O mistério da pedra central de Stonehenge é descoberto
Uma análise geoquímica sugere que a Pedra do Altar de Stonehenge veio do norte da Escócia — além disso, os químicos finalmente descobriram como quebrar ligações de selênio de forma desigual
O mistério da Pedra do Altar de Stonehenge
A pedra central de Stonehenge veio do norte da Escócia, a mais de 600 milhas de distância do monumento, de acordo com uma nova análise de sua geoquímica. É comumente aceito que muitas das rochas que compõem o icônico monumento neolítico vieram do País de Gales, a 150 milhas do local. Anteriormente, pensava-se que uma pedra central, chamada de Pedra do Altar, também veio desta área, conhecida como Preseli Hills. O novo trabalho sugere que os antigos bretões foram muito mais longe, talvez transportando a Pedra do Altar por centenas de milhas, para colocar a rocha no centro de Stonehenge.
Análises químicas de pequenos cristais na Pedra do Altar central de Stonehenge sugerem que ela veio da Escócia — e não do País de Gales, como se pensava anteriormente. Pesquisadores tiveram a oportunidade de analisar uma amostra retirada da pedra em 1844 — antes de ela se tornar um monumento protegido que é proibido para geólogos que usam martelos. Eles descobriram que a rocha provavelmente veio de uma parte do nordeste da Escócia que inclui as Ilhas Orkney — embora não se saiba como a enorme pedra pode ter feito a jornada de 800 quilômetros para o sul.
quinta-feira, 12 de setembro de 2019
O DNA antigo da civilização do vale do Indo foi encontrado nesse
indivíduo enterrado no sítio arqueológico de Rakhigarhi, na Índia.
Vasant Shinde
Genoma de mulher de quase 5000 anos de idade liga índios modernos à civilização antiga
Mais ou menos na mesma época em que os antigos egípcios estavam
construindo suas primeiras grandes pirâmides e os mesopotâmicos
construíam templos e zigurates monumentais, os harappans do sul da Ásia -
também conhecida como civilização do vale do Indo - erigiam complexos
habitacionais de tijolos assados e cortavam sistemas de canais
elaborados.
A queda abrupta da civilização continua sendo um dos grandes mistérios do mundo antigo. Agora, pela primeira vez, os cientistas analisaram o genoma de um antigo Harappan.
As descobertas revelam pouco sobre por que a sociedade entrou em
colapso, mas elas iluminam seu passado e seu legado genético contínuo
nos índios modernos.
"A civilização do vale do Indo é um enigma há muito tempo", diz Priya
Moorjani, geneticista populacional da Universidade da Califórnia,
Berkeley, que não participou do estudo. "Portanto, é muito emocionante ... aprender sobre seus ancestrais e história." A civilização do vale do Indo surgiu por volta de 3000 a.C. e desmoronou
por volta de 1700 a.C.
Durante seu auge, se estendeu por grande parte do
que é hoje o noroeste da Índia e partes do leste do Paquistão.
É também conhecida como civilização Harappan, após o primeiro de seus
locais a serem escavados na província de Punjab, no Paquistão, a partir
da década de 1820.
Juntamente com o Egito antigo e a Mesopotâmia, estava entre as
primeiras sociedades agrícolas urbanas em larga escala do mundo,
ostentando algo entre 1 milhão e 5 milhões de habitantes em cinco
cidades centrais. Embora centenas de esqueletos do Vale do Indo tenham sido descobertos, o
clima quente da região destrói rapidamente o material genético que tem
sido fundamental para traçar a história de outras civilizações antigas.
Nos últimos anos, no entanto, os cientistas descobriram que o osso
petroso do ouvido interno contém uma quantidade incomumente alta de DNA,
permitindo que localizem material genético utilizável, mesmo em
esqueletos de outra forma degradados.
Uma equipe liderada pelo geneticista David Reich na Universidade de
Harvard e pelo arqueólogo Vasant Shinde no Deccan College em Pune, na
Índia, decidiu tentar a técnica promissora com amostras de Indus.
Eles coletaram mais de 60 peças esqueléticas, incluindo numerosos ossos
petrosos, antes de conseguir extrair o DNA antigo de um. Então eles tiveram que sequenciar a amostra mais de 100 vezes para juntar um genoma relativamente completo.
