Robert-Goldwater-Library

Thirteen Towers of Chankillo Decoded

Photo: Ivan Ghezzi; National Aerial Service, Peru
Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.

via NYTimes:
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: March 6, 2007

Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler's power.

Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.

This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.

In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.

The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.

Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.

"In the first hours of measurements," Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, "we realized the nature and importance of the towers."

Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided "evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults," beginning in the fourth century B. C.

Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal "what was going on in the heads of these people."

Obituary: William C. Sturtevant

The field of anthropology lost a leading figure with the passing, on Friday, March 2nd, of William C. Sturtevant, Curator of Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution ...

Jason Baird Jackson writes an obituary of William C. Sturtevant in the blog Museum Anthropology. Of no small interest to this library was his contribution as editor-in-chief of the compendious Handbook of North American Indians:

Published by the Smithsonian, the handbook is a major multi-volume reference work summarizing anthropological, linguistic and historical knowledge about native peoples north of Mexico. Bearing the imprint of its editor, the thoroughness of the handbook has made it the essential resource for those interested in Native American societies. 

Americas reinstallation @ Field Museum

Reblogged from the Field Museum web site:

The Ancient Americas
 Opens March 9, 2007
 
 
Step into the windswept world of Ice-Age mammoth hunters. Walk through a replica of an 800-year-old pueblo dwelling and imagine your entire family cooking, eating, and sleeping in one small room. Explore the Aztec empire and its island capital, Tenochtitlan, a city of more than 200,000 people and an extraordinary feat of engineering for any era. Discover what Field Museum scientists and others have learned about the Americans who lived here before us, and how it’s changing nearly everything we thought we knew!
 
The Field Museum’s ground-breaking new exhibition, The Ancient Americas, takes you on a journey through 13,000 years of human ingenuity and achievement in the western hemisphere, where hundreds of diverse societies thrived long before the arrival of Europeans. In this 19,000-square-foot permanent exhibition you’ll live the epic story of the peopling of these continents, from the Arctic to the tip of South America. Discover how and why the early Americans developed farming, created new forms of artistic expression, and forged mighty empires. See more than 2,200 artifacts, amazing reconstructions, and dozens of videos and interactive displays, and come to understand the ingenuity with which ancient peoples met the challenges of their times and places…as we meet ours today.
 
 The Ancient Americas is made possible by the McCormick Tribune Foundation. The Farming Villagers Gallery is presented by the Abbott Fund. The Innovators Gallery is presented by ITW Foundation.

An interview with Gary Feinman (curator of Middle American Anthropology) and Jonathan Haas (MacArthur Curator, Anthropology of the Americas) appears in the Spring 2007 issue of In the Field.

Recovered: 650 ancient artefacts smuggled from Mali

Some of the artefacts confiscated may be up to one million years old


via BBC News [thanks Nicole!]:

Mali relics recovered in France
French customs officials say they have seized more than 650 ancient artefacts smuggled from Mali in one of the largest such finds at a Paris airport.

Described as an "archaeological treasure", the objects were thought to be on their way to private US buyers.

Experts say most of the items are from the Neolithic period, but some may be up to one million years old.

The artefacts are thought to have been taken from archaeological sites on the edge of the Sahara desert.

The 669 items - 601 stones and 68 bracelets - were confiscated on 19 January at Charles de Gaulle airport and included axe heads, flintstones and stone rings.

Most of the artefacts date from a few thousand years BC. But others are from the Acheulean period, between one million years and 200,000 years old, and from the Middle Stone Age (200,000 years BC to 20,000 years BC).

The artefacts were shipped in nine parcels from the Malian capital, Bamako, which the accompanying paperwork described as handcrafted objects.

Customs officials look out for artefacts being exported from specific countries such as Mali which may be smuggled, a customs spokeswoman told the BBC News website.

If they have a doubt, they then seize the objects and have them assessed by experts to establish their age - in this case an expert from the Department of Prehistory at the Natural History Museum in Paris, she said.

Growing traffic
This type of traffic was unheard of a few years ago, an airport customs official told the AFP news agency.

