The Millennium Shrimp

Word Geek Examiner: City of Sodom in the Bronze Age — or is the Iron Age?

Posted using Word Geek Examiner: City of Sodom in the Bronze Age — or is the Iron Age?

Just some responses to Word Geek’s critique of the press release for Tall al Hammam.

(a) Tall versus Tell - “Tell” is generally considered the “Israeli” transliteration of the word. “Tall” is the preferred transliteration in Jordanian archaeology. Just like Hebrew uses “el” and arabic uses “al” as a definitive article.

(b) neolithic is an English word, the same as television. It is, of course, a long hallowed tradition of English-speaking academics to coin new words out of their Greek and Latin roots. That doesn’t make them “Greek” or “Latin” words.

(c) the intermediate Bronze age - these “ages” do not refer to chronological periods per se, but to cultural assemblages - i.e., clusters of artifacts that are consistently found together, and generally in a certain progression. In other words, the Early Bronze Age IV refers to an assemblage of pottery styles that are consistently found together. We know the pottery from the Bronze Age IV is younger than the pottery from the Bronze Age III, because it’s generally found higher up in the stratigraphy of a mound. The term “intermediate bronze age” is used because there are sites or strata within sites where we find artifacts that are typical both of the later Early Bronze phases and the earlier Middle Bronze Age. Basically these strata represent periods of continuous occupation from the Early Bronze Age through the Middle Bronze Age. Think of walking into a house that has a mixture of furniture from the 1960s through 1980s.

(d) Jordan disk - this is a rather uncommon rendering of the Hebrew phrase “kikkar hayyarden” which is a specific area of the Jordan river where the River Valley widens into a circle when viewed from the air. According to this biblicalarchaeology.org web page it is the arabah or “plains” of Moab. I agree, however, this is an obscure term that the writer could clarify better.

I’ll write some more about the significance of the site’s identification as “Sodom” in a later post. Read the rest of her article.

Archaeologists Discover Temple That Sheds Light On So-called Dark Age

ScienceDaily (2009-04-16) — The discovery of a remarkably well-preserved monumental temple in Turkey — thought to be constructed during the time of King Solomon in the 10th/9th-centuries BCE — sheds light on the so-called Dark Age.

Looks quite interesting. One of a number of sites that provide contrary evidence to the assertion that the late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age transition was disruptive. The site has evidence of cultural links to the Aegean world and the “Sea Peoples” (aka the Philistines that the ancient Israelites loved so much).

The first job that I remember having as a Freshman workstudy in college was the tedious task of “assholing” (sticking on those plastic hole reinforcements) the carbon copies of Meadowcroft’s F-1 Notes (i.e., the excavation’s master log). The logs contained everything from Adovasio’s precise notes on time, temperature, pressure and the day’s notable events to short stories and bizarre ramblings written by bored site guards and drunk people at 3 a.m. I remember coming across one page that was just filled with the word “f*ck” in capital letters all the way down. That’s about how I feel right now.

Interesting news release about a study of contemporary homelessness that will be published early next year in Historical Archaeology.

In the study Larry Zimmerman and Jessica Welch of IUPUI studied the material culture of homeless populations. Material culture - the clothing, utensils and other “stuff” that helps people live.

Some of their findings and even what they did not find surprised them. “We found a large number of food cans. Most had been opened, often not very successfully, with knives or by banging them against rocks or even by heating them until the contents exploded. We rarely found cans that had been opened by a can opener. That made us realize that they didn’t have can openers, which must have been very frustrating to them,” said Zimmerman.

“We also found a lot of hotel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant and toothpaste. Only the toothpaste was used. This tells us that giving things like shampoo and conditioner to individuals without access to water doesn’t make sense. It would be better to send these kinds of things to shelters and not distribute then to people living on the streets. When we try to deliver aid to the homeless we tend to give them what we think they need. A much better way to deliver aid is to target what they actually need, and our work on the material culture of the homeless may help us find out what that really is,” said Zimmerman.

How do we define what it means to be human? I like John Hawks answer.

From John Hawk’s Weblog

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors…

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future… History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

…You can see why this answer to the question may be unsatisfying — it is not predictive. You can’t take our shared history and make a prediction about the human future. You can’t predict which genes or traits two people may share. You can’t take this notion and apply it directly to a fossil hominid to tell whether it is a human.

But I don’t see why that it is a weakness. The fact is, you can’t place a statistical confidence interval around humanity based on a gene or a trait without leaving some people out. Unless the confidence interval is so wide that it includes some non-humans — and it is not hard to define “human” in a way that leaves out many children but draws in Kanzi, the stone-tool-making and logogram-using bonobo. Our shared history brings us close to Kanzi, too — but not the human part of our shared history.

Deep Sea Divers discover the wreck of the HMS Ontario, a Royal Navy warship that sank in Lake Ontario in October of 1780. 120 - 130 people died when it went down somewhere between Rochester and Niagara.  The BBC has more on the discovery.
The Ontario was a brig/sloop of war (22 guns) built at the Carleton shipyard east of Kingston on the St. Lawrence in 1779/80 with the role of deterring anticipated American military attacks by supporting Loyalist insurgency groups conducting hit and run raids over the border into upper New York. At the time of her construction she was the most powerful warship on the Great Lakes. According to the Droan Bay Ships web site, her sinking was kept a state secret for a number of years.

The wreck is believed to be located in about 500 feet of water. According to the divers who found her, she is remarkably well preserved. There is even glass in some of the port holes. The Star also has a good article about the shipwreck.

Arthur Britton Smith, (1997) The Legend of the Lake - details the history of the  HMS Ontario

Great Lakes Historical Society

Doran Bay Ships 

Dating to the period AD33-70, the underground chapel would have served as both a place of worship and a home.

The cave was found under the historical Church of St. Georgeous in Rihab (northern Jordan). The director of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological studies, a Dr Abdul Qader Al-Hassan, believes that the cave shows evidence of Christian cultic artifacts predating the ancient Church building above it. (Cultic in the technical sense of referring to material culture remains that would have been used in worship rituals.

More here:

Update

From National Geographic:

Ghazi Bisheh, former director general of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, dismissed the claim as “ridiculous,” saying the archaeologist behind them “has a tendency to sensationalize discoveries” and offered no evidence to back his recent assertion.

Bisheh thinks that the site is much younger than what the excavator is claiming, that stylistically it is consistent with cave Churches that were present in the 700s, when the area was a province of the Christian eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople. I’ll have to ask Susanne what she thinks about it, she just got back from Amman last week.

(With apologies to Marvin Harris)

From the New Yorker (via Boing Boing)

Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper lying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

Jared Diamond is one of those people I love to hate. He’s an ornithologist (actually he’s a biogeographer who teaches geography at UCLA, but his academic research is is in studying the geographical distribution of birds), but he feels the need to write about human culture. Nonetheless, the Boing Boing comments section has a good discussion of him and some of the criticism that anthropologists have of his work.

Article on the Beeb about the first excavations at Stonehenge in 40 years:

They have a new theory about why the bluestones were transported 250 miles from Wales to the site: that neolithic Britons believed they had healing properties.

Professor Geoffrey Wainwright said the site could have been a “Neolithic Lourdes”.

People always ask me why I didn’t go on in archaeology. It wasn’t just the lack of job prospects, dealing with the undead every day really does just wear you down…

Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils

HASAKE, SYRIA-When archaeologist Edward Whitson joined a Penn State University dig in Hasake last year, he did so to participate in the excavation of a Late Bronze Age settlement rich in pottery shards and clay figurines.