New information about Stonehenge people

Despite over a century of intense study, we still know very little about the people buried at Stonehenge or how they came to be there. Now, a new University of Oxford research collaboration, published in Scientific Reports suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument's construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.

Conducted in partnership with colleagues at the UCL, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France, the research combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis, pioneered by lead author Christophe Snoeck during his doctoral research in the School of Archaeology at Oxford.

While there has been much speculation as to how and why Stonehenge was built, the question of 'who' built it has received far less attention. Part of the reason for this neglect is that many of the human remains were cremated, and so it was difficult to extract much useful information from them. Snoeck demonstrated that that cremated bone faithfully retains its strontium isotope composition, opening the way to use this technique to investigate where these people had lived during the last decade or so of their lives.

With permission from Historic England and English Heritage, the team analysed skull bones from 25 individuals to better understand the lives of those buried at the iconic monument. These remains were originally excavated from a network of 56 pits in the 1920s, placed around the inner circumference and ditch of Stonehenge, known as 'Aubrey Holes'.

Analysis of small fragments of cremated human bone from an early phase of the site's history around 3000 BC, when it was mainly used as a cemetery, showed that at least 10 of the 25 people did not live near Stonehenge prior to their death. Instead, they found the highest strontium isotope ratios in the remains were consistent with living in western Britain, a region that includes west Wales - the known source of Stonehenge's bluestones. Although strontium isotope ratios alone cannot distinguish between places with similar values, this connection suggests west Wales as the most likely origin of at least some of these people.

While the Welsh connection was known for the stones, the study shows that people were also moving between west Wales and Wessex in the Late Neolithic, and that some of their remains were buried at Stonehenge. The results emphasise the importance of inter-regional connections involving the movement of both materials and people in the construction and use of Stonehenge, providing rare insight into the large scale of contacts and exchanges in the Neolithic, as early as 5000 years ago.

Lead author Christophe Snoeck said: 'The recent discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation (up to 1000 degrees Celsius) offered us the exciting possibility to finally study the origin of those buried at Stonehenge.'

John Pouncett, a lead author on the paper and Spatial Technology Officer at Oxford's School of Archaeology, said: 'The powerful combination of stable isotopes and spatial technology gives us a new insight into the communities who built Stonehenge. The cremated remains from the enigmatic Aubrey Holes and updated mapping of the biosphere suggest that people from the Preseli Mountains not only supplied the bluestones used to build the stone circle, but moved with the stones and were buried there too.'

Rick Schulting, a lead author on the research and Associate Professor in Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at Oxford, explained: 'To me the really remarkable thing about our study is the ability of new developments in archaeological science to extract so much new information ¬from such small and unpromising fragments of burnt bone.

'Some of the people's remains showed strontium isotope signals consistent with west Wales, the source of the bluestones that are now being seen as marking the earliest monumental phase of the site.'

Commenting on how they came to develop the innovative technique, Prof Julia Lee-Thorp, Head of Oxford's School of Archaeology and an author on the paper, said: 'This new development has come about as the serendipitous result of Dr Snoeck's interest in the effects of intense heat on bones, and our realization that that heating effectively "sealed in" some isotopic signatures.'

The technique could be used to improve our understanding of the past using previously excavated ancient collections, Dr Schulting said: 'Our results highlight the importance of revisiting old collections. The cremated remains from Stonehenge were first excavated by Colonel William Hawley in the 1920s, and while they were not put into a museum, Col Hawley did have the foresight to rebury them in a known location on the site, so that it was possible for Mike Parker Pearson (UCL Institute of Archaeology) and his team to re-excavate them, allowing various analytical methods to be applied.'

The drought that collapsed classic Maya society

A period of severe drought near the end of the 1st millennium C.E. likely sealed the fate of Lowland Classic Maya society, and a new study shows just how dry it was as the populations of the Maya Lowlands began to evaporate.

The fall of the ancient Maya during the Terminal Classic Period (~800 - 1000 C.E.) is a commonly used example of how abrupt past changes in climate have contributed to the decline of ancient societies. While paleoclimate studies from the region indicate that the Classic Maya collapse occurred during an exceptionally dry period, it has not been clear just how dry that period actually was. Most climate data are limited to qualitative reconstructions - a period being simply wetter or drier than another, for example.