"Não há dúvida de que este é o esforço mais intensivo que já fizemos
para obter DNA antigo a partir de uma única amostra", diz Reich.
O indivíduo da amostra, provavelmente uma mulher baseada em seu DNA,
foi enterrado entre dezenas de tigelas e vasos de cerâmica em um local
do Indo conhecido como Rakhigarhi, cerca de 150 quilômetros a noroeste
da atual Delhi.
Evidências arqueológicas sugerem que ela viveu em algum momento entre
2800 e 2300 a.C. Seu genoma coincidiu com o DNA de 11 outros indivíduos
que foram encontrados em locais no Irã e no Turcomenistão, onde as
condições favorecem uma melhor preservação do DNA.
(Esses indivíduos pertencem a um conjunto de 523 seqüências de DNA antigas usadas para mapear a história da população dos sul-asiáticos e publicadas hoje na Science .)
Sabendo que a civilização Indus negociava com essas regiões e que esses
11 indivíduos tinham pouco em comum geneticamente com outros enterrados
em suas regiões, Reich e colegas concluíram que provavelmente eram
migrantes de Harappan.
Agora, trabalhando com um banco de genomas do Indus, supostamente com
12 indivíduos, os pesquisadores compararam suas assinaturas genéticas ao
DNA de outras civilizações antigas da Eurásia, bem como das populações
modernas.
Uma árvore genealógica Indus resultante revelou que, embora a
civilização tenha desmoronado há quase 4000 anos, seu estoque genético forma a base da maioria das pessoas que vivem na Índia hoje , informa a equipe hoje na Cell . O artigo da Science
, também liderado por Reich, observa que as pessoas modernas do norte
da Índia também carregam as marcas genéticas dos cruzamentos antigos com
os pastores da estepe da Eurásia, uma vasta pastagem que se estende
pelo norte da Ásia, movendo-se para o sul por volta de 2000 AEC.
Os
autores observam que o DNA de eventos pré-reprodutores anteriores
explica a ligação genética outrora desconcertante entre europeus e
sul-asiáticos.
Nos próximos milhares de anos, os grupos no norte e no sul da Índia se
misturaram, levando à complexa mistura ancestral da população moderna. Uma surpresa diz respeito ao DNA relacionado aos antigos iranianos, que antes era predominante nos sul-asiáticos modernos.
A descoberta pareceu apoiar uma crença popular entre os antropólogos de
que os migrantes do Crescente Fértil - que inclui o Irã moderno e deram
origem aos primeiros agricultores do mundo que começaram a perambular
cerca de 10.000 anos atrás - se mudaram para o leste em algum momento e
se misturaram com o sul da Ásia. caçadores-coletores, introduzindo a
agricultura no subcontinente indiano.
No entanto, o novo estudo sugere que o DNA relacionado ao Irã, tanto
nos indivíduos indus quanto nos indianos modernos, antecede a ascensão
da agricultura no Irã em cerca de 2000 anos.
Em outras palavras, esse DNA relacionado ao Irã veio de cruzamentos com
caçadores-coletores de 12.000 anos de idade, e não agricultores mais
recentes, explica Reich.
"Parece provável que houve avanços independentes na agricultura", diz o
antropólogo biológico Gyaneshwer Chaubey, da Universidade Hindu de
Banaras, em Varanasi, Índia, que não participou do estudo.
Uma explicação, observa ele, pode ser que os antigos sul-asiáticos
aprendessem práticas agrícolas de seus vizinhos sem cruzar com eles.
Descobrir exatamente o que aconteceu exigirá mais trabalho arqueológico
e mais amostras de DNA antigas de toda a região, diz Chaubey. "As descobertas do estudo são extremamente emocionantes, mas este é apenas o começo da história."
Stonehenge pode ser o exemplo mais famoso, mas dezenas de milhares de outros locais antigos, com pedras enormes e curiosas, pontuam a Europa.Um novo estudo sugere que esses megálitos não foram criados independentemente, mas em vez disso podem ser rastreados até uma única cultura de caçadores-coletores que começou há quase 7000 anos no que é hoje a região da Bretanha no noroeste da França.Os resultados também indicam que as sociedades na época eram melhores velejadores do que se acreditava, espalhando sua cultura pelo mar.
