Archaeology

Bolomor Cave is a Middle Paleolithic (Middle Stone Age) site, located in the beautiful Valencia region on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Those Neanderthals had some good taste in locations!

The site is interesting for its multiple hearths, the earliest of which dates back to Marine Isotope Stage 9, a paleoclimatic period which translates to about 300,000 years ago. More about that later. Bolomor cave has evidence of butchering and cooking turtles, rabbits and other small creatures by its Neanderthal occupants, pretty early in and of itself.

• More on Bolomor Cave
• When was the earliest fire, anyway?
• More on Middle Paleolithic

Dr. Ruth Blasco of the Bolomor Team sent along some photographs of the recent excavations, including this one of the hearths in level 11

Bolomor Cave: Hearths in Level 11 © Bolomor Team

Bolomor Cave Entrance © Bolomor Team

The tasty dried meat product called jerky, available nearly everywhere, and made of nearly every conceivable kind of meat, has a name which is derived from the South American version called ch'arki.

Although preserving meat in a smoked, salted or freeze-dried way was certainly not (only) invented in South America, ch'arki refers to a preserved meat from the highland Andes of Peru, and it is and was made primarily (but not exclusively) from llama and alpaca meat. Ch'arki's archaeological history is pretty slim, Jim (if you'll pardon the expression), so we have to rely on ethnographic reports on traditional cooking methods. That makes it a pretty interesting story...

• Read more about Ch'arki
• Read about the Schlep Effect, an interpretive methodology derived by archaeologists
• Read about Llamas and Alpacas

I don't know about you, but I've always been confused about llamas and alpacas. In zoos I've visited, they looked pretty similar to me, and never having done much study on them, well, all I knew was they were domesticated in South America, somewhere high in the Andes.

It turns out they are pretty similar. The wild forms of the species evolved from the same creature some two million years ago. Both were domesticated in the same time and place, and, like their distant camel cousins, both were and are used for meat, and their dung was and is used for fuel. But each came from a different wild camel form and each has a distinct and very useful quality that made both of them vital for the survival of the cold climate Andean herders who turned them into domesticates.

• Read the history of Llamas and Alpacas
• Or their cousins, Bactrians and Dromedaries
• More Animal Domestication Stories

Abri Pataud is an important Upper Paleolithic cave site located at the base of a bluff in the Dordogne valley of south central France, one of several sites in this part of France that can be seen by visitors.

Pataud (the "abri" just means "cave") has fourteen occupations dated between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, including crucial Gravettian and Aurignacian occupations with lots of evidence for Upper Paleolithic art work--drawings, paintings, carvings, personal ornaments, even a venus figurine.

Best of all, it was excavated by Hallam Movius in the 1950s and 1960s. By all accounts, Movius did a stellar piece of excavation and recording, particularly for his era, and although his notes are as yet unpublished, they are extensive enough to be used to support modern scholarly research sixty years later.

• Read my summary of research at Abri Pataud
• Plan your visit to the museum

For some mysterious reason, faience--that striking turquoise colored stuff used as fake precious stones in Mesopotamia and Egypt beginning some 5500 years ago or so--has always fascinated me.

A new article in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science describing the cementation production technique gives me an excuse to freshen up my piece from 2007, and find this terrific photo from the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Uzbekistan.

• Read more about the latest research on faience

Matin M, and Matin M. 2012. Egyptian faience glazing by the cementation method part 1: an investigation of the glazing powder composition and glazing mechanism. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(3):763-776.

Fish traps, which go by an astounding array of terms, are at least 8,000 years old, and were invented by complex hunter-gatherers all over the world.

Archaeological examples are found in Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and range in size from simple brush enclosures to massive stone built complexes to move fish just where we want them to go.

Read more about the latest information on fish traps and archaeology

A couple of articles published in the last month or so have continued the debate as to the earliest domestication of the dog.

The oldest dog-like characteristics on what some scholars are now calling "European Paleodogs" is still from Goyet Cave in Belgium, but the two new articles are supporting evidence that the transition from wolf to dog was in Europe or Eurasia about 35,000 years ago. Calling this "domestication" is problematic, which is after all what archaeology is all about anyway.

• Read more about the latest findings on dog domestication

Germonpré M, Láznicková-Galetová M, and Sablin MV. 2012. Palaeolithic dog skulls at the Gravettian Predmostí site, the Czech Republic. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(1):184-202.

Ovodov ND, Crockford SJ, Kuzmin YV, Higham TFG, Hodgins GWL, and van der Plicht J. 2011. A 33,000-Year-Old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum. PLoS ONE 6(7):e22821. Open Access

Mongooses (Herpestes spp) are kind of like cats, in that they really never became what you could call domesticated, but they do make great pets. Like cats, they also make for an interesting story on their quasi-domestication, nonetheless.

Native to Africa and Asia, the Egyptian mongoose was brought to southwestern Iberia in the 7th century AD, when the Umayyad dynasty of the Islamic civilization conquered what is today the Andalusian region of Portugal and Spain. In the process, the Umayyads and their successors unarguably established a terrifically blended culture in the form of art, music, food and architecture. According to recent research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science last month, they also brought with them their pet mongooses.

• Mongoose History
• Islamic Civilization

Butrint, on the coast of Albania across from the island of Corfu, is an astonishing blend of architecture. Founded in the 6th century BC, the strategically important port was owned by Greeks, Romans, Normans, Venetians, Byzantines and Ottomans, all of whom left their imprint on the city's architecture.

The astounding architectural variety of Butrint's ruins (second only to Constantinople in Turkey) owes a lot to its location on a promontory jutting into the Mediterranean. There it played crucial roles in battles for trade supremacy by both the Roman Caesar Augustus and the Ottoman Pasha of Ioannina, some 18 centuries later. But really, you should read all about it...

• Butrint, Albania, my summary of the history and recent archaeological research there
• Explore Butrint, the official webpage

Shillourokambos is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site on the island of Cyprus, at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea and not terribly far from the more-famous and visitable Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins at Limassol.

Excavated between 1992 and 2004, and occupied between 9,000-10,500 years ago, Shillourokambos holds evidence of the early process of animal management and domestication, of animals as diverse as cats, cattle and wild pigs. Although Cyprus was never closer than 50 miles or so from the mainlands of what are now Turkey and Syria, the PPNB occupants shipped in most of their animals and plants they lived on, the obsidian they used to make stone tools and many of their ideas of architecture and religion from their Levantine PPNB relatives, all of which makes Shillourokambos indeed an important site for understanding the PPNB.

• Shillourokambos
• Guide to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic