Published in spring 2009, Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books) argues that the ability to use fire for cooking foodstuffs allowed the changes that have made humans a distinct species.

Says Wrangham, “cooking is the signature feature of the human diet, and indeed, of human life—but we have no idea why. It’s the development that underpins many other changes that have made humans so distinct from other species.”

Cooking changed digestion and, Wrangham argues, freed up physiological energy that made the larger brains we see in the fossil record possible. Cooking made many foods easier to chew, and increased the potential for food preservation. Also, using fire meant more warmth and protection during dark hours.

In the introduction, Wrangham writes,

Nowadays we need fire wherever we are. Survival manuals tell us that if we are lost in the wild, one of our first actions should be to make a fire. In addition to warmth and light fire gives us hot food, safe water, dry clothes, protection from dangerous animals, a signal to friends and even a sense of inner comfort. In modern society fire might be hidden from our view, tidied away in the basement boiler, trapped in the engine block of a car, or confined in the power-station that drives the electrical grid, but we are still completely dependent on it. A similar tie is found in every culture.

Wrangham says he’s the first to advance this argument, that the shift to cooking food made such a difference in human evolution. If this hypothesis is so plausible, why hasn’t it been put forth before? Also, what do you think of this argument?

Links

Harvard University press release by Steve Brandt.

Book review by Simon Ings on Telegraph.co.uk.

Book review on Powells books website, including link to author interview.

Book review by Dwight Garner on the New York Times website.

Basic Books webpage on this book.

Excerpt from the book’s introduction on the New York Times website.

Transportation networks, and the potential for social connectivity across landmasses and via waterways and along coastlines is worth pondering as part of reconstructing an understanding of our human past that emphasizes continuity—social, political, technological, etc.—rather than a series of major events. Barry Cunliffe’s Europe between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000 (Yale University Press, 2008) is not inexpensive—due in part to its wonderful visuals—but it is worth tracking down as an example of this approach. Cunliffe makes the point repeatedly as he traces Europe’s past that this was not a large area, nor was it trackless. He views Europe’s landmass as a peninsula, which could be crossed, despite a few mountainous zones, by following river systems, or by circumnavigating the landmass. Cunliffe writes:

In Europe, distances are not great and knowledge could spread rapidly. The networks of communication pulsated with the flow of information—stories of exotic lands and people, technological know-how, systems of values and beliefs. At the notes where the exchanges took place…, the excitement of the new would have been palpable. Even the most remote communities would not have been totally immune from the flow of information. So it was that the disparate peoples of Europe, from the most innovative to the most conservative, became enmeshed in networks of contact that inexorably drove change. (page 29)

As reviewer Benjamin Schwarz noted in The Atlantic:

Geography forms the essential basis of Cunliffe’s history. The waters encircling Europe, the transpeninsular rivers that penetrated it, and its topography, currents, tides, and seasonal wind patterns all determined millennia-old sailing routes, and thus the goods and beliefs transported along them. From Cunliffe’s perspective, even the Roman Empire was just an interlude, and perhaps its main achievement was to institutionalize through its ports, roads, and market centers Europe-wide networks of exchange that had been operating since the Middle Stone Age.

By stressing historical continuity and adroitly employing a wide-ranging archaeological record to highlight mobility and interconnectedness, Cunliffe draws a startling picture. Europe, he demonstrates, was geographically and culturally merely “the western excrescence of the continent of Asia.” His archaeological and topographic analysis shows how for thousands of years the steppe lands linked central Asia to the Great Hungarian Plain, thus providing “easy access” from China to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a corridor for trade and migration, starting with nomadic groups deep in prehistory and continuing through the preclassical, classical, medieval, and early modern eras with great hordes of Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Moguls, and Tatars. Knowledge of, for example, the chariot seems to have moved from the Russian forest steppe (the earliest known examples date to 2800 B.C.) to the Carpathian basin in Hungary and, by the 16th century B.C., to Mycenaean Greece and Sweden. Sarmatian horsemen, originally from central Asia, served in northern England as mercenaries in the Roman army.

The core of the European peninsula, without northern Scandinavia.

