Tag: SMU Department of Anthropology

440-year-old parish survey by priest in Yucay Valley of Peru explains Inca decline under Spanish colonialism

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 7, 2011

440-year-old document sheds new light on native population decline under Spanish colonial rule

Analysis of a 440-year-old document that is a survey by a parish priest reveals new details about native population decline in the heart of the Inca Empire following Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

According to the new analysis, the native Andean population in the Yucay Valley of Peru showed a remarkable ability to bounce back in the short term from the disease, warfare, and famine that accompanied the initial Spanish invasion.

However, it was the repetition of such disasters generation after generation, along with overly rigid colonial administration, that dramatically reduced the population over the long term.

The research, by R. Alan Covey of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Geoff Childs of Washington University in St. Louis, and Rebecca Kippen of the University of Melbourne, is published in the June issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

1569 survey by parish priest supplies clues to rare snapshot
The analysis in the article “Dynamics of Indigenous Demographic Fluctuations: Lessons from Sixteenth-Century Cusco, Peru” is based on an unusually detailed survey of the native population taken by the valley’s parish priest in 1569 and copied by a royal official during a 1571 visit.

Most surviving Spanish documents recording native population from this time included only a few age and sex categories, but this one counted individual men, women, and children in more than 800 households. As such, it provides researchers with a rare snapshot of a rural native population under colonial rule, and sheds light on the demographic pressures they faced.

Several aspects of the census data are indicative of the hardships the native population faced, Covey and his team report. First, there were many more women than men aged 45 to 64, likely due to the most intense fighting of the first years of the colonial period, which occurred 20 years earlier. Second, there were noticeable declines in the male population in the 25-29 age cohort, some of which appear to be linked to high mortality rates for men forced to work in coca plantations. Third, there was a particularly small cohort of both boys and girls aged 10 to 14. Young children are especially susceptible to famine and epidemic disease, so the small cohort likely indicates that low fertility and high mortality were prevalent around the time these children were born.

Despite the obvious hardships, the census also shows that the population had begun to bounce back. The cohorts aged 0-4 and 5-9 were surprisingly large.

Hard evidence shows indigenous population decline not universal
“This is a key finding,” Covey said. “The identification of recovery fertility is something that previous researchers have suggested but had not been able to identify with hard evidence. It challenges the long-held assumption that indigenous populations in the Americas experienced universal and consistent processes of decline after contact with Europeans.”

In fact, the data suggest that from 1568 to 1570 the women in the population were producing more than enough daughters to replace themselves. “If mortality and fertility conditions remained constant over time, then this population would have grown,” the researchers write.

Unfortunately, a cascade of events beginning in 1580s proved too much to overcome.

In the latter part of the decade, new waves of epidemic disease swept across the region. It was also around this time that the small 10-14 cohort documented in the census reached its peak child-bearing years. Even if the fertility rate of the women in that cohort had remained high, its small size meant that those women would produce fewer children than their immediate predecessors. Epidemics hitting at the same time would have decreased fertility for this group and increased mortality among the young, magnifying what already would have been a significant demographic dip.

Then around 1614, when the children born in the 1580s were at their peak fertility ages, another wave of disease hit, likely producing another magnified dip.

Population levels in the region declined by about 40 percent over the course of a generation, from the 1570s to around 1600. Similar declines were seen across the Americas around this time, but varied according to local social and ecological conditions, Covey says.

Boom-n-bust cycles exacerbated Spanish colonial insensitivity
The Spanish colonial administrators were generally unwilling to adjust their tax and labor demands along with these changes in demographics. And they probably were unaware of the changes until they affected working-age men, because women and children received limited attention in most early colonial population surveys.

“At times, macrodemographic cycles would have placed significant burdens on indigenous communities, which in turn probably contributed to conditions (poverty, malnutrition) favoring the spread of epidemic disease and enhancing its morbidity,” the researchers conclude.

“While indigenous populations showed considerable resilience in the face of imperial transformation, we hypothesize that the boom-and-bust cycles created by pandemics and exacerbated by insensitive administration drove the long-term trend of population decline observed in the Yucay Valley and probably in other parts of the Cusco region.” — University of Chicago Press Journals

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with Dr. Alan Covey or to book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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National Geographic: “Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 27, 2011

Science journalist Ker Than interviewed SMU archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich about her Maya research in Guatemala. His article “Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth” published April 26 on the daily news web site of National Geographic.

Kovacevich, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology, is an expert in Meso-American cultures and co-leader of an international scientific team that has been granted permission by the Guatemalan government to work the site of Holtun, or “Head of Stone,” which has never before been excavated.

The archaeological team has made the first three-dimensional topographical map of the site’s ancient monumental buildings, long buried under centuries of jungle at the Maya location.

The map puts into 3-D perspective the location and size of Head of Stone’s many buildings and architectural patterns, which are typical of Maya sites: 70-foot-tall “triadic pyramid,” an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, numerous plazas and also residential mounds that would have been the homes of elites and commoners, says Kovacevich.

The map situates the primary buildings relative to one another and also places them within the context of the site’s hills and valleys in the Central Lakes agricultural region of north-central Guatemala.

EXCERPT:

Ker Than
for National Geographic News

Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of Stone, is finally coming into focus.

Three-dimensional mapping has “erased” centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this month.

Though it’s long been known to locals that something — something big — is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it’s only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures.

The Maya Denver?
Some of the stone houses, said study leader Brigitte Kovacevich, may have doubled as burial chambers for the city’s early kings.

“Oftentimes archaeologists are looking at the biggest pyramids or temples to find the tombs of early kings, but during this Late-Middle Preclassic period” — roughly 600 B.C. to 300 B.C. — “the king is not the center of the universe yet, so he’s probably still being buried in the household,” said Kovacevich, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Read the full story.

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CBC’s Quirks & Quarks: Recreating the Bamboo Age

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 18, 2011

Canadian science journalist Bob McDonald interviewed SMU archaeologist Metin Eren for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald radio show.

Eren’s latest research tests the long-held theory that prehistoric humans in East Asia crafted tools from bamboo, which archaeologists in the past devised to explain a lack of evidence for advanced prehistoric stone tool-making processes. Eren research asked “Can complex bamboo tools even be made with simple stone tools?”

A modern-day flint knapper, Eren replicated the crafting of bamboo knives and confirmed that it is possible to make a variety of bamboo tools with the simplest stone tools. However, rather than confirming the long-held “bamboo hypothesis,” the new research shows there’s more to the theory, he says.

In “Recreating the Bamboo Age,” Eren explains how he made the bamboo tools and what he and his colleagues determined from the experiment.

Listen to the podcast.

EXCERPT:

Quirks & Quarks
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Prehistoric humans achieved a lot with stone tools, and some cultures developed them to the acme of refinement.

However, archeologists have been puzzled by the fact that in Southeast Asia, the stone tools they’ve found were universally simple and crude. Some have suggested that this was because early humans used flexible, plentiful bamboo instead, as their material for more sophisticated tools.

Experimental archeologist Metin Eren, a PhD at Southern Methodist University, had an opportunity to test this idea. Mr. Eren has spent years developing his skills as a flint-knapper — a maker of stone tools. He decided to try his hand at bamboo tool making. He rediscovered techniques that allowed him to make various bamboo implements, using a few simple rock edges to start the process.

He had great success making spears, and breaking down bamboo for weaving. However, his attempts to make a bamboo knife — an essential tool for early humans — were disappointing: the knives could be made very sharp indeed, but weren’t durable enough to be really useful.

Listen to the podcast.

Tags Dedman College, Metin I. Eren, SMU Department of Anthropology

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Slideshows Videos

3-D mapping of Guatemala’s “Head of Stone” confirms ancient Maya buildings buried beneath forest cover

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 12, 2011

Mapping of Maya’s “Holtun” site in Central Lakes region of Guatemala locates triadic pyramid, astronomical observatory, ritual ball court, residential mounds, plazas

Archaeologists have made the first three-dimensional topographical map of ancient monumental buildings long buried under centuries of jungle at the Maya site “Head of Stone” in Guatemala.

The buildings date from 800 B.C. to 900 A.D., says Kovacevich, an expert in Meso-American cultures and co-leader of an international scientific team that has been granted permission by the Guatemalan government to work the site, which has never before been excavated.

