Archaeology

Horsepower: Professor unveils a new history of horses

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 19:10:30 +0000

Horsepower: Professor unveils a new history of horses Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/11/2024 - 13:10

Doug McPherson

In his upcoming book, ‘Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,’ William Taylor writes that today’s world has been molded by humans’ relationship to horses

Nearly a million years ago in what is now southern England, human ancestors called Homo heidelbergensis were creating tools from horse bones. Fast forward to about 30,000 years ago, and humans across Europe and northern Eurasia were regularly painting horses on cave walls and carving their likenesses from bone and ivory.

“The connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world,” says William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology at the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ and curator of archaeology for the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Museum of Natural History.

But Taylor says it’s what happened about 4,000 years ago that really changed things. That’s when people living in the grasslands near the Black Sea first domesticated horses.

William Taylor, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology for the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Museum of Natural History, notes that "the connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world.”

And when that happened, Taylor says the effect on the world and the centuries that followed was not a gradual development “but a sudden jolt, a shock to the system” that influenced nearly every aspect of human life―revolutionizing things like transportation, agriculture and warfare.

“After domestication, horses spread like wildfire, stampeding into new societies, creating new partnerships with people that shook up the structure of the ancient world almost everywhere they went,” he explains.

It’s just one of the many insights in Taylor’s new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, available Aug. 6. Taylor’s book also has received the spring 2024 Kayden Book Award from the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ College of Arts and Sciences, with a $5,000 award given annually to a book representing excellence in history and the arts.

In the book, Taylor offers a broad swath of the horse-human connection along with new findings based on more than a decade of researching horse domestication and archeological fieldwork around the globe―in places like the Eurasian steppes, the mountains of inner Asia, the pampas of Argentina and the Great Plains of North America.

“These are places and cultures that have had a tremendous impact on human history, but factors like low population densities, tough weather, difficult fieldwork, lack of written records and bias from written records that do exist have all helped keep that story from being properly integrated into the bigger picture,” Taylor says.

Breaking new ground

Taylor is helping break new ground with his scientific perspective on horse domestication, the timing and origins of which scholars have argued over for decades. Taylor says his book tells “a very different narrative” about the origins of horse domestication, one that’s grounded in interdisciplinary science.

One of the book’s main threads, he says, is to understand that nearly all of the most important facts about horses can be told well only by combining other kinds of information with archaeology.

William Taylor's book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History has received the spring 2024 Kayden Book Award from the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ College of Arts and Sciences.

“The book relies first and foremost on the archaeological record, and to pair the most cutting-edge and up-to-date scientific information with all the other insights we gain from things like ecology, evolutionary biology, oral traditions, historical records and everything in between.”

The book connects this new understanding of horse domestication with new insights into the timing of key innovations, including the origins of horse cavalry and equipment like the saddle and stirrup, which seem to be “closely intertwined with cultures from the steppe,” Taylor says.

One of Taylor’s newest findings is the role ancient people in Mongolia played in innovating the saddle and the stirrup, two technologies that Taylor says most people take for granted today, but which really revolutionized what people could do while mounted.

“Saddles and stirrups allowed folks to do all sorts of things on horseback that were harder before, like staying mounted with heavy armor, bracing for impact with heavy weapons like lances or standing in the saddle for archery. Our recent collaborative scholarship shows that Mongolian cultures were doing this by the 4th or 5th centuries.”

To understand Taylor’s interest in horses, he says it helps to look at his own history. “I first became interested in the human-horse story as a way of understanding my family and their own past,” he says.

His grandfather was a cowboy, and Taylor’s dad grew up with horses, too. Taylor is from the first generation in his family that didn't grow up with horses.

“So, when I started studying the ancient world, I was immediately drawn to understanding horses. One of my first experiences as a student was getting to study the skeleton of a 2,500-year-old horse. That’s when I became really curious about all the things we could learn about people through the study of horse remains. Living in places like Montana or Colorado today, we are still in a legacy horse culture.”

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In his upcoming book, ‘Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,’ William Taylor writes that today’s world has been molded by humans’ relationship to horses.

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Archaeologists unearth top half of Ramesses II

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:59:17 +0000

Archaeologists unearth top half of Ramesses II Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/17/2024 - 10:59

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Team co-led by ��ƷSM��ӰƬ classics researcher unearths the upper portion of a huge, ancient pharaonic statue whose lower half was discovered in 1930; Ramessess II was immortalized in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s ‘Ozymandias’

In 1930, German archaeologist Günther Roeder unearthed the lower half of an enormous statue depicting pharaoh Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, ruler of Egypt some 12 centuries before the common era.

