YEAR IN REVIEW 2001: ANTHROPOLOGY-AND-ARCHAEOLOGY

Anthropology Physical Anthropology. In 2000 an international research team published a molecular analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from the rib of an approximately 29,000-year-old Neanderthal infant. (Mitochondria are DNA-containing cytoplasmic components of cells that play an essential role in the conversion of the energy of foodstuffs into the energy used for cellular activities.) The specimen was recovered from Mezmaiskaya Cave in the northern Caucasus region of Russia, one of the easternmost Neanderthal sites. When the DNA fragment, consisting of 345 base pairs, was compared with the same region sequenced in 1997 from a specimen found in the Feldhofer Cave in Germany, only 12 differences (3.48%) were found. This close genetic relationship provided invaluable corroboration for the authenticity of the previously reported, but undated, Neanderthal sequence from Germany. The infant's DNA exhibited 22 differences from the standard human (Anderson) reference sequence for modern human mitochondrial DNA, whereas the Feldhofer Cave specimen contained 27 differences with respect to the Anderson sequence. Nineteen of these differences were shared by the two Neanderthals, and subsequent analysis placed them in a clade (lineage) distinct from modern humans. The age of the most recent common ancestor of the mitochondrial DNA molecules of the two Neanderthal specimens was estimated to be 151,000-352,000 years, a range concordant with dates derived from the paleontological record for the emergence of the Neanderthal lineage. Overall, the results supported the out-of-Africa theory for the origin of modern humans rather than the multiregional hypothesis. The surprisingly recent radiocarbon date (29,195 years ago) on collagen derived from the Neanderthal infant lent credence to the assertion that Neanderthals and modern humans overlapped throughout much of Europe for thousands of years. An international team also recently redated two important Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave in Croatia. The new radiocarbon dates of 29,080 ( 400) and 28,020 ( 360) years ago from a mandible and a parietal bone of different individuals provided additional confirmation of previous claims, based on sites in Spain and Portugal, that some Neanderthal populations were still present less than 30,000 years ago, well after the first definitive evidence of modern human skeletal structure in Europe (at approximately 32,000 years ago). Dmanisi, Georgia, captured the paleoanthropological spotlight when two partial hominid crania dated to about 1.7 million years ago documented what may have been the first migration of the genus Homo out of Africa. The site had previously yielded a hominid mandible in 1991 and a metatarsal bone in 1997; however, the taxonomic affinities of the two specimens as well as their dating were uncertain. The new skeletal material, along with more than 1,000 simple stone artifacts and new geochronological and paleomagnetic data, were combined by an international group of scholars to suggest the following scenario. Shortly after the first appearance of Homo ergaster (also called African Homo erectus) about 1.9 million years ago, a population of these hominids moved out of Africa via the Levantine corridor (near the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea) and continued in a northeasterly direction, eventually arriving in Dmanisi between the Black and Caspian seas. Structurally, the Dmanisi remains closely resembled the 1.6 million-year-old Kenyan fossil known as the Nariokotome boy. The larger of the two Georgian specimens was an almost complete adult male calvarium (skullcap) with a cranial capacity of 780 cc (47.6 cu in), while the slightly smaller but more extensively preserved cranium, thought to be from an adolescent female, yielded an estimate of 650 cc (39.7 cu in). Perhaps the biggest surprise came not from the African morphology of the specimens but rather from the extreme simplicity of the associated artifacts. The tools consisted of flakes, scrapers, and choppers made entirely from local basalt sources, using a technology similar to that employed in East Africa as early as 2.4 million years ago. Consequently, a major implication of the cultural remains was that biological changes rather than new tools may have prompted early global colonization by Homo. Once H. ergaster achieved larger body size and once brain size exceeded that of the australopithecines, the forests of Africa were quickly left behind. It is possible that after Dmanisi these hominids moved eastward to Asia, where simple chopping tools predominated for more than a million years and where their descendants gave rise to Asian H. erectus. The apolipoprotein (a complex molecule that combines fat and protein) E locus provided a clear example of natural selection in action during the last 300,000 years of human evolutionary history. An American-Finnish collaboration traced the genealogical history of a potentially deadly human gene. Although humans exhibited three different alleles at this locus (designated E2, E3, and E4), their closest living relative, the chimpanzee, had only the medically dangerous E4 allele. (An allele is any one of two or more genes that may occur alternatively at a given site on a chromosome.) The E4 allele was already known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease in humans. The ancestral E4 allele associated with elevated lipid levels was detected in only 13.5% of the chromosomes taken from an ethnically diverse set of four human populations, whereas the much more favourable E3 allele had a frequency of 79.7% among the 96 individuals sequenced at this locus on chromosome 19. Thus, the E4 allele inherited from humans' apelike common ancestor with the chimpanzee was hypothesized to be undergoing a rapid replacement throughout the world's populations by the medically far less dangerous E3 allele under the influence of natural selection. June 26, 2000, was a historic day in the annals of human biology and physical anthropology. It marked the joint announcement-by Francis Collins (see Biographies), leader of a publicly funded international consortium of genome scientists, and by J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics-of the final assembly of two working drafts of the human genome sequence. The actual data were posted on the Internet as a public database (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide). (See Life Sciences: Special Report.) Stephen L. Zegura Archaeology Western Hemisphere. The debate over the date of the first human settlement of the Americas continued unabated in 2000. A few new discoveries appeared to support a pre-Clovis culture settlement more than 13,000 years ago. The Topper site on South Carolina's Savannah River was originally thought to be a Clovis site of about 11,500 BC, but test pits sunk below the Paleo-Indian occupation level revealed small stone flakes and tools of an apparent pre-Clovis type more than one metre (3.3 ft) lower. The artifacts included tiny microblades and a scraping tool, which excavator Albert Goodyear considered unique to southeastern North America but reminiscent of Stone Age tools from Siberia. As of late 2000, the occupation level remained undated but was possibly up to 18,000 years old, one of the earliest known records of human occupation in the Western Hemisphere. Maya archaeology continued to yield spectacular discoveries. A Maya lord named Ukit-Kan Lek ("Snake Gourd") ruled over the ceremonial centre of Ek Balam in Mexico's northern Yucatn between AD 790 and 835. In 1999 archaeologist Victor Castillo unearthed Snake Gourd's grave under a limestone pyramid, which was built atop at least four earlier buildings. Twenty-two ceramic vessels lay in the burial chamber, one bearing the lord's name, together with fine jade fragments, obsidian (volcanic glass) blades, and inscribed conch shells. The spectacular Nazca lines of southern coastal Peru had generated controversy for generations. The Nazca were farmers, fisherfolk, and expert weavers, and their pots and textiles revealed complex religious beliefs. They lived on the fringes of the Pampa de Ingenio, a desert with all the potential of a fine sketch pad. There they swept away the topsoil of fine sand and small stones to form in the white alluvium an intricate web of lines and figures too large to be fully viewed from the ground. High above the desert in a helicopter, one can see lines, some as wide as an airport runway, that extend for kilometres across valleys and low hills. Others radiate from hubs. Some lines coalesce into giant birds, monkeys, a whale, spiders, even plants, but those who created them never saw them in their entirety. Why, then, did people without airplanes draw such lines and figures? Were the lines a giant astronomical observatory or a huge religious monument? Astroarchaeologists Anthony Aveni and Gary Urton, in an effort to answer those questions, mapped more than 62 raylike hubs of lines and measured the orientation of 762 straight lines near Nazca, some up to 13 km (8 mi) long. Aveni and Urton plotted the orientations on a computer and found that many of them pointed to the point on the horizon where the Sun appears during those critical days in early November when runoff first flows into coastal rivers from the Andes Mountains. Thousands of Nazca potsherds, crude shelter remains, and cairns litter the lines, the latter serving as markers for people walking the alignments. Aveni concluded that the Nazca lines were pathways, maintained, swept, and ritually cleansed by local kin groups as an important part of ritual activity surrounding the arrival of water on the pampa. A nearby ceremonial centre, Cahuachi, forms a complex of mounds, cemeteries, and shrines, which face toward the pampa and its pathways. Also nearby, water bubbles to the surface year-round. Nazca art from Cahuachi and other locations emphasizes masked performances by priests and mythical beings, part of the ceremonies that surrounded the first appearance of life-giving mountain water. Aveni's research thus pointed to a close connection between the lines in the desert and the water that nourished crops and people along the Pacific. Brazil's Amazon Basin was among the archaeologically least-known regions of the world. Recently, caves in Amap state on the Marac River, a tributary of the Amazon, yielded ceramic funerary urns, used by local peoples between the 5th and 15th centuries AD.The now sparsely occupied area was densely populated 1,500 years ago. The finely made urns, about 0.75 m (2.5 ft) high, were modeled in the form of seated male and female figures and placed on benches, a privilege reserved for shamans and chiefs. The urns contained defleshed bones from corpses that were