YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: ANTHROPOLOGY-AND-ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY Prevailing political turmoil continued to close off the possibility for archaeological fieldwork in many parts of the Old World during 1995. One notable exception was Lebanon, where the end of political strife allowed archaeological clearances to be conducted on the war-torn ruins of broad areas of the city of Beirut. Another impediment to archaeological research, one of worldwide concern, was the increasing resistance to excavation of the remains--either artifactual or physical--of indigenous inhabitants. In Israel, Australia, and the Americas, religious officials and descendants of the ancient inhabitants strove to prevent further excavations and were demanding the return of previously exhumed bones and artifacts. Increasingly, evidence showed that the earliest traces of human activity come from Africa. Dating of stone tools recently recovered in Ethiopia showed them to be about 2.6 million years old. By contrast, the oldest known tools found in Europe, reported during the year for a site in north-central Spain, yielded dates of about 780,000 years. Even carved bone points recently recovered in Zaire were found to be about 75,000 years old, far older than their European counterparts. (See Anthropology: Physical, above.) For the Upper Paleolithic range of the Old World, the spectacular cave art first reported at the end of 1994 from the Ardche River valley in southeastern France proved yet more remarkable after dating showed some of the images to be 30,000 years old, 10,000 years older than first thought. Some 300 paintings and engravings show many species of animals, including some never before represented in cave art. Samples for radiocarbon dating were taken from the pigments used for the images, from the soot of torch marks, and from carbon remains on the cave floor. Radiocarbon dating of materials from a cave in southern Spain containing the remains of Neanderthals yielded an age of 30,000 years. The finding fueled the debate over the degree to which late Neanderthals and early modern human beings interrelated. The June issue of Antiquity featured an account of early Upper Paleolithic (about 45,000-year-old) materials from southeastern Siberia near Lake Baikal. The production of such early flint blade tools so far to the east and toward the New World tempted speculation about the timing and identity of the first humans to arrive in the Americas. In England studies were conducted on hair from the 5,000-year-old remains of a man, nicknamed tzi and the Iceman, found frozen in an Alpine glacier in 1991. The hair was heavily contaminated with copper and arsenic, which suggested that tzi was associated with copper smelting. Although the American Journal of Archaeology provided useful regional reports on fieldwork in southwestern Asia and the Aegean region, the contents of the reports were usually several years old. A lack of archaeological information from Iran, Iraq, and southeastern Turkey tended to skew generalizations about the origin of food production in the region. For the present, some archaeologists seemed to take for granted that the settled-village-farming-community way of life, based on livestock and cultivated grains, began in the Levant (southern and western Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel). Fruitful fieldwork persisted in the central and western portions of Turkey. Excavations at various sites of the more developed time range were renewed after some years, including work by Italian and British teams at Mersin and Catalhuyuk, while joint German and American excavations continued at Troy. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was returning after 57 years to its old excavations in the Plain of Antioch in southern Turkey. Work by its so-called Amouq expedition, interrupted by World War II, had yielded important materials over a 6,000-year time frame. The new Amouq team was headed by Aslihan Yener. In northern Syria a Dutch team continued its work at an important early site, Hammam el-Turkman. Excavations were reported from Jordan covering a time frame that stretched from fully prehistoric to early Christian. On Mt. Gerizim Yitzhak Magen, Israel's chief archaeologist for the West Bank, located what was claimed to be an exact replica of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Big news from Egypt was anticipated as archaeologists worked to finish clearing a large multichambered mausoleum found in the Valley of the Kings. The structure was believed to be the burial place of many of the sons of the great pharaoh Ramses II, who fathered more than 100 children. Egyptologist Kent R. Weeks of the American University in Cairo made the discovery. During 1995 items of clothing belonging to the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen, including dozens of loincloths, tunics, gloves, and shawls, were under study for the first time. They had lain in wooden chests in a Cairo Museum storeroom and remained ignored since the discovery of Tut's tomb in 1922. A claim made by archaeologists early in the year that the grave of Alexander the Great had been found near Siwa in the western desert of Egypt was discounted by other researchers sent to investigate. In recent years archaeological activity in Cyprus increased, as did fieldwork in Crete. News of the activities was covered in the American Journal of Archaeology's October 1994 and April 1995 issues. An article by L. Vance Watrous offered an excellent general review of Cretan prehistory through the end of the protopalatial period (about 3500-1800 BC). The various national "schools" in