Exhibition at The Met to Explore Superb Artistic Achievements of Ancestral Caribbean Civilizations

Exhibition Dates: December 16, 2019–January 10, 2021 Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Gallery 359

Deity Figure (zemí) (detail), ca. A.D. 1000. Dominican Republic (?). Taíno. Wood (Guaiacum), shell, 27 x 8 5/8 x 9 1/8 in. (68.5 x 21.9 x 23.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979    A special exhibition highlighting the artistic achievements of early Caribbean civilizations will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning December 16, 2019. Showcasing more than 40 works drawn primarily from The Met collection and augmented by select loans from public and private collections in the United States, Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean will present a stunning narrative of creativity from the ancestral cultures that encircled the Caribbean Sea in the millennia before European colonization. The exhibition will be the first to focus on the artistic exchange that took place among the Taíno civilizations of the Greater Antilles (present-day Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico) and the coastal societies in countries such as Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras before the 16th century.  Highlights will include rarely seen sculptures created in ancient Puerto Rico. The exhibition is made possible by the Friends of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas: Art of Five Continents. "Early Caribbean civilizations developed a rich cultural legacy that was fueled by the interplay of ideas and influences across the region," said Max Hollein, the Director of The Met. "This exhibition celebrates the artistic traditions of these ancestral communities while honoring the enduring power of the objects." Organized into three primary sections focused on ritual knowledge, ceremonial performance, and political power, Arte del mar (art of/from the sea) will highlight the sculptural achievements of the diverse island societies known today as the Taínos. Featured works on view include four rare wooden sculptures, such as the 10th- to 11th-century Deity Figure (Zemí) from The Met collection, a masterpiece that intertwines spirituality, ceremony, and politics. Another spectacular wooden figure from the 14th century, on loan from the Saint Louis Art Museum, illustrates how special trees inspired sculptors to reveal specific deity or ancestor forms in collaboration with leaders and ritual specialists. An exceptional group of three-pointed stones (trigonolitos), on loan from the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, highlights the extraordinary range of materials and imagery used by Taino sculptors to create spiritually charged ritual objects.  Alongside works of art created by their better-known Taíno peers, the exhibition will present objects created by the artists of the Tairona in northern Colombia, the diverse kingdoms in the Isthmus of Panama and Costa Rica, and the networks of sculptor communities in the Ulúa Valley, Honduras. Objects created from luxury materials including greenstone, shell, gold, and marble will underscore the range of trade connections between Caribbean peoples. In a fourth section, the exhibition will explore the ancestral legacies into the 20th century and today by incorporating Rumblings of the Earth (Rumor de la tierra), 1950, by painter Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902–1982), on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.  In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will offer a variety of educational programs in 2020, including an Artists on Artworks event, a lecture, Conversations With a Curator (bilingual in English and Spanish), Teen Career Lab, and a Family Afternoon (for families with children ages 3–11).   These programs are made possible by The Reed Foundation.

Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean—part of a slate of special exhibitions on view for the Museum's 150th anniversary year—is accompanied by a Met Bulletin, which will present new archaeological and art historical research from international scholars of the region.  The Met's quarterly Bulletin program is supported in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established by the cofounder of Reader's Digest. The exhibition is organized by James Doyle, Assistant Curator for the Art of the Ancient Americas in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. This exhibition will open just ahead of the renovation and re-imagination of The Met's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, the 40,000 square feet of galleries devoted to the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The exhibition will be featured on The Met website as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hashtag #Artedelmar. The exhibition labels will be available in Spanish online.

Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 10,000 years of cultural interaction across Africa

Ostrich eggshell beads are some of the oldest ornaments made by humankind, and they can be found dating back at least 50,000 years in Africa. Previous research in southern Africa has shown that the beads increase in size about 2,000 years ago, when herding populations first enter the region. In the current study, researchers Jennifer Miller and Elizabeth Sawchuk investigate this idea using increased data and evaluate the hypothesis in a new region where it has never before been tested.

