resulted in documentation of numerous sites, largely confined to the valley floor. Based on artifact density, sites are divided into small, medium, large, and very large. Of these, the most important localities include the sites of Hunsgi and Isampur which were excavated. In the neighboring Baichbal valley, sites also occur along the sloping sides of interfluves, of which most appear clustered within a stretch of 3–4 km around the Fatehpur Nala (stream), of which Yediapur was excavated. In northern Karnataka, most sites are concentrated in the Kaladgi region in the basins of the rivers Ghataprabha and Malaprabha. These are clustered primarily in the lower reaches of the former river which is rich in quartzites suitable for tool manufacture; rather than in regions geologically comprising Deccan Traps and which are poor in raw material. A recent re-examination of the Malaprabha-Ghataprabha site complex indicates that the artifact-bearing conglomerates in the middle courses of these river systems represent a series of

coalescent alluvial fans. In this region, sites are buried under Late Quaternary alluvial deposits, postdate the formation of alluvial fans, and also occur on pediment surfaces in association with ponds and lacustral clays and fine-grained silts deposited by now extinct water courses. In the Lakhmapur complex, sites are clustered around the fan system north of the Kaladgi escarpment and away from the river. In Karnataka scholars attribute site distribution to relate primarily to raw material availability. A detailed study of the Krishna–Tungabhadra Doab revealed that all sites save Kuduvalli, are located 20–25 m above the present riverbed and 0.5–1.5 km away from the river. Moving to Andhra Pradesh, in the Gunjana complex, Acheulian groups occupied small ephemeral channels, streams, and braided runnels situated 1–2 km away from the main river channel, and in scrub woodland, scrub savanna, and thorny thicket zones near low hill ranges where there was access to food resources and perennial water. In Tamil Nadu, most Acheulian sites in the Kortallaiyar, Arani, and Cooum basins are deeply stratified within laterites and clays, and extend from the foothills of the Allikulli and Satyavedu ranges to the coast, apparently concentrated in regions rich in quartzite cobble and boulder beds. Lower Palaeolithic sites occur in varied sedimentary contexts. Most sites in southern India are surface scatters. Artifacts occur on weathered bedrock, on the surface of laterites and lateritic gravels, on gravels derived from fluvial or colluvial processes, on the eroded surface of high-level gravels, or in the foothill zones. Surface sites range from those in secondary contexts, to those which are regarded as being primary to relatively in situ, being exposed only owing to recent erosion. Thus, in the Kortallaiyar basin, sites designated as type 2a have artifacts which are exposed owing to deflation or sheet wash and are in a relatively undisturbed context. In northern Karantaka, open-air surface sites in association with outcrops of raw material and which are rich in manufacturing waste, are relatively undisturbed. In almost all regions, sites occur within fluvial conglomerates, once again not necessarily transported over long distances. Thus, Anagwadi in Karnataka is designated as a semi-primary open air channel occupation site, where excavations revealed Acheulian artifacts in the upper half of a well-cemented pebbly gravel, with a sandy silty matrix, and ferruginous cementing material. Similar channel occupation sites in a semi-primary context are documented in the Ghataprabha–Malaprabha complex, located 3–7 m above the riverbeds (with relatively unabraded tools). In the Kortallaiyar river basin, Tamil Nadu, sites of type 1a have a high integrity and comprise sites which

Surface

T7A, datum, SW corner, 37.89 m AMSL 0m

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Layer 1: clayey-slit Layer 2: ferricrete gravel Layer 3: clayey-slit Layer 4: clayey-slit

Ferruginous gravel lense

2.5 m Acheulian 3m

Layer 5: ferruginous gravel Layer 6: laminated clay Not excavated Mud balls Calcrete nodules Burrows Brick intrusions

Area excavated (2002)

Acheulian 3.5 m

6m

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4.5 m

4m

3.5 m

3m

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Geomatics Solutions Development Group (GSDG), CDAC-Pune

ATM, Trench T7A, South wall

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Figure 2 Attirampakkam: the stratigraphic sequence. ã Sharma Centre for Heritage Education.

0.25

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ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South 709

2m Transitional to Middle Palaeolithic

710 ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South

were buried within ferricretes/laterites and ferruginous gravels and exposed only recently owing to quarrying, construction, and section scrapings. Excavations at Attirampakkam in this region revealed Acheulian assemblages in fine-grained ferruginous gravels where evidence of on-site lithic manufacture and conjoining pieces point to a high degree of preservation. Sites occurring in colluvial deposits are noted again in most regions, and are relatively undisturbed. In the Hunsgi valley, such sites occur close to the foothill zone of the tableland, where the deposit measures more than 1 m across, and artifacts are unabraded. In the Ghataprabha–Malaprabha complex, sites occur on gently sloping pediment surfaces at the foot of the Kaladgi hills, in deposits formed by a mass-wasting process. These are unstratified, located either close to the river or 1–3 km from the present stream channels, as well as in talus and colluvial deposits where they are relatively undisturbed. Later studies in this region led to the demarcation of sites within and on the surface of alluvial fans, and a reinterpretation of sites such as Anagawadi and Kovalli, as representing a series of coalescent alluvial fans. In the Lakhmapur complex, sites are clustered around the fan complex north of the Kaladgi escarpment and away from the river. Among primary sites, those resting on weathered bedrock and sealed by later deposits are noted in excavations in the Hunsgi complex, where Acheulian occupation on bedrock is sealed by gruss derived from weathering of granites. Recent excavations at Isampur in the Hunsgi valley revealed a primary site located on a siliceous limestone pediment capped by 1–3 m of silts. In the Hunsgi valley, some primary sites occur in soft sediments, on the surface of travertine deposits and covered by black soils. Several sites in the Baichbal valley occur as distinct lenses in a brownish clay deposit in a 3 m section comprising locally derived granite/basalt detritus. A detailed study of the Krishna–Tungabhadra Doab led to the discovery of sites found on limestone beds and covered by 0.30–0.50 m of thick yellowish-brown soil. Sites associated with laterites/ferricretes and elements associated with lateritic landscapes are common all over the southeast coast, in the Kortallaiyar complex of Tamil Nadu, and in the Nellore and Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh. In the Kortallaiyar basin, Acheulian sites occur within ferricretes and ferruginous gravels as revealed by field studies and excavations at Attirampakkam, where tools occur in layer 5, overlying clays also bearing Acheulian tools (Figure 3). Recent studies in the Malaprabha basin, Karnataka, at Lakhmapur West, revealed Acheulian tools in unit III, a stone line, and in the Malaprabha valley as a whole; the buried and well-developed

nodular laterites are linked with Acheulian occupations. In the case of the nonbiface assemblages, at the site of Rishikonda, 250 m inland along the east coast, pebble tools occur at the junction of a pebblybouldery gravel on a lateritic gravel resting on bedrock, on a wave-cut terrace. A unique context noted at Attirampakkam was the presence of Acheulian tools, within clays, which were previously assigned to the Cretaceous period (Figure 4). Taking into account lithic technology, on typotechnological grounds assemblages consist of the Acheulian biface complex, marked by handaxes, cleavers, scrapers, knives, retouched light and heavy duty flakes, chopper-chopping tools, a few borers and burins, cores and debitage. Pebble tool assemblages lacking the biface element, and comprising chopper-chopping

Figure 3 Attirampakkam: Acheulian artifacts in ferruginous gravels.

Figure 4 Attirampakkam: Acheulian artifacts in clays.

ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South 711

tools, scrapers, borers on pebbles and large flakes are noted at several sites in Kerala, at Rishikonda along the east coast, and at Nittur in Karnataka. It is as yet unclear as to how these industries relate to the Acheulian, either in terms of chronology or technology, although some scholars believe these represent a pre-Acheulian phase. In the Acheulian complex, the predominant raw materials used were a variety of quartzites derived from local geological formations, generally within a radius of 1–4 km of the site. These occur in the form of river gravels, high-level gravels, talus, and colluvial deposits or outcrops from which nodules and chunks were utilized. Recent excavations at Attirampakkam, point to transport of tools from within a radius of around 3 km in the lower levels of layer 6; whilst in the overlying ferruginous gravel horizon (layer 5), on-site manufacture of tools, as well as localized transport of boulder cores is noted (Figure 5). In the Hunsgi complex, studies point to caching of handaxes, evidence of curation, as well as long-distance transport at Mudnur X, and greater transport of bifaces as compared to cores and hammers (although in all cases this is less than 1 km). A small percentage of other raw materials were also used, such as quartzitic sandstones or sandstones (in the Kortallaiyar basin) or chert, quartz, and sandstone (Anagawadi). In the Lakhmapur complex in the Malaprabha basin, mineralogical studies indicate that tools are on quartzites sourced from neighboring quartzite outcrops. An interesting feature seen in the Kurnool complex is that in the eastern and western parts of the Nallamalais of the eastern division, finegrained quartzites from water worn river pebbles were preferred, while in the adjoining Erramalais, of the central division, siliceous raw materials were used, with little effort made to import raw material from adjoining regions. In the Hunsgi–Baichbal basin, the most notable feature is the predominant use of limestone, of the Bhima series which occurs in the

Figure 5 Acheulian tools at Attirampakkam.

form of nodules or blocks eroding out of the conglomerates on the valley floor. The site of Isampur is the first-known Acheulian quarry site in South Asia. This has evidence of choices exercised in raw materials used for hammerstones, and evidence of levering action by hominins to extract slabs. Interestingly, in the adjoining Baichbal basin, tools were principally on granite gneisses and schistose rocks as compared to the use of limestone in the Hunsgi valley. In the pebble tool complex of Kerala, tools are on quartz and gneissic rocks, and at Nittur, on dolerites. In the Krishna–Tungabhadra Doab region, site locations are tied to raw material sources, and variability in these sources determines whether pebbles, cobbles, or chunks were used as blanks. Similarly, in the Middle Krishna basin, the paucity of sites is linked to raw material constraints. As elsewhere in India, the Acheulian has been divided into an Earlier and Later Phase, with early scholars referring to cruder ‘Abbevillian’ industries; and in some cases with both ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ technological trends often occurring in the same region or locality. In these cases, scholars have often divided an assemblage into groups based on artifact rounding, abrasion, patination, and flaking technology into older or younger phases. Acheulian tools were on pebbles and cobbles, chunks, slabs, nodules, and flakes. Evidence of both hard hammer techniques as well as more refined flaking, prepared core techniques, Victoria West and Vaal techniques are documented. Rolled artifacts termed as ‘crude’, with pebble-based tools, deep flake scars, predominance of choppers are seen at Rallakalava A, Sagileru Group 1, (Nandipalle and Vadamanu) and Nalgonda Group 1, some localities in Nagarjunakonda and Giddalur, where evolution of the Acheulian is also noted. Evolved Acheulian traditions are also noted at these sites. The predominant use of pebble tools, or tools on pebble blanks is seen in the Nellore and Bellary regions, and at Kurnool. It is argued that the chopper-chopping element is an intrinsic part of the Acheulian, and regional variability seen here is largely a matter of raw material constraints. Variability in handaxe types is also noted by scholars, both within and between regions, both in the nature of blanks used and in the degree of flaking, standardization, and symmetry. At several excavated sites such as Lakhmapur and Attirampakkam, evidence of industries transitional to the Middle Palaeolithic is noted, and observations of surface scatters also indicate this trend (Figure 6). V. Jayaswal singles out the Nittur complex as resembling other chopperchopping tool complexes of India, which also include the Soan industries. She also situates the site of Vadamanu in the Sagileru complex as part of a group constituting a high percentage of chopper-chopping

712 ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South

finished tools to the site for resource exploitation and did not manufacture bifaces on site. In later levels, on-site manufacture and use of tools is documented.

The Middle Palaeolithic

Figure 6 Middle Palaeolithic artifacts at Attirampakkam. ã Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, India.

tools as contrasted with handaxes and cleavers. The rest of the sites in South India are classified within the handaxe-cleaver group, with the exception being Nagarjundakonda-1, which has a predominance of cleavers, and is compared with the excavated sites of Chirki-Nevasa and Lalitpur, in western and northern India, respectively. Inferences on hominin behavior are drawn from settlement pattern studies in the Hungsi–Baichbal basins, which have led to a classification of sites into occupation sites, scavenging or food-processing localities, tool caches, and sites with single episodes of activities. This pattern is noted in other regions and sites are divided into base camps, workshops, and transient camps, based on site size, artifact density, and assemblage composition. Drawing on ethnographic and ecological models, K. Paddayya suggested seasonal movements of hominin groups in the Hunsgi valley involving dry season aggregation in the valley where water was available in the form of springs and in streams; and wet season dispersion, in accordance with the movement of game and seasonality of plant resources. Excavations at Isampur revealed hominin quarrying of limestone slabs for tool manufacture; raising issues of sociality and cognition. The importance of site-formation studies has also contributed to new approaches toward examining behavior in this region. In the Lakhmapur region, behavior in terms of exploiting raw material resources has been examined. Excavations at Attirampakkam revealed that during the earliest Acheulian occupation, hominins brought

The distribution of Middle Palaeolithic sites in South India roughly parallels that of the Lower Palaeolithic. For the first time, there was an expansion into southern Tamil Nadu, as also the first occupation of rock shelters such as Gudiyam in the Allikulli hills of Tamil Nadu, and the karstic cave of Belum in Kurnool district. In the Hunsgi–Baichbal complex, settlements expanded outside the valley floor into the surrounding plateaux. In the Kaladgi basin, in the Ghataprabha– Malaprabha complex, most Middle Palaeolithic sites occur in the same locales as the Acheulian, in the semi-arid lower reaches of the valley and much less than in the subhumid middle and upper reaches, and proliferate in regions with good development of chert formations. In the Krishna–Tungabhadra Doab, for the first time, hominins entered the savanna woodland zone. There are very few chronometric dates for what is termed the Middle Palaeolithic in India. Nandipalle in the Sagileru basin (1.11–1.26 m in clayey silts; from gastropod shells) dates to 23 670
640, 690; (half-life 5568
30 years) and 24 360
660, 710 (halflife 5730
40) (PRL –293). However, the Indian Middle Palaeolithic is in general bracketed between 150 kyr BP to around 30 kyr BP. Stratigraphically, most such sites in southern India are surface collections, often found in a mixed context with the Acheulian. However, stratified sites show that they overlie Acheulian horizons, and occur in a wide range of sedimentary contexts. In most areas, sites occur in finer fluvial gravels, termed gravel II, and sometimes separated by fine sediments from gravels bearing Acheulian artifacts (e.g., Sagileru complex and Kurnool complex). In the Hunsgi–Baichbal complex, they occur in a brown silt overlying the Acheulian, and often associated with it. In the Ghataprabha–Malaprabha complex, sites occur on the eroded surface of high-level gravels, in alluvial or channel gravel beds, on the surface of pediments, in talus and colluvial deposits, and as surface sites near raw material. In the Lakhmapur complex, Middle Palaeolithic tools were identified in black clays, palaeovertisols (unit II) resting uncomfortably over a nodular laterite (unit III), as also in the top of the unit III, but are reworked. In another complex, tools were noted in laterite (unit III) resting on the top of an indurated portion of the section (unit IV), along the distal margins of a pediment slope. In the Middle Krishna valley, sites were in association with highlevelgravels and the first major occupation of this

ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South 713

region occurred owing to the abundance of raw material in these gravels.The unique occurrence of Middle Palaeolithic artifacts in red beds at a depth of 3.2 m is noted at the site of Ramayogi Agraharam, along the Visakhapatnam coast, Andhra Pradesh. In the Kortallaiyar river basin, Tamil Nadu, artifacts occur eroding out of ferruginous gravel deposits, and on the surface of eroded bedrock. At Attirampakkam, tools are noted in layer 2, a fine ferruginous gravel. Over most of South India, quartzites continued to be used, with a preference for fine-grained rocks. Some regions witnessed a shift toward siliceous raw materials (chert, jasper, quartz) available in the form of nodules eroding from chert veins, outcrops, river, and high-level gravels. This is seen in the Krishna– Tungabhadra basin, the Cuddappah complex, and the Kurnool region, where there is the additional use of indurated shale, slate, quartz, and basalt; as also in the Hunsgi–Baichbal basins, and sites in the Kaladgi basin. Regional variability within complexes is also noted. Thus, in the Sagileru complex, while quartzites continued to be used, a complete switch to siliceous raw materials is seen at the site of Vemula. Similarly, in the Krishna–Tungabhadra Doab, distinct regional variability is seen in the use of quartzite, chert, and jasper at different sites. At Ramayogi Agraharam, khondalites were used. The Middle Palaeolithic is generally characterized by a predominance of flake tools: scrapers, borers, and points, along with a continuation of handaxes (which become diminutive), and chopper-chopping tools. However, tools were also made on chunks and nodules, and many authors note a decline in standardization and refinement of tools as compared to the Acheulian. The prepared core technique and blade techniques predominate along with use of simple flakes and minimal retouch, although along the southeast coast the Levallois element is thought to be negligible. In excavated sites such as Kovalli, evidence of the prepared core technique was noted with predominance of cores and debitage and fewer scrapers, borers, scrapers-cum-borers, and points. At a number of sites, tools were on nodules as well as on flakes struck from nodules. Shouldered tools, tanged points and miniature handaxes, blunting on flakes and flake blades are also noted at several sites. With the exception of the Gunjana complex of sites (with a high percentage of handaxes), scrapers and points predominate in most regions. In the Kortallaiyar river basin, hominins exploited locally available raw material sources (cobbles, pebbles, thermal fracture flakes) in an expedient manner, with minimal retouch and trimming. Prepared core and blade techniques are noted as also a continuation of tool types and techniques associated with the Acheulian.

Inferences on behavior are sporadic. In the Krishna– Tungabhadra Doab, sites are classified into base camps and transient sites, or factory sites. Similarly, Kovalli in the Kaladgi region is designated as a factory site. In the Kortallaiyar basin, technological strategies and assemblage composition along with studies of site-formation processes were used to infer site functions and suggest possible alternate mobility patterns across the landscape.

The Upper Palaeolithic The Upper Palaeolithic cultures of South India are distributed in a wide range of ecozones. Although, the Terminal Pleistocene was a period of greater aridity in South Asia, evidence from the Kurnool caves as well as from other sites in the Krishna and Godavari valleys indicates a grassland ecosystem with forest cover, swamps, and pools. The same pattern of tropical semi-arid monsoon climate is thought to have prevailed in southern India during this phase. Faunal remains from the Kurnool caves with Rhinoceros karnuliensis, Boselephas tragocamelus, Gazella gazella, Antelope cervicapra, Tetraceros quadricornis, Cervus unicolor, Axis axis, and Tragulus cf. memmina, point to scrub-to-tree jungle type of thick vegetation with open expanses of grasses and a source of water in streams. Cave sediments in the Kurnool region were deposited under somewhat humid conditions. Fluvial changes in river regimes have been documented. A number of chronometric dates available from sites in India bracket this phase between 40 kyr and 10 kyr BP with regional variability. In South India dates from Nandipalle on freshwater gastropod shells are 24 260
600, 710 and 17 390
10%. Burnt clay samples from a fireplace in the Upper Palaeolithic levels at the cave site of Muchchatla Chintamanu Gavi II gave a TL date of 17 390
10 BP. A date from Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu, on freshwater shells is around 25 160
850. Sites are distributed all over southern India, with once again a few noted in Tamil Nadu and none in Kerala. In the Gunjana complex, sites occur as surface scatters, but excavations at Vodikallu revealed that artifacts occur in a fine loam possibly deposited by a sluggish stream, which covered cultural material lying exposed on the adjacent land surface. In the Rallakalava complex, artifacts occur on the eroded surface of the first aggradational terrace of the stream, and sites are found in association with sands. At sites in the Shorapur Doab, a black brown silt with lenses of loose pebbly granular gravel yielded blade tools. The best-known complex of sites lie in the Kurnool karstic cave complex, where Muchchatla Chintamanu Gavi (MCG) was excavated as also were Billa Surgam

714 ASIA, WEST/India, Paleolithic Cultures of the South

and Kottala Polimera Gavi. The MCG complex yielded the best evidence of the Upper Palaeolithic, both within caves and in the surroundings. Here, Upper Palaeolithic tools were noted below an upper cave earth in brown and chocolate brown poorly sorted deposits consisting of rockfall in a brown clayey sediment resulting from disintegrated limestone bedrock. Upper Palaeolithic site sizes vary greatly, and extend up to 20 000 m2 as seen in the southeastern fringes of the Eastern Ghats. In the Eastern Ghats, the sites are concentrated around riverine zones, marked by high artifact densities pointing to long-term occupation. Siliceous raw materials as well as quartz were now preferred, although fine-grained quartzites continued to be used. Regional variability is marked. In the Rallakalava complex, fluted cores and tools on blades are noted along with cores, scrapers, and choppers. The distinctive features include large-sized blades and blade tools and robust burins. Along the eastern coastal plain, the blunted backed blade element forms a significant part of the tool kit at some sites. Variability is also seen in the form of a tendency toward microlithization at some sites, indicating a trend toward the Mesolithic. In the Eastern Ghats, the blade tool complex comprises long parallel-sided blades, irregular blades, flake-blades, flakes, burins, borers, blade and flake cores, and debitage. The predominance of unmodified blades, flake blades and flakes, and the presence of an amorphous element are notable, with a low backed blade component. In the southeastern outliers of the Eastern Ghats, irregular and pointed blades, scrapers on blades, and flakes, denticulates, horse hoof scrapers on blade cores, prismatic curved back points, backed knives, macro lunates, macro triangles, and burins predominate. The burins, backed blades, and end scrapers are refined and are almost microlithic in form. Here, the presence of bored stones (possible net sinkers) and grinding slabs is notable. The sites of Salvadgi and Meralbhavi in the Shorapur Doab, Karnataka, are termed as workshops with two distinct stone working traditions: one characterized by manufacture of scraper-point-borer category of tools on flakes and flake-blades and the other by the production of blade tools. In the Gunjana complex, manufacturing sites could be identified with a high percentage of cores and debitage, a predominance of backed blade variants and scrapers, and a few burins, with tools tending toward microliths and representing a possible Late Upper or Epipalaeolithic phase. Excavations at the site of Vodikallu in this region yielded grinding stones and rubbers which testify to processing of plant food. Within the Kurnool cave complex, excavations at MCG yielded a wealth of blades and blade tools, along with a significant component of bone tools including perforators (some with fire-hardened

tips), scrapers, chisels, scoops, shouldered points, spatulae, worked bones, and bone blanks. This complex also has a paucity of retouched tools on blades or flakes, while backed blade variants, several burin types and other forms are absent or rare; and the culture is assigned to an incipient facies of the Upper Palaeolithic. In terms of behavioral implications, it was suggested that the cave was possibly neither a kill site nor a permanent settlement, but a transient camp, used when it received sufficient light. The scatters of sporadic artifacts in the surrounding region suggest a nomadic lifestyle. Ethnographic parallels are drawn on to explain seasonality in movement across this landscape.

Conclusion and Future Trends The South Indian Palaeolithic has yielded evidence of Early Acheulian sites which may date back to as old as 1 myr BP. Evolution within the Acheulian is noted from stratified sites, as well as from surface collections. Regional variability in raw material usage, site location and hominin behavior is also clear. Sites such as Attirampakkam display a stratified sequence of industries in well-preserved contexts, with the potential for informing on long-term adaptations to changing environments. Excavations at Isampur have revealed the first Acheulian quarry site in South Asia (see Asia, South: Paleolithic Cultures). The place of non-biface Acheulian industries requires further study. Industries transitional with the Middle Palaeolithic have been documented from numerous surface sites, as also from excavations at Lakhmapur and Attirampakkam. Regional variability in terms of raw material and tool types is seen in this phase. The origins of the Upper Palaeolithic are relatively less clear, although distinct trends in blade and burin industries are seen, with the best-documented sites located in the karstic cave complexes of Kurnool district. Recent multidisciplinary efforts in the Kortallaiyar basin and in the Hunsgi–Baichbal and Lakhmapur complexes, point to new approaches toward understanding these cultures. Future studies need to focus on generating more chronometric dates and on multidisciplinary studies for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Questions related to hominin dispersals, evolution of the Acheulian, position of the pebble industries, transitional industries, and origins of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic require to be addressed and placed within a global perspective. See also: Asia, East: China, Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, South: India, Deccan and Central Plateau; Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, Southeast: Pre-agricultural Peoples.

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 715

Further Reading Allchin B (1997) The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mishra S (1995) Chronology of the Indian stone age: the impact of recent absolute and relative dating attempts. Man and Environment XX(2): 11–16. Misra VN (1989) Stone age India: An ecological perspective. Man and Environment 14: 17–64. Murty MLK (1979) Recent research on the Upper Palaeolithic Phase in India. Journal of Field Archaeology 6(3): 301–320. Murty MLK (1985) Ethnoarchaeology of the Kurnool cave areas. World Prehistory 17(2): 192–205. Paddayya K (1982) The Acheulian Culture of the Hunsgi Valley (Peninsular India): A Settlement System Perspective. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute. Paddayya K (1984) India: old stone age. In: Bar-Yosef O (ed.) Neue Forschungen zur Altsteinzeit. Sonderdruck, pp. 345–403. Munich: Verlag C.H Beck. Pappu RS (2001) Acheulian Culture in Peninsular India. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld. Pappu RS and Deo SG (1994) Man-Land Relationships During Palaeolithic Times in the Kaladgi Basin, Karnataka. Pune: Deccan College. Pappu S (1999) A study of natural site formation processes in the Kortallaiyar Basin, Tamil Nadu, South India. Geoarchaeology, An International Journal 14(2): 127–150. Pappu S (2001) BAR-International Series 1003:. A Re-examination of the Palaeolithic Archaeological Record of Northern Tamil Nadu, South India. Oxford: BAR. Pappu S (2001) Middle Palaeolithic stone tool technology in the Kortallaiyar Basin, South India. Antiquity 75: 107–117. Pappu S, Gunnell Y, Taieb M, Brugal J-P, and Touchard Y (2003) Ongoing excavations at the Palaeolithic site of Attirampakkam, South India: Preliminary findings. Current Anthropology 44(4): 591–597. Pappu S, Gunnell Y, Taieb M, and Kumar A (2004) Preliminary report on excavations at the Palaeolithic site of Attirampakkam, Tamil Nadu (1999–2004). Man and Environment XXIX(2): 1–17. Petraglia MD (1998) The Lower Palaeolithic of India and its bearing on the Asian record. In: Petraglia MD and Korisettar R (eds.) Early Human Behaviour in Global Context. The Rise and Diversity of the Lower Palaeolithic Record, pp. 343–390. London: Routledge. Petraglia MD, LaPorta P, and Paddayya K (1999) The first Acheulian quarry in India: Stone tool manufacture, biface morphology and behavior. Journal of Anthropological Research 55: 39–70.