Greece were active, but direct information was long delayed. The most fascinating news from Greek archaeology concerned the analysis of a scene from the frieze of the Parthenon. The text of a papyrus found in the wrapping of an Egyptian mummy stimulated Joan B. Connelly of New York University to reason that the scene showed Erechtheus, king of Athens, about to follow the Delphic oracle's request that he sacrifice his three daughters in order for Athens to be saved from an impending attack. Not all authorities accepted the interpretation. A compact U.S. Navy nuclear submarine originally designed for Cold War missions was made available for deep-sea inspection and recovery of archaeological remains. It was capable of diving to 800 m (2,600 ft), and its first use was to be in the Mediterranean along the ancient Greco-Roman-Carthaginian trade route, where it would search for and recover materials from ancient sunken ships. One highlight among the scant news of eastern Asia was the success of radar images taken from space during a U.S. space shuttle mission in late 1994 in delineating the whole complex of the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor. The region is so covered with tropical forest that surface-based mapping had never been addressed. In China vast new development of the region around the so-called Three Gorges of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River), stimulated by an enormous dam-construction project, attracted archaeological attention, and several U.S. universities were involved. The loss of one of archaeology's foremost figures in later European prehistoric studies came with the death of Sir Grahame Clark (see OBITUARIES) of the University of Cambridge. Another death of note was that of Benjamin Mazar (see OBITUARIES), a Russian-born Israeli biblical archaeologist who excavated the southern and western walls of Temple Mount, Jerusalem, in the late 1960s and early '70s. (ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD) ARCHAEOLOGY: Western Hemisphere. Of all the controversies in New World archaeology, none has engendered such passionate debate as that over the nature and date of first settlement of the Americas. Most experts believed that the first human settlers crossed from Siberia over the Bering land bridge into Alaska near the end of the last ice age, before sea levels began rising about 15,000 years ago. The earliest widely accepted dates for human arrival in the Americas were in the 14,000-12,000-year range, after which time human populations rapidly increased with the appearance of the Clovis cultural tradition about 11,000 years ago. For years claims for much earlier settlement centred on the controversial Pedra Furada, a rock shelter in northeastern Brazil. French archaeologist Nide Guidon maintained that the lower levels of the site contain hearths and stone artifacts, which radiocarbon dating showed to be as old as 48,000 years, contemporary with the Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia. In 1994 three U.S.-based experts on North American Paleo-Indians, James Adovasio, Thomas Dillehay, and David Meltzer, visited Pedra Furada for a firsthand look at the evidence. They concluded that the early "occupation deposits" and associated stone "artifacts" were probably formed by natural geologic phenomena. If they were correct, Pedra Furada was no longer an anomaly--the only 50,000-year-old archaeological site in the Western Hemisphere. Recent DNA studies tended to collaborate a somewhat later date for human settlement, for they identified at least three genetic strains of Native American ancestry dating back to the end of the last ice age. Not only genetics but also medical science worked increasingly closely with archaeology. The frozen body of a girl that was found buried in a subterranean house near Barrow, Alaska, promised to throw light on endemic diseases among the Thule whaling people who lived in the region about AD 1200. The girl, who probably died of starvation between four and eight years of age, suffered from a congenital respiratory disease, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. Rare among modern Americans, the disease may have been more common in the far north in ancient times. In the 1950s and '60s, archaeologist Richard MacNeish's excavations in the dry caves of Mexico's Tehuacn Valley yielded early maize (corn) cobs from levels that were dated by standard radiocarbon techniques--measuring the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 atoms in an organic sample by their decay--to about 5000 BC. That figure became the long-accepted date for the beginning of maize agriculture in Mesoamerica. In recent years archaeologists benefited from a technological refinement called accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), which allows radiocarbon dating to be carried out with greater precision and on much smaller samples, even individual seeds, by the direct counting of carbon-14 atoms rather than radioactive disintegrations. When early Tehuacn cobs found in levels previously dated to 5000 BC were analyzed with AMS, they yielded dates of about 2600 BC, placing early maize farming some 2,500 years later than long assumed. Thus, maize agriculture apparently preceded the appearance of Olmec and Maya civilizations in the Mesoamerican lowlands by only about a millennium. AMS dating also produced convincing evidence for the widespread cultivation of native tubers and grasses in the river valleys of eastern North America by at least 2000 BC. It confirmed that experimentation with the deliberate cultivation of many native grasses was widespread in pre-Columbian North America at least 4,500 years