All posts by Heather Pringle

Wanted: Archaeologists for CSI

January 18, 2010

A community newspaper in London, England, carried an important article last week with an unusual request. According to the London Daily Advertiser, a Romanian institute dedicated to the investigation of Communist crimes in that country has put out a call for archaeologists to volunteer for the excavation of a mass grave in the Apuseni Mountains. According to the institute’s director, historian Marius Oprea, the mass grave in question contains the bodies of five anti-communist resistance fighters, including a pregnant woman, who were all killed by the Romanian secret service during the 1960s.

This sounds like a very worthy project, and it reminds me of something I often hear from archaeologists–namely that they struggle daily to find a way to make their discipline relevant to students who are not particularly interested in what happened five years ago, much less five centuries or five millennia ago. And yet the techniques of archaeological mapping, excavation and analysis are directly pertinent to crime scene investigation.

One year ago, I published an article entitled “Witness to Genocide” in Archaeology Magazine, about a team of archaeologists and physical anthropologists who excavated several mass graves in Iraq, at the height of the insurgency. The team members risked their lives to dig and document the remains of more than 100 Kurdish women and children who were secretly massacred by Iraqi forces in 1988 and buried at a site known as Muthanna in a remote desert near the Saudi Arabian border.

Michael Trimble, a civilian archaeologist in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, led the archaeological team. And on November 30, 2006, he took the stand as an expert witness in the trial of Saddam Hussein and several of his key supporters, who were charged with crimes against humanity and genocide of the Kurds. During four hours of grueling testimony, Trimble presented the key results of the archaeological and anthropological investigation. Here’s what happened on the stand (and please forgive me for quoting myself):

“As he spoke, he tried to maintain as much eye contact as he could with the judges. Partway through his presentation, however, he noticed one judge dabbing his eye. Two others soon followed suit. At first Trimble was puzzled, thinking something was wrong. Then he realized what was happening. “My God,” he thought, “they are all crying.”

The team’s meticulous excavation furnished a host of horrific and very telling details that brought the victims of the Muthanna massacre back to life. And with the benefit of a geographical information system expert, they reconstructed the crime in detail. The security forces had literally mowed down the victims–some of whom were infants and very young children–as they stood in a prepared mass grave. It doesn’t get much more chilling than that.

If this kind of forensic investigation is not a way to make archaeology relevant today, I really don’t know what is. Romanian historian Marius Oprea has put out a call for help. I sure hope some archaeologists will answer.

How Early Wooden Armor Defeated Russian Firearms

January 15, 2010

As regular readers will know, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about ancient forms of body armor. I got started on this subject last weekend, when I read about new research on the cloth armor that Alexander the Great and his army favored. But a question from reader Dan Hilborn and a very cool post over at Northwest Coast Archaeology (one of my favorite blogs) have led me to the subject of wooden armor, specifically the armor Tlingit men wore into battle against Russian traders in the late 18th century.

The Russians coveted furs — primarily the sea-otter fur, which is the thickest and warmest of any mammal on Earth. By the 18th century, these traders had pretty much exhausted the sea-otter populations that once flourished in Siberia’s kelp forests, so they sailed further east along the coast of the Bering Sea, searching for new kelp forests and more sea-otters. Along the Aleutian Islands, Alaska and eventually northern British Columbia, they spied abundant sea-otter habitat

Initially, the Russians traders sailed into Aleut villages, taking women and children hostages in order to force the men to bring them pelts. They did not hesitate to murder their captives if things didn’t go their way. In 1745, a Russian group slaughtered 15 Aleuts on the island of Attu, just to strike terror into the hearts of the villagers. The Aleut people, in turn, tried to expel these ruthless invaders from their lands, but Russian firearms and Russian diseases took a terrible toll.

Eventually, the Russians worked their way southward into Tlingit territory. Like many Northwest Coast peoples, the Tlingit fished the bountiful rivers and coasts of their territory and hunted sea lions and other sea mammals. They had a rich, complex culture, with chiefs, nobles and even slaves. To settle grievances with their neighbors, they embarked on raiding parties from time to time, outfitting themselves in armor made from the one of the most bountiful materials in their territory: wood. Tlingit men carved alder into slats and rods, then lashed these pieces together to form sturdy, lightweight armor.

The Smithsonian Institution holds several really spectacular examples of the traditional Tlingit armor. I particularly love the Tlingit battle helmet beautifully carved from a very hard spruce burl. The helmet itself is shaped like a very fierce-looking (and tattooed) man’s head and would have been worn atop the fighter’s head. According to the Smithsonian notes, “it would have been “impossible to split open with a club.” (The two images accompanying this blog show other Tlingit armor from the collection of a Spanish museum.)

But back to my story. After seeing images of Tlingit war gear, I began to wonder how effective it was in battle against the Russians and their firearms. I knew that the Tlingit had put up a very strong fight against the Russians, even capturing their settlement, New Archangel, on Sitka Island in 1802. But an account of one battle in Carl Waldman’s book, Atlas of the North American Indian, really caught my attention.

In their attack on Russian-led forces in Prince William Sound, writes Waldman, the Tlingit “wore animal masks to protect their faces as well as chest armor of wooden slats lashed together with rawhide strips, which actually repelled Russian bullets.” (The italics are mine.)

I would never have guessed that well-made wooden armor could deflect a bullet. It looks to me as if we don’t give early armorers nearly enough credit.

Sugar: A Short Bittersweet History

January 14, 2010

Wealthy Europeans of the Renaissance adored dessert time. Indeed their cravings for sweet cakes and marzipan, plum pies and mince tarts far outstripped supplies of the chief ingredient—refined sugar. To keep up with the vast demand and turn fields of sugar cane into bags of white sugar, European mill owners required timber to fuel their boiling vats: by the early 16th century, sugar masters from Italy to Madeira had all but exhausted the most easily accessible forests.

The first Spanish colonists to land in the Caribbean understood this problem perfectly, and when their quest for gold failed in Jamaica, they turned to sugar in 1515 to make their fortunes. In Jamaica’s earliest settlement–Sevilla la Neuva–Francisco Garay, a former slave trader and minor member of the Spanish nobility, imported a sugar master, constructed a large mill to process newly planted sugar cane and forced Jamaica’s indigenous Taino villagers to do all the hard labor.

Simon Fraser University archaeologist Robyn Woodward and her team are now excavating the industrial quarter of Seville la Neuva, uncovering traces of a tragic history that ended in the decimation of the Taino . To read more about this new research, please see my newly posted article on the Smithsonian magazine website.

Replicating the Armor of Alexander the Great

January 13, 2010

I think that there are few things more delightful and amusing to watch than an adventurous archaeologist in the act of trying replicate ancient drinks, hunting techniques, weapons, or other long vanished technologies. Who knew, for example, how punishingly difficult it was to chew one’s way through dozens of pounds of milled corn to make chicha, the beer of choice for the Inca and other Andean peoples? I had no idea until I began looking into the experiments of Penn State archaeologists Patrick McGovern and Clark Erickson and their associates at Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats.

Yesterday, I found a very intriguing YouTube video of the experiments that University of Wisconsin historian Gregory Aldrete and his student Scott Bartell conducted on linothorax, the ancient linen armor worn by Alexander the Great and his army. I wrote about their research on this remarkable kevlar like gear in my post yesterday, but seeing is really believing. Check this out.

Cloth, a Body Armor of Choice?

January 12, 2010

I think it’s safe to say that the ancient world is absolutely full of surprises. While most of us have long envisioned Alexander the Great donning a gleaming bronze cuirass for battle, new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America reveals that one of the greatest military generals in history and his soldiers favored a much humbler form of body armor–cloth.

Gregory Aldrete, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, and his student Scott Bartell, became interested in Alexander’s armor after collecting more than two dozen different classical descriptions of a type of cloth armor known as linothorax, made of linen. The Greek historian Plutarch, for example, describes Alexander’s gear on the day he headed into the famous Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C. and decisively defeated the forces of the Persian king Darius III. Alexander, says Plutarch, wore “a breastplate of folded (or doubled) linen.”

Intrigued by this, the two historians set out to replicate linothorax. They scrambled to find linen made from hand-harvested and woven flax, and then painstakingly glued the layers of linen together with two types of glue available in the ancient world –one made of rabbit skins and the other from flax seeds. The two historians then set up a kind of ancient firing range, shooting arrows and thrusting swords at the linothorax. “The laminated layers function like an ancient version of modern Kevlar armor,” Aldrete told a reporter from Discovery News, “using the flexibility of the fabric to disperse the force of the incoming arrow.”

What I find particularly fascinating is the fact that soldiers in both the Old and New World developed cloth armor. Aztec warriors, for example, wore a kind of quilted cloth-armor jacket or tunic known as ichcapuipilli for combat against the Spanish invaders. This battle gear consisted pieces of unspun cotton sandwiched between two layers of cotton: the armor measured nearly two fingers in thickness and, according to Ross Hassig’s fine book, Aztec Warfare, was capable of deflecting both arrowheads and atlatl darts.

Inca soldiers, too, wore a form of cloth armor. The attire couldn’t protect its wearer against cannon fire or Spanish steel swords, but it clearly had some advantages. It was comfortable, lightweight, and probably very cool in the heat of mid-day. So some 16th century Spanish soldiers themselves adopted it, wearing cotton armor into battle in the Andes.

Clearly, there is more to cloth than meets the eye.

The Most Ancient Mariner

January 11, 2010

When did land-loving humans first trust their fates to simple rafts and begin exploring the world by water? Most archaeologists would say some 50,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans sailed from island southeast Asia to Australia. But Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist at Providence College in Rhode Island, dropped a bombshell last week at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. Strasser reported that he had found several hundred double-edged cutting tools on the island of Crete that dated to at least 130,000 years ago. Some, said Strasser, looked very much like the hand-axes that Homo erectus wielded in Africa 800,000 years ago.

Strasser now proposes that the ancient hominins voyaged out of Africa by primitive boat, island-hopping from Crete to Europe. “We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place,” Strasser told Science News reporter, Bruce Bower.

This new evidence sounds immensely intriguing, and I would certainly like to know much more. But I think that we are still a long way from seeing Homo erectus as a seafarer. Other evidence for such primeval ocean voyaging, after all, is very thin. Let me briefly recap. In 1998, a team led by Michael Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, excavated stone tools on the island of Flores in Indonesia (the same island that produced the so-called “Hobbit” remains of Homo floresiensis) that dated to some 800,000 years ago. This was the time period when H. erectus was roaming southeast Asia.

How did the ancient hominin get to Flores? Morwood himself suggested that they might have held on to logs as simple flotation devices, and kicked their across the narrow strait separating Komodo from Flores. But a more flamboyant researcher, Robert Bednarik, an independent scholar who heads The First Mariners project, proposes that H. erectus sailed there by raft. To demonstrate that such a voyage is indeed possible, Bednarik and several associates built a bamboo raft with paleolithic stone tools, and then sailed successfully on it from Lombok to the neighboring island of Sunbawa in a ten hour and twenty five minute crossing in rough seas.

So such a voyage is indeed possible in a simple raft. But most archaeologists working on the subject of coastal migration have been exceedingly reluctant to buy into the idea of seafaring H. erectus. When I interviewed half a dozen of the world’s leading experts on the subject two years ago while working on an article on ancient seafaring for Discover magazine, most suggested that that ancient hominins likely floated to Flores accidentally, after being blown out to sea in a storm.

A major sticking point for many is the cognitive ability of H. erectus. Many researchers believe that only modern humans possessed the necessary technological creativity to build a raft and the requisite intellectual ability to navigate at sea. But if Strasser’s new findings are accepted (and you can be sure that people will be looking very carefully at both the stone tools themselves and at the proposed dates), then it could be a whole new ballgame. I personally will be following this research with great interest.

Royal Chamber-Pots and Privies

January 8, 2010

Today, I’m bringing you a small, strange, guilty pleasure. I just stumbled across this delightful video of a very animated British archaeologist showing off the ancient privies of British kings and queens at several royal palaces. (Does anyone know who she is? She’s terrific, but uncredited.) Check out her real delight at finding residues of Tudor urine in a chamber pot!

Off with Their Mummified Heads

January 7, 2010

Why do so many of the world’s major museums hold bizarre collections of mummified body parts from ancient Egypt–a human head here, for example, and a withered hand there? This is not the kind of question that often pops up in casual conversation, even in the circles I run in. But it came to mind this morning after reading Josie Glausiusz’s excellent review in Nature of a very cool new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

The museum’s “Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets,” explores artistic body parts from Ancient Egypt–bits and pieces of worked wood, bronze and obsidian that curator Yekaterina Barbash found tucked away on storage shelves. And Josie Glausiusz, a writer whose work I like a lot, makes several lovely points in the review. She notes, for example, that Egyptian artists were very fond of depicting human perfection. (This is one reason, I suppose, why we see so many young, slender, beautiful people painted on Egyptian tombs.) But some artists were not at all shy about depicting human frailties such as dwarfism or scoliolis, as artifacts in the exhibition demonstrate.

But back to my question about the mummified body parts. While researching my book, The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead, I toured dozens of museums around the world, and was stunned to learn about all the disembodied heads, hands and the like. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for example, owns the head of a woman, and a hand with a scarab ring. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicag0 possesses five mummy heads. The Louvre has two heads and a hand. And on it goes.

So what’s going on? The answer, I’m afraid, relates to an old antiquities trade. During the nineteenth century, wealthy European tourists clamored to buy Egyptian mummies as souvenirs of their Grand Tours. Indeed, few stately homes were complete at the time without a mummy or two propped up in the corridors. In 1835, however, the Egyptian government passed legislation to control the antiquities trade there: it banned exports of its ancient treasures, including mummies.

But enterprising and unscrupulous travelers were not to be denied their souvenirs. They began to smuggle mummies out–something that proved very tricky. It was impossible, after all, to cram a whole mummy into the steamer trunks of the day, and larger shipping containers attracted too much attention. So antiquities dealers developed a whole new trade. They dismembered Egyptian mummies, hewing and chopping off heads, hands, and feet–the very parts that travellers craved as souvenirs. Back at home, many travelers had these mementos mounted in Victorian glass cases, a fashionable addition at the time to many a mantel.

Grotesque, isn’t it? Particularly when the Egyptians deliberately mummified their dead so that their bodies would be preserved whole and intact for eternity. I guess they didn’t count on Victorian souvenir hunters.

The Archaeology of Spray Cans

January 6, 2010

Is the graffiti that blankets our backalleys and freeway ramps an urban blight or a street-wise data set for some future archaeologist? I have to say I was firmly in the former camp until very recently, when I came across Cassidy Curtis’s superb website, Graffiti Archaeology. Curtis is a PDI/Dreamworks animator who has worked on such wonderful films as The Bee Movie, Shrek the Third, and Madagascar. And he clearly loves what he calls “the chameleon skin of the urban landscape.”

Curtis sees tag-covered city walls as a highly ephemeral art form. Grafitti artists, as we all know, are constantly overwriting old images with their spray cans, creating a palimpsest of tags–and this makes these images particularly interesting to the archaeologically minded. How does this uber-urban art change and evolve over time? How often do artists revisit and rewrite graffiti sites? Do the same artists return again and again? Or do different artists add their tags to a site, creating a kind of graffiti dialogue? I think these are all intriguing questions, but to get at them, one clearly needs data.

Curtis offers it up in spades. To document ever-evolving urban graffiti, he began taking photos of urban walls in 15 different locations in 1999, returning regularly–sometimes daily–to update his data bank. Sometimes he caught tag artists in the act with spray cans in hand; other times he caught images of the street life that these walls attracted.

Curtis has posted the results on his website Graffiti Archaeology in a clear and beautiful way, creating a timeline for each wall. Click on the timeline, and you can see what the wall looked like on a specific date and then how it changed over time. The site is really a web masterpiece, and after spending time there, I began to see urban graffiti as an organic, breathing, living urban artifact. If you haven’t visited Curtis’s site, I highly recommend that you check it out.

I’d love to see archaeologists take a serious look at this street-life art. Researchers have been poring over ancient graffiti at sites like Pompeii for years, and it seems to me that future archaeologists could learn something intriguing about street culture from poring over our painted concrete walls.