“This demonstrates absolutely that Brittany is the origin of the
European megalithic phenomenon,” says Michael Parker Pearson, an
archaeologist and Stonehenge specialist at University College London.
As origens dos construtores megalíticos têm assombrado Bettina Schulz Paulsson desde que ela escavou seu primeiro monumento megalítico em Portugal quase 20 anos atrás.No início, a maioria dos antropólogos considerava os megálitos originados no Oriente Médio ou no Mediterrâneo, enquanto muitos pensadores modernos apoiaram a ideia de que foram inventados independentemente em cinco ou seis regiões diferentes na Europa.O maior obstáculo, diz ela, foi vasculhar as montanhas de dados arqueológicos para encontrar datas confiáveis para os 35.000 locais, incluindo pedras eretas esculpidas, tumbas e templos.
“Everyone told me, ‘You’re crazy, it can’t be done,’” says Schulz
Paulsson, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in
Sweden and the study’s sole author. “But I decided to do it anyway.”
The Ring of Brodgar on the United Kingdom’s Orkney Islands
Bettina Schulz Paulsson
What she did was sift through radiocarbon dating data from 2410
ancient sites across Europe to reconstruct a prehistoric archaeological
timeline. The radiocarbon dates came mostly from human remains buried
within the sites. The study looked not just at megaliths, but also at
so-called premegalithic graves that featured elaborate, earthen tombs
but no huge stones. Schulz Paulsson also factored in information on the
sites’ architecture, tool use, and burial customs to further narrow the
dates.
The very earliest megaliths in Europe, she found, come from
northwestern France, including the famous Carnac stones, a dense
collection of rows of standing stones, mounds, and covered stone tombs
called dolmens. These date to about 4700 B.C.E., when the region was
inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Engravings on standing stones from the
region depict sperm whales and other sea life, which suggests the
precocious masons may also have been mariners, Schulz Paulsson says.
O noroeste da França é também a única região megalítica que também apresenta túmulos com complexos túmulos de barro que datam de cerca de 5000 aC, o que ela diz ser evidência de uma "evolução dos megálitos" na região.
Dolmen Sa Coveccada on northeastern Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea
Bettina Schulz Paulsson
Por volta de 4300 a.C, os megálitos se espalharam para locais costeiros no sul da França, no Mediterrâneo e na costa atlântica da Península Ibérica.Nos próximos milhares de anos, as estruturas continuaram a surgir em torno das costas da Europa em três fases distintas.Acredita-se que Stonehenge tenha sido erguido por volta de 2400 a.C.E., mas outros megálitos nas Ilhas Britânicas remontam a cerca de 4000 a.C.E.O surgimento abrupto de estilos megalíticos específicos, como túmulos estreitos de pedra em locais costeiros, mas raramente no interior, sugere que essas ideias estavam sendo disseminadas por marinheiros pré-históricos.Se assim for, isso empurraria de volta o surgimento da navegação avançada na Europa por cerca de 2000 anos, diz Schulz Paulsson.
“This seems quite plausible,” says Gail Higginbottom, an archaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Parker Pearson says the study does a good job establishing that
megaliths first arose in northwestern France, but it doesn’t quite rule
out the possibility that some later cultures independently developed the
idea.
Karl-Göran Sjögren, a fellow archaeologist at the University of
Gothenburg, says he accepts that northwest France was among the first
builders. But he isn’t fully convinced there aren’t still earlier
megaliths yet to be uncovered, or more evidence that might push back the
dates of some known megaliths. Future studies that include ancient DNA
and other bioarchaeological evidence on population movements could clear
things up, he says.
Um crânio alongado do Período Maia Clássico revela pistas sobre a tradição de moldar as cabeças das crianças para alterar seu crescimento
Trained in both medicine and archaeology, Vera
Tiesler has revealed how the human body was deeply woven into the
religion, tradition and politics of the Maya world.
An elongated
skull from the Classic Maya Period reveals clues about the tradition of
shaping infants’ heads to alter their growth.Credit: Pim Schalkwijk
The Autonomous University of the Yucatán, in the Mexican
city of Mérida, holds one of the most comprehensive libraries on Earth.