Indus Civilization Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Dholavira One of the largest and most prominent archaeological sites in India, belonging to the Indus civilization. It is located on the Khadir island in the Kutch district of Gujarat. Mehrgarh One of the most important Neolithic (7000–3200 BCE) sites in archaeology, lies on the Kachi plain of Baluchistan,

Pakistan, and is one of the earliest sites with evidence of farming (wheat and barley) and herding (cattle, sheep and goats) in South Asia. Great Bath The earliest public water tank in ancient South Asia is one of the most spectacular features of Mohenjo-daro. Indus script (Harappan script) Refers to the undeciphered writing system consisting of short strings of symbols found on pottery and seals. Used between 2600–1900 BC and associated with the Harappan period settlements of the Indus civilization.

Indus Civilization Introduction

The Indus civilization is a general term that refers to the first urban society that emerged in the greater Indus valley of Pakistan and northwestern India, between 2600 and 1900 BC. This urban society was first discovered in the 1920s and has also been called the Harappa culture after the type site of Harappa, Pakistan where it was first discovered. Other common names that are found in the literature include the Indus valley civilization and the Indus–Saraswati civilization. Another common terminology that will be used in this essay uses the framework of long-term cultural traditions to examine the origin, character, and eventual decline of a civilization. The Indus tradition (also called the Indus valley tradition) refers to the wide range of human adaptations in the greater Indus region over a long span of history, approximately 10 000 to 1000 BC. The Indus tradition encompasses all adaptive strategies that contributed to the emergence and decline of the first phase of urbanism, including hunting-foraging the origins of agriculture and specialized crafts, the emergence of cities and state-level society, and finally the transformation and decline of the Indus cities (Figure 1). In addition to the Indus, three other major cultural traditions relating to the initial emergence of urbanism can be identified for the northwestern subcontinent: the Baluchistan, Helmand, and the Bactro-Margiana Traditions. These cultural traditions are linked in different ways to processes of socioeconomic and political developments in the subcontinent, beginning as early as the Palaeolithic and continuing through the Early Historic period. The Indus tradition can be subdivided into ‘eras’ and ‘phases’ that are roughly correlated to major adaptive strategies and regional material cultural styles (Table 1). A brief summary of each major era is provided below in order to provide a larger context in which to discuss the urban Harappa phase, of the Integration era, which is the main focus of this essay.

716 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization

Chronological Framework: Origin to Decline Earlier models for the origin of the Indus civilization proposed that it was the result of direct or indirect influence from urban societies in Mesopotamia or Iran to the west. Over the past several decades, new excavations and better radiocarbon dating have resulted in more complex models for interpreting the origins and transformations of this early urban society. The Indus region was clearly not isolated from the events going on in other parts of West Asia; nevertheless, the origin of Indus cities such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro can be traced to indigenous socioeconomic and political processes. Continued

archaeological excavations in both India and Pakistan have revealed the presence of numerous different types of sites that provide a more complete understanding of the origins and decline of the Indus civilization. While most scholars look to the Early Neolithic as the foundation of later urban centers, it is important to include a discussion of hunting and foraging communities who have continued to coexist and interact with settled communities throughout human history. With the retreat of glaciers in the northern subcontinent around 12 000–10 000 years ago and changes in climate, major changes in the species and distributions of fauna and flora in the South Asian subcontinent resulted in the establishment of new strategies of

Oxus (Amu Darya)

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Baluchistan tradition

s R.

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INDO-GANGETIC TRADITION Malwa tradition

Ancient coastline

Arabian Sea

Ganga-Vindhya tradition

Narmada R.

Godavari R. Deccan tradition Krishna R.

N

Figure 1 Major traditions in South Asia.

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 717 Table 1 Indus Tradition Foraging era Mesolithic and Microlithic

10 000–2000 BCE

Early Food Producing era Mehrgarh Phase

7000–5500 BCE

Regionalization era Early Harappa phases Ravi, Hakra, Sheri Khan Tarakai, Balakot, Amri, Kot Diji, Sothi

5500–2600 BCE

Integration era Harappan phase Subdivided at the site of Harappa into Period 3A – 2600–2450 BC Period 3B – 2450–2200 BC Period 3C – 2200–1900 BC Localization era Late Harappan phases Punjab, Jhukar, Rangpur

2600–1900 BCE

1900–1300 BCE

foraging and hunting. The ‘Foraging era’ represents a relatively long period of time and broad geographical area where mobile and semisedentary foraging and hunting communities began focusing on intensive exploitation of specific plants and animals. In parts of Afghanistan and the edges of the Indus valley these adaptive strategies eventually contributed to the domestication of humped zebu cattle and possibly other species of animals and plants. During the Neolithic or ‘Early Food Producing era’, which dates to around 7000–5500 BCE at sites such as Mehrgarh, Pakistan, there is evidence for the emergence of wheat and barley agriculture and the herding of domestic cattle, along with sheep and goat. These plants and animals became the primary subsistence base for the development of larger towns and eventually cities in the Indus region. Major trade networks were also established during this period, connecting small agro-pastoral communities with distant resource areas. These networks extended from the Arabian Sea along the Makran coast to the highlands of northern Afghanistan, and from the Baluchistan hills to the deserts of Sindh and Rajasthan. In the subsequent Chalcolithic or ‘Regionalization era’, 5500–2600 BCE, distinctive regional cultures became established in the northern and southern alluvial plain, as well as in surrounding regions. Small villages became established in agriculturally rich areas and larger villages grew up along the major trade routes linking each geographical region and resource area. Some settlements, such as Mehrgarh, which is situated at the base of the Bolan Pass, became important craft production and trade centers. At Mehrgarh a wide suite of specialized crafts were developed for local use as well as for regional trade: pottery making, stone bead making, shell ornament production, copper

working, and eventually bronze working, as well as glazed steatite and faience bead making. Distinctive pottery styles and painted designs, along with regional human and animal figurine styles can be seen in other regions at sites such as Rehman Dheri (Gomal Plain), Sheri Khan Tarakai and Tarakai Qila (Bannu Basin), Sarai Khola (Taxila Valley), Harappa and Jalilpur (central Punjab), Siswal (Haryana), Kot Diji (Sindh), Amri and Ghazi Shah (southern Sindh), Nal/Sohr Damb (southern Baluchistan), and Balakot (Makran coast). Different regional cultures of phases have been named after the regions or sites where they were first discovered, such as Hakra, Ravi, Sothi, Amri, and Kot Diji phases. These cultures are collectively referred to as Early Harappan, because they set the foundation for the development of major urban centers in the core agricultural regions and at important crossroads. In addition to the developments in the core areas of the Indus and Saraswati–Ghaggar–Hakra valleys, recent excavations in Gujarat, India reveal the establishment of Early Harappan cultural traditions in Kutch and Saurashtra. The sites of Dholavira, Loteshwar, and Nagwada appear to have links to Amri and Kot Diji phase cultures in Sindh, but also reflect a local tradition from Gujarat, sometimes referred to as the Anarta culture. Many of the raw materials traded during the Early Harappan period derive from Gujarat, but the degree to which local cultures in Gujarat contributed to the Early Harappan and subsequent Harappan cultural traditions is still under investigation. At the end of the Regionalization era, during the ‘Kot Diji phase’, the first urban centers began to emerge in the Indus and Saraswati–Ghaggar–Hakra plain. At the site of Harappa, which is the bestdocumented settlement, the early urban phase dates from around 2800 to 2600 BCE (Figure 2). This settlement grew to more than 25 ha in area and was divided into two walled sectors. Smaller villages dating to the same time period have been discovered in the hinterland around Harappa and reveal that the site was a central place in an urban network and also had links to distant resource areas. At Harappa there is evidence for the first use of the ‘Early Indus script’, standardized weights, writing, and square stamp seals that were used to stamp clay sealings on bundles of goods or store rooms. Other small and large sites dating to this period reveal local developments in artifact styles, stamp seal styles, graffiti on pottery, and settlement planning. Standardized mud bricks used for building city walls and domestic architecture also appear at this time. The use of cardinal directions for orienting streets and buildings, and the use of bullock carts for transport of heavy commodities into the settlement begins during the Kot Diji phase at Harappa and numerous other sites

718 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 60

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throughout the greater Indus region. Together these developments confirm the emergence of hierarchical social, economic, and political systems associated with early urbanism. Kot Diji phase sites have been found in the Gomal plain (Rehman Dheri), Kacchi plain (Nausharo), Taxila valley (Sarai Khola), along the bed of the Ghaggar–Hakra river (Jaliwali, Gamanwala, etc.), in the southern Indus region (Mohenjo-daro, Kot Diji, and Ghazi Shah), as well as in Kutch (Dholavira). The precise nature of regional interaction and chronology of local cultural developments is still unclear, but taken as a whole, these sites set the stage for the rise of large urban centers that came to dominate the greater Indus valley region. The Integration era, Harappa phase, dates from around 2600 to 1900 BCE, and it is during this long time span that cities such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, and Ganweriwala grew to their largest extent (Figure 3). This 700-year period can now be divided into three subphases on the basis

of changes in pottery, use of seals, and architecture as seen at the site of Harappa and other major settlements. Although the precise dates may differ from one site to another, at Harappa, these subphases are referred to as period 3A (2600–2450 BCE), 3B (2450–2200 BCE), and 3C (2200–1900 BCE). Some scholars still refer to this long time span as the ‘mature’ Harappan period (or Mature Harappan), but excavations and radiocarbon dating at the site of Harappa indicate that the artifact types generally associated with the so-called ‘mature’ Harappan period actually only occur during the last half of this 700-year time span. During the Harappa phase, the largest urban centers may have directly controlled their surrounding hinterland, but there is no evidence for hereditary monarchies or the establishment of centralized territorial states that controlled the entire Indus region. Cities, such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Dholavira were clearly being ruled by influential elites, probably a combination of merchants, landowners, and religious

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 719

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leaders. Smaller towns and villages may have been run by corporate groups such as town councils or individual charismatic leaders, but there is a conspicuous absence of central temples, palaces and elaborate elite burials that are characteristic of elites in other early urban societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Hierarchical social order and stratified society is reflected in architecture and settlement patterns, as well as artifact styles and the organization of technological production. A vast network of internal trade and exchange and a shared ideology united the greater Indus valley. There was widespread use of similar styles of pottery, figurines, ornaments, the distinctive Indus script, seals, and standardized weights. Massive mud-brick walls surrounded most large settlements, and appear to have functioned primarily for control of trade access into the cities. These walls also would have served as formidable defenses, but there is no evidence for major conflict or warfare at any major center. A more detailed discussion of the Harappa phase will be presented below.

During the ‘Localization era’, ‘Late Harappan phases’, from 1900 to 1300 BCE or even as late at 1000 BCE, the major cities and their supporting settlements began to lose power due a number of factors. Shifting river patterns and the eventual drying up of the Saraswati–Ghaggar–Hakra River resulted in the abandonment of many sites and migration into the Indus valley, Gujarat or to the Ganga–Yamuna valley. The disruption of agriculture and the eventual breakdown of trade and political networks led to the decline of urbanism and the disappearance of many distinctive features of the Indus culture. The Indus script and inscribed seals were no longer used, and writing disappeared along with the use of cubical stone weights and many forms of symbolic objects. Other social and religious factors also contributed to the gradual reorganization of trade and technology and the emergence of new cultural, political and religious traditions. Although changes in material culture and socioritual traditions are well documented, there are also

720 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization

significant continuities. Even though cubical stone weights disappeared, the weight system used during the Early Harappan and Harappan periods continued in use in later periods and is still used in South Asia today. Other continuities are seen in pottery styles and technology, some symbolic objects, overall site layout, the use of standardized bricks, etc. These continuities justify the use of the term Late Harappan to characterize many of these traditions. The Punjab phase, Cemetery H culture spread throughout the Punjab and Ganga–Yamuna region, the Jhukar phase and related cultures were found in Sindh and Baluchistan, and the Rangpur phase includes the Lustrous Red Ware and associated Black-and-Red ware cultures that were present in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Malwa Plateau. In the northern Indus valley and parts of Baluchistan some sites show an overlap between Late Harappan and Bactro-Margiana material culture. In the Gangetic region there is overlap with the Copper Hoards culture, the Ochre Colored Pottery, and Painted Gray Ware culture. Some of these cultures may be associated with Indo-Aryan speaking Vedic communities mentioned in the sacred hymns of the Rig Veda and later Brahmanical texts, but there is little consensus among scholars on this point. Considerable research still remains to be done on this transitional period, but some answers should be forthcoming from the many new sites that have been discovered in northern Pakistan and India.

Geographical Setting The greater Indus valley refers to a vast area drained by the various tributaries of the Indus River and a parallel (now dry) river that is variously referred to as the Saraswati–Ghaggar–Hakra–Nara River. The Indus tributaries emerge from the Kirthar and Suleiman mountains of Baluchistan on the west, the Hindu-Kush and Karakorum to the northwest, the Pamir and the Himalaya to the north and east. All of these mountainous regions have played an important role in providing minerals, timber, and trade routes to adjacent cultural centers in Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. The second major river has different names along its length. In the north are several tributaries, one of which is today called the Saraswati. Some scholars suggest that this was the sacred Saraswati River mentioned in the Rig Veda and other Brahmanical texts, but so far it has not been possible to confirm this identification. In the midsection it is called Ghaggar or Hakra and the depression where it appears to have flowed in the south is called the Nara. This ancient river, which will be referred to as the Ghaggar–Hakra, flowed

to the east and generally parallel to the Indus River. The Sutlej (ancient Satadru), which now flows into the Indus, appears to have been a tributary of the Ghaggar–Hakra system. The Ghaggar–Hakra appears to have reached the Rann of Kutch during the Regionalization era, but began drying up and eventually disappeared in the middle of the Cholistan desert toward the end of the Harappa phase or during the Late Harappan period. To the east, the greater Indus valley is bordered by the Thar Desert and the Aravalli mountains, both of which are rich in mineral resources used by communities of the Indus region. On the southeast lie the islands of Kutch, the peninsula of Saurashtra, and the mainland of Gujarat. The combined deltas of the Indus and the Ghaggar–Hakra Rivers extend from the Greater Rann of Kutch in the east to the rocky coast of Baluchistan near modern Karachi in the west. The coastal settlements in the Makran, Kutch, and Saurashtra appear to have had connections across the Arabian Sea to the coasts of modern Oman and the Persian Gulf. Although no purely Harappan site has been found on the Arabian Peninsula, many Indus artifacts have been found in coastal and some inland settlements.

Climate of the Greater Indus Region The Indus valley and adjacent regions are dominated by two major weather systems, the winter cyclonic system of the western highlands and the summer monsoon system of the peninsular subcontinent. The winter cyclonic system produces snowfall in Baluchistan and rainfall in parts of the Indus valley. The summer monsoon brings scattered rainfall to Sindh and Gujarat and heavy rainfall to the northern Indus plain, with rain and snow in the high mountains in the north. These two systems overlap in the Indus valley and if one system fails the other usually provides sufficient precipitation to support large populations throughout the region. The main crop cycles in the Indus valley region are aligned with the winter rains and the summer monsoon rains. Recent models of global climate indicate that, at 18 000–9000 BP, southern Asia would have been cooler and drier than today, with a weak summer monsoon. From 9000 to 7000 BP, there appears to have been a stronger summer monsoon, warmer summers, and cooler winters. Although these models work at the macrolevel, they cannot be confirmed through detailed analysis of specific sites or regions. Generally speaking, there is no evidence for major changes in climate or rainfall since at least 9000 BP. Specific regional environmental changes that directly impacted human settlement in the greater Indus region can

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 721

generally be attributed to changing river-flow patterns and humanly induced erosion or soil degradation.

Subsistence Strategies Indus cities and villages were provisioned through a combination of intensive and extensive agriculture, combined with animal husbandry, and supplemented by fishing and hunting. During the Harappa phase, two major crops could have been harvested in some regions provided there was sufficient winter rain and summer flooding or rains. Agricultural fields were watered primarily by annual rainfall and seasonal flooding, but water-diversion channels, and dams for trapping soil and moisture are common along the Baluchistan piedmont and in parts of Kutch. Irrigation canals have been found at the site of Shortughai along the Amu Darya or Oxus River in Afghanistan, but there is no evidence for the construction of large-scale irrigation channels as was common in Mesopotamia at the time. Smaller fields and vegetable plots would have been watered by wells, which are found at most Harappa phase sites, and reservoirs like those found at Lothal and Dholavira. The brick-lined tank at Lothal was filled with river overflow during the monsoons, and at Dholavira a series of interconnected stone-lined reservoirs were filled by a combination of river run-off, and rainfall collected from rooftops and the city wall by an elaborate system of drains within the city itself. The main winter or rabi season crops in the core regions of the Indus were wheat and barley, supplemented by pulses, sesame, peas, and vegetables. Perennial cotton could have been grown during the winter season and harvested in the spring. The kharif crops, including rice, sorghum, and various millets, would have been sown during or at the end of the summer monsoon and harvested in the fall. Rice was not common in the Indus valley itself and is found only in Gujarat during the Harappa phase. Cotton, mustard, sesame, dates, melon, and peas were also cultivated, possibly as kharif crops. The most important domestic animals were cattle (humped Bos indicus and nonhumped Bos taurus) and water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), followed in importance by sheep and goat. Although domestic pig is found in the cities, it was not a major source of meat. The domestic dog is well attested from animal bones as well as figurines, some of which depict small house pets, while others show mastiffs used in hunting. Many different types of wild animals were hunted and brought to the cities. Large game, such as elephant, rhinoceros, wild water buffalo, and various types of elk, deer, antelope and wild ass were hunted for food or for other products such as horns, antlers,

tusks and possibly their hides. Smaller animal may also have been hunted, and numerous terracotta figurines suggest that some of these small animals, such as Macaque monkeys, squirrels, and a variety of birds, were also captured for use as pets. Fishing and shellfish collection was important along the coasts and at the many settlements located along rivers and oxbow lakes. Marine shells were used for making ornaments and some riverine shells were used as tools. At the site of Harappa, which is more than 800 km from the coast, there is evidence for the trade of dried marine catfish, even though local riverine catfish were also being consumed. This trade in salted fish underscores the importance of preserved foods in the subsistence strategies of large urban centers (see Asia, South: India, Deccan and Central Plateau).

Settlement Patterns Many of the largest Indus cities were continuously occupied from the Early Harappan through the Harappan period. Consequently, the Harappa phase buildings and city walls often rose high above the surrounding plain, being constructed on top of earlier buildings and city walls. In some settlements, new suburbs were constructed out on the plain or on old city dumps, resulting in a higher older town and a lower newly built areas. At sites such as Harappa and Kalibangan, two distinct walled areas or mounds were created, and at other sites such as Mohenjo-daro, several different mounded areas were established. The landscape was dominated by large cities located at strategic positions along trade routes and in the core area of agricultural production. Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira are major cities, all of which are over 100 ha in area. Ganweriwala may represent a fifth major city at around 80 ha in area. The actual size of a settlement would have changed considerably over 700 years, but based on surveys of mounded ruins it is possible to identify an hierarchy of five settlement tiers: cities (greater than 80 ha), towns (10–50 ha), villages (5–10 ha), and hamlets (1–5 ha), camps (<1 ha). In addition, many people may have lived in floating villages or along the many rivers and lakes that surrounded the major cities. Over 1500 sites have been identified from this time period located in many different geographical regions, including coastal areas, alluvial plains, and remote mountain valleys. Estimates of the total area of the Indus civilization range from 680 000 to as much as 800 000 km2, but it should be clearly understood that there were large stretches of uninhabited wasteland between many of the sites and

722 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization

the total area does not represent a territory of centralized political control or one that has distinct boundaries. Population estimates for the Indus period are difficult to determine, because it is not possible to accurately define how much of a city was occupied at any given time or which settlements were inhabited during the 700-year time span of the Harappa phase. The site of Harappa, which covers around 150 ha, could have held between 60 000 and 80 000 people at the height of the urban phase, but the total urban population may have fluctuated seasonally. Nomads and merchants may have come to the city during trading seasons, and many urban dwellers may have left to help in the fields during the agricultural or herding seasons.

major urban centers as well as smaller settlements. Most settlements were laid out on an irregular gridoriented north–south and east–west. The use of cardinal directions for settlement planning began in the Early Harappan period and continued through the Late Harappan period. Massive perimeter walls were constructed of mud brick, sometimes faced with fired brick, or stone. Gateways located near the corners or in the middle of the city walls provided controlled access into the settlements. The city walls and gateways were regularly maintained and modified over time, indicating that they had an important function throughout the life of each settlement. This function may have changed over time, but they would have provided defense from attacks from enemies or bandit raids, they allowed for the control of trade, and they protected the city from flooding. While some smaller sites have evidence for localized fire and conflagration, there is no evidence that any major settlement was attacked or destroyed by warfare (Figures 4–6).

City Planning One of the hallmarks of Harappan or Indus culture is the highly developed city planning that is seen in E1400

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ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 723 Mohenjo-daro, Sindh, Pakistan

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Figure 5 Mohenjo-daro site plan.

Within the settlements, streets and buildings were oriented on a north–south and east–west grid. The layout of streets and the placement of houses were often maintained for hundreds of years, either as the result of city ordinances or simply for functional purposes. Major north–south and east–west streets were between 4.5 and as much as 9 m wide allowing for two-way traffic using ox carts. Smaller streets were around 2–3 m wide, allowing only one-way cart traffic. Gateways were generally only 2.5 m wide that would allow only one-way cart traffic and more control of movement into and out of the city. Wide streets were constructed to allow ox carts carrying goods to access each major neighborhood and also to cross through the entire settlement. In Mesopotamian cities, the main streets went from the city gate to the temple or palace, but did not provide equal access to all parts of the settlement.

Fired brick-lined drains were located along the edges of the street, and some streets had large covered drains down the center of the street. Corbelled arches were used to carry drains under buildings or streets. The streets were not paved, but the accumulation of crushed pottery and nodules compacted by use resulted in hard surfaces similar to modern gravel roads. Large potholes and ox cart ruts were periodically filled with additional debris to level the streets out. Even with periodic maintenance, the accumulation of debris on the streets resulted in clogged drains that were eventually filled in and new streets and drains were built at a higher level to allow proper drainage. Streets in neighborhoods where there was less maintenance rose faster than the main streets, resulting in an uneven topography. Eventually, the highest parts of the cities were 18–20 m above the surrounding plain.

724 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization Dholavira, Kutch, India

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Manh Figure 6 Dholavira site plan.

Private Architecture Indus cities were made up of both small and large private houses and larger public structures. Many buildings were built on top of earlier ruins or newly constructed mud-brick platforms that raised the level of the house above the street level to protect it from flooded streets. Over time, this construction practice resulted in neighborhoods that were much higher than the streets and as noted above, cities as a whole rose high above the plain. At Mohenjo-daro the highest walled mound is located in the west with a series of lower mounds on the east, and one or two habitation areas to the north and south of the high mound. The site of Harappa has a high mound in the west and much larger mound that is almost as high extending to the east. Lower suburbs are located to the north, northeast, south, and east of these two main mounds. Dholavira has a unique layout with three nested rectangular city walls and a higher citadel located on a hill in the south. Some of the smaller

settlements are also divided into separate mounded areas, or have a single large walled area divided by an internal wall. The segregated habitation areas associated with a single city may indicate competing economic or political groups, and with the exception of Dholavira, no single area appears to have dominated the total settlement. Bricks used for constructing buildings and city walls were of a standardized ratio of 1:2:4 (thickness: width:length). The absolute size of unfired mud bricks for city walls and large platforms was approximately 10 cm  20 cm  40 cm. The size for bricks used in the construction of houses was approximately 7 cm  14 cm  28 cm. Over 700 years, these ratios did not change and there was very little variation in absolute size. Most houses in the large cities were constructed with smaller fired bricks, while unfired small bricks were used for temporary walls and foundation repairs. In regions where stone was plentiful, such as Kutch and Saurasthra, roughly hewn and carefully dressed

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 725

stone blocks were also used in architecture. While some effort was made to maintain the 1:2:4 ratio, this was not rigorously imposed in stone construction. There is no standardization in the layout of Harappan houses, but private houses were generally laid out with a central space surrounded by living and storage rooms. Many houses had entryways from a side alleyway rather than from the main street, and usually windows were maintained only on the second storey. The roof and second floor were made with wooden beams and covered with reeds and plaster to create a sturdy floor. Doors and windows were made with wood and some windows had wood or stone latticework to allow airflow, and at the same time a degree of privacy. Although there are numerous large building complexes in the larger cities, most appear to be the result of growth and remodeling over time. The core building may have belonged to a wealthy merchant or landowner, with numerous smaller units inhabited by relatives or servants. None of these structures appear to have been used as a central palace or temple. Many smaller private buildings as well as some of the larger structures are associated with manufacturing debris from specialized crafts, and small craft workshops are often found in association with domestic architecture. At sites such as Chanhudaro and Lothal, some buildings and open areas may have served as specialized factories for bead making or copper working, but most crafts associated with kilns were located at the edges of the sites (see the section on ‘specialized crafts’) or in what appear to be abandoned structures.