Nearly a century later, an Egyptian-American archaeological team co-led by Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classics at the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, discovered the upper portion of the enormous statue while conducting research in the ruins of the ancient city of Hermopolis, about 150 miles south of Cairo.

The 12.5-foot-long upper half depicts the pharaoh seated and wearing a double crown and headdress topped with a royal cobra. The researchers determined that the complete statue would have stood approximately 23 feet tall when it was erected.

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, ��ƷSM��ӰƬ assistant professor of classics, co-led an Egyptian-American archaeological team that discovered the upper portion of a statue of Ramesses II.

“We knew it might be there, but we were not specifically looking for it,” says Trnka-Amrhein, who teamed up with Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. “It was plausible that the rest of the statue might be there, but it was a total surprise. … Getting the text was amazing.”

Trnka-Amrhein, a specialist in papyri whose PhD dissertation at Harvard University examined a “mostly lost Greek novel” about a pharaoh, had been eager to conduct research in Egypt since researching them at Oxford University as a graduate student.

In 2022, Gehad offered her access to conduct research on a papyrus that turned out to be 98 lines containing “substantial excerpts” of two lost works by Greek playwright Euripides. She soon brought in ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Classics Professor John Gibert, a specialist in tragedy, to continue research on that unusual find.

After the two met, Gehad asked her to co-lead a team of field researchers at Hermopolis. Gehad submitted a proposal and obtained all the necessary permissions to begin work at the site. Theirs was the first major excavation at the site since one led by the British Museum in the 1980s.

“Hermopolis is the second-most productive site for Greek papyri,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “In addition to research, our goal is to preserve the site and make it a viable part of the Egyptian economy.”

Clues to Egypt's history

Trnka-Amrhein was in the United States awaiting the birth of a child when the piece was discovered in a face-down position in January. She and her teammates were thrilled but had to temper their excitement pending further excavation.

“One problem with Hermopolis is that it’s close to the Nile (River). After (the building of) the (the 1902-built) Aswan Low Dam, the water table became a huge issue. There was no guarantee that the stone would be OK. Sometimes sandstone is uncovered that is basically just sand or degraded limestone,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “It could have just been a lump of rock.”

A bas-relief of Ramesses II on his chariot during the Battle of Kadesh on the south wall in the Hypostyle Hall of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, Egypt. (Photo: Diego Delso)

Additional excavation revealed that the pharaonic face was remarkably well preserved. The team even found traces of ancient blue and yellow pigment that can be analyzed to deepen their understanding of the time period and the circumstances of the statue’s creation; Gehad specializes in paintings of the Greco-Roman period.

“It will be quite exciting to have a scientific analysis of the pigment,” Trnka-Amrhein says, noting that soil mixed in with the paint will also be scrutinized for clues to Egypt’s history.

Ramesses II is one of the few Egyptian pharaohs widely known to non-experts in the Western world. He was the inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem, “Ozymandias,” was played by Yul Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s movie The Ten Commandments and voiced by actor Ralph Fiennes in the animated movie The Prince of Egypt.

The lower half of the statue remains at the site and Gehad has submitted a proposal to reunite the two pieces, which Trnka-Amrhein expects will be approved. It’s uncertain what would happen to a reassembled statue, but it would likely remain at the site or be placed in a museum, she says.

In the meantime, the team continues intensive study of the piece, and she hopes they will publish a paper on their work sometime this year. Trnka-Amrhein says she hopes to involve more ��ƷSM��ӰƬ graduate students in the project as it proceeds.

“I came to CU after finishing my PhD because the Classics Department is a really great place where everyone is willing to think outside the box; it’s less canonical than typical classics departments,” she says. “I love Homer and Virgil, but it’s fun to do other things, too.”

Top image: The recently discovered top portion of a limestone statue of Ramesses II unearthed by an Egyptian-U.S. archaeological mission in Al Ashmunein, south of Minya, Egypt. (Photo: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities)

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Team co-led by ��ƷSM��ӰƬ classics researcher unearths the upper portion of a huge, ancient pharaonic statue whose lower half was discovered in 1930; Ramessess II was immortalized in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s ‘Ozymandias.'

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Taking archaeology beyond big discoveries and bullwhips

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Taking archaeology beyond big discoveries and bullwhips Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/29/2024 - 00:00

Rachel Sauer

��ƷSM��ӰƬ archaeologist Sarah Kurnick addresses some common myths about archaeology at the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of China’s terracotta warriors

March 1974 was particularly dry in China’s Shaanxi Province, so at the end of the month a farmer named Yang Zhifa and several brothers who lived near Xi’an began digging a well.

