YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: ANTHROPOLOGY-AND-ARCHAEOLOGY

ARCHAEOLOGY As had been the case increasingly in recent years, archaeological field activity in the Eastern Hemisphere faced political problems in 1996. Much of southwestern Asia was not a comfortable or even safe region in which to undertake excavation. In Iraq, where foreigners had not been permitted to excavate for some years, looters were active, and material from the national museums was also said to be available for sale. Much the same situation existed in Afghanistan. In Israel, for religious reasons, it was no longer permissible to export excavated artifacts for study abroad, and human burials that archaeologists encountered were to be immediately reburied by religious officials. A political crisis in Jerusalem during the year centred on Israeli-Arab concerns over the so-called archaeological tunnel that runs under two of Islam's most sacred mosques, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, in central Jerusalem. The region is considered sacred by the Jews and the Muslims, and allowing people to tour through it is believed to be unsacred. The most surprising new evidence of Pleistocene prehistoric times consisted of claims that cave art in northwestern Australia with datings apparently reaching back toward 75,000 years ago had been found. The art is simple, mainly small circles engraved by hand into rock faces. Traces of red ochre also appeared along with stone tools. The findings suggested that new considerations could be necessary concerning early Pacific geography and the eastward spread of early humans. Among other discoveries from prehistoric times, "harpoon points" of a type familiar in Europe about 40,000 years ago were found in Zaire dating to about 90,000 years ago. In southern France a stone slab structure within a cave, undoubtedly built by Neanderthals, was dated to about 47,000 years ago. Impressions of woven cloth were detected on fired clay recovered some years earlier in a Czechoslovak site of about 27,000 years ago. In Siberia 10,000-year-old flint arrowheads of a type characteristic of the early American Clovis points suggested the region from which very early peoples moved to the New World. During 1996 studies increased speculation that Tutankhamen may have been murdered. Several years earlier a British specialist had made X-rays of the young king's skull (in his tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings) and suggested that his death may have been due to a blow to the back of his head. Also in Egypt the assistant field director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago at its Luxor excavation undertook a study on artistic change as seen in the reliefs and statuary of King Amenhotep III. At the University of Cambridge, a beer residue found in Egyptian pottery was analyzed, and a British brewery copied it. For ancient southwestern Asia not beer but wine gained attention; residue in a 7,000-year-old jar recovered some years earlier at the Hajji Firuz Tepe site in northwestern Iran was proved during the year to have been of wine made of wild grapes. Also in southwestern Asia a five-roomed tomb built of limestone slabs, with gold beads of the type seen in ancient Troy, was cleared near Dayr az-Zawr, Syria. In northeastern Syria a University of California, Los Angeles, team finished eight years of work and identified their site as the ancient Hurrian city of Urkesh. In Israel a joint U.S.-Israeli team established that Tel Miqne, southwest of Jerusalem, held the remains of the Philistine city Ekron. It appeared that the site would yield useful information on the Philistines. From the regions of ancient Greece and Rome, a study of very early farming procedures and yields in Crete was under way. Also, a U.S.-owned firm in Rio Nareca in southern Spain began mining substantial beds of gold once worked by the Romans. A conference covering recent finds in western China took place in April at the University of Pennsylvania. Many of the finds were naturally mummified human corpses buried in the clothes they had worn; these were people who had lived in the Tarim Basin area from about 4,000 to 2,000 years ago. The features of the corpses were unmistakably Caucasian, and the weaving of the material for their clothes, including plaids, also appeared to be European. Thus, early Indo-Europeans appeared to have spread farther east than had been previously imagined. In China the government refused to allow large-scale archaeological efforts to save sites and artifacts in the vast Chiang Jiang's (Yangtze River's) Three Gorges area, which would be flooded upon the completion of an enormous new dam currently under construction. The Chinese government engineers would not yield to an appeal by hundreds of China's historians, archaeologists, and other scholars to save the many cultural remains that the flooding would destroy. In northeastern Thailand flooding damaged the foundations of the spectacular Wat Chai Wattanaram temple complex. Thirteen birch-bark scrolls from eastern Asia were studied in the U.K. and reported to be of the 1st or 2nd century AD and thus the oldest known Buddhist writings. (ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD)