Newly revealed archaeological finds at Sidon in
Lebanon include the rare remains of a Canaanite child and its funerary
jar, the British Museum excavation team revealed on Monday.
By the time of the
Canaanites, burial in jars had been the local practice for thousands of
years throughout the region. The burial jars archaeologists found in
copper-age Sidon had all contained adults. However, the burial presented
Monday was a child.
The child was interred with a necklace around its neck, said the team, headed by Dr. Claude Doumet-Serhal.
The fact of the child's burial, with a funerary
vessel and jewelry, could be indicative of status, or of the value
attributed to children. Prehistoric burials had been confined to adults,
indicating that children were held to be of little importance.
Canaanite child's necklace from burial in Sidon
Mahmoud Zayyat, AFP
Lebanon, like Israel, is on
the Mediterranean Sea and is smack on the route – or at least one route -
by which humans and their predecessors left Africa for the rest of the
world. Throughout the region and in Sidon too, archaeologists have found
stone axes, chisels, and bifacial tools from the Stone Age.
Fire
use appears to have been relatively common among Neandertals in the
Middle Palaeolithic. However, the means by which Neandertals procured
their fire—either through the collection of natural fire, or by
producing it themselves using tools—is still a matter of debate. We
present here the first direct artefactual evidence for regular,
systematic fire production by Neandertals. From archaeological layers
attributed to late Mousterian industries at multiple sites throughout
France, primarily to the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition (MTA)
technoculture (ca. 50,000 years BP), we identify using microwear
analysis dozens of late Middle Palaeolithic bifacial tools that exhibit
macroscopic and microscopic traces suggesting repeated percussion and/or
forceful abrasion with a hard mineral material. Both the locations and
nature of the polish and associated striations are comparable to those
obtained experimentally by obliquely percussing fragments of pyrite (FeS2)
against the flat/convex sides of a biface to make fire. The striations
within these discrete use zones are always oriented roughly parallel to
the longitudinal axis of the tool, allowing us to rule out taphonomic
origins for these traces. We therefore suggest that the occasional use
of bifaces as ‘strike-a-lights’ was a technocultural feature shared
among the late Neandertals in France.
Introduction
Most
people today are familiar with the concept of striking steel against
flint to produce a shower of sparks that fall onto tinder, which begins
to smoulder, and when placed into a bundle of dried grass, can be gently
blown into flame. Prior to cigarette lighters and wooden matches, the
flint-and-steel method was among the most common fire making systems in
modern times, originating in the Iron Age1,2,3.
Prior to their introduction to metal products by Western colonialists,
numerous hunter-gatherer, pastoralist and horticulturalist societies
employed the minerals pyrite or marcasite—two very similar species of
iron disulphide (FeS2) that are virtually indistinguishable
from one another in their nodular or crystal aggregate forms, referred
to hereafter simply as pyrite—in place of steel for their fire making
needs. Ethnographic accounts describe the flint-and-pyrite (and in some
cases, pyrite-on-pyrite) fire making system being employed from Alaska
and Canada to Tierra del Fuego in the Americas, and from Australia and
Melanesia to Siberia, and only a few instances noted in Africa1,4,5. However, the earliest known instances of percussive fire making extend much deeper into the prehistoric past.
Sorensen,
A. C. & Scherjon, F. fiReproxies: A computational model providing
insight into heat-affected archaeological lithic assemblages. PLOS ONE13, e0196777 (2018).
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van Gijn, A. L. The Wear and Tear of Flint: Principles of Functional Analysis Applied to Dutch Neolithic Assemblages. (Leiden University, 1990).
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Keeley, L. H. Experimental determination of stone tool uses: A microwear analysis. (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
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Semenov, S. A. Prehistoric technology: an experimental study of the oldest tools and artifacts from traces of manufacture and wear. (Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1964).
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Fullagar, R. Functional analysis and its implications to two southeastern Australian archaeological assemblages PhD thesis, La Trobe University (1986).
71.
