Professional Documents
Culture Documents
www.archaeology.org
INTERVIEW
WERNER
HERZOG
Origins of Art
on the
Lost
Wrecks
of the Adriatic
Life Beyond
Imperial China
Medieval
Arms Race
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PLUS:
Worlds Oldest Soup,
Microarchaeology,
Cold War Whodunit,
Old Europes New Money
July/August
March/April2009
2011
First
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Allan Cobb
David Lee
Marieka Arksey
Gabe Wrobel
Mat Saunders
Patrick Wilkinson
Dorie Reents-Budet
Francisco Estrada-Belli
American Foreign
Academic Research
school
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MARCH/APRIL 2011
VOLUME 64, NUMBER 2
CONTENTS
features
18 Reading the Yellow River
Preserved by centuries of oodborne silt, a rural landscape offers
a new look at the Han Dynasty
BY LAUREN HILGERS
24 The Adriatics
Uncharted Past
Once closed to exploration,
the waters off the Albanian coast
begin to give up their secrets
BY MARA HVISTENDAHL
29 Pieces of History
On one of Britains most famous
battleelds, early gun fragments
hint at a new style of warfare
BY JARRETT A. LOBELL
32 Interview:
Werner Herzog
on the Birth of Art
The famed director of more than
60 lms speaks with ARCHAEOLOGY
about Chauvet Cave
vk.com/englishlibrary
68
47
14
departments
4 In This Issue
6 From the President
8 Letters
Archaeology of (illegal) immigration, Americas
rst church, and the endangered sherman
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12 Reviews
on the web
www.archaeology.org
More from this Issue
Listen to Werner Herzog talk
about his new lm, Cave of
Forgotten Dreams.
14 World Roundup
Secret message from the Civil War, a black velvet
mask, a Neanderthal familys grisly end, rst groundedge tool, rock art vandals, and the oldest soup
16 Insider
Ancient irrigation systems in the Southwest point
the way toward sustaining modern water supplies
Interactive Digs
Read about the latest discoveries
at the Minoan site of Zominthos
in central Crete.
Stay in Touch
Visit Facebook to become a
friend of ARCHAEOLOGY or follow us
on Twitter @archaeologymag
Archaeological News
from around the worldupdated
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And sign up for our e-Update
so you dont miss a thing.
68 Artifact
A working Antikythera Mechanism
made out of Legos
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IN THIS ISSUE
Editor in Chief
Claudia Valentino
Executive Editor
Deputy Editor
Jarrett A. Lobell
Samir S. Patel
Senior Editors
Nikhil Swaminathan
Zach Zorich
n December , , in the southern Ardeche region of France, three speleologists had climbed the clis above the Ardeche River and were picking their
way along a mule path that led to a small opening in the cli face. Once they
squeezed through, they began to search for drafts that might indicate the presence of
larger spaces. Jean-Marie Chauvet, liette Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire
did indeed detect a ow of air. They followed a narrow passage and climbed down into
an enormous chamber. What they discovered that night is now known as Chauvet Cave,
site of the worlds oldest paintings.
Since the discovery of Chauvet, only a handful of
researchers has been able to view the extensive galleries lled with sophisticated paintings of horses,
lions, and other animals dating back some 30,000
years. This spring, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a new
movie by renowned lmmaker Werner Herzog,
documents the site, and will oer the public a rare
and intimate view of Chauvets masterpieces.
Herzog, whose lms such as Fitzcarraldo and
Nosferatu have dealt evincingly with themes of
humanness and the soul, spoke with senior editor
Zach Zorich. In our interview,Werner Herzog on
the Birth of Art (page 32), they discuss the new
movie, his decision to lm in 3-D for the rst time,
and his unique ties to archaeology.
In Reading the Yellow River (page 18), ShangPanel of the Horses in Chauvet Cave hai-based writer Lauren Hilgers surveys work
in Chinas Henan Province to excavate a vast site
preserved some 2,000 years ago by the capricious ooding habits of the Yellow River.
For the rst time, archaeologists are now uncovering signs of a prosperous Han Dynasty
farming community.
The deep waters of the Adriatic have hidden hundreds of shipwrecks, dating from
antiquity and more modern times, due to the decades-long prohibitions against exploration during Communist rule. In The Adriatics Uncharted Past (page 24), science
journalist Mara Hvistendahl joins an international team aboard the R/V Hercules as
they explore the Albanian coast for evidence of ancient trade routes.
In The New Upper Class (page 40), contributing editor Andrew Curry surveys three
emblematic Copper Age sites that show how metalworking created both wealth and social
hierarchy in ancient Europe. At sites all across the continent, decades of dogma are being
overturned as the complex nature of society more than 6,000 years ago is revealed.
Plus, microarchaeology helps detect what the eye cant see, some of Europes oldest
guns and the Wars of the Roses, ancient lessons for water conservation today, and much
more. Happy reading!
Claudia Valentino
Editor in Chief
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structure tightens,
becoming less disordered, and samples
become poor candidates for radiocarbon
dating or DNA
analysis. If you can
check right away, says
Poduska, you can say,
Wow, these bones
arent very well crystallizedwe should
take more samples.
On-site analysis of a crucible at Tell es-Safi/Gath provided
Curtarolo believes
the first evidence of ancient Philistine metalwork.
that in 20 to 30 years,
scientists could develop spectral nCase in point: the metal-making
gerprints for the majority of minerals
center at Tell es-Sa/Gath. Says dig
that archaeologists might encounter
director Aren Meier, an archaeologist
during excavations.
at Bar-Ilan University, Perhaps some
Microarchaeology oers not just
of these barely noticeable areas where
quicker analysis of nds on-site, it
metal production was conducted
also allows excavators to restrategize
would have been plowed through in
digs on the y based on solid
the past.
knowledge of what theyve found.
Nikhil Swaminathan
10
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13
1/4/11 2:05 PM
WORLD ROUNDUP
NEVADA: In the
world of graffiti
writers, location is importanttagging
an inaccessible
or notable site
is an achievement. This spirit often leads
to serious damage. In a recent
incident, a vandal covered three
panels of ancient Native American
pictographs at Red Rock Canyon
with maroon spray paint. Its the
worst damage the site has seen in
years, and cleanup may cost
upwards of $10,000. The suspect the
police have identified may face federal charges.
14
vk.com/englishlibrary
ENGLAND: Silk
k inside
and black velvet
vet
outside, this
rare 16th-century vizard,
or mask,
would have
been worn
to hide or
protect a
gentlewomans face while
e
traveling. The
small white thread
read
by the mouth was once attached to
a bead, also found with the mask,
that she would have held in her
mouth to keep the mask in place. It
was secreted away in a stone wall,
perhaps as a witch deposit, a common practice for warding off maleficent forces.
By Samir S. Patel
ISRAEL: During the construction of a
mikveh, or ritual bath, in Jerusalems
Jewish Quarter, archaeologists found
an older bathing pool, built and used
by the Roman Tenth Legion. The
troops were garrisoned there after
A.D. 135, when the Roman city of Aelia
Capitolina was established following
Hadrians destruction of the old city.
The location of the find supports an
emerging theory that Aelia Capitolina was larger than previously thought.
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Reading the
YELLOW
RIVER
Preserved by centuries of ood-borne
silt, a rural landscape offers a new
look at the Han Dynasty
by Lauren Hilgers
18
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took this place by surprise and preserved a never-before-seen picture of farming life in the
Han Dynasty, far from any imperial city, across an area so large it will keep archaeologists
busy for generations.
The river had broken its banks a few miles away and Kidder imaginesinvoking Carl
Sandburgthat the water came in on little cat feet, in a slow trickle at rst and then faster.