But few books line the shelves on the bottom floor of the
anthropological sciences building. Instead, boxes are stacked from floor
to ceiling in almost every corner of the laboratory, with labels naming
Calakmul, Pomuch or Xcambo and other ancient Maya ruins. Inside every
box is a set of human bones.
Bodies from some 2,000 burials are
stored here, with another 10,000 records of others in a database. The
remains of some of the most famous Maya kings have passed through this
room at the university. Ancient paupers, warriors, priests, scribes,
lords, ladies and artisans — the lab has seen them all.
And tucked
in the middle of it, surrounded on all sides by the remains of
long-dead civilizations, sits bioarchaeologist Vera Tiesler. Over the
past quarter of a century, Tiesler has carved out a reputation as the
world’s premier specialist on ancient Maya remains, which has helped her
to unlock secrets of their lives and culture. On a drizzly November
day, she pulls out one of her favourite bones, a flat strip no bigger
than her finger, and puts it under a magnifying lens. It’s a sternum
bone from a young man who was probably sacrificed. She points to a deep
V-shaped cut over the centre of the chest, and she marvels at the skill
of the person who inflicted it.
“You’d need a lot of strength — a
lot of force — and you’d need to know exactly where to hit,” she says.
“Because if not, you’d have these false starts, it would be a mess.”
Trained
as a physician and an archaeologist, Tiesler reads the region’s history
in its bones. By bringing a medical eye to ancient Maya civilization,
she has changed how scientists perceive that society, putting some of
its seemingly more unusual traditions into context and shedding light on
the lives of key individuals.
Through studies of thousands of
bodies, she has helped to illuminate how the Maya’s knowledge of human
physiology was an integral part of their society — from birth to death.
How they shaped the heads of their babies reveals insights into their
family traditions and spirituality. And her investigations into many of
the deaths suggests that ritualized sacrifice was perfected to a high
art — an idea that challenges popular views of the Maya world as a
society of peaceful stargazers. Throughout, she has uncovered a rich
culture in which the human body was deeply woven into religion,
tradition and politics.
“I always look at things from a different
angle,” Tiesler says. “That way it never loses its attraction. It’s
like it triggers me. I find it thrilling.”
Tiesler is an anomaly
in Mexican archaeology. Born in Germany and trained in Mexico, where she
has lived for decades, she has crossed cultures to make partnerships
and discoveries around one of the most famous ancient civilizations.
“There
are very few people with those kinds of credentials,” says Stephen
Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode
Island. “She represents this collegial internationalism — a kind of
global approach to knowledge in which people at their best, in the best
conditions, work together.”
The power of love
Quiet and bookish as a child,
Tiesler had always felt out of place in the small German village near
the border with France where she grew up. She just saw things
differently. Although her friends went to James Bond films to see the
hero, she was more interested in his steel-toothed nemesis Jaws. And she
yearned to travel.
So she enrolled at Tulane University in New
Orleans, Louisiana, where she avoided its famously boisterous campus
life and graduated after just one year, with honours, at 19 in 1985.
Afterwards, she took a little money that she had won in an art
competition and flew to Mexico City for two weeks before returning to
Germany to start a medical degree. In Mexico, she met a young doctor and
archaeology enthusiast, who offered to take her to the ruins of
Teotihuacán just outside the city with his friends. They fell in love,
and spent a week driving thousands of kilometres through the Maya region
to visit sites — although she neglected to inform her parents, who
eventually called Interpol in a panic.
“I saw Mexico in a way that I fell in love with,” she says.
They
made plans to get married, but her fiancé died suddenly in 1987 while
Tiesler was in Germany studying medicine. She vowed to go to Mexico and
do what he always wished he could — become an archaeologist. Against the
wishes of her family, she enrolled at the National Polytechnic
Institute in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico ever since.
Tiesler
finished her medical degree in Mexico and later earned her doctorate in
anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
in Mexico City. Back then, few people were interested in the bones of
the ancient Maya; Mexican archaeology was about temples, pottery and
jade masks. Those who did study bones typically collected only the most
basic information.