exposed until the flesh had decayed and then were laid to rest in deep caverns. The Marac finds were unique and dated to a period before the region was depopulated by European contact and infectious diseases. While reexamining the excavated bones of colonists from Jamestown, Va., the earliest permanent English settlement in the New World, biological anthropologist Doug Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution discovered that five of the skeletons were those of Africans. The five died in their early 20s to mid-40s, and, as they had not been buried on their backs with their hands at their sides and heads to the west-the European fashion at the time-they were originally thought to be Native Americans. One of them displayed an advanced case of syphilis, which had affected every bone in his body. Judging from the bullet hole in his head, he was killed to put him out of his misery. Owsley's discovery confirmed that Europeans, Native Americans, and African slaves were all present at Jamestown. In a fascinating piece of archaeological detective work, British Museum scientists determined that a copper breastplate owned by late-19th-century Pacific Northwest coast Native American chief Neghicum-gee was made not of native copper but of English ore. His intricately decorated breastplate was an important status symbol, one of many "coppers" that linked individuals to the remote past of their ancestors. Neghicum-gee's copper contained unusually high quantities of bismuth, a heavy element that occurs in large amounts only in Cornish copper from southwestern England, where it was smelted between 1700 to 1850. The scientists believed it was quite possible that the copper was made from ore traded with trappers or whalers decades before the Spaniards and Capt. James Cook arrived in the area in 1774 and 1777. On Nov. 29, 1864, more than 700 soldiers of a volunteer Colorado militia unit attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho Native American encampment at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. Ignoring the American flag, peace signals, and a white flag, they slaughtered at least 150 old men, women, and children while most of the men were out hunting. Although the general location of the massacre was known through oral tradition to the descendants of the victims, it was only when an archaeological survey was carried out that the actual location was found, about a kilometre and a half (about a mile) north of where historical evidence said it was. The archaeologists found 5.4-kg (12-lb) cannonballs, the type used by the Colorado soldiers in their surprise attack, and artifacts that matched well with records of goods given to the Native Americans and found at sites of equivalent age. The Sand Creek research confirmed the essential truth of Native American oral traditions and thus allowed them to be used as archaeological tools. Brian Fagan Cultural Anthropology. As it entered the new millennium, cultural anthropology, after a decade of questioning its subdisciplinary character (specifically versus physical anthropology) and its role in understanding major trends in the contemporary world, had undergone changes that culminated in clear directions for the future. Among current concerns were ethnographic methods in anthropology, violence and war, race and ethnicity, the public face and role of anthropology, cross-national immigration and identity, the anthropological code of ethics, the environment, and human rights. In addition, core topics such as kinship were being revisited. The shift from an earlier focus on discourse, gender, and postmodernist writing was reflected in American Anthropological Association Distinguished Lectures (for example, Sidney Mintz) and in major publications (most prominently, Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by H. Russell Bernard, an updating of the 1970 methodological "bible" edited by Raoul Naroll and Ronald Cohen). The Sidney Mintz distinguished lecture of 1996 was published in Current Anthropology in 2000, and the Handbook of Methods, a major 1998 hardcover reference volume of 19 chapters by anthropologists actively engaged in research, was reissued in paperback during the year and was thus made more accessible for classroom teaching and research. Both publications were trendsetting and pathbreaking. This was welcomed in a field that had become saturated with nonempirical works on, among other subjects, women and gender (especially on women in the Middle East)-works that were influenced more by premises from area, women's, and cultural studies than by anthropology. Some had adopted strong anticulture postmodernist postures that questioned ethnographic authority and stressed multiple "voices." Discourse scholarship (originating in art, literary, and cultural studies) examined text without understanding its context and words without ethnography. Reaction against this trend was strong, some of it ironically by non-Western scholars who challenged its fundamental humanist claim and objected to its implications of Western superiority. Most prominent was the discussion by Ziauddin Sardar, who wrote: "Colonialism has already drained much of the wealth of the 'Third World,' postmodernism appropriates the last resources . . . its traditions, spiritualities, cultural property, ideas and notions . . . the new imperialism." This challenged the presumed claim that a humanistic quality inheres in certain human domains, such as oratory and dance performance, but not in others, such as alliance and kinship practices. Mintz's lecture-publication reaffirmed field-gathered ethnographic data. Beyond this, it recalled earlier anthropology with its applications and impact beyond academia, adopting unpopular postures in defense of the legitimacy of traditional ways of life and cultural practices. The recent posture against culture and generalization, which denied people's individuality and the particularity of cultures, was compellingly critiqued in the above-mentioned Handbook of Methods. Stripped of identity, people become homogenized and globalized actors in a large machine of economy and postmodernity. The volume was timely in topic and current and comprehensive in the range of subjects covered; it embraced qualitative and quantitative approaches and visual and archival methods, from epistemology to ethics to visual anthropology and much more. The chapter on visual anthropology reflected the growing importance of the visual as a tool for analysis and a source of data. The Handbook was favourably reviewed as authoritative on the methods of anthropological research (systematic collecting and interpreting of human behaviour in natural settings) by experts on fieldwork in anthropology and also was regarded as serious about the ethnographic enterprise. As to public issues, an international conference was organized by universities in Sweden and Denmark to which international scholars were invited to discuss the impact of legal immigration from less-developed (particularly Islamic) countries to the welfare states of Scandinavia. The rapid shift in population demographics became an urgent subject, intersecting cultural anthropology with public policy. The growing presence of Muslim immigrants in predominantly Lutheran Scandinavia was changing the sociocultural landscape of that area. This trend drew attention to the need of anthropological understanding of Islam and Muslim life. The publication in November of Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon by freelance journalist Patrick Tierney produced a major crisis in anthropology. Advance proofs of the book precipitated sensationalized stories critical of the Yanomami project, a series of studies among the indigenous Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil that began with genetic research conducted in 1968, funded in part by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and led by the late James V. Neel of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Also on the project team were anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon of the University of California, Santa Barbara (now retired), who had worked with the Yanomami since 1964, and, later, filmmaker Timothy Asch. Tierney's allegations included improper use by Neel and his team of a vaccine purported to have resulted in a devastating measles epidemic among the Yanomami. Subsequent expert investigations refuted these and many other claims, and by year's end the credibility of Tierney's own research was being called into question.A second aspect of the controversy involved accuracy and representation of data, specifically Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomami as a fierce and violent people. Concerns over scientific accuracy were not new (for example, more discussion of the controversy over Margaret Mead's classic work in Samoa was reported in Current Anthropology's August-October 2000 issue). In the current case, this longstanding intramural debate among anthropologists was further muddied by external factors, including an old dispute between Chagnon and local missionaries and the sometimes violent relations between Brazilian gold miners and the Yanomami. On the bright side, out of this crisis in cultural anthropology emerged a needed debate on ethical accountability in field research, informed consent by studied populations, and the role of the revised Code of Ethics drafted by the American Anthropological Association in 1998. Fadwa El Guindi Archaeology Eastern Hemisphere. The year 2000 proved fruitful for Old World archaeology. A joint Syrian-American expedition uncovered what was purported to be one of the world's oldest cities, a more than 5,500-year-old urban centre at Tell Hamoukar in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border. At the site, located on an ancient trade route between Nineveh and Aleppo, archaeologists identified what may be a Late Chalcolithic (about 3500 BC) mud-brick city wall, 3 m (10 ft) high and4 m (13 ft) wide, and excavated a group of mud-brick dwellings complete with ovens. Also recovered were more than 80 bone stamp seals carved with animals such as leopards, lions, rabbits, fish, bears, birds, and dogs; 15 seal impressions; and thousands of beads. The presence of a Late Chalcolithic city in Syria challenged the generally accepted view that urban centres first developed in ancient Sumer (present-day southern Iraq) following the invention of writing during the Uruk period (about 3200 BC). It would appear that Tell Hamoukar developed well before the invention of writing and before the appearance of several other criteria thought of as marking "civilization." An underwater archaeological survey of the Mediterranean just a few kilometres off Egypt's north coast revealed the remains of two 2,500-year-old cities, possibly the suburbs of Canopus