The Han settlement was in a low spot, a dangerous place to be considering the Yellow Rivers
well-earned reputation for caprice. The water rose and rose until the entire area was ooded. Its
residents traveled roughly 40 miles to reach higher ground, leaving behind tile-roofed houses
and well-maintained elds. They abandoned coins and farming tools and looms still in use, and
traveled along roads that still bear the tracks of their wooden wheels. The Yellow River covered
it all in thick, heavy silt. Today, though the river has meandered north, the county is still called
Nei Huang, or Inside Yellowa reminder of how much time it spent under water.
Archaeologists have now excavated four homestead sites here, which they refer to as
www.archaeology.org
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19
A corner roof
tile is decorated
with the characters Yi Shou
Wan Sui, or long life, a decoration
reserved for well-to-do households.
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21
just spraying all over the place. In each channel, silt slowly
builds the riverbed above the surrounding landscape and
gives the river the devastating habit of breaking its banks and
changing course. In some places, where water owed slowly
or not at all, sediment could accumulate and preserve whatever was below. In other places, it might ow fast and furious,
carving deep channels. A ooding Yellow River might crush
one ancient household and preserve the next.
The sediment left behind changes depending on the rivers
mood. In Kidders excavation, the cross-section, or prole, of
each ood has a dierent color and texture. Kidders reading of the Han ood reveals two distinct layers: one rustcolored and syrupy to the touch, the other dark brown and
composed of a denser, thicker mud. The ood was part of a
centuries-long cycle, but its two phases were uniquely suited
to preserving the landscape. A slow initial ood allowed a
protective layer of silt to settle to the bottom, and then a
second, stronger ood brought more silt that sealed it all
away. The rst stage would have undermined the foundations
of buildings and walls. When the second wave came, roofs
collapsed and sank into the layer of mud already covering the
ground below. Then there was a period of time when the
river was relatively still, says Kidder, who guesses the area
stayed under water for nearly 50 years while the river slowly
carved out a new path elsewhere. More oods would come,
including a strong one in the Tang Dynasty (a.d. 618907),
but higher up the dirt in Kidders prole becomes loose and
sandy, a sign that the river had settled in elsewhere.
The monumental volume of sediment is key to preserving
The condition of the Han Dynasty sites is so pristine that
in many cases the archaeologists stopped at the level of
collapsed roofs to protect what lies beneath.
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23
The Adriatics
Uncharted
Once closed to exploration,
the waters off the Albanian coast
begin to give up their secrets
by Mara Hvistendahl
vk.com/englishlibrary
Past
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25
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narrows down the possibilities, but the team must use the
SeaEye to determine a sites identity. They also use divers, but
the robot is preferable, especially at deeper sites, as it can stay
underwater longer and gather more data.
When the SeaEye reaches a point two yards above the
ocean oor, Wilson looses the ROV from its cage and steers
it toward the target anomaly they identied on the sonar
scan of the area. The trick is to keep the robot hovering at a
steady depth to prevent it from stirring up blinding clouds
of silt. Hit bottom, says Robb, and its like a pickup on a
Texas road. Royal, the archaeologist, keeps a watchful eye on
the wall of screens. The robots armscritical to retrieving
any particularly interesting or diagnostic artifactsare not
working, and the FedEx shipment containing replacements
is still a few days away, delayed by Albanian bureaucracy.
Though theyre in the midst of a weeklong dry spell, Royal
knows each anomaly is a potential shipwreckand that a
few of those can recongure ancient history.
www.archaeology.org
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January 12, 1945. Another particularly striking modern nd is the long-missing bow of the
HMS Volage, which is rewriting a controversial
bit of Cold War history (see sidebar on page
26). Nautical archaeologists are just starting
to understand the region, Royal stresses. But
that is an improvement on years past, he adds.
Before, archaeologists didnt even know what
questions to ask.