“They figured they had done everything they
could. They had measured them, they had classified them,” says Manuel
Gándara, an archaeologist who oversaw her work at the time, and is now
at the National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography in
Mexico City. “And here comes this lady saying, ‘Oh but we haven’t taken
samples of tissue to analyse’.”
Tiesler was introducing a field
often called taphonomy, which was gaining popularity in Europe at the
time, and goes beyond classifying bones by trying to reconstruct the
body that once hung from them. But the practice had never been applied
to ancient Mesoamericans. She began looking through Mexican museums at
various collections of skulls, which she considered the most interesting
parts of the body. She became fascinated with the practice of head
shaping, whereby a mother tied boards to an infant’s head to shape its
growth.
It didn’t hurt the baby and was a surprisingly common
practice around the world. Archaeologists who study the Maya assumed
that the practice had something to do with religion, but knew little
more than that.
Vera Tiesler examines the remains of a person buried in Mexico during early colonial times.Credit: Pim Schalkwijk
Tiesler noticed that certain regions tended to have specific
head styles. After looking at a few hundred skulls, she found that
people during the Classic period (250–900) along the coast of today’s
Veracruz had a vertical, pear-shaped style, those in the lowlands had a
sloping, tubular style, and those along the coast of the Caribbean Sea
had wide, flat heads. Over time, that shape became popular, and
dominated the late Classic period1.
By
looking at drawings and carvings from the time and comparing them to
skull shapes, she deduced that head styles follow matrilineal
traditions: children tend to have the mother’s style. She, along with
others, found a possible reason, based on Maya traditions in colonial
times. The ancient Maya saw babies as not-yet human, and at risk of
losing their essence through a few points in their skulls, she says. By
shaping the head, the Maya kept the essence in place2.
Lives of the kings
By
the time Tiesler got her PhD in 1999, she was already fleshing out much
of ancient Maya culture and soon began excavating royal tombs. The
ancient Maya spanned from the northern Yucatán peninsula southwards
towards modern-day Honduras (an area about the size of today’s Egypt),
and Tiesler has examined many of its important kings or queens found
over the past 100 years. She was part of the team that examined Pakal
the Great (or K’inich Janaab’ Pakal) of Palenque and his companion, the
Red Queen, between 1999 and 2006. She found that their relatively
luxurious lifestyle gave them premature osteoporosis, visible in their
thinning bones. Their teeth were barely worn from eating soft, decadent
food their whole lives3.
Tiesler
excavated the bones of a king named Lord of the Four Sides of the Flint
(or Ukit Kan Le’k Tok) of Ek Balam, depicted in a painting in his
opulent vault with a double lip. She found that he had a disfigured
upper jaw with teeth that were dislodged and had then healed at angles,
possibly from a blow to the face during battle, given that he was eager
to show it off.
Tiesler’s favourite kings are the ones for which
she oversaw the excavation process from start to finish. Take Fiery Claw
(or Yukom Yich’ak K’ahk’) of the Classic Snake dynasty. The Snakes were
a line of kings who moved into the Maya world in 560 and, over 150
years, built the closest thing the Maya ever saw to an empire.
At Chichén Itzá, a pyramid rises up behind a stone platform decorated with skull carvings.Credit: Alamy
The first of these, Sky Witness, was found in a moderately
humble grave, shared with a handful of other elite warriors who died in
battle. Tiesler had very little time to inspect him, but found his skull
speckled with deep injuries — some on top of previously healed ones.
His shield arm was mangled from numerous heavy blows, and he could
barely have used it by the time he died, in his early 30s. All this fits
the image in snippets of writing from across the region that describe a
brilliant military leader who toppled the ruling city of Tikal and
establish the Snakes as the dominant force in the region.
Contrast
that with Fiery Claw, who came at the end of the Snakes’ dominance in
the region. When Tiesler and other researchers excavated the king, they
found him opulently arrayed in a chamber with a jade mask alongside a
young woman and a child sacrificed at the same time. From her studies of
his bones, Tiesler found that he was portly, bordering on obese, and in
his 50s when he died. Like Pakal, his teeth showed that he spent his
life eating soft food such as tamales and sipping a chocolate and honey
drink popular among the elites4.
One carving shows him as a fit man, athletically playing a Mesoamerican
ball game. But Tiesler found that Fiery Claw had a painful disease that
fused several vertebrae together, meaning the game would have been
dangerous to play, and suggesting that the carving was propaganda.
Sacrifice as spectacle
These
kinds of details do not change the basic plot line of Maya history, but
they do fill out its characters and hint at what their lives were like.
Since 2000, when Tiesler became a professor at the Autonomous
University of Yucatán, she has established herself as the premier
bioarchaeologist in Mexico. Her lab has compiled a database of 12,000
burials, 6,600 of which she and her colleagues worked on directly. Her
university alone houses the remains of more than 2,000 individuals from
ancient, colonial and modern times, most of which she had a hand in
uncovering.
Tiesler enjoys a unique position in Mexican academia.
After centuries of watching antiquities fly north, along with all the
credit, the authorities have become reticent to allow foreign
archaeologists to do large projects in the Maya area. But Tiesler
readily works with specialists in the United States, Europe and Mexico
and publishes widely in both English and Spanish.
She pairs this
multiculturalism with a ravenous appetite for research and boundless
energy. This came in helpful when she dug into her favourite topic:
human sacrifice.
A skeleton from early colonial times in Mexico.Credit: Pim Schalkwijk
In 2003, while working in Champotón, on the coast of the
Gulf of Mexico, three of her students discovered a group of bodies that
seem to have been discarded. When Tiesler examined the bones, she found a
sternum with deep, clean cut marks in it that showed intentional,
almost surgical, placement. The cuts were horizontal, not likely to have
come from battle, and were later found in the same place on other
bodies.
Tiesler’s mind went back to her medical training. A
skilled person, who knew what they were doing and was moving fast, might
have cut the chest open, pulled the ribs apart and exposed the heart
while the victim was still alive. “Then the heart would come out by
itself and would be jumping,” she says. Para Tiesler, esses cortes representavam algo maior do que apenas assassinato macabro.Era mais provável que fosse um espetáculo, alguma forma de cerimônia.Suas observações ressoaram com alguns relatos escritos do sacrifício de Mexica (ou Asteca) a 1.300 km de distância, por volta da época da invasão espanhola no século XVI.Isso a levou a um fascinante e escuro buraco de coelho na fisiologia do sacrifício humano.Como foi feito?E porque?
She
and her colleagues started noting cut marks in other remains that
seemed too precisely placed to be accidents. As she compiled them and
compared them to iconography, she began seeing similar well-placed cut
marks in other bones that looked to her like signs of elaborate rites.
Carvings
at places such as the Maya ruins Chichén Itzá show captives being
beheaded in front of crowds. If you cut the head off seconds before
removing the heart, the organ will keep pumping as you hold it, says
Tiesler. Do it the other way round and you can feed the heart to its
owner, a practice also hinted at in texts. A different procedure, which
leaves cut marks on other parts of the chest, might create a tranquil
pool of blood in a victim’s chest cavity that looks almost like a lake.
Tiesler’s
ideas are not universally accepted — some people see the killings as
less choreographed — but Tiesler says they fit with the Maya world view.
As she sits at her desk, a nook in the centre of her laboratory
surrounded by 3-metre-high stacks of bone boxes, she is not revulsed by
this practice. She is fascinated. These executions required practice and
precision — perhaps taking generations to perfect — and must have
carried profound meaning.
She says that the method of sacrifice
was incredibly important. In that moment, the victim becomes a sort of
pretender god — a glimpse of the divine in human form, an idea that was
well-documented among the Mexica people. Thus, the executioners were not
feeding a person’s heart to himself, but rather to a god.
Tiesler
is not the first to propose these ideas. Sacrifice leading to divinity
(either in the executioner or in the victim) is well-documented in other
cultures of the Americas. But her work supports ideas of religion
gleaned from what other sources describe as a Xipe Totec sect, named
after an Mexica god said to wear human skins over his own.
During
the Post-Classic period (950 to 1539) the Maya people practised a great
deal of human sacrifice and body processing, she says, including
creating racks of skulls called tzompantlis and cutting off human skins
to wear over the body.
As grisly as these killings might seem,
they were nothing compared with other practices at the time. Far worse
to Tiesler was the European use of the breaking wheel, a device that
allowed torturers to break a criminal’s bones, one by one, before
displaying the victim to the village.