Review of old ideas, analysis of old collections
To conduct their study, the researchers recorded the diameters of 1,200 ostrich eggshell beads unearthed from 30 sites in Africa dating to the last 10,000 years. Many of these bead measurements were taken from decades-old unstudied collections, and so are being reported here for the first time. This new data increases the published bead diameter measurements from less than 100 to over 1,000, and reveals new trends that oppose longstanding beliefs.
The ostrich eggshell beads reflect different responses to the introduction of herding between eastern and southern Africa. In southern Africa, new bead styles appear alongside signs of herding, but do not replace the existing forager bead traditions. On the other hand, beads from the eastern Africa sites showed no change in style with the introduction of herding. Although eastern African bead sizes are consistently larger than those from southern Africa, the larger southern African herder beads fall within the eastern African forager size range, hinting at contact between these regions as herding spread. "These beads are symbols that were made by hunter-gatherers from both regions for more than 40,000 years," says lead author Jennifer Miller, "so changes -- or lack thereof -- in these symbols tells us how these communities responded to cultural contact and economic change."
Ostrich eggshell beads tell the story of ancient interaction
The story told by ostrich eggshell beads is more nuanced than previously believed. Contact with outside groups of herders likely introduced new bead styles along with domesticated animals, but the archaeological record suggests the incoming influence did not overwhelm existing local traditions. The existing customs were not replaced with new ones; rather they continued and incorporated some of the new elements.
In eastern Africa, studied here for the first time, there was no apparent change in bead style with the arrival of herding groups from the north. This may be because local foragers adopted herding while retaining their bead-making traditions, because migrant herders possessed similar traditions prior to contact, and/or because incoming herders adopted local styles. "In the modern world, migration, cultural contact, and economic change often create tension," says Sawchuk, "ancient peoples experienced these situations too, and the patterns in cultural objects like ostrich eggshell beads give us a chance to study how they navigated these experiences."
The researchers hope that this work inspires a renewed interest into ostrich eggshell beads, and recommend that future studies present individual bead diameters rather than a single average of many. Future research should also investigate questions related to manufacture, chemical identification, and the effects of taphonomic processes and wear on bead diameter. "This study shows that examining old collections can generate important findings without new excavation," says Miller, "and we hope that future studies will take advantage of the wealth of artifacts that have been excavated but not yet studied."

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Europe

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World's oldest glue used from prehistoric times till the days of the Gauls

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Minoan treasures found on Libyan Sea island: Experts

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Americas

Unique sled dogs helped the inuit thrive in the North American Arctic

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Barbequed clams on the menu for ancient Puerto Ricans

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Only eat oysters in months with an 'r'? Rule of thumb is at least 4,000 years old

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Egypt and the Near East

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Neanderthals

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The last Neanderthal necklace

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Africa

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The homeland of modern humans

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Israel

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Study reveals that humans migrated from Europe to the Levant 40,000 years ago

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1,400 year-old hammer and nails discovered at Usha show Byzantine inhabitants practiced metallurgy.

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Asia

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Jonathan KantrowitzatArchaeology News Report - 4 weeks ago

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The art of the Roman surveyors emerges from newly discovered pavements in Pompeii

Politecnico di milano

IMAGE: Plan of the house of Orion, Showing the disposition of the newly discovered images (1,2) and of the mosaics (3) view more 