The Caribbean area, including southern North America and Central America.

These two satellite views are screen-grabs from Google Earth (downloadable for free), and are at the same scale; north is “up” on both. Note how the maritime edges of Europe provide a different transportation scenario compared to continental North America. Clearly, the Arctic, the Great Lakes region, and the circum-Caribbean area are the only parts of North America with the topographic potential for similar maritime transportation networks.

Yet, summaries of the prehistory of the Southeast rarely mention much about circum-Caribbean transportation and exchange networks. Is this because data for them are scanty? Is it due to the fractured modern political boundaries of the region? Is it because such exchange networks just didn’t exist? Or…?

Click here to read The Atlantic review by Benjamin Schwarz, published in December 2008.

Click here to read about Sir Barry Cunliffe on Wikipedia.

Oblique view of Moundville facing south, with the Black Warrior River in the foreground, from Google Earth.

John H. Blitz doesn’t mince words. Answering the question who built the mounds at the famous Mississippian settlement next to the Black Warrior River at Moundville, Alabama, Blitz writes: “We don’t know” (page 4).

In a slim volume (116 pages; also called a “pocket guide”) simply titled “Moundville” (University of Alabama Press, 2008), Blitz, an archaeologist on the faculty of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, summarizes “the story of Moundville and the people who once lived there” (page 6). Liberally illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, this book is easy to read yet chock-full of information.

Blitz tells both the story of research at the site and the developing understanding of the Mississippian period, and the role of the Moundville community in the local area, and in the Mississippian Southeast.

Moundville’s first substantial occupation began in approximately AD 1120. Residents “lived in small one-room houses dispersed across the natural terrace above the river” (page 61). Moundville was one of many settlements at this time that were built around civic-ceremonial mounds. At Moundville, people built two non-residential raised areas archaeologists call platforms, because they seem to have been constructed as a special place to erect special buildings.

Around AD 1200 Moundville’s resident population increased dramatically, and people constructed more monumental architecture—a complex with mounds, a large plaza or open area lacking buildings, and an encircling palisade wall, and many new houses. The population change is too much to have been a natural demographic increase; instead, people must have immigrated to the community. Perhaps people were attracted by the prospect of living in a palisaded (essentially fortified) settlement, where residents felt safer. Indeed, Blitz says (page 65) about a thousand people lived within the palisaded area, and Moundville was probably the political and ritual capital of the region.

By shortly after AD 1300, that is, less one hundred years later, or only a few generations, Moundville’s population had decreased and it had become “a sparsely populated ceremonial center” (page 66). People moved out for reasons archaeologists have yet to identify. Perhaps there were shortages in important resources, like firewood and game. Perhaps people felt safer so they moved away from the palisaded area. Perhaps leaders made lower-ranked people leave. “Whatever the case,” Blitz writes on page 68, “Moundville became a place of pilgrimage, ceremonies, and funerals.” Moundville was not a ghost town (page 68); houses in the northern part of the settlement continued to be occupied, and graves with fancy highly crafted burial goods continued to be created.

After AD 1450, Moundville gradually declined in population and funerary activity diminished. Burials from this period lack the fancy grave goods that characterized those of the previous period. Although activities at Moundville declined, other nearby civic-ceremonial settlements also with mounds continued to be occupied and important (page 70). Some parts of southeastern North America suffered extensive drought in the 1400s, which could have affected residents of Moundville and the Moundville region. Further, in 1540, Hernando de Soto and his army passed through small villages in this area, although there’s not evidence they came to Moundville itself. The Spanish brought Old World diseases that devastated Native American populations, and “Moundville was abandoned by 1600, if not before” (page 71).

Researchers continue moderate excavations at Moundville, and also reanalyze collections stored there. Continued research across the Southeast also amplify our understanding of this dramatic settlement, now the 320-acre Moundville Archaeological Park.

http://moundville.ua.edu/home.html

The summary in this review just skims the surface of the detailed material Blitz presents. Some readers may find his fictional story about what it might have been like to live at Moundville the most thought-provoking section of this small yet worthwhile publication (pages 85–97).

