YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: ANTHROPOLOGY-AND-ARCHAEOLOGY: ...

ARCHAEOLOGY: Western Hemisphere. Archaeologists had often assumed that the first Americans were big-game hunters, preying on such animals as the mammoth and the mastodon. The big-game stereotype was based on Clovis culture kill sites on the North American plains dating to about 9500 BC. Archaeologist Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago recently debunked this myth with her excavations in Caverna da Pedra Pintada in dense rain forest on the Amazon River in Brazil. Roosevelt found that the cave had been occupied more or less continuously from about 9200 BC until about 400 years ago, when Europeans first invaded the Amazon. The earliest inhabitants were contemporary with the Clovis people of North America. They foraged for plant foods and small game near the cave and also took fish from the Amazon. The walls of the cave are covered with red and yellow handprints and paintings of humans, animals, and geometric designs that were claimed to be the earliest in the Western Hemisphere. The Pedra Pintada finds showed that, contrary to popular belief, the first Americans adapted to diverse environments, including tropical rain forest, soon after their arrival. While the Pedra Pintada discovery was dated to Clovis times, another early site in the Saltville Valley in far southwestern Virginia, found by Jerry MacDonald of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., was radiocarbon-dated to about 12,000 BC. At Saltville MacDonald discovered that early Americans skinned and cut up a mammoth carcass. Further evidence of skilled environmental exploitation in later times by native Americans came from a Genesee culture site of five or six houses on the banks of the Niagara River at the eastern end of Lake Erie dating to about AD 675. Waterfowl and fish abounded at this location, which may have served as a regional gathering place for groups living a considerable distance away. Many archaeological finds were now coming from museum collections rather than new excavations. Archaeologists at the Nevada State Museum recently restudied a human mummy excavated from Spirit Cave in eastern Nevada in 1940. The male mummy, believed to be 2,000 years old, was found lying on its side, wrapped in a skin robe. He was about 1.57 m (5 ft 2 in) tall and suffered from a fractured skull and severe teeth abscesses. He wore moccasins and was wrapped in shrouds woven from marsh plants. Ervin Taylor of the University of California, Riverside, radiocarbon-dated the body to about 7400 BC, a time when western North America was becoming much drier. The textiles found with the corpse were very sophisticated, revealing the antiquity of this craft in native American culture. Archaeologists digging Maya cities were working in close collaboration with epigraphists (those who study ancient inscriptions) and as a result could sometimes establish why individual buildings were erected and by whom. They also found the burials of some of the people who commissioned pyramids and lesser ceremonial structures. At La Milpa in Belize, a site with pyramids surrounding a central plaza, Boston University archaeologist Norman Hammond unearthed the tomb of a ruler of about AD 450 named Bird Jaguar. Hammond uncovered layers of limestone and flint chips filling a shaft that led to an underground burial chamber carved out of solid rock about 3 m (10 ft) below the surface. Bird Jaguar died when he was between 35 and 50 years old, somewhat young for a Mayan lord. He wore a jade necklace of coloured and matched apple-green jade. A pendant in the form of a vulture head, a symbol of kingship, hung from the necklace. The jade in the tomb came from sources more than 400 km (250 mi) away in Guatemala. A spectacular archaeological discovery resulted from a volcanic eruption at 6,400 m (20,700 ft) above sea level in the Andes Mountains in Peru. Falling volcanic ash melted the ice and snow on the summit of a peak named Nevado Ampato. The Inca considered Ampato a sacred mountain, home of a deity who brought rain and plentiful harvests. Anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his climbing partner Miguel Zrate were close to the summit when Zrate spotted a small fan of red feathers protruding from a slope. The feathers were part of the headdress of one of three Inca gold, silver, and seashell statues, each with a feather headdress, that they found there; the statues had once stood on a now-collapsed ceremonial platform. Reinhard and Zrate tracked the collapse 60 m (200 ft) downslope, where they spotted a mummy bundle of a young girl that had once lain in a grave above. She was a deep-frozen Inca sacrificial victim of 500 years ago. Inside her outer garments, the girl was wrapped in a dress encircled with a belt. She wore a shawl fastened with a silver pin. Her head was bare, but she wore leather slippers. On the basis of a headdress found with a second mummy at a lower altitude, it was thought that she may have once worn a plumed fan that arched over a feather-wrapped cap. Her hair was in a pigtail