In this study, Nicholas Evans and colleagues reconstructed the isotopic composition of water from Lake Chichancanab, Mexico, using sediment cores containing precipitated gypsum. They measured the triple oxygen and hydrogen isotope compositions of water molecules incorporated in the crystalline structure of gypsum deposited as layers on the lake bottom, as a proxy for past aridity. The authors found that during the Terminal Classic Period, annual rainfall in the Maya lowlands was reduced by nearly 50% on average, and up to 70% during peak drought conditions. Also, for the first time, the authors were able to measure a 3-8% decline in relative humidity compared to today.

The study's results reveal the severity and duration of the drought experienced by Lowland Maya society and provide the quantitative data necessary to better understand its impact on Maya agricultural and sociopolitical systems.

Making thread in Bronze Age Britain

IMAGE: A micrograph of the spliced textile from Over barrow, Cambridgeshire. view more 

Credit: M. Gleba, S. Harris, with permission of Cambridge Archaeological Unit

A new study published this week in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences has identified that the earliest plant fibre technology for making thread in Early Bronze Age Britain and across Europe and the Near East was splicing not spinning.

In splicing, strips of plant fibres (flax, nettle, lime tree and other species) are joined in individually, often after being stripped from the plant stalk directly and without or with only minimal retting - the process of introducing moisture to soften the fibres.

According to lead author Dr Margarita Gleba, researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, "Splicing technology is fundamentally different from draft spinning. The identification of splicing in these Early Bronze Age and later textiles marks a major turning point in scholarship. The switch from splicing - the original plant bast fibre technology - to draft spinning took place much later than previously assumed."

Splicing has previously been identified in pre-Dynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Swiss textiles, but the new study shows that this particular type of thread making technology may have been ubiquitous across the Old World during prehistory.

"The technological innovation of draft spinning plant bast fibres - a process in which retted and well processed fibres are drawn out from a mass of fluffed up fibres usually arranged on a distaff, and twisted continuously using a rotating spindle - appears to coincide with urbanisation and population growth, as well as increased human mobility across the Mediterranean during the first half of the 1st millennium BC."

"Such movements required many more and larger and faster ships, all of which largely relied on wind power and therefore sails. Retting and draft spinning technology would have allowed faster processing of larger quantities of plant materials and the production of sail cloth."

Among the finds analysed for this study are charred textile fragments from Over Barrow in Cambridgeshire, dated to the Early Bronze Age (c. 1887-1696 BC). The site was excavated by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

Dr. Susanna Harris of the University of Glasgow, co-author of the paper and expert in British Bronze Age textiles notes: "We can now demonstrate that this technology was also present in Britain. It's exciting because we think the past is familiar, but this shows life was quite different in the Bronze Age."

"Sites like Over Barrow in Cambridgeshire contained a burial with remains of stacked textiles, which were prepared using strips of plant fibre, spliced into yarns, then woven into textiles".

"It had always been assumed that textiles were made following well-known historical practices of fibre processing and draft spinning but we can now show people were dealing with plants rather differently, possibly using nettles or flax plants, to make these beautiful woven textiles."

Archaeological finds at Sidon in Lebanon include the rare remains of a Canaanite child and its funerary jar,

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.

Alabaster jar from Egypt found in the Phoenician temple by a British Museum team in Sidon AFP

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.

Neandertal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis

Scientific Reports complete article

 

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 Age^1,2,3. 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 Africa^1,4,5. However, the earliest known instances of percussive fire making extend much deeper into the prehistoric past.

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Acknowledgements

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

1. Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

   • A. C. Sorensen
   •  & M. Soressi

2. INRAP, GSO, Bègles, France

   • E. Claud

3. 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.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. C. Sorensen.

Electronic supplementary material

1. Supplementary Information

2. Supplementary Video S1

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Publication history

Received

03 January 2018

Accepted

21 June 2018

Published

19 July 2018

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28342-9

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1. Abstract
2. Introduction
3. Archaeological evidence for fire making
4. Where are the Middle Palaeolithic strike-a-lights? The biface hypothesis
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
8. Methods
9. Additional information
10. References
11. Acknowledgements
12. Author information
13. Electronic supplementary material
14. Rights and permissions
15. About this article
16. Comments

Gault site research pushes back date of earliest North Americans

IMAGE: Stone tool assemblage recovered from the Gault Site. view more 

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."

Archaeologists identify ancient North American mounds using new image analysis technique

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."