Here’re some dishes you’re likely to find at a cookout or picnic:

• Fried or grilled chicken
• Carrot and celery sticks
• Green beans
• Baked beans
• Squash casserole
• Potato salad
• Cornbread
• Bread roll
• Banana cream pie

We’d call them typical of or commonly found at such an event here in Georgia. Indeed, you may have eaten at least one in the past week or two.

Their universality suggests they may be “from” here. Are they actually native foods? Consider:

• Chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are native to Asia, and may have been domesticated in Vietnam. They are domesticated descendents of junglefowl (Gallus species).
• Carrots (Daucus spp.) are native to Europe and Southwest Asia. The oldest carrots were yellow and red. Orange carrots date to the seventeenth century. Celery (Apium graveolens) was used in the eastern Mediterranean by ancient Greeks and Romans. Because of the bitterness of the stalks, early use focused on the seeds, roots, or leaves. Some people are allergic to a chemical in celery, and in Europe, foods containing celery must be marked, as we do with nuts here.
• Green beans (Phaseolus spp.) are native to the New World. The earliest archaeological specimens are from Peru.
• Baked beans are beans like green beans, but different varieties are selected. Most people make baked beans with navy beans. Baked beans are sometimes made with tomato sauce, and sometimes with molasses; some cooks use both. Tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are native to South America, and were cultivated in Mexico by 500 BC. Molasses is most commonly made from sugar cane (Saccharum spp.), which is native to tropical Asia.
• Squash (Cucurbita spp.) were first cultivated in Mesoamerica.
• Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) are native to the Andes of Peru, in South America.
• Cornbread has two main ingredients. Corn is maize, of course, and maize (Zea mays) is native to southern Mexico. The second ingredient is wheat flour.
• Bread rolls are mostly wheat flour, with a few other minor ingredients. Wheat (Triticum spp.) is native to the geographic arc that extends from northern Egypt to southern Turkey.
• Banana creme pie. Bananas are from the genus Musa, and they’re native to Southeast Asia. Cream is skimmed from milk produced by female cattle. All the varieties of cattle are of the genus Bos. Their ancestor is the auroch (Bos primigenius), which lived in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Genetics suggest the aurochs were native to India.

What’s most interesting here? The assortment of foods native to Asia? Or the Mediterranean? Is it that the famous Mesoamerican trilogy of corn, beans, and squash (often called the Three Sisters) are represented?

OR that none of the principle ingredients is native to North America? AND that Europe is underrepresented as a native zone?

What other dishes do you usually eat at a picnic? What part of the world are the major ingredients of those dishes from?

BONUS: what kind of plant is shown in the big picture at the top of this story?

Screenshot from modern Georgia road map found online here.

Roads constitute the largest human-made artifact on earth.

Ted Conover wrote this in his latest book, The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (2010, Knopf: New York; page 9). On the same page, he also notes:

In fact, almost 1.5 percent of the surface area of the continental United States—an area about the size of Ohio—is now covered with “impermeable surfacing”: roads, parking lots, buildings, and houses.

Modern roads—we know where they are. Go back a century—we know where many of the roads in the continental US were.

Go back six centuries, and it’s trickier—where were the roads? This is something Georgia archaeologists ponder.

Mostly, archaeologists record habitation sites—that is, places where people lived. They may have lived there for quite a while, generations even, at perhaps large villages. Other residential sites may have been been small and used for only a short while, perhaps for a season, or even for a shorter period (often referred to as a “camp”).

But, we know from the artifacts that are found here and there that ancient peoples traveled great distances.

Consider the example of the Leake Site, a civic-ceremonial village settlement in northwest Georgia near Cartersville on the bank of the Etowah River. This unusual village was originally settled about 300 B.C. Over time, the residents constructed large mounds, and dug a ditch around part of the settlement area, meaning some houses were inside the ditch and some were outside. The location of this settlement mean the residents were well positioned to monitor or participate in trade that came from either the Gulf or Atlantic Coast and extended to the lower Ohio River, or vice versa.

We know the residents of the Leake Site participated in such a trading network because of the artifacts that have been found there, on the west bank of the Etowah, and at other archaeological sites that were occupied at the same time.

