Earliest Known American Settlers Harvested Seaweed

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

May 8, 2008

People living in the earliest known settlement in the Americas harvested seaweed and other marine plants from a coastline more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) away, new research shows.

Scientists discovered several species of seaweed and marine algae dating back more than 14,000 years at the Monte Verde archaeological site in south-central Chile.

The findings suggest that these early Americans were beachcombers with a tradition of using coastal resources, says study lead author Tom Dillehay.

"At least some first Americans had a broad spectrum diet, because we're seeing that they exploited a wide range of resources from multiple environmental zones—terrestrial, coastal, and so forth," said Dillehay, an anthropologist at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University.

The results, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, also support the theory that the first Americans spread through the New World along a coastal route after walking across a land bridge from Asia to Alaska at least 15,000 years ago.

(See an interactive map of ancient human migration.)

Rising Sea Levels

The discovery of a human settlement at Monte Verde in the mid-1970s provided the first evidence that people had inhabited the Americas before the spread of the so-called Clovis culture around 13,000 years ago.

Scientists were long mystified how people could have reached the southern tip of South America without leaving much evidence along the way.

But many now believe the first Americans spread down the coast where they could exploit the sea for food.

Read the full story here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080508-first-americans.html

Recently Excavated Headless Skeleton Expands Understanding Of Ancient Andean Rituals

Loading Image...

The head jar dates to Nasca 5 and contains the image of a head with a tree growing out of the top and branches extending around the vessel. The tree has eyes, and tassels hang from its branches. The nose is placed high on the forehead, and when the vessel is turned upside down a different face is represented with the nose in the correct anatomical position. The jar has repair holes along a crack in the back and small chips indicating that it was used before being placed in the tomb. It also has holes that are not along a crack or area of stress, suggesting that they were not used for keeping the vessel together with cord. (Credit: Christina A. Conlee)

Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region's archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University). Conlee's analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.

As Conlee outlines in the June issue of Current Anthropology, the third vertebrae of the La Tiza skeleton has dark cut marks, rounded edges, and no evidence of flaking or breakage, indicating decapitation occurred at or very soon after the time of death. A ceramic jar decorated with an image of a head was placed next to the body. The head has a tree with eyes growing out of it, the branches encircling the vessel.

"Ritual battles often take place just before plowing for potato planting, and trees and unripened fruit figure in these rituals, in which the shedding of blood is necessary to nourish the earth to produce a good harvest," Conlee writes. "The presence of scalp cuts on Nasca trophy heads suggests the letting of blood was an important part of the ritual that resulted in decapitation."

Read the full story here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070529101025.htm

Rare skeleton, jewels found in Bolivia pyramid

TIWANAKU, Bolivia (Reuters) - Archeologists have uncovered the 1,300-year-old skeleton of a ruler or priest of the ancient Tiwanaku civilization together with precious jewels inside a much-looted pyramid in western Bolivia.

The bones are "in very good condition" and belong to either "a ruler or a priest," Roger Angel Cossio, the Bolivian archeologist who made the discovery, told Reuters on Wednesday.

He said the tomb -- containing a diadem and fist-sized carved pendant of solid gold -- survived centuries of looting by Spanish invaders and unscrupulous raiders who depleted Tiwanaku of many precious treasures.

"After so much looting... miraculously this has stayed to tell us the history," Cossio said.

"It's a complete body... next to it are jewels, offerings and a llama," he said.

The llama may have been a status symbol or a source of food for the journey to the afterlife, archeologists

said.

The corpse was found in a niche carved inside the 15-yard-high (15-metre-high) Akapana pyramid, which was built around 1200 BC and is described by experts as one of the biggest pre-Columbian constructions in South America.

Read the complete story here: http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKN0248360320070502?rpc=401&

The New World's Oldest Calendar

Research at a 4,200-year-old temple in Peru yields clues to an ancient people who may have clocked the heavens

By Anne Bolen

They were excavating at Buena Vista, an ancient settlement in the foothills of the Andes an hour's drive north of Lima, Peru. A dozen archaeology students hauled rocks out of a sunken temple and lobbed them to each other in a human chain. Suddenly, Bernardino Ojeda, a Peruvian archaeologist, called for the students to stop. He had spotted bits of tan rope poking out of the rubble in the temple's central room. Ojeda handed his protégés small paintbrushes and showed them how to whisk away centuries of dirt. From the sickeningly sweet odor, he suspected that the rope wasn't the only thing buried beneath the rocks: most likely, it was wrapped around a corpse.

"Burials here have a distinctive smell," says Neil Duncan, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, "even after 4,000 years."

The crew spent the rest of the day uncovering the remains, those of a woman in her late 40s, her body mummified by the dry desert climate. Two intertwined ropes, one of braided llama wool and the other of twisted cotton, bound her straw shroud, bundling the skeleton in the fetal position typical of ancient Peruvian burials. Nearby, the researchers found a metal pendant that they believe she wore.

The mummy—the only complete set of human remains yet recovered from Buena Vista—may play a role in a crucial debate about the origin of civilization in Peru. The excavation's leader, Robert Benfer, also of the University of Missouri, is analyzing bones from the site for signs of what people ate or the sort of work they did. He hopes the analyses will shed light on a controversial theory: that these ancient Peruvians established a complex, sedentary society relying not just on agriculture—long viewed as the catalyst for the first permanent settlements worldwide—but also on fishing. If so, Benfer says, "Peru is the only exception to how civilizations developed 4,000 to 5,000 years ago."

As it happens, one of his liveliest foils in this debate is Neil Duncan, his collaborator and Missouri colleague. Both agree that some farming and some fishing took place here. But the two disagree about how important each was to the ancient Peruvians' diet and way of life. Duncan says these people must have grown many plants for food, given evidence that they also grew cotton (for fishing nets) and gourds (for floats). Benfer counters that a few useful plants do not an agriculturalist make: "Only when plants become a prominent part of your diet do you become a farmer."

Benfer and his team began excavating at Buena Vista in 2002. Two years later they uncovered the site's most notable feature, a ceremonial temple complex about 55 feet long. At the heart of the temple was an offering chamber about six feet deep and six feet wide. It was brimming with layers of partially burned grass; pieces of squash, guava and another native fruit called lucuma; guinea pig; a few mussel shells; and scraps of cotton fabric—all capped by river rocks. Carbon-dated burned twigs from the pit suggest the temple was completed more than 4,200 years ago. It was used until about 3,500 years ago, when these occupants apparently abandoned the settlement.

A few weeks before the end of the excavation season, the archaeologists cleared away rocks from an entrance to the temple and found themselves staring at a mural. It was staring back. A catlike eye was the first thing they saw, and when they exposed the rest of the mural they found that the eye belonged to a fox nestled inside the womb of a llama.

Within days, Duncan spied a prominent rock on a ridge to the east. It lined up with the center of the offering chamber, midway between its front and back openings. The rock appeared to have been shaped into the profile of a face and placed on the ridge. It occurred to Benfer that the temple may have been built to track the movements of the sun and stars.

Read the whole story here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/10024281.html

In Peru, scientists discover the oldest solar observatory in the Americas

Return of the Sun Cult
In Peru, scientists discover the oldest solar observatory in the Americas
By Eric Jaffe

As archaeologists evaluate whether an ancient temple in Buena Vista, Peru, functioned as a calendar, a different research team is preserving the remains of an unusually elaborate astronomical complex just north, in Chankillo. This solar observatory is considered the oldest in the Americas, dating back to the 4th century B.C., and it offers unique physical evidence that a sun cult inhabited Peru at least 1,500 years before the Incas.

"We have references that Incas practiced solar observation, but none of those sites have been preserved," says the site's lead archaeologist Ivan Ghezzi of Yale University and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. "We don't have a single one of this complexity."

