Agricultural productivity and Amazonian settlement

The nature of Pre-Columbian agricultural systems in Amazonia has stimulated considerable debate, specifically: can one or another cultigen — maize or manioc — provide a stable agricultural base for sedentism and population growth (eg. Carneiro 1961; 1986; Gross 1975; Meggers 1996; Roosevelt 1980)? Certain ecological factors are generally seen to limit production and intensification of those subsistence resources that can support sedentary or densely distributed populations. Low agricultural productivity, characteristic of many Amazonian soils, and the generally low density and patchy distribution of terrestrial game are commonly cited as limiting factors (Gross 1975; 1983; Johnson 1982; Meggers 1954; 1996; Ross 1978; Sponsel 1989). It has become accepted that the highly restricted váirzea regions, primarily the floodplain settings of the major ‘white-water’ rivers (the Amazon and its Andean-derived tributaries), did not impose these environmental constraints on demographic or economic growth due to their fertile soils and higher concentrations of rich aquatic resources (e.g. Brochado 1984; 1989; Carneiro 1986; 1995; Denevan 1996; Lathrap 1968; 1970; 1987; Lathrap et al. 1985; Meggers 1996; Moran 1993; Roosevelt 1980; 1989; 1994).

The Early Neolithic central place at Herxheim is defined by a perimeter of elongated pits containing fragments of human bone, together with pottery imported from areas several hundred kilometres distant. This article offers a context for the centre, advancing strong evidence that the site was dedicated to ritual activities in which cannibalism played an important part.

Homo erectus leaving Africa a million years ago ought to have passed through the area that is now Turkey, and the authors report a first certain sighting of human activity of this date in a lignite quarry near Konya. The remains of rhino, hippo and horse were found with 135 modified quartz implements in layers dated by palaeomagnetic reversal to between 0.78 and 0.99 million years ago.

The author reports the oldest human skeletal assemblage found so far in the pacific Islands: at the site of Chalechol Ra Orrak on Palau, Micronesia.

This paper represents the joint work of two very different specialists. The fieldwork was undertaken by Sillitoe as part of his ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the interpretative work was done by an archaeologist, Hardy. The work described here represents some of the last direct evidence from users of stone tools. It shows how procurement, manufacture, use, storage and the relative roles of men and women in the process was dependant on what other materials were available – material often sadly elusive in the archaeological record. Discard did not reflect use, but was often guided by the thoughtful wish to avoid cut feet.

Most archaeological interest in the story of European social evolution has looked to the grand picture, as the bands combine and climb at last to achieve states and empires. What about the structure of European Neolithic as it was experienced at home, when the OX, the pig, the sheep and the goat came to live in the domestic unit of the single household?

Evidence of early occupations by hunter-gatherers in diverse tropical forests is increasing the world over (e.g. Gorman 1971; Pavlides & Gosden 1994), even in America (Roosevelt et al. 1996). This paper reports them in northern South America. Several lines of evidence suggest that many kinds of forests, some or all without modern analogues, existed in the American tropics during glacial times and remained there, with changing composition, until the present. According to evidence presented here, human beings adapted to those forests in northern South America since, at least, the end of the Pleistocene.

On ten stone tools from Tabun Cave, Israel, excavated from a layer dated to 90,000 years old, the presence of organic tool-use residues has been detected. Among them are red blood cells, collagen, resin and hair fragments identified by microscopy and biochemical analyses.

The authors discuss the first evidence for the use of birch-bark tar on Late Neolithic pottery from Greece. This appears to have been used for two different purposes, to seal a fracture and to line the interior walls. The authors also discuss other possible uses.

The growth of medieval cities in Northern Europe placed new demands on food supply, and led to the import of fish from increasingly distant fishing grounds. Quantitative analysis of cod remains from London provides revealing insight into the changing patterns of supply that can be related to known historical events and circumstances. In particular it identifies a marked increase in imported cod from the thirteenth century AD. That trend continued into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after a short downturn, perhaps attributable to the impact of the Black Death, in the mid fourteenth century. The detailed pattern of fluctuating abundance illustrates the potential of archaeological information that is now available from the high-quality urban excavations conducted in London and similar centres during recent decades.

It has long been recognised that the proportions of Neolithic domestic animal species—cattle, pig and sheep/goat—vary from region to region, but it has hitherto been unclear how much this variability is related to cultural practices or to environmental constraints. This study uses hundreds of faunal assemblages from across Neolithic Europe to reveal the distribution of animal use between north and south, east and west. The remarkable results present us with a geography of Neolithic animal society—from the rabbit-loving Mediterranean to the beef-eaters of the north and west. They also demonstrate that the choices made by early Neolithic herders were largely determined by their environments. Cultural links appear to have played only a minor role in the species composition of early Neolithic animal societies.

From their research in Jordan, the authors show that the appearance of early farming and herding communities in western Asia coincided with a large expansion in stone bead production. This reflects a new social role for personal ornament.

Cuisine, argues the author, is like language – it can be adopted, adapted or modified through time. The evidence from actual words for food is also used, together with seed assemblages and types of pottery to chronicle changing food cultures in Neolithic and later India. While some new food ideas (like African millets) were incorporated into existing agricultural practice as substitute crops, others such as the horsegram and mungbean appear to have moved from south to north with their pots (and probably the appropriate recipes) as a social as well as a dietary innovation.

‘Animals were wild, and then some of them were tamed and so became domestic.’ The archaeological definition of ‘domestic’ is a fundamental, alongside the means by which the domestic is to be recognized in the archaeological record. Setting that relationship with human beings which we call ‘domestication’ alongside other relations between species clarifies the issues.

Microstratigraphy — the sequencing of detailed biological signals on site — is an important new approach being developed in the Çatalhöyük project. Here the authors show how microscopic recording of the strata and content of widespread middens on the tell are revealing daily activities and the selective employment of plants in houses and as fuel. Here we continue to witness a major advance in the practice of archaeological investigation.

Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the authors demonstrate that the ambiguous dating of the trilithons, the grand centrepiece of Stonehenge, was based on samples taken from the wrong context, and can now be settled at 2600-2400 cal BC. This means that the trilithons are contemporary with Durrington Walls, near neighbour and Britain's largest henge monument. These two monuments, different but complementary, now predate the earliest Beaker burials in Britain – including the famous Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen, but may already have been receiving Beaker pottery. All this contributes to a new vision of massive monumental development in a period of high European intellectual mobility….

New excavation at Blombos Cave, in the southern Cape of South Africa, and new radiocarbon dates for its sequence further illuminate the chronology of pastoralism in southern Africa, and the relations between pottery-using and shepherding.

The Lapita question

The prehistory of the western Pacific has, for the last 30 years, been dominated by the problem of the origins of the present Polynesian and Melanesian cultures (Terrell 1988). In 1961 Golson drew attention to the distribution of highly decorated Lapita pottery, now known to date from between 3500 BP and 2000 BP, which crossed the present-day division between Melanesia and Polynesia. Furthermore, sites with Lapita pottery represented the first evidence of occupation on Tonga and Samoa, the most westerly Polynesian islands from which it was thought that the rest of Polynesia was colonized. Lapita pottery came to be associated with a movement of people from Melanesia to Polynesia and was seen to represent the founding group ancestral to later Polynesian groups.

The authors report and describe the remarkable grain silos discovered at Tel Tsaf in the southern Levant. These tall, white, barrel-shaped towers seem to mark the first appearance of monuments of demonstrative surplus.