You begin to interest me…vaguely
Almost a half century of the The Bulletin, the Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association, is now available online. Volume 1, published in 1954, to 1999’s Volume 115 can be downloaded for free at NYSAA’s site. While visiting their site, see if you can spot the photo of Harrison Follett’s camp at Lamoka Lake.
Being rather parochial, I never realized that the phrase “Norwegian handball star” existed, let alone described an actual person. Nor did I think I would learn this from a blog called Cooking with Archaeologists
and no, they are not an ingredient in someone’s soup, although it is, in part, a cookbook:
It’s about recipes, and digs, and communal living. Check it out, and find out how nice a Norwegian handball star can be: Cooking with Archaeologists
The National Science Foundation has just announced the winners of the 2015 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
The Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study in science and engineering (this includes social sciences, such as economics and geography, as well as anthropology) at a university in the United States.
2,000 awards are offered, each of which includes tuition and a stipend of $32,000 per year (expected to be raised to $34,000 this year).
Of the 2,000 fellowships awarded, how many went to aspiring anthropologists? Just under 3%, or 57 fellowships. Among anthropology awardees, archaeologists won 11, or 19%, of the fellowships. 2,004 people achieved Honorable Mention (you don’t get a stipend or tuition remission with this honor, but hey, you can get access to supercomputers), and the stats are similar: 58 anthropology candidates, of which 17, or 29%, are archaeologists.
The list of graduate schools archaeology awardees and honorable mentions will be attending is diverse. Two awardees will be attending Syracuse University, but no other institution will have more than one awardee.
See the summary tables after the break for the breakdown by anthropology subdiscipline, graduate institution awardees will be attending, and the undergraduate school they are coming from.
The New York Archaeological Council (NYAC) publishes a poster for Archaeology Season (formerly Archaeology Month) every year. In 2008, the Lamoka Lake site (and the Lamoka Life Group diorama from the New York State Museum) were featured. Check out the (never before seen?) photo of William Ritchie excavating at the site in 1962.
Maney Publishing is making all content from all their archaeology journals free to download for a limited time:
http://www.maneyonline.com/fa14/archaeo
Journals include Plains Anthropologist, Southeastern Archaeology, and more.
The deal ends 26 April 2015.
Just published in the new STAR: Science and Technology of Archaeological Research:
‘Brewster site zooarchaeology reinterpreted: understanding levels of animal exploitation and bone fat production at the Initial Middle Missouri type site’
By Landon P. Karr
Download at Maney Online http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/2054892315Y.0000000003
Abstract:
The Brewster site is a Native American village in Northwest Iowa that was likely occupied between AD 1100 and AD 1200. The villagers at the Brewster site hunted large mammals from the landscape surrounding their village, and practiced some of the earliest agriculture in the region. As a result, large numbers of bison bones are preserved archaeologically at the site. ~140 kg of bone, excavated in 1970, has been analyzed and reported in this article. When fractured and fragmented bones are found in the archaeological record, they are often associated with the exploitation of bone marrow and bone grease, two highly nutritious substances. This article reports on the relative importance of the bones and bone fragments at the Brewster site with regard to their use and utility as sources of bone fats. While there is some evidence to suggest that the bones were intentionally fractured and fragmented, the evidence suggests that the Brewster villagers frequently ignored the dietary potential of bone fats.
Data availability The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are contained within the paper.
The first interesting find isn’t an animal bone. This argillite projectile point was mistakenly put in with the animal bones in the field. It’s unusual to find argillite tools at the Lamoka Lake site – most of the Lamoka points at the site are made from Onondaga chert. In the original excavations in the 1920s, however, William Ritchie did identify a single biface made from argillite which, he said, was identical to the argillite found in New Jersey.
LL.1990.93.1
This point is similar to Lackawaxen points found in the northeast, especially in Pennsylvania, that also date to the Late Archaic period. Compare it with these Lackawaxen points excavated from a CRM project in Philadelphia.
It’s been a while since we’ve written anything about the actual archaeology of the Lamoka Lake site, but that’s about to change. I’m starting the identification of a large assemblage of animal bones from the site that hasn’t been studied before. The first step is to get out the bone binders with photocopied and hand-drawn reference material. These are in need of some new binders.
The bone identification guides are also getting pulled out of the bookshelves. Yes, I know there are some duplicates.
Ceramics were invented independently at least twice in North America – in the Southeast about 4,500 years ago, and in the Northeast around 3000 years ago. The earliest pottery in the northeastern United States and southern Canada is called Vinette, named after an archaeological site in New York state, and dates to the Early Woodland, about 3,100-2,300 cal years BP.
Since we now know pottery vessels predate the introduction of maize, it has been posited that ceramic vessels were used in preparing wild seeds and nuts or animal fats and oils, although these food sources were used by people long before pottery was invented. Perhaps there were other reasons that explain why ceramics were invented.
Karine Taché has been researching Vinette pottery for a while now, and in a new paper in Antiquity with Oliver E. Craig, they conduct carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis and lipid analysis of Vinette I sherds and carbonized deposits (i.e., burned food remains) from 33 sites in the U.S. and Canada.
Overall, they argue that Vinette I pottery is associated with processing of marine or freshwater resources; few sherds show evidence of being used to process terrestrial animals like deer or elk, and little to no evidence for processing plant foods. There is also no identifiable patterning through time or space.
While they recognize that contemporary and earlier hunter-gatherers would have eaten both terrestrial and aquatic animals and that subsistence varied, the authors are arguing that Vinette I represents a change in the use of fish. It is important to keep in mind, however, that there is good evidence for use of fish prior to the Early Woodland, including during the Late Archaic at the Lamoka Lake site.
How to explain these results?
In north-eastern North America the innovation of pottery co-occurred with key social developments such as the increased regionalisation and complexity of hunter-gatherer groups (Versaggi 1999), the emergence of new elaborate mortuary practices (Farnsworth&Emerson 1986;Heckenberger et al. 1990), and the creation of long-distance interaction networks that ensured the circulation of prestige items (Taché 2011). (p. 185)
The archaeological evidence for this include:
increased evidence for surplus accumulation (e.g. storage features) and social inequalities (e.g. differential distribution of grave goods), the advent of burial precincts distinct from habitation sites, complex burial practices shared between distinct groups (e.g. cremations, intentional destruction and burning of grave goods, abundance of red ochre in burials), and by the widespread distribution of stylistically and technologically homogeneous artefacts (e.g. Onondaga chert bifaces, ground slate objects) and exotic raw materials (e.g. native copper, marine shells). The social context for such long-distance interaction typically takes place at large, episodic and multi-ethnic gathering sites. (p. 186)
If correct, these gatherings would have taken place the same time that fish were spawning and could be taken in large numbers.
Intriguingly however, the relatively small size and low abundance of vessels at these sites precludes a major economic role for pottery. Instead, pottery may have been used to prepare fish as part of small-scale celebratory feasts. The act of cooking and consuming fish with novel ceramic containers would have been largely symbolic, serving to cement social relations during these important periods of aggregation. Therefore, we would expect the bulk of aquatic resources harvested during these gatherings to be processed and consumed using other means. (p. 186)
Based on ethnographic data, pottery could also have been used in preparing fish oil in bulk for storage. In this case,
as large quantities of fish yield limited amounts of oil, only a few ceramic containers would have been required. The production of fish oil either for exchange with more distant communities, or as a highly valued prestige food for conspicuous consumption, would also reinforce social relations during periodic aggregation of scattered hunter-gatherer groups, in keeping with the ‘cooperative harvesting’ hypothesis. (p. 186)
Reference:
Karine Taché & Oliver E. Craig
2015 Cooperative harvesting of aquatic resources and the beginning of pottery production in north-eastern North America. Antiquity 89:177-190.
The first issue of PaleoAmerica, something of a successor to the discontinued Current Research in the Pleistocene, has just been released. Maney Online has made the entire first issue, which includes articles on the early peopling of North and South America, available for free (for a limited time?).