Lemorini, C. Reconnaître
des tactiques d’exploitation du milieu au Paléolithique moyen. La
contribution de l’analyse fonctionnelle; étude fonctionnelle des
industries lithiques de la Grotta Breuil (Latium, Italie) et de la
Combette (Bonnieux, Vaucluse, France). (BAR international Séries 858, 2000).
72.
Odell,
G. H. & Odell-Vereecken, F. Verifying the reliability of lithic
use-wear assessments by ‘blind tests’: the low-power approach. J Field Archaeol7, 87–120 (1980).
Claud,
E., Deschamps, M., Colonge, D., Mourre, V. & Thiébaut, C.
Experimental and functional analysis of late Middle Paleolithic flake
cleavers from southwestern Europe (France and Spain). J Archaeol Sci62, 105–127 (2015).
Claud,
E., Brenet, M., Maury, S. & Mourre, V. Étude expérimentale des
macrotraces d’utilisation sur les tranchants des bifaces.
Caractérisation et potentiel diagnostique. Nouvelles Archéol, 55–60 (2009).
75.
Beyries, S. & Plisson, H. Pointes ou outils triangulaires? Données fonctionnelles dans le Moustérien levantin. Paléorient24, 5–24 (1998).
Tringham,
R., Cooper, G., Odell, G., Voytek, B. & Whitman, A. Experimentation
in the formation of edge damage: a new approach to lithic analysis. J Field Archaeol1, 171–196 (1974).
Funding
was provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(Grant# PGW-13-42) and the Stichting Nederlands Museum voor
Anthropologie en Praehistorie (SNMAP). Thanks to J. Airvaux, J. Jaubert,
J.-J. Hublin, S. McPherron, E. Ihuel, D. Colonge, M. Brenet, J.-M.
Geneste and A. Turq for providing access to the studied materials. Some
of the bifaces used in the experiments were produced by D. Pomstra and
B. Ginelli. Earlier versions of this article benefitted greatly from
revisions provided by W. Roebroeks. A.C.S. and M.S. are grateful for the
insightful discussions held with various members of the Leiden Human
Origins Group and Material Culture Studies Group.
Author information
Affiliations
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
A. C. Sorensen
& M. Soressi
INRAP, GSO, Bègles, France
E. Claud
UMR 5199 PACEA, Université de Bordeaux, Pessac, France
E. Claud
Contributions
A.C.S.
conceived/designed the study in collaboration with M.S. and E.C.,
A.C.S. conceptualised and conducted the experiments, A.C.S. and E.C.
analysed the results, M.S. provided and analysed archaeological
materials, A.C.S. wrote the manuscript with input from E.C. and M.S.,
A.C.S. prepared the figures, tables and supplementary information, all
photographs appearing in the article and the Supplementary Information
were taken by A.C.S.
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IMAGE: Stone tool assemblage recovered from the Gault Site.
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Credit: Credit: Produced by N Velchoff, The Gault School of Archaeological Research.
For decades, researchers believed the
Western Hemisphere was settled by humans roughly 13,500 years ago, a
theory based largely upon the widespread distribution of Clovis
artifacts dated to that time. Clovis artifacts are distinctive
prehistoric stone tools so named because they were initially found near
Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s but have since been identified
throughout North and South America.
In recent years, though, archaeological evidence has increasingly
called into question the idea of "Clovis First." Now, a study published
by a team including DRI's Kathleen Rodrigues, Ph.D. student, and Amanda
Keen-Zebert, Ph.D., associate research professor, has dated a
significant assemblage of stone artifacts to 16-20,000 years of age,
pushing back the timeline of the first human inhabitants of North
America before Clovis by at least 2,500 years.
Significantly, this research identifies a previously unknown, early
projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis, which suggests that
Clovis technology spread across an already well-established, indigenous
population.
"These projectile points are unique. We haven't found anything else
like them," said Tom Williams, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate in
the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University and lead
author of the study. "Combine that with the ages and the fact that it
underlies a Clovis component, and the Gault site provides a fantastic
opportunity to study the earliest human occupants in the Americas."
The research team identified the artifacts at the Gault Site in
Central Texas, an extensive archaeological site with evidence of
continuous human occupation. The presence of Clovis technology at the
site is well-documented, but excavations below the deposits containing
Clovis artifacts revealed well-stratified sediments containing artifacts
distinctly different from Clovis.
To determine the ages of these artifacts, Rodrigues, Keen-Zebert,
and colleagues used a process called optically simulated luminescence
(OSL) dating to the ages of the surrounding sedimentary material. In
OSL, researchers expose minerals that have long been buried under
sediment layers to light or heat, which causes the minerals to release
trapped potassium, uranium, and thorium electrons that have accumulated
over time due to ambient, naturally occurring radiation. When the
trapped electrons are released, they emit light which can be measured to
determine the amount of time that has elapsed since the materials were
last exposed to heat or sunlight.
"The fluvial nature of the sediments deposited at the Gault Site
have created a poor environment for preservation of organic materials,
so radiocarbon dating has not been a useful technique to apply in this
region," said Kathleen Rodrigues, graduate research assistant in DRI's
Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences. "This made luminescence dating
a natural choice for dating the archaeological materials here. We are
really pleased with the quality of the results that we have achieved."
Researchers at Binghamton University, State
University at New York have used a new image-based analysis technique to
identify once-hidden North American mounds, which could reveal valuable
information about pre-contact Native Americans.
"Across the East Coast of the United States, some of the most
visible forms for pre-contact Native American material culture can be
found in the form of large earthen and shell mounds," said Binghamton
University anthropologist Carl Lipo. "Mounds and shell rings contain
valuable information about the way in which past people lived in North
America. As habitation sites, they can show us the kinds of foods that
were eaten, the way in which the community lived, and how the community
interacted with neighbors and their local environments.
In areas that are deeply wooded or consist of bayous and swamps,
there exist mounds that have eluded more than 150 years of
archaeological survey and research. Due to vegetation, these kinds of
environments make seeing more than a couple of dozen feet difficult, and
even large mounds can be hidden from view, even when one systematically
walks on the terrain.
The use of satellites and new kinds of aerial sensors such as LiDAR
(light detection and ranging) have transformed the way archaeologists
can gather data about the archaeological record, said Lipo.
Now
scientists can study landscapes from images and peer through the forest
canopy to look at the ground. LiDAR has been particularly effective at
showing the characteristic rises in topography that mark the presence of
mounds. The challenge to archaeologists, however, is to manage such a
vast array of new data that are available for study. Object based image
analysis (OBIA) allows archaeologists to configure a program to
automatically detect features of interest. OBIA is a computer-based
approach to use data from satellite images and aerial sensors to look
for shapes and combinations of features that match objects of interest.
Unlike traditional satellite image analyses that looks at combinations
of light wavelengths, OBIA adds characteristics of shape to the search
algorithm, allowing archaeologists to more easily distinguish cultural
from natural phenomena.
Lipo's team systematically identified over 160 previously undetected
mound features using LiDAR data from Beaufort County, S.C., and an OBIA
approach. The result improves the overall knowledge of settlement
patterns by providing systematic knowledge about past landscapes, said
Lipo.
"Through the use of OBIA, archaeologists can now repeatedly generate
data about the archaeological record and find historic and pre-contact
sites over massive areas that would be cost-prohibitive using pedestrian
survey. We can now also peer beneath the dense canopy of trees to see
things that are otherwise obscured. In areas like coast South Carolina,
with large swaths of shallow bays, inlets and bayous that are covered in
forest, OBIA offers us our first look at this hidden landscape."
Having demonstrated the effectiveness for using OBIA in conditions
of dense vegetation and after optimizing our processing, Lipo and his
team are expanding their efforts to include much-larger areas.
"Fortunately, satellite and LiDAR data are now available for much of
the eastern seaboard, so undertaking a large-scale project is now a
task that is achievable," said Lipo. "Due to climate change and
sea-level rise, many major mounds and middens on the East Coast are
threatened by erosion and inundation. It is urgent we document this
pre-contact landscape as soon as possible, in order to learn as much as
we can about the past before it is gone forever."
IMAGE: Medieval ceramic article from Chalcis
typical of main Middle Byzantine Production (MBP), in the collection of
the Musée National de Céramique and the Manufacture de Sèvres (Cité de
la Céramique)....
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Credit: S. Y. Waksman
In the 12th century, the Byzantine Empire was flourishing and the
city of Thebes--between Corinth and Athens--was a bustling center of
commercial and cultural exchange. Its outlet to the sea was the port of
Chalcis, part of a vast maritime trade network. In addition to
agricultural products and silk, ceramic tableware was shipped from
Chalcis throughout the Mediterranean. Most of this tableware has been
assigned to the main Middle Byzantine Production (MBP) ceramic type.
The research team examined one lot of MBP ceramics salvaged from a
wreck discovered by the island of Kavalliani, near Chalcis, in the
Southern Euboean Gulf. Analyses performed at the Archéologie et
Archéométrie research unit revealed their chemical composition, which
the scientists then compared with that of ceramics known to have been
produced at Chalcis. The chemical profiles were a match, leading them to
conclude that MBP ceramics were indeed manufactured in Chalcis. This
was followed up with a study of pieces from the collections of the Cité
de la Céramique in Sèvres, in collaboration with the Centre de Recherche
et de Restauration des Musées de France (French Ministry of Culture).
These findings provide a new perspective on medieval Mediterranean
trade and reveal that Chalcis was an epicenter of maritime commerce,
exporting goods across a vast territory. They also pinpoint the place of
manufacture of a large number of Byzantine ceramics currently on
display in museums around the world.
At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have
discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers
14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to
date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The
findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have
encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed
to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.
A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University
College London and University of Cambridge have analysed charred food
remains from a 14,400-year-old Natufian hunter-gatherer site - a site
known as Shubayqa 1 located in the Black Desert in northeastern Jordan.
The results, which are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the earliest empirical evidence for the production of bread:
"The presence of hundreds of charred food remains in the fireplaces
from Shubayqa 1 is an exceptional find, and it has given us the chance
to characterize 14,000-year-old food practices. The 24 remains analysed
in this study show that wild ancestors of domesticated cereals such as
barley, einkorn, and oat had been ground, sieved and kneaded prior to
cooking. The remains are very similar to unleavened flatbreads
identified at several Neolithic and Roman sites in Europe and Turkey. So
we now know that bread-like products were produced long before the
development of farming. The next step is to evaluate if the production
and consumption of bread influenced the emergence of plant cultivation
and domestication at all," said University of Copenhagen archaeobotanist
Amaia Arranz Otaegui, who is the first author of the study.
University of Copenhagen archaeologist Tobias Richter, who led the excavations at Shubayqa 1 in Jordan, explained:
"Natufian hunter-gatherers are of particular interest to us because
they lived through a transitional period when people became more
sedentary and their diet began to change. Flint sickle blades as well as
ground stone tools found at Natufian sites in the Levant have long led
archaeologists to suspect that people had begun to exploit plants in a
different and perhaps more effective way. But the flat bread found at
Shubayqa 1 is the earliest evidence of bread making recovered so far,
and it shows that baking was invented before we had plant cultivation.
So this evidence confirms some of our ideas. Indeed, it may be that the
early and extremely time-consuming production of bread based on wild
cereals may have been one of the key driving forces behind the later
agricultural revolution where wild cereals were cultivated to provide
more convenient sources of food." Charred remains under the microscope
The charred food remains were analysed with electronic microscopy at
a University College London lab by PhD candidate Lara Gonzalez
Carratero (UCL Institute of Archaeology), who is an expert on
prehistoric bread:
"The identification of 'bread' or other cereal-based products in
archaeology is not straightforward. There has been a tendency to
simplify classification without really testing it against an
identification criteria. We have established a new set of criteria to
identify flat bread, dough and porridge like products in the
archaeological record. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy we identified
the microstructures and particles of each charred food remain," said
Gonzalez Carratero.