For example, Leake Site Principal Investigators Scot Keith and Dean Wood examined collections from the Mann Site, a contemporaneous occupation in the southwest corner of Indiana not far from the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. Some of the pottery from this site has produced an abundance of Swift Creek complicated stamped pottery and sand tempered simple stamped wares very similar to Cartersville simple stamped pottery, as reported elsewhere on this website and on the Bartowdig.com website. Other artifacts found in common on other contemporaneous (that is, Middle Woodland) archaeological sites scattered around east-central and southeastern North America include anthropomorphic figurines made from fired clay. They have similar faces and other attributes.

The distinctive decorations of Swift Creek pottery indicate there was communication among these far-flung settlements. We don’t know if people traveled along routes we would recognize as roads, or constructed flattened pathways. We surmise that they would in part have traveled on rivers, like the Etowah itself. But some of their passage must have been overland. Some overland routes were used for generations, into historic times. As Professor Louis DeVorsey has noted in the New Georgia Encyclopedia online:

Before Georgia had roads, it was laced with Indian trails or paths. These trails served the needs of Georgia’s native populations by connecting their villages with one another and allowing them to travel great distances in quest of game, fish, shellfish, and pearls, as well as such mineral resources as salt, flint, pipestone, steatite, hematite, and ochre. Many groups followed an annual economic cycle that saw them undertake seasonal migrations in pursuit of plants and animals needed for their existence.

So, what about roads and archaeology? Conover is right—roads are a huge human impact on our modern landscape. Indeed, the expansion of a state highway is the reason that SGA members Keith and Wood conducted the excavations at the Leake Site, and analyzed the data recovered.

Image from bartowdig.com online here.

Based on their research, they have suggested trading routes that the Leake Site residents and their contemporaries likely followed. That, however, is not the same as documenting those routes.

Some ancient roads are known. They were constructed with care, even with drainage, and distinct margins. They connected important trade centers across sometimes inhospitable landscapes. In general, we define a route as a road if it is an identifable thoroughfare, although it may or may not be constructed; this definition includes footpaths and trails.

Consider the Appian Way, or Via Appia in Latin, which connected Rome to communities to the east and south. Or consider the famous white ways, or sacbes/sacbeob, of the lowland Maya. Some sacbes connected parts of single communities; others ran some distance and connected cities. They are called white ways because they were surfaced in the white limestone ubiquitous in the Maya lowlands. Consider the Camino Real roads the Spanish commissioned to link places in the New World; one of the most famous is El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, or the Royal Road to the Interior, which is part of a network that connected Mexico City with the harbor at Veracrúz and extended north into modern New Mexico. Some stretches of all of these examples can be seen on the free satellite photos projected byGoogle Earth, and some are even modern roads and highways (consider these pictures of New Mexico’s Camino Real).

But, what about travel routes, perhaps used for centuries, that were no more than foot-pounded soil? This, clearly, is a class of ancient archaeological resources that are poorly known, more hypothesized than systematically recorded.

The Appalachian Trail in north Georgia in March 2009.

As Dr. DeVorsey also notes:

Native Americans tended to avoid difficult terrain as they traveled across wide stretches of Georgia’s early landscape, and as a result Indian trails generally followed ridges and drainage divides to minimize stream crossings and swampy bottomlands. Later, engineers used the same criteria when laying out and constructing railways and roads. Bridges were costly to construct and hard to maintain, so the routes pioneered by the Native Americans were often later overlaid by iron rails and graveled roads. When large creeks and rivers couldn’t be avoided, the Indian trails often led to rocky shoals or shallows that could be easily crossed or safely forded. In times of high water travelers sometimes carried collapsible wooden frames and covered them with hides to provide small portable boats for crossing. Dugout canoes were sometimes hidden for use in crossing, or rafts or hickory or elm bark canoes were made on the spot.

The Hightower Trail is a named Indian trail here in Georgia. It may have been used for generations and centuries before it appears in the historic record. The words Hightower and Etowah are corruptions of the same Cherokee term, Ita-Wa, according to a historical marker. Another marker notes that this route was once considered the boundary between the Creek and Cherokee territories; today part of it is the Gwinnett/Dekalb County line. As with other prehistoric trails in Georgia, portions of the Hightower Trail are modern roads, some of them well-traveled routes.

