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ASA – Wednesday Night Lecture• THE NINTH CLAN—EXPLORING 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 Steward’s 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 Steward’s 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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ASA Lectures

• September 16, 2015: The Ninth Clan—Exploring 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

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Updates

• 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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Scientific Method

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Alphabet Soup

• BC (‘before Christ’)

• AD (‘anno Domini’)

• BCE (before the common era)

• CE (common era)

• BP (before present)

• RCYBP (radiocarbon years before present)• Counted since 1950

• cal BP (calendar years before present)

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Dates

• So…

• 3000 BP = 1050 BC

• 1812 BC = 3773 BP

• AD 400 = 1550 BP

• AD 1949 = 1 BP

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History of Archaeology

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Classical World

• Greek writer Hesiod

• 800 BC

• Epic poem Works and Days

• Five Stages:

• Age of Gold and the Immortals

• Age of Silver

• Age of Bronze

• Age of Epic Heroes

• Age of Iron and Dread Sorrow

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Classical World

• Nebonidus (last native king of Babylon)• 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

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Renaissance

• 14 – 17th cent in Europe

• Cabinets of curiosities• Displayed exotic minerals and all manner of specimens illustrative of what was called

‘natural history’

• 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 Teotiucacan’s Pyramid of the Moon

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First Excavations

• 18th cent

• Excavated some of the most prominent sites

• Called the Speculative Phase

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Pompeii

First Excavations

• ‘the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology’

• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)• 1748 dug a trench or section across a burial mound on his property in Virginia

• This is the end of the Speculative Phase

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Speculative Phase

• Hundreds of unexplained mounds known east of the Mississippi River

• People were speculating that they were built by mythical and vanished races of Moundbuilders

• 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

• He saw no reason why ancestors of the present-day Natives could not have built the mounds

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Before Modern Archaeology

• James Hutton (geologist – 1726-1797)

• Studied the stratification of rocks

• Their arrangement in superimposed layers or strata

• Uniformitarianism – The principle that the stratification of rocks is due to processes still going on in seas, rivers, and lakes

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Before Modern Archaeology

• Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875)

• Principles of Geology

• Geologically ancient conditions were in essence similar to or ‘uniform with’ those of our own time

• One of the fundamental notions of modern archaeology

• The past was much like the present

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Biblical Time

• Early archaeology followed Biblical view of the history of the earth

• Established by James Ussher (1581-1656)

• Archbishop of Armagh

• Primate of All Ireland

• Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin

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

• Used biblical genealogies and correlation of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern histories

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Biblical Time

• The 4004 BC date did not allow for extensive human antiquity

• BUT…. • 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

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Prehistory

• The term ‘prehistory’ came into general use after the publication of John Lubbock’s book Prehistoric Times (1865)

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Evolution

• Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

• 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 Darwin’s concept of natural selection as the basis of species survival

• Darwin’s work laid the foundations for the study of artifact typology

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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

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

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Three great conceptual advances

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

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Ethnography & Archaeology

• 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 (1818-1881) 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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Ancient Society (1887)

• Lewis Henry Morgan’s book Ancient Society• Based on knowledge of living Native American cultures

• This influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

• Drew on Morgan’s work for their views of pre-capitalist societies

• This influenced later Marixst archeologists

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Early Civilizations

• Egypt

• Napoleon’s military expedition of 1798-1800

• 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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Early Civilizations

• Ancient Maya

• John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood

• Early 1840s

• Superbly illustrated book of the ruined cities of the ancient Maya

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Classificatory-Historical Period

• Focus on chronology

• Began at the end of the 19th cent

• Until ~ 1960

• Establishment of regional chronological systems

• The description of the development of culture in each area

• STILL USED AND USEFUL TODAY

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Classificatory-Historical Period

• Gordon Childe

• European prehistory and Old World history

• Early economies

• Franz Boas

• Reacted against evolutionary schemes of Morgan and Tylor

• 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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Midwest

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

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Ecological Approach

• 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

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Ecological Approach

• Gordon Willey (1913-2002)

• One of Steward’s 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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Ecological Approach

• Grahame Clark (1907 – 1995)

• British archaeologist

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

• Need collaboration with specialists in other fields

• Provided a panoramic view of the varying human adaptations to the European landscape over thousands of years

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Radiocarbon Dating

• American chemist Willard Libby (1908-1980)

• 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

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

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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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