Archaeologists uncover oldest mine in the Americas

Archaeologists uncover oldest mine in the Americas

Posted 19 May 2011, by Kevin Stacey (University of Chicago Press Journals), EurekAlert (American Association for the Advancement of Science), eurekalert.org

Archaeologists have discovered a 12,000-year-old iron oxide mine in Chile that marks the oldest evidence of organized mining ever found in the Americas, according to a report in the June issue of Current Anthropology.

A team of researchers led by Diego Salazar of the Universidad de Chile found the 40-meter trench near the coastal town of Taltal in northern Chile. It was dug by the Huentelauquen people—the first settlers in the region—who used iron oxide as pigment for painted stone and bone instruments, and probably also for clothing and body paint, the researchers say.

The remarkable duration and extent of the operation illustrate the surprising cultural complexity of these ancient people. “It shows that [mining] was a labor-intensive activity demanding specific technical skills and some level of social cooperation transmitted through generations,” Salazar and his team write.

An estimated 700 cubic meters and 2,000 tons of rock were extracted from the mine. Carbon dates for charcoal and shells found in the mine suggest it was used continuously from around 12,000 years ago to 10,500 years ago, and then used again around 4,300 years ago. The researchers also found more than 500 hammerstones dating back to the earliest use of the mine.

“The regular exploitation of [the site] for more than a millennium … indicates that knowledge about the location of the mine, the properties of its iron oxides, and the techniques required to exploit and process these minerals were transmitted over generations within the Huentelauquen Cultural Complex, thereby consolidating the first mining tradition yet known in America,” the researchers write. The find extends “by several millennia the mining sites yet recorded in the Americas.”

Before this find, a North American copper mine dated to between 4,500 and 2,600 years ago was the oldest known in the Americas.

###

Diego Salazar, D. Jackson, J. L. Guendon, H. Salinas, D. Morata, V. Figueroa, G. Manríquez, and V. Castro, “Early Evidence (ca. 12,000 BP) for Iron Oxide Mining on the Pacific Coast of South America.” Current Anthropology 52:3 (June 2011). The issue is scheduled to publish online later this week.

Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.
Contact: Kevin Stacey
kstacey@press.uchicago.edu
University of Chicago Press Journals

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/uocp-auo051811.php

MU Archeologist Finds Oldest 3-D Statue in Western Hemisphere

Statue at temple in Peru helps us understand ancient culture, myths

Posted 21 May 2011, by Staff, Kansas City infoZine, infozine.com

 Columbia, MO – infoZine – A University of Missouri archeologist has found a 4,000-year-old statue in Peru that gives new insight into an ancient agricultural society.

Exposed sculpture of the menacing disk flanked by two mythical foxes. The foxes have lunar eyes that face the December solstice sunset.

Robert Benfer, a professor emeritus of anthropology, said the mud plaster bust – a bust of a figure blowing a trumpet and another mask-like image flanked by foxes – was found at the “Buena Vista” site in the Andes Mountains, about 30 miles north of Lima, Peru. Radiocarbon dating indicates the bust was created around 2,000 B.C, making it the oldest 3-D statue found in the Americas.

“This is really the find of a lifetime,” Benfer said. “This bust helps us better understand this culture. As with many ancient cultures, the Andean people had a great investment in agriculture and some of their myths and legends revolve around growing and gathering food. Even today, the Andean people still tell stories about the fox as they explain the gift of the first cultivated foods. The Andean legend says the fox found a rope that led to heaven where it found an abundance of new foods. When the fox fell from heaven, it split open, providing a variety of new foods for the Andean people.”

Exposed sculpture of the menacing disk flanked by two mythical foxes. The foxes have lunar eyes that face the December solstice sunset.

The 4,000 year old bust is fully exposed, although the legs are not visible because they hang over the edge of a wall. The fingers of the hands can be seen on the flute.

The Andeans had their own Zodiac signs, and the constellation of the fox is still associated with the timing of agricultural events such as planting and irrigation, Benfer said. At sites like Buena Vista, ancient astronomer-priests directed the construction of platform pyramids and art in their temples based on astronomical alignments of the sun, moon and other figures in the Andean Zodiac.

On the 4,000-year-old statue, it appears that the horn player is announcing the priests when they enter the Temple of the Menacing Disk, a site first discovered by Benfer in 2004. On the left, the female foxes around the menacing disk mask-like central figure face the June solstice sunset with two eyes shaped like the moon, indicating gathering darkness Benfer said. On the right, the male fox has one eye shaped like the sun, looking to the rising sun of the December solstice.

