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Mapping
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The New Frontier
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July/August
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MAY/JUNE 2012
VOLUME 65, NUMBER 3
CONTENTS
features
24 Excavating Tel Kedesh
More than a decade after they began
working at an enormous mound in
Israels Upper Galilee region, two
archaeologists reflect on their work
BY ANDREA BERLIN AND SHARON HERBERT
30 Ancient Germanys
Metal Traders
34 Archaeology of Titanic
One hundred years after it sank, the
wreck of Titanic has finally become
what it was always meant to be: an
archaeological site
BY JAMES P. DELGADO
42 Rethinking the
Thundering Hordes
48 Games Ancient
People Played
An intriguing discovery in a
Mexican swamp provides evidence
of the earliest form of amusement
in the Americas
BY BARBARA VOORHIES
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12
14
departments
18
4 Editors Letter
6 From the President
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8 Letters
The number of deaths on the Trail of Tears, why
on the web
www.archaeology.org
22 World Roundup
Excavating a Mormon tabernacle, cursing the
local greengrocer, the worlds earliest popcorn,
and did Bantu-speaking farmers reshape central
Africas landscape?
53
68
Artifact
A Roman gurine is the rst depiction in bronze of an
African child charioteer ever found
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j2IFHRIWKH*RYHUQRU(FRQRPLF'HYHORSPHQWDQG7RXULVP
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A Lifes Work
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Claudia Valentino
Editor in Chief
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Presenting the
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Institute of America
Located at Boston University
Open Access
OFFICERS
President
Elizabeth Bartman
First Vice President
Andrew Moore
Vice President for Outreach and Education
Pamela Russell
Vice President for Professional Responsibilities
Laetitia LaFollette
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GOVERNING BOARD
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Cathleen Asch
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Michael Galaty
Greg Goggin
Ronald Greenberg
Michael Hoff
Jeffrey Lamia
Lynne Lancaster
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Robert Littman
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Heather McKillop
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Naomi Norman, ex officio
Maria Papaioannou
Eleanor Powers
Paul Rissman
Glenn Schwartz
David Seigle
Chen Shen
Charles Steinmetz
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Claudia Valentino, ex officio
Shelley Wachsmann
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C. Brian Rose
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Elizabeth Bartman
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to use it. Well, youre not alone. Computers without the cluttered look of the normal
were supposed to make our lives simpler, but computer screen. The buttons on the screen
theyve gotten so complicated that they are not are easy to see and easy to understand. All
worth the trouble. With all of the pointing you do is touch one of them, from the Web,
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Drought
Doomed
Angkor?
the region being more weathered during Angkorian times due to people using the land for intensive agriculture,
says Mary-Beth Day of Cambridge University, lead author of the study.
It is believed that Angkor, already
suering from deforestation and conflict with other kingdoms, overtaxed its
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19
An Elite Viking
Community
Written on Agate
rchaeologists have uncovered a Viking cemetery dating to the turn of the eleventh century
A.D. near the central Polish town of Bodzia. The
graveyard holds close to 50 peoplewarriors and their
familiesand consists of neatly arranged plots enclosed
by wooden fences, each containing up to three burials in
wooden caskets with iron fixtures.
20
talian archaeologists working at the sanctuary of TasSilg on Malta have discovered an agate fragment with
a Middle Babylonian cuneiform inscription dating to
the thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C. Found more than
1,500 miles from Mesopotamia, where cuneiform was u
used, it is the westernmost
example o
of the script ever found.
T
The fragment, which was
o
originally part of a crescentsh
shaped votive object mounted on a pole or hung on a rope,
mention
mentions the religious center of
Nippur, tthe moon god Sin, and
of at least five people. Acthe names o
project director Alberto Cacording to pro
dicult to know how and when
zzella, its dicu
the artifact arrive
arrived in Malta. He believes it
was probably plundered during a war, taken to Greece, and
then perhaps traded between the Mycenaean Greeks and the
Cypriot world, which at the time included Malta.
JARRETT A. LOBELL
he transition from hunting and gathering in the Paleolithic period to sedentary agricultural lifestyles
in the Neolithic may have been a long process,
according to a research team working at Kharaneh IV, a
20,000-year-old site in Jordan. There, archaeologists uncovered the remains of two huts and plant and animal remains that show the site was occupied continually across a
thousand-year time spanbut only for several months at a
time. The landscape
is arid today, but back
then it was grassland
that provided stable
food sources, including herds of gazelle,
wild cereal grains and
other plants, and small
stands of trees that
provided more food
and hut-building materials. The study builds on evidence from
other sites in Jordan and Israel. We can actually say now, with
evidence, that there was a widespread pattern of people staying put in larger groups, and starting to build the environment
around them, says Lisa Maher of the University of California,
Berkeley, one of the lead archaeologists on the project.
ZACH ZORICH
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WORLD ROUNDUP
UTAH: The
2010 blaze that
gutted the Provo
Tabernacle, a
meeting place
for members
of the Mormon
Church, created
an opportunity
to excavate the remains of the
citys first such building. The
old meetinghouse, which was
torn down on the site in 1919,
would have been the center of
religious and cultural life for the
pioneers who founded the city.
Finds include parts of the stone
foundation and stone frames that
held stained glass above the door.
22
PERU: At two
tw mounds dating to
between 4,000 a
and 6,500 years ago,
dete
archaeologists have determined
how ancient
Peruvians liked their cornpopped and ground into
flour. Among the finds were starch grains, husks,
kernels, stalks, tassels, and cobs of species that leant
themselves to either popping or grinding. Before this
find, li
little if anything was
kn
known about how
c
corn was used in
tthese early years of
its cultivation.
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T
TURKEY:
Getting a
b
bad piece of fruit is
ffrustratingits not like
y
you can return itbut few
w
would hire a magician to
c
curse the man who sold
it to you. In a well in the ancient
city of Antioch was a lead tablet
inscribed with a curse directed
at a greengrocer named Babylas,
according to the first published
translation. The curse, which may
actually have been authored by a
business rival almost 2,000 years
ago, insults his mothers polluted
womb and calls for the gods to
drown and chill his soul.
By Samir S. Patel
EUROPE...
TO THE MYSTERIES
OF THE
PA
PAPUA
NEW GUINEA:
A mysterious two-inchlo
long tool had scientists
b
baffled.
The 3,300-yearo gouge, made of a
old
r
rare
form of jade called
ja
jadeite,
was found on
E
Emirau Island. Its jadeite
is different from any
geologists had ever seen, with the
closest match being from distant
Mexico. A possible solution came
from an unpublished manuscript
by a German scientist who found
some strange rocks on the Irian
Jaya mainland (the Indonesian half
of New Guinea) 100 years ago.
Analysis is ongoing, but the finds
appear to be a close match.
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An aerial view shows the immense administrative building constructed around 500 B.C. and used until
the 2nd century A.D. as it appeared after more than 10 years of excavation. Early 2nd-century redslipped dishes, part of a set found in the buildings courtyard, were imported from coastal Syria.
24
vk.com/englishlibrary
Excavating
Tel Kedesh
by Andrea Berlin and Sharon Herbert
In 1997, archaeologists Sharon Herbert and Andrea
Berlin began an excavation project at Tel Kedesh, an
enormous mound located in the rural interior of Israels
Upper Galilee region. More than a decade later, they
have completed the first phase of their work and reflect
on how the site brought them a story far dierent from
the one they had gone looking for.
2
B.C.) and a plateau-like
lower tell likely constructed in the Middle
Bronze Age ((23001550 B.C.). Since our
research interests
inte
focused on a relatively
short period
perio in the sites long history, we
hoped to devise
d
a strategy that would
allow us to
t reach those levels rapidly.
In 1997, we began by surveying the
entirety o
of the lower tell along two
broad nort
north-south and east-west transects. N
Next we excavated two small
test trenches to discover the
www.archaeology.org
eology.org
vk.com/englishlibrary
25
I
26
important di
discoveries occur on the
last days of aan excavation season, and
what happened: We found
thats exactly w
with less than a week to
the bullae w
go in 1999. There was no
time to clean them all or fintim
ish excavating the room in
is
which theyd been found, so
w
these were the top priorith
vk.com/englishlibrary
Artifacts of Administration
www.archaeology.org
vk.com/englishlibrary
27
28
vk.com/englishlibrary
sim
simply
too large in value.
It might have belonged
tto a high-ranking Ptoleemaic official, who
would have traveled to
wo
Kedesh to meet with one
Ked
of his Seleucid counterparts
and br
brought the coin as a
diplomatic gift. The findspot
diplomat
within a w
wall of the granary suggests that it had been stolen and
hidden, likely by somebody who
worked in this part of the complex.
Tel
Kedesh to investigate life on
the border more than 2,000
years ago. No ancient author recorded
an ocial presence here and it occupied
an area and a time outside the pages of
history. Tel Kedesh, until 1997, remained
unexcavated and the surrounding region
largely unexplored. Our curiosity about
this border area led to the discovery of a
building of enormous size and complexity, and its expensive decoration and the
vari
variety and quantity of artifacts uncovered have revealed a
do
dominating administrative presence in the Kedesh valley
aand the Upper Galilee lasting nearly 350 years. Now that
tthe excavation phase of the project is at an end and we
work through the thousands of objects we discovered, we
w
aare asking questions that only archaeological evidence can
aanswer: How did provincial elites and the workers who
catered to them live? What was the relationship between
ca
thi
this ocial collection complex and nearby settlements? Did
status items and the cosmopolitan culture they represent
stat
trickle out, or did local ocials live in a kind of elite bubble,
tric
with their own supplies of specialty goods? And perhaps
most interesting, how do the social, economic, and cultural
conditions reflected in the architecture and artifacts relate
to periods of political calm and turmoil? As we turn from the
excitement of excavation to the necessity of final report writing, we must now shift our focus from looking for artifacts
to looking for answers.
E ORIGINALLY
ORIGI
CAME TO
vk.com/englishlibrary
29
Ancient
Germanys
Metal Traders
A postCold War construction
boom is exposing evidence of a
powerful Bronze Age culture
by Andrew Curry
30
demand for weapons and tools. What they were doing buried
outside of Dermsdorf became the question.
We had had signs of a settlement from the Middle Ages,
but we had no clue there were Bronze Age finds, says Kssner.
Before uncovering the ax heads, the only things the team had
turned up were post moldsdark stains in the soil that show
where wooden posts had once been planted as a frame for a
house. With the discovery of the axes, Kssner and his team
began taking a harder look at the surrounding area. Soon they
found more post molds, dozens of them, enough to trace where
the walls of a structure 35 feet wide and nearly 150 feet long
had been. Based on the width of the walls and the spacing of
the posts, Kssner estimates that the roofs peak would have
been nearly 30 feet above the ground. Inside the walls, a double
row of posts ran the length of the building, creating a central
chamber. Altogether, the structure covered 5,000 square feet,
vk.com/englishlibrary
for miles. A few hundred yards away was a cemetery with dozens of burials. At least two other Bronze Age villages were also
found within a mile of Dermsdorf as part of the rescue excavations for the highway construction. The villages and burial
sites all date to within a century of each other and are part of
what has proven to be a densely settled Bronze Age landscape.
Y THE LATTER HALF of the twentieth century, historical circumstances had brought research on Germanys
prehistory to a halt. In the 1930s, some impressive finds
at sites dating to the Bronze Age and earlier became part of
the Nazi propaganda narrative. The Nazis claimed that the
archaeological sites were proof of a prehistoric German nation
stretching across most of Europe. The Nazis tried to prove all
culture was from Germany, which was a joke, Kssner says.
Researchers of the time went so far as to measure the skel-
vk.com/englishlibrary
31
netice
culture.
etons found in Bronze Age graves to show that the people had
been Nordic, in an eort to prove an ancestral link to modern
Germans. Nazi propaganda claimed European culture originated in Germany, then spread south, Kssner says. German
archaeology is for meindigenous, blood-bound Germanic and
Indo-Germanic prehistory, wrote Hans Reinerth, the Reich
Deputy of German Prehistory. Our spadework has the preeminent goalof illuminating our hitherto neglected indigenous
prehistory, he continued. After the war, German archaeologists
stayed away from studying sites in their own nation in order to
avoid being associated with the Nazis and their dubious science.
They ruined it for another 50 years, Kssner adds.
After the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, infrastructure
investment poured into the former East Germany. Since then,
construction of new highways, train tracks, gas pipelines, and
power lines has been preceded by archaeological surveys and
digs intended to recover parts of the past before construction
erases them forever. The study of the German Bronze Age has
boomed once again, thanks in part to rescue excavations like
the one at Dermsdorf.
Carbon dating, ceramics analysis, and burial practices
suggest that the Dermsdorf sites belonged to the ntice
culture, which dated from 2300 to about 1600 B.C. As soon
as the Dermsdorf graves were opened Kssner could see the
people had been buried in the ntice style. Theyre buried
in a fetal position, always lying on their right sides with their
32
heads pointed south, Kssner says. That way theyre looking toward the rising sun. ntice-style ceramic vessels with
concave sides were also found at the site.
The ntice culture was first identified at a site near Prague
in the 1870s. Since then, ntice artifacts have turned up
at sites in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland. The
ntice people were adept metal workers, producing distinctive styles of ax heads, daggers, and a type of spearhead called
a halberd, which could be used for both stabbing and slashing.
The ntice people controlled the area around the only known
source of tin on the continent. Tin is an important ingredient
in manufacturing bronze, which put the ntice people in a
good position to control a large part of the European metal
trade. ntice dominates the routes from north to south,
says Harald Meller, head of the State Museum of Prehistory
in the nearby town of Halle. In the Bronze Age, you needed
copper and tin, the same way you need lithium for the battery
of your iPhone.
Grave goods recovered from ntice sites show the extent
of their trade networks. Amber, finely worked flint knives, and
reindeer antler connect archaeological sites in the region to
Denmark, northern Poland, and Sweden. Metal axes similar
to those found in what is now Hungary and Romania are also
found in ntice graves. Broad-bladed bronze axes, shaped in
a style best known from Scotland and Ireland, have also turned
up. All of the trade moving through their territory made the
ntice people wealthy, especially their rulers.
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more than a pound. The Leubingen chieftain and the people who built the Dermsdorf house all lived within a few generations
of each other. Kssner says the men and
women buried in the Dermsdorf cemetery
could have been the grandparents or parents
of the people who erected the Leubingen
burial mound.
There are only a handful of similar grave
mounds in the area, suggesting that the
ntice culture had a definite hierarchy.
We know it was a stratified society, Kssner says. People with political or religious
power had a better life. In contrast to the
occupant of the burial mound, the people
buried at the Dermsdorf cemetery had
much simpler graves than the chieftains.
They were buried with some ceramic
pots, shell beads, maybe some small bronze
piecesa pin, a ring, Kssner says. But
nothing like the immense riches we found
in the house or in the grave mound.
Under Bronze
Age Heavens
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Inside a laboratory
of the oceanographic
vessel Jean Charcot,
an array of screens
display sonar images
of the wreck of
Titanic, part of the
effort to create the
first comprehensive
archaeological
map of the site.
Archaeology
of Titanic
It has been 100 years since it sank, and 27
years since it was rediscovered. Now the wreck
of Titanic has nally become what it was
always meant to be: an archaeological site.
by James P. Delgado
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black-andwhite photographs depicted it departing the Irish coast in 1912. Humans first visited the wreck
the following year in the research submersible Alvin, peering
out of small portholes. In 1987, another submersible, Nautile,
glided over the site, and with a robotic arm carefully picked
up the first of 1,800 artifacts it would recover from the mud
during that expedition.
Since then, a new era has dawned in our quest to study the
past that lies at the bottom of the ocean. In 2010 two highly
sophisticated robotic vehicles systematically crisscrossed the
seabed on their own, with high-resolution sonar and camera
systems, creating the first comprehensive map of the Titanic
site. Another robot, at the end of a fiber-optic cable, sent to
the surface live, full-color, 3-D images, allowing scientists to
virtually walk the decks of the ship. This latest research eort,
of which I was a part, represents a paradigm shift in underwater archaeology. For the first time, Titanic can be treated and
explored like any other underwater siteeven extreme depth
is no longer an obstacle to archaeology. Thanks to rapid technological advances and interdisciplinary work, archaeologists
have a whole new perspective on sites such as Titanic, and new
questions to ask, questions we never could have dreamed of
when underwater archaeology began just 50 years ago.
developing, so was underwater archaeology. Its specific techniques and methods began to emerge in the
late 1950s, through pioneers such as Jacques Yves Cousteau,
Frederic Dumas, Peter Throckmorton, Honor Frost, and
George Bass. Their work culminated in Bass first complete
underwater excavation of a shipwrecka Bronze Age vessel
at Cape Gelidonya, Turkeyin 1960. When asked by col-
36
leag
leagues
whether proper archaeology could
be done
d
underwater, Bass said that archaeology was archaeology, regardless of where it
was performed. Since then, thousands of
wa
underwater archaeological sites, from shipun
wrecks to prehistoric sites to submerged
wr
cities, have been located, documented, and
cit
excavated. And advanced diving, especially
ex
mixed-gas technology, has allowed divers
m
to go deeper and stay longer, without the
muddling eects of pressurized air on the
m
brain. However, deep sites still lay beyond
b
tthe reach of divers.
Ironically, the first steps in expanding
underwater
archaeology to the depths
u
were propelled by the Titanic disaster
itself, as the first sonar systems were
developed and tested after the sinking to
locate and avoid iceb
icebergs. This technology improved through
the two world wars an
and into the Cold War, moving into deeper
waters, until its most dramatic discovery to dateTitanic. But
even in 1985, the idea that Titanic could be explored, photographed, and mapped like an archaeological site seemed like
the stu of science fiction.
The introduction of the global positioning system (GPS)
was the next big step, providing a platform on which to integrate sonar data with increasingly sophisticated maps and
satellite imagery. Better robotic systems also evolved, as well
as manned submersibles that could travel even deeper than
Titanic. But the submersibles are hardly the same as diving
on a site. They are built on Cold War technology, with tiny
crew compartments surrounded by life support, thrusters,
batteries, lights, cameras, and sonar systems. Lying face down,
neck craned upward in the cold, dark capsules, scientists peer
through small portholes and rely on deployed instruments and
mechanical arms to interact with the environment outside.
My first submersible dive was in 2000, in a Russian Mirclass sub, to assess the wreck and cultural tourism at the
Titanic site. I was struck by both the extreme conditions and
the incredible skill that these unsung pilots need to safely
launch, dive, navigate, and ascend. As submersible pilot PaulHenry Nargeloet of the salvage and exhibition company RMS
Titanic Inc. noted, those missions to Titanic were merely
glimpses through a keyhole. I spent my submersible dive
with my forehead pressed for hours against the cold steel of
a Mir hull to stare through four-inch-thick PlexiglasI know
exactly what he means. Each of those dives added incrementally to our knowledge of Titanic, but the ability to do a basic
detailed survey, map with accuracy, and measurelet alone
impose the archaeological discipline of a grid and units, as
one would on a divable underwater siteremained elusive.
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38
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40
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41
RETHINKING
THE THUNDERING
How herding nomads created the network
that carried civilization across Central Asia
more than 4,000 years ago
by Andrew Lawler
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HORDES
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F
44
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use horses until well into the second millennium B.C., and
the varieties of sheep and goat found here today appear to be
related to the varieties first domesticated thousands of years
before in western Iran, near ancient Mesopotamia. This indicates that Begash was at the crossroads of extremely wide
networks among Eurasian communities by the third millennium B.C., asserts Frachetti. That doesnt mean that traders
traversed thousands of miles in this early period. Instead,
the archaeologist envisions pastoralists taking their flocks
to higher pastures in the summer, where they encountered
neighbors from other valleys doing the same. Thus, ideas
and technologies might have passed gradually through the
mountain corridors of southern Central Asia. This corridor,
Frachetti believes, may have been a key conduit for Bronze
Age developments farther into East Asia and Mongolia. Frachettis team is now busy analyzing both human and animal
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46
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www.archaeology.org
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47
Games Ancient
People Played
An intriguing discovery in a Mexican swamp provides evidence of the
earliest form of amusement in the Americas
by Barbara Voorhies
Professor Emerita Barbara Voorhies of the University of California,
Santa Barbara, has spent much of her career investigating Mesoamericas
Archaic period, the time when people were on the verge of practicing
agriculture and settling in permanent villages. Over a span of nearly 35
years, she has excavated on several occasions at the 5,000-year-old site
of Tlacuachero in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
48
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have stood. Also on the floors were groups of tiny holes in oval
patterns. These oval features are clustered only in one area of
the floors, but why they were made has been a mystery ever
since the first one was found. Features like these are often
interpreted by archaeologists as being either purely utilitarian
or purely ritualistic, which leaves out a whole range of human
activities that has nothing to do with religion or making a living. But an answer to the question of what the oval features
were used for may have been provided by an unlikely sourcea
book titled Games of the North American Indians, published in
1907, by Stewart Culin. Were the oval features used to play a
game? Historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence
supports this idea.
Culins book pulled together ethnographic accounts showing that board games were played by societies across the area
that is now Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Nearly
all of the board games Culin compiled were variations on one
of two themes: wars and races. In war games, the object is to
capture your opponents pieces, as in checkers. In race games,
the winner is the first player to move his or her pieces to a
goalCandyland and Snakes and Ladders are modern versions
of race games. The boards themselves were usually impro-
This 16th-century image shows Aztecs playing a game called patolli, next to Macuilxochitl, the god of games, whom gamblers
prayed to for luck. His name translates as Five Flower, shown here by the flower he holds and five circles.
50
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Archaeological evidence of
Archae
game playing is widespread in
Mesoamerica. A game board
Mesoa
carved into a stone (above)
carve
was ffound at Piedras Negras in
Guatemala. This statue of the
Guat
Aztec god Macuilxochitl
Azte
(left) dates to the 15th
(left
16th century.
or 16
a p
person who had what we
would consider a gambling
wo
addiction, but instead, he
ad
attributes the persons probat
lem to his having been born
le
on an inauspicious day:
o
He wagered everything
which was in his home.
w
He used up everything
H
in patolli and tlachtli [a
type of ballgame]. The friars
disapproved of the gambling
gamblin and that the gamblers
often
f
invoked
i
k d Macuilxochitl,
M il hi l the
h god of games, for luck.
Macuilxochitl also appears in documents from neighboring
societies, such as the Eastern Nahuas and Mixtecs, indicating that this gaming culture was widespread.
If the oval features at Tlacuachero are indeed game boards,
they are the earliest evidence of people playing games in Mesoamerica. Parts of more than 10 of these ovals have been found
at the site. One of the most telling details is that as the clay
floors were repaired and remade, so were the oval features. For
the fisherfolk of Tlacuachero, game playing had apparently
become one of the necessities of life.
Barbara Voorhies is a professor emerita of the University of
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51
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he approximate location of
the Donner Party encampment at Alder Creek has been
known since the late nineteenth century, but the precise camp spot had
never been pinpointed. Don Hardesty, an archaeologist and professor
emeritus at the University of Nevada,
Reno, searched for the site in the
54
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ter in the otherwise heroic tale of pioneers who settled the American West.
I pictured hundreds of wagons, packed
full of provisions, with calico-clad
children bouncing along the Oregon
Trail to a better life. Not unexpectedly,
Van Pelt saw the story of the Donnersand all westward expansion, for
that matteras a self-serving expedition for land and wealth. To him, their
troubles were symptomatic of greed
rather than bad luck.
Van Pelt urged me to seek out the
wel mel ti, or the tribe now known as
the northern Washoe, to ask what
their oral history says of the Donners.
They were there, and probably saw
them, he said. Van Pelt also warned
me against the negative energy that
lingers in such places of suffering. He
removed from his neck an elaborately
carved shell pendant given to him by
a Florida shaman. On it, two animal
spirits, called splya (coyote in the
Sahaptin language), danced, actively
creating order from chaos. It would
protect me through the turmoil of
the Alder Creek dig, Van Pelt said.
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A THOUSAND YEARS
OF TAOS HISTORY
The archaeological team, co-led by the author (right), located the hearth the
Donners had used that notorious winter.
800.422.8975
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A fragment
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of a writing slate may
have been used by the children
hav
and adults of the Donner Party
for lessons, notes, and speaks,
perhaps, to their desire to
per
maintain a sense of normalcy.
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SITE PRESERVATION
t(SBOUT
t"EWPDBDZ
t0VUSFBDI
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Donate at
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Photos of 4 AIA Site Preservation Grant Funded Sites: Assos, Turkey: AIA/Assos Project; Kissonerga, Cyprus: AIA; Easter Island,
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Chile: Charles Steinmetz; Umm el Jimal, Jordan: AIA/Open
Hand Studios and Umm el Jimal Project;
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he eruption of the
Soufrire Hills Volcano on
Montserrat covered the southern two-thirds of the Caribbean
island under pyroclastic ow and
volcanic ash. The eruption destroyed
Montserrats capital, Plymouth, and
a signicant portion of the islands
prehistoric and historic settlements.
The islands populace was forced to
relocate to the northern part of the
island and a new capital was established in the town of Little Bay.
Subsequent to the tragic destruction of most of the islands historical
sites, the Montserrat National Trust
(MNT) initiated a program to preserve and study the William Carr
Estate, one of the earliest and few
remaining European settlements
on Montserrat. Despite the histori-
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National Archaeology
Day, October 20, 2012
he Archaeological Institute
of America (AIA) is pleased to
announce that National Archaeology Day will be held on October
20, 2012. National Archaeology
Day is a celebration of archaeology
and an opportunity for the AIA and
other like-minded organizations
and individuals to raise awareness
of the discipline across the United
States, Canada, and abroad. In 2011,
National Archaeology Day was ocially recognized by Congress and
more than 14,000 people participated
in over 100 events held throughout
the month of October. To follow this
years program and to nd out about
events in your area, visit
www.nationalarchaeologyday.org. In
addition to events that you can attend,
the AIA will organize a series of online
opportunities that will allow you to
participate in the event from the comfort of your home. Last years virtual
participation opportunities included a
global scavenger hunt and the cooperative creation of a Google Earth layer
showing popular archaeological sites
across the United States and Canada.
An important part of last years
Archaeological Institute of America
NATIONAL
ARCHAEOLOGY
DAY
O C TO B E R 2 0 , 2 0 1 2
www.nationalarchaeologyday.org
66
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Fascinating Itineraries
Expert Lecturers
ARTIFACT
DATE
perhaps surprising, then, to learn from epigraphic evidence that most charioteers were
slaves who began racing as children, and many were foreigners, who came to the sport
to earn fame and fortune. But until the discovery
very of this
figurine, according to archaeologists Sinclair Bell
and Franziska Dvener, no representation of an
African child charioteer had ever been found. Bronze
figurines of Roman charioteers are rarethere
re
WHAT IS IT?
Statuette of an auriga
(charioteer)
2nd century A.D.
MATERIAL
Bronze
DISCOVERED
2005, Altrier,
Luxembourg
Luxembou
SIZE
Muse national
natio
dhistoire et dart
Luxembourg
Luxembou
68
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