Monumental or Public Architecture Large buildings that do not appear to be domestic in nature have been identified at Mohenjo-daro as well as at Harappa. The famous Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro may have been used for public rituals and consists of a specially constructed water tank (12 m north–south and 7 m wide, with a maximum depth of 2.4 m), surrounded by a colonnade with entries at both ends. Smaller rooms, one of which contains a well, are located on the eastern side of the tank, and may have been used for visitors or for storage. Just to the north of this tank are eight small rooms with bathing platforms, where people may have cleansed themselves before coming to the main tank for special rituals. To the southwest of the Great-Bath is the so-called Granary, which consists of a monumental brick foundation (50 m east–west and 27 m north–south) with narrow passageways and sockets for holding what

may have been a wooden superstructure. Although it is referred to as a granary, there is no archaeological evidence for the storage of grain in this building. Its precise function may never be known, but it was clearly an impressive monumental building or public hall in a prominent area of the city. At Harappa a monumental building complex, also mistakenly called a ‘granary’, has been the focus of recent excavations in an attempt to determine its precise function. This structure was originally constructed on a massive mud-brick platform with fired brick facing (50 m north–south and 40 m east–west). Two rows of six long rectangular rooms were separated by a central passageway. These rooms had brick foundations and narrow hollow floors, and were thought to have been used for storage of grain. Careful analysis of several unexcavated portions of this structure in 1997 did not reveal any evidence of storage vessels, or grain and the precise function is still unknown. When it was first excavated in the 1930s, it was thought to be associated with equally enigmatic circular working platforms interpreted as grainprocessing areas and located to the north of the ‘granary’ New excavations and radiocarbon dating have shown that the circular working platforms were not used for processing grain and that they date some 200 years after the so-called ‘granary’ was constructed. The precise function of these circular platforms is still being investigated. Recent excavations at the site of Dholavira have found large buildings in the highest citadel area of the site, but once again there is no conclusive evidence for their function during the Harappan period. The excavators suggest that they may have been administrative or ritual structures that were eventually abandoned and reused by later inhabitants.

Wells and Latrines The construction of wells made with specially designed wedge-shaped bricks reflects the high level of technical expertise achieved by Indus architects and the overriding need for reliable sources of water in large urban centers. Wedge-shaped well bricks were the same length as normal rectangular bricks (28 cm) but one edge was constricted to create a tight fitting tubular construction. As wells were sunk into the ground, the surrounding pressure of the soil made the construction even stronger. Wells range in size from around 1 m internal diameter to over 2 m in diameter and were excavated below the water table to provide freshwater in the heart of the cities. Many houses, particularly at sites such as Mohenjo-daro, had private wells, but in other sites a single well was used for a

726 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization

larger neighborhood. Public wells were located along major streets or in public courtyard areas. Most houses in larger cities had separate bathing areas with paved floors made with bricks set on edge and closely fitted to make them water tight. A separate latrine area was usually located next to the bathing platform. The latrines were in the form of a commode made from an old storage jar, which usually had a hole punched into the base and was buried up to the rim in the floor. These commodes would have been regularly emptied and the waste taken outside of the city. Small drains discharged wastewater from the bathing area and latrine overflow into a sump pot in the street or into a neighborhood drain. When houses were remodeled, a new jar would be placed on top of the old commode and the surrounding floor was raised with rubble or debris. The larger city drains were generally not used for removal of human waste, but rather to take away water from bathing areas and wells, and excess rainwater. Major drains emptied the wastewater onto the plains outside the city. Many streets in the larger cities had garbage bins for the accumulation of nonliquid waste that would have been collected and dumped outside the settlement. Although the Indus cities were equipped with the most sophisticated drainage system of any contemporaneous ancient city, these drains and garbage collection areas and latrines had to be maintained continuously to function effectively. Excavations at Harappa have shown that while some areas of the city were being maintained, streets and drains in other neighborhoods became filled with refuse, and even rotting animal carcasses. Eventually, the city or more likely neighborhood committees refurbished these streets and new drains were constructed above the old ones, indicating a fluctuating and possibly decentralized process of civic order and maintenance.

Specialized Crafts The emergence of urban centers is closely linked to the development of specialized technologies. Due to the fact that the Indus script has not yet been deciphered, the study of specialized crafts provides one of the most important sources of information on the nature of Indus trade, technology, and socioeconomic and political organization. Cities were located at crossroads of interaction and trade that stimulated the development of distinctive technologies. Withthe increase in urban populations, many crafts were developed to create status items to differentiate specific communities and meet the demands of increasingly complex urban needs. While many crafts practiced in

the large urban centers can be traced back to earlier village communities in distant resource areas, others were the result of innovative urban craft specialists. For example, chipped stone tools, shell working, stone bead making and even copper metallurgy began long before the emergence of cities. In contrast, complex metal casting and joining, drilling of hard stone beads with specialized drills, finely carved steatite seals, the production of compact glassy faience, and the manufacture of stoneware bangles, are technologies that were invented or developed in the cities. The technology of writing itself can also be seen as a specialized craft that was refined and standardized during the urban phase. Some of these technologies were exclusively developed for creating status items for elites, in order to communicate and reinforce social, ritual, and probably political hierarchy. Many of the crafts practiced in the cities were not directly controlled by elites, but any craft located within the city walls could have been indirectly controlled through taxation of raw materials coming into the city or finished goods leaving the city. Stone tool making, shell working, the production of grinding stone, and steatite and agate bead making were carried out in many different parts of the city. These crafts involved local as well as nonlocal materials and relatively simple extractive or reductive technologies, that involve processes such as chipping, grinding, carving, spinning and twisting, etc., to process raw materials into finished objects. Transformative technologies were generally more important for the creation of trade and status items and involved pyrotechnological or chemical processes using either local or nonlocal materials. Copper/bronze working, some pottery firing, and the manufacture of faience and steatite seals are transformative crafts and were often practiced in isolated or sometimes highly controlled areas of the city. During the Harappa phase, pottery was generally made on the fast wheel, though molds and handbuilding techniques were used for some vessels. Most of the pottery was either undecorated or simply ornamented with red slip and black bands. Around 10% of the pottery was elaborately decorated with black-painted motifs on red slip or occasionally with polychrome decorations. Stoneware bangles were finely crafted high-fired ceramic ornaments whose production was restricted to the largest cities of Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and possibly Dholavira (Figure 7). The faience produced in the Indus cities was extremely strong and made from reground frit or melted silica. It was colored with copper or other minerals to create a range of colors and was used

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 727 4

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Figure 7 Mohenjo-daro pottery types. From Dales GF and Kenoyer JM (1986). Excavations at Mohenjo Daro, Pakistan: The Pottery. Philadelphia, University Museum Press, fig. 102.

to make bangles, beads, pendants, and also seals and inscribed tablets. Fired steatite or soapstone was used to make beads as well as square inscribed seals. While bead making and seal production were usually undertaken in different areas, recent excavations at Harappa found a highly restricted faience and steatite seal workshop where beads were also being manufactured. Indus ornaments were made in similar styles but from different qualities of materials that would have had different relative value. For example, bangles were made in terracotta, faience, shell, ivory, alabaster and a high-fired stoneware, as well as copper/ bronze and gold (Figure 8). Beads and pendants were made out of stone, shell, ivory, terracotta, faience, and precious metals (Figure 9). The similarity in ornament style is thought to reflect shared ideologies, but the hierarchy in material quality may have been used to define different social or economic groups. Similar patterns can be seen in the manufacture of identical shaped containers made of terracotta, copper, or silver. Copper metallurgy was highly developed, and included the use of pure copper, tin bronze, and arsenical bronze to make tools, weapons, mirrors,

ornaments, figurines, and a variety of vessels. The different compositions and alloys resulted in objects with different colors as well as functional capabilities such as hardness or flexibility. Silver was used to make ornaments and vessels, while gold was used primarily for ornaments. Textiles were also an important industry in the Indus cities and though the preservation of fabrics is rare, it is possible to identify the use of cotton and different qualities of wool to make cords and weave both coarse and fine fabrics. These fibers were being spun on hand-turned spinning wheels as well as drop spindle whorls. The most important recent discovery from Harappa is evidence for the earliest use of wild silk at around 2450 BC, to manufacture threads used in beaded ornaments. On the basis of decorated textiles depicted on figurines, such as the famous PriestKing sculpture from Mohenjo-daro (Figure 11d) and one sample of fabric with traces of dye, fabrics were probably dyed or stamped with different colors, such as red (from madder) and blue (from indigo) or bleached to create contrasting white patterns. All of these crafts would have been important for both everyday existence as well as for trade and the creation of status items to differentiate the many

728 ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization Terracotta

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Figure 8 Harappan bangle styles.

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Selected phase beads from Harappa: 2600–1900 BC Figure 9 Harappan bead styles.

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 729

different communities and social classes. Specialized crafts were also used to create distinctive ritual objects such as figurines, ornaments, and narrative seals.

Trade and Economy The overall economic organization of the Indus cities can be reconstructed through a study of the distribution of resource areas, sites with specialized production of semifinished goods, and the presence of raw materials, workshops, and finished goods in major settlements. These data reveal a highly stratified economic interaction system. Many of the larger towns and cities were directly connected with external regions and to each other by inter-regional networks. The long-term stability of this system would have been essential for merchants to make profits from raw materials and goods after traveling hundreds of kilometers to the major cities. Cities were connected to towns and villages through regional networks of exchange, and more local networks were used to redistribute food items and essential commodities between a city and its immediate hinterland. Although no coinage system has been discovered, a highly standardized system of stone weights was used throughout the entire area of the Indus civilization. The base weight may have been two seeds of barley or moong bean, or possibly the wild licorice seed (Abrus precatorius or ‘gunja’), which is red and black and weighs approximately 0.109 g. Indus weights use a combination of both a binary system (doubling in size from 1:2:4:8:16:32:64) and a decimal system of 160, 200, 320, 640, etc. The smallest weight is equal to 8 ‘gunja’ or 0.871 g, and the largest weight at Mohenjo-daro is 10 865 g. Cubical stone weights were probably not used for everyday exchange, but are found primarily in the gateway areas of large cities and may have been used for taxation. Another possible form of accounting or credit may have been the use of inscribed tablets or molded faience tablets that begins around 2450 BC (period 3B) at Harappa and continues through the end of the Harappa phase. Stamp seals with Indus script and distinctive animal motifs were used to mark bundles of goods with clay sealings, and provide conclusive evidence for elite control of trade within the Indus region as well as in long-distance trade. Indus weights, seals, and sealings have been found in the Arabian Gulf and distant Mesopotamia, as well as in Central Asia. Special trade goods produced in the Indus, such as beads, shell objects and figurines have been recorded from Mesopotamian sites, but so far there is no evidence for Mesopotamian produced items in the Indus sites. Trade goods from Mesopotamia may have been perishable materials such as textiles or consumables, or

raw materials that were reworked into new forms. The only exotic finished goods found in Indus cities originate in Baluchistan or Afghanistan and include copper and stone tools, cylinder seals, carved stone figurines, stone vessels and ornaments, and possibly some pottery vessels.

Indus Script During the Harappa phase, the Indus script appears to have been standardized throughout the Indus region and used in a wide variety of contexts and forms. This script emerged out of earlier forms of writing found during the Kot Diji phase at Harappa and other sites throughout the greater Indus valley region (Figure 10). Beginning around 2600–2450 BC, the most widespread context for writing is seen in cursive graffiti incised onto pottery that was used for storage and trade, as well as for personal or ritual use. Other forms of cursive script are seen on personal ornaments used to indicate ownership or dedication. The most formal type of writing is seen inscribed on square steatite seals that were also carved with animal motifs. The various iconographic motifs include the mythical unicorn, multiple headed animals, as well as the bull, elephant, bison, goat, tiger, and rhinoceros. The inscriptions were made in reverse and stamped into clay sealings to create a positive text indicating ownership or destination. Beginning around 2450– 2200 BC, a complex system of inscribed tablets or tokens was developed for keeping accounts and maintaining trade contacts throughout the Indus valley. Toward the end of the Harappa phase, c. 2200– 1900 BC, distinctive copper tablets with incised script and animal motifs were produced at Mohenjo-daro, and a different style of copper tablet with raised script on both sides was produced at Harappa. These copper tablets were relatively standardized in terms of shape, weight, and inscriptions, and may have been used for special accounting or rituals. During this same time period, rectangular seals with writing, but no animal motif began to be used, and writing came to be used in conjunction with elaborate narrative depictions of myths and religious ceremonies found on seals, tablets, or pendants. The Indus script has not yet been deciphered, due to the absence of bilingual tablets and the lack of long inscriptions. More than one language may have been spoken in the Indus settlements and therefore the Indus script was probably used to write words or short sentences in more than one language. The major language families that may have coexisted in the greater Indus region include Dravidian, AustroAsiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Indo-Aryan. While some individuals have proposed that the Indus script was

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not a writing system and was not used to encode a language, this opinion is not widely supported. Most inscriptions are made up of only a few signs, with the average being five signs. The contexts of its use allow archaeologists to reconstruct the function and importance of writing in the economy, politics, and ideology of the Indus cities. The script was quite versatile and could be used to encode a range of messages. The general function of the inscriptions would have been to identify ownership of goods or economic transactions, accounting, the recording of sociopolitical or ritual events and less formal graffiti. Approximately 400–450 different signs have been identified, but not all were used at the same time. The number of signs and the sequences in which they occur has led many scholars to suggest that the writing system is logo-syllabic, though some signs appear to have served as pictographs or even as ideographs. Most inscriptions were written from right to left, though some longer inscriptions were written in both directions, alternating from right to left on each succeeding line. As noted above, the use of the Indus script and the types of objects being inscribed can now be divided

into three phases corresponding to the major chronological developments at Harappa. Although there may have been some use of graffiti on pottery during the Late Harappa phase (1900–1300 BC), inscribed Indus seals were no longer made or used after around 1900 BC. The relatively abrupt disappearance of a writing system that had existed for over 700 years suggests that the Indus script itself was closely linked to the ruling elites of the Indus cities and that the writing system had economic, religious, and political significance.

Religion Given the large geographic area of the Indus cities and the hierarchy of settlements, it is surprising that distinctive shared symbols and distinctive ritual objects are found in all major settlements. These symbols are thought to reflect a shared ideology that in conjunction with economic strategies helped to integrate the many different communities living in the major cities and surrounding settlements. Some of the more common artifacts and symbols are similar styles of terracotta figurines of animals that may have been used for

ASIA, WEST/Indus Civilization 731

symbolic sacrificial purposes. Human figurines of males and females with ornaments and elaborate headdresses may represent fertility or other specific deities (Figure 11) Various geometric symbols such as the stepped cross, swastika, endless knot, and intersecting circle motif are found on pottery as well as pendants and seals. Narrative scenes on seals depict outdoor ceremonies that took place under the sacred pipal or fig tree, worship of deities in trees or seated in yogic position on a throne, processions with sacred animals, the practice of animal sacrifice, and possibly even human sacrifice. Other scenes depict what may be important myths and stories. Local cults may have been practiced in specific regions while a more established state religion appears to have emerged in the major cities. At Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira, stone sculptures of male figures have been found that may represent clan leaders. In the past, these were incorrectly called ‘priest-king’ images. The most direct evidence for ritual practice is found in the cemetery burials at major sites such as Harappa, Dholavira, and Mohenjo-daro, as well as some smaller settlements such as Lothal, Rupar, and Kalibangan. Most burials were made in a north–south-oriented rectangular pit with the head to the north. The body was placed in a wooden coffin or wrapped in a shroud, and laid out on top of or surrounded by burial pottery and other offerings needed for the

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after-life (Figure 12). Although these burials do not contain large amounts of material wealth, they do contain distinctive pottery and ornaments that would not have been available to common people. The health status and mature age profiles of the buried individuals also indicate that they were a privileged class. The delicate shell bangles found buried with many of the women also indicate that over time they became less and less involved in manual labor, clearly an indication of elite status. Although there are no ‘royal burials’, the recent excavation of a burial complex at Dholavira suggests that some individuals were interred with gold ornaments, a tradition that was not practiced in the major cities and towns. Cemeteries that have been discovered represent only a small portion of the population, and the rest of the urban population would have been disposed of by other means that have left no archaeological trace. This burial pattern is one more indication of social differentiation and hierarchy.

Social and Political Organization Without the aid of written texts, the sociopolitical and ritual character of Indus cities is difficult to understand. Nevertheless, the various types of artifacts and the patterns of their use discussed above provide insight into the ways in which these cities and the society as a

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Figure 11 Harappan figurines and sculpture. (a) Terracotta female figurine, Mohenjo-daro; (b) terracotta female Figurine, Harappa; (c) bronze female figurine, Mohenjo-daro; (d) steatite ‘priest-king’ figure, Mohenjo-daro; (e) terracotta male figurine, Harappa.

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whole was organized. Urban populations would have included administrative and service classes such as sweepers and garbage collectors. Wealthy landlords and merchants along with their service groups and craftsmen may have occupied the large multiroomed houses. Numerous specialized craftspeople would have been employed by the merchants or worked as entrepreneurs in the urban market places and craft workshops. The gateways would have been staffed with gatekeepers and tax collectors, while guards would have kept watch at the gateways and on the city walls. Many farmers may have lived inside the city walls in addition to maintaining hamlets close to their fields. Herders, fisher folk, and hunters may have lived in the city periodically in order to participate in urban markets and to provision the large urban population. Rural populations would have been made up of farmers and herders, fisher folk, and hunters. Miners and specialized craftspeople would have lived near

major resource areas, and long-distance traders would have moved between cities and resource areas to market their goods. It is not difficult to reconstruct the many different occupations that are necessary to run a city, but the actual political organization is more difficult to define. The lack of palaces, temples, and extravagant burials of hereditary monarchs has led some scholars to argue that this urban society was not organized as a state, but rather as a complex chiefdom or some other form of nonstate society. Without the aid of written texts, it would be quite difficult to differentiate a complex chiefdom and an early state-level society. Nevertheless, other scholars, including this author, argue that these cities were organized as state-level societies with highly stratified and hierarchical social organization. The support for this model is seen in the hierarchy of settlement patterns, the relatively limited use of

ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier 733

seals, weights and writing by some communities living in the city, and the presence of relatively small and intensively used cemeteries that contain individuals who represent elites. Instead of a single dominant group, the rulers of the various cities would have controlled through a corporate structure, similar to that seen in the republics and confederacies of the subsequent Early Historic period. The major ruling communities would have been made up of landlords, merchants, or ritual specialists who shared a common ideology and economic system as represented by seals, ornaments, ceramics, and other artifacts. The cities were probably more rigidly stratified and segregated than the rural settlements, but the social organization of the society as a whole would have been loosely stratified. While the largest cities may have been relatively independent, they were integrated with other settlements though political and economic interaction based on the trade and exchange of important subsistence goods as well as socioritual status items. See also: Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Ganges Valley; India, Deccan and Central Plateau; Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier; Sri Lanka; Cities, Ancient, and Daily Life; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Craft Specialization; Exchange Systems; Writing Systems.

Further Reading Allchin R and Allchin B (1997) Origins of a Civilization: The Prehistory and Early Archaeology of South Asia. Delhi: Viking. Bisht RS (2005) The water structures and engineering of the Harappans at Dholavira (India). In: Jarrige C and Lefevre V (eds.) South Asian Archaeology 2001, vol. 1, p. 11–26. Paris: CNRS. Dales GF and Kenoyer JM (1986) Excavations at Mohenjo Daro, Pakistan: The Pottery. Philadelphia: University Museum Press. Kenoyer JM (1998) Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Kenoyer JM (2003) Uncovering the keys to the Lost Indus Cities. Scientific American Jul.2003: 67–75. Kenoyer JM (2006) The origin, context and function of the Indus Script: Recent insights from Harappa. In: Osada T and Hase N (eds.) Proceedings of the Pre-symposium and the 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable, pp. 9–27. Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, RIHN. Lal BB (1997) The Earliest Civilization of South Asia (Rise, Maturity and Decline). New Delhi: Aryan Books International. Law RW (2005) Regional interaction in the Prehistoric Indus Valley: Initial results of Rock and Mineral Sourcing Studies at Harappa. In: Jarrige C and Lefevre V (eds.) South Asian Archaeology 2001, vol. 1, p. 179–190. Paris: CNRS. Meadow RH and Patel AK (2003) Prehistoric pastoralism in Northwestern South Asia from the Neolithic through the Harappan Period. In: Weber S and Belcher WR (eds.) Ethnobiology and the Indus Civilization, pp. 65–94. Lanham, ML: Lexington Books.

Mughal MR (1997) Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture. Lahore: Ferozsons. Parpola A (1994) Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Possehl GL (1999) Indus Age: The Beginnings. New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd. Possehl GL (2002) The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Weber SA (2003) Archaeobotany at Harappa: Indications for change. In: Weber S and Belcher WR (eds.) Ethnobiology and the Indus Civilization, pp. 175–198. Lanham, ML: Lexington Books. Wright RP, Schuldenrein J, Khan A, and Mughal MR (2005) The emergence of satellite communities along the Beas Drainage: Preliminary Results from Lahoma Lal Tibba and Chak Purbane Syal. In: Jarrige C and Lefevre V (eds.) South Asian Archaeology 2001, vol. 1, p. 327–336. Paris: CNRS.

Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier Robin Coningham and Mark Manuel, Durham University, Durham, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Early Historic Refers to the second emergence of urbanization in South Asia, dating to the early part of the first millenium BCE through to the mid-first millenium AD. Its historic references are derived from Vedic texts such as the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, texts. The period ends with the establishment of the Gupta Empire, which witnesses massive changes in both political and administrative structures. Gandhara The name of one of the early Historic Mahajanapadas, situated in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Gandhara was located primarily within the Kabul River valley, the Vale of Peshawar, Potwar Plateau, but had strong links to the Swat Valley. The main cities are Charsadda and Taxila. The name has been utilized throughout history to refer to this region and its inhabitants. Janapada (and Mahajanapada) Janapada or ‘territory’ refers to the emergence of a number of settlements and their hinterlands during the first millenium BCE. Competition and internecine fighting between these settlements, resulted in individual centers expanding their control over neighboring janapada – resulting in the establishment of the classic sixteen Mahajanapadas or ‘Great Territories’. philhellene Someone who was an admirer of Greek culture, but not necessarily of Greek origin. In this sense, refers to a series of communities within Central and Southern Asia who adopted Greek architecture, coinage, religion, and script or language, but were not of Greek descent. satrapy A territory or province that was governed by a governor or client-king. Originating in the Persian Empire, conquered lands were run as politically and economically semi-autonomous states, whilst military aspects were centrally controlled and annual tributes/taxes were paid to the Empire. Satrapies were used by later philhellene empires in Central, Southern, and Western Asia.

734 ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier transhumance A method of subsistence in which livestock (sheep, goat, cattle) and humans move between different geographical and/or topographical regions on a seasonal basis. Generally, summers are spent in upland areas, whilst winters are spent in lower-lying regions.

southern plains, whilst in the northern valleys snow can remain on the ground for 9 months of the year. Part of the catchment of the Indus, the Valleys of Swat, Chitral, Dir, Hunza, Gilgit, and Leh join the Indus system high in the mountains whilst foothills to the east feed the Jhelum, Chenab Ravi, Sutlej. Before opening onto the plains of the Punjab, a series of large vales are encountered, including Kashmir and Peshawar, the former with its well-known lakes. The southernmost areas of this study are the Bannu Basin, within the watershed of the Kurram River, and the western plains of the Indus until it meets Dera Ismail Khan and two regions with very different characters – Sindh and Baluchistan (see Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands) (Figures 2 and 3). Bitterly contested by states with nuclear capability, this region has a patchwork of languages and religions, but its archaeological and historical context has been shaped by its stark physical features. However, this is not a marginal area but one of innovation, and although impassable for many months of the year, its valleys have facilitated the movement and exchange of goods, peoples, and ideas between southern Asia and the lands to its north, east, and west for millennia.

Introduction Although partitioned for the last 60 years, the geography, archaeology, and history of the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir present a distinct regional unit within South Asia. This is most clearly demonstrated by its geography, which is part of the great barrier defining the northern limits of the subcontinent. Formed by the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains, its foothills are dissected by a series of meandering valleys, whose deep-cutting rivers conjoin in vales before disgorging onto the fertile plains of the Punjab to the south (Figure 1). Despite this unity, the region’s topography is diverse and ranges from eight peaks over 7500 m down to the alluvial plains of the Indus River less than 200 m above sea level. Corresponding diversity is found in its temperatures, where it can reach over 45  C in the

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Figure 2 The Hunza Valley with Karakoram mountains beyond.

Figure 3 General view of the Kashmir Valley.

Early Prehistory

Despite the discovery of the early primates, Sivapithicus and Ramapithicus, in the strata of the northern mountains in the late nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, no remains of early hominids have been found in this region (Figure 4). These early discoveries led to the mission of De Terra and Paterson, a geologist and an archaeologist, who surveyed possible occupation sites in the 1930s. Although tasked with providing

evidence of an Asian origin for humans, they concluded that early humans migrated from Africa. However, their findings have provided the foundations of our understanding of the earliest phases of South Asian prehistory. New exploration and excavation in recent decades, particularly an analysis of the Soan Valley where De Terra and Paterson worked, have pushed back the established date for early human occupation in the

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Figure 4 Timeline.

region to 1.9 million years ago, and have necessitated the reformulation of many of the concepts regarding the character of the Asian Palaeolithic. Our evidence comes from two key areas, the Potwar Plateau, and the Valleys of Swat and Kashmir. Rather than representing the distribution of Palaeolithic occupation in the region, they reflect the most intensively examined areas (see Asia, South: Paleolithic Cultures). The Soan Palaeolithic

The Palaeolithic occupation of the region is best known from the Potwar Plateau where the Soan River has cut a deep gorge into early strata and includes the earliest known human artifact in South Asia. The latter, a flaked quartzite pebble, was recovered from a gully close to the site of Riwat, where it was embedded in a conglomerate dating to 1.9 million years old. While there has been some debate over the authenticity of the find as well as questions regarding the lack of chronometric dates, this artifact is yet to be successfully refuted. Somewhat younger, hand-axes have been recovered from sites in the Jhelum river basin within securely dated geological deposits of 700–500 ka. The most extensive corpus of Palaeolithic occupation comes from Riwat itself. Dated to 45 ka, excavations have revealed remains of a small stone-lined pit associated with a low wall-footing and lithic blades. A high proportion of the stones found at the site appear to be flakes, flaked cores, and blades; however, despite extensive excavation no evidence of animal bones, charcoal, burnt stones, or burnt clay was identified, leaving the excavators to suggest that the site was not an habitation site but a manufacturing site, possibly for skin working (Figure 5).

Figure 5 Flaked quartzite pebble from Riwat.

Elsewhere on the Potwar Plateau, manufacturing sites predominate in areas where water and raw materials are abundant. Scrapers, trimmed points, small cleavers, and axes dominate the assemblages, most of which are manufactured from quartzite. The dating of loess deposits immediately above these finds from the Soan River provides a terminus ante quem of between 20 and 60 ka. Northern Valleys

Sanghao Cave, situated on a tributary of the Swat River in the Vale of Peshawar, has yielded 3 m of cultural deposits with a degree of continuity in occupation.

ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier 737

Excavated in the 1960s and poorly published, its scrapers, blade-flakes, tanged and triangular points, burins and small-hand ax have been loosely attributed to the Middle Palaeolithic. Again, quartzite predominates the assemblage, unsurprisingly as there is a source less than 100 m from the cave entrance. Occupation at the site is thought to have continued, although not continuously, until the Early Historic period. Further Palaeolithic tools have been identified in the Alakananda Valley near Garhwal in Kashmir. Quartzite is the most commonly utilized raw material, but there are also some isolated uses of jasper. Although difficult to date, it is likely that many of the hunters and prey depicted on boulders and rock shelters in Chilas and Hunza in the upper Indus and Dungri in the Vale of Kashmir relate to this period (Figure 6).

First Food-producing Communities While it is extremely difficult to identify a distinct Mesolithic phase across the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir region, pollen analysis from peat deposits in the central Himalayas suggests that the period between c. 4000 and 2500 BC was one of increased temperature and rainfall – a result of enhanced monsoon strength. Associated with the frequent growth and decline of pine forests, these changes coincided with the emergence and spread of Neolithic communities within the valleys and vales of the region. Notably later than the sites of Mehrgarh and Kili Ghul Muhammed to the west (see Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands), the Neolithic of the Swat Valley, and Vale of Kashmir possesses its own distinct regional character.

Kashmir Valley

One of the most extensively excavated sites is Burzahom, ‘the place of Birch’, in the Vale of Kashmir. Situated 16 km southwest of Srinagar on a saddle above the lakes, it was identified in the 1930s but not extensively excavated until the 1960s. Burzahom’s first phase, IA, is aceramic and dates to between 3000 and 2850 BC. Phase 1B, dating to between 2850 and 2250 BC, is associated with the introduction of coarse, thick-walled, and over-fired ceramics with mat impressions. This phase also witnesses a steady increase in the number of domesticated animal bones and a corresponding decrease in the presence of wild species. The type site of a corpus of over 40 similar settlements, Burzahom’s Neolithic levels are associated with an assemblage of bone, antler, and polished stone tools, the latter including ring stones, axes, and rectangular sickles. However, the most characteristic feature of the site is the 37 bell-shaped pits dug into the loess. The largest of these was 2.74 m wide at the top and 4.57 m wide at the bottom, with a depth of 3.95 m. Some deeper pits have steps, while others had their floors painted with red ochre and their walls plastered (Figure 7). Evidence from Gufkral, 25 km southwest of Burzahom, has provided rather fuller evidence for subsistence and suggests that farming, herding, and hunting supported its inhabitants. Certainly, this is likely from the assemblage of wild ibex, bear, sheep, goat, cattle, wolf, and deer alongside with domesticated sheep, goat, wheat, barley, and lentils. The discovery of jade beads from these sites also indicates the movement of materials over long distances.

Figure 6 Petroglyphs of Markhor and hunters on the Sacred Rock of Hunza.

738 ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier

Figure 7 General view of the site of Buzahom.

Swat Valley

Despite the presence of occupation dating to the third millenium BC in the cave of Ghaligai, evidence of food-producing communities in Swat is somewhat later with the majority of sites occupied from c. 1700 BC onward. Remarkably similar to the evidence from Kashmir, the Pakistani-Italian team have provided a greater corpus of knowledge, ranging from the chronology of sites to their location within the landscape and the seasonal mobility of their occupants. Additionally, there are many more radiocarbon dates from Swat than from Kashmir. Aceramic in its earlier phase, ceramics are introduced in Period II of Ghaligai’s sequence in c. 1810 BC alongside limestone mortars whose presence in these levels is suggestive of food-processing strategies, but most evidence has been recovered from the sites associated with pits, many of which are also bell-shaped and located on saddles above the river Swat. Loebanr III, for example, has nine large pits and numerous smaller pits containing ceramic vessels, bone objects, terracotta figurines and its faunal record includes wild cat, tiger, deer, Himalayan goral, markhor, hare, and porcupine as well as domesticated dog, pig, zebu, goat, and sheep. Taxila Valley

Not all Neolithic occupation was restricted to the northern valleys and it is possible that alluvial deposition has masked the presence of earlier sites down on the plains. One known site is Sarai Khola, some 3 km southwest of the Early Historic city of Taxila. Its

earliest period with ground-stone axes, stone-blade industry, bone points, and burnished pottery with mat-impressions has been characterized as Neolithic and dated to c. 3000 BC. The presence also of a number of pits suggests a link with the early foodproducing communities to its north (see Asia, South: Neolithic Cultures). Dwelling Pits or Granaries?

The pits at Buzahom, Gufkral, Kalako-deray, Loebanr III, Aligrama, and Ghaligai have traditionally been interpreted as underground dwellings occupied during the cold winter months. However, experiments demonstrate that fires would have created a reduced atmosphere, making living conditions untenable. It now seems likely that the pits were used to store grain over the winter when the transhumant inhabitants of the region relocated to the lower valleys or plains. When sealed, the pits’ reduced atmosphere created ideal conditions for storage, protecting grain against microorganisms, humans, mammals, and rodents (Figure 8).

Indus Valley Tradition Originally considered to be a distinct and abrupt phenomenon, the intensive urbanization of the Indus Valley, often referred to as the Indus or Harappan Civilization, is now considered to be the culmination of a number of indigenous regional traditions and cultural developments (see Asia, South: Indus Civilization). This developmental period, referred to as ‘the

ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier 739

Figure 8 General view of the Swat Valley during the winter months.

Regionalization Era’ by Shaffer, stretched as far north as the valleys of our study region. One of these regional traditions, the Hakra, is dated to between 3300 and 2700 BCE and is located primarily in the Ghaggar–Hakra river basin. However, the discovery of Hakra-ware ceramics in the cave of Ghaligai in Swat suggests that there was a high degree of inter-regional trade and exchange present at this period. Furthermore, the presence of later Kot Dijian ceramics at Burzahom and sites within the northern valleys suggests an integral role in the growing social and economic complexity witnessed in the floodplains of the Indus to the south. Although demonstrating continuity with the region’s early food-producing settlements, a number of significant cultural changes occur such as the cessation of use of storage pits. These features are abandoned in Kashmir from 2250 BC and replaced with rectangular mudbrick structures, a sequence also encountered in the Swat Valley. The presence of Kot Dijian ceramics within Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier is also accompanied by the presence of metal objects and beads of agate and carnelian, suggesting access to long-distance trade and sufficient agricultural surplus to allow the accumulation of luxury goods. Rehman Dheri

While most sites, such as Burzahom in Kashmir, Sarai Khola in the Taxila Valley, and Sheri Khan Tarakai and Lewan in the Bannu Basin may have participated in the exchange of goods and ideas, it is only in the very south of the study region that urbanization occurs and complexity is fully demonstrated. Located on the western bank of the Indus River close to Dera Ismail

Khan, Rehman Dheri was established c. 3300 BC. Enclosed by a massive mudbrick wall, the town measures 550  400 m and is subdivided by cardinal streets to form a rigid grid-plan layout, making it one of the earliest planned settlements in South Asia (Figure 9). Despite its role in the development of the regional cultures, which converged to form the urbanized Integration Era (c. 2500–1900 BC), the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir remained detached from this later development. For example, unlike the sites of Kalibangan and Harappa to the east, Rehman Dheri does not appear to have been incorporated into the wider networks of the Harappa Phase – only a very small terracotta bangle-making site (Hisan Dheri) was established next to the old abandoned town. The northern valley sites also appear to have remained ‘unintegrated’, but this is not to suggest that there was no cultural and economic interaction between the two communities.

The End of the Indus Valley Tradition The causes of the decline of the Indus Valley cities at the beginning of the second millennium BCE are still debated. Despite this debate, and that over the correct term for its demise, it is widely agreed that this period was one of de-urbanization associated with the loss of long-distance trade, written scripts, weights, measures, and monumental architecture. Traditionally attributed to incursions of Indo-European speakers from Central Asia, it is now recognized that there were many more complex and multifaceted factors involved – not all of which are fully understood, and that concepts of an ‘Aryan invasion’ were more

740 ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier

Figure 9 Exposed house foundation on the surface of Rehman Dheri.

driven by British imperial motivations than archaeological fact. These points notwithstanding, as the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir were never fully integrated into the Indus urbanized system, they did not suffer from the symptoms of ‘systems collapse’ witnessed in the Indus floodplains; yet the vacuum precipitated the re-emergence of a distinct tradition in the region associated with the adoption of new influences from Western and Central Asia. It is important to note, however, that the region still remained connected with the Punjab, as illustrated by the discovery of ‘Cemetery H’ motifs on sherds from Bir-Kot-ghundai in the Swat Valley. Gandharan Grave Culture

One of the newly emergent traditions is termed the Gandharan Grave Culture within the Northwest Frontier and the Megalithic within Kashmir, but the sequences of the two are yet to be fully integrated. It was first identified in Swat by Italian archaeologists and has continued to be studied by the University of Peshawar. A homogenous tradition of burial practices with associated ceramic and artifact assemblages, it appears to have emerged in the upper Indus Valley c. 1700 BCE and then spread across the Valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral, and into the Vale of Peshawar and survived until the middle of the first millennium BC (Figure 10). Its most distinctive feature is the stone-sided cists, some of which are surrounded by stone circles. Usually contain one or two inhumations, the body commonly on its side with the legs drawn up and the arms raised and bent. A small number of graves contain cremated remains deposited in an anthropomorphic

Figure 10 Anthropomorphic urn from the Gandharan Grave Culture.

vessel but almost all are associated with burnished gray- or red-ware vessels and human terracotta figurines, although later examples have more numerous and elaborate grave goods. A number of horse burials have also been recovered from the burials of this tradition as well as items of horse furniture. Kashmir Valley

Contemporary with this tradition, similar cist burials with associated ‘Megalithic’ architecture have been identified within Kashmir at the sites of Devidhoora and Gwaldam in the Alakananda Valley as well as at

ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier 741

Burzahom and Gufkral. This similarity is also present at Malari where human and horse burials were exposed, the former buried prostrate with their knees flexed, and at Baseri with its cist burials. These common elements, combined with the presence of spouted goblets in both Swat and Kashmir, have led some scholars to advocate an expansion of Gandharan Grave Culture right across the region but others have questioned the contemporaneity of the two. While cemetery sites are numerous on account of their visible stone remains, there are few contemporary habitation sites. However, evidence from one of the most recently identified, the Bala Hisar of Charsadda, suggests that communities from the northern valleys had moved southwards to colonize the Vale of Peshawar by c. 1300 BC and were already associated with the manufacture of iron objects. Whether these communities were seasonal, following a transhumant way of life between valleys and plains is unclear with the present data set (Figure 11). Equally significant is the appearance of related ceramic vessels at Hathial in the Valley of Taxila to the south. When compared with the burnished wares from Charsadda, it becomes clear that a process of convergence was unifying the northern valleys and

leading to the establishment of larger settlements on the plains by the beginning of the first millennium BC. This southward movement was soon to be augmented by the introduction of open form vessels from the Ganga Valley to the east, a northward pattern shared with appearance of Painted Gray Ware at Thapli in the Alakananda Valley and Purola in the upper Yamuna Valley (see Asia, South: Ganges Valley). Frequently characterized as a ‘dark age’ between urbanizations, this was clearly a period of steady growth, innovation, and interaction between the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir.

Age of Empires This phase of increased complexity resulted in the emergence of nascent polities in the Northwest, centered on Taxila and Charsadda but augmented by the dramatic growth of the settlement of Akra in Bannu to the south. However, their success was not unnoticed and led to its dramatic annexation by Darius the Great in 520 BC. Renamed the satrapy of Gandhara, the newly partitioned region saw the imposition of Achaemenid garrisons, coinage, and script. Now part of a political and economic identity stretching from the Aegean to the Indus, annual tribute and levies of conscripts were drained, as illustrated on the bas-reliefs of Persepolis. In contrast with the textual evidence, archaeological evidence of Achaemenid occupation is limited even in the regional capitals of Charsadda and Taxila, although Achaemenid levels have been postulated at Balambat in the Dir Valley. Suggesting that the new satrapy enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, the ceramic and artifactual corpus of Taxila and Charsadda indicate that strong links with the Gangetic states were retained throughout this period. The same is true of the region’s later incorporation into the empire of Alexander the Great. The fact that, despite a century of searching, none of his newly founded cities has been identified suggests that Alexander was no more than a temporary interruption and it was left to his successors to spread Hellenistic art and architectural styles 200 years later. The Mauryan Empire

Figure 11 View of excavations at the Bala Hisar of Charsadda.

As Alexander’s generals were fusing personal empires after his death, the Selucids readily ceded the Northwest Frontier to a relatively unknown raja from the Ganges in exchange for 500 war elephants. The raja, Chandragupta Maurya, used the exchange to confirm the ascendancy of his kingdom of Magadha and began the elimination of his competitors (see Asia, South: Ganges Valley).

742 ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier

Whilst Greek and Achaemenid evidence is sparse, Mauryan occupation is readily available at the Bhir Mound in the Valley of Taxila. Capital of Gandhara, Taxila’s location at the bifurcation of the routes to Central and Western Asia was so important that its Viceroy was one of Chandragupta’s grandsons – Asoka. The Bhir Mound was an unfortified stonebuilt settlement of narrow streets covering an area of 1100 by 670 m. While there is evidence of limited civic control, it is only at the Dharmarajika stupa beyond the town that monumental investment is found in the construction of a 15 m wide Buddhist stupa (Figure 12). Ashoka’s Edicts

Figure 12 Curving drain and residential structures at the Bhir Mound, Taxila.

The presence of a similar monument in the Swat Valley at Butkara indicates the impact of Mauryan influence into the valleys, as does the scatter of sites with access to Northern Black Polished Ware, such as Bir-kot-ghundai in the Swat Valley, the Bhir Mound, and Charsadda in the Vale of Peshawar. Finally, it is indicated by the presence of three Asokan rock edicts in the Northwest Frontier. The first at Sirkap in the Taxila Valley, the second at Manshera on the way to Kashmir and Central Asia, and the third at Shahbazghari on the route to Afghanistan and Western Asia. All are written in Aramaic, indicating the Mauryan Empire’s Achaemenid inheritance and its desire to unify its own disparate communities (Figure 13).

Figure 13 The Asokan rock edict at Shahbazghari in the Vale of Peshawar.

ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier 743

Although there are no edicts in Kashmir, it is recorded that the monk Majjhantika was tasked by Asoka and the third Buddhist Council to introduce Buddhism to both Gandhara and Kashmir, confirming the linked nature of the two. Although of less magnitude than the Northwest, evidence of a Mauryan horizon in Kashmir is becoming clearer with contemporary brick-built structures at Ranihat on the eastern bank of the Alakananda River and at Semthan. Similarly, the presence of North Black Polished Ware, elite Mauryan tableware, at Ranihat and Moradhwaj indicates the close links between the imperial center in the Ganges and its northern periphery.

Hellenes and Philhellenes This brief integration of South Asia ended in 189 BC with the dissolution of the Mauryan Empire and the absorption of the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir into the sphere of expansionist Central Asian polities. Best known from their coinage, the first of these – the Indo-Greeks – were descendants of Alexander’s colonists in Bactria. Copying the architectural modes of their homeland, they established new colonies in the Northwest Frontier such as at Sirkap in the Taxila Valley and Shaikhan Dheri in the Vale of Peshawar. They introduced a rigid plan to urban centers, with straight streets lined with shops, temples, and monasteries subdivided by smaller lanes into residential blocks. The most fully excavated of these, Sirkap, has clear evidence of civic authority with over 100 ha of unencroached streets and 5 km of stone walling

Figure 14 The main street of Sirkap, Taxila.

surround the acropolis and its lower town. Founded in the second century BC, it was also selected by successive philhellenic dynasties of Parthians and Sakas as their capital. Their presence in the mountain valleys to the north is also recorded on rock inscriptions in Chilas in the upper Indus (Figure 14).

The Kushan Empire This patchwork of city-states and petty dynasties was to be reintegrated by a Central Asian nomadic people known as the Yuezhi or Kushans. Partly responsible for pressuring the Greek communities of Bactria southwards into the Northwest Frontier, they expanded rapidly from this base into Kashmir and by the second century AD had established control from the Oxus to the Ganges – acting as a buffer between the Roman and the Han empires. Highly dependent on the movement of trade between east and west, they developed a series of major fortified strong points along the trade routes from Mathura on the Jamuna to Sirsukh in the Taxila Valley and on to Begram in Afghanistan and Dalverzintepe in Uzbekistan as well as within the Kashmir Valley. While Begram was strengthened by the building of a 12 m wide wall with bastions holding catapults and ballista, Sirkap was abandoned in favor of a site within the valley – Sirsukh. Sirsukh was a massive rectangle measuring 1375  1000 m with 5.5 m thick stonewalls strengthened by a rounded berm to prevent undermining. Its walls were regularly punctuated by stirrup bastions with arrow-slits providing a wide range of

744 ASIA, WEST/Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier

fire but the absence of occupation deposits suggests that a mobile force occupied the site (Figure 15). The discovery of ivory objects from the Ganges, Roman glass and metalwork, and Chinese lacquer work in a storeroom at Begram illustrates the success of Kushan trade routes – a success that also facilitated the spread of Buddhism along the Silk route. Although Kushan rulers patronized many religious traditions, there was a dramatic rise in the number of Buddhist

monasteries established in the Northwest Frontier and Kashmir. These ranged from the emperor Kanishka’s stupa complex at Shah-ji-ki-dheri in Peshawar to the hundreds of individual religious complexes in the Taxila Valley, such as at Pippala, and within the Vale of Kashmir, such as at Moradhwaj (Figure 16). Associated with some of the earliest depictions of the Buddha in human form, Kushan rule saw the blending of local and exotic cults, styles, and traditions,

Figure 15 One of the stirrup-bastions at the city of Sirsukh, Taxila.

Figure 16 The Kushan period quadrangular monastery at Morha Moradu in the Valley of Taxila.

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 745

culminating in the emergence of the Mahayana movement. Depictions of the Kushans and the presence of their inscriptions at Chilas and Hunza in the upper Indus Valley and near Leh in Kashmir indicate that their influence was not just urban but was felt high in the mountain passes as well (see Asia, South: Buddhist Archaeology).

The End of the Early Historic World Partitioned again, the Sasanian kings Ardashir I and Shahpur I drew the Northwest Frontier back into their Western Asian empire in the third century AD and, with the loss of their access to Silk Route traffic, Kushan rule contracted. Losing Kushan-dominated territories in the Ganges to Chandragupta in the fourth century AD, their independence in Kashmir was only to last another hundred years. The conquests of Chandragupta and his son, Samudragupta, ended once more the cycle of regional fission and fusion and, with the creation of new Gupta Era in 320 AD, ushered in a new era of social and political organization based on a core polity run by royal officials surrounded by a periphery of client rulers – a model which was to serve Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier, as well as South Asia more widely, until the Mughal period. See also: Asia, Central, Steppes; Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Buddhist Archaeology; Ganges Valley; Indus Civilization; Neolithic Cultures; Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, West: Achaemenian, Parthian, and Sasanian Persian Civilizations; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of.

Further Reading Allchin FR (ed.) (1995) The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coningham RAE (2006) South Asia: From early villages to Buddhism. In: Scarre C (ed.) The Human Past, pp. 518–551. London: Thames and Hudson. Dani AH and Masson VM (eds.) (1992) History of Civilisations of Central Asia, Vol. I. The Dawn of Civilisation: Earliest Times to 700 BC. Paris: UNESCO. Harmatta J, Puri BN, and Etemadi GF (eds.) (1994) History of Civilisations of Central Asia, Vol. II. The Development of Sedentary and Nomadic Civilisations: 700 BC to 250 AD. Paris: UNESCO. Jettmar K, Konig D, and Thewalt V (eds.) (1989) Antiquities of Northern Pakistan, Reports and Studies, Vol. 1. Mainz. Marshall JH (1951) Taxila. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nautiyal KP and Khanduri BM (1991) Emergence of Early Culture in Garhwal Central Himalaya: A Study Based on Excavations at Thapli and Ranihat. Srinagar: University Museum of Himalayan Archaeology and Ethnography.

Rendell HM, Dennell RW, and Halim MA (1989) Pleistocene and Palaeolithic Investigations in the Soan Valley, Northern Pakistan. BAR International Series 544. Oxford: BAR. Stacul G (1987) Prehistoric and Protohistoric Swat, Pakistan (c. 3000–1400 BC). Rome: IsMEO. Wheeler REM (1962) Charsadda: A Metropolis of the North-West Frontier: Being a Report on the Excavations of 1958. London: Oxford University Press. Young RL (2003) Agriculture and Pastoralism in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan. BAR International Series 1124. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Megaliths U S Moorti, American Institute of Indian Studies, Gurgaon, Haryana ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary alignment A series of menhirs arranged in lines on some definite system. avenue Two or more alignments approximately parallel with one another. chamber burials A box-grave (normally rectangular on plan) built of stone-slabs/boulders containing skeletal remains and burial goods of the interned person(s). It may be with/without a passage and porthole, and is normally enclosed on surface by cairn/boulder circle(s). dolmen A single slab of stone supported by several orthostatic boulders/slabs built on the surface of the ground in such a way as to enclose a space or chamber beneath the capstone. It may or may not be wholly or partially covered by a barrow or cairn. A dolmen may be with or without a porthole. hat stone (Topi-kal) Urn burial capped by a slab and marked on the surface by a topi-kal. The topi-kal rests upon four quandrantal clinostatic stones joining up together at the base into a square, and dressed so as to give the shape of a truncated paraboloid to the entire monument. The topi-kal or the hat stone rests on the truncated surface. legged and unlegged urn burials Baked earthenware/ terracotta urn/sarcophagus (placed within a pit with/without a ramp) containing skeletal remains and burial goods of the interned person(s). It may be enclosed on the surface by an earthen mound/cairn/boulder circle(s). menhir Simplest of all the megalithic monuments, consisting of a single monolith set up, as a rule, at or near a burial/memorial/ commemorative spot. The monolith may be small or gigantic in height with its base fixed into the earth. It may be either sepulchral, memorial, or commemorative. pit burials A pit (circular/oblong/oval/rectangular on plan) containing skeletal remains and burial goods of the interned person(s). It may be with/without a ramp/capstone(s), and is normally enclosed on surface by an earthen mound/cairn/boulder circle(s). rock-cut chamber burials Chamber (single or multiple) cut out of the lateritic rock containing skeletal remains and burial goods of the interned person(s).

746 ASIA, WEST/Megaliths sarcophagus A cist, often with legs or feet, made of baked earthenware or terracotta containing skeletal remains and burial goods of the interned person(s). umbrella stone (kudai-kal) Passage urn burial capped by a slab and marked on the surface by a Kudai-kal (Umbrella stone). The Umbrella stone is a dome-shaped dressed lateritic stone resting with its flat face directly on the ground.

The Megalithic culture of South Asia is mainly represented by burials of many varieties. Although some of these burial monuments are not strictly ‘megalithic’ (i.e., ‘built of large stones’) in their nature, the usage of the term Megalithic can be justified because of its antiquity and continued popular use. However, the term denotes in the present context a socio-religious expression of burying the deceased in a grave (which may or may not have lithic appendage) accompanied by certain specific cultural traits of the period under reference. The use of iron coincides with the cultural period and forms an adjunct of Megalithic culture.

Terminology and Typology While studying the sepulchral and nonsepulchral monuments of this period, at a first glance one comes across variety of monuments that is quite bewildering. Attempts to evolve a suitable classificatory system for incorporating all the known burial types lead the earlier researchers to recognize five basic types, namely pit burials, urn and sarcophagi burials, rock-cut burial chambers, cist burials, and stone alignments. To this list were added some more types such as dolmen, menhir, topi-kal, and kudai-kal. However, ignoring some of the minor variations in the construction methods and by taking into account instead the basic concepts of the nature of the tomb itself, the list can be contracted still further, and can be grouped under the following two broad categories: (1) sepulchral monuments, and (2) nonsepulchral monuments. The first category is essentially a burial proper, whereas the second can be considered as commemorative or memorial in nature. Within the ambit of these two main categories, the following classification may help understand the basic types along with their numerous subvarieties (Table 1 and Figures 1–13); and, if new varieties are brought to light, these can also be accommodated within this main classificatory system. The mutual influence of those basic types on each other in certain architectural features such as passage, capstone, porthole, and even in the use of a nonsepulchral monument such as a menhir is certainly evident. While it has to be conceded that there are difficulties in explaining the specific socio-religious concepts governing these four basic types, it may be noted that variations do occur in these basic types because of

spatiotemporal factors: this was but natural since it depended on the modulations in socio-religious expressions.

Distribution and Spread of Megalithic Custom in the Old World Probably the most astonishing fact about the ‘megaliths’ is their occurrence almost throughout the Old World. Their occurrence from the shores of England to that of Japan unquestionably catches one’s imagination and may be seen as a ‘world phenomenon’. It may be somewhat safer to outline the distribution of ‘megalithic’ sepulchral/nonsepulchral monuments but forming opinions on their ‘spread’ is nothing less than walking on a hotbed of controversies. The European ‘megaliths’ are considered as the earliest in the chronological sequence. The basic tomb types noticed there are ‘megalithic’ temples (found in the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo), burial chambers (subdivided into dolmen, passage graves, court tombs, and gallery graves), single upright stone or menhir, and lastly grouped standing stones, placed either in rows or in elliptical range. (The last three tomb types are noticed in Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, southern Sweden, and northern Germany). Traditional views derived the whole ‘megalithic’ complex of Europe from the East Mediterranean which trace the spread of this custom by a seafaring people moving northward, through Spain, up the coast of Western Europe and into Scandinavia. Considering the long span of the prevalence of this custom from Neolithic to Bronze Age (from c. 5000 to 2000 BC) and its continuation even in Iron Age, majority of the European archaeologists believe that the development was indigenous, probably having different independent centers. However, many of them tend to agree with Mackie’s version of ‘modified diffusionism’ in the diffusion of ideas and think that it occurred along the seaboard from Atlantic coast toward the interior. Coming down to the South Asian theater of ‘megaliths’, parallels have been drawn from south Russian/Caucasian (the main tomb type being a long barrow), portholed cists of Tepe Sialk IV (in Iran), sarcophagus tombs of Philistan (located along the southern coast of Palestine), the rock-cut caves of Kunama in north Ethiopia, cists and stone circles of Makran coast which have been taken either as the areas of inspiration or wherefrom migration of people took place having this ‘megalithic’ trait. The main burial types occurring in the aforementioned areas are chamber tombs and pit circles. The principal ‘megalithic’ sepulchral and nonsepulchral monuments noticed in South Asia are pit circles,

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 747 Table 1 Types of sepulchral and nonsepulchral Megalithic monuments in South Asia Sepulchral 1. Pit burials 1a

Pit burial enclosed by an earthen mound

1b

Pit burial enclosed by cairn packing

1c

Pit burial enclosed by boulder circle(s)

1d

Pit burial enclosed by cairn packing and bound by boulder circle(s)

1e

Pit burial capped by a slab and enclosed by boulder circle(s)

1f

Pit burial enclosed by boulder circle(s), having flat slabs at the center

1g

Pit burial with a ramp and enclosed by cairn stone circle(s) (Figure 1)

1h

Pit burial with a passage and enclosed by cairn stone circle(s)

2. Chamber burials Chamber burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s) 2a 2b

Passage chamber burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s) (Figure 2)

2c

Portholed chamber burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s) (Figures 3 and 4)

2d

Passage, portholed chamber burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s)

2e

Chamber with a sarcophagus burial and with/without a passage/porthole and with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s)

2f

Rock-cut chamber burial (Figures 5 and 6)

3. Legged and unlegged Urn burials Urn burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s) (Figure 7) 3a 3b

Urn burial capped by a slab and with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s)

3c

Passage urn burial capped by a slab and covered by a Kudai-kal (umbrella stone)

3d

Urn burial capped by a slab and covered by a Topi-kal (hat stone) (Figure 8)

3e

Urn burial capped by a slab and marked by a menhir

3f

Unlegged sarcophagus burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s)

3g

Legged sarcophagus burial with/without cairn packing and boulder circle(s) (Figure 9)

Nonsepulchral (either commemorative or memorial (?) monuments) Dolmen (Chamber open on one side) (Figure 10) 1 2

Portholed dolmen (A closed chamber) (Figure 11)

3

Menhir (A monolithic slab) (Figure 12)

4

Stone alignment

5

Avenue (Figure 13)

chamber tombs, urn burials, and monolithic upright slabs (either single or in rows). However, notwithstanding the chronological difficulties, some of the regions mentioned in the preceding paragraph have been pointed out as the probable areas wherefrom the ‘megalithic’ custom spread. Lasting for over 1000 years (from c. 1500 BC to early centuries of Christian era) the majority of ‘megalithic’ burials is certainly associated with the Iron Age communities of South Asia. As noted earlier, either land-borne or sea-borne ‘cultural impulses’ have been considered in academic circles as probable routes for the spread of this custom. Here may also be noted the various tomb types of the rest of Asia which are spread out in Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other parts of Indo-Pacific region. The main types of ‘megaliths’

are menhirs (erect stones), dolmens (flat stones resting on two stone pillars), stone seats, stepped stone pyramids, various types of stone tombs, and sarcophagi. The prevalence of the ‘megalithic’ custom has been noted here from Late Neolithic to Iron Age. In any case, they are chronologically much later than European and South Asian ‘megaliths’, since they belong to the middle centuries of the first millennium BC.

Chronology and Related Problems One of the most crucial aspects in building up a coherent picture of any archaeological culture period is a substantial dating base. Although after the advent of C14 dating method, the picture for the period with which we are concerned has given a broad understanding of the time sequence involved in it;

748 ASIA, WEST/Megaliths

Figure 1 Pit burial with a ramp and enclosed by cairn stone circles. Brahmagiri (Chitradurga district, Karnataka, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

Figure 2 Passage chamber burial with cairn packing and boulder circle. Bhagimohari (Nagpur district, Maharashtra, India). Courtesy: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.

nevertheless, it is far from satisfactory. The observation becomes comprehensible when one looks at the absolute dates available for these sites. For a total of more than 2000 known sites of Megalithic culture of South Asia, absolute dates are available only for about 30 sites. In very few cases, dates have been obtained both for the Megalithic habitational layers and the adjacent cemetery area. On the basis of available C14 dates, the dates/chronological range for the following geographical regions are as follows: Gufkral, Kashmir valley (c. 1888–1671 BC), Gagrigol, Kumaun area (c. 2666–2562 BC), Vindhyan region, Mirzapur area (c. 1300 BC), Rayalaseema plateau, Kalyandurg area (c. 1880–1595 BC), Upper Tungabhadra valley, Davanagere area (c. 1440–930 BC), Cuddapah basin, Tadpatri area (c. 1375–1230 BC), Upper Tungabhadra

valley, Hirekerur area (c. 1385–825 BC), Tambraparani plain, Palayankottai area (c. 905–780 BC), Nagpur plain, Nagpur area (c. 800–405 BC), Javadi Hills, Vellore area (c. 425–155 BC), Baramahal, Tirupputtur area (c. 805–25 BC), Upper Cauvery valley (c. 225 BC), Krishna–Tungabhadra doab, Kurnool area (c. 1670 BC–AD 35), Warangal plateau (c. 185 BC–AD 35), Upper Krishna valley (c. 160 BC–AD 70), Kongunad upland, Tiruppur area (c. 300 BC–AD 100). Considering the limited information on absolute chronology for such a vast area, the difficulties in building up a coherent regional chronological sequence are innumerable. Although it is hazardous to make precise generalizations about the time sequence of this period at regional levels, it is obvious from the available data that the total span of this culture extends for more

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 749

Figure 3 Portholed chamber burial with cairn packing and boulder circle. Brahmagiri (Chitradurga district, Karnataka, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

Figure 4 Portholed chamber burial with cairn packing and boulder circle. Sankarapuram (Chengalpattu district, Tamilnadu, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

than 1200 years. Its beginning can now be securely pushed back to around c. 1500 BC. The terminating phase of this culture seems to be around c. 300 BC, as the evidence of script, coinage, and growth of urban centers is seen (although not uniform throughout South Asia) from this time onwards. Obviously, the ‘megalithic’ tradition continues in later centuries also and it forms a part of early historical cultures in the beginning.

Settlement Sites of the Megalithic Communities: Myth and Reality Of the many ‘myths’ prevalent in certain quarters of archaeologists is the notion of absence of ‘identifiable habitational remains’ of Megalithic communities of

South Asia. Attached with this notion is another ‘myth’ of ‘flimsy deposits’ in habitational layers of Megalithic people, wherever there is evidence of dwelling sites. A comprehensive and critical analysis of the excavated material of the Megalithic communities from several zones shows that there are undeniable similarities between the material of habitation and burial sites, and wherever the cultural deposit of Megalithic communities is noticed, the average thicknes of the deposit ranges between 1.5 and 2.5 m. However, wherever there is real evidence for the ‘thinness’ of occupational deposit and ‘sporadicity’ of dwelling sites, those need to be understood in terms of local site formation and postdepositional processes as also the locational advantages or stresses operative in the particular eco-zones.

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Figure 5 Rock-cut chamber burial. Umichipoyil (Kasaragod district, Kerala, India). Courtesy: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.

Figure 6 Rock-cut chamber burial. Kattakampal (Thrissur district, Kerala, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

Revisiting Iron Age Megalithic Arena: Recent Researches on the Megalithic Material Culture In spite of a vast body of literature on the Megalithic material culture, hitherto no comprehensive effort had been made to collate the data against an ecologic and systemic framework. The priorities and perspectives of the earlier researchers different as they were,

devoted much of their efforts to the reconstruction of culture histories. The complex questions related to the Megalithic modes of production, relations of production, aspects of social differentiation, and societal organization remained largely unfocused. However, the recent quantitative evaluation of the material data of the Megalithic period, as also its collation against an ecologic and systemic framework, has indicated that a combination of specialized strategies, that is, agriculture and cattle pastoralism, was adopted at the societal scale of production. The Megalithic sites located in the physiographic zones of Wardha–Penganga plain, Wainganga basin, Middle Krishna valley, Rayalaseema plateau, Andhra Ghats south, Dharwad plateau, Bangalore region, Mysore region, South Malnad, Mettur–Vellore region, Coimbatore uplands, the Palar–Ponnaiyar basin, the Vaigai–Tambraparani basin, and South Malabar unambiguously indicate these subsistence strategies. It is important to note here that a majority of their settlement sites are located either on the banks of major rivers or on their major tributaries and most of the burial sites are situated within a distance of 10–20 km from the major water resources. The following facts may also be suggestive of this substistence strategy: (1) the maximum concentration of their sites in river valleys and basins and preference shown toward occupying black soil, and red sandy-loamy soil zones; (2) the distributional pattern of these sites in rainfall zones where the average annual precipitation ranges from 600 to 1500 mm; as also (3) the occurrence of maximum number of their sites mainly in tropical dry deciduous, tropical thorn, and tropical moist deciduous forest zones avoiding as they did other dense forest zones.

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 751

Figure 7 Urn burial with cairn packing and boulder circle. Madavilagam (Chengalpattu district, Tamilnadu, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

Figure 8 Urn burial capped by a slab and covered by a Topi-kal (hat stone). Cheramanangad (Thrissur district, Kerala, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

Figure 9 Legged sarcophagus burial with cairn packing. Pallavaram (Chengalpattu district, Tamilnadu, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

752 ASIA, WEST/Megaliths

Figure 10 Dolmen (Chamber open on one side). Padavigampala (Kegalle district, Sri Lanka). Courtesy: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.

Figure 11 Portholed dolmen (A closed chamber). Rajanakoluru (Gulbarga district, Karnataka, India). Courtesy: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute.

However, the predominance of pastoral traditions which is seen in the present distribution of Kuruvas (who are mainly sheep/goat pastoralists), and Gollas (who are mainly cattle pastoralists but also keep small number of sheep/goats) in southwestern Andhra Pradesh, northwestern Karnataka, and northwestern Andhra Pradesh comprising Telangana, Rayalaseema peneplain, Andhra Ghats south, and North Maidan regions may indicate greater inclination toward pastoral subsistence strategy. This may be due to ecological stresses and greater economic advantages provided by this subsistence strategy. Although there is a very strong evidence of cattle pastoralism in these regions, currently archaeological evidence lacks concerning sheep/goat pastoralism. This lacuna seems to

be mainly due to the lack of efforts for finding out evidence. However, this can be taken as a working hypothesis and future investigations must seek them. Nonetheless, these aforementioned divergent economic patterns, which seem to have then prevailed, as is the case even now, were not isolated but had a symbiotic relationship with each other. Their subsistence base was a specialized agropastoral economy dominated by cereal, millet, and pulse production: there seem minor variations in the agroeconomy of the area. There is evidence for the occurrence of wheat, rice, barley, kodo millet, and pulse crops in Vidarbha (Wardha–Penganga plain, Wainganga basin); barley, rice, kodo millet, and pulses in the Middle Krishna valley and Andhra

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 753

Ghats south area; and, the remaining parts of South India have mostly produced the evidence of rice, ragi, kodo millet, and pulses. The cattle (including buffalo) predominates over other domesticated species and

Figure 12 Menhir (A monolithic slab). Anapara (Thrissur district, Kerala, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

invariably, in all these sites it accounts for more than 60% of the total faunal assemblage; whereas sheep/goat accounts for only 10–15% and was next only to cattle in importance. This suggests that first the earlier Neolithic tradition of cattle keeping was continued and second it clearly brings home that cattle pastoralism and not sheep/goat pastoralism formed a major preoccupation of the Megalithic society. Thus, irrespective of the variations in agriculture, cattle herding seems to have formed a major preoccupation of the Megalithic society in all these areas. There is enough evidence that many of the known 400 settlement sites of this period testify that industrial activities such as smithery, carpentry, bead making, and pottery manufacturing were carried out, displaying as they do a highly developed tradition in these crafts. The items of exchange seem to have consisted mainly of iron tools and weapons, copper and gold ornaments, semiprecious beads, and pottery. Although it is not possible at this juncture to give a clearer picture of exchange network of various items in this area, the following areas seem to be major zones of industrial activities. Kumaun area for iron working; Wainganga basin (or Nagpur plain) and Wardha–Penganga plain for iron, copper, silver, and semiprecious bead working; Telangana peneplain, Rayalaseema peneplain, Gulbarga plain, Bijapur region, Dharwad plateau, and Raichur plain for iron, copper, and gold working; Bangalore region, Mettur–Vellore region, and Coimbatore uplands for iron, gold, and semiprecious bead working. The location of several large Megalithic sites on the known early historical trade routes leaves a strong

Figure 13 Avenue: Vibhutihalli (Gulbarga district, Karnataka, India). Courtesy: Archaeological Survey of India.

754 ASIA, WEST/Megaliths

possibility of these acting as places/centers for exchange. Although the gravity of exchange mechanism and patterns of consumption still need to be understood, the hierarchical nature of sites and occurence of nonlocal prestige goods such as gold, marine shell, lapis lazuli in Megalithic burials leave little doubt about the inter-regional circulation of these goods. Besides indicating long-distance trade, it also shows growing acquaintance with new areas of the resourcerich zones of South Asia. The above synthesis of the material conditions of Megalithic society may help us to comprehend its ideological manifestations also. Although no comprehensive attempt has so far been made to understand the Megalithic religion and ritualism, the basic objective here is to know the role of religion and ritualism as part of ideological system of the Megalithic society. The main source of information invariably are the burials as they form a prominent feature and are crucial in understanding some of the ideological facets of the Megalithic society. A casual survey of the cemetery sites shows that megaliths typically cluster in groups, showing continued use of the same burial area for several centuries. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the megalithic burial monuments were meant to hold only a very restricted number of persons, and the burial took place in them rather rarely, once or twice in a generation. It is also likely that these burials reflect only a certain (upper?) segment of the society. It may be contextually useful to recapitulate here the nature of burial practices of the preceding periods, that is of the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic phases. Excavations at many Neolithic, and Chalcolithic sites of South Asia have clearly shown the practice of pit, and urn (kept horizontally, mouth-to-mouth) burial methods for disposing of the dead in primary condition. The dead were buried invariably within the settlement and mostly inside the living premises. In contrast to this practice, during the Megalithic period in general, the dead were buried outside and away from the settlement area. Both primary and secondary burials occur in this period. The three main sepulchral categories which were in vogue during this period, namely the pit burials, chamber burials, and legged/unlegged urn burials have already been emphasized earlier. Certain structural features such as passage, capstone, porthole, and even menhir (a nonsepulchral monument type) served as interchangeables within the aforementioned tomb types and evolved numerous subvarieties in the course of time. However, what deserves attention here is the continuation of earlier Neolithic/Chalcolithic burial traditions (but now with a stone appendage over the burial). Leaving aside the sharp differences noticed

in the actual treatment of the dead, and also the placement of the remains of the dead in an urn placed verticaly, these two burial methods, namely pit burials and urn burials, strongly indicate continuality of an earlier tradition. That this change was gradual and was definitely an indigenous development can be discerned from some of the earliest Megalithic sites such as Ramapuram, Gandlur, and Piklihal. However, same cannot be said about the chamber burial type. In the event of this being a borrowed mortuary practice, it is not clear whether the advent of this new mortuary element signifies the arrival of new people or was it just a borrowed ritual custom. This important aspect needs further investigation. It is also not clear whether the aforementioned sepulchral types, namely the pit burial, chamber burial, and legged/ unlegged urn burial methods, indicate different ritualistic concepts connected with the burying of the dead or different ethnic groups. A brief note regarding the occurence of anthropomorphic figures found in association with Megalithic burials may not be out of context here. The occurrence of these anthropomorphic figures in Megalithic sites right from Central Godavari valley to Tamil Nadu Hills is interesting. So far, from at least 15 Megalithic sites these have been reported. The shape and symbolic sculptural features greatly vary in these anthropomorphic figures. However, one striking feature is that they are invariably associated with chamber tombs and dolmens at most of these sites. Although their significance in the cult of the dead is yet to be comprehended, their close association with burial monuments indicates a connection with ancestor worship. More importantly, a significant shift in the societal attitude toward certain age categories is discernible during the Megalithic period. In the preceding Neolithic/Chalcolithic period, a large number of infant/child burials and comparatively less adult burials are reported. But, as against this fact, in the Megalithic period very few child burials have been noticed and a majority of the burials are of the youngto-mature adults. Infant burials have not at all been found. Even within the adult category, the percentage of adult males is very high which in all probability strongly indicates the patriarchical nature of Megalithic society as also the dominant status of its male members. It has been suggested that ritual activities form an active part of the social construction of reality within social formations and may be conceived as a particular form of the ideological legitimation of the social order, serving sectional interests of particular groups. That the construction of these monumental structures, both sepulchral and nonsepulchral, ultimately

ASIA, WEST/Megaliths 755

depended on the social mobilization of resources and societal cooperation is clearly implied. Detailed ethnographic studies available for some of the ethnic communities such as Savaras, Gadabas, and Bondos, and Kodis practicing megalithism clearly show that these are closely connected with production– feast–alliance cycle. The occurrence of nonlocal prestige goods in limited number of megalithic burials of superordinate social dimension may suggest the control of long-distance trade by local elite groups, the procurement of which eventually depended on alliance and gift exchange. Thus, burials of superordinate category provide a clue as to how surplus production entered the local cycle of prestige building, embedded as it was in alliances and exchange. It is also widely noticed that the ritualized chiefly organization of land and lineage through ancestor worship in megalithic tombs is a recurrent phenomenon in different parts of the world and occurs both in small-scale and more developed societies. There is a lack of conceptual studies of this genre for the study area, but these analogs do offer insights into the functional and organizational framework of the Megalithic monuments. If we can understand their functional role, it is quite clear that they do not represent burials as we understand them but may have served as ‘living entities’. The dead were not separated from the living, but lived as ancestors in their houses among the living and could be approached when opening the chamber or contacted through rites and offerings. In this way the megaliths symbolized the collective efforts of the community as also the heroic leadership of ancestor chiefs, legitimizing and sustaining the power of their successors. Thus, ritual and religion clearly served material functions in the social organization of production and the tombs formed part and parcel of the reproduction of power relations. Significantly, the use of iron in these communities seems to have been limited in its initial phase. It is rightly observed that, in the beginning, the use of iron was mostly confined to the production of weaponry and did not contribute much to handicrafts and agriculture and that the weapons were probably in the sole possession of elites. Iron seems to have started playing a significant and effective role in these areas only after c. 500 BC as there is clear evidence in the increase of agricultural and craftsman’s tools during this phase. The rise and growth of occupational divisions in these areas seems to have contributed to the beginnings of social differentiation. The aspect of social differentiation and ranking in the Megalithic society is clearly

brought out in the analysis of their burial monuments. However, more importantly, the Megalithic society shows a chiefdom-level organization and there are no indications either of a regular taxation system or a regular standing army, which are characteristics of the succeeding state societies. An augmentation in the intensive field agriculture and greater utilization of mineral resources — as evidenced in the increase of agricultural and craftsman’s tools — seems to be characteristic of the later phase (after c. 500 BC) of the Megalithic society. Probably, rice cultivation acquired new dimension because of improvement in technology, that is, an advance in the production techniques, and this seems to have led to demographic expansion. An increase in the number of sites and colonization of new areas was certainly an outcome of much consequence to the succeeding phases of historical developments. See also: Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Buddhist Archaeology; Ganges Valley; India, Deccan and Central Plateau; Kashmir and the Northwest Frontier; Neolithic Cultures; Sri Lanka; Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of; Image and Symbol; Political Complexity, Rise of; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Social Inequality, Development of.

Further Reading Banerjee NR (1965) The Iron Age in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Chakrabarti DK (1999) India: An Archaeological History (Palaeolithic Beginnings to Early History Foundations). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Childe VG (1948) Megaliths. Ancient India (Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India) 4: 4–13. Kim B-m (ed.) (1982) Megalithic Cultures in Asia. Seoul: Hanyang University. Krishnaswami VD (1949) Megalithic types of South India. Ancient India (Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India) 5: 35–45. Leshnik LS (1974) South Indian ‘Megalithic’ Burials – The Pandukal Complex. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Moorti US (1994) Megalithic Culture of South India: SocioEconomic Perspectives. Varanasi: Ganga Kaveri Publishing House. Mohanty RK and Selvakumar V (2002) The archaeology of the megaliths in India: 1947–1997. In: Settar S and Korisettar R (eds.) Indian Archaeology in Retrospect, Vol.: Prehistory, Archaeology of South Asia, pp. 313–351. New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research and Manohar Publishers. Ramachandran KS (1971) A Bibliography on Indian Megaliths. Madras: State Department of Archaeology, Government of Tamil Nadu. Thapar R (2002) Early India (From the Origins to AD 1300). London: Allen Lane.

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Neolithic Cultures Dorian Q Fuller, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary Anarta A kingdom of ancient India, roughly forming the northern Gujarat state of India. It was ruled by Yadavas after they fled from Mathura of Surasena Kingdom, due to the attacks of Jarasandha, the king of Magadha. The site of Anarta also has prehistoric remains which have given their name to a local Neolithic tradition. Neolithic (New Stone Age) A period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. sedentism A term applied to the cultural transition from nomadic to permanent, year-round settlement.

The Neolithic period marks a major watershed in economy, social organization and technology. Although the Neolithic was initially recognized on the basis of a change in lithic technology, the production of ground stone axes, it soon came to be seen to relate to major changes in subsistence (food production), settlement pattern (sedentism), in cooking and food container technology (ceramics), and in the production of textiles. In India, as in other parts of the world, various traits of the Neolithic did not evolve simultaneously and thus research has begun to clarify the ordering and interrelationships of these changes. Through most of South Asia there is not a clear cultural or economic change associated with the beginnings of copper-working and an understanding of early food production invariably must consider sites from periods when copper is in use. Thus, scholars often talk of the Neolithic-Chalcolithic cultures and distinguish these from the earlier Mesolithic and the later Iron Age. In general terms, seven distinct Neolithic traditions can be defined in South Asia (Figure 1), and the development of settled village farming societies can be understood as developing from these regional traditions or interactions between them. In general, the emergence of Neolithic societies is recognizable by groundstone axes, food production, and/or ceramic manufacture during the Middle Holocene, as early as the late seventh millennium BC in the northwest and as late as c. 2000 BC in other parts of India (Figure 2). Despite the different dates at which the Neolithic began in various parts of India and Pakistan, many of these developments must be seen in terms of local processes of social evolution and environmental change.

An important context for considering these changes in provided by the environmental variability across south Asia and how this has been affected by climatic changes in the past (Figure 3). Much higher monsoon rainfall occurred in the Early Holocene, and to a lesser extent mid-Holocene, as is recorded in pollen and sedimentary evidence from the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, and from sea core records in the Arabian Sea. The mid-Holocene wet period is also characterized by higher winter rainfall in the northwest, which would have affected areas like Punjab, Rajasthan, and perhaps parts of central India. This is suggested, for example, by the strong shift toward C-3 vegetation indicated in carbon-13 isotope measurements from Lunkaransar lake. A drying trend toward modern rainfall conditions had started before the end of the fourth millennium BC and reached levels of near-modern aridity by 2000 BC. Marked events of sudden aridity are numerous but those at c. 6200 BC, 3400–3200 BC, and 2200 BC might be pointed out as potentially significant for understanding transitions to the Neolithic.

Crops, Livestock, and Centers of Domestication The basis of food production is a direct involvement of humans in the management of the lives and life cycles of certain plant and animal species, termed domesticated. The management of these species has led to changes in their form, genetics and behavior which define the process of domestication. Several important domesticated species came to South Asia from early origins in the Near East, including staple crops such as wheat, barley peas, and lentils, as well as livestock such as sheep and goats (Table 1). Nevertheless, numerous species were also domesticated within South Asia (Table 2). This includes plants as well as livestock, including humped zebu cattle, water buffalos and chickens. While zebu cattle underwent domestication in the northwest, it remains unclear whether there was another domestication elsewhere in India. Water buffalos appear to have been domesticated somewhere in the lower Indus Valley region by the time of Harappan civilization, while chickens may have been domesticated in the middle Ganges or the eastern Indus regions. The domestication of local plants was also important for the beginnings of agriculture in parts of monsoonal India. With summer rains, many regions of India are not well-suited to the winter-grown crops of Southwest Asia, which were established early in Baluchistan, unless winter irrigation is provided by

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 757

Glg Bzm Glk

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Bgr Btl

2 Snr

Mhg Kjn

4 Rjd

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Pdr

Gbsn

5 Bdl Wtg Hlr

Utr Ngr

Sgk

Figure 1 The major independent Neolithic zones of South Asia, with selected archaeological sites. For each zone the solid outline indicates best guess region(s) for indigenous domestication processes and/or earliest adoption of agriculture. The dashed lines indicates the expanded region of related/derivative traditions of agriculture; selected sites plotted. 1. The northwestern zone, with the disjunct area of the Northern Neolithic shown: Mgr. Mehrgarh, Glg. Ghaleghay, Bzm. Burzahom, Gfk. Gufkral. 2. The middle Ganges zone with two possible rice domestication areas: Dmd. Damadama, Lhd. Lahuradewa, Mhg. Mahagara, Kjn. Kunjhun, Snr. Senuwar. 3. Eastern India/ Orissan zone: Bnb. Banabasa, Kch. Kuchai, Gpr, Gopalpur, Gbsn. Golabai Sassan. 4. Gujarat and southern Aravalli zone: Ltw. Loteshwar, Rjd. Rojdi, Pdr. Padri, Btl. Balathal, Bgr. Bagor. 5. Southern Indian zone: Bdl. Budihal, Wtg. Watgal, Utr. Utnur, Sgk. Sanganakallu and Hiregudda, Hlr. Hallur, Ngr. Nagarajupalle.

perennial rivers or artificial sources. Instead native species, including numerous minor millets and pulses such as mungbean, urd, horsegram, and pigeonpea, offered local populations with suitable local crops. While horsegram is native to the savanna zone of western and Southern India, pigeonpea derives for a limited region of moist deciduous forests in eastern India. The wild forms of mung and urd are rather more widespread with patchy distributions in the wetter deciduous zones along either side of the peninsula, in the highest hills of Rajasthan, as well as part

of the Western Himalayan foothills. Six significant millet crop species were also domesticated in India, either as local savanna grasses or as wetland species, although some of them may represent secondary domestications of early rice field weeds. Although further archaeological research is needed to clarify what happened, it appears that, in the Southern Deccan, cultivation began perhaps c. 3000 BC based native millets and pulses. Similarly, native small millets may have provided the initial agriculture in Saurashtra during the same general period. In the

758 ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures Figure 2 Chronological chart of selected Neolithic/Chalcolithic archaeological regions of South Asia, indicating the likely horizons of the earliest crops, livestock, ceramics, and possible regions/periods of important domestications.

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 759 750 700 650 600 550 500 −2.5

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Figure 3 Correlation between various palaeoclimatic proxies from northwestern south Asia, and selected archaeological phases. From top to bottom: global atmospheric methane as measured in the Greenland GISP core, O-18 isotopic variation from Pakistan continental margin; 5000 years of Indus discharge inferred from Karachi delta varve thickness, lake level data from Lunkaransar, lake levels from the Didwana lake, selected archaeological phases.

Vindhyan hills and tributaries of the middle Ganges, Neolithic village communities appear to have developed around cultivation of ‘indica’ rice (a separate strain from ‘japonica’ rice of Neolithic China), millets and native pulses certainly by the third millennium BC, although the process may have begun as much as two to four millennia earlier. Parallel processes may have happened independently in Orissa. Another important source of crops for South Asia was sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout much of the drier tracts of India today, sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), and finger millet (Eleusine coracana) are staple grains, while cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) and hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) are

important pulses. These five species were domesticated in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa and had dispersed to South Asia via Indian Ocean contact by sometime in the early second millennium BC. The earliest direct dates come from South India, c. 1500 BC, although these species may have first come into South Asian subsistence on the Harappan periphery in Gujarat, perhaps even by 2000 BC. The Northwest: Aceramic Introductions, Local Addition and Intensification

An important Neolithic tradition that started out without pottery is found in Pakistan west of the Indus Valley. In general, this Neolithic tradition is found in

760 ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures Table 1 Important domesticates in South Asia originating in the Near East Species

Region and period of origin

Earliest occurrence in South Asia

Comments

Wheat(s) Triticum spp.

Near Eastern fertile crescent, 9700–8000 BC

Mehrgarh, ca. 7000 BC

Barley Hordeum vulgare

Near Eastern fertile crescent, 9700–8000 BC. Additional domestication further east is possible. Near Eastern fertile crescent (Southern Levant), 9700–8000 BC. Near Eastern fertile crescent, 9700–8000 BC.

Mehrgarh, ca. 7000 BC

Mehrgarh finds include primitive glume wheats (Triticum monococcum, T. diococcum) as well as derived freethreshing breadwheats (T. aestivum) Wild barley also reported at Mehrgarh, probably as a field weed

Pea Pisum sativum Lentil Lens culinaris Chickpea Cicer arietinum Grasspea Lathyrus sativus Flax Linum usitatissimum Safflower Carthamus tinctorius Goat Capra hircus Sheep Ovis aries Cattle Bos taurus

Near Eastern fertile crescent, (Northern Levant) 9700–8000 BC. Greece(?), Anatolia(?), 8000–7000 BC(?) Near Eastern fertile crescent (Northern Levant), 9700–8000 BC. Near East Near East, 8500–8000 BC Near East, 8500–8000 BC; and Baluchistan? Near East, 8500–8000 BC

Indus valley sites, Kashmir, 3rd M. BC

Earlier sites lack adequate sampling

Indus valley sites, Kashmir, 3rd M. BC; 4th M. BC Makran Indus valley sites, 3rd M. BC

Earlier sites lack adequate sampling

Earlier sites lack adequate sampling

Indus valley sites, 3rd M. BC

Earlier sites lack adequate sampling

Indus valley sites, 3rd M. BC

Earlier sites lack adequate sampling

Balathal, Rajasthan, c. 3000 BC Mehrgarh, c. 7000 BC Mehrgarh: domestication process, 7000–5000 BC (?) Indus valley sites, 3rd M. BC

the hilly regions west of the Indus Valley as far north as the Bannu Basin. This tradition is best known through the site of Mehrgarh, which has been extensively excavated. The chronology of Mehrgarh has been problematic. The second ceramic phase at Mehrgarh seems well-dated, beginning c. 6000 BC, and the site is estimated to have begun by c. 7000 BC, or even earlier, although radiocarbon dates are inconsistent. There is no good evidence for crop domestication here, and most evidence suggests the spread of crops from the Near East, although barley might have grown here wild. Possible connections with Neolithic cave sites in Afghanistan, which might have earlier occupations, require clarification through further archaeology. As evidenced at Mehrgarh, these Neolithic settlers built substantial square and rectangular mud-brick buildings. It is from their use of cereal processing by-products (chaff) that identifications of their crop repertoire have been made, indicating a focus on the cultivation of winter crops that had their ultimate origins in Southwest Asia, that is, barley, emmer wheat, possible einkorn, and

May have more than one domestication in Near East More than one origin in West/Central Asia

Separate origins of zebu (Bos indicus), which has domestication process at Mehrgarh, 7000–5000 BC

free-threshing (bread) wheat. In terms of animal exploitation, hunting of gazelles dominated the economy, but at least some domesticated goats were also present, indicated by their size and by the sacrificial burial of their kids together with human burials. Goats, like the cereals, had arrived before the site was founded, plausibly from the west. Other species of both plants and animals appear to have been brought under human management locally. The evidence from animal bones indicates both a dramatic shift in dependence away from hunted game animals (such as gazelles) toward goats, sheep and especially cattle over the course of the first two phases of Mehrgarh, that is, from c. 7000 to 4500 BC. In addition to this change in the faunal spectrum, clear morphological change is documented in the cattle, which suggests the local domestication of humped Indian zebu cattle (Bos indicus). Similar evidence for sheep raises the likelihood of local domestication processes as well. By the end of period I, early in the fifth millennium BC, finds of cotton seeds and cotton thread suggests that this fiber crop had been brought under

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 761 Table 2 Selected domesticates of South Asian Neolithic origin Species

Region and period of origin

Comments

Zebu cattle Bos indicus Water buffalo Bubalus bubalis Chicken Gallus gallus Tree Cotton Gossypium arboreum Sesame Sesamum indicum Long-grained rice Oryza sativa ssp. indica Little millet Panicum sumatrense

Baluchistan, e.g. Mehrgarh donmestication process, 7000–5000 BC Lower Indus region (Sindh, Kutch), by Harappan period 2500 BC Northern India and/or Kashmir: present on Indus valley and Gujarat sites by Harappan period. Pakistan: present at Mehrgarh by 5000 BC; cultivated by Harappans in Indus valley (3rd M. BC) Indus valley(?); cultivated by Harappans in Indus valley, by 2500 BC Ganges valley. In use by 7000 BC (Lahuradewa), domesticated by 3rd M. BC Saurasthra Peninsula, Gujarat; staple grain by 3rd Millennium BC; also upper Punjab(?) present at Harappa by 3000 BC South India; staple grain of South Indian Neolithic by 3rd Millennium BC

A second domestication in India is possible. A second domestication in India is possible. Probably a separate origin from Chinese Chickens Wild ancestor extinct(?)

Browntop millet Brachiaria ramosa Urd bean, black gram Vigna mungo Mungbean, green gram Vigan radiata Horsegram Macotyloma uniflorum Pigeonpea Cajanus cajan Ivy gourd Coccinia grandis

Gujarat or northwest Peninsula; present in Saurashtra by 2500 BC South India; important pulse by 3rd M. BC; Also upper Punjab, present by 3rd M. BC on Harappan sites South India; important pulse by 3rd M. BC

Domestication process poorly understood Domestication process poorly understood. Two domestications (?). May also be present as a crop in Gujarat and Ganges during the Neolithic.

Additional domestication in Western India possible

Eastern India: Orissa Neolithic sites by 1500 BC; spread to South India by 1500 BC North India, Himalayan foothills; on Late Neolithic sites in Ganges by 1800 BC

cultivation from local, but now extinct, ancestors. Sesame and a local variety of the date palm may also have been brought under cultivation during this period, although undisputed finds only come from several milleniums later. Early archaeobotanical evidence for the pulses domesticated in southwest Asia (peas, lentils, chickpea, and grasspea) is similarly missing from the Neolithic, but is likely a product of limited sampling. It is clear that these species were important cultivars in the Indus region by the third millennium BC during the Harappan civilization. It was the food production established at Mehrgarh by the seventh to sixth milleniums BC, based on wheat, barley, wintergrown pulses, and cotton, as well as livestock that formed the basis on which settlement of the Indus Valley and the Later Harappan civilization developed. Over the course of the fourth and third milleniums BC, which represent the Early Bronze Age, agricultural settlement proliferated in the greater Indus Valley region. Agricultural intensification through simple forms of irrigation and cattle-drawn ard tillage are likely, and such intensification is likely to have been important in increasing agricultural output in the face of declining rainfall and for providing the food surpluses on which the emergence of Harappan urbanism in the mid-third millennium BC depended. By the time

of the Harappan civilization long-lived perennial crops were grown, notably fruits such as dates and grapes. One the eastern margins of the Harappan zone, the cultivation of the Near Eastern winter crops, was constrained by climatic conditions, in particular the predominance of summer rainfall. The perennial rivers of the Ganges system, however, offered a means to grow winter crops as well as monsoon crops. Such mixed season agriculture is evident from the foundational levels of the site of Harappa (c. 3200 BC) and from the earliest known agricultural settlements in the Upper Ganges plain, such as Kunal, starting from c. 3000 BC. The presence of rice, millets, and native Indian pulses on this site implies that the monsoon crops were already available as cultivars, perhaps from this region, in an as yet undocumented presedentary agricultural period, or else from areas to the east, such as the middle Ganges.

A Late Extension of Agriculture to the Far North A rather different Neolithic tradition is documented from Kashmir and the far north of Pakistan (the Swat Valley), although it appears to have derived its crops from the same suite of winter crops of Near Eastern

762 ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures

origins. Generally known as the Northern Neolithic, this tradition is best represented by sites in the Kashmir Valley, although related sites can be identified in Swat (Northwest Pakistan). Here sites occupy the milder valley bottoms and began to be occupied between 3000 and 2500 BC, represented by the sites of Burzahom, Gufkral, and Ghaleghay, but with more evidence and sites dating closer to 2000 BC. The earliest phases are characterized by broad deep pits, with bell-shaped profiles, and lack pottery. While these have conventionally been interpreted as pit houses, recent debates have raised the likelihood that they were large storage features. Whatever the case, it is clear from these sites that the dominant crops were winter wheat, barley, peas, and lentils. It is possible that these crops had diffused to local hunter-gatherers from the Indus region to the south or from Central Asia, together with domesticated animals. Impressions in pottery from Ghalegay suggest some localized rice cultivation as well which must have diffused from the Gangetic region to the southeast. The West: Hunter-Herders to Millet Farmers and Traders

The areas to the south and east of the Thar Desert, the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, are likely to have been regions both of the extension of the wintercrop agriculture and livestock from Baluchistan as well as local traditions of cultivation based on indigenous domestication. Gujarat is likely to have been a center for the domestication of local, monsoonadapted crops, perhaps after livestock was adopted into this area from the Indus region to the west in the fourth millennium BC. Archaeobotanical evidence for the beginnings of cultivation in this region is not yet available from the earliest ceramic-bearing sites, of the Padri and Anarta traditions (c. 3500–2600 BC), but the extensive sampling on Harappan period sites in the region after 2600 BC indicates the predominance of small millets, in particular, little millet (Panicum sumatrense) but probably also Setaria spp. and Brachiaria ramosa. Nevertheless, these sites and contemporary sites further north on the Thar Desert fringes of northern Gujarat and Rajasthan have produced evidence for some domestic fauna in the earliest ceramic levels, including cattle bones from the mid-fourth millennium BC at Loteshwar and probable domestic fauna from Padri. Other sites, such as Bagor, are often cited as evidence for the adoption of livestock by mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers, although current knowledge highlights the need for more systematic archaeobotanical and archaeozoological investigations. East of the Thar Desert there is clear evidence for establishment of agricultural villages before the end of the fourth millennium BC. Demonstrated by

excavations at the site of Balathal, more or less sedentary ceramic-producing farmers became established in this region alongside hunter-gatherers such as those of Bagor. Limited archaeobotanical data suggest that Balathal agriculture was based on the winter crops from further west, together with livestock, rather than indigenous crops. These crops were then taken up further east in central India and on the northern Peninsula in the second half of the third millennium BC. On the northern peninsula the winter cereals and pulses were markedly important but they seem to have been part of a mixed cultivation strategy which included significant frequencies of the native species, such as the pulses and millets that featured prominently in the Southern Neolithic. The North and East: Potting Foragers to Rice-Growing Villagers

The Ganges Basin, the adjacent Himilayan foothills to the north, and the hill zones of Bihar and Orissa taken together delimit an important zone of probable plant domestications. Evidence has long been clear that a number of cucurbit crops originate in this general area, including cucumbers, luffas and various ‘gourds’, although only the ivy gourd has an archaeological record. Of special interest is, of course, the predominant staple today, rice, which is also native domesticate of this region. Rice is consistently present at all these sites from the earliest documented phases together with various small millets (B. ramosa, Setaria vertcillata, and Setaria pumila). Native Indian pulses are also present but only from later phases, which could indicate dispersal of native pulses from elsewhere prior to 2000 BC. Still to be clarified is whether there was one main trajectory toward agriculture or dispersed parallel trajectories in different local traditions, and what role interactions between early farmers and hunter-gatherers played. At present three distinct cultural traditions can be defined, each of which passed through two or three economic stages. First there is a tradition located in the eastern part of this region, represented by Lahuradewa and Senuwar. Its earliest stage, represented by occupation of the lake margin area at Lahuradewa, shows ceramic production by sometime in the fifth millennium (and perhaps as early as 7000 BC), and rice was part of the diet from 7000 BC, although clarification is needed on its cultivation status and the earliest rice material is plausibly wild. Later levels at Lahuradewa and at Senuwar indicate more sedentary settlement and clear rice cultivation after 2500 BC. Some winter crops, especially wheat and barley, were added to the agricultural system by 2200 BC, and pulses from elsewhere in India were

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 763

added shortly thereafter. Livestock were also adopted, beginning perhaps as early as 2500 BC and certainly by c. 2000 BC. A second tradition that shows parallel economic developments was in the northern Vindhyan hills and the Son and Belan river valleys, represented by sites such as Mahagara, Koldihwa, and Tokwa, although here the founding of sedentary villages with mixed agro-pastoralism occurred mainly after c. 2000 BC (Figure 7). Once again the initial agriculture was rice and millets, with winter crops and pulses adopted shortly thereafter. Earlier evidence in the region suggests seasonal settlement, rice use, and probably some production of ceramics among huntergatherers. A third distinct cultural tradition to take up agriculture was the Mesolithic of the central Ganges plains, represented by the site of Damdama. Here there has been a long tradition of semisedentary hunting and fishing focused on the oxbow ponds and former meanders of the Ganges plain. Despite the absence of pottery, crops, including rice and barley, were adopted after 2500 BC, but this distinct aceramic tradition ceased to be recognizable by the early second millennium BC. After 2000 BC agricultural villages became more widespread in the Gangetic region. They seem to have consisted of small villages of round huts and possible communal animal pens (Figure 5). While it is not yet clear that these sites were truly year-round sedentism, it is clear that they were much more permanent and longlasting than anything that had been before. It is also clear that cultivation was established before this phase of sedentarization. Indeed, finds of probable Gangetic domestics in the Eastern Harappan zone suggest that the beginnings of cultivation date to before 3000 BC. The recent discovery of Lahuradewa dating back to before 4000 BC suggests that future work may indeed be able to elucidate the plant economies of less settled

societies that saw through the transition from foraging to food production. During the course of the second millennium BC, agriculture diversified as did other aspects of the society. It is during this period that the first evidence for aboriculture of native tropical trees occurs. This includes evidence from wood charcoal suggesting the planting of trees in the Gangetic Plains such as jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus), mango (Mangifera indica), bael fruit (Aegle marmelos), the citron (Citrus medica), and tamarind (Tamarindus indicus). Fruittree cultivation may have begun early in the second millennium BC but was widespread by the second half of the millennium. It is also during this period that the first finds of possible fiber crops, including flax and hemp, occur, together with probable spindle whorls, suggesting the beginnings of textile production. The Lesser Known East and Northeast: Orissa, Assam, Bangladesh and Burma

Areas in Eastern India and the far northeast, including Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma), are still poorly explored in terms of Neolithic archaeology. In the past few years a few Neolithic sites in lowland Orissa have been studied. In the lowlands of Orissa, along the coastal plain and the Mahanadi River substantial archaeological settlement mounds exist. This provides evidence for Neolithic settlement based on the cultivation of rice and Indian pulses as well as herding of domesticated livestock, including introduced sheep and goat. Rice, some of the pulses, and water buffalos are all candidates for domestication in this region, although there is not yet clear archaeological evidence documenting this. While some of these sites, such as Golabai Sassan, may have been founded before

Figure 4 View north across the Belan river from Koldhiwa Neolithic site to Mahagara (on left), Uttar Pradesh, 2001.

764 ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures

Post-hole Hut floor Cattle hoof-prints

N 0

5m

10 m

Belan River Figure 5 Plan of the Gangetic Neolithic settlement of Mahagara, c. 1700 BC, indicating the distribution of huts in relation to a small animal pen.

2000 BC, most of the substantial occupation seems to start later closer to 1500 BC and continue perhaps a thousand years into the Iron Age (Figures 6). In the upland regions of Orissa the Neolithic is known mainly from surface collections of ground stone axes, although ceramics from the site Kuchai, which are tempered with rice husk, suggest some rice cultivation. Possible precursors to the Neolithic settlements may be sought in the many rock shelters of northwest Orissa, which are rich in rock art, and sometimes include ceramics in their surface collections. Similarly, in the northeastern states of India, such as Assam, and neighbording Myanmar, the Neolithic is known only from surface collections of groundstone axes and ceramics. The Neolithic remains unidentified in Bangladesh. There is not yet any clear evidence for dating the Neolithic in these areas, nor for inferring the economic basis. Scholars have long noted that in this zone shouldered axes are typical, and that this tool type suggests possible links with Orissa and parts of Southern China. While this typological linkage has featured in several models of Neolithic population dispersal, it remains undocumented through excavated archaeological contexts. The South: Millet and Pulse Farming Cattle Keepers

The Southern Neolithic, of northern Karnataka and southwest Andhra Pradesh, provides the earliest

evidence for pastoralism and agriculture in Peninsular India, starting by 2800 BC. A well-known site category of the Southern Neolithic is the ashmound (Figures 7, 8, and 9). These sites form a prominent part of the archaelogical landscape of Southern India and consist of large accumulations of burnt cattle-dung reduced to ash and in some cases to a slag-like consistency. Excavations, especially at Utnur and Budihal, have revealed these to be ancient penning sites that have been episodically burnt, probably as part of seasonal communal rituals. The centrality of cattle in this symbolic aspect of life is also suggestsed by a rich rock art corpus associated with some Neolithic sites in the region, which are dominated by pecked images of cattle. While these sites were seasonal encampments, in many cases they developed over time into village settlements. This is indicated by ashmound deposits buried under village occupation at sites such as Sanganakallu (Figure 10), and by the development of a village adjacent to the ashmound at Budihal (Figure 11). These transitions are part of a protracted regional process of increasing sedentism between 2200 and 1800 BC. After 1800 BC the distribution of ashmound sites had reached their maximal extent in northwestern Karnataka, and other traditions of village settlement began to be established in adjacent regions, of West and South Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and northwest Tamil Nadu. Agriculture further South, throughout

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 765

Figure 6 The Neolithic/Chalcolithic settlement mound at Golabai Sassan, Orissa. The site is cut through by the road, 2003.

Figure 7 Kudatini, the largest Neolithic ashmound, west of Bellary, Karnataka, 1998.

Tamil Nadu for example, appears to have only become established during the Iron Age and in some regions of Southwest Tamil Nadu as late at the end of the first millennium BC. Here agriculture included rice, which had diffused from northern India, perhaps along the eastern coast early in the first millennium BC. Similarly, rice-based agriculture came to Sri Lanka, perhaps by c. 900 BC. This long regional transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculturalists is also characteristic of the hill tracts of peninsular India, where in some areas hunter-gatherers became specialized forager-traders tied to agricultural societies in the plains, and some of these forager-trader

communities persisted into the ethnographic present. The subsistence of the Southern Neolithic combined indigenous crops with introduced livestock. Animal bones indicate the dominance of cattle in the animal economy with a smaller presence of sheep and goat. While the latter species must have been adopted from the north, this also seems likely for the cattle. Recent archaeobotanical research has provided a picture of recurrent staples and occasional secondary crops of the Southern Neolithic. The staples include two native species of millets (B. ramosa and Setaria verticillata) and two pulses, mungbean and horsegram (Vigna radiata and Macrotyloma uniflorum). The existing

766 ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures

Figure 8 The Southern Neolithic ashmound site of Palavoy, showing exposed stratigraphy of durg ash layering, Anatapur District, Andhra Pradesh, 1998.

Figure 9 Two ashmounds at Palavoy seen from above, looking West, the ashmound at right is shown close-up in Figure 8.

evidence indicates dependence on a group of species that are native to the peninsula, with non-native species being rare (on a minority of sites) or occurring only in the latest Neolithic period, including crops of African origin by c. 1500 BC. In addition, evidence from this later phase of the Neolithic suggests the adoption of fiber crops, cotton and flax, as well as some fruit trees such as mango and citrus. In all, this indicates increasing diversity and links between agriculture, craft production, and trade. Concluding Remarks: Directions in South Asian Neolithic Research

Throughout most of India, the agricultural foundations of early Historic cities and states drew upon the rich

mixture of native species and adopted species that had been assembled by regional Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies. While some important species are known to have diffused from the Near East, several important species are native to India. Unfortunately, archaeological evidence is listed for documenting the use of these native species in a wild form by hunter-gatherers, followed by their transformation under cultivation into domesticated crops. In most cases our earliest finds come from communities where cultivation was already established. It would appear that most of the known Neolithic sites in South Asia come from periods of settling down for the long term and becoming more sedentary. The fact that these sites already show clear agriculture suggests that the origins lie earlier in more mobile societies, and less archaeologically visible sites.

ASIA, WEST/Neolithic Cultures 767

Figure 10 The granite inselberg of Sannarachamma near modern Sanganakallu, a typical hilltop location for a South Indian Neolithic village site, view to Southwest, 1998.

Ashmound

Pen edge (stone fence)

Butchery floor

Huts

N 0

25 m

Figure 11 Plan of the Southern Neolithic site of Budihal, indicating the substantial ashmound developed atop a large penning area, c. 2200 BC, and a small area of huts, 2200–1700 BC.

Also, further research on the biogeography of the wild progenitors of most native species is needed and more efforts at producing quantitative data through longer regional sequences of both botanical and zoological remains are also needed. Other emerging directions of research are the study of later hunter-gatherers and their interactions with established agricultural neighbors, and the study of the role of later Neolithic

communities in the development of craft specialization, specialized crop production (such as fruits and fiber crops) and the regional trajectories toward social complexity. While there remains much research to be done, it is now clear that South Asia has several Neolithic traditions which participated in the recurrent social processes of domesticating plants and animals and creating economies of food production.

