IMAGE: This is the Rach Nui site in Southern Vietnam under excavation.
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Credit: ANU
A team of archaeologists from The Australian National University
(ANU) has uncovered a vast trading network which operated in Vietnam
from around 4,500 years ago up until around 3,000 years ago.
A new study shows a number of settlements along the Mekong Delta
region of Southern Vietnam were part of a sophisticated scheme where
large volumes of items were manufactured and circulated over hundreds of
kilometres.
Lead researcher Dr Catherine Frieman School of the ANU School of
Archaeology and Anthropology said the discovery significantly changes
what was known about early Vietnamese culture.
"We knew some artefacts were being moved around but this shows
evidence for a major trade network that also included specialist
tool-makers and technological knowledge. It's a whole different ball
game," Dr Frieman said.
"This isn't a case of people producing a couple of extra items on top of what they need. It's a major operation."
The discovery was made after Dr Frieman, an expert in ancient stone
tools, was brought in to look at a collection of stone items found by
researchers at a site called Rach Nui in Southern Vietnam.
Dr Frieman found a sandstone grinding stone used to make tools such
as axe heads out of stone believed to come from a quarry located over 80
kilometres away in the upper reaches of the Dong Nai River valley.
"The Rach Nui region had no stone resources. So the people must have
been importing the stone and working it to produce the artefacts," she
said.
"People were becoming experts in stone tool making even though they live no-where near the source of any stone."
Dr Phillip Piper of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology,
an expert in Vietnamese archaeology, is working to map the transition
from hunting and gathering to farming across Southeast Asia.
"Vietnam has an amazing archaeological record with a number of
settlements and sites that provide significant information on the
complex pathways from foraging to farming in the region" Dr Piper said.
"In southern Vietnam, there are numerous archaeological sites of the
Neolithic period that are relatively close together, and that
demonstrate considerable variation in material culture, methods of
settlement construction and subsistence.
"This suggests that communities that established settlements along
the various tributaries and on the coast during this period rapidly
developed their own social, cultural and economic trajectories.
"Various complex trading networks emerged between these communities,
some of which resulted in the movements of materials and manufacturing
ideas over quite long distances"
Analysis of ancient Roman coins has shown that the defeat of the
Carthaginian general Hannibal led to a flood of wealth across the Roman
Empire from the silver mines of Spain. This finding, which gives us a
tangible record of the transition of Rome from a regional power to an
Empire, is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in
Paris.
The Second Punic War, where Hannibal famously marched his elephants
across the Alps in a failed attack on Rome, has been regarded as one of
the pivotal events of European history. Rome entered the war as the
dominant power in Italy, but emerged an empire. The war led to the
conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, with the Romans gradually gaining
control over the lucrative Spanish silver mines from around 211 B.C.
Revenues from the rich Spanish silver mines coupled with booty and
extensive war reparations from Carthage, helped fund the expansion of
its territory.
Now the application of geochemical analysis techniques has provided
proof of the importance of the Spanish silver to the Roman conquest. A
group of scientists based in Germany and Denmark and led by Prof Fleur
Kemmers and Dr Katrin Westner (Institute for Archaeological Sciences,
Goethe University, Frankfurt) analysed 70 Roman coins dating from
310-300 B.C. to 101 B.C., a period which bracketed the Second Punic War.
Using Mass Spectrometry, they were able to show that lead in the coins
made after 209 B.C. has distinctive isotopic signatures which identified
most of the later coins as presumably originating from Spanish sources.
The changing origin of the coin bullion is mirrored by differing ratios
of the lead isotopes 208Pb, 207Pb, 206Pb and 204Pb, which serve as
geological clocks recording the formation age of the ores used to
extract the silver. After 209 B.C., the lead isotope signatures mostly
correspond to those of deposits in southeast and southwest Spain or to
mixtures of metal extracted from these districts.
"Before the war we find that the Roman coins are made of silver from
the same sources as the coinage issued by Greek cities in Italy and
Sicily2. In other words the lead isotope signatures of the coins
correspond to those of silver ores and metallurgical products from the
Aegean region", said Katrin Westner. "But the defeat of Carthage led to
huge reparation payments to Rome, as well as Rome gaining high amounts
of booty and ownership of the rich Spanish silver mines. From 209 B.C.
we see that the majority of Roman coins show geochemical signatures
typical for Iberian silver".
"This massive influx of Iberian silver significantly changed Rome's
economy, allowing it to become the superpower of its day. We know this
from the histories of Livy and Polybius and others, but our work gives
contemporary scientific proof of the rise of Rome. What our work shows
is that the defeat of Hannibal and the rise of Rome is written in the
coins of the Roman Empire."
Commenting, Professor Kevin Butcher (Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick, UK) said:
"This research demonstrates how scientific analysis of ancient
coins can make a significant contribution to historical research. It
allows what was previously speculation about the importance of Spanish
silver for the coinage of Rome to be placed on a firm foundation".
Humans may have exited out of Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia
20,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new study involving
University of Queensland researchers suggests.
Findings from the Macquarie University-led study also suggest humans
could have potentially made the crossing to Australia even earlier than
the accepted 60,000 to 65,000 years ago.
Dr Gilbert Price of UQ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences
said the dating of a cave site in West Sumatra, called Lida Ajer,
provided first evidence for rainforest use of modern humans.
"Rainforests aren't the easiest place to make a living, especially
for a savannah-adapted primate, so it suggests that these people were
ahead of the curve in terms of intelligence, planning and technological
adaptation," Dr Price said.
He said the study stood on the shoulders of brilliant Dutch
paleo-anthropologist Eugene Dubois, famed for his discovery of 'Java
Man'.
"He visited a series of caves in Sumatra in the late 1800s, and in
one in particular, recovered some human teeth, which is quite
interesting in itself, but no one had spent much time trying to
determine their significance," Dr Price said.
"Fast forward over 100 years later, both the team of lead author Dr
Kira Westaway of Macquarie University and my crew (separately) were
lucky enough to re-discover and visit the caves.
"It was quite an adventure. We ended up sharing notes and the collaboration was born."
As a result of thorough documentation of the cave, reanalysis of the
specimens, and a new dating program, it was confirmed the teeth were
modern humans, Homo sapiens, but dated to as old as 73,000 years ago.
A barrage of dating techniques were applied to the sediment around
the fossils, to overlying and underlying rock deposits in the cave and
to associated mammal teeth, indicating that the deposit and fossils were
laid down between 63,000 to 73,000 years ago.
"This cave has been shrouded in doubt since it was first excavated" Dr Westaway said.
"We employed a range of dating techniques from different
institutions to establish a robust chronology that would, after 120
years, finally put an end to the uncertainty associated with the age and
significance of these teeth."
Advanced equipment at UQ's Centre for Geoanalytical Mass
Spectrometry, a hub backed by researchers from Queensland's major
research institutions, was used in the analysis.
"We were lucky to have some of the best dating facilities in the
world at our disposal, including the same pieces of equipment at UQ that
had earlier dated the famous 'Hobbit' fossils of Southeast Asia," Dr
Price said.
Dr Westaway said the hardest part was trying to find the site again,
with only a sketch of the cave and a rough map from a copy of Dubois's
original field notebook to guide them.
Southeast Asia is a key region in the path of human dispersal from
Africa round to Australia, as all hominins would have had to pass
through this region en route to Australia.
Ancient DNA used to track the mass exodus of Ancestral Pueblo people
from Colorado's Mesa Verde region in the late 13th century indicates
many wound up in the Northern Rio Grande area north of Santa Fe, New
Mexico, inhabited today by the Tewa Pueblo people.
Here's the twist: The DNA came from domesticated turkeys that had
been kept by ancient Pueblo people in both places, according to
University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Scott Ortman, one of
four lead study authors. The study indicates DNA from turkey bones
unearthed at Mesa Verde matched the turkey DNA in the northern Rio
Grande area after the Mesa Verde society buckled.
"What we found was good evidence of a substantial influx of turkeys
into the northern Rio Grande region that had the same genetic
composition as turkeys from the Mesa Verde region," Ortman said. "This
is a new line of evidence suggesting a strong connection between
contemporary Tewa Pueblo people in New Mexico and the Pueblo people who
lived in Mesa Verde country before its collapse."
A paper on the subject was published in a recent issue of the science journal PLOS ONE.
In addition to Ortman, the study included co-authors from Washington
State University, the University of California, Davis and the University
of Oklahoma.
The Mesa Verde region was a hub of Southwest Puebloan society,
populated by as many as 30,000 people in the middle of the 13th century,
Ortman said. But a severe drought in 1277, coupled with resource
depletion and social upheaval, is thought to have triggered a massive
migration south to New Mexico and Arizona by the end of the 13th
century.
For the study, Ortman and his colleagues used mitochondrial
DNA--which is passed down from mother to offspring--extracted from
turkey bones buried in the Mesa Verde region before the migration and
mitochondrial DNA collected from the northern Rio Grande region before
and after the Mesa Verde was abandoned.