Credit: L. Ferro, G Magli, M. Osanna

The technical skills of the Roman agrimensores - the technicians in charge of the centuriations (division of the lands) and of other surveys such as planning towns and aqueducts - are simply legendary. For instance, extremely accurate projects of centuriations are still visible today in Italy and in other Mediterranean countries. Their work had also religious and symbolic connections being related with the foundation of towns and the Etruscan's tradition.
These technicians were called Gromatics due to their chief working instrument, called Groma. It was based on a cross made of four perpendicular arms each bringing cords with identical weights, acting as plumb-lines. The surveyor could align with extreme precision two opposite, very thin plumb-lines with reference poles held at various distances by assistants or fixed in the terrain, in the same manner as palines (red and white posts) are used in modern theodolite surveying.
Up to now, the unique known example of a Groma was coming from Pompeii excavations, while images illustrating the work of the Gromatics were passed on only by medieval codex's, dating to many centuries after the art of the agrimensores was not practiced any more. It now looks like that again Pompeii is the place where new information about these ancient architects can come out. As part of the Great Pompeii Project indeed, inaugurated in 2014 and co-financed by the European Community, new archaeological investigations unearthed a house with a solemn, ancient facade. Inside, almost intact floors have been found containing two beautiful mosaics probably representing Orion, and a series of enigmatic images.
The interpretation of the images has been recently given in a joint paper by Massimo Osanna, Director of the Pompeii archaeological site, and Luisa Ferro and Giulio Magli, of the School of Architecture at the Politecnico of Milan. Among the images there is, for instance, a square inscribed in a circle. The circle is cut by two perpendicular lines, one of which coincides with the longitudinal axis of the atrium of the house and appears as a sort of rose of the winds that identifies a regular division of the circle in eight equally spaced sectors. The image is strikingly similar to one used in the medieval codex's to illustrate the way in which the Gromatics divided the space. Another, complex image shows a circle with an orthogonal cross inscribed in it, connected by five dots disposed as a sort of small circle to a straight line with a base. The whole appears as the depiction of a Groma.
Was the house used for meetings and/or the owner himself belonged to the gromatic's guild? We do not know it for sure. In any case however, and once again, Pompeii reveals itself as an invaluable source in understanding key aspects of the Roman life and civilization.

Facial deformity in royal dynasty was linked to inbreeding

IMAGE: King Charles II of Spain was the last in the Habsburg line and one of the most afflicted with the facial deformity view more 

Credit: Don Juan Carreño de Miranda

The "Habsburg jaw", a facial condition of the Habsburg dynasty of Spanish and Austrian kings and their wives, can be attributed to inbreeding, according to new results published in the Annals of Human Biology.
The new study combined diagnosis of facial deformities using historical portraits with genetic analysis of the degree of relatedness to determine whether there was a direct link. The researchers also investigated the genetic basis of the relationship.
Generations of intermarriage secured the family's influence across a European empire including Spain and Austria for more than 200 years but led to its demise when the final Habsburg monarch was unable to produce an heir. However, until now no studies have confirmed whether the distinct chin known as "Habsburg jaw" was a result of inbreeding.
"The Habsburg dynasty was one of the most influential in Europe, but became renowned for inbreeding, which was its eventual downfall. We show for the first time that there is a clear positive relationship between inbreeding and appearance of the Habsburg jaw," says lead researcher Professor Roman Vilas from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The researchers recruited 10 maxillofacial surgeons to diagnose facial deformity in 66 portraits of 15 members of the Habsburg dynasty. Despite differences in artistic style, the portraits are characterised by a realistic approach to the human face. The surgeons were asked to diagnose 11 features of mandibular prognathism, otherwise known as "Habsburg jaw", as well as seven features of maxillary deficiency, the most recognisable of which are a prominent lower lip and an overhanging nasal tip.
The portraits, which can be viewed online, are preserved by some of the most important art museums in the world, including the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Prado Museum in Madrid.
The surgeons gave scores for the degree of mandibular prognathism and maxillary deficiency in each member of the Habsburg family. Mary of Burgundy, who married into the family in 1477, showed the least degree of both traits. Mandibular prognathism was most pronounced in Philip IV, King of Spain and Portugal from 1621 to 1640. Maxillary deficiency was diagnosed to the greatest degree in five members of the family: Maximilian I (regent from 1493), his daughter Margaret of Austria, his nephew Charles I of Spain, Charles' great-grandson Philip IV and the last in the Habsburg line, Charles II.
The study authors detected a correlation between the two conditions, suggesting that "Habsburg jaw" is in fact characterised by them both and that they share a common genetic basis. The extent of inbreeding was calculated from a large-scale family tree, including more than 6,000 individuals belonging to more than 20 generations. Analysis was carried out to determine if it was connected to the degree of facial deformity. The researchers detected a strong relationship between the degree of inbreeding and the degree of mandibular prognathism. The relationship to maxillary deficiency was also positive, but it was only statistically significant in two of the seven features diagnosed.
The causes of the relationship between inbreeding and facial deformity remain unclear, but the authors suggest it's because the main effect of mating between relatives is an increase in the chances of offspring inheriting identical forms of a gene from both parents, known as genetic homozygosity. This reduces people's genetic fitness, so "Habsburg jaw" should be considered a recessive condition.
However, the authors note that the study involves only a small number of individuals so it's possible that the prevalence of Habsburg jaw is due to the chance appearance of traits, or genetic drift. They suggest this scenario is unlikely, but can't rule it out.
"While our study is based on historical figures, inbreeding is still common in some geographical regions and among some religious and ethnic groups, so it's important today to investigate the effects," says Vilas. "The Habsburg dynasty serves as a kind of human laboratory for researchers to do so, because the range of inbreeding is so high."