and was tied to her waistband by a thread of black alpaca, which suggested that other people helped dress her, either before or after her death. Her silver shawl pins were hung with miniature wood carvings, including a wooden box and two drinking vessels. Subsequently, two Inca children, perhaps a boy and an eight-year-old girl, were recovered in sacrificial graves at a somewhat lower altitude, 5,855 m (19,200 ft). Reinhard believed they may have been sacrificed together in a symbolic marriage, a custom recorded by early Spanish chroniclers. The girl wore a reddish-brown feathered headdress, made of tropical macaw feathers. Her grave contained clay vessels, wooden ceremonial drinking spoons, weaving tools, and offering bundles. The Ampato mummies promised a rich fund of medical information, which could reveal how the victims died. The textiles alone revolutionized knowledge of Inca weaving. One statue wore some of the finest Andean cloth known, a miniature vicua garment with a weave count (number of strands per unit area) as high as that of modern machine-made clothing. Marine archaeologist Barto Arnold of the Texas Historical Commission located the wreck of the French ship Belle, a vessel used by French explorer Ren-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on his ill-fated expedition in search of the mouth of the Mississippi River in 1684. The Belle was the smallest ship of the four on the expedition and sank off the eastern Texas coast in 1686. The wreck lay in 3.6 m (12 ft) of water off the present shoreline and was identified by means of a 1.8-m (6-ft)-long bronze cannon bearing the distinctive crest of Louis XIV, king of France. Other finds included pewter plates, lead shot, a stoneware pitcher, a sword hilt, glass trade beads, and an iron pike with part of its wooden handle. Only one of La Salle's ships returned to France. Another was captured by the Spanish, and the third was wrecked while entering Matagorda Bay. The Texas Historical Commission was searching for that wreck. La Salle himself was murdered by his crew when they mutinied during an attempt to reach the Mississippi on foot. All but 12 of the 180 crew members and colonists subsequently perished from disease or Indian attacks. (BRIAN FAGAN) This article updates human evolution; archaeology; cultural anthropology. Cultural. Cultural anthropology continued to be a discipline in the throes of change in 1996. Although the developed nations of the West remained the primary centres of professional training, employment, and theoretical development, anthropologists from nations in Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc exerted increasing influence. No longer content to work in the West or restrict research to societies within national borders, non-Western ethnologists, such as Komei Sasaki, who had conducted fieldwork in Nepal, China, and India as well as in his native Japan, worked to expand ethnographic horizons. At the same time, growing numbers of Western ethnographers increasingly focused their attention upon their own societies. Whatever their nationality or wherever they worked, anthropologists throughout the world continued to redefine their discipline, reassess their roles, and reconsider the subjects and locations of their ethnographic studies. In a front-page article in the December 1996 issue of Anthropology Newsletter, published by the American Anthropological Association, University of Chicago anthropologist Richard Shweder contrasted competing views of cultural anthropology as a platform for moral and political activism; as a nonmoral, value-free objective science; and as a forum for postmodern critics challenging the existence of objective knowledge. Recognizing that knowledge of the world is incomplete when regarded from one point of view and incoherent when seen from all points at once, Shweder championed a pluralistic anthropology. Such an approach would examine "multiple cultural realities" from "manywheres" rather than from such particular "places" as the individual ethnocentric view or the objective "view from 'nowhere in particular' " and rather than giving no view at all, as favoured by postmodern critics. Scholars continued with considerable warmth to conduct the debate as to whether anthropology is a science. Representing scientific anthropology at a symposium convened in 1995 by the New York Academy of Sciences entitled "The Flight from Science and Reason," anthropologist Robin Fox of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., addressed assertions claiming that science was invalid because its findings could be wrong, trivial, biased, or used for evil purposes. Noting that science by its very nature was designed to deal with error, triviality, and experimenter bias, Fox urged colleagues to distinguish between the use and abuse of the enterprise and not give up on the search for scientific truth in the service of humanistic goals and understanding. Anthropologists debating the role of science in their discipline were part of the wider international dialogue assessing the role of evolution and the relative impacts of