Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2017 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeologists think of stone tools in terms of “technologies”— the particular ways that they were made and used—that help us understand the cultures that produced them. Today we have our own technologies, but they come and go at a vastly different pace. Their life spans are measured not in thousands of years, but in months and even days. To modern digital technology, 65 years is an eon. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the birth of the computer age, and one of its nurseries was the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, England, led by logician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Lesser known among the many innovations to come out of the lab—including “Baby,” the first stored-program computer—are the first melodies generated by computer, the most distant ancestor of modern electronic…

ON A SWELTERING DAY in 1862 at the foot of the Tuxtla Mountains in the Mexican state of Veracruz, a farmworker was clearing a cornfield when he hit something hard and smooth lodged in the earth. He thought it was the rounded base of an iron cauldron buried upside down, and, it being the 1860s, he reported the find to the owner of the hacienda where he worked. The farmworker’s boss told him to dig up the cauldron immediately and bring it to him. As the farmworker labored to uncover the object, he realized he had found not a large iron bowl, but a gargantuan stone sculpture with a pair of glaring eyes, a broad nose, and a downturned mouth. What had appeared to be the base of a cauldron…

ONE OF ARCHAEOLOGY’S paradoxes is that in order to comprehend ancient people’s lives, often the best place to look is not through the broken sherds of the pots they used to cook their family dinners, or at what may be left of their homes after hundreds or even thousands of years, but in their graves. How people are buried, the things they are buried with, and their physical remains can reveal much about those who might otherwise be lost to history. Are their graves filled with valuable items that mark them as wealthy, or with only a few small treasured possessions? Or were they interred with nothing at all and simply consigned to the earth? Did they succumb to a common disease, or were they casualties of war? Do their…

Thomas W. Dyott arrived in Philadelphia from England some time around 1803 with little besides a formula for bootblack and a few shillings in his pocket—and ambitious dreams in his head. He probably lacked the credentials for it, but that didn’t stop him from setting up shop as an apothecary—the nineteenth-century equivalent of a pharmacist—at the corner of Race and Second Streets, referring to himself as “Dr. Dyott,” and assuming all the airs that went with the honorific. “He was into hyperbole for sure,” says Ingrid Wuebber, a historian with the Cultural Resources Department of the engineering firm AECOM. “And he had to have been well-spoken because people believed him and sought his advice.” It wasn’t long before Dyott put his stamp on both the pharmaceutical trade and Philadelphia history.…

As the new president of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), I will have the pleasure of communicating with you in each issue of ArchAeology, and I’d like to begin by introducing myself. I was born in Philadelphia, and when I was 12 we moved to Miami, Florida. By that time, thanks in part to my seventhgrade history teacher, who acquainted me with the ancient world—particularly classical Greece—I had decided to become an archaeologist. My interest has never waned. At the age of 16, I moved to Israel on my own. I completed high school there and went on to earn a B.A. in archaeology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For three years after graduation, I worked as a field guide and naturalist at the Ein Gedi…

Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal Archaeology and History Complex, in Old Montreal, Quebec, sits right on top of the city’s birthplace. This location is the site of more than 1,000 years of human activity, beginning when indigenous peoples made camp here between the Little Saint Pierre and the Saint Lawrence Rivers. The first French settlement on the site, Fort Ville-Marie, was created in 1642 as the home for some 50 settlers, including founders Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance. The museum, which was built in 1992 as part of the celebration to mark Montréal’s 350th anniversary, has both permanent and temporary exhibits, including traveling displays from all over the world. Pointe-à-Callière Project Manager Louise Pothier says, “Pointe-à-Callière is a site museum unlike any other in Canada. It combines a number of…

In the summer of 2013, Julien Beck, an archaeologist from the University of Geneva, was swimming in the Bay of Kiladha, off the east coast of the Peloponnese in Greece, when he spotted something unusual. “I started seeing lines of stones underwater,” he says. “I really could not believe what I was seeing.” A closer look the next summer revealed potsherds as well. His interest piqued, Beck and his team devoted much of their 2015 and 2016 seasons to investigating what they now regard as the underwater remains of a third-millennium b.c. site that was inhabited by Early Bronze Age people whose building projects demonstrated great ambition. “Even on the seafloor, you can see that you have many different structures and what seems to be part of a fortification system,”…

CANADA: A zinc deficiency caused by malnutrition— and not lead poisoning as previously theorized—may have led to the deaths of the Franklin Expedition crew. All 129 men were lost between 1845 and 1848 when their ships became trapped in ice while seeking the Northwest Passage. Recent laboratory analysis of the nails of crewman John Hartnell, who was buried on Beechey Island, indicate that a lack of fresh red meat severely compromised his immune system, making him susceptible to the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. MEXICO: Today, in parts of southern Mexico, turkeys are a major part of the socioeconomic structure of local communities—just as they were to the culture there 1,500 years ago. At the site of Mitla Fortress in Oaxaca, recently excavated houses contained the earliest and most comprehensive…

THE OFT-TOLD TALE of the Roman Empire’s expansion is one of violent conquest—its ever-widening borders pushed forward at sword point by Roman legions. Some of the bloodiest military engagements pitted Rome against the inhabitants of Germania, who are described by contemporary sources of the time as a loose confederation of uncivilized, quarrelsome, warlike, ferocious tribes to the north. The conventional wisdom goes that after a decades-long attempt to conquer the region east of the Rhine River finally failed in a.d. 9, Rome gave up on the Germans entirely. But what if there’s more to it than that? In the 1980s, the chance discovery of sherds of Roman-style pottery on a farm in the Lahn Valley near Frankfurt led archae- ologists and historians at the German Archaeological Institute’s Romano-Germanic Commission to…

THE LANDSCAPE OF Cappadocia in central Turkey is dry and jagged and strange. Winding roads look out onto mountain peaks rising to almost 13,000 feet, and vast canyons and cliff faces have been striped dark brown, rusty red, and sandy yellow over the epochs. Pigeons, first introduced into the region by the Romans, wing by at eye level. Fantastical 40- to 50-foot-high “fairy chimneys”— spires of soft volcanic tuff—rise up from the desert floor. Carved into some of these hillsides are houses—some recently built and some centuries old—with rough wooden doors, small windows, and storage areas overhung by high shelves of stone. There are even rock-cut garages where drivers swoop into the dark and then cut their engines. This picturesque region draws more than two million tourists a year, and…