14/09/2015

ASA Wednesday Night Lecture

ASA Lectures

THE NINTH CLANEXPLORING APACHEAN ORIGINS IN THE

PROMONTORY CAVES, UTAH
September 16, 2015. University of Calgary Room ES 162. 7:30pm
Dr. Jack Ives, University of Alberta
Twentieth century anthropologist Julian Steward concluded in the
1930s that the Promontory Caves on Great Salt Lake, Utah,
contained highly suggestive evidence that Navajo or Apache
ancestors had lingered briefly in the eastern Great Basin on their way
between Canada and the American Southwest. Compelling though
Stewards arguments were, comparatively few archaeologists took
them seriously. Today we can use the astonishing array of perishable
materials (including hundreds of moccasins, as well as mittens, other
clothing, basketry, bows, arrows, and bison robes) from Stewards as
well as our own more recent excavations in the Promontory Caves to
illustrate how Steward was indeed correct, and how Dene ancestors
originally from the Subarctic had begun their transformation toward
historic Navajo and Apache cultural identities.
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September 16, 2015: The Ninth ClanExploring Apachean Origins in

the Promontory Caves, Utah
October 21, 2015: Recent Discoveries in the Sierra de Atapuerca
(Spain)
November 18, 2015: Life and Death in the Napoleonic Era Royal Navy
stationed at English Harbour, Antigua, West Indies

Updates

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Scientific Method

Quizzes. Still sorting out how to move grades from Top Hat to D2L
All bonus/lecture dropboxes have been created
Labs start this week ES851

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Dates

Alphabet Soup

So
BC (before Christ)
AD (anno Domini)
BCE (before the common era)
CE (common era)
BP (before present)
RCYBP (radiocarbon years before present)

3000 BP = 1050 BC
1812 BC = 3773 BP
AD 400 = 1550 BP
AD 1949 = 1 BP

Counted since 1950

cal BP (calendar years before present)

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Classical World
Greek writer Hesiod
800 BC
Epic poem Works and Days

History of Archaeology

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Five Stages:
Age of Gold and the Immortals
Age of Silver
Age of Bronze
Age of Epic Heroes
Age of Iron and Dread Sorrow

Classical World

Renaissance
14 17th cent in Europe
Cabinets of curiosities

Nebonidus (last native king of Babylon)

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Displayed exotic minerals and all manner of specimens illustrative of what was called
natural history

Reigned 555 539 BC)

Interested in antiquities
Dug at a temple and found stones from 2200 years before
Created something like a museum to house the finds from this excavation

Collected relics of Classical antiquity

In the north
Study their own remote past
Field monuments (ex. Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany)

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Renaissance
William Stukeley (1687-1765)
Took detailed notes about several of field
monuments (namely Avbury)
Since Roman roads cut barrows, the former
must be later than the latter

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Renaissance
1675 in the New World
First excavation
A tunnel dug into Teotiucacans Pyramid of the
Moon

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Pompeii

First Excavations
18th cent
Excavated some of the most prominent sites

Called the Speculative Phase

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First Excavations

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Speculative Phase
Hundreds of unexplained mounds known east
of the Mississippi River

the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

People were speculating that they were built by

mythical and vanished races of Moundbuilders

1748 dug a trench or section across a burial mound on his property in Virginia
This is the end of the Speculative Phase

Lost Tribes of Israel

A more advanced society that was killed off by the
savage natives

Jefferson deduced that the mounds had been

reused as a place of burial on many separate
occasions
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Before Modern Archaeology

He saw no reason why ancestors of the present-day

Natives could not have built the mounds
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Before Modern Archaeology

Charles Lyell (1797 1875)

James Hutton (geologist 1726-1797)

Studied the stratification of rocks

Principles of Geology

Their arrangement in superimposed layers or strata

Geologically ancient conditions were in essence similar to or uniform with

those of our own time

Uniformitarianism The principle that the stratification of

rocks is due to processes still going on in seas, rivers, and lakes

One of the fundamental notions of modern archaeology

The past was much like the present

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Biblical Time

Biblical Time

Early archaeology followed Biblical view of the history of the earth

Established by James Ussher (1581-1656)

The 4004 BC date did not allow for extensive human

antiquity

Archbishop of Armagh
Primate of All Ireland
Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin

BUT.

Creation began at sunset on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC

1836 a French customs inspector, Jacques Boucher de Perthes, found

chipped stone hand-axes or bifaces in gravel quarries of the Somme
River
With bones of extinct animals

Used biblical genealogies and correlation of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern

histories

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Prehistory

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Evolution
Charles Darwin (1809 1882)

The term prehistory came into general use after the

publication of John Lubbocks book Prehistoric Times (1865)

On the Origin of Species (1859)

Evolution
The best explanation of the origin and development of all plants and animals
The process of growth and development generally accompanied by increasing complexity
In biology, this change is tired to Darwins concept of natural selection as the basis of
species survival
Darwins work laid the foundations for the study of artifact typology

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Three great conceptual advances

Three Age System

Colt Hoare (1808) recognized a sequence of stone, brass,
and iron artifacts within the barrows he excavated
Danish scholar C.J. Thomsen (1788-1865)
A Guide to Northern Antiquities (1836, English 1848)
Divided collections into the 3 Ages
Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age

1.

Antiquity of humankind

2.

Prince of evolution

3.

Three Age System

From these archaeologist developed evolution of artifact forms which gave rise to the
method of typology

The arrangement of artifacts in chronological or developmental sequence

Later the Stone Age was divided into the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and Neolithic (or
New Stone Age)

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Ancient Society (1887)

Ethnography & Archaeology

Lewis Henry Morgans book Ancient Society

Based on knowledge of living Native American cultures
This influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Contact with indigenous communities of North America

provided antiquarian and historian with models for tattooed
images of Celts and Britons
Edward Tylor (1832 -1917) & Lewis Henry Morgan (18181881) both published works in the 1870s arguing that
human societies had evolved from a state of savagery
(primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to
civilization (the highest form of society)
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Drew on Morgans work for their views of pre-capitalist societies

This influenced later Marixst archeologists

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Early Civilizations

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Early Civilizations

Egypt

Ancient Maya

Napoleons military expedition of 1798-1800

John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick

Catherwood
Early 1840s
Superbly illustrated book of the
ruined cities of the ancient Maya

Rosetta Stone
Key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
Identical texts written in Egyptian and Greek scripts

Mesopotamian
Paul Emile Botta & Austen Henry Lard
1840s see who could obtain the largest number of art in the least amount of time

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Classificatory-Historical Period

Classificatory-Historical Period

Gordon Childe

Focus on chronology

European prehistory and Old World history

Began at the end of the 19th cent

Until ~ 1960

Early economies

Franz Boas
Reacted against evolutionary schemes of Morgan and Tylor

Establishment of regional chronological systems

The description of the development of culture in each area
STILL USED AND USEFUL TODAY

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Attention to the collection and classification of information in the field

W.C. McKern
Midwestern Taxonomic System
Correlated sequences in the Midwest by identifying similarities between artifact
collections

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Classificatory-Historical Period
The questions
To what period do these artifacts date?
With which other materials do they belong?
Who did these artifacts belong to?

A constantly recurring collect or assemblage of artifacts could

be taken as the material equipment of a particular group of
people
Childe called a culture
McKern called an aspect

Midwest
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Ecological Approach

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Ecological Approach
Gordon Willey (1913-2002)

Julian Steward (1902 1972)

Cultures do not interact simply with one another but with the environment as
well
Cultural Ecology
The dynamic relationship between human society and its environment, in which culture
is viewed as at the primary adaptive mechanism

One of Stewards students

Carried out a pioneering investigation of the Viru Valley, Peru in the late 1940s
1500 years of pre-Columbian occupation
Used:
detailed maps and aerial photography
Survey at ground level
Excavation and surface potsherd collection (to establish dates)

First settlement archaeology study

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Radiocarbon Dating

Ecological Approach
Grahame Clark (1907 1995)

American chemist Willard Libby (1908-1980)

British archaeologist
Argued that by studying how human populations adapted to their
environments we can understand many aspects of ancient society

In 1949 announced his discovery of radiocarbon (C14) dating

Implications: archaeologists might have a means of directly determining the age of
undated sites and finds anywhere without cross-cultural comparisons

Need collaboration with specialists in other fields

Europe was dating sites based on contract with the Classical world
(Rome, Greece, Egypt)

Provided a panoramic view of the varying human adaptations to the European

landscape over thousands of years

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New Archaeology
1948 Walter W. Taylor A Study of Archaeology
Argued for a conjunctive approach
a methodological alternative to traditional normative archaeology in which the full range
of a culture system was to be taken into consideration in explanatory models

Problems with old archaeology

Everything was explained as migration of people and influences

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