Turkeys had been kept as a source of feathers to make blankets and
other goods by the Mesa Verde inhabitants before A.D. 1000, Ortman said.
But after that the archaeological record shows the Mesa Verde people
began raising the turkeys as a meat source, causing turkey bones to
become much more common in the archaeological record.
The study showed the genetic composition of the turkey population in
the northern Rio Grande changed substantially before and after the Mesa
Verde exodus. Since the genetic composition of the northern Rio Grande
turkeys after the migration period was genetically indistinguishable
from the birds that lived in the Mesa Verde country before the
migration, it appears the migrating people took their turkeys with them,
he said.
Ortman said the people fleeing the Mesa Verde area in the 13th
century likely moved to many places in present-day New Mexico and
Arizona during the great migration.
"The argument we are making is that a sizable chunk of the Mesa
Verde population moved to the northern Rio Grande region," Ortman said.
"And this group of migrants stimulated the formation of the Tewa Pueblo
people that live in the area."
Previously, Ortman and his colleagues used biological, linguistic,
oral tradition and material culture evidence to suggest that the
ancestors of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo people in New Mexico lived in the
Mesa Verde region and migrated to the northern Rio Grande during the
13th century. The recent study is the first ever to use ancient DNA to
look at the scientific puzzle, Ortman said.
While the research team also looked at mitochondrial DNA from what
were thought be domestic dogs buried at Mesa Verde and in the northern
Rio Grande area, it did not pan out for an interesting reason, Ortman
said. While the remains of most of the Mesa Verde canids were
genetically dogs, almost all of the canids buried in the northern Rio
Grande--traditionally thought to be dogs--were actually coyotes.
"It's an interesting puzzle as to why the northern Rio Grande people buried so many coyotes," he said.
This 3,000-year-old female statue was uncovered at a
citadel gate complex in Turkey by University of Toronto archaeologists
leading the Tayinat Archaeological Project. Initial speculations are
that the figure is a representation of either Kubaba, divine mother of
the gods of ancient Anatolia, or the wife of Neo-Hittite king
Suppiluliuma, or Kupapiyas, who was the wife - or possibly mother - of
Taita, the dynastic founder of ancient Tayinat.
Credit
Photo courtesy of Tayinat Archaeological Project
The remains of a majestic female statue uncovered at the
archaeological site of Tayinat in Turkey may challenge our understanding
of the public role of women in the ancient world.
Excavations led by University of Toronto archaeologists in southeast
Turkey near the Syrian border have unearthed a beautifully carved head
and upper torso of a female figure. The remnants are largely intact,
although the face and chest appear to have been intentionally - possibly
ritually - defaced in antiquity.
The preserved remnants are made of basalt and measure 1.1 metres
long and .7 metres wide, suggesting the full figure of the statue would
have been four to five metres high. The lower body is missing. The
statue was found within a monumental gate complex that would have
provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua - later Tayinat - the
capital of the Iron Age Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738
BCE). The site is approximately 75 kilometres west of the Syrian city of
Aleppo.
"Her striking features include a ring of curls that protrude from
beneath a shawl that covers her head, shoulders and back," says Timothy
Harrison, professor of near eastern archaeology in the Department of
Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto (U
of T) and director of U of T's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP).
Since 1999, TAP researchers have been documenting Tayinat's exceptional
cultural record to advance understanding of early social complexity and
the rise of state-ordered societies in the ancient world.
"The statue was found face down in a thick bed of basalt stone chips
that included shard-like fragments of her eyes, nose and face, but also
fragments of sculptures previously found elsewhere within the gate
area," says Harrison, " including the head of the Neo-Hittite King
Suppiluliuma that we discovered in 2012. The recovery of these tiny
fragments will make it possible to restore much if not all of the face
and upper body of the original figure."
Supppiluliuma, who ruled in the early ninth century BCE, was named
after a famed Bronze Age Hittite warrior and statesman who challenged
the then-dominant Egyptian Empire for control of the lands between the
Mediterranean and the Euphrates River.
"That parts of these monumental sculptures have been found deposited
together, suggests there may have been an elaborate process of
interment or decommissioning as part of their destruction," says
Harrison.
The identity of the female figure has not yet been determined, but the archaeological team has some ideas.
"It is possible that she is a representation of Kubaba, divine
mother of the gods of ancient Anatolia," says Harrison. "However, there
are stylistic and iconographic hints that the statue represents a human
figure, possibly the wife of King Suppiluliuma, or even more
intriguingly, a woman named Kupapiyas, who was the wife - or possibly
mother - of Taita, the dynastic founder of ancient Tayinat."