Though Spanish chroniclers described "sun pillars" used by the Incas to mark specific solar events, the physical remains of these pillars—likely destroyed during 16th-century anti-idolatry campaigns—have not been found. Archaeologists have uncovered the base of two pillars on an island in nearby Lake Titicaca, but the observatories in Chankillo appear more sophisticated than any of these Incan structures, says Ghezzi, who published his findings along with coauthor Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester, in Science last month.

The Chankillo observatory consists of a row of 13 towers that precisely tracked solar movement throughout the year. When viewed from two main observation points, the sun would have reached one end of the tower line at the winter solstice and the other end at the summer solstice. The regularly spaced gaps between each tower could have been used to divide the year into even shorter intervals of 10 to 12 days.

Read the full story here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/10024296.html

Pre-Incan Metallurgy Discovered

Metals found in lake mud in the central Peruvian Andes have revealed the first evidence for pre-Colonial metalsmithing there.

These findings illustrate a way that archaeologists can recreate the past even when looters have destroyed the valuable artifacts that would ordinarily be relied upon to reveal historical secrets. For instance, the new research hints at a tax imposed on local villages by ancient Inca rulers to force a switch from production of copper to silver.

Pre-Colonial bronze artifacts have previously been found in the central Peruvian Andes dating back to about 1000 AD, after the fall of the Wari or Huari civilization , the largest empire in the Andes before the Incas . However, it has been unclear how metallurgy had developed there, or whether or not these artifacts even came from the Andes, instead perhaps coming from trading with coastal villages.

"There's a lot you can't tell about history from the metal artifacts here because there's been a lot of looting, during both modern times and when the Spanish first arrived to melt down what silver and other metals were there to send back to the Spanish crown," said researcher Colin Cooke, an environmental scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Read the entire story here: http://www.livescience.com/history/070419_metal_andes.html

Ancient "Lost City" Discovered in Peru, Official Claims

Kelly Hearn
for National Geographic News

January 16, 2008

Ruins recently discovered in southern Peru could be the ancient "lost city" of Paititi, according to claims that are drawing serious but cautious response from experts.

The presumptive lost city, described in written records as a stone settlement adorned with gold statues, has long been a grail for explorers—as well as a lure for local tourism businesses.

A commonly cited legend claims that Paititi was built by the Inca hero Inkarri, who founded the city of Cusco before retreating into the jungle after Spanish conquerors arrived.

On January 10 Peru's state news agency reported that "an archaeological fortress" had been discovered in the district of Kimbiri and that the district's mayor suggested it was the lost city.

Mayor Guillermo Torres described the ruins as a 430,000-square-foot (40,000-square-meter) fortification near an area known as Lobo Tahuantinsuyo.

Few other details about the site were offered, but initial reports described elaborately carved stone structures forming the base of a set of walls.

Read the entire story here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080116-lost-city.html

Oldest Gold Artifact in Americas Found

A necklace of gold and turquoise-colored beads at an ancient hunter-gatherer burial site in the Andes Mountains is the oldest crafted gold artifact known in the Americas and challenges the idea that only complex societies could produce such displays of wealth and prestige.

The nine-bead necklace was found at the base of an adult skull in a grave at Jiskairumoko, a primitive hamlet once occupied by a group of hunter-gatherers near Peru's Lake Titicaca. The burial site dates to between 2155 to 1936 B.C., before more advanced societies, such as the Chavin, Moche and Inca, flourished in the region.

Gold and other finery were symbols of wealth and status in these societies (as they still are in ours). "Gold certainly is one of those things in human history that has attracted the eye," said Mark Aldenderfer of the University of Arizona, the leader of the team that found the necklace. "People see it as something unique and different."

But such rich adornments hadn't been documented by archaeologists in more primitive societies. The discovery of the necklace, detailed in the March 31 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that these primitive people were in the middle of the transition to a more structured, agrarian society and that their metal-working abilities may have been underestimated.

"This is, for us, signaling this interesting social process that's really part of a dramatic transformation towards some kind of [social] inequality," Aldenderfer said.

Read the whole story here: http://www.livescience.com/history/080331-old-gold.html