768 ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Animal Domestication; Asia, South: Baluchistan and the Borderlands; Ganges Valley; Paleolithic Cultures; Asia, West: Mesolithic Cultures; Ceramics and Pottery; Plant Domestication.

Soan culture A Palaeolithic culture found along the Soan river valley in the Potwar region of the Punjab and dated to the Middle Pleistocene.

Further Reading

South Asia as an ancient culture area is inconceivable without consideration of the firm foundations provided by the prehistoric phase spanning more than a million years of hunting and foraging way of life. The terminal stage of this preliterate life, called the Mesolithic, is dated to the early part of the Holocene and merges into the succeeding agro-pastoral stage comprising various Neolithic–Chalcolithic cultures and the Indus civilization. The present essay seeks to provide a review of the existing evidence pertaining to the preceding Palaeolithic stage, which comprises three phases (Lower, Middle, and Upper) and is dated to the Pleistocene.

Ajithaprasad P (2004) Holocene adaptations of the Mesolithic and Chalcolithic settlements in North Gujarat. In: Yasuda Y and Shinde V (eds.) Monsoon and Civilization, pp. 115–132. New Delhi: Lustre Press/ Roli Books. Chattopadyaya UC (2002) Researches in archaeozoology of the Holocene period (including the Harappan tradition in India and Pakistan). In: Settar S and Korisettar R (eds.) Researches in Archaeozoology of the Holocene Period (Including the Harappan Tradition in India and Pakistan). New Delhi: Manohar. Fuller DQ (2002) Fifty years of archaeobotanical studies in India: Laying a solid foundation. In: Settar S and Korisettar R (eds.) Indian Archaeology in Retrospect III. Archaeology and Interactive Disciplines, pp. 247–363. Delhi: Manohar. Fuller DQ (2003) Indus and non-Indus agricultural traditions: Local developments and crop adoptions on the Indian Peninsula. In: Weber SA and Belcher WR (eds.) Indus and Non-Indus Agricultural Traditions: Local Developments and Crop Adoptions on the Indian Peninsula. Lanham: Lexington Books. Fuller DQ (2003) An agricultural perspective on Dravidian historical linguistics: Archaeological crop packages, livestock and dravidian crop vocabulary. In: Bellwood P and Renfrew C (eds.) An Agricultural Perspective on Dravidian Historical Linguistics: Archaeological Crop Packages, Livestock and Dravidian Crop Vocabulary. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Fuller DQ (2006) Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia: A working synthesis. Journal of World Prehistory 20(1): 1–86. Meadow R and Patel AK (2003) Prehistoric pastoralism in Northwestern South Asia from the Neolithic through the Harappan Period. In: Weber SA and Belcher WR (eds.) Prehistoric Pastoralism in Northwestern South Asia from the Neolithic through the Harappan Period. Lanham: Lexington Books. Singh BP (ed.) (2004) Early Farming Communities of the Kaimur. Jaipur: Publication Scheme. Singh Purushottam (2001) The Neolithic cultures of Northern and Eastern India. In: Settar S and Korisettar R (eds.) Indian Archaeology in Retrospect I. Prehistory, pp. 127–150. Delhi: Manohar.

Paleolithic Cultures K Paddayya, Deccan College, Pune, India ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Glossary palaeomagnetism The study of the record of the Earth’s magnetic field preserved in various magnetic minerals through time. thermoluminescence (TL) The determination by means of measuring the accumulated radiation dose of the time elapsed since material containing crystalline minerals was either heated (lava, ceramics) or exposed to sunlight (sediments).

Introduction

Geographical Features

South Asia occupies a middle position among the three peninsular projections marking the southern margin of the Asiatic landmass. It comprises the Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Bhutan, the island nation of Sri Lanka, and the sovereign states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In the north, South Asia is separated from the main Asiatic landmass by the high Hindukush and Karakoram ranges, and the Himalayan massif proper. On the western, southern, and eastern sides, the Indian peninsula is neatly marked off by the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, respectively. Notwithstanding its status as a distinct geographical unit, outside influences did reach the South Asian region by both land and sea from the very beginnings of human life, such that its cultural make-up is a combined product of both outside stimuli and internal development. Within this larger geographical entity, there is tremendous regional diversity. The major topographic subdivisions include the arid zone of Rajasthan in the west; the high snow-clad Himalayas in the north; the hill-tract of northeastern India supporting a rich tropical rainforest ecosystem; the vast Indus and Gangetic alluvial plains which served as the springboards of First and Second Urbanizations, respectively; and the triangular-shaped plateau of peninsular India. The peninsular block is flanked on the western and eastern sides by narrow hill-chains running close to the seaboard and is drained by eastor west-flowing rivers. Sri Lanka is situated some 20 km off the tip of the peninsula; central highlands, northern lowlands, and southern rolling plains are its chief geographical units.

ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures 769

South Asia is an area of monsoonal climate which originated due to the upthrust of the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau, the final phase of which is dated to about 14 Ma. Much of the peninsular block receives its precipitation from the southwest monsoon. The northern mountainous tract lies in the winter rainfall belt of Northern Hemisphere; moisture comes in the form of winter storms or snow melt. The extreme southern part of the peninsula as well as Sri Lanka benefit from the rainfall caused by the northeast monsoon. History of Research

Prehistoric research started in South Asia immediately after the epoch-making discoveries of stone stools by Boucher de Perthes in the Somme river gravels of northern France in the mid-nineteenth century. The ratification of these findings by the Royal Society in London in 1859 was a great source of inspiration to Robert Bruce Foote who came to Madras (now Chennai) in 1858 as a young officer to work in the Geological Survey of India. Foote found a few bifacial stone implements in a lateritic gravel pit near Madras in May 1863. In the course of his three-decade-long geological surveys in various parts of southern India and Gujarat, he located a large number of prehistoric sites which he classified under three periods – Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and Iron Age. His publication entitled The Foote Collection of Indian Prehistoric and Protohistoric Antiquities: Notes on Their Ages and Distribution, published in 1916, is the first major synthesis of South Asian prehistoric research and still offers many useful insights into the environmental settings and lifeways of prehistoric populations. Foote is therefore rightly called the ‘Father of Indian Prehistory’. The next phase, spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s, witnessed the rise of what may be called the stratigraphical-cum-cultural-cum-climatic sequence paradigm. During this period efforts were made to divide the Stone Age into various phases based on stratigraphical evidence, as supplied by river sediments and other deposits. Based upon the character of these deposits (gravels, silts, etc.), inferences were also made about past climates consisting of a succession of wet and dry climatic episodes. Four major studies were involved in the development of this paradigm: (1) the work of L. A. Cammiade and M. C. Burkitt on the southeast coast of India postulating the existence of four successive cultural stages (series I–IV); (2) joint investigations of the Yale and Cambridge Universities in the Potwar plateau and Kashmir Valley, and the formulation of Soan culture-sequence with reference to alternation

of glacial and interglacial episodes; (3) the work of F. E. Zeuner of the Institute of Archaeology, London, in Gujarat and the Deccan seeking to identify the stratigraphical contexts of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic assemblages with reference to alluvial and sand dune deposits; and (4) H. D. Sankalia’s reconstruction of fourfold cultural sequence (series I–IV) based upon his study of cliff-sections of the river Pravara at Nevasa in the Deccan. From the mid-1950s to mid-1970s, this paradigm was extended to many other parts of India. Simultaneously, some important Stone Age sites were reported from other parts of South Asia, such as the Sanghao cave from Pakistan and the Ratnapura industry from Sri Lanka. Indeed, the emergence of Stone Age archaeology on the academic scene in South Asia was epitomized by the publication of the second edition of H. D. Sankalia’s book Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan in 1974. The third phase, which was initiated in the late 1970s, reflected the advent of New Archaeology into the region. It began to be realized that stone artifacts recovered from secondary deposits such as alluvial gravels and silts could not serve as secure data for making behavioral interpretations. Also it was felt that interpretations about past climate based on alluvial deposits were not sound. Against this background a fresh approach was initiated in the South Asian Stone Age research. Its chief components were: (1) region-based intensive field-surveys; (2) emphasis on the identification of in situ sites and their careful investigation, employing the perspective of formation processes; (3) use of both biological and Earth sciences in palaeoenvironmental reconstructions; and (4) use of experimental and ethnoarchaeological analogies. In an accompanying paradigm shift, culture was redefined as a systemic whole and as a means of human adaptation, rather than being treated as a mere vehicle for arriving at classificatory and descriptive definitions. During the last quarter-century, several projects employing some or all of these strategies were carried out in the Siwalik hills of India and Pakistan, central India covering the Belan, Narmada and Son Valleys, arid tract of Rajasthan, Saurashtra, the Deccan uplands, Chotanagpur plateau, and South India. In more recent years, some important studies were undertaken in the Deccan, the Bhima and Kaladgi Basins of north Karnataka, and the Kortallayar Basin of south India. Sri Lanka and Nepal also yielded evidence of Stone Age occupation. Discovery of fossil hominid remains at Hathnora in central India and Odai in south India, and the use of various radiometric methods for dating Stone Age sites are two other major developments of this phase.

770 ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures

Some of these more recent projects benefited from collaboration with research teams from Cambridge, Oxford, Sheffield, and Sussex universities in England, University of California and the Smithsonian Institution in the US, and Australian National University and Marquarie University in Australia. Scientific institutions in India like the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur, Geological Survey of India, and Anthropological Survey of India also participated actively in some of the regional investigations. These joint studies were particularly helpful in attempting palaeogeographic and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. Palaeoenvironments

In the Pleistocene, which has a duration of 2.5 Myr, South Asia was a part of the global climatic set-up. Oxygen-isotope studies of ocean-bed sediment cores established a repeated alternation of cold and warm periods. During the last 1 Myr, 9 or 10 glacial/interglacial cycles occurred. During glacial periods in northern latitudes, the monsoon was weak in South Asia and dry climate prevailed. When the northern latitudes were experiencing interglacial climate, the monsoon was strong in South Asia resulting in a wet climatic episode with a high level of precipitation. Although for want of clear data it is not possible to correlate the Palaeolithic cultural stages in South Asia with any specific climatic episodes, sedimentary data from fluvial and other contexts in the Kashmir valley, western and central India, and the Deccan region revealed a succession of wet and dry or arid and humid phases. Some of these studies deserve mention here. Employing the technique of pollen analysis, D. P. Agrawal and his team reconstructed a long and detailed palaeoclimatic sequence for the Kashmir Valley. The area experienced a warm temperate climate up to 3.8 Myr. From 3.7 to 2.6 Myr the climate changed from subtropical to cool temperate type. Cool climate persisted in the area for 2 Myr. The last 200 kyr saw the building up of a thick deposit of loess due to wind activity. Separating the periods of wind activity were periods of climatic stability as revealed by the formation of palaeosols. H. D. Sankalia found a few stone artifacts in the alluvial conglomerate at Pahlgam and dated them to the first interglacial period. Subsequent work in the area confirmed that at least from the Late Pleistocene the area was occupied by Stone Age groups in a regular way. The prolonged research of the British Archaeological Mission led by Robin Dennell from 1980 to 1990 in the Potwar plateau of Pakistan resulted in a wholesale re-evaluation of the Quaternary glacial/interglacial terrace stratigraphy and Soan culture-sequence put

forward earlier by H. de Terra and T. T. Paterson. The terraces proved to be only erosional features and nonglacigenic. Similarly, the Stone Age cultural material was found on surface in secondary contexts and hence it was found unsuitable for fixing culture sequences. However, this recent work produced new discoveries – two Acheulian sites at Dina and Jalalpur dated between 700 and 400 kyr and a possible Lower Pleistocene Early Man site at Riwat near Peshawar dated to 1.9 Myr by means of palaeomagnetism. The western part of Rajasthan, now mostly occupied by the Thar Desert and its characteristic sand dunes, provided sound evidence for reconstructing palaeoenvironmental history and human adaptations. In the Pleistocence the area was a favorable habitat for Stone Age communities. The work of Bridget Allchin and others in the 1970s showed that the area witnessed two major dry periods separated by wet climatic episodes. Palaeolithic and Mesolithic groups occupied sand dunes overlooking shallow water pools and other favorable micro-niches. In the 1980s the team led by V. N. Misra carried out further work in the area and identified three major Quaternary sedimentary units called the Jayal, Amarpura, and Didwana formations. This multidisciplinary research involved excavations at Singi Talav and Didwana (16 R locality) and made it possible to reconstruct a detailed history of climate and landscape development. The 20 m deep trench at 16 R locality exposed a series of five major paleosols, sixteen calcrete bands, and well-dated cultural material belonging to the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, and Mesolithic stages (Figure 1). During the Early Pleistocene the present-day waterless sandy plains of the region supported large streams originating from the Himalayas, which laid down extensive and thick gravel beds in Nagor and Jodhpur districts. Man was absent. Subsequently, these beds were tectonically uplifted and new streams with wide flood plains marked with pools and lakes were formed. The Palaeolithic groups camped around these pools and ponds and also on the exposed gravel beds. The climate during this period was basically semi-arid, but it alternated several times between cool dry and warm wet periods. Sand sheets and dunes were formed in cool dry periods and their surfaces were stabilized during the subsequent wet phases. Palaeolithic groups occupied the stabilized sand surfaces. In central India the middle stretch of the Narmada preserved thick deposits of gravels, silts, and clays broadly classified under a Lower Group and an Upper Group. This sedimentary record, basically alluvial in nature, yielded rich evidence of mammalian fauna and Stone Age cultural record. The recent hominid findings at Hathnora brought this area into focus

ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures 771 0 6,140 B.P. (T.L.)

Mesolithic

14,610 B.P. (T.L.) 1 16,190 B.P. (T.L.)

Brown (10 yr 4/4) loamy fine sand weak pedogenesis

2 Unit I Yellow brown (10 yr 6/4) fine sand with soft carbonates

3

4

5 26,210 +2200B.P. (16c) −1700 6

Upper Palaeolithic

Unit II

Colluvial slate and schist coarse sand Calcrete I Pale yellow brown (10 yr 5/4) loamy fine sand Calcrete II Pale yellow brown (10 yr 5/4) loamy fine sand Calcrete III Calcrete IV Yellow brown (10 yr 6/4) fine sandy loam with tubular carbonates moderate pedogenesis

7 Calcrete V 8

Yellow brown (10 yr 6/4) loany fine sand

9

Calcrete VI Calcrete VII Calcrete VIII Reddish brown (5 yr 4/8) fine sandy loam strong pedogenesis

10 Unit III Brown (7.5 yr 4/6) fine sand

11

Middle Palaeolithic

163000 ± 21000 B.P. (T.L.)

Calcrete IX Brown (7.5 yr 5/6) loamy fine sand strong pedobenesis

12 1,44,000 ± 12,000 B.P. (U/Th) 13

Brown (7.5 yr 5/6) medium sand Calcrete X 14 1,50,000 ± 10,000 B.P. (U/Th)

Calcrete XI Brown (7.5 yr 5/6 to 6/6) loamy fine sand

15

Calcrete XII Brown (7.5 yr 5/6) loamy medium sand 16 Calcrete XIII 17

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Brown (7.5 yr 5/6) loamy medium sand Calcrete XIV Calcrete XV

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Brown (7.5 yr 5/6) loamy medium sand Calcrete XVI

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Figure 1 16 R sand dune section at Didwana, Rajasthan, showing sedimentary stratigraphy and Stone Age culture sequence. Courtesy: V. N. Misra, Stone Age India: an ecological perspective, Man and Environment, Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1989, Fig. 10.

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once again. The University of Allahabad team, in collaboration with the universities of California and Melbourne, worked in the Belan and Son Valleys of north central India and identified gravel and silt deposits grouped under Baghor, Sihawal, Patpara, and Khetauni formations. Various phases of the Stone Age were correlated with these sedimentary bodies. In the Deccan region the basins of the rivers Godavari and Krishna and their various tributaries were the scene of Quaternary studies for the last half a century. These preserved rich and continuous record of Stone Age occupation including animal fossils. In the northern Deccan geoarchaeological work during the last two decades led to the recognition of four major Quaternary formations – Bori, Godavari, Upper Bhima, and Chandanpuri formations – containing valuable data for reconstructing Stone Age culture sequence against the background of Quaternary climatic history. Following upon the pioneering work of R. V. Joshi, important fresh field studies were carried out in the Bhima and Kaladgi Basins of north Karnataka and also in the Kortallayar Valley of Tamil Nadu. These yielded important fresh data bearing upon reconstruction of palaeogeography and settlement patterns of the Palaeolithic times. Faunal collections obtained from different parts of South Asia prove that the Quaternary landscape supported rich animal world. The Karewa beds of Kashmir and the Siwalik hills of the Punjab and Himachal Pradesh produced Lower Pleistocene fauna. Similarly, the sediments of the Godavari, Narmada, Krishna, Belan, Son, and other Peninsular Indian rivers yielded fossil fauna comprising various species dated to the Middle and Late Pleistocene. The Kurnool caves in the southern part of the country and the Ratnapura beds of Sri Lanka also yielded rich faunal assemblages. As regards the plant world, it is inferred that as is the case today the South Asian landscape supported a cross-section of vegetation types comprising the Alpine type geared to glacial landscape, evergreen forest system, deciduous vegetation, savanna grasslands, and scrub vegetation. From the wide spatial distribution of Palaeolithic sites, it is clear that man was adapting himself to various environmental settings during the Pleistocene.

Archaeological Record Nature of Palaeolithic Record

The South Asian Palaeolithic record is extremely rich in terms of empirical contents. Its major components are as follows:

1. The bulk of the record consists of lithic artifacts fashioned out of a variety of basic rocks and siliceous materials. 2. Wood may have been used for artifact preparation from the earliest stages, but unfortunately nothing has survived the ravages of time. 3. Bone tools and objects are known from the Upper Palaeolithic stage. 4. Remains of simple dwelling structures were exposed from Acheulian levels at Bhimbetka, Hunsgi, and Paisra, and there is evidence of a shrine-like feature from Baghor I in north central India and a hearth from one of the caves in Kurnool area. 5. Rock art may date to the terminal phase of the Palaeolithic. 6. Hominid remains are known from Hathnora in the Narmada Valley and Odai in Tamil Nadu. 7. Fossil fauna is reported from a number of places in alluvial context and from a few sites in association with in situ cultural record. Chronology

In South Asia until the 1970s understanding of the chronology of the Palaeolithic was entirely based on criteria like the association of cultural record with laterite and alluvial deposits, faunal succession, stratigraphical record exposed in archaeological excavations, measurement of fluorine/phosphate ratios of ancient animal bones, and weathering of rocks. Starting with the radiocarbon method, during the last quarter-century South Asian Palaeolithic research benefited from the application of several absolute dating methods on various organic and inorganic materials comprising animal bones, charcoal, freshwater shells, burnt soils, calcretes and travertines, and, more recently, volcanic ash. These methods include thermoluminesence (TL), uranium–thorium, potassium–argon, argon–argon, palaeomagnetism, and electron-spin resonance. East Africa is still regarded as the cradle of mankind. The earliest known stone tools, belonging to the Oldowan or mode I assemblages and attributed to the Australopithecines or Homo habilis, are dated to 2.6 Myr. The Acheulian tradition appears around 1.6 Ma. Further east, the sites of Ubeidiya in Israel and Dmanisi in Georgia are dated to 1.4 and 1.8 Myr, respectively. In China, the Longguppo hominid and associated stone artifacts have been dated to 1.9– 1.7 Myr. In Indonesia there are claims that the Modjokerto fossil infant calvaria may date to 1.9–1.8 Myr. Seen against the background of these early artifact and hominid findings from West Asia and East Asia,

ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures 773

it is not surprising that stone artifacts dated between 1.2 and >2 Myr have been reported from certain parts of South Asia – Riwat (Pakistan), Uttarbaini (India) and some other sites found in the upper Siwalik formations of the Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu. Unfortunately, the artifacts from all these places are of a nondescript type and also doubts have been expressed about their sedimentary contexts. Whatever be the uncertainty about the earliest stage of hominid occupation, the absolute dating methods have now placed at our disposal a good number of dates for fixing the chronological limits of the three regular phases within the South Asian Palaeolithic (Table 1). The Acheulian, representing the principal component of the Lower Palaeolithic, is dated to the Middle Pleistocene. The available dates range from 670 kyr to 190/66 kyr. At Bori in the Deccan, the lithic assemblage found in association with a tephra layer is dated

to 670 and 538 kyr. At Dina and Jalapur in the Jhelum Basin of Pakistan, the gravels yielding stone artifacts have been dated by palaeomagnetic stratigraphy between 600 and 400 kyr. Among the many thorium– uranium dates for sites in Rajasthan, Saurashtra, and the Deccan, there are some which indicate an age of >350 kyr for the Acheulian. More recently, Isampur in north Karnataka has given a date of 1.2 myr, thereby stretching the antiquity of the Acheulian to the Early Pleistocene. The available radiocarbon, uranium–thorium, and TL dates stretch the antiquity of the Middle Palaeolithic up to 40 kyr or the early part of last glacial stage. The evidence from 16 R sand dune at Didwana in Rajasthan suggests a still higher age. The cultural level here has been dated to 125 kyr by means of thermoluminescence. The succeeding Upper Palaeolithic has a larger number of radiocarbon dates which cluster between 19 and 25 kyr. The dates from sites like

Table 1 Absolute dates for Palaeolithic sites in South Asia Site

Material used

Method used

Possible early sites Riwat, Pakistan Uttarbaini, Siwalik hills, Jammu, India

Sediment stratigraphy Volcanic ash

Palaeomagnetism Fission–track

Sediment stratigraphy Miliolite Calcrete Calcrete Volcanic ash Volcanic ash Calcrete Elephas molar Bos molar Elephas molar Tooth-enamel, Bos sp.

Palaeomagnetism Thorium–uranium Thorium–uranium Thorium–uranium Potassium–argon Argon–argon Thorium–uranium Thorium–uranium Thorium–uranium Thorium–uranium Electron-spin resonance

Important Acheulian sites Dina and Jalapur, Pakistan Umrethi, India Didwana, India Nevasa, India Bori, India Yedurwadi, India Sadab, India Teggihalli, India Isampur, India Important Middle Palaeolithic sites in India Badalpur Dhom dam Mula dam Nandipalle Rati Karar Didwana (16 R) Important Upper Palaeolithic sites in India Bhedaghat Deoghat, Belan valley (3 dates) Chandrasal (2 dates) Inamgaon (3 dates) Mehtakeri Nagda Patne Dharangaon Muchchatlachintamanugavi (Kurnool) Dharmapuri

Age in years B.P. >1.9 Myr 1.6 (revised to 2.8) Myr 400 to 600 kyr 190 kyr >390 kyr >350 kyr 537 kyr 670 kyr >350 kyr 290 kyr 287 kyr > 350 kyr 1.2 Myr

Calcrete

C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 TL

24 kyr 37 kyr 31 kyr 23 kyr 32 kyr 125 kyr

Freshwater shells Freshwater shells Ostrich eggshell Freshwater shells Ostrich eggshell Freshwater shells Ostrich eggshell Ostrich eggshell Freshwater shells Burnt clay Freshwater shells

C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 C-14 TL C-14

25 kyr 18 to 25 kyr 36/39 kyr 12 to 21 kyr >41 kyr 30 kyr >31 kyr 25 kyr 25 kyr 16 kyr 29 kyr

Wood Wood Freshwater shells

774 ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures

Bhedaghat, Dharangaon, Mehtakheri, Nagda, and Dharmapuri are in the range of 25–40 kyr. The upper limit for sites like Baghor I ranges from 8000 to 9000 BC. The Mesolithic representing the terminal stage of the Stone Age has been dated to 18–28 kyr at the Batadomba-leva and Beli-leva caves in Sri Lanka. The Mesolithic sites in India date to 8000–10 000 years ago. Culture Sequence