Justinianic plague not a landmark pandemic?

National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center

IMAGE: A graphical abstract showing highlights of the research presented in the article: "The Justinanic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic? " view more 

Credit: Elizabeth Herzfeldt-Kamprath, SESYNC

Researchers now have a clearer picture of the impact of the first plague pandemic, the Justinianic Plague, which lasted from about 541-750 CE.
Led by researchers at the University of Maryland's National-Socio Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), the international team of scholars found that the plague's effects may have been exaggerated. They examined diverse datasets, but found no concrete effects they could conclusively attribute to the plague. Their paper appears in the December 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"Our article is the first time such a large body of novel interdisciplinary evidence has been investigated in this context," said lead author Lee Mordechai, a postdoctoral fellow at SESYNC, and co-lead of Princeton's Climate Change and History Research Initiative (CCHRI). He is now a senior lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "If this plague was a key moment in human history that killed between a third and half the population of the Mediterranean world in just a few years, as is often claimed, we should have evidence for it but our survey of datasets found none."
The research team, which collaborated through the CCHRI, examined contemporary written sources, inscriptions, coinage, papyrus documents, pollen samples, plague genomes, and mortuary archaeology.
The researchers focused on the period known as Late Antiquity (300-800 CE) that included major events such as the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Islam--events that have been sometimes attributed to plague, including in history textbooks.
"Our paper rewrites the history of Late Antiquity from an environmental perspective that doesn't assume plague was responsible for changing the world," said Merle Eisenberg, also a SESYNC postdoctoral fellow, member of the CCHRI and a co-author on the paper. "The paper is notable because historians led this PNAS publication, and we asked historical questions that focused on the potential social and economic effects of plague."
The team found that previous scholars have focused on the most evocative written accounts, applying them to other places in the Mediterranean world while ignoring hundreds of contemporary texts that do not mention plague.
"While plague studies is an interdisciplinary, demanding field of study, most plague scholars rely solely on the types of evidence they are trained to use. We are the first team to look for the impacts of the first plague pandemic in very diverse datasets. We found no reason to argue that the plague killed tens of millions of people as many have claimed," said co-author Timothy Newfield, another co-lead of the CCHRI who is now an assistant professor of history and biology at Georgetown University. "Plague is often construed as shifting the course of history. It's an easy explanation, too easy. It's essential to establish a causal connection."
Many of these datasets, such as agricultural production, show that trends that began before the plague outbreak continued without change.
"We used pollen evidence to estimate agricultural production, which shows no decrease associable with plague mortality. If there were fewer people working the land, this should have shown up in pollen, but it has failed to so far," said co-author Adam Izdebski, a member of CCHRI who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and an assistant professor of history at Jagiellonian University.
Even some of the most well-known effects of large epidemics, such as changes in burial traditions, follow existing trends that began centuries earlier.
"We investigated a large dataset of human burials from before and after the plague outbreak, and the plague did not result in a significant change whether people buried the dead alone or with many others," said co-author Janet Kay, a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and history and the CSLA-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Late Antiquity in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. She contrasted that with the Black Death, a plague that took place about 800 years after the Justinianic Plague. "The Black Death killed vast numbers of people and did change how people disposed of corpses," she said.
The researchers also used available plague genomes to trace the origin and evolution of the plague strains responsible for outbreak, which certainly killed people across Eurasia--how many people is the question.
Co-author Hendrik Poinar, a professor of evolutionary biology and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University, added: "Although tracing the origins and development of the plague bacterium is crucial, the presence of the pathogen does not in itself mean catastrophe."