Read about Moundville in the online Encyclopedia of Alabama here.

The Historic Preservation Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources has a downloadable sixteen-page booklet dated November 2007, titled Preserving Georgia’s Historic Cemeteries, that you may find interesting.

Download or review this booklet by visiting this webpage.

Or click here to access the booklet PDF directly.

This booklet compliments the book, Grave Intentions: A Comprehensive Guide to Preserving Historic Cemeteries in Georgia, by Christine Van Voorhies. This book is available in print only, and cannot be downloaded as a PDF. Grave Intentions is a small, easy-to-read guidebook with, as the HPD website notes:

…great information on cleaning up a graveyard and tombstones, getting access to gravesites, funding your project, handling threats to graves, and legal issues.

In Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (Counterpoint, 1997), ethnobotanist and essayist Gary Paul Nabhan argues that modern peoples tend not to have opportunities for discovery in the natural world, and that this distance from our environment means we don’t grasp the complexity of the world and of ecology. He writes on pages 97–98:

I have a wish for humanity: that all of our children would become field naturalists as they grow up. Imagine living in a society where every youth has the chance to explore the earth on foot and in hand, getting to know its creatures on a first-name basis.

…

The reason that I want everyone to become field naturalists has nothing to do with financial or professional rewards—or, for that matter, with the hope of advancing science. To the contrary, ecology seems to be the field in which I am most likely to fail to prove any scientific hypothesis I attempt to test. And that’s why I like it; I am constantly reminded how wrong I can be about how the world works.

That’s half the problem: most of us need to be humbled more often, to be reminded that nature is not only more complex than we think, it’s more complex than we can think.

The other half of the problem is that most children today grow up robbed of the chance of discovering anything at all on their own. They are told early on that scientists in little white coats discover all the world’s “facts” in neat, antiseptic laboratories. These facts are then handed to an ecologically illiterate public on an equally antiseptic platter filled with pasteurized, homogenized truisms to nibble on as stale appetizers empty of much of their former nutrition. Trouble is, all those tasty tidbits taste far more bland than any wild fruit plucked right off the tree.

And so I wish to champion the fine art of discovering, a process far different from the heroic act of discovery. Through the process of discovering, we seldom achieve any hard-and-fast truth about the world, its cornucopia of creatures, or its cultural interactions with them. Instead, we are inevitably assured of how little we know about that on which each of our lives depends.

Nabhan defines cultures of habitat as human communities that have long interacted with a particular landscape—and its non-human occupants—that is local to those communities. Usually we think of cultures as societies with particular customs and shared beliefs that are passed along from generation to generation. It stands to reason that cultures would have a grounding in their local habitats. Indeed, understanding this kind of human-environment linkage is fundamental to modern archaeological research and theory-building.

Do you think so many people find archaeology interesting because of the potential for discovery that Nabhan outlines? Is there a link between archaeological research and understanding and a knowledge of natural history as Nabhan describes? Or do you mostly disagree with Nabhan?

Elsewhere in this volume, Nabhan argues that people are not natural stewards of the environment. Do you agree?

When a scientist analyzes data, sometimes the values are more similar—except for one or a few values or characteristics or whatever. These different values are called outliers, meaning they lie outside the pattern of most of the values (or of the sample of values). Thus, outliers are rare within that data set. In the set of imaginary data points in the plot above, the outlier plots way in the upper right. The question of how to deal with outliers haunts many scientists, and is a point of analysis for some statisticians.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a mathematical researcher, has published a book he titled The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007, Random House). A “black swan,” to Taleb, refers to a rare event that is difficult to predict yet has an outsize impact, beyond normal expectations. Thus, there’s an element of randomness and an element of uncertainty in the outlier.

The name Taleb chose for the book, “Black Swan,” refers to the assumption by Europeans that all swans are white, since all wild swans Europeans were familiar with for centuries were indeed white. The term “black swan” thus was a metaphor for an impossibility. No one (in their world) had seen a black swan, so for them black swans did not exist. Then, in 1697, a Dutch explorer in Australia found black swans, and the Europeans had a bit of a shock. Thus, they altered the term to mean something assumed to be impossible that actually happened.

To Taleb, a Black Swan event is a surprise and has a major impact. Although he applies this concept to financial investment patterns, archaeologists can learn from consideration of Black Swan events and outliers.

First, you have to think about the data set that produced the Black Swan outlier. Perhaps the data may be just a small sample, so that the apparent outlier is really part of a normal distribution of data—it’s just that some data points are missing. You also need to make sure that the way the data were measured is sufficiently accurate and precise that the outlier does not result from some form of mismeasure.

If the data set seems complete, or to be a complete representation of the data set, so that the outlier is “real,” then how to explain it?

Archaeologists sometimes encounter statistical outliers in, for example, a set of radiocarbon dates. Sometimes, the “bad” date may result from inaccuracies in the sample, thus skewing its date. Sometimes, the “bad” date means something that is actually real, but doesn’t match with previous interpretations—for example, that some particular artifact type was actually used earlier or later than previous data and dates suggest.

Sometimes, because the “real world” doesn’t always make sense at a given time, it is hard to determine, based on field and laboratory methodology, why a particular outlier date is “bad.” If we assume it is not “bad,” and that it measures a real data point that is beyond expectations based on other reliable data, then we have far different concerns when we try to explain what that outlier means.

I am not a statistician, and this is by no means a complete disquisition on this subject. Instead, my intention is to raise the issue of interpreting outliers, and perhaps add a new twist to it for some. The Edge Foundation website has a long article by Taleb that you might be interested in reading, which elaborates on the Black Swan outliers, and, ultimately, on human behavior. Click here to read that article, posted in September 2008.

Long time SGA member and primitive technology researcher Scott Jones has just published a book that is a compilation of his articles from the past decade related to primitive technology and experimental archaeology. Scott has practiced primitive technology for two decades and now makes a living presenting the subject to the general public (always with lots of examples and demonstrations) and by conducting experimental archaeology with CRM firms. He is a long time board member of the Society for Primitive Technology and is currently its president. He lives with his wife and son in rural (i.e., primitive) Oglethorpe County.

The book, entitled A View to the Past: Experience and Experiment in Primitive Technology, is a 277-page, soft bound collection of about 40 articles, most of which were originally published in the Bulletin of Primitive Technology. The articles are illustrated with numerous photographs and a few drawings and charts. They are organized into six chapters: foundation skills, making things fly, shelter, stone tools, regional perspectives in experimental archaeology and other musings. While there is a good bit of “how to” in many of the articles, Scott also addresses the “why” and “what does it mean” aspects of experimental work. The fact that Scott has an anthropology degree (UGA) and works with professional archeologists allows him to make a great many more anthropological observations from his work than most primitive technologists. Thus, while the articles on building a shelter, making a long bow, and fire starting will appeal to the general public, and especially young readers, these and most every article have important messages for the working archaeologist who is trying to interpret the anthropology of artifact assemblages. This is a very readable, interesting, and entertaining book that will appeal to a wide audience.

A View to the Past by Scott Jones is available from Createspace.

Wiley Publishing has just issued Archaeology for Dummies ($21.95) by SGA member Nancy White. The book tells how archaeology is detective work and traces over 2 million years of prehistoric human cultures. It demonstrates how archaeology uncovers things about historic times that history can’t, and shows how archaeological knowledge is useful for modern issues like global warming, environmental depletion, genocide or disaster victims, and recovering a people’s lost heritage. Included in the book are also some of White’s (awful) jokes and stories from fieldwork in northwest Florida, south Georgia and south Alabama. This book is useful for professional and avocational archaeologists as well as lay readers who want to learn about the breadth of the field and how to get involved. It’s available in many bookstores and at online outlets such as amazon.com.

By the early 1800s, Choctaw-speakers lived across Mississippi and in what are now modern neighboring states. Choctaw is closely related to the languages that peoples living in what is now Georgia spoke at that time. They are all part of the Muskogean language family that was common across southeastern North America in late prehistory.

