YEAR IN REVIEW 1998: ARCHAEOLOGY

Eastern Hemisphere. In 1997 stone tools from Ethiopia's Gona River were dated to between 2,600,000 and 2,520,000 years ago, which made them the oldest in the world by at least 120,000 years. Three wooden spears from Schningen, Ger., were dated to between 400,000 and 380,000 years ago. According to a report in Archaeology, "the spears show design and construction skills previously attributed only to modern humans"; at the time, archaic Homo sapiens inhabited Europe. Flints and grooved wooden tools, which probably served as handles, found at the site may be remains of the oldest composite tools in the world. Chlorine-36 dating revealed that the spectacular petroglyphs in Portugal's Ca Valley, brought to public attention in 1994, were at least 16,000 years old. The new results settled a debate between scholars who dated the artworks to the Upper Paleolithic (35,000 to 10,000 years ago) on the basis of their style and others who argued that stylistic dating was unreliable and that the petroglyphs were no older than 3,000 years. Diring Yuriakh, a site with stone tools in central Siberia, was thermoluminescence-dated to between 370,000 and 260,000 years ago, long before the date of 30,000 years ago that had been generally accepted for the settlement of the area. Some experts, however, questioned whether the tools were actually man-made, while others sought confirmation of the dates by the use of another method. In Oceania stone tools from the Indonesian island of Flores were dated to just after 730,000 years ago, which suggested that H. erectus could cross open sea; the controversial claim awaited verification. Optical-luminescense dates from several sites suggested that Australia had been colonized by 60,000 years ago, instead of the usual 40,000 to 30,000. A 13,000-year-old burial from San Teodoro Cave in Sicily yielded the first evidence of Paleolithic archery--a fragment of flint, probably part of an arrowhead, embedded in a human pelvis. A 7,000-year-old skull found at Ensisheim, France, provided the earliest unequivocal evidence of trepanning, a surgical procedure, in which a small disk or square of bone is removed from the cranium. As the British Museum reopened its "Celtic Europe" halls, scholars argued over the widely accepted link between the Keltoi described by classical authors and the predominant style of late Iron Age European art, La Tne (c. 450-55 BC). Some pointed out that ancient descriptions, confusing and often contradictory, did not attest the existence of a coherent pan-European Celtic ethnic group that could be identified with La Tne. Furthermore, La Tne itself displayed substantial regional variations, and there was no La Tne in Spain, where there were known to have been Celts. Defenders of the Celtic ethnicity of people across Iron Age Europe noted the overarching similarity of cultures across the continent. The argument highlighted the caution necessary to avoid what John Collis of the University of Sheffield, Eng., called "simplistic correlations between material culture and ethnic groups." Excavations at Pompeii questioned much of the site's traditional chronology, in which each historical period was thought to have a distinctive type of masonry, suggesting that many structures there and elsewhere in Italy would have to be redated. The finding also emphasized the importance of dating buildings by materials found in construction layers rather than by wall fabric, which often varied according to structural or financial considerations. An Israeli archaeologist argued that skeletons found at Masada in the 1960s were those of Roman soldiers, not Jewish patriots who fought the Romans in AD 70. Bones of pigs, which the zealots would have regarded as unclean but which Romans sacrificed at burials, were found with the skeletons. The authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls was also debated. Arguments against their usual ascription to the Essenes, a Jewish sect living at Qumran, were based on differences of doctrine and lifestyle between the texts on the scrolls and descriptions of the sect by classical authors. In China discoveries from more than 100 sites along the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) showed that rice cultivation began 11,500 years ago rather than 8,000. Archaeologists also identified a site in Hebei province, long under excavation, as Zhongdu, one of three capitals of the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368). In Japan the Imperial Household Agency for the first time permitted archaeologists to map two imperial tombs of the 5th century AD, but it continued to prohibit the excavation of such mounds. Preservation of archaeological sites threatened by construction projects continued to a be a problem. China's Three Gorges Dam moved forward, even though its completion would spell doom for many important sites along the Chang Jiang. The fate of possibly the largest Roman villa in Great Britain, found during the summer near Swindon, remained uncertain, as the local council and the developer who owned the land debated its future. At Pompeii the superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, opposed the renewal of contracts for large excavations like that at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, arguing that the money would be better spent on restoration and maintenance of decaying buildings already unearthed. The Italian Parliament approved a measure granting Pompeii administrative and fiscal autonomy, which would allow the underfunded superintendency to keep all of its ticket revenues (most of which had been turned over to the Ministry of Culture), thereby tripling its annual budget. Looting of archaeological sites was also a problem. Additional artifacts from Iraqi sites, including Nineveh, Khorsabad, and Nimrud, appeared on the world market. The museum at Butrint, Alb., was reported to have been looted, and further excavation at that major Roman site was postponed. Working partly from documents furnished by an insider, British journalist Peter Watson wrote a book pillorying the auction firm Sotheby's for participating knowingly in smuggling and selling looted and stolen works of art. Among the antiquities cited were a goat-headed goddess from a shrine at Lokhari, India, which had been photographed in place before 1986, and an Apulian vase that had been described in an Italian magazine as having been looted. In response, Sotheby's closed its London antiquities and Indian and Islamic art departments and moved all regular sales of such material to New York City, where tighter U.S. laws would limit what it could sell. In January Swiss and Italian authorities announced the largest seizure ever of looted antiquities--$40 million worth of Roman and Etruscan artifacts discovered in four warehouses in Geneva. Thirteen sculptures stolen from Angkor Wat and found in 1990 in a Bangkok gallery were returned to Cambodia in September 1996, the first time that Thailand, much criticized for its complicity in the illegal antiquities trade, had returned stolen works of art. The U.S. Customs Service returned several stolen medieval manuscript pages to Spain under a provision of the U.S. Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 that prohibits interstate or international trafficking in antiquities. It was the first time that the act had been invoked in a case involving artifacts of foreign origin. ANDREW SLAYMAN Western Hemisphere. For more than a century, archaeologists have argued over the date of the first human settlement of the Americas. Most scholars now believe Native Americans arrived from Siberia across the Bering Strait about 15,000 years ago. Recently, new accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dates obtained by University of Kentucky professor of anthropology Tom Dillehay from the Monte Verde site in Chile's Llanquihue province shed new light on early settlement in the extreme south of the Americas. Monte Verde is an open-air wetland residential site with bone and wooden artifacts, hut foundations, and ecological data preserved under a peat layer. Dillehay identified hearths, braziers, refuse pits, and footprints. Wooden artifacts included basins, bow drills for making fires, and, possibly, tool handles. Twelve wood-framed houses mantled with hides form rows of dwellings, perhaps a tentlike residential complex. Dillehay compared them to dwellings used by the Tehuelche Indians of southern Argentina, which comprised hides smeared with grease and red ocher drawn over wooden poles. AMS samples from the main occupation layer yielded dates between 10,300 and 10,800 BC, some of the earliest-known dates for human settlement in the Americas. Far to the north, in Alaska, new archaeological finds were being used to date early settlements on the eastern side of the Bering Strait. East of Kotzebue, Smithsonian Institution paleoanthropologist Dennis Stanford studied undated stone projectile points found near a glacial lake at the Sluiceway site. He believed the style of the points indicated that they were more than 10,500 years old. On-Your-Knees Cave on Prince of Wales Island in the middle of Alaska's Tongass National Forest yielded human bone fragments radiocarbon-dated to about 7800 BC, some of the earliest ever found in North America. Stable isotope analysis of the remains (a comparison of chemical isotopes of food absorbed by bone) revealed a predominantly marine diet. Farther south, in Washington state, archaeologist James Chatters dug a complete human skeleton of a man between 45 and 50 years old, radiocarbon-dated to about 7300 BC, from the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick. Fierce controversy surrounded this find, a male with an elongated skull more characteristic of Caucasians than Native Americans. Research stalled while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the local Umatilla Indians worked to settle the ownership of the skeleton. Some of the earliest human-worked wood came from the newly excavated Page-Ladson site on Florida's Aucilla River. The earliest occupation there dated to about 8000 BC, when that part