Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i ARCHAEOLOGY

There are several photographs in this issue that might make even those without the slightest fear of heights a bit uneasy. On page 28, there is an image of a vertiginous rock-cut staircase ascending a mountain in the Saudi Arabian desert. On page 36, we see bioarchaeologist Marla Toyne casually taking notes while suspended on a cliff at the site of La Petaca in northern Peru. And look closely at the photo on page 57—those half-moon-shaped areas high in a canyon in Mexico’s Sierra Madre are filled with sturdy buildings. In their time, the ancient people who created these sites conquered heights that modern researchers often struggle to merely visit, leaving behind an enduring record of their values and accomplishments. For the prehistoric inhabitants of the Mexican state of Chihuahua,…

When researchers discovered the burial of an individual interred with stone implements and projectile points at Wilamaya Patjxa, a site in southern Peru occupied by hunter-gatherers some 9,000 years ago, they had little doubt as to the role the deceased had played while alive. “It was clear that the tools buried with this individual reflected a hunter’s toolkit,” says archaeologist Randy Haas of the University of California, Davis. Initially, Initially, the team assumed the hunter was a high-status male, but osteological analysis and a new technique that examines differences between X and Y chromosome versions of a particular gene in tooth enamel determined that the remains actually belonged to a young woman. According to Haas, the division between men as hunters and women as foragers often described in ethnographies of…

A child belonging to the Hohokam culture who died in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert 500 to 1,000 years ago appears to have been fed a special diet in the final weeks of life that included hundreds of saguaro cactus flowers. Partially mummified remains of the child, who died at the age of five or six of unknown causes, were recovered in the early 1940s. Starting in the 1980s, Karl Reinhard, an environmental archaeologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, analyzed fossilized excrement, called coprolites, found inside the mummy. He has learned that the child ate saguaro cactus fruit, flour made from ground mesquite pods, and cholla or prickly pear cactus buds, all of which are well-known staples still eaten in the region. Consumption of saguaro flowers, which come from a cactus…

IDAHO: Researchers are retracing the precise route of the historic Three Blaze Trail, a 50-mile pathway used by miners during an early 20th-century gold rush. The track was made through rugged terrain in 1902 to bring prospectors to Thunder Mountain, where gold had been discovered, but much of its course has been lost or obscured over the past century. The route was named for the 3 ax marks trailblazers notched into trees to guide travelers along the way. Some of these marks are still visible. MEXICO: It is well known that ancient Mesoamericans used tobacco for religious, social, and medicinal purposes. A new study shows that they occasionally added other plants to the mix to enhance the smoker’s experience during ceremonies. Analysis of residue found in 1,000-year-old miniature ceramic flasks…

OVER TWO DAYS IN AUGUST 2018, the sky above the ruins of Kuelap, in the cloud forest of the northeastern Peruvian Andes, was intermittently filled with the high-pitched whine of a drone. The six-rotor aircraft wasn’t shooting images or video footage of the spectacular site, which was built by the Chachapoya culture some 1,500 years ago atop a limestone ridge 10,000 feet above sea level. Instead, the device was creating laser scans of the site using a lidar sensor the size of a coffee cup. It was the first time the technology had been used at Kuelap. Over the course of five flights, the sensor captured an enormous amount of information about the site’s architecture, much more than would have been possible using traditional mapping techniques. “It’s really tough to…

The rise of tourism on Palomar Mountain took place at a time when Americans were discovering the allure of wilderness outings, particularly in the West. “There’s this irony that as soon as the California government was able to annihilate the Indigenous population and steal most of their land—right at that moment—there was this romance of the vanishing Indian and this attempt to try to reclaim an experience of rugged naturalism,” says San Diego State University archaeologist Seth Mallios. With the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908, Palomar became a magnet for early car enthusiasts. “This is all part of the new frontier for where the automobile can take you,” says Mallios. “Many people had never been on a ride like this before, and many of the automobiles didn’t…

Every January, the AIA gathers as a community for its annual conference featuring panels on archaeological research and events honoring the dedication of the lay enthusiasts who run many of the Institute’s 106 local societies in the United States and Canada. This year brought a number of changes. The conference was completely virtual for the first time. We also included a new preconference program, Society Sunday, to engage and thank those society officers and members who support the Institute’s many activities, such as its extensive lecture program; its cultural heritage efforts, both in North America and abroad; and the immensely popular International Archaeology Day. Highlights included an exciting public lecture, “Discoveries in the Desert,” by eminent Egyptologist Salima Ikram. With more than 600 people attending virtually, Ikram traced continuity and…

In the fall of 2020, archaeologists unearthed 59 wooden mummy coffins from burial shafts at Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis (“Top 10 Discoveries of 2020,” January/February 2021). Since then, continued investigations at the site have added to the still-growing tally. A total of more than 100 painted coffins, most dating to between 712 and 30 B.C., have emerged from the shafts—so far. Among the objects interred alongside the deceased were 40 statues of Saqqara’s patron deity, Ptah-Sokar, 20 wooden boxes decorated with images of the god Horus, and a variety of gilded death masks, amulets, and ushabti figurines.…

Henry VIII’s jousting yard on the former grounds of Greenwich Palace has been located using ground-penetrating radar. Jousting was one of Henry’s (r. 1509–1547) favorite pastimes, so he ordered a custom-built tiltyard to be constructed at his beloved residence, where he often entertained and held tournaments. However, the game ground’s precise location was lost when Greenwich Palace was torn down in the mid-seventeenth century. A research team led by the University of Greenwich’s Simon Withers knew the yard was somewhere on the property of the National Maritime Museum. They were able to pinpoint its exact location by identifying the foundations of a tower from which courtiers viewed the jousting competitions. “The tiltyard is shown in contemporary paintings to have two large octagonal brick towers,” says Withers. “On our second day,…