While it is true that at no single site in South Asia one could see the Palaeolithic as a single evolving cultural entity, we have now several excavated primary sites (caves/rock shelters and open air sites) showing evidence of all three stages within the Palaeolithic. These include the Sanghao cave in Pakistan, the rock shelters at Adamgarh and Bhimbetka in central India, 16 R dune site at Didwana in Rajasthan, and Patne in the Deccan. Lower Palaeolithic The South Asian Lower Palaeolithic consists of two distinct tool traditions, viz. the Soan or pebble-tool assemblages (treated as part of the general Southeast Asian tradition) and the biface or handax-cleaver tradition (Figure 2). The former tradition is best known from the Himalayan foothill zone. In the 1930s de Terra and Paterson postulated the existence of a regular sequence within this tradition, made up of pre-Soan, Early, Evolved, and Late Soan stages. Later T. T. Paterson and H. J. H. Drummond treated the lithic assemblages as the handiwork of a war-loving people, as against the peaceful folk of the bifacial tradition. As mentioned earlier, the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan later raised serious doubts about the sedimentary contexts of lithic assemblages collected by de Terra and Paterson and their evolutionary sequence. On the Indian side of the border, pebbletool assemblages were found in the Sirsa Valley of Haryana and the Beas–Banganga Valleys of Himachal Pradesh. On the basis of stratigraphic data and palaeomagnetic dates these sites were assigned an age of 300–400 kyr. These studies on the Indian side of the Siwalik frontal range also produced bifacial assemblages of Acheulian character from the Hoshiarpur– Chandigarh sector, thereby raising the possibility that the two traditions coexisted in the area – the Soan confined to the dun valleys of the frontal range and the biface tradition occupying the flat or plateau surfaces. Pebble-tool assemblages have occasionally also been reported from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, lower Deccan and Kerala, but their stratigraphical contexts need to be placed on a stronger basis. The lithic assemblages from all these sites are characterized by the use of stone hammer technique and the artifact types

comprise uni- and bifacially worked choppers with thick butts and convex, straight or pointed edges, cores, and flakes (Figure 3). Rich clusters of sites belonging to the second and more widely spread Acheulian tradition are known from northern part of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand, hilly tracts of West Bengal, lower hilly tracts of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, mainland Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Himalayan foothill area of Punjab. Some lithic assemblages have also been reported from the Saurasthra and Konkan coasts of western India. Good Acheulian assemblages are also known from Sind and the Jhelum Basin in Pakistan, and the dun valleys of Dang-Deokhuri in Nepal. Barring a few cave/rockshelter sites like Bhimbetka and Adamgarh, all known Acheulian sites are of the open air type and are mostly associated with alluvial deposits. Quartzite was the most commonly used rock for tool-making, but in areas lacking in it other suitable and locally available rocks such as dolerite and basalt, granite, schist, fossilwood and even limestone were employed. In addition to stone hammer technique, soft hammer and prepared core techniques were also employed commonly. In pursuance of the behavioral approach to the Stone Age past that began to be adopted by the workers since the 1970s, intensive surveys were undertaken in some regions for identifying in situ occurrences of lithic assemblages. Large site complexes were found in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, the Singhbhum area of Bihar, the Belan and Son Valleys of north central India, Orissa, the Hunsgi and Baichbal Valleys of the Bhima Basin, the Kaladgi Basin, the Chittoor, Kurnool and Cuddapah areas of the Eastern Ghats, and the Kortallayar Basin of Tamil Nadu. Further, excavations were undertaken at some well-preserved (in situ) sites for understanding the Acheulian occupation activities and techno-typological aspects. These included Singi Talav and 16 R dune site at Didwana in Rajasthan, Bhimbetka, and Adamgarh caves and the open air site of Durkadi in the Narmada Valley, Samadhiala in Gujarat, Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh, Sihawal, Patpara, and Nakhjar Khurd in the Son Valley, Paisra in Bihar, Chirki-Nevasa and Bori in Maharashtra, and Hunsgi and Yediyapur in Hunsgi and Baichbal Valleys. More recently, excavations were done at Isampur and Lakhmapur in north Karnataka, Morgaon in Maharashtra, and Attirampakkam in the Kortallayar Basin of Tamil Nadu. At Chriki-Nevasa the Acheulian cultural material was found in association with colluvial gravel of basalt rocks resting on a sloping rock platform exposed

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Figure 2 Important Lower Palaeolithic sites in South Asia: 1, Riwat; 2, Pahlgam; 3, Jalalpur; 4, Dina; 5, Beas-Banganga complex; 6, Sirsa-Ghaggar complex;7, Dang-Deokhuri complex; 8, Didwana; 9, Jayal; 10, Jaisalmer-Pokaran Road; 11, Ziarat Pir Shaban; 12, Berach complex; 13, Chambal complex; 14, Bhimbetka; 15, Raisen complex; 16, Lalitpur; 17, Damoh complex; 18, Son complex; 19, Sihawal; 20, Belan complex; 21, Sisunia; 22, Singhbhum complex; 23, Paisra; 24, Brahmani complex; 25, Waingana complex; 26, Mahadeo Piparia; 27, Adamgarh; 28, Durkadi; 29, Samadhiala; 30, Umrethi; 31, Gangapur; 32, Chirki-Nevasa; 33, Bori; 34, Nalgonda complex; 35, Hunsgi and Baichbal basins complex; 36, Mahad; 37, Anagwadi; 38, Malwan; 39, Lakhmapur; 40, Nittur; 41, Kurnool complex; 42 Nagarjunakonda complex; 43, Cuddapah complex; 44, Rallakalava complex; 45, Kortallayar complex.

on the right bank of the river Pravara. One of the trenches (VII) exposed a cultural level spread over an area of 74 m2 and rich in stone artifacts and fossilized bones of Bos sp. The large stone blocks found in the

level may have formed part of the foundation of a dwelling structure. Localities V and VI at Hunsgi and Yediyapur VI locality also preserved 20–35 cm thick Acheulian levels under half-a-meter thick silt

776 ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures

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Figure 3 Pebble tools from South Asian Lower Palaeolithic sites – (a) Nittur, Karnataka; (b) Jaisalmer-Pokaran Road, Rajasthan; (c) Sirsa valley, Haryana; (d) Mahadeo Piparia, Madhya Pradesh.

deposits. These levels yielded limestone cores, finished tools and debitage. All these spots were associated with rocky eminences/ridges standing 3–6 m above the beds of local streams. The Acheulian groups appear to have preferred small open spaces enclosed by rock boulders which facilitated the erection of temporary shelters with leaves and branches. Paisra in the Munger district of Bihar exposed Acheulian levels under 1–1.5 m thick colluvial gravel deposits in an inland valley enclosed by hills. These levels also preserved evidence of dwelling structures in the form of alignment of post-holes and circular arrangement of stone blocks. At Attirampakkam the Acheulian level was found in a thick deposit of laminated clay. In III F-23 rockshelter at Bhimbetka, the Acheulian deposit was 2.5 m thick and consisted of occupation

floors paved with stone slabs and pieces. A small area of 16 m2 produced 4700 lithic artifacts. Detailed geoarchaeological studies and excavations conducted by K. Paddayya at Isampur in the Hunsgi Valley exposed a quarry-cum-occupation spot covering an area of 0.75 ha. It is associated with a weathered rock outcrop consisting of silicified limestone blocks of suitable sizes and shapes. It preserved a 20–30 cm thick in situ Acheulian level below 50 cm thick brown silt deposit. Trench 1 exposed seven chipping clusters (each 6–8 m2 in extent) made up of cores, flake blanks, finished tools, hammerstones, and debitage, all found in mint-fresh condition (Figures 4 and 5). The total assemblage from this trench comprised over 15 000 artifacts, illustrating the manufacturing trajectories adopted by the hominids to produce various categories

ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures 777

Figure 4 (a) Acheulian level exposed at 50 cm depth below surface in trench 1 at Isampur, Karnataka; (b) close-up of a chipping cluster.

of implements. Small amounts of fossilized dental and bone remains of bovids and cervids, and turtleshell pieces were also found along with cultural material. Three electron-spin resonance dates obtained on fossil tooth-enamel of animals belonging to Bos sp. found in the excavation gave an average value of 1.2 Myr, thereby making Isampur the earliest known well-documented Palaeolithic site in South Asia. Despite its long duration and wide geographical spread, the developmental history of the Acheulian is still unclear because none of the sites has preserved any clear stratigraphical record. At the moment it is possible to recognize two broad stages, i.e., Lower Acheulian and Upper Acheulian. The Lower Acheulian is characterized by crude workmanship. Consequent upon the use of stone hammer technique, the artifacts (handaxes, cleavers, pebble tools, etc.) are generally thick with irregular cross-sections; the surfaces are uneven with large patches of cortex; and

the edges are sinuous. Among the hand axes pointed forms (pear-shaped, lanceolate, pyriform, etc.) show a majority. In some of the Lower Acheulian assemblages picks, knives and polyhedrons occur regularly. As examples of this stage one may cite the assemblages from Ziarat Pir Shaban in Sind, Dina, and Jalalpur in the Punjab (all in Pakistan), and assemblages from the excavated Indian sites of Singi Talav in Rajasthan, Durkadi in Madhya Pradesh, Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh, Chirki-Nevasa and Bori in Maharashtra, Hunsgi, Yediyapur, Isampur, and Anagwadi in Karnataka, Singhbhum complex and Paisra in Bihar. The bottom 10 cm portion of the Acheulian level exposed in trench 1 at Isampur yielded 13 043 artifacts. Among these 169 are shaped implements comprising hand axes (48), cleavers (15), knives (18), scrapers (45), chopping tools (14), discoids (3), perforators (5), and an indeterminate example (Figure 6).

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Figure 5 Chipping clusters in the Acheulian level exposed at 50 cm depth in trench 1 at Isampur. Courtesy: K. Paddayya et al., Recent findings on the Acheulian of the Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys, Karnataka, with special reference to the Isampur excavation and its dating, Current Science, Vol. 83, No. 5, 2002, Fig. 6.

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The Upper Acheulian assemblages show the employment of cylinder or soft hammer technique, as a result of which the artifacts become thinner with smooth surfaces; the edges run more or less in a straight line. There is a general increase in the proportion of cleavers. Hand axes now include oval and triangular forms. Flake tools become more common. Bhimbetka, Raisen complex and Sihawal II in central India, Gangapur in Maharashtra, Mudnur and Lakhmapur in Karnataka, and Rallakalava complex in

Andhra Pradesh are good examples of this stage. Bhimbetka has the following types among finished artifacts: hand axes (55), cleavers (150), side-scrapers (368), end-scrapers (108), backed knives (163), truncated flakes and blades (87), notches (111), and denticulates (78) (Figure 7). The Middle Palaeolithic H. D. Sankalia’s findings in the 1950s at Nevasa in the Deccan led to formal recognition of the existence of a distinct Middle

780 ASIA, WEST/Paleolithic Cultures

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Palaeolithic tradition in South Asia. Since then literally hundreds of sites were found in different parts of the Indian subcontinent (Figure 8). In addition to the areas yielding Lower Palaeolithic sites, lithic assemblages of Middle Palaeolithic affiliation have been reported from hilly and forested tracts like Tripura and Garo hills of northeast India and the Karnataka sector of Western Ghats. The Ratnapura chert assemblages from southern alluvial tracts of Sri Lanka and the Mainmati–Lalmai group of assemblages on fossilwood from Bangladesh also belong to this tradition. In addition to this tendency to occupy even hilly, forested zones, there is a distinct increase in the number of sites and this suggests a more intensified use of the landscape. Sojat in Rajasthan, Choli Dongargaon in central India, and Kovalli and Devapur in Karnataka are good examples of extensive workshops that came up on raw material outcrops. The Middle Palaeolithic tradition is marked by two major changes. First, while quartizite and other rocks continued to be used in some areas, there was now an overall preference for cryptocrystalline silica forms such as chert, chalcedony, jasper, and agate. The

nodules/cobbles of these materials were procured from river-beds or hillsides lying several kilometers away. The second important change concerns the manufacture of shaped tools on flake blanks. These blanks were obtained by means of the plain flaking (soft/hard hammer), prepared core and discoidal core techniques. Margin or edge-retouch was the most common form of secondary working employed for shaping the flakes into regular implements. The chief tool-types are as follows: (1) side-scrapers of various types (straight, concave, covex, transverse, and alround edges); (2) points (simple, tanged or shouldered and bifacially worked); (3) borers; (4) combination tools like scraper-cum-borers and borer-cum-points; and (5) knives, denticulates, burins, and end-scrapers. Hand axes, cleavers, and pebble tools also occur at a limited number of sites. Sanghao cave provided a five-period culture sequence, of which period I belongs to the Middle Palaeolithic. The lithic assemblage is based on the working of quartz by means of plain flaking, discoidal, tortoise core, and fluted core or blade techniques. The major tool types include scrapers of varioustypes, points, discoids, and borers. The rock shelter at

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Figure 8 Important Middle Palaeolithic sites in South Asia: 1, Sanghao; 2, Ror; 3, Mangalpura; 4, Didwana; 5, Dang-Deokhuri complex; 6, Luni complex; 7, Hokra; 8, Berach complex; 9, Sihora; 10, Belan complex; 11, Meghalaya complex; 12, Mainmati-Lalmai complex; 13, Tripura complex; 14, Bhimbetka; 15, Patpara; 16, Samnapur; 17, Wainganga complex; 18, Patne; 19, Singhbhum complex; 20, Brahmani complex; 21, Rojdi; 22, Nevasa; 23, Shorapur doab complex; 24, Kovalli; 25, Nagarjunakonda complex; 26, Sanganakallu; 27, Nandipalle; 28, Rallakalava complex; 29, Kortallayar complex; 30, Ratnapura complex.

Bhimbetka also preserved a rich Middle Palaeolithic level yielding a variety of quartzite scrapers, Levallois flakes, and blades. A number of scrapers are made on thin slabs. The occurrence of cleavers and hand axes indicates the transitional nature of this assemblage.

Samnapur on the Narmada, Patpara on the Son, and Sanganakallu in South India are three excavated sites of the open air type. At Samnapur the cultural level was found in a semiprimary context in association with a rubble deposit of colluvial origin,

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forming part of a thick deposit of brown silt. The total site measured 100  60 m. Over 3000 cherty quartzite artifacts were excavated from an area of 44 m2 along with some fossil animal bones. This was an occupation-cum-workshop site. The shaped tools include side-scrapers, end-scrapers, denticulates, notches, points, borers, and knives. The assemblage is totally lacking in hand axes and cleavers. The granite hill-top site of Sanganakallu produced an assemblage of dolerite artifacts. Without meaning any chronological implications, two broad groups could be recognized among the Middle Palaeolithic assemblages – those still showing some proportion of bifacial implements (e.g., Luni Valley in Rajasthan, Bhimbetka in central India, and Rallakalava complex) and the ones consisting of flake-tools of various types (e.g., Samnapur in central India and Shorapur Doab complex of sites in north Karnataka) (Figures 9 and 10). The Upper Palaeolithic M. L. K Murty’s discovery of blade-burin assemblages in the 1960s from half

a dozen workshops occurring on the surface of Rallakalava gravel and silt deposits in the Chittoor district of south India enabled the formal acceptance of this phase in the South Asian Palaeolithic. In the following quarter-century blade tool assemblages were reported from a number of sites in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Gujarat (Figure 11). Quartzite and siliceous materials such as chert and chalcedony continued to be the chief raw materials for tool making. A notable development concerns the use of animal bone at some sites like the Kurnool caves in South India and of ostrich eggshell in western and central India. The shaped tools were now fashioned on long slender blanks called blades struck from longish, well-prepared fluted cores. This blade technique involved the use of a soft hammer (wood or bone) and an intermediate punch or chisel. The blades so detached were subjected to secondary working comprising edge-retouch/chipping and blunting. The shaped tools include scrapers, points, −

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Figure 9 Middle Palaeolithic artifacts from Rallakalava basin, Andhra Pradesh: 1–3, hand axes; 4–5, cleavers; 7–10, scrapers; 11, tanged point; 12–13, bifacial points; 14–15, borers.

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Figure 10 Middle Palaeolithic artifacts from Samnapur, Madhya Pradesh: 1–4, 10, scrapers; 5, core; 6, blade core; 7, round scraper; 8, knife; 9, steep scraper. Courtesy: V. N. Misra et al., Geoarchaeology of the Palaeolithic site at Samnapur in the central Narmada valley, Man and the Environment, Vol. XV, No. 1, 1990, Fig. 8.

knives, borers, etc. In a few cases (e.g., the Rallakalava assemblages) various burin forms also occur commonly. Toward the terminal part of this stage microlithic forms appear, heralding the tradition of composite tools which characterize the succeeding Mesolithic stage. The majority of Upper Palaeolithic sites belong to the open air type and consist of extensive lithic scatters which developed on outcrops or veins of raw material. Rallakalava assemblages from the Chittoor area, Vodikalu in the Gunjana Valley of Cuddapah region, Yadwad in the Kaladgi Basin, Maralbhavi in the Bhima Basin, Bhokar in Maharashtra, and Baghor on the Son are well-known examples. The excavated sites include the caves of Bhimbetka and Kurnool, and the open air sites of Patne and Baghor I. In rock-shelter III F-23 at Bhimbetka the Upper Palaeolithic level (layer 4) was found sandwiched between the Middle Palaeolithic and Mesolithic levels, and yielded blade artifacts of quartzite. The Kurnool limestone caves were first investigated by R. B. Foote in the nineteenth century. Foote

even claimed recovery of bone implements of the Magdalenian type. Muchchtlachintamanugavi was excavated in the 1970s and exposed 40–85 cm thick deposit made up of stone blocks and rubble as well as cultural material and animal fossils. It yielded over 223 artifacts of shale and limestone, and 2003 bone implements comprising scrapers, spatulae, and points. The faunal material was typically Upper Pleistocene in character comprising dental and osteological remains of various animal species. A fireplace was also noticed in the cultural level and a burnt clay sample from it has a TL date of 17, 390 years B.P. Patne is located in the Ajanta range of hills of the Deccan, and preserved a three-tier (Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, and Mesolithic) sequence in gravel and silt deposits measuring 10–20 m in thickness (Figure 12). Levels 5–12 (from top) represented the Upper Palaeolithic. Among these layers 5 and 7 were especially rich in stone artifacts and yielded 11 788 and 12 301 specimens, respectively. Five developmental phases (A–E) were recognized within the Upper Palaeolithic. Phases A and B form an early variant with jasper as the main raw material, while phases C–E represent a late variant characterized by the use of chalcedony and appearance of lunates, trapezes, and triangles. Phase D has a C-14 date of 25 kyr. Patne also yielded many ostrich eggshell pieces including a few incised specimens and beads. Excavations at Baghor I on the river Son exposed a terminal Palaeolithic occupation floor covering an area of 286 m2. It yielded a developed lithic assemblage. An interesting feature exposed at this site was the discovery of a rubble platform which was interpreted as a shrine for mother goddess worship. Two broad variants could be recognized among the lithic assemblages – an incipient blade-tool tradition and a developed blade-tool tradition. In the former the blades are rather thick and ill-formed. Simple or retouched blades, flake scrapers, points and borers, and sometimes even chopping tools occur. Backed tools and burins are uncommon. Sites in the Kurnool area, Shorapur Doab in the Bhima Basin, Bhokar in Maharashtra, Bhimbetka in central India, Singhbhum region in Bihar, Buddha Pushkar in Rajasthan, and Visadi in Gujarat represent this archaic stage (Figure 13). In the evolved tradition the blade technique undergoes a large degree of refinement so that the blade blanks are slender with perfect parallel sides. Implements like scrapers, points, and knives obtained by edge-blunting become more common. Vodikalu in Cuddapah area, Rallakalava assemblages from Chittoor, and Baghor I assemblage from the Son Valley are some examples of this tradition (Figure 14).

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Figure 11 Important Upper Palaeolithic sites in South Asia: 1, Sanghao; 2 Jenana; 3, Didwana; 4, Budha Pushkar; 5, Belan complex; 6, Michimgiri; 7, Singhbhum complex; 8, Baghor I; 9, Bhimbetka; 10, Visadi; 11, Bhadne; 12, Patne; 13, Bhokar; 14, Papamiya Tekdi; 15, Dhavalpuri; 16, Nevasa; 17, Inamgaon; 18, Asla; 19, Shorapur Doab complex; 20, Yadwad; 21, Kurnool complex: 22, Nagarjunakonda complex; 23, Yerragondapalam; 24, Vodikalu; 25, Nandipalle; 26, Peddarajupalli; 27, Renigunta; 28, Vemula.

General Features

Settlement Patterns

Having reviewed the substantive and chronological aspects of the South Asian Palaeolithic record, it now remains to consider briefly some general features of Stone Age adaptations.

Excluding some specific tracts such as the Indus and Gangetic plains, central and northern parts of Sri Lanka, and the deltaic region of Bangladesh, Palaeolithic sites occur practically all over the South Asian

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Figure 12 Sedimentary stratigraphy and Stone Age culture sequence at Patne, Maharashtra. Courtesy: S. A. Sali, The Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Cultures of Maharashtra (Pune, Deccan College), 1989, Fig. 11.

zone. The Stone Age groups occupied diverse geographical regions comprising high altitude and cold tracts like the Kashmir Valley, the Potwar plateau filled with thick sedimentary deposits, the dun valleys of Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Nepal, the Aravalli hills stretching from Gujarat to Delhi, the desert zone of Rajasthan, plateau tracts of central and eastern India, the Deccan and south India, and some coastal tracts. Geological basins of the Purana age seem to have served as preferred habitats on account of the valley-like topographic forms, availability of various rocks for flaking, and presence of perennial water springs. Prehistorians in South Asia are yet to fully explore the topic of hominid

adaptations in terms of sub-regional topographic and ecological settings. The intensive site surveys carried out in some regions permit inferences about settlement patterns. A large cluster of about 90 open air Acheulian sites is known from the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh. These are found in a valley enclosed by sandstone hills and were occupied in winter. In the rainy season Palaeolithic groups moved to the rock shelters of the adjacent Bhimbetka hills. In the Kaladgi Basin, covering the Malaprabha and Ghataprabha Valleys, sites were mapped in relation to landform types. The Stone Age groups generally avoided the forested and high rainfall tracts close to the Western Ghats and concentrated their occupation on river banks and in foothill zone of the middle reaches of rivers. The more recent work in the Malaprabha Basin, including a small excavation at Lakhmapur, exposed Acheulian occurrences on a lateritic surface and these were later covered by sediments laid by low-energy processes. Raw material from quartzite outcrops and water sources in the form of springs and shallow streams were exploited by the hominid groups. The two-decade-long surveys and excavations in the Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys of the neighbouring Bhima Basin brought to light over 200 Acheulian sites in an area of about 500 km2 (Figure 15). Four major site categories emerged from this study: (1) secondary fluvial sites; (2) secondary colluvial sites; (3) secondary sites modified by surface runoff; and (4) in situ or primary occurrences. Most of the sites were found to belong to the last category, which were again classified into manufacturing sites, occupation sites, food-processing sites yielding faunal material, single-event activity or off-sites, and stone tool caches. Two major site concentrations (each made up of 15–20 occurrences and spread over a stretch of 1 or 2 km) were recognized in the area – one near Hunsgi in the Hunsgi Valley and the other near Yediyapur in the Baichbal Valley. The remaining sites were found in a dispersed way all over the basin floors. In East Africa a similar differential distribution of Palaeolithic sites was called ‘scatter between the patches’. Considering this differential site distribution together with seasonal availability of water sources and wild plant and animal foods, as inferred from ethnographic data, it was proposed that the Acheulian settlement system of the Hunsgi and Baichbal Basins hinged upon two main annual resource management strategies: (1) dry season aggregation of the Acheulian groups near the perennial waterpools (fed by seepsprings) in the Hunsgi and Fathepur streams and concentration on large game hunting; and (2) wet season random dispersal across the basin floors, resulting in

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Figure 13 Upper Palaeolithic artifacts from the Shorapur Doab, Karnataka: 1–3, retouched blades; 4–5, strangulated blades; 6–7, backed blades; 8, nosed scraper; 9, end-scraper; 10–15, burins; 17–18 simple points; 19–20, tanged points; 21–22, borers; 23–24, blade cores.

the widely scattered small sites and nonsites, and exploitation of a variety of season-specific plant foods, small fauna and water pools of the basin floors. The more recent work at Isampur revealed that this place was a localized hub for manufacturing and occupation activities. Three or four additional hubs constituted the Acheulian settlement system of the Hunsgi and Baichbal Valleys. Economic Organization

The South Asian Palaeolithic sites could be grouped under the forager model, where the hunter-gatherer groups map on to resources of a given region, as according to their seasonal and spatial distribution. The fossil fauna obtained from alluvial contexts at a number of places definitely shows that in the Pleistocene various ecosystems were supporting rich wildlife and vegetation. Direct evidence of faunal exploitation is however confined to open-air sites like

Isampur, Chirki-Nevasa, Samnapur, and the caves of Bhimbetka and Kurnool. In recent years ethnoarchaeological research provided many analogies drawn from the study of hunting-gathering communities like the Chenchus, Boyas, Yerukalas, and Yanadis in South India, and Pardhis and Van Vagris in central and western India. The faunal remains from excavated sites prove that wild cattle, wild horse, wild elephant, and various deer, and antlelope species were being exploited for food purposes. Isampur excavation yielded shell remains of land turtle, thereby indicating that small fauna too was being exploited by the Palaeolithic groups. From the ethnographic record one could infer that this small fauna comprised the hare, birds, reptiles, amphibians, rodents, insects, and fishes. It is particularly abundant in wet season and its exploitation requires only collecting strategies. Muchchatlachintamanugavi exposed a fireplace consisting of regular arrangement of limestone blocks. This is the

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Figure 14 Upper Palaeolithic artifacts from Rallakalava Basin, Andhra Pradesh: 1–2, blades; 3, backed knife; 4–12, backed blades and bladelets; 13, borer; 14, tanged point; 15, blade core; 16, end-scraper; 17–21, burins of various forms.

earliest known human use of fire in South Asia; it was used for both cooking and heating of rocks required for tool making. Unfortunately, direct evidence of exploitation of plant foods is lacking. But ethnobotanical studies clearly show that the scrub jungle and deciduous ecosystems which occupy much of the peninsular Indian landmass offer a wide variety of wild plant foods which are still being exploited by many tribal groups like the Gonds, Boyas, Yerukalas, Yanadis, and Chenchus, and also by the economically background classes of village communities. These foods comprise a variety of tuber and root crops, leafy vegetables, edible seeds, gums and mushrooms, and many species of fruits, berries/pods. Honey is another commonly used item. Like small fauna, many of these plant foods are particularly abundant in the rainy season. We may infer that the Palaeolithic groups of South Asia exploited all these wild plant foods by adopting simple collecting strategies. The recovery of archaeobotanical remains of three wild edible plant species, i.e., Artocarpus nobilis (wild bread fruit), Canarium zeylanicum (a wild nut), and two

species of wild banana from the Mesolithic levels (dated between 8000 and 10 000 years BP) in the Batadomba-lena and Beli-lena caves of Sri Lanka is a clear pointer in this regard. Art, Ornamentation, and Religious Aspects

Certain strands of evidence inform us about the esthetic/artistic activities too. In some of the Acheulian assemblages, hand axes, particularly the pointed, ovate, and cordate forms, assume symmetric and esthetically pleasing shapes. So it is possible that these specimens, in addition to serving utilitarian purposes, were also treated as objects of art. Judging by the criteria formulated by Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, these specimens also betray higher cognitive abilities acquired by the Acheulian groups. Second, several hundred painted rockshelters are known from the Vindhyan and Kaimur hills of central India. The earliest of these pictures depicting hunting, gathering, fishing, and trapping activities may go back to the terminal Palaeolithic. A third piece of art evidence comes from one of the Upper Palaeolithic sites of

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