"Since 2004 we have observed regular traffic in this kind of contraband. There is a big market and we are pretty sure that these items, which had been neatly sorted and were of very high quality, had been pre-sold," Eric Cailheton said.

French customs officials made two similarly large finds of archaeological items from Niger in March 2004 and December 2005.

The 2005 haul included more than 5,000 stone arrowheads and 90 carved stone artefacts, dating back 5,000 years.

The items were found in the baggage of a passenger who arrived on a flight from Niger's capital, Niamey.

World Rock Art

Contents from Conservation, vol. 21, no. 3 (2006):

Rock Art Today
Rock art is a major part of our cultural heritage. It is certainly the most ancient and perhaps the most vulnerable. How can we best preserve the millions of images on rocks throughout the world, which constitute a kind of gigantic museum collection exposed to the depredations of nature and human activity?

Preserving a Worldwide Heritage: A Discussion about Rock Art Conservation
J. Claire Dean, an archaeological conservator in private practice; Josephine Flood, former director of the Aboriginal Environment section of the Australian Heritage Commission; and Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Rock Art Archive at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, talk with Neville Agnew and Jeffrey Levin of the Getty Conservation Institute.

U.S. Rock Art in the Twenty-first Century: Problems and Prospects
The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the status of North American rock art, expressed in the United States by numerous research advances and a greater concern for conservation and site management. While these improvements are cause for optimism, serious problems persist, including the lack of trained rock art conservators and limited resources for site documentation and management.

Building Capacity to Conserve Southern African Rock Art
Over the years, the GCI has facilitated conservation and training programs to improve the management of rock art sites, particularly in the Americas and Australia. The lessons learned from these programs have been valuable in structuring the Institute's most recent involvement in rock art conservation—the Southern African Rock Art Project.

Access issues of Conservation, 1991-current, via WATSONLINE

In ancient Cuba, brass was the new gold

From the New York Times, January 16, 2007

Huts have been reconstructed near the site as a heritage center. (photo credit: Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

Humble Brass Was Even Better Than Gold to a 16th-Century Tribe in Cuba

By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI

Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th-century Taíno Indians of Cuba called it turey, their word for the most luminous part of the sky.

They adored its sweet smell, its reddish hue, its exotic origins and its dazzling iridescence, qualities that elevated it to the category of sacred materials known as guanín. Local chieftains wore it in pendants and medallions to show their wealth, influence and connection to the supernatural realm. Elite women and children were buried with it.

What was this treasured stuff? Humble brass — specifically, the lace tags and fasteners from Spanish explorers’ shoes and clothes, for which the Taíno eagerly traded their local gold.

A team of archaeologists from University College London and the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment came to these conclusions by analyzing small brass tubes found in two dozen burial sites in the Taíno village of El Chorro de Maíta in northeastern Cuba, according to a recent paper in The Journal of Archaeological Science. [Local note: not electronically available at MMA]

The graves mostly date to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when waves of gold-hungry conquistadors landed on Caribbean shores. Within decades, the Taíno, like their neighbors the Carib and the Arawak, were largely wiped out by genocide, slavery and disease.

But the archaeologists say this is not the whole picture. Their research — the first systematic study of metals from a Cuban archaeological site — focuses on one of the few indigenous settlements ever found that date from the period after the arrival of Europeans. The scientists say the finds add important detail and nuance to a history of the Caribbean long dominated by the first-person reportage of the Europeans themselves.

“It’s certainly true that the arrival of the Europeans was in the short term devastating,” said Marcos Martinón-Torres of University College London, the project’s lead researcher. “But instead of lumping the Taíno in all together as ‘the Indians of Cuba who were eliminated by the Spaniards,’ we’re trying to show they were people who made choices. They had their own lives. They decided to incorporate European goods into their value system.”

• Read full article here

Mummy dogs, Moo and Olmec writing

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press -- in this instance, Archaeology.

Atwood, Roger. "Peru's mummy dogs: Are the country's beloved pets descendants of ancient llama herders?" Archaeology, vol. 60, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2007), p. 42-43. col. ill.

McDaniel, Sean. "The lure of Móo: a Victorian archaeologist's obsession with a fictitious Maya queen." p. 48-51. ill. Augustus Le Plongeon.