FROM HIGH ABOVE, Saudi Arabia’s Al Ula oasis appears as a green swath of date palm groves in the midst of red-tinted sandstone mountains. Closer in, it’s possible to make out a string of ruined settlements dotting the length of the narrow valley. One of the largest is an expanse of cut-stone rubble nearly half a mile long. These are the ruins of ancient Dadan, an oasis settlement that became the capital of the little-known Kingdom of Lihyan, which ruled this part of the Arabian Desert some 2,500 years ago. The first millennium B.C. was a time of prosperity on the Arabian Peninsula. It was crisscrossed by caravan routes that linked frankincense and myrrh groves on the Arabian Sea to the great civilizations of the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and beyond.…

Perhaps no people in the Americas went to quite the same heights to honor their ancestors as the Chachapoya of northern Peru. From about A.D. 800 until the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, the Chachapoya regularly carried their dead hundreds of feet up imposing cliffs. There they placed the bundled remains in sarcophagi and in chamber tombs on platforms they constructed around natural crevices and ledges, as well as in cave entrances located on high escarpments. Surviving Chachapoya sarcophagi made of plaster and reeds, such as the vivid examples at the site of Carajía, are well-known to researchers. But archaeologists had conducted few recent systematic studies of these vertical cemeteries until University of Central Florida bioarchaeologist Marla Toyne and her team, aided by a group of Spanish cavers, explored…

Stephen H. Lekson is a curator emeritus of archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and has excavated in the American Southwest for almost 50 years. He first contributed to ARCHAEOLOGY in 1990. Among his articles is “Rewriting Southwestern Prehistory” (1997), in which he first articulated the novel “Chaco Meridian” theory, which holds that successive regional capitals in the Southwest were established in relation to one another according to precise geographic coordinates. Here, Lekson tells the story of his latest visit to the Chaco Meridian’s southernmost end. Outside the town of Madera in the Sierra Madre, some 130 miles west of Chihuahua City in northern Mexico, canyons cut deep into the mountains. Here, in caves and alcoves and on ledges high up the canyon cliffs, the white…

For thousands of years, Chinese emperors ensured good harvests for their people by practicing a state religion centered on the worship of a supreme God of Heaven. Archaeologists have identified many imperial temples associated with this tradition, but, until recently, where the emperors of the Northern Wei Dynasty (A.D. 386–535) conducted rituals was unknown. Originally nomadic tribal leaders, the Northern Wei emperors came to rule much of northern China. Now, a team led by archaeologist Wenping Zhang of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’s Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology has unearthed a temple complex where they believe four Northern Wei emperors made regular offerings to the God of Heaven in the late fifth century A.D. Located in the Yin mountain range north of Hohhot, Inner Mongolia’s capital city, the temple…

For some 13,000 years, Native people in the southern Great Plains obtained flint from an outcrop of dolomite chert that straddles the Texas Panhandle’s Canadian River. Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, which is named after early twentieth-century rancher Allen “Allie” Bates, features an arresting landscape of arroyos, bluffs, and more than 700 hand-dug quarry pits. The site has been visited and exploited by humans for millennia, but is only known to contain permanent settlement remains dating to the period when the Antelope Creek culture occupied the area. People belonging to this sedentary culture built stone houses, hunted bison, and grew maize between about A.D. 1200 and 1450. “The assumption is that people who lived in the village were the excavators of the quarry pits, given the time and labor involved,”…

By 500 B.C., writing was common across the Arabian Peninsula. From traders at caravan outposts such as Dadan to desert nomads, many people seem to have been literate, and they left a large body of inscriptions that scholars can now use to decipher the different scripts employed to write the languages indigenous to the peninsula. In the century or so since its identification, Dadan has yielded almost 2,000 inscriptions carved in its distinctive 28-letter script. Some 1,500 are graffiti, which suggests that literacy was widespread in the population. There are also approximately 400 monumental inscriptions recording the names of local kings or dedicated to the chief god of the oasis, Dhu Ghabat. “The vast majority of these inscriptions refer to religious practice dedicated to the main deity,” University of Oxford…

MOST HISTORIANS AND archaeologists agree: The sixth century A.D. was not an easy time to be alive. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed in the previous century, plunging much of the continent into economic, political, and social upheaval. On top of this, the first outbreak and frequent recurrence of bubonic plague resulted in the estimated deaths of millions. Making matters even worse, a series of volcanic eruptions caused climatic changes from Britain to China, ushering in a cooling period known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Recent studies have indicated that this caused drought, crop failure, breakdown in food supply chains, and famine. Harvard University medieval historian Michael McCormick has gone so far as to characterize the period following a particularly intense volcanic eruption in A.D. 536 as one…

Whether it’s arcing an orange one through a hoop, kicking a black-and-white patterned one into your opponent’s goal, or crushing a white one with perfectly stitched red seams over the center-field fence, in order to play the game, you need a ball. Three young men buried in the Yanghai cemetery in northwest China’s Turfan Basin in the first millennium B.C. wouldn’t have considered going to the afterlife unequipped for a ball game. At the time, the Turfan Basin was one of the key centers of innovation in Eurasia, explains archaeologist Patrick Wertmann of the University of Zurich. Many local advances adopted by the agropastoralist people typically considered members of the Subeixi culture were associated with horseback riding and mounted warfare. For example, one of the men was interred wearing a…