A historic volume called A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language was published in 1915. It is the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology’s Bulletin 46. The author was Cyrus Byington, and the volume editors were John R. Swanton and Henry S. Halbert. You can download it here, where it is offered free by the Internet Archive.

Reverend Byington (b. 1793, d. 1868) had passed away by the time this volume was published. He had lived and worked among the Choctaw as a missionary for over fifty years.

This particular part of the dictionary deals with Choctaw phrases that begin with “ahe” and refer to potatoes. Note how many phrases refer to cultivating potatoes. The Choctaws made small mounds of dirt around their potato plants to keep the sunlight from bothering the potatoes, which grow underground. Byington refers to these little mounds as hills in this dictionary.

Do you think the word written here as “ahe” means potatoes in Choctaw?

The word “ahe inchuka” is defined as a potato house. What do you think that is?

David Macaulay is an author and illustrator who has written many interesting books. One of my favorites is Motel of the Mysteries, published in 1979 by Houghton Mifflin (Boston). The book is now out of print, so I always look for a copy at yard sales and flea markets—and every once in a while I’m lucky enough to find one!

The publisher’s blurb about Motel says:

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson’s incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

Thus, Macaulay imagines being an adventurer in the future, when civilization had been destroyed by being overrun with junk mail—remember, the book was written before there was internet spam! So, in the book, Howard is trying to understand the ruined walls and other architecture he finds. Can you guess what the “porcelain sarcophagus” is?

Howard is an intrepid explorer, and he is certain, based on the architecture and artifacts he finds, that he has found funerary architecture. In his eyes, he is seeing special ceremonial buildings complete with burial goods distributed in separate chambers, similar to the archaeological remains we see today that survive from ancient Egypt.

As you might guess from the title of the book, what Howard had found were the decrepit remains of a modest, twentieth-century, highway-side motel somewhere in this country. His interpretations of the remains are erroneous in extremely funny ways.

This book leads the reader to think about the processes of scientific thinking, and how scientists assemble a wide variety of data to attempt to understand complex systems and situations. Sometimes, theories are developed based on what turn out to be scanty data. Thus, the theories turn out to be wrong, sometimes in humorous ways, when more data are collected.

You may also be interested in other volumes by Macauley, such as Cathedral (1973), Pyramid (1975), Underground (1976), and Castle (1977). All have been reprinted in paperback. Macauley is probably most famous for his award-winning international bestseller The Way Things Work (1988), which he later expanded, updated, and renamed The New Way Things Work (1998).

This entertaining, colorful cartoon book is about archaeology, particularly in Georgia; it is accurate and amusing. The book features hand-lettered text accompanied by eye-catching, vivid, often humorous artwork. The volume also provides various ideas for archaeological projects. Although oriented toward Georgia and Southeastern archaeology, this volume is useful for understanding general concepts in the archaeology of any geographical area, and is highly recommended for any audience.

Frontiers in the Soil begins with an introduction to the complex field of archaeology, which is often part of multidisciplinary projects and must deal with complicated issues related to chronological dating, and the meaning of the material evidence of past human behaviors. Dickens discusses the major prehistoric eras, and describes important locations occupied in prehistory. Dickens also describes an archaeological project at an imaginary sixteenth-century Native American community, including fieldwork methods, cleaning and analyzing artifacts, and finally authoring a report so that the information the site contained is preserved for the future.

The author of Frontiers in the Soil, Roy S. Dickens, Jr., was a well-known archaeologist who worked in Georgia, and across Southeastern North America. His engaging text is supported by the captivating artwork of James McKinley. The first edition, published in 1979, quickly sold out. SGA now owns the copyright to the book, and published a second edition with the assistance of the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

Concurrently with the second edition, the SGA published a new teacher handbook to assist teachers in instructing students in all aspects of archaeology, including methods and techniques (and advancements in the field since the original edition was published), preservation and stewardship, and archaeological ethics. The new handbook meets Quality Core Curriculum (QCC) standards for the state of Georgia (current at the time of its publication).

Click here for information for ordering this volume through the Carl Vinson Institute of Government online bookstore. The Teaching Handbook is available here.