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PIECES OF
HISTORY
On one of Britains most famous
battleelds, early gun fragments
hint at a new style of warfare
by Jarrett A. Lobell
www.archaeology.org
Two ffragments
found o
on the
Towton b
battlefield
are from th
the earliest
guns to have been
discovered in En
England on
the site of a known conflict.
that at
Analysis has shown th
least one of the guns was fired,
probably during the battle.
vk.com/englishlibrary
29
When Tim Sutherland of the Towton Battleeld Archaeology Project began digging at
the site more than a decade ago, he expected to
nd the usual artifacts of medieval warfare
arrowheads, horse ttings, spurs, and graves.
What he did not expect to nd was evidence
of new developments in armament technology
that would eventually change the way that
subsequent battles and wars were fought.
On what is believed to be the Lancastrian
side of the battleeld, Sutherland found the
remains of two guns, the earliest rearms
found on the site of a known battleeld in
Britain, and possibly Europe. Although we
know from historical sources that guns were
becoming popular on the battleeld at this
time, no examples this early have ever been
found at the site of a recognized conict. The Battle of Towton pitted the House of Lancaster under King Henry VI (left)
against Edward of York, who would become King Edward IV (right).
Sources also tell us the Lancastrians hired
gunners from the Burgundy region of France,
noise and lots of smoke, and probably intimidated people
who were known to be up-to-date in their battle practices, to
who had never seen one. But they also might have blown up
ght alongside them as mercenaries. But with only these two
in a persons face.
guns for evidenceand the possible remains of a thirdits
One of the main questions Sutherland wanted to answer
hard to gauge the weapons eectiveness on the battleeld.
was if the guns had actually been red during the battle. He
Although local bronze smiths knew how to cast bronze very
sent the fragmentsearlier microscopic analysis had already
wellthey made really good bells found just down the road
established that they were from two dierent gunsto
that still ringthese guns are poor castings, lled with air
Bruker AXS, a company specializing in high-tech scientic
bubbles, says Sutherland.The guns would have made a huge
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A Superior Shot
t isnt only the guns discovery that has provided scholars with new evidence of medieval
warfares advancement. In the center of the
Towton battleeld, Sutherlands team also
uncovered a lead ball with a wrought-iron core.
It may seem like a small nd, but, in fact, it is the
earliest example found in Europe of a specic type
of lead shot that would make artillery much more
lethal. Shot is a round piece of artilleryin contrast
to bullets, which are rounded cylinders and were not
made until the nineteenth century. Medieval shot
was fashioned of lead (or occasionally wrought iron).
When you blast lead out of something and it hits
a hard target, like a castle, armor, horse, or person,
lead completely splatters, says Sutherland, so there
is not a lot of point in solid lead shot. But neutron
tomography has shown that the shot from Towton
is composite shot, made of an iron cube inside a
spherical lead shell (shown at right). In contrast to
the earlier, simple lead shot, composite shot, with its
hard iron center, doesnt totally shatter on impact.
Thus, the potential for far greater bodily harm to
ones enemies is obvious. So far, there has been
no evidence linking this shot to one of the newly
discovered guns.
instrument manufacture and materials analysis. There, specialist
Mike Dobby used X-ray uorescence to conrm that at least one
fragment had traces of both sulfur and lead inside. He believes the
sulfur is from the original gunpowder and the lead residue is from
shot, evidence that at least one of the guns was used during the battle.
Sutherland even believes he may be able to pinpoint what time the
round was red. Primary sources, some of which were written only
days after the battle, suggest that the main conict began between 9
a.m. and noon. This would t with it being a very cold day since the
guns heating up very quickly as they were rst red, possibly even
with their rst shots, would have stressed the poor-quality castings
until they fractured and exploded, says Sutherland.
lthough it is clear that a gun was red at Towton, whether the expelled shot would have wounded or killed anyone it
hit is a question for future research. But the guns eectiveness
may be beside the point. Sutherland thinks its possible that a gun may
sometimes have been more of a fashion statement than a functional
weapon. One can imagine a Lancastrian noble saying I have to have
a gun, and even if he couldnt get a good one, he might have had one
made that was of inferior quality, cast by nonexperts, or perhaps one
the manufacturer was passing o as high quality. In the nal analysis,
it may have been somewhat like showing up on a battleeld in a Ferrari. It would look great and be highly impressive, but as to its ability
to determine the outcome of the battle, the jury is still out.