New archaeological information on the use of plants in prehistoric northern Europe

University of Helsinki

IMAGE: Charred remains of prehistoric gathered plants: a rose hip, a nutshell fragment, a raspberry seed, a yellow water lily seed and a bird cherry seed. The rose hip, dating back... view more 

Credit: Santeri Vanhanen

In the study, the following questions were explored: Which plants did humans gather in prehistoric times? When did the first cultivated plants make their initial appearance, and where did they come from? How did farming develop after its adoption?
To find answers to these questions, ancient plant remains, such as nutshells, seeds and grains found at archaeological digs were analysed.
Finland was settled roughly 11,000 years ago after the ice cover receded. Today, Finland is covered mostly by coniferous forest, including pine and spruce.
Prior research has focused on the animals that Stone Age people hunted. Based on the recently completed study, a number of plants were also utilised in Stone Age Finland. For example, hazelnuts and water chestnuts were gathered for food, and they in fact grew further north than today. At that time, the average temperature was a couple of degrees higher, and deciduous trees grew in larger numbers in the forests of the region. These days, the northernmost regions where water chestnut grows are approximately 1,000 kilometres further south.
Agriculture was introduced to Europe by populations migrating from the Middle East. During their journeys, farming cultures underwent change. Hunter-gatherers had an impact on the human DNA, while material culture was transformed and the number of cultivated plants decreased the further north humans travelled.
Earliest grains found on Åland In the study, the oldest barley and wheat grains in Finland were found on the Åland Islands, located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. Based on radiocarbon dating, these grains proved to be roughly 5,000 years old, making them a thousand years younger than those found in the area surrounding Stockholm and 2,500 years younger than those found in Central Europe. At the time, hunter-gatherers specialised in hunting seals and representing the Pitted Ware culture moved to the islands from the area of today's Stockholm. They appear to have adopted agriculture from farmers who had spread to Scandinavia 6,000 years ago. The finding was a surprise, as hunter-gatherers have very rarely been demonstrated to have adopted the art of cultivating land.
After the first farming wave, there is roughly a thousand-year break in the incidence of crops in Finland, even though the Corded Ware culture, spread through Estonia, did practise animal husbandry.
The cereal grain discoveries indicate that farming became an established practice in the south-west coastal area of Finland only from the beginning of the Bronze Age, approximately 3,500 years ago. Based on the shape of burial sites and material culture, this farming culture arrived from Sweden.
Barley as the key cereal crop Due to its adaptation to colder climates, barley was the most important cereal crop throughout prehistory. In the early Common Era, the plants cultivated in fields also included emmer wheat, rye and common wheat, as well as flux and hemp. Slash-and-burn cultivation has been considered the oldest cultivation method employed in Finland, but on the basis of the weeds found in this study and previously analysed discoveries in ancient fields, it appears that field cultivation was adopted no later than approximately 1,500 years ago.
In addition, plant gathering continued even after the adoption of farming. However, cereal crops seem to have replaced carbohydrate-rich wild plants, such as yellow water lily, the seeds of which contain approximately 80 grams of carbohydrates per 100 grams. The use of wild strawberry, raspberry and juniper, among others, continued, potentially for their taste as well as for their medicinal effects.
The ancient hunter-gatherers of northern Europe adapted to their changing surroundings and took advantage of the plants available to them in many different ways. The introduction and establishment of farming, which took place later, constituted a development of thousands of years affected alternately by migrant waves and local developments.