For two days they hacked into the hard, red earth, and on the third day, March 29, Yang struck something terracotta in the soil. It would eventually be discovered as one of the greatest archaeological finds of the century, and arguably of the modern era: the ancient tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first emperor, guarded by thousands of life-size terracotta warriors and horses.

In the 50 years since its discovery, the terracotta army has captivated visitors to what is now an archaeological complex in Xi’an and, perhaps less thrillingly, contributed to one of the enduring myths about archaeology: that the main goal of the field is to make huge discoveries like the terracotta warriors.

Like many archaeologists, Sarah Kurnick, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ assistant professor of anthropology, often encounters common myths about the field and science of archaeology. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

“I think it’s common for people to assume we’re only interested in the very distant past and only interested in things that occur in exotic locations—deserts and jungles or in places like China or Egypt,” says Sarah Kurnick, a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ assistant professor of anthropology and an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in ancient Mesoamerica. “What you tend not to hear as much about are historical archaeologists—people who are studying plantation sites in the American South, for example—or even projects where people are doing archaeology of the contemporary world.”

Thanks to swashbuckling characters like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft and the broad attention given to just a small handful of archaeological discoveries—the terracotta warriors, King Tut’s tomb and Machu Picchu, for example—archaeology has become a field in which myth and reality often dramatically diverge.

At the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of the terracotta army, Kurnick addresses some of the most common myths about the field and science of archaeology.

Myth: If you’re not hacking through jungle vines with a machete, you’re not doing archaeology

People don’t really think of archaeologists teaching classes or doing research in libraries, doing data analysis. There’s the idea that it’s all field work and that field work is entirely excavation. I don’t think it’s commonly known how much technology has changed and advanced the field. There’s ground-penetrating radar—which doesn’t work in all environments, but it can find anomalies—and a whole bunch of aerial survey methods. LIDAR is a big one. The idea is to rent a plane and fly over a survey area back and forth in straight lines while you’re sending a laser down. That creates what are almost photographs of the topography, and it’s a way of looking at large swaths of land and getting rid of levels of trees, essentially.

But field work, if you’re a field archaeologist, is just part of it. Archaeologists work in labs, they write code to analyze data, they do text-based research. Unfortunately, that’s not very glamorous.

Myth: Archaeology is for men

I do think there’s a common misconception that archaeology is this masculine endeavor—that archaeologists are men and it’s all hardship and ruggedness and strength and alcohol. There’s a famous archaeologist, Alfred Kidder, who said in the early 1940s that there are two types of archaeologists in popular imagination: the hairy chested and the hairy chinned. You’ve got the hairy chested, rugged explorer with his shirt unbuttoned, with the pith helmet and bullwhip—the Indiana Jones type—and then you think of his father, an older gentleman with a beard and a jacket with elbow patches, decoding ancient texts. Those are the two types—or myths—of archaeologists people think of, and they’re both men.

Sarah Kurnick, left, and colleagues hike to the Punta Laguna archaeology site in Mexico's Yucutan Peninsula. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

Although much has changed since the 1940s, women in archaeology still deal sometimes with this macho, masculine feel to archaeology—this sense that archaeologists are the cowboys of science and it’s not a field for women because we can’t carry buckets of dirt or cut vines down with machetes, which is obviously not true.

Myth: Archaeologists deal in the supernatural

There’s a lot of pseudo-archaeology stuff out there—this notion that the past was significantly influenced by aliens or people from the lost city of Atlantis. If I meet a random person on a plane sitting next to me and they ask what I do and I say I’m an archeologist, a lot of the time they’ll start talking about something related to pseudo-archaeology. Almost everybody gets information about archaeology from television and movies, and if you look at the types of movies and TV shows, you’ve got things like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, and on TV there’s “Ancient Aliens” and “America Unearthed.” You’ve got “Ancient Apocalypse” listed as a documentary on Netflix.

There’s this disconnect between what archaeologists are saying and what people want to know. In some instances, I do think people might be geared toward the wrong questions, but on other hand, I think archaeologists do a pretty poor job of communication and are not really meeting people where they’re at.

For archaeology, like most science, it’s still the 'publish or perish' model, and generally the peer-reviewed publications are considered much more important than public outreach. There’s still sometimes a stigma associated with public outreach. But it’s important not to turn people off. We need to do a better job of engaging people in the science in a way that’s interesting and relevant.

[video:https://youtu.be/W59CV66z9lQ?si=5Umhwxvagh6QzZGU]

Myth: Archaeologists are treasure hunters

Unfortunately, this is something that’s still being perpetuated by the History Channel, National Geographic and other organizations. There was a documentary several years ago that was all about LIDAR—which makes sense because LIDAR is awesome and the images it produces are amazing—and they interviewed real archaeologists who work in Central America. But whoever wrote the narrative for the documentary kept talking about LIDAR-facilitated treasure hunting and about how you have a map and X marks the spot and LIDAR shows you where that X is.

Also, I think there’s not a great understanding of what happens to artifacts once they’ve been excavated—how complicated and difficult and ethically fraught the next steps are. The notion of who owns the past is a huge question. I also think people assume that archaeologists pocket some things they find, or that they’re insisting everything belongs in a museum. Archaeology has historically been a colonial endeavor, and we’re doing things very differently now than in the past. I’m on the Society for American Archaeology Decolonization Task Force, and part of our work is recognizing that yes, our past is problematic, but we’re working to do things differently now.

Sarah Kurnick (seated left, blue shirt) discusses the Punta Laguna archaeological project with residents who live near the site. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

Myth: All archaeologists want to work in Egypt

Ancient China, Egypt, ancient Maya—these are the things that people assume archaeologists should do and want to do. But it would be so disappointing if that was all we wanted to do. There’s so much exciting historical archaeology and contemporary archaeology happening. There’s a famous archaeologist named Bill Rathje who said we should be looking at trash to learn about ways of life and suggested excavating landfills in the present. Because of his work, we learned all sorts of insights about consumer habits, about what people recycle and don’t recycle, what does and doesn’t degrade in a landfill.

There are really cool historical projects in Colorado—one that Bonnie Clark and her colleagues are leading is learning more about a Japanese internment camp at Amache, and I don’t think people commonly think of doing the archaeology of World War II. Another project by Dean Saitta and his colleagues is looking at some of the early labor movements and the violent interactions between labor and capitalists in the region, and an aspect of that is looking at the Ludlow Massacre and the history of miners.

One thing that’s really exciting about archaeology is it’s in many ways democratizing. If we look at history, oftentimes the people we know the most about are the most elite—the 1%. When we have the extraordinary finds—the terracotta warriors, King Tut’s tomb—we’re learning about the top echelons of those societies. But for a lot of archaeologists, we’re interested in the 99%. Finding these aspects of daily life in households can be just as exciting, if not more exciting, than the huge discoveries. We’re finding out about how things were for most people, rather than just the upper echelons. There’s an emerging field of household archaeology that’s excavating houses and figuring out what daily life was like, how did people interact. We’d be getting a really warped picture of the world if the only things we knew about our past came from royal tombs.

Myth: Archaeologists look for dinosaur bones

No, that’s paleontologists.

Top image: Terracotta army in Xi'an, China (Photo: iStock); Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (Photo: Paramount/Everett Collection)

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��ƷSM��ӰƬ archaeologist Sarah Kurnick addresses some common myths about archaeology at the 50th anniversary of the discovery of China’s terracotta warriors.

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Anthropologist finds that South American cultures quickly adopted horses

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:25:43 +0000

Anthropologist finds that South American cultures quickly adopted horses Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/14/2023 - 11:25

Doug McPherson

��ƷSM��ӰƬ Assistant Professor William Taylor’s new study offers a telling glimpse into the lives of humans and horses in South America

A new study from a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ researcher, conducted with colleagues in Argentina, sheds new light on how the introduction of horses in South America led to rapid economic and social transformation in the region.

William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology in the Museum of Natural History at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, says this research shows that the story about people and horses in the Americas is “far more dynamic” than previously thought.

��ƷSM��ӰƬ researcher William Taylor has found that once horses were introduced to South America, horse-based ways of life spread rapidly across the continent.

“Our findings from Patagonia show that the spread of horses, the emergence of horse-based ways of life in the southernmost areas of South America, was both rapid and largely independent of European control,” says Taylor, who has studied horses since 2011. “From almost their first arrival on the shores of the Americas in the 16^th century, horses had an impact at a continental scale.”

Juan Bautista Belardi, a professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral in Argentina and Taylor’s research colleague, and his team in Patagonia conducted all the field research at a canyon site called Chorrillo Grande 1 in southern Argentina. They unearthed the remains of an Aónikenk/Tehuelche campsite (people of the Indigenous Tehuelche nation traditionally used horses for hunting, transportation, warfare and food) that included horse bones, artifacts and metal ornaments.

Belardi says he believes the Chorrillo Grande 1 camp is just one of the many archaeological sites spread across the canyon.

“As far as we can tell, the human occupation of the canyon started at least around 3,500 years ago,” Belardi says. “This is very important, because it allows us to model how hunter-gatherers used the landscape.”

An introduction to horses

Taylor and his colleagues at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ then used DNA sequencing, radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis on the items Belardi’s team uncovered.

“The use of genetic and isotopic data showed a life history of the horses, where they were raised and their mobility between valleys,” Belardi says. “Horses changed the way hunter-gatherers used the landscape and, of course, this has had great influences on social and ideological life.”

Artifacts found at the Chorrillo Grande 1 site include Venetian glass beads (top), horse bones and teeth (middle) and metal artifacts including nails and ornaments (bottom). Photos: Juan Bautista Belardi

Taylor and Belardi say that when hunter-gathers first encountered horses, they were quick to begin using them.

“The advantages clearly showed up as soon as people had horses—the chance to save energy riding them, to extend the radius of hunting parties, less time needed to find prey and the ease to transport things, among others,” Belardi says. “Plus, horses could be consumed and their hides used. It was a great change that impacted all economic and social aspects of life in Patagonia.”

Taylor says horses reshaped the landscape of the ancient world by connecting people across vast distances; by transforming the grasslands into thriving cultural, economic and political centers; and during colonization, they helped maintain sovereignty for many peoples around the world.

“Even in 2023, these roles and impacts are still visible just under the surface of the world around us,” Taylor says.

Taylor first became interested in studying what he calls the “human-horse story” as a way of understanding his family and its past.

“My grandfather was a cowboy, and my dad grew up with horses, but I'm from the first generation in my family that didn't,” Taylor says. “So, when I got into the study of the ancient world, I was immediately drawn to understanding people and horses.”

One of his first experiences as a student was studying the skeleton of a 2,500-year-old horse. “After that, I became curious about everything I could learn about people by studying horse remains. Living in places like Montana or Colorado today, we’re still in a legacy horse culture.”

He also has a book coming out later this year from the University of California Press, telling the global history of the human-horse story called Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History.

Taylor says he views this latest research as “not yet completed” and hopes that the study will serve as a platform for launching researchers toward a wider investigation of the role of horses in ancient Argentina and South America.

“We hope to build on this work to continue to collaboratively explore the role of horses in shaping life in Patagonia and Argentina,” he says, “and connect this record with our research in other parts of the ancient world.”

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Assistant Professor William Taylor’s new study offers a telling glimpse into the lives of humans and horses in South America.

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Museum creates science teaching tools for deaf students

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 22:11:37 +0000

Museum creates science teaching tools for deaf students Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/24/2023 - 16:11

Katie Langford

CU Museum of Natural History launches pilot for science-education tools using American Sign Language

A team at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History is working with education and disability advocates to create science-education resources for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

Funded through a $22,800 grant from the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Office for Outreach and Engagement, university staff are collaborating with educators and experts to develop free archeology, paleontology and biology lessons in American Sign Language, Spanish and English available to the public online.

“The COVID-19 pandemic drove home in a relatively immediate and urgent way just how serious the impact is on all communities that are losing access to education resources,” says William Taylor, assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archeology at the CU Museum of Natural History.

William Taylor, curator of archaeology in the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Museum of Natural History, is part of a team creating educational resources for children who are deaf or hard of hearing.

“I think we observed that some of the communities that are hardest hit by the impact are those that are underserved to begin with.”

Creating inclusive science education

The idea to create science education tools in ASL, as well as Spanish and other languages, was a long time coming for Taylor and Cecily Whitworth, project co-directors and siblings.

Taylor and Whitworth, a former linguistics professor who now works in advocacy with Montana Family ASL, each brought a distinct perspective to the project.

Whitworth, who is deaf, says her approach to the project has roots in seeing how inadequate education resources affect deaf children in rural communities.

It’s not unusual for there to be only one deaf child in a rural town or school district, and with resources far away or otherwise inaccessible, language deprivation is “a huge problem,” Whitworth says.

While newborn-hearing screenings are the norm, deaf children can still miss out on weeks, months or even years of language acquisition before and after they’re identified.

“If the family lives a far distance away from a big city or maybe decides they don’t want to rely on ASL, the infant continues to miss out on a lot of typical language acquisition milestones, and that causes permanent problems throughout their life,” Whitworth says.

Rural communities may not have ASL classes or a deaf community to support families, Whitworth adds. That’s where online education resources for deaf children can start to bridge the gap.

Taylor says Whitworth’s experience is the reason he enters museums thinking about whether the content is being shared with the deaf community.

Cecily Whitworth, who works in advocacy with Montana Family ASL and who is deaf, created illustrations for the ASL educational materials, including the ASL words for archaeology (left) and hat (right).

“The truth of the matter is that at most museums, especially smaller museums that struggle with funding, that are understaffed and reactive rather than strategic with their planning, the folks that get the short shrift with content, accessibility and science education are the disabled community,” Taylor says. “That’s true at every museum, but it’s also true at our museum.”

Highlighting excellence

The program’s first lesson, “Let’s Talk About Archeology,” is aimed at children ages 4-7 and introduces them to Amelia Dall, an archeologist who is deaf, who talks about what archeologists do and what tools they need in the field. Dall uses ASL, and the video includes English captions.

Students can also learn ASL archeology vocabulary and fill out a worksheet.

Taylor and Whitworth developed the materials along with the museum’s archeology team, Montana Family ASL and other public-education experts, who met to decide what core concepts to introduce through the lesson and how to make it accessible for young children.

“One of the things about the project is we want to have it not just be an archeologist talking in ASL translation. We want deaf scientists and educators to present directly to kids, because there’s something special about learning it in their language,” Taylor says.

Archaeologist Amelia Dall, who is deaf, explains archaeology in ASL for the video "Let's Talk About Archaeology."

While the concepts being taught are simple, the lessons give kids a chance to encounter deaf scientists, Whitworth says.

“I think that’s where the potential long-lasting impact is of a project like this, to show people excellence and show them you can do this. Those hopes and dreams can get hard-wired when you’re really young,” Whitworth says. “Deaf, hard-of-hearing youth and other minority children often don’t think they can achieve those goals or do those jobs.”

In the coming months, the team plans to launch similar lessons for biology and paleontology, offer lessons in Spanish and potentially expand into other areas of study.

“Our hope with this project is we get other folks excited to develop resources for things like planetary sciences, engineering—there’s a whole diverse range of exciting academic fields and sciences,” Taylor says. “We want for folks to come forward and say, ‘We want to add our voice to this project.’”

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CU Museum of Natural History launches pilot for science-education tools using American Sign Language

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Ghosts, global warming and hunter-gatherers

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 21:05:21 +0000

Ghosts, global warming and hunter-gatherers Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/15/2023 - 15:05

Daniel Long

A recently published paper co-authored by ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Fernando Villanea offers new insights into what happened to the populations of Central Mexico a millennium ago

Between 1,100 and 900 years ago in modern-day Mexico, a series of droughts spurred on by global warming forced the nomadic hunter-gatherers of Aridoamerica to migrate south into the more verdant Mesoamerica, geographical home of the Aztecs and Mayans.

Until recently, archaeologists assumed that, over time, these hunter-gatherers replaced their agricultural neighbors to the south. Yet that assumption was rooted solely in archaeological evidence, which, according to ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Assistant Professor of Archaeology Fernando Villanea, can be tricky to interpret.

“There’s always a problem when it comes to looking at archaeological remains, when you think there is a chance of two different groups of people going into each other,” Villanea says.

“You find artifacts layered in time, and then you see them change, and you don’t really know what’s happening. You don’t know if these people are merging. You don’t know if one group is replacing the other. You don’t know if one group is learning from the other.”

Approximately 1,000 years ago, global warming caused the border between Aridoamerica and Mesoamerica to shift south. The hunter-gatherers who lived in Aridoamerica consequently moved south as well. Image from “Demographic History and Genetic Structure in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico.”

But a recently published paper co-authored by Villanea brings new evidence to bear on the question of who replaced whom in Central Mexico a thousand years ago—or whether anyone was replaced at all.

“Demographic History and Genetic Structure in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico,” published May 12 in Science, reveals that the genetic structure of people as far back as 1,400 years ago strongly resembles that of people living in Central Mexico today—a finding that all but disproves the population-replacement hypothesis.

“The genetic results say that these two groups of people’’—the Aridoamericans and the Mesoamericans—“probably just merged into each other,” says Villanea.

For the study, Villanea and his colleagues compared the DNA of people who lived along the Mesoamerican northern frontier before the onslaught of droughts with people who lived in the same area after the droughts.

The DNA itself came from the subjects’ bones.

“Your bone is living tissue, and it’s constantly repaired,” Villanea explains. “As you grow, you make more bone, and when you make that bone, a lot of cells get stuck between the bone layers. And it turns out, that is a perfect chemical condition to preserve DNA for a long time.”

This preserved DNA taught Villanea and his colleagues that the genetic structure of the people of Central Mexico has had much greater continuity than once thought.

But that’s not all it taught them. It also turned up two strands of previously unknown “ghost DNA,” or DNA that can be found in ancient remains but not in people alive today.

Ghost DNA is a common phenomenon, Villanea says, and when it shows up, there are two possible explanations.

The first is that there are living people who share the ghost DNA but whose genes simply haven’t been sampled, and the other is that the original owners of the ghost DNA didn’t leave any descendants. Because scientists have made so much progress sampling DNA from all over the world, Villanea believes the latter explanation is likelier.