Archaeologist Tim Sutherland of the
Towton Battlefield Archaeology Project
www.archaeology.org
vk.com/englishlibrary
31
ast March, preeminent lmmaker Werner Herzog was given unprecedented access to Chauvet Cave
in southeastern France to lm the sites Paleolithic art. The result, his lm Cave of Forgotten Dreams,
which will be released this spring, is a document of some of humankinds earliest and most extraordinary
paintings. Since the cave was discovered in December 1994, few people, mostly researchers, have seen the artwork,
owing to the caves extremely delicate climate and concerns about preserving the ancient paintings. But the lm
is more than a tour of the cave. It is an exploration of what the science of archaeology is revealing about the
Aurignacian peopleEuropes rst artistsand the origins of the modern human mind. Part of the lm focuses
on the work of Jean Clottes, the former director of research for the Chauvet Cave Project, and Jean-Michel Geneste,
the projects current director, and what their work tells us about how the Aurignacian people may have lived their
lives and connected to their world through art. In November, Archaeology senior editor Zach Zorich was
invited to Herzogs Manhattan apartment for an extended interview about the unique challenges of making this
lm, the kinship among artists across the ages, and Herzogs archaeologist grandfather.
INTERVIEW
WERNER HERZOG
ON THE BIRTH OF ART
ARCHAEOLOGY: There are hundreds of ancient sites in the
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HERZOG: No, I was able to tell what I had to tell, but we had
to be completely focused, very fast, and very professional. So,
when I am asked, what was your feeling inside the cave? Did
it somehow strike you like a religious experience? No, it was
professionalism that was foremost. But there were moments
where the crew moved out and I just stayed behind for ve
minutes, which I apparently was not supposed to do. But I
did it anyway and the guards knew I wouldnt do anything
foolish so I stood there in silence and looked.
ARCHAEOLOGY: What was it like in those ve minutes?
HERZOG: It is really awesome, absolutely awesome.
ARCHAEOLOGY: The lm seems to convey what it is really
HERZOG:
HERZOG:
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ARCHAEOLOGY:
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35
HERZOG: Yes, what I am trying to say in the movies voiceover is that this kind of staging of the landscape as an interior
landscape does not belong to the German romanticists alone.
It belongs to the Aurignacian people, and that makes them
immediately familiar to me. The kind of wild, exuberant
fantasy and the stylizations. Ive done this all my life in my
movies. That is why I feel absolutely at home, in a way, when
I move into the cave, as strange and as remote and as foreign
as some of it is, and beyond the reach of my understanding.
But that doesnt matter. There were people out there who
created something absolutely fantastic.
applied to you. Were the people of Chauvet artists or craftsmen in your estimation?
HERZOG: In this case, you can clearly say this is art, and
you can say it easily. It goes back to a time when there was,
for example, no art market, no exhibitions, no galleries. No
doubt in my heart that this is art, and its some of the greatest
that the human race ever created, period. It cant get any better, and it hasnt gotten much better. Thats a great mystery.
ARCHAEOLOGY: There is a great shot in the lm of a painting of a half-woman, half-bison gure that wraps around
a stalactite. Until now, the painting has only been photographed from one side. How dicult was it to get that shot
considering the constraints of the cave?
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HERZOG:
ARCHAEOLOGY: Youve talked about how culture conditions the way we interpret images. Have we lost something
between the modern day and the time of Chauvet?
HERZOG:
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for this interview, I was surprised to nd out that you actually have a very personal connection to archaeology. Your
grandfather, Rudolph Herzog, was an archaeologist who
excavated in Greece.
ARCHAEOLOGY:
on the island of Kos, and that was his lifes work in the early
twentieth century.
Asklepieion?
HERZOG: Yes. I went out when I was 15. I was more interested in my grandfathers generation than in my parents
generation and I followed his footsteps trying to nd out
what he had done and where he had done it. That is why I
went to Greece and actually made my rst long feature lm
in 1966 on the island of Kos, Signs of Life.
ARCHAEOLOGY: As you were making this lm, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, were you surprised at how much archaeology
has changed since the days of your grandfather?
ARCHAEOLOGY:
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A CHAUVET PRIMER
Dating
After the cave paintings were discovered in December 1994,
the rst question archaeologists faced was, how old are they?
At rst glance, the paintings technical sophistication made
them seem relatively recent, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 years
old. Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal in the black pigments, however, showed that the earliest paintings in the cave
were made 35,000 years ago. The date overturned the idea
that Europes earliest cave paintings were crude and simple
and that artistic techniques had to be rened over thousands
of years before the nest cave art could be made. More than
80 radiocarbon dates have been taken from the torch marks
and paintings on the walls, as well as the animal bones and
charcoal that litter the oor, providing a detailed chronology
of the cave. The dates show that the artwork was made in two
separate periods, one 35,000 and one 30,000 years ago.
Cave Bears
The way that people used Chauvet Cave was shaped by their
interactions with the caves primary residents, the now-extinct
cave bear. Humans do not appear to have lived in the cave and
it is likely that the paintings were made in the spring or summer when the bears would not have been hibernating. The
bears themselves seem to have held a special signicance for
the artists who worked in the cave, in addition to being subjects of the artwork. A bear skull was placed on top of a large,
at rock in an area called the Skull Chamber. There is evidence a re was lit before it was set there, raising the possibility
that it had some kind of ritual function. More than 190 bear
skulls have been found in the cave, giving paleontologists an
enormous amount of information about a species that disappeared 20,000 to 25,000 years ago and used caves in ways that
were similar to how humans used them. The bears organized
the space within the cave by digging shallow depressions in
Tracings
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CLASS
Beginning in the early 1970s,
archaeologists excavating
the Copper Age site of Varna,
Bulgaria, uncovered evidence
of the emergence of a class
system in prehistoric Europe.
In one grave (pictured
above in a reconstruction
from the Varna Museum of
Archaeology), the remains of
a man buried with more than
two pounds of gold pointed to
his economically and socially
superior position in society.
www.archaeology.org
vk.com/englishlibrary
41
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43
A
Agathe Reingruber cleans and catalogs tens
o
of thousands of pieces of pottery that are
u
uncovered each season at Pietrele alongside
th
the copper artifacts.
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ietrele was occupied for a few centuries starting around 4500 b.c. Then, some
time around 4250 b.c. the settlement was
abruptly aba
abandoned. At hundreds of tells
all across the region, radiocarbon dates
s
tell a similar
story. There are a lot of
radio
radiocarbon
dates for 4700, 4600,
45
4500, 4300, and then it drops
o a cli, says Anthony, who
oorganized a denitive exhibition
oof Copper Age artifacts at the
In
Institute for the Study of the
An
Ancient World at New York University called The Lost World of Old
Europe Something
So
Europe.
really catastrophic
something culture-endinghappened there.
In the end, perhaps the people of Old Europe simply
exhausted the potential of the technology they had at hand.
Metalworking, however miraculous it may have seemed,
wasnt enough. They still lacked the advancements, including
writing and the wheel, that pushed later civilizations, such
as those in Mesopotamia, into more complex social organization. Maybe they just were not able to make that last big
step, Reingruber says.
Andrew Curry is a contributing editor to Archaeology.
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Archaeology (ISSN 0003-8113) is published bimonthly for $23.95 by the Archaeological Institute of America, 36-36 33rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11106. Periodicals
postage paid at Long Island City, NY, and additional mailing oces. POSTMASTER:
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An aerial view of Las Capas, a Hohokam site in southern Arizona, shows the remnants
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65
he Annual Meeting
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AIAs academic programming and the largest event organized by the
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