Movement to understand early periods, how kingship developed
Known for its far-reaching state-level government, Maya civilization during the “Classic” period from 200 A.D. to 900 A.D. consisted of huge monumental cities with tens of thousands of people ruled by powerful kings, palaces, pyramidal temples and complex political and economic alliances, Kovacevich says.

The ancient culture at its peak during the Classic period has been well-documented by archaeologists studying the civilization’s large urban centers, such as Tikal, which was one of the most powerful and long-lasting of the Maya kingdoms.

In contrast, “Head of Stone,” called “Holtun” in Maya, is a modest site from the “Pre-Classic” period, 600 B.C. to 250 A.D., she says. The small city had no more than 2,000 people at its peak. Situated about 35 kilometers south of Tikal, “Head of Stone” in its heyday preceded the celebrated vast city-states and kingship culture for which the Maya are known.

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By excavating a small city, Kovacevich says, the archaeologists hope to understand early Maya trade routes and alliances, the importance of ritual for developing political power, how political power emerged, and how kingship lines evolved and solidified.

“There is a movement toward a greater understanding of these early periods, with smaller sites and common people,” says Kovacevich, an assistant professor in SMU’s Anthropology Department. “Little is known about how kingship developed, how individuals grabbed political power within the society, how the state-level society evolved and why it then was followed by a mini-collapse between 100 A.D. and 250 A.D.”

Kovacevich presented “‘Head of Stone’: Archaeological Investigation at the Maya Site of Holtun, Guatemala” during the 76th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, Calif., March 30 to April 3.

Besides Kovacevich, archaeologists on the team and co-authors of the paper are Michael G. Callaghan, University of Texas at Arlington; Patricia R. Castillo, Universidad San Carlos, Guatemala; and Rodrigo Guzman, Universidad del Valle, Guatemala. The 3-D topographic map expands surveys from 1995 and 2002 by Guatemalan archaeologist Vilma Fialko and Guatemala’s Institute of Anthropology and History, which were documented by Fialko and archaeologist Erick M. Ponciano.

Situated in a patch of rainforest on defensible escarpment
Head of Stone today sits in a patch of rainforest surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields on a limestone escarpment, which would have made it highly defensible, Kovacevich says.

Holtun’s structures — more than 100 of them — now are overgrown with a thin layer of centuries-old jungle foliage and soil. The site is about one kilometer long and half a kilometer wide, or almost three-quarters of a mile long and one-third of a mile wide. The large mounds protruding here and there from the jungle floor signal to archaeologists the familiar building arrangements customary at a Maya site, Kovacevich says.

As with most Maya sites, looters have tunneled into many of the important structures. Kovacevich and her colleagues will dig more tunnels to further explore the buildings with the help of Guatemalan experts skilled at working Maya sites.

Key structures: “E Group,” residential group
The 3-D mapping has confirmed an “E Group,” a key Maya architectural structure. Holtun’s “E Group” dates from 600 B.C. to 600 A.D. and consists of stair-step pyramids and elongated buildings that likely served as astronomical observatories central to Maya rituals. A stepped pyramid to the west of a long narrow building directly oriented north-south served as the observational structure and was related to veneration of sacred ancestors, Kovacevich says.

“From the observational structure you can see the sun rising at the different solstices throughout the year, which is very important agriculturally, to know the timing of the seasons and when to plant and when to harvest,” she says. “So the people creating this are harnessing that knowledge to show their followers and constituents that they possibly are even controlling the change of seasons.”

Adjacent to the “E Group” are four structures that face one another around a central patio. The pattern usually indicates a residential group, where cooking and food processing were carried out on the patio, Kovacevich says.

“The closeness of the residential structure to the “E Group” suggests these were very early elites, and possibly kings,” she says. “Kingship was just being established during this period.”

The Maya often left offerings to their ancestors, such as jade or ceramics, at the base of structures.

Triadic pyramid represents Maya mythology?
Besides the “E Group,” a triadic pyramid dating from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. sits at the north end of the site. As is typical at Maya sites, three pyramids about 10 feet tall sit atop a high platform that rises about 60 feet from the jungle floor, Kovacevich says. One of the pyramids faces south, flanked on either side by the other two, which face inward around a central patio. The platform sits atop — and obscures — an earlier sub-structure platform, buried underground and decorated with monumental masks that are visible from the looters’ tunnels.

“Some archaeologists argue that this configuration represents elements of Maya mythology: the three hearthstones of creation that were set down by the gods to create the first home and hearth, thereby civilizing humanity,” Kovacevich says. “Re-creation of that by the people at Holtun would show piousness and connection to ancestors.”

During the Classic period, kings were typically buried in Maya pyramids. During the Pre-Classic period, however, that isn’t the case and they were typically buried in their residence. It’s possible an early king of Holtun was buried in one of the residential structures, Kovacevich says.

“Ancestors are buried beneath the floor and kept very close and venerated,” she says. “The more ancestors a residence has, the more times the family redoes their floor, making a new floor, and so their mound gets higher and higher. A person with more ties, more ancestors, has more status.”

Another familiar structure is a ball court, signified by two long mounds that are exactly parallel, said Kovacevich.

“Those are the two sides of the ball court, and the ball would have been bounced in the center off of the sides,” she said. “Almost all Maya sites had a ball court.”

The team’s Holtun excavation is scheduled to start this summer. Funding is from the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, the Downey Family Fund for Faculty Excellence and SMU. — Margaret Allen

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with Dr. Kovacevich or to book her in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Brigitte Kovacevich, Dedman College, SMU Department of Anthropology

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Modern-day bamboo tool-making shines light on scarcity of Stone Age tools from prehistoric East Asia

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 7, 2011

Bamboo knives are easy to make — and will cut meat, but not hides, suggesting prehistoric people preferred crudely made stone flakes

The long-held theory that early human ancestors in East Asia crafted their tools from bamboo and wood is much more complicated than originally conceived, according to a new study.

Research until now has failed to address a fundamental question: Is it even possible to make complex bamboo tools with simple stone tools?

Now an experimental archaeological study — in which a modern-day flint knapper replicated the crafting of bamboo knives — confirms that it is possible to make a variety of bamboo tools with the simplest stone tools.

However, rather than confirming the long-held “bamboo hypothesis,” the new research shows there’s more to the theory, says archaeologist Metin I. Eren, the expert knapper who crafted the tools for the study.

Study: Bamboo knives were efficiently crafted and able to cut meat, but not hide

The researchers found that crudely knapped stone choppers made from round rock “cobbles” performed remarkably well for chopping down bamboo. In addition, bamboo knives were efficiently crafted with stone tools.

While the knives easily cut meat, they weren’t effective at cutting animal hides, however, possibly discouraging their use during the Stone Age, say the authors. Some knives made from a softer bamboo species entirely failed to produce and hold a sharp edge.

“The ‘bamboo hypothesis’ has been around for quite awhile, but was always represented simply, as if all bamboo species, and bamboo tool-making were equal,” says Eren, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Our research does not debunk the idea that prehistoric people could have made and used bamboo implements, but instead suggests that upon arriving in East and Southeast Asia they probably did not suddenly start churning out all of their tools on bamboo raw materials either.”

The findings appear online in the article “Were Bamboo Tools Made in Prehistoric Southeast Asia? An Experimental View from South China,” which will be published in an issue of the journal Quaternary International, edited by Parth Chauhan and Rajeev Parnaik.

“The importance of experimental archaeology, of replicating the production of bamboo tools with simple stone artifacts, was needed for a long time. Due to successful cooperation in every stage of the experiments with our Chinese colleagues, we managed to demonstrate the potential of a simple stone tool technology to produce many different daily tools made of bamboo,” said archaeologist and lead author Ofer Bar-Yosef, professor of Stone Age archaeology at Harvard University.

In addition to Bar-Yosef and Eren, co-authors were archaeologists Jiarong Yuan and Yiyuan Li of Hunan Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics; and archaeologist David J. Cohen of Boston University.

Poor diversity of prehistoric stone tools in Southeast Asia
As in Africa, previous fossil discoveries in East Asia have indicated that early human ancestors continuously inhabited those regions for as much as 1.6 million years. Unlike Africa and western Eurasia, however, where stone tools show increasing and decreasing complexity, East Asia’s stone tools remain relatively simple.

Researchers know that simple flaked “cobble” industries existed in some parts of the vast East and Southeast Asia region, which includes present-day China, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, parts of Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, East Timor and Vietnam. Stone tool discoveries there have been limited to a few hand axes, cleavers and choppers flaked on one side, however, indicating a lack of more advanced stone tool-making processes, innovation and diversity found elsewhere, say the authors.

The lack of complex prehistoric stone tool technologies has remained a mystery. Some researchers have concluded that prehistoric people in East Asia must have instead crafted and used tools made of bamboo — a resource that was readily available to them.

Scientists suggest several reasons for missing stone tool industry
Scientists have hypothesized various explanations for the lack of complex stone tools in East and Southeast Asia. On one hand, it’s been suggested that human ancestors during the early Stone Age left Africa with rudimentary tools and were then cut-off culturally once they reached East Asia, creating a cultural backwater.

Others have suggested a lack of appropriate stone raw materials in East and Southeast Asia. In the new study, however, Bar-Yosef, Eren and colleagues showed otherwise by demonstrating that more complex stone tools could be manufactured on stone perceived to be “poor” in quality.

Studies set out to test “bamboo theory” by replicating stone tools
Prolific in East and Southeast Asia, bamboo stands grow fast and thick, reaching maturity in 5 to 7 years and totaling more than 1,000 species, the authors say.

In a 2007 pilot study and a 2008 expanded study the authors worked with the Archaeological Field Research Station of the Hunan Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics in Shimen, China. Experiments were carried out in three locations across Hunan province known to possess clusters of Paleolithic sites.

The researchers gathered different kinds of cobble-sized rocks along the banks of the Li, Wu and Xiao Shui rivers, similar to those that would have been available to prehistoric human ancestors.

From those rocks, Eren easily replicated flake tools and stone choppers, some of them flaked on one side and some flaked on two sides. The team then observed a local bamboo toolmaker — who used metal tools to easily slice the bamboo — to learn techniques for sawing, shaving, splitting, peeling and chopping bamboo.

Stone tools efficiently chopped down bamboo stalks and produced knives
Using the crudely knapped stone choppers, the researchers in 84 minutes chopped down 14 bamboo stalks representing five species. When cut, the stalks, both small and large in diameter, totaled more than 65 meters in length. The stone tools performed remarkably well for that purpose, the authors write. That was especially true, they said, considering the tools were wielded by two modern people who were inexperienced with chopping bamboo, researchers Eren and Li. But Eren sometimes found himself scrambling up trees to release felled bamboo wedged in branches.

After numerous trials, the researchers developed a simple “bamboo knife reduction sequence” that could produce 20 sharp, durable bamboo knives in about five hours. Using pork purchased from a local market, the researchers write, they found that the knives easily cut meat, but not hide.

In other findings, the authors write that with a simple stone unifacial chopper, Bar-Yosef was able in 30 minutes to easily make a sharp spear that would have been capable of killing an animal. Also, using the replicated stone tools they were able to produce strips of bamboo thin enough for weaving baskets. “For some items, like baskets, bamboo might have been an ideal raw material,” Eren said.

“But one is left to wonder, at least for butchery tasks, why a prehistoric person would go to the trouble of producing a bamboo knife when a stone flake would certainly do the trick,” the authors write.

Unprecedented study confronts long-standing assumption
“The so-called bamboo hypothesis, to explain the virtual absence of complex prehistoric stone tool technologies in eastern and southeastern Asia, has been often cited but always remained somewhat ambiguous,” said Chauhan, co-editor of the Quaternary International issue in which the article will be published. “This unprecedented experimental study by Ofer Bar-Yosef, Metin Eren and colleagues represents a first step in the right direction, to confront a long-standing assumption about early human technological adaptations.”

Funding for the research was provided by the American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University; a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; and the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with Metin Eren or book him in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Dedman College, Metin I. Eren, SMU Department of Anthropology

440-year-old document sheds new light on native population decline under Spanish colonial rule

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Mapping of Maya’s “Holtun” site in Central Lakes region of Guatemala locates triadic pyramid, astronomical observatory, ritual ball court, residential mounds, plazas

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Bamboo knives are easy to make — and will cut meat, but not hides, suggesting prehistoric people preferred crudely made stone flakes

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