In the case of Villanea’s study, the two strands of ghost DNA, having never before emerged, add new layers of complexity to the demographic history of Central Mexico, which Villanea says is exciting.

Yet what he finds perhaps even more exciting are not the study’s findings themselves but how the study was done.

“The real story is that this was a group of Mexican scientists who did all the ancient DNA sequencing in Mexico, in their own labs, and they were able to tell the story of the people of Mexico for themselves.”

Assistant Professor of Archaeology Fernando Villanea.

Often, Villanea says, projects like this are done via “helicopter research,” whereby researchers from the Global North fly into lower-income countries, collect samples and return home to publish their findings, all without consulting local scientists or providing any benefit to local communities.

Villanea and his colleagues took a different approach.

“This is the first time that we’ve seen a major study come from a lab in a country outside the Global North,” he says. That lab is the International Laboratory for Human Genome Research at Universidad Autónoma de Mexico.

Villanea adds that, for him, the research process was “amazing.”

“Out of the 27 authors, most of us are Latin American. All the email correspondence was in Spanish, which is something I’ve never experienced before.”

He smiles when he thinks about it. “It’s a huge win for Mexico.”

A recently published paper co-authored by ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Fernando Villanea offers new insights into what happened to the populations of Central Mexico a millennium ago.

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Archaeologist, classicist wins NEH fellowship

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:51:15 +0000

Archaeologist, classicist wins NEH fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/04/2023 - 14:51

Dimitri Nakassis, classics professor and former ‘genius grant’ winner, lands support from National Endowment for the Humanities to complete paradigm-shifting study of ancient Greece

Dimitri Nakassis, an archaeologist and classicist at the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, has landed a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to advance his paradigm-shifting study of ancient and Mycenaean Greece.

Nakassis, who is professor and chair of the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ Department of Classics and was a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, has won a $60,000 NEH fellowship that will support his research and writing that will yield a book that will challenge the “historical periodization of ancient Greece and the historical construction of Mycenaean Greece as a unified, homogeneous world from 1650 to 1075 BCE.”

Nakassis’ project is titled “Reassembling Mycenaean Greece, ca. 1650–1075 BCE.” It is one of 204 humanities projects that will receive $28.1 million in grants this year.

Top of page: Mycenaean fresco from Mycenae (1250-1180 BCE). Archeaological Museum Mycenae. Above: Dimitri Nakassis (PhD Texas 2006) studies the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece.

In documents outlining his plans, Nakassis notes that the stories that archaeologists tell about the past matter in the here and now. “Yet, although we know that ancient societies were complex and heterogeneous, we often present them as monolithic entities, even as simplifications and caricatures. We are conditioned to do so by a long tradition focused on isolating and studying individual cultures, a tradition that emerged from the search for national, ethnic and even racial origins,” he writes.

This way of thinking perpetuates “simplistic narratives in which such cultures are arranged serially across time to produce master narratives, like the rise of Western civilization,” he observes, adding: “But in order to understand the past productively and accurately, we require approaches that reject categories rooted in racial and ethnic essentialism and instead embrace the complexity of the past. If we use outmoded categories, we will tell outmoded stories.”

These problems appear specifically in the study of ancient Greece, Nakassis says, because people have traditionally imagined Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 BCE), and especially Athens, as the originator of so much: democracy, philosophy, tragedy and so on.

“In the master narratives that attempt to explain the emergence of the so-called ‘Greek miracle,’ the Mycenaean societies of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1650-1075 BCE) that preceded the Classical era have wrongly been reduced to a caricature: the oppressive, hierarchical, and centralized early state,” he observes.

Nakassis plans to use the NEH support to write Reassembling Mycenaean Greece, a book that will propose a new way of understanding the archaeology of mainland Greece in the Late Bronze Age.

“Its goals are to undermine the reductive role that Mycenaean Greece plays in Eurocentric master narratives and to unlock the enormous amount of new archaeological evidence has been published in recent years, but which has had little effect on our understanding of this critical phase in Greek (pre)history,” Nakassis writes.

I argue that a paradigm shift is needed to activate this data and transform the field. The shift is, in short, to eliminate the notion of a culturally homogeneous Mycenaean world and to replace it with a post-cultural archaeology that focuses on specific practices. We can trace the histories of these practices through time and space, and assemble them to produce rich, textured historical understandings.”

He adds: “I argue that a paradigm shift is needed to activate this data and transform the field. The shift is, in short, to eliminate the notion of a culturally homogeneous Mycenaean world and to replace it with a post-cultural archaeology that focuses on specific practices. We can trace the histories of these practices through time and space, and assemble them to produce rich, textured historical understandings.”

Nakassis has developed new methods for investigating individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts, and he argued from this evidence that Mycenaean society was far less hierarchical and much more dynamic than it had been considered in the past. He is the co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project, an archaeological survey in southern Greece, and the Pylos Tablets Digital Project, a museum-based research project that makes use of computational photography and other techniques.

Nakassis holds an MA and PhD in classics from the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ faculty in 2016. He won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—also called a MacArthur “genius grant”— in 2015. Nakassis is one of nine ��ƷSM��ӰƬ professors to win the award.

NEH Fellowships are competitive awards granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody “exceptional research, rigorous analysis and clear writing.” Recipients must clearly articulate a project’s value to humanities scholars, general audiences or both. Nakassis is the 12^th��ƷSM��ӰƬ professor to win an NEH fellowship.

Dimitri Nakassis, classics professor and former ‘genius grant’ winner, lands support from National Endowment for the Humanities to complete paradigm-shifting study of ancient Greece.

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A Lesson from the Past?

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:03:35 +0000

A Lesson from the Past? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/20/2022 - 09:03

Robert L Hohlfelder

Marine concrete from the Roman empire has proven to stand the test of time—and offers insights into ways to combat rising sea levels now

Throughout the Mediterranean Sea, scores of ancient marine concrete monuments, once components of artificial harbors constructed by Roman builders as part of their vast imperial maritime infrastructure, have survived for two millennia and counting.

Modern marine concrete usually survives in the sea for little more than 50 years and sometimes even less. What did Roman builders know that modern harbor engineers did not? This was one of the questions that the Roman Maritime Concrete Study, an international, multidisciplinary project that I organized and co-directed in the first decade of this century, hoped to answer.

Field work was undertaken to collect and analyze concrete cores extracted from submerged structures at various ancient harbor sites in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt. The results of this study were published in Building for Eternity: The History and Technology of Roman Concrete Engineering in the Sea in 2014 with a reprint in 2021.

At the top of the page: The last stages of the reproduction of a small marine concrete block using the same materials from the Bay of Naples in the harbor of Brindisi, Italy. Above: A massive concrete block, c. 15x11x4 m, discovered in the harbor of Caesarea Maritima, Israel.

The key ingredient responsible for the amazing durability of Roman marine concrete was volcanic ash or sand from the Bay of Naples, called pulvis puteolanus. It was the binding element in the mortar that, along with aggregate, comprised the concrete itself.

This Neapolitan volcanic ash has a unique chemical composition. When it was mixed with quick lime and seawater, to which rock aggregate was added, the resulting concrete could be placed while still in a liquid state into the sea within a variety of wooden formworks to set quickly and then cure over time. The internal chemical processes that occurred as the concrete cured underwater eventually reduced the porosity of the surface of the concrete block until it became like rock itself. Some scientists have claimed that Roman marine concrete is the most durable substance yet created by humankind.

Obviously, there is not enough volcanic ash in the Bay of Naples region to meet the demands of today’s world. However, material scientists throughout the world are using the data published in Building for Eternity as a starting point in efforts to recreate the chemical processes that occurred in Roman marine concrete that made it so durable—which could become even more important as sea levels rise in response to a warming climate.

NOAA scientists have predicted a sea level rise of at least 2 meters by the end of this century, and this might be a conservative estimate. If this prediction is close to being accurate, all of our coastal cities are at risk of flooding. There will be mass migration of our coastal populations to places like Colorado. But, if a new form of concrete could be used to build durable, long-lived seawalls at critical locations, say along the shores of Manhattan, perhaps our coastal cities might be able to survive.

Such seawalls, of course, would be only one part of future efforts to mitigate the sea level increase that threatens our future.

In addition, perhaps new marine concrete containers that, over time would become indistinguishable from rock itself, might provide one answer to how society safely stores nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel. On-site steel and concrete barrels, now used as storage containers in scores of locations scattered around our country, are not the answer, since they eventually will leak. New containers made of this impervious marine concrete might well prove to be better receptacles.

After hazardous nuclear material was emplaced, they could then be shipped safely to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository (YMNWR) to be stored in the caverns in this mountain. If so, we would have gone a long way to solving the issue of nuclear waste storage or disposal for perhaps the million years that was the hoped-for goal for the YMNWR. Moreover, there would be little possibility of leakage into nearby aquifers during these millennia.

As I often said to students in my classes, the ancients keep stealing our good ideas. When it comes to improving our marine concrete, we may learn a lesson from the distant past.

Marine concrete from the Roman empire has proven to stand the test of time—and offers insights into ways to combat rising sea levels now.

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