The issue of ancient roads raises many potential topics for discussion, for example, trading networks, stream fords and bridges, road construction techniques…. What are you thinking about? Log in and comment!

If you are interested in Georgia’s Indian trails, you may want to track down a copy of Marion H. Hemperley’s Historic Indian Trails of Georgia (1989, Garden Club of Georgia: Atlanta).

You might not agree with the order given, but some of the blogs in this list, “50 Best Blogs for Archaeology Students,” may interest you….

Perhaps you watched Steve Jobs and other Apple people introduce the iPad on 27 January 2010…. Fans of archaeology might have noted that one of the major demonstrations, of the program Keynote (does a better job of making presentations than the Microsoft program Powerpoint), used the topic “Seven Wonders of the World,” which focused on selected archaeological sites.

Clearly, many people put considerable thought into deciding what to use to demonstrate this new machine.

What does it mean that they chose an archaeological topic to punch their high-profile product introduction?

Here’s the link to watch video-on-demand introducing the iPad….

The Weekly Ponder begins its second year of publication this week! The very first Weekly Ponder was posted on 26 January 2009.

We initiated the Weekly Ponder to guarantee a frequent posting of new material on the Society for Georgia Archaeology’s website. We felt that providing new stories was a key to making thesga.org a robust website that would further the Society’s mission and goals, as well as—we very much hoped—help attract members to the Society.

We wanted the Weekly Ponder to be not just words, but to have a picture, too. We thought that would add to its appeal. Indeed, we originally thought the topics addressed in Weekly Ponder stories would have a geographic focus on Georgia. However, we didn’t always have materials, especially photographs, to do that.

At present, the Weekly Ponder addresses issues regarding archaeology from around the globe, and seeks to offer an idea or information worth pondering each week.

All members of the SGA are invited to submit stories for posting to the Weekly Ponder. Please send your contributions to Editor Sammy Smith by clicking here.

Photo by Maggie Villiger; from the the PBS website.

You’re going hunting. You have both arrows and spears. Which do you choose?

After all, as Dr. Veronica Waweru, a research affiliate of the National Museums of Kenya and a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University (NY) whose own research has focused on a site on the Kinangop plateau in Kenya, notes:

To any hunter, putting distance between yourself and prey that might potentially fight back is important. Here, arrows have an advantage over spears. Weapons also need to deliver lethal blows, induce massive bleeding or cause damage to internal organs. Penetration depth is therefore important.

Indeed, Dr. Waweru’s research suggests arrow use began much earlier in Africa than had previously been widely believed—perhaps about 100,000 years ago.

In a PBS blog linked to The Human Spark program series, Dr. Waweru laments:

Modern hunters often add a cocktail of poisons to the shafts of their arrows. These are derived from plants (such as the arrow poison tree) that have wide distribution in Africa. Did prehistoric hunters use arrows to deliver poisons to quarry? We may never know because poisons are unlikely to survive that long.

The Human Spark is a three-part series investigating the topic of human uniqueness hosted by Alan Alda. Read more about the series by clicking here.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/humanspark/about/about-the-series-introduction/35/

The first broadcast of The Human Spark will be on January 6, 13, and 20, 2010.

View east down Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street, from Google Earth, a free downloadable program.

If you want to have coffee in an historic eighteenth century coffeehouse, you can now do so! The drinks that are offered are tea, chocolate, and, of course, coffee!

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse was dedicated at Colonial Williamsburg on the afternoon of Friday, November 20th, 2009. The present building is rebuilt from the ground up. The original structure is only known from archaeological and archival data. Notes the Colonial Williamsburg website and press release:

Archaeological evidence recovered from the coffeehouse site reflects the importance of fine dining as well as the consumption of tea, coffee and chocolate. Charlton offered an epicurean menu that included fish, shellfish, all kinds of meat and game, even peacock. Besides hot beverages, patrons could choose from a section of wines, beer and spirits. A fragment of a Cherokee pipe suggests the presence of Indians who may have been part of an official delegation. Other finds include a number of wig curlers, indicating Richard Charlton’s connection to the wig-making business, and several bones from an anatomical skeleton that was likely used in scientific presentations.

