Previous: Artifacts The initial excavation at House Pit Seven was finished by 1989. At that point Brian Hayden thought that a relatively benign process lay behind the simple class structure—that the wealthier and more powerful attained their rank because they provided valuable services that benefited the community at large. For instance, they might have been adept at organizing the fishing and preservation process to create a bigger salmon pie for everyone in the community. Since everyone's share is bigger, the community would not begrudge the benefactor a slightly larger ... Read More
The Pit House
August 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Previous: The Path to Keatley Creek After studying stone tool fabrication and use with the aborigines in Australia, Brian Hayden returned to the University of Toronto to complete work on his doctorate. One summer he was given a contract for a dig where a new airport was planned. "There was basically an undisturbed village in the Pickering area in the way of the runway", he said. "I got the contract to do the excavation before they put in the runway. At that location I became very interested in long houses as social and economic phenomena. We called them corporate groups at the time, ... Read More
Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth
May 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced. But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the ... Read More
Uncovering Ancient Brews, and Cures
November 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When Patrick McGovern dons his Royal Purple latex gloves, the "Doctor Is In." But this doctor isn't working with live bodies; his "patients" are pottery sherds from ancient China, Egypt, Lebanon and even Honduras. Unlike traditional archaeologists who study the sherds themselves for what they can tell us of past civilizations, McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, is looking for evidence of organic material in these remnants of jars, goblets and bowls. "Most of what we are as humans is organic," ... Read More
Global Warming: the Archaeological Frontier
October 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In the small laboratory next to his office at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, N.M., Jim Dixon unlocks a large steel cabinet, slides open a drawer and gingerly lifts out a thin piece of gray, brittle-looking wood. "This fragment is actually a spear shaft," he says and then shows me a dart shaped to fit into the socket of an ancient spear-thrower called an atlatl. "This is the stone point with sinew lashing. This is very fragile. This is about 2,800 years old." Opening one drawer after another, Dixon displays dozens of other artifacts — arrows, some decorated with red ... Read More
Learning from the Ancients
July 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Gazing at the famous Mayan pyramids of Chichén-Itzá, it's hard not to be mesmerized by the colossal limestone structures rising out of an expansive green lawn. It makes for a great photo, although the scene is missing a key feature from when those pyramids rose: a tropical rainforest canopy. In fact, that absent forest is the focal point of the widely accepted theory explaining the Maya's downfall. To the majority of archaeologists, anthropologists and Maya scholars, the collapse of the Maya civilization 1,000 years ago is best summed up by three words: slash and burn. According to the ... Read More
Indiana Jones and the Temple of eBay
June 24, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
For the past couple of years, Charles "Chip" Stanish, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been hosting a regular, rather geeky get-together of his colleagues. "I have a couple of friends over, we get a nice bottle of Cabernet, and we plug my computer into my big-screen TV," explains the director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology with a sly chuckle. "Then we log on to eBay, do a search for something like 'Egyptian antiques' and just roll with laughter all night long. It is really funny." That's because the items that pop up for sale on the ... Read More