"The Cascajal block." p. 72. col. ill. "What It Is: Tablet with the oldest writing found in the Western Hemisphere; Civilization: Olmec ..."

Scholars tangle over Maya collapse theories

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press.

Werner, Louis. "The Maya war of words." Américas, vol. 58, no. 6 (Dec. 2006), p. 40-47. col. ill.

"Scholarly theories collide around the disappearance of the ancient Maya. How do you spell collapse?" 

U.S. crackdown on trade in native American artifacts

Oregon man sentenced to 2 years in prison for skeleton sale

11/02/2006 (Associated Press via KGW.com)

A Redmond man was sentenced to two years in prison Wednesday for trafficking in an American Indian skeleton.

Michael Orf, 30, also was ordered to pay a $20,000 fine to the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation and spend three years on probation.

In addition, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ordered Orf to finish a high school equivalency program. She allowed him until the first of the year to report to prison.

Orf pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to violate the federal Archaeological Resource Protection Act after selling the skeleton to a government informant in 2004.

The 5 1/2-hour sentencing hearing Wednesday capped a six-year investigation into the looting of Indian artifacts and remains, called "Operation Bring 'Em Back."

Warm Springs tribal leaders testified before sentencing in federal court about how grave robbers undo the prayers, songs and ceremonies that accompany their ancestors in the next life, causing spiritual damage for mere money.

"It's a horrible attack on our way of life," said Louie Pitt Jr., governmental affairs director for the Warm Springs tribes.

Delvis Heath, chief of the Warm Springs tribes, sometimes speaking in his tribal language, said "unwritten laws" have guided native people for tens of thousands of years and should never be violated for personal gain.

"Outside people put a monetary value on Indian artifacts. These are treasures and history of our people," Heath said. "It is like a disease. The greed will start to take over."

The federal investigation began in 2000 and has yielded 13 convictions so far, with sentences ranging from probation to three years in prison, U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut said.

It is the largest investigation of its kind in U.S. history targeting illegal artifact excavation and trafficking in Indian remains, Immergut said. The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service led the effort, she said.

• Read the rest of the story

Two important archaeological finds in Mexico

via National Geographic Online

Aztec Temple Found in Mexico City "Exceptional," Experts Say

Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News,October 5, 2006

Archaeologists working in the heart of Mexico City have discovered an altar and a monolith that date back more than 500 years to Aztec times.

The finds may be one of the most significant Aztec discoveries in years.        

The altar depicts the Aztec rain god Tlaloc and was uncovered last weekend at the Aztec main temple, Templo Mayor, near mexico City's central Zocalo Square.

The 11-foot (3.5-meter) monolith, which is still mostly buried, is potentially the more important discovery. Some archaeologists speculate the stone slab could be part of an entrance to an underground chamber.

"This is a really impressive and exceptional Aztec monolith," said Leonardo López Luján, an archaeologist at the Museo del Templo Mayor.

• Read more story

AND:

via USA Today (yes! USA Today) posted 10/5/2006 3:33 PM ET

Mexican archaeologists unearth monolith showing early calendar, decapitated women

By Mark Stevenson, The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — Researchers said Thursday they have unearthed what may be one of the earliest calendars in Mesoamerica, a monolithic sculpture that suggests that women held important status roles in pre-Hispanic culture.

The massive stone sculpture depicts two decapitated women with streams of blood or water flowing from their necks. Markings around the sides of these figures appear to depict a 13-month lunar calendar, said archaeologist Guillermo Ahuja, who led the discovery of the monument.

"This would be the first depiction of a calendar or calendar elements in such an early time period," Ahuja said.

Luciano Cedillo, director of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History — which employs Ahuja — called the find "important and surprising."

The monolith, which measures more than 8 yards and weighs about 20 tons, was found in March 2005 by construction workers at the Tantoc ruins in San Luis Potosí state, near Mexico's northern Gulf coast.

It was carved sometime around 700 B.C., likely by the Huasteco culture and possibly predates early Mayan calendars by hundreds of years, Ahuja said.

• Read more story