Still, her descriptions of
sacrifice do not sit well with everyone. Anthropologists once depicted
the Maya as a purely peaceful civilization and, although that view has
largely gone, many loathe casting them in such a bloodthirsty light.
The
history of archaeology is filled with warped ideas of ancient cultures
that have been promulgated by scholars from powerful nations, and modern
researchers tread carefully into issues such as sacrifice and
cannibalism. “It has been an argument by colonizers to depict people of
other societies in what we’d consider the worst imaginable scenarios,”
says Estella Weiss-Krejci at the Institute for Oriental and European
Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “You always
have to think of all the possibilities, especially when you’re not sure
what happened.”
Weiss-Krejci thinks that human sacrifice was
incredibly rare in the Maya world and that the woman in Fiery Claw’s
burial was actually a family member who died later. If the sacrifices
that Tiesler describes were so common, Weiss-Krejci wonders why there
aren’t hundreds of chest bones with the same cuts. She thinks that
sacrifices were relatively rare and diverse, with little repetition.
Tiesler responds by pointing to numerous examples from her extensive
database of burials, but she says that given the amount of post-mortem
mutilation and the wet soils, we are lucky even to have those.
Vera Tiesler amid the collections at the Autonomous University of the Yucatán.Credit: Pim Schalkwijk
The two respect each other, but Tiesler says that
Weiss-Krejci follows a well-meaning, although misguided, trope. She says
that local Maya are not turned off by the gruesome reality of their
forebears, any more than are the descendants of ferocious Romans or
Vikings. Understanding another culture means looking at their history,
warts and all.
“If we don’t understand, we can believe they are
crazy or they are different from us. But they are not different. We are
all the same,” says Kadwin Pérez, a Maya PhD student in Tiesler’s lab
who grew up with Mayan spoken around the house.
Disembodied heads
Walking
through an ancient Maya site with Tiesler is a little like getting a
backstage pass to a magic show; everything you thought you understood
before starts to look different. That was the feeling on a trip last
November through Chichén Itzá. Just past the iconic El Castillo, the
step pyramid, is the site’s famous tzompantli, a stone platform
decorated with carvings of hundreds of skulls and various half-dead
underworld monsters.
Tzompantlis were skull racks constructed as a
series of horizontal beams stacked vertically, like a ladder. Adorned
with skulls, they were popular with the Mexica. Many experts have
assumed that Maya images of tzompantli are metaphorical, and do not
refer to an actual event. Some go so far as to say that the Maya did not
participate in the practice.
Tiesler stops and examines the
carvings. Colonial Spanish drawings of tzompantlis often depict them
with clean, white skulls. She squints. They’re not clean skulls at all,
she says, but heads that have been recently cut off and still have flesh
attached. The sculptor even included cheeks and eyeballs on many of
them, whereas others seem more decayed. In addition, the head shapes
vary wildly, suggesting that most were foreigners, perhaps captured on
the field of battle. It was not, as some have suggested, an honour to be
sacrificed. It’s a classic example of Tiesler’s work, putting flesh
back on the bones.
Chichén Itzá has been studied by countless
specialists and is visited by more than two million people a year —
every detail of its structures has been mapped, analysed and discussed —
and yet no one thought about these carved heads as a medical doctor
would until Tiesler.
Later, we sit down in a small hut to eat a
traditional corn-based pie, stuffed with chicken and spices and cooked
underground, and a hot chocolate drink that has changed little since
kings sipped it 2,000 years ago. Tiesler has been partnering with a
local university trying to promote ecotourism that benefits local
communities. Maria Guadalupe Balam Canche, who made the dish as a part
of the month-long Day of the Dead festivities, says she doesn’t feel a
direct connection to the builders of the nearby pyramids that draw the
tourists. It’s a common sentiment here. They were the old Maya — alien,
distant and perhaps a little brutal.
Tiesler sees things
differently. As she slices off a portion of pie, she notes that eating
meat cooked in the soil has echoes of ancient ideas of the underworld.
People here commonly remove family members’ bones and clean them, much
as Fiery Claw once did. And during rodeos here, it’s not uncommon to
pull the heart from a dying calf as part of the show.