Two inscribed monuments carved in Hieroglyphic Luwian, the ancient
language of the Hittites, found near Hama in Syria more than 50 years
ago, provide a description of Kupapiyas, the only named female known
from this region in the early part of the first millennium BCE. She
lived for more than 100 years, and appears to have been a prominent
matriarchal figure, though no memory of her is preserved in any
historical sources for the first millennium BCE.
"The discovery of this statue raises the possibility that women
played a more prominent role in the political and religious lives of
these early Iron Age communities than the existing historical record
might suggest," Harrison says.
The statue also provides valuable insight into the innovative
character and cultural sophistication of the indigenous Iron Age
cultures that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the
collapse of the great civilized powers of the Bronze Age at the end of
second millennium BCE.
The presence of lions, sphinxes, and colossal human statues in the
citadel gateways of the Neo-Hittite royal cities of Iron Age
Syro-Anatolia continued a Bronze Age Hittite tradition that accentuated
the symbolic role of these transitional spaces as boundary zones between
the ruling elite and their subjects. By the ninth and eighth centuries
BCE, these elaborately decorated monumental gateways had come to serve
as dynastic promenades, legitimizing the power and authority of the
ruling elite.
The Tayinat gate complex appears to have been destroyed following
the Assyrian conquest of the site in 738 BCE, when the area was paved
over and converted into the central courtyard of an Assyrian sacred
precinct. Tayinat was then transformed into an Assyrian provincial
capital, equipped with its own governor and imperial administration.
"Scholars have long speculated that the reference to Calneh in
Isaiah's oracle against Assyria (Isaiah 10:9-10) alludes to their
devastation of Kunulua," says Harrison. "The destruction of the Luwian
monuments and conversion of the area into an Assyrian religious complex
may represent the physical manifestation of this historic event,
subsequently memorialized in Isaiah's oracle."
TAP is an international project, involving researchers from numerous
countries, and more than 20 universities and research institutes. It
operates in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkey,
and provides research opportunities and training for both graduate and
undergraduate students. The 2017 season was funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of
Toronto.
An innovative study published today in the journal Science Advances
demonstrates how decorations on ancient pottery can be used to discover
new evidence for how groups interacted across large regions. The
research, conducted by John P. Hart, Director of Research and
Collections at the New York State Museum; Jennifer Birch, Assistant
Professor at the University of Georgia; and Christian Gates St-Pierre,
Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, sheds new light on
the importance of a little-understood Iroquoian population in upstate
New York and its impact on relations between two emerging Native
American political powers in the 16th century.
Iroquoians in northeastern North America are best known for the
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wendat (Huron) confederacies in upstate New
York and southern Ontario. There are extensive early historic records
of both groups. Descendants of these confederacies and their respective
nations that remain in these areas today have rich oral traditions that
speak to their histories before and after European contact. Archaeology
fills out these records through the excavation and analyses of ancestral
communities.
Other Iroquoian groups did not persist and, for some, archaeology is
the primary means of understanding their histories. One such group
occupied the eastern end of Lake Ontario south of the head waters of the
St. Lawrence River. Known by archaeologists as the Jefferson County
Iroquoians, this group had abandoned their territory by the early 17th
century.
Archaeologists have pondered their "disappearance" for over a
century, asking two primary questions, "why did they disperse" and
"where did they go"? However, Hart, Birch and Gates St-Pierre ask a very
different question, "what role did the Jefferson County Iroquoians play
in Iroquoian social networks"?
Northern Iroquoians made pottery vessels with often complex
geometrical decorations, which Hart and his colleagues suggest signaled
membership in regional interaction networks. Using social network
analysis with a statistic that measured the similarities of pottery
decorations between sites, they demonstrate that the Jefferson County
Iroquoians played a key role in regional interactions during the 16th
century. As brokers between Iroquoian ancestral Haudenosaunee and Wendat
groups, the Jefferson County Iroquoians were intermediaries in
relationships between these groups.
According to Birch, "by focusing on
the connections between communities and regions, rather than a single
scale of analysis, we are better able to understand how people's
everyday activities relate to the larger-scale social and political
histories."
After the Jefferson County population dispersed in the early 17th
century, no other group took the place as "brokers" between Iroquoian
people living in New York and Canada. The dispersal of Jefferson County
populations effectively ended this brokerage function and may have
contributed to the escalation of conflict between the Huron-Wendat and
Iroquois confederacies. These results add to a growing literature on the
use of network analyses with archaeological data and contribute new
insights into processes of population relocation and geopolitical
realignment, as well as the role of borderlands and frontiers in
non-state societies.