with the districts of Menouthis and Iraklion, which served as trading hubs in the Late Dynastic Period. Among the well-preserved remains were temple structures with statues of Isis, Sarapis, and Osiris associated with royal heads of pharaohs; port facilities; fallen monuments; inscriptions; ceramics; and late Islamic and Byzantine jewelry and coins, all embedded in the seafloor less than 10 m (33 ft) below the water's surface. A controversial find was the so-called Tomb of Osiris on the Giza Plateau in Egypt. Thought by some to be an Osirion, a cenotaph dedicated to Egypt's master of the underworld and god of fertility, the four-pillared rock-hewn grotto, 30 m (98 ft) below the Giza Plateau, may simply have been another shaft tomb belonging to royalty of the Late Dynastic Period. Pits containing the remains of sacrificed dogs at the 5,500-year-old settlement of Botai in north-central Kazakhstan may shed light on ritual practices recorded in the Rigveda, written c. 1000 BC. In the epic, dogs serve as guardians of the gate into the afterlife, which was believed to lie to the west. The bodies of at least 15 dogs, similar in stature and cranial features to Samoyeds, had been deposited in small pits in or near the western walls of houses. Each pit contained between one and six dogs, along with the skulls of horses. Thirteen 2,500-year-old carved stelae (stone pillars) of a type never seen before in Anatolia or the Middle East were found at Hakkari, a small town in Turkey near the border with Iran and Iraq. Hewn from a hard local stone, the stelae ranged from about 75 cm (28 in) to more than 3 m (10 ft) in height. They may depict rulers of Hubushkia, a kingdom centred on the headwaters of the Great Zap River that appears in the Assyrian annals of the 10th and 9th centuries BC. In China a walled city about 3,300 years old was unearthed at Anyang. Known as Huanbei Shang City, the site, covering approximately 465 ha (1,160 ac) and surrounded by rammed earthen walls, dates to the Middle Shang Period (about 1450-1250 BC), a time little understood in Chinese history. Oracle-bone inscriptions placed the last Shang capital at a site known as Yinxu, about 1.5 km (l mi) southwest of Huanbei Shang City. Scholars believed the newly found site may have been the city of Xiang, which, according to historical sources, served as the capital of the Shang Empire prior to the founding of Yinxu. A large cache of gold and silver bangles, gold beads, and agate and onyx beads, dating to the Harappan Period (2600-1900 BC) and of a type known from the Indus Valley sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan and Lothal, Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira in India, was discovered by villagers in the city of Mandi some 150 km (90 mi) east of New Delhi. The finds extended the known reach of the Indus Valley civilization beyond its previously known cultural area of eastern Pakistan and western India. Excavations in Britain yielded a number of important finds, including a large cache of Roman coins found in a farmer's field near Glastonbury, Eng. The hoard comprised more than 9,200 coins, most of which were silver denarii, common coins equivalent to pennies in Roman times. The coins spanned the period from Mark Antony (31-30 BC) to Severus Alexander (AD 222-235), with the latest coin dating to about AD 224. The hoard was unusual in that many of the coins dated from the early part of the 3rd century, a relatively calm and prosperous period of Roman rule in Britain. Most Roman hoards found in Britain date from the end of the Roman period, the late 4th and early 5th centuries, when political instability prompted people to hide their wealth. What was hailed as the best-preserved Iron Age settlement in Britain was found on the southern tip of Mainland, Shetland Islands. Occupied from about 200 BC to AD 800, the site consisted of a massive round stone watchtower approximately 15 m (50 ft) in diameter and 3-4 m (12-15 ft) high, surrounded by well-preserved buildings, some still bearing traces of yellow plastered walls. The tower was an Iron Age status symbol for the ruling elite, which suggested that the site was a centre of considerable wealth. Ongoing construction and development in Italy laid bare more of the country's ancient past. In Rome walls and foundations belonging to a villa from about AD 150 were found during construction of a tunnel leading to a large parking garage beneath the Vatican, and the remains of the Imperial Roman port, once used to receive and warehouse goods arriving from Ostia on the coast, came to light during excavations prior to the building of a streetcar station at Trastevere on the Tiber River. Port remains included warehouses, workshops, offices, and baths adorned with mosaics depicting sea creatures and marine life, as well as numerous amphorae, ceramics, coins, and oil lamps dating to the 2nd through the 4th century AD. A submarine crew searching for the wreckage of an airplane piloted by Antoine Saint-Exupry, author of The Little Prince, discovered the wreck of a 6th-5th-century BC Etruscan ship off the coast of southern France. Found off the coast of the Hyres Islands near Toulon, the ship was carrying a varied cargo, which included amphorae possibly filled with wine, olive oil, or garum, a fermented fish sauce, and a shipment of tile. Only three Etruscan wrecks had ever been recovered, all plundered and poorly preserved.