R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse is built on its original foundations with 18th-century construction techniques and in compliance with modern building codes. The finished reconstruction will appear as close to the original structure as historical, archaeological and architectural evidence permits. It incorporates substantial portions of the building’s original brick foundations. The one-and-a-half-story framed portion of the building—35 feet square—is constructed of hand-sawn timber framing covered with cypress weatherboards and white cedar roof shingles. A central brick chimney allows two of the three first floor rooms to have functional fireplaces, while in the cellar a massive hearth is the central feature of the reconstructed kitchen. Research indicates that at least two of three first floor rooms were used for serving food and beverages which were prepared in the cellar. Other rooms on the first and second floors may have been rented or used for lodging or living quarters.

The general history page of the Colonial Williamsburg website notes:

Williamsburg was the thriving capital of Virginia when the dream of American freedom and independence was taking shape and the colony was a rich and powerful land stretching west to the Mississippi River and north to the Great Lakes. For 81 formative years, from 1699 to 1780, Williamsburg was the political, cultural, and educational center of what was then the largest, most populous, and most influential of the American colonies. It was here that the fundamental concepts of our republic—responsible leadership, a sense of public service, self-government, and individual liberty—were nurtured under the leadership of patriots such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Peyton Randolph.

Tickets to Colonial Williamsburg start at $36 for adults, so your visit to R. Charlton’s Coffeehouse will not be inexpensive, but where else can you enjoy am eighteenth-century style coffeehouse!

Maps, a video of the coffeehouse, and an online tour can also be found at the Colonial Williamsburg website.

All photos used in this story are copyright 2009 by Colonial Williamsburg, and were obtained from their website.

Photo by Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press.

Writes John Tierney in the 16 November 2009 New York Times:

Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient “cultural property” discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions: that artifacts should remain in whatever country they were found, and that the best way to protect archaeological sites is to restrict the international trade in antiquities.

Tierney’s article is titled “A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’,” and discusses the ownership of artifacts traded on the international art market. Some of these items are very well known, for example, the bust of Nefertiti from what is now Egypt, presently kept in a Berlin Museum.

Obviously each nation involved may have laws that conflict, making the ownership of antiquities a complicated matter, with no obvious, undeniable solutions.

If you own a piece of land in the United States of America, do you own the antiquities on that land? Is the same true if that land is in England?

Listening to the hype over the movie “2012,” some people are wondering if the Maya have predicted the end of the world in that year.

If you believe archaeologists, no. As the New York Times reports:

Mayan time was cyclic, and experts like Dr. [Ed] Krupp and Anthony Aveni*, an astronomer and anthropologist at Colgate University, say there is no evidence that the Mayans thought anything special would happen when the odometer rolled over on this Long Count in 2012. There are references in Mayan inscriptions to dates both before the beginning and the ending of the present Long Count, they say, just as your next birthday and April 15 loom beyond New Year’s Eve, on next year’s calendar.

If you believe NASA, no. Their website says, “Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012.”

* More on Anthony Aveni, a astronomer and Maya researcher, here on the Colgate University website.

To compare the archaeology of Indiana Jones and of “real” archaeologists, the National Science Foundation presents a web experience called “Archaeology from Reel to Real: A Special Report.” For the activities of “real” archaeologists, the presentation draws on the research projects the NSF has funded.

In the Introduction, the NSF website accurately notes:

Unlike Indiana Jones, there is nary a fedora to be found in their field kits and their grants certainly don’t cover the costs of Webley revolvers or bullwhips, but it could be convincingly argued that in some respects NSF-funded archaeologists are “shadowy reflections” of their big-screen counterpart.

And yet, they go on, there are parallels between what Jones does on-screen, and what professional archaeologists do in real life. They teach, they study vanished civilizations, and they also “seek rare and precious artifacts that tell important stories about the past.” And:

Rather than relic hunters and adventurers, they are scientists, whose work is aimed at answering key questions about the past, answers that may even inform policy about contemporary problems such as how societies adapt to climate change, ecological shifts, political upheaval or mass migrations.

Most of the pages you can click through detail how archaeologists do research, including field methods, and what kind of data they recover.

The final page is a list of useful on-line resources, although the “Special Report” does not seem to have been updated since spring 2008.

Click here to visit the NSF web experience about “real” archaeology.

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.

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.