biology and culture on human behaviour. Responding to critics who censured science as merely another belief system and evolution as simply an erroneous belief, personalities as varied as the pope and a historian of science rallied to the support of the scientific perspective. In a pronouncement made at the 1996 annual meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II stated that the theory of evolution was more than a hypothesis and that its teaching was not incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine. In a highly publicized and potentially influential study entitled Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) visiting scholar Frank J. Sulloway used the example of Darwin's formulation of the theory of evolution and the Darwinian evolutionary perspective to show how competition for parental attention within families between firstborns and those born later affected personality development and, by extension, larger cultural events. Sulloway demonstrated that firstborns, firmly established in secure familial niches, tended to support the status quo, while children born later, forced to compete for parental favour, tended to develop more rebellious personalities. Statistically analyzing more than 20,000 biographies written during the past 500 years, Sulloway found that those born later played major roles in revolutionary movements. He proposed that competition between individuals within families rather than community competition between kin groups exerted the most profound influence upon culture and history. Science and scientists themselves increasingly became subjects of anthropological inquiry in 1996. In Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Paul Rabinow described the intensely complex commercial technological environment within which the polymerase chain reaction essential to genetic engineering was invented and developed. In Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, MIT anthropologist Hugh Gusterson contrasted the perspectives of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, Calif.) weapons scientists who believed in the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons with antinuclear activists concerned by the threat of nuclear war. He found "each side holding tenaciously to their corner of a larger truth"--that people need "to rethink our relationship with nuclear weapons and our use of science." Anthropologists working among the more than 12 million native people in the Western Hemisphere continued to be involved in those peoples' ongoing struggles over land, sovereignty, and fishing, hunting, and water rights. Many supported the findings of a major report released by the Canadian government in 1996 that showed that self-governing tribes fared much better than did those subjected to governmental supervision. (ROBERT S. GRUMET) Architecture Two architects, one Spanish and the other American, dominated much of the world's architectural news in 1996. Each won a prestigious award. Jos Rafael Moneo received the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world's most prestigious architecture honour, and in late 1996 it was announced that Richard Meier would receive the 1997 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Both prizes were for career achievement rather than for any one building. Moneo received his Pritzker at a ceremony in Los Angeles in June, the same month in which he was chosen to design a new $50 million Roman Catholic cathedral for that city, intended to replace the structure damaged in a 1994 earthquake. The proposed demolition of the old cathedral was stopped by court order, however, after a protest by historic preservation groups, and at year's end the outcome was not clear. Other Moneo buildings under construction in 1996 included a major addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and museums of art and architecture in Stockholm. Among the architect's completed works, the best known was the National Museum of Roman Art in Mrida, Spain, completed in 1986 and regarded as a masterpiece. Richard Meier's gold medal was announced during a year in which the first section opened of his enormous Getty Center, an institution for the study and conservation of art, the construction cost of which was expected to reach some $1 billion. Dramatically sited on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, the Getty was scheduled to be completed in 1997. Like Moneo, Meier had designed buildings in many parts of the world; these included the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain, the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, Calif., and a federal courthouse in Islip, N.Y. The opening of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry of the U.S., scheduled for 1997, was much anticipated. A pile of sharply twisting, curving shapes, surfaced in titanium and rising to a height of 30 m (100 ft), it might signal the beginning of a new free-form kind of architecture that had become possible because of computers, without which Gehry's complex forms could not have been designed, engineered, or constructed.