ago. The decipherment of Maya glyphs, which had advanced particularly rapidly in the past two decades, was one of the great triumphs of archaeology in the 20th century. As recently as the 1960s, the Maya were considered a peaceful civilization ruled by calendar-obsessed priests. Decoding their complex script, however, painted an entirely different portrait of a society of powerful militaristic states ruled by bloodthirsty shaman-rulers. Maya civilization was seen to be a mosaic of small centres that vied diplomatically and on the battlefield. Many rose to prominence, then fell into obscurity with bewildering rapidity. Recently, with ongoing decipherment, perceptions were changing again. From a study of numerous inscriptions, Simon Martin of University College, London, and Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, Germany, found that most settlements in the core of the Maya lowlands were allied politically with two powerful kingdoms, Tikal in the Petn region of Guatemala and Calakmul in southern Campeche state, Mexico, each of which competed ferociously for vassal centres. Thus, the real political power lay in only a few hands. By no means were all Maya excavations concerned with cities. Investigations at Talgua Cave in northeastern Honduras by James Brady of George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and other American and Honduran scholars revealed a Maya ossuary, used between about 980 and 800 BC. Twenty-three deposits of human skeletal material were found in the cave, many of them communal bone collections arranged in natural depressions, topped with ceramic jars. The interred individuals probably were all from a nearby village of manioc (cassava) farmers, and Brady believed that they were all from the same lineage. About AD 900 Maya civilization in the southern Yucatn lowlands collapsed rapidly. The cause has long been a controversial subject, with experts invoking such factors as environmental degradation, warfare, internal rebellion, and disease. A large-scale settlement survey at the ancient Maya city of Copn in Honduras examined more than 135 sq km (1 sq km is about 0.39 sq mi) around the urban core and documented the collapse in dramatic detail. A combination of aerial photography, on-foot inspection, and test excavations recorded more than 1,425 archaeological sites in the Copn Valley. The survey revealed an urban core, a densely occupied area surrounding the core, and a rural region with a much lower settlement density. By using hydration dating on artifacts made of obsidian (volcanic glass), the investigators were able to date the sampled sites quite precisely and reconstruct the changing demography of the Copn Valley. From AD 550 to 700, the Copn state expanded rapidly, with most of the population concentrated in the core and immediate periphery. Between 700 and 850, the valley reached its greatest sociopolitical complexity, experiencing a rapid population increase that peaked at 18,000-20,000 people. Those figures, calculated from site size, suggested that the local population was doubling every 80-100 years. About 80% lived in or near the city, while rural settlement remained relatively scattered. At the time, people were farming foothill areas to support a population density that reached more than 8,000 per square kilometre in the urban core and about 500 per square kilometre in the periphery. About 80% of the population lived in relatively humble dwellings, an indication of the extreme stratification of Copn society. Then, after AD 850, a few decades following the end of Copn's ruling dynasty, depopulation occurred. The urban core and periphery lost about half their populations, while the rural population increased by almost 20%. Small regional settlements replaced the scattered villages of earlier times, a response to cumulative deforestation, overexploitation of even marginal agricultural soils, and sheet erosion near the capital. By 1150 the Copn Valley population had fallen to 5,000-8,000 people. (BRIAN FAGAN) This updates the articles human evolution; archaeology; cultural anthropology. Architecture The most talked-about work of architecture and engineering in 1995 was what some called "the Crossroads of Europe," the immense new cluster of buildings at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel (Eurotunnel) in Lille, France. The complex, known as Euralille, was one hour from Paris and two hours from London by train. It was to be linked by high-speed rail to Amsterdam; Brussels; Cologne, Germany; and other parts of Europe in the future and would likely serve as the nerve centre for a multinational community of 100 million people. Parts of Euralille opened in 1994 and 1995, but much was still under construction. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas created the master plan for Euralille. He also designed the vast Grand Palais, or Congrexpo, which included a conference centre, an exhibit hall, and an arena for rock concerts. Koolhaas gave each of them a different architectural appearance, using industrial materials such as corrugated polyester and aluminum, in order to create a sense of random collision and congestion--qualities that he admired and that were described in his book Delirious New York. Other buildings, straddling the station for the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse), included a slope-sided Credit-Lyonnais bank tower by French architect Christian de Portzamparc and Euralille Centre, a vast complex by Frenchman Jean Nouvel that included stores, restaurants, theatres, a business school, a sports centre, and residential apartments. Hotels, parks, and a world trade centre were also planned for Euralille.