ArchaeoBlog

Excavation of prehistoric home finished

oette Marie Rex lives west of remote Escalante in southern Utah, but she’s no homesteader: An excavation by archaeologists from Brigham Young University unearthed evidence that the site of Rex’s inn may be one of the oldest inhabited places in the area.

The prehistoric dwelling place, called the North Creek Shelter Site, is behind Rex’s bed-and-breakfast and has been known for decades. But it wasn’t until 2003 that archaeologists began digging through layers of cultural eras until they stopped 12 feet down at the Paleoarchaic period, which dates back to at least 9,000 B.C.

“We knew of pictographs and petroglyphs, but suspected there might be a village,” said Rex, who owns the Slot Canyons Inn.

If you recall this post that linked to an entertainment guide from 1962 LA, many of the menus featured steaks. Steaks, steaks everywhere. Steaks and chops and seafood. I can imagine a typical plate consisting largely of a piece of rare meat and a bit of vegetal matter on the side for show.

I don’t eat a lot of meat anymore, not particularly for health or ethical reasons, mostly because I don’t care for it much (except for BBQ, of course). I was never much of a steak eater either. I was never particularly good at cooking the dumb things either; too hard to get the right mix of being done and being tender. But eh, whatever, I don’t miss it much (beef steaks, that is).

Except we were at the grocery store today and they had t-bones on sale. Two big hunks of meat for $10. Decent meat! Steak-and-eggs meat! Meat-and-potatoes meat! Hence, I regressed back to 1950s Man and made a couple of steaks on the grill. No spices, no nothing, just meat — with Adolph’s meat tenderizer, due to the ArchaeoWife’s continuing use of braces which requires very tender meat.

And corn on the cob. And pea salad. The only things missing from the plate were potatoes and Jell-O salad. Or just a bit of side salad.

And apple pie for dessert.

Behold, I am a mid-century Man and I have grilled my steaks over an open flame. The meat took up over half the plate. It was pink and tender and delicious.

The only thing missing was a Schlitz.

I kinda like steak sauce although I don’t have any now (never eat steak so why bother?). I was an A1 man, although I could get into Heinz 57 as well. These days I think I would prefer it plain. Seasoned with salt and pepper only.

And tomorrow I hit the gym and then head up in my Mustang to do fieldwork. In the rain.

I can feel the testosterone dripping off of me like a leaky gasket.

UPDATE: And then I watched football.

[slightly edited as well]

Llandudno to bid farewell to Neolithic skeleton Blodwen

A prehistoric woman’s skeleton which went back to her north Wales roots for the first time in more than 100 years will return to a Lancashire museum.

The remains, nicknamed Blodwen, went on display in July at Llandudno Museum in Conwy county, close to the Little Orme, where they were found in 1891.

Organisers hoped they would be allowed to stay, but they say that is unlikely.

Ancient brewers tapped antibiotic secrets

A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Eh, it seems a bit inconclusive that they really knew what they were doing with the tetracycline, although I imagine that if you could establish a link between disease resistance and consumption of the beer, then it would seem a bit more solid to me.

UPDATE: Hey, this is really new news!

Oak tracks at 10th century road site leave archaeologists puzzled

ARCHAEOLOGISTS ARE puzzled as to the exact purpose of an ancient oak road unearthed on a Bord na Móna bog in Co Tipperary.

Operations manager and site director with Archaeological Development Services (ADS) Jane Whitaker believes the track, which runs parallel to a modern road, may have formed part of an ancient road network.

The road, discovered by ADS during a walking survey, is constructed from oak planks laid across oak beams and gravel. Mortise holes have been bored into the planks to facilitate wooden pegs. All of the materials were brought to the site from other locations.

Not sure why it’s such mystery, it sounds like it was a simple causeway to cross a bog. Those are known all over the place (well, in at least a couple of other places). They often find lots of junk in the bog sediment on either side of the road and, if memory serves, some of the stuff is debated to be some kind of ritual offerings rather than just stuff that was accidentally dropped.

Ancient Moche burials provided insects with banquet

Peru’s ancient Moche exposed their dead to corpse-eating bugs as an act of veneration, archeologists report.

. . .

In the journal, the team reports on the burial of a man in his twenties, found with four pots, five copper ornaments in his mouth and his skull streaked with red cinnabar. Study revealed, “the skeleton was incomplete and had been disturbed prior to excavation: the left forearm and lower legs were entirely missing; and the right humerus had been put back on the wrong side. In all likelihood, these disturbances were caused by the Moche reopening the grave, and not by tomb plunderers (Huaqueros) who would have removed the grave goods to sell, and not bothered with the skeleton.”

Not the only people who would allow decomposition before burial, but it’s interesting that they have some actual insect evidence of it rather than just a presumption based on the state of the skeletal remains.

Jordan unearths 3,000-year-old Iron Age temple

Archaeologists in Jordan have unearthed a 3,000-year-old Iron Age temple with a trove of figurines of ancient deities and circular clay vessels used for religious rituals, officials said Wednesday.

The head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, Ziad al-Saad, said the sanctuary dates to the eighth century B.C. and was discovered at Khirbat ‘Ataroz near the town of Mabada, some 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of the capital Amman.

He said the complex boasts a main room that measures 388 square feet (36 square meters), as well as two antechambers and an open courtyard.

Season 2.

Figured I’d give ‘em a plug seeing as an earlier post on it has driven a lot of traffic this way. . . . .

Ancient Sorcerer’s “Wake” Was First Feast for the Dead?

Some 12,000 years ago in a small sunlit cave in northern Israel, mourners finished the last of the roasted tortoise meat and gathered up dozens of the blackened shells. Kneeling down beside an open grave in the cave floor, they paid their last respects to the elderly dead woman curled within, preparing her for a spiritual journey.

They tucked tortoise shells under her head and hips and arranged dozens of the shells on top and around her. Then they left her many rare and magical things—the wing of a golden eagle, the pelvis of a leopard, and the severed foot of a human being.

Now called Hilazon Tachtit, the small cave chosen as this woman’s resting place is the subject of an intense investigation led by Leore Grosman, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Good article.

Actually, just a bunch of flakes (the tools, not the archaeologists. Well, maybe. . . .) Israel researchers find ancient disposable cutlery

Israeli archaeologists believe thousands of ancient shards of flint found scattered around a fire pit in a cave near Tel Aviv might be the world’s oldest known disposable knives.

Dating to the Stone Age, the tiny knives are believed to be at least 200,000 years old. A Tel Aviv University excavation team found the tools around a fireplace littered with charred animal bones.

Archaeologist Ran Barkai said he believes Stone Age hunter-gatherers used the rough, round-shaped cutlery — ranging from the size of human teeth to guitar picks — for slicing through cooked meat because they were found next to the animal bones. The bones were used to determine the age of the knives.

The headline is a bit misleading, but accurate. Allow me to explain. I’m not entirely sure these are “the oldest disposable knives” or, as we call them, expedient tools, found. Not that I can name the earliest utilized flakes off the top of my head, but I’m guessing use wear on flakes goes back a ways. But the comment near the end of the piece may be accurate, in that what is often interpreted as “debitage” in the field — the various chips and flakes produced from the production of more complex formal tools — may actually have been utilized as expedient tools, or produced themselves to be tools. After all, many of the flakes have nice sharp edges that can be used for a bit and discarded. Parry and Kelly (in The Organization of Core Technology by Johnson and Morrow) linked expedient tool use to sedentism, such that sedentary people would be likely (wishy-washy word, I know) to use expedient tools that are cheap to manufacture because they could stockpile raw material and wouldn’t need the more complicated tools that mobile hunter-gatherers often use. The latter tend to have (more wishy-washy) a variety of smaller, more complicated tools that they can carry around and resharpen and refashion as needed; the cost of doing so is justified by the need to be mobile and often out of range of available raw materials. Thus, the idea that having a lot of good stone around might even be a prerequisite for such an expedient technology: the more you have, the more wasteful (in terms of raw material) you can be.