of Florida, now only 8 km (5 mi) from Tallahassee, was more than 160 km (100 mi) from the ocean and situated in open savanna. Within a century, rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age flooded the site and sealed the occupation layers. The Page-Ladson people used stone projectile points and gouges made of local stone, worked with antler flakers found at the site. They also made spherical stones that were attached to leather cords and used to bring small animals to the ground. Three wooden stakes driven into the ground and a burned and slightly hollowed-out log were the earliest-known wooden objects found in the Americas. On the other side of the continent, a sandal fragment from a cave on southern California's Channel Islands was dated to approximately 7000 BC, the earliest such find on the Pacific coast. AMS radiocarbon-dating was revolutionizing archaeologists' knowledge of early Native American agriculture. AMS dating, which counts actual carbon-14 atoms, uses tiny organic samples such as individual seeds, which thereby removed such potential sources of dating error as specimens' being trampled from one level into a lower one. On the basis of this method, Austin Long of the University of Arizona redated early diminutive corncobs from Mexico's Tehuacn Valley--once estimated at 5000 BC--to no older than about 3500 BC. Experts now believed that corn (maize) was first domesticated from wild teosinte grass in southwestern Mexico perhaps as early as 4000 to 3500 BC. Such plant cultivation was not, however, a novelty. For example, Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Bruce Smith recently dated squash seeds from Guil Naquitz cave in Mexico's Valley of Oaxaca to at least 8000 BC, which showed that some form of simple agriculture was practiced in Central America at the same time food production and village life began in southwestern Asia. Whereas Chinese and southwestern Asian villagers shifted rapidly to diversified agricultural economies, it was generally believed that Native Americans continued to forage rather than plant for several thousand more years; future discoveries and AMS dates could change this scenario dramatically. The new dates for corn domestication, for example, shortened the gestation period for the development of corn agriculture in Mayan and other Native American civilizations by at least 1,500 years. Many long-known sites were being reinterpreted as a result of modern archaeological technology. The Serpent Mound, a spectacular earthwork depicting a serpent with gaping jaws devouring a burial mound (one of various interpretations), twists along a low ridge in south-central Ohio. The earthwork was originally dated by Frederick Putnam of Harvard University's Peabody Museum to the Adena culture (800 BC-AD 100), but readings taken from wood obtained by core borings put the date at about AD 1070. Consequently, archaeologists Bradley Lepper and Dee Anne Wymer assigned the earthwork to the Fort Ancient culture (900 to 1600), a much later Mississippian group. Art historian Mary Miller of Yale University used infrared photography to produce computer reconstructions of the faded images on Mexico's Bonampak murals, painted by Mayan artists in the late 8th century. Her research team scanned colour photographs of the images into a computer and then added details based on infrared photographs and study of the murals at the site. The new approach allowed Miller and her colleagues to record previously invisible inscriptions, to distinguish one group of Mayan nobles from another by their regalia and insignia, and to read their titles, such as regional governor or dancers. They then began "stitching" together the digitized images into seamless webs of paintings in order to create a digital restoration of the Mayan Lord Chaan Muan's life and deeds, including scenes of battle and human sacrifice that occurred during his reign, AD 776-795. The first James Fort, built in 1607 on what is now Jamestown Island, Virginia, was long assumed to have eroded into the nearby James River. During the past few years archaeologist William Kelso delved into contemporary accounts of the settlement and searched for telltale postholes and palisades in the sandy soil. His sophisticated excavations recovered traces of the fortifications and interior buildings and also more than 90,000 artifacts, including 12 coins, none earlier than 1603. Kelso recovered many ceramic fragments, a full breastplate and helmet made before 1610, bullet molds, and cast-iron shot. A skeleton of a male colonist in his 20s found on site revealed bullet wounds to a leg and shoulder. Signs of glassmaking suggested that a special building to fabricate beads to trade with Chief Powhatan lay outside the palisade. This trade was vital, for the Indians supplied corn for the fledgling settlement. Satellite photographs confirmed the position of the fort, which was recorded on an early 17th-century Dutch chart of the James River that was discovered in 1995 in the Dutch National Archives. BRIAN FAGAN This article updates archaeology.