Anthro Lecture 14 3.5
- Peopling of the Americas:
- The "Ice-Free Corridor" between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Glaciers was blocked between 22,000-13,000 years ago, but most archaeologists believe America was peopled 13,000 yrs ago
- People could have taken a coastal route
- Early Occupation on the Channel Islands 12-13kya or earlier
- Triquet Island, hearth and other remains from abt 14kya
- 22kya footprints from New Mexico
- Mammoth bones w/stone tool cut marks in NM 37kya
- Some of the early North Americans were called "Clovis" after some of their spear points were found near Clovis, NM, in the 1920s and 1930s
- Clovis point
- Clovis point flute
- Confined to North America
- Clovis point
- The Solutrean/Trans-Atlantic Hypothesis states that Europeans settled in North America around 20kya. This idea is not widely accepted
- Could Solutreans have survived on ice floes?
- Problems:
- Unsupported by genetic evidence
- Example of "this sure looks a lot like that" argument
- No smoking gun
- Many Ice Age sites are underwater
- Assuming the Solutrean ppl had boats, this would be a difficult journey
- People could have taken a coastal route
- The "Ice-Free Corridor" between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Glaciers was blocked between 22,000-13,000 years ago, but most archaeologists believe America was peopled 13,000 yrs ago
- Farming:
- Setting: Holocene
- Rainfall patterns changed at the end of the Ice Age, bringing large, shallow lakes and short grasslands to the Sahara
- For 95+ percent of human existence, we were hunters and gatherers
- Agriculture, the deliberate cultivation of cereal grasses and edible root plants, is a phenomenon of only the last 12,000 years
- 15,000 yrs ago, the world population was about 10 million
- Except in a few areas, late Ice-Age environments were incapable of supporting only the sparsest of population densities
- In early Holocene times, after 10,000 BC, still-rising human populations began to match the ability of the world's environment to support them as hunter-gatherers
- A few potential solutions:
- Storing food
- Careful seasonal exploitation
- Raiding your neighbors
- Others?
- How are hunter-gatherers different from state-level societies?
- What is social complexity?
- Political hierarchies. economic specialists, food surplus, long-distance trade, mechanism(s) for those in power to remain in power (i.e. political authority), laws, large populations, settled villages & cities, others?
- Archaeologists conceive of complexity as a continuum
- More complex does not mean better
- Complexity also does not equal "advanced"
- What environmental and social conditions favor increasing complexity?
- What is social complexity?
- In 1923, V. Gordon Childe coined the term "Neolithic Revolution", to refer to the radical period in which humans began cultivating plants and breeding animals for food
- Early Theories of Farming Origins:
- Childe: Drought & population pressure (Oasis Theory)
- Braidwood: "Hilly Flanks" theory. He observed that in the Zagros Mountains of southwest Asia agriculture and animal domestication first began on the periphery of fertile lands in mountainous terrain. In other words, there was not sufficient motivation to switch to agriculture in areas where people could easily obtain food (e.g. oases)
- Ways to Reconstruct Past Environments and Foodways
- Since the 1950s, there have been numerous advances that help archaeologists better understand past environments and foodways
- Pollen samples can be used to determine what types of plants or crops were growing in a certain area
- Deep-sea cores and tree-ring data can be used to access variations in rainfall
- New botanical data acquired through large systematic use of flotation methods allow for the recovery of large samples of wild and domesticated seeds from occupation lvls
- Major advances in zooarchaeology, the study of animal bones
- Radiocarbon dating can be used to date things that were once living (e.g. plant and animal remains)
- Plants take in C14 and C12 from the atmosphere. C14 decays into N14. When the plant dies, it no longer replenishes C14. By measuring the ratio of C14 to C12 we can tell when the plant died. This technique works for animals too, since animals eat plants (or they eat animals that ate plants). This inly works up to around 50/60kya, and only things that were once alive
- Since the 1950s, there have been numerous advances that help archaeologists better understand past environments and foodways
- Early Theories of Farming Origins:
- A few potential solutions:
- Following the advances, archaeologists now know that many different variables led to farming. These varied from region to region and society to society
- Agriculture began at different times in various places
- Why switch?
- Risk management
- Experimentation that leads to full-blown food production
- Climate
- Population pressure
- War
- A source of food during seasonal aggregations
- Others?
- Domestication: the adaptation of a plant/animals thru breeding in captivity to a life immediately associated with humans
- Why?
- major source of meat under one's control
- byproducts
- transportation, plowing, etc.
- How?
- Lure them with salt
- Constrain the movement of the target populations
- Regulate breeding
- Control their feeding to shape future generations and reinforce behaviors
- Why?
- Setting: Holocene