“Anthropologists think that many of our beliefs today stem from ancient beliefs, but only occasionally can these beliefs be confirmed,” Benfer said. “This is one of those times. Myths and symbols are reused and recycled in different ways, but the lessons remain the same. The Andean people couldn’t read; yet, the fox story survives and is at least as old as the horoscopes many people read today. The story depicted in the statuary symbolizes the basic opposition between the sun and the moon, male and female, day and night, good and evil.”

Benfer said there is still excavation to do at the site and that future discoveries may give more insight into the mythology.

The paper “Ancient South American Cosmology: Four Thousand Years of the Myth of the Fox,” was co-authored with Louanna Furbee, a MU professor emeritus of Linguistic Anthropology, and Hugo Ludeña, of the National University of Federico Villarreal of Perú. It is being published in the upcoming edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/47502/

Patterns of ancient croplands give insight into early Hawaiian society, research shows

Posted 18 May 2011, by Earle Holland, EurekAlert (American Association for the Advancement of Science), eurekalert.org

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A pattern of earthen berms, spread across a northern peninsula of the big island of Hawaii, is providing archeologists with clues to exactly how residents farmed in paradise long before Europeans arrived at the islands.

The findings suggest that simple, practical decisions made by individual households were eventually adopted by the ruling class as a means to improve agricultural productivity.

The research was reported in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Archeologically, this kind of research is really hard to do in most places since there is rarely a ‘signature’ for the agricultural activity, or a strong connection between the remains of a house and a plot of farmland,” explained, Julie Field, an assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.

Field, along with colleagues from California and New Zealand, has spent three field seasons unearthing the remnants of an agricultural gridwork that dates back nearly 600 years. The pattern was formed by a series of earthen walls, or berms, which served as windbreaks, protecting the crops.

“In this part of Hawaii, the trade winds blow all the time, so the berms are there to protect the crops from the winds,” she said. “The main crop was sweet potato which likes dry loose soil. The berms protect the soil from being blown away.”

The researchers are familiar with the challenges the winds posed. Field said that while they were excavating sites, the wind would “blow so hard, the skin would come off our ears if they weren’t covered. It just sandblasts your ears and you have to wear goggles to see.” “It is an intense place to work,” she said.

Previous work by other researchers has radiocarbon dated organic material found in the berms, establishing a timeline for when the agricultural system was first built. Over time, more walls were built, subdividing the original agricultural plots into smaller and smaller parcels.

At the same time, other researchers were able to date materials from household sites of the early Hawaiians, and link those dates to the building of specific agricultural plots.

This showed that individual households that farmed the land expanded over time and then separated into new households as the population grew.

“Within a 300-year period, 1,400 AD to 1,700 AD, the data suggests that the population at least quadrupled, as did the number of houses,” Field said.

The researchers believe the data also provides insight into the structure of Hawaiian society at the time. “We know that there was a single chief for each district and a series of lesser chiefs below that,” she said.

Similar to the feudal system of Europe, a portion of the crop surplus was always designated for the chiefs.

“This suggests to us that the field system was originally put in place probably by individual households that produced crops for their own consumption.

“It was then appropriated by the chiefs and turned into more of a surplus production system, where they demanded that the land be put into production and more people would produce more surplus food,” she said.

“Our study is unique in that we can trace the activities of very, very small groups of people and, from that, try to glean the larger processes of society,” Field said.

“We want to look at parts of Hawaii and treat them as a model for the evolution of Hawaiian society.”

The researchers said that the next question is whether the field system was used seasonally, whether they modified it over the year and used different parts of it depending on the season.

“That’s what it looks like happened, but we need more dating of different features at the sites to be able to figure that out,” Field said.

###

The National Science Foundation provided support for the project. Along with Field, Patrick Kirch of the University of California, Berkeley, Thegn Ladefoged of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Shripad Tuljapurkar and Peter Vitousek of Stanford University, and Oliver Chadwick of the University of California, Santa Barbara, worked on the project.

Contact: Julie Field,  field.59@osu.edu

Written by Earle Holland,  Holland.8@osu.edu

Search and rescue – reclaiming farmland and an ancient grain

Posted 20 May 2011, by GoodFood World Staff,GoodFood World, goodfoodworld.com

Sam Lucy, grain farmer and land conservationist in the Methow Valley of north central Washington, is a one-man search and rescue team for farmland. He has spent the last 15 years seeking out and reclaiming fallow farmland and bringing it back to viable production or transitioning it into native grasses and other plants.

One would not expect land in the Methow Valley, which is rapidly becoming a premium area for second homes belonging to Puget Sound residents, to be abandoned. In fact, as more and more vacation and retirement homes are built, the land is going at a premium. Unfortunately, development is causing useful farm acreage to be fragmented.

Landowners and other groups interested in land preservation have organized to protect agricultural land in the valley and place it into agricultural easements to prevent future development.

For Sam to bring acreage back into production, the crops require water for irrigation. When land has lain fallow for years – decades sometimes – and has not been actively farmed, the water rights may have been forfeited or transferred. He has found it frustrating to identify land that he would happily lease and not be able to bring in the needed water. For example, a recent contract Sam had with the State of Washington lapsed because no agreement could be reached on water rights.

As a first step to bring land back into production or to transition to native plants, Lucy uses grasses – most grains are grasses – to improve the soil. His farming practices include green manures, crop rotation, and the application of live microbe and enzyme soil conditioners. Sam experimented with ancient “landrace” grains like emmer (Triticum dicoccum) as cover crops. Emmer gives good yields on poor soils and is resistant to diseases like stem rust, which can be prevalent in wet areas.

Today, Sam leases and farms about 200 acres, half of which is in grain production each year growing hard red and pastry wheat as well as rye and flax. The organic farming practices he uses require crop rotation to preserve soil fertility, and he alternates cereal grains with other grasses and plants like mustard and vetch. The cover crops are plowed back into the soil to return nutrients to replace those taken out by the harvested grains.

Brooke, Sam’s wife, researched emmer’s origins and uses as a food crop and discovered that emmer, einkorn, and barley were three of the so-called Neolithic “founder crops” in the development of agriculture. These cereal grains were first domesticated about 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of southwest Asia.

Emmer is one of 40 landrace varieties left in the modern world and it was abandoned for general food production when a hulless variety of durum wheat became widely used. Emmer is a hulled wheat; it has strong husks that enclose the grains and must be removed by pounding or threshing. Modern wheat “shatters” and the hulls fall off the grain without additional processing.

High in protein (16-18%) in comparison to soft wheat (10% protein) and hard wheat (15%), emmer also has the lowest gluten value when compared with commercial wheat and spelt.(1) While emmer has a low gluten content and the gluten structure is different from modern wheat, it is not “gluten-free” and should be consumed with care by those who are gluten intolerant or have gluten allergies.

At Bluebird Grain Farms, the Lucys not only plant and grow organic grain; they reap, thresh, mill, package, market, and sell it. Brooke has developed an entire line of products that incorporate whole grain berries, cracked grains, and fresh milled flour, including breakfast cereals, pilaf, and pancake and biscuit mixes.

It is possible to bake bread entirely with emmer flour, but it takes a skilled hand. Because emmer is sweet and yet does not have particularly strong gluten, the yeast rises quickly and the dough can fall just as fast. Mixing with hard wheat or bread flour will give the bread additional gluten.

Brooke is the marketing wizard behind Bluebird Grain Farms and she not only wholesales her products and sells direct, she has also incorporated the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, better known for the sale of produce. The CSA is a monthly delivery, based on a 4-, 6-, or 12-month subscription, and buyers get a standard assortment or those with special wants can customize the shipment. All the products are milled and blended fresh to order and are shipped by UPS or US Postal Service.

Brooke and Sam Lucy are model representatives of a new generation of farmers. Sam is a responsible land conservationist who brings unused farmland back to health and production; Brooke is an educator and teaches consumers how to select and prepare healthy food from the grain he nurtures.

Together they are building a sustainable business inspired by European farms that not only grow, thresh and mill their own grain, but sell it in a small retail shop or bake it into bread right on the farm.

Bluebird Grain Farms‘ products are widely available around the Northwest at natural food co-ops, small independent food markets, local farmers markets, and through Bluebird Grain Farms’ online store.  (Click here for a virtual tour of Bluebird Grain Farms.)

http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2011/05/search-and-rescue-%E2%80%93-reclaiming-farmland-and-an-ancient-grain/