This study is part of an ongoing effort by Hart and colleagues that
employs social network analysis to better understand the relationships
between Iroquoian populations in New York and Canada. According to Hart,
"the past is a much more complex place than ordinarily considered. Our
results highlight how our views of the past can be informed through the
application of new methods and techniques."
The Minoans were a literate Bronze Age
civilization that flourished thousands of years ago (one woman shown
dancing, in a fresco fragment that dates from 1600-1450 BCE).
For the first time, scientists have obtained and analyzed genome
sequences from the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans, who lived three to
five thousand years ago and were Europe's first civilized people.
The new analysis suggests that the Minoans and Mycenaeans share a
great deal of their genetic heritage, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(HHMI) investigator David Reich and colleagues report August 2 in the journal Nature.
The research adds richness to our understanding of these cultures,
which are mostly known from archeology and ancient literature, Reich
says.
"Who these Bronze Age peoples were -- the people who lived in a
world dimly remembered in the poetry of Homer -- has been a great
mystery," explains Reich, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical
School. "We set out to investigate the origins of these ancient
civilizations."
Their origins have been intensely debated. Theories include
migrations from various locations, including Europe and Asia Minor, and
at various times before and during the Bronze Age. Both cultures were
literate and had writing, but the Minoan language hasn't been
deciphered. The Mycenaean language, an early form of Greek, is part of
the Indo-European language family, whose languages have been spoken
across Europe and central and southern Asia since the beginning of
recorded history. The identity of the Minoan language is unknown. But
despite extensive archeological and linguistic research, the origins of
both cultures and their relationship to each other and to other Bronze
Age peoples have remained a puzzle.
Reich and his colleagues' work suggests that about three-quarters of
the ancestry of both peoples derives from the first farmers of the
Aegean Sea, including western Anatolia (a region that lies within modern
day Turkey), Greece, and the Greek islands. But, quite different from
the rest of contemporary Europe and from the first farmers of Greece,
the Bronze Age Greek civilizations also derived a small part of their
ancestry from populations from the Caucasus and Iran.
The Minoans, based on the island of Crete from roughly 3100 to 1050
BCE, were a maritime people with sophisticated palaces, one of which was
so large and complex that it may have been the historical basis of the
myth of the Labyrinth, home of the beast called the Minotaur. The
Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, 1700 to 1100 BCE, who eventually
conquered the Minoans, were skilled engineers and fierce warriors. Their
culture is named for Mycenae, a site with a fortified palace that was
the seat of the celebrated King Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the
Trojan War.
Reich and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Jena,
Germany and the University of Washington teamed up with Greek and
Turkish archeologists and anthropologists to obtain samples from 19
Bronze Age individuals excavated from tombs and other sites throughout
the Aegean. The ancient DNA, carefully extracted from bones and teeth,
included 10 Minoans, four Mycenaeans, three individuals from southwest
Anatolia (Turkey), an individual from Crete that dates from after the
arrival of the Mycenaeans on the island, and one Neolithic sample (5,400
BCE) from the mainland that predated the emergence of the Greek
civilizations. The researchers then compared and contrasted the new DNA
samples with previously reported data from 332 other ancient
individuals, 2,614 present-day humans, and two present-day Cretans.
The new study also shows that the Mycenaeans have additional
ancestry that is distinct from the Minoans, says Iosif Lazaridis, a
postdoctoral researcher in Reich's lab and lead author of the study.
This genetic contribution may be from people of the steppes north of the
Black and Caspian seas.
Scholars have debated whether the Indo-European language, which gave
rise to Italic, Germanic, Slavic and Hindi languages, among others,
spread with migrations from Anatolia or from the steppe.
Previous work
by Reich and colleagues supports the "steppe hypothesis."
Their latest data suggest that the speakers of this early Greek
language may have formed the southern portion of the same migrations
that contributed to the dispersal of other Indo-European languages,
Reich says.
"This increases the weight of evidence that Greek was derived from the same expansion of peoples," he says.
While the research sheds light on the origins of these ancient Greek
civilizations, questions remain, notes Reich. For example, it's still
unknown when the common "eastern" ancestors of both Minoans and
Mycenaeans arrived in the Aegean. And details regarding the "northern"
ancestry found only in the Mycenaeans remain to be worked out, like
whether that contribution came in a single rapid migration, or sporadic
waves over a long period.