"Bread involves labour intensive processing which includes
dehusking, grinding of cereals and kneading and baking. That it was
produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the
desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the
decision to begin to cultivate cereals. All of this relies on new
methodological developments that allow us to identify the remains of
bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification," said
Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology). Research into prehistoric food practices continues
A grant recently awarded to the University of Copenhagen team will
ensure that research into food making during the transition to the
Neolithic will continue:
"The Danish Council for Independent Research has recently approved
further funding for our work, which will allow us to investigate how
people consumed different plants and animals in greater detail. Building
on our research into early bread, this will in the future give us a
better idea why certain ingredients were favoured over others and were
eventually selected for cultivation," said Tobias Richter.
IMAGE: This is incipient J?mon pottery from Hanamiyama site, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
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Credit: Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties
A study into some of the earliest known pottery remains has
suggested that the rise of ceramic production was closely linked with
intensified fishing at the end of the last Ice Age.
Scientists examined 800 pottery vessels in one of the largest
studies ever undertaken, focussing mainly on Japan- a country recognised
as being one of the earliest centres for ceramic innovation.
A three year study led by researchers at BioArCh, the University
of York, concluded that the ceramic vessels were used by our
hunter-gatherer ancestors to store and process fish, initially salmon,
but then a wider range including shellfish, freshwater and marine fish
and mammals as fishing intensified.
Scientists say this association with fish remained stable even
after the onset of climate warming, including in more southerly areas,
where expanding forests provided new opportunities for hunting game and
gathering plants.
The research team were able to determine the use of a range of
ceramic vessels through chemical analysis of organic food compounds that
remained trapped in the pots despite ca. 10,000 years of burial.
The samples analysed are some of the earliest found and date from
the end of the Late Pleistocene - a time when our ancestors were living
in glacial conditions - to the post-glacial period when the climate
warmed close to its current temperature and when pottery began to be
produced in much greater quantity.
The study has shed new light on how prehistoric hunter-gatherers
processed and consumed foods over this period - until now virtually
nothing was known of how or for what early pots were used.
As part of the study, researchers recovered diagnostic lipids
from the charred surface deposits of the pottery with most of the
compounds deriving from the processing of freshwater or marine
organisms.
Lead author, Dr Alex Lucquin, from BioArCh, Department of
Archaeology, University of York, said: "Thanks to the exceptional
preservation of traces of animal fat, we now know that pottery changed
from a rare and special object to an every-day tool for preparing fish.
"I think that our study not only reveals the subsistence of the
ancient Jomon people of Japan but also its resilience to a dramatic
change in climate.
Professor Oliver Craig, from the Department of Archaeology and
Director of the BioArCh research centre at York, who led the study,
said: "Our results demonstrate that pottery had a strong association
with the processing of fish, irrespective of the ecological setting.
"Contrary to expectations, this association remained stable even
after the onset of warming, including in more southerly areas, where
expanding forests provided new opportunities for hunting and gathering.
"The results indicate that a broad array of fish was processed in
the pottery after the end of the last Ice Age, corresponding to a
period when hunter-gatherers began to settle in one place for longer
periods and develop more intensive fishing strategies"
"We suggest this marks a significant change in the role of
pottery of hunter-gatherers, corresponding massively increased volume of
production, greater variation in forms and sizes and the onset of
shellfish exploitation."
Dr Simon Kaner, from the University of East Anglia, who was
involved in the study, added: "The research highlights the benefits of
this kind of international collaboration for unlocking some of the big
questions about the human past, and the potential of engaging with
established research networks as created by the Sainsbury Institute over
the years."
The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and
the study was funded by the AHRC. It was an international collaboration
including researchers in Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands.