Centuries
of Spanish and Mexican statehood have influenced the culture here, but
they haven’t changed the bones. Tiesler, who also works with more modern
burials, sees a long arc of history in a way that few people can. In
her bone library, she can see the rise and fall of empires, the wax and
wane of famine and disease and the tales of many, many lives.
When
Europeans came to these shores, their priests burned the Maya writings
and their diseases swept through the population. Almost all of what the
people who built these pyramids wrote down was lost, their libraries
destroyed. It’s a hole that archaeologists have endeavoured to fill. And
although we will never rebuild their lost libraries, at least one woman
hopes to paint a picture of how these people lived by using the only
libraries left for us to peruse.
Nature566, 168-171 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-00517-y
sexta-feira, 7 de dezembro de 2018
Geologists are measuring bullet damage to ancient Middle Eastern settlements
The ultimate goal is to inform efforts to conserve or repair heritage sites.
Wadi Rum in Jordan was once home to prehistoric humans.Credit: Diego Cupolo/NurPhoto via Getty
In 2015, Lisa Mol stared at a series of satellite images,
distraught. The before-and-after pictures showed how the Islamist
terrorist group ISIS had damaged the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra
with explosives and bulldozers. An oasis in the desert, Palmyra had
been a cultural meeting place in the first and second centuries AD, and contained the fingerprints of many civilizations.
“Seeing
that deliberate destruction pushed me into taking action,” says Mol, a
geomorphologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “I
am not a lawyer, I cannot do anything medical, but I do know rocks.”
Mol,
who specializes in rock art and rock deterioration, is now spearheading
an initiative — the first of its kind — to quantify and catalogue the
impacts of bullets in rock at a heritage site in the Middle East. The
eventual goal is to inform efforts to conserve or repair such sites.
Normally,
people look at the impact of conflict on a site in its totality, rather
than at individual damage, says Robert Bewley, who specializes in
endangered archaeology at the University of Oxford, UK. “The science
into what’s going on is very important,” he says. “If there is no
science, people may say, ‘Let's just slap concrete over it and it will
be fine’. It won’t.”
Satellite imagery has been used extensively to identify damage in conflict areas, for example in Syria
and Libya. But there is a dearth of information about how stone
structures weather after ballistic damage, despite the fact that ancient
sites are often casualties of conflict — and have been for centuries.
“I saw something that needed doing, and built up a team,” Mol says.
Ballistic expedition
Mol’s
five-woman team, comprising a palaeontologist, two geomorphologists, a
heritage specialist and an archaeologist, returned in September from an
expedition to Wadi Rum, a cultural heritage site in southern Jordan.
Wadi
Rum is home to rock paintings, engravings and archaeological remains
that document millennia of human habitation, and it wears the scars of
conflicts old and new. The rocks’ physical characteristics, or
lithology, are also similar to those in areas such as Syria, where
safety issues are too great for researchers to make expeditions.
The
team hopes ultimately to develop step-by-step guidelines for locals to
identify and catalogue ballistic damage to heritage sites — for use in
Jordan and beyond. Residents could record and communicate their findings
using an information sheet, or send images to researchers by e-mail or
through an app, says Mol.
But the researchers must first determine
which stone properties are most crucial for tracking ballistic damage
and environmental degradation. “We can’t simplify to that level without
the high-level scientific understanding,” says Mol.
Bullet damage on rock art at Wadi Rum.Credit: Lucy Clarke
The bullet damage at Wadi Rum spans decades, from guerilla
conflict in the early twentieth century to damage from AK-47 machine
guns in the past few months thought to have been caused by people using
rocks for target practice.
Over the decades, munitions have
changed — as has the extent of the harm they cause. How badly weathering
worsens after ballistic hits depends on factors including weapon type,
rock composition and climate. For instance, a 2017 study by Mol’s team1
found that bullets from a .22-calibre gun changed how stone reacted to
changes in moisture and temperature, exacerbating deterioration.
This
degradation can be as harmful as the initial bullets, says Bewley.
“With wind, rain, freezing, drying, you open up the possibility for more
damage,” he says. But these impacts are not well studied.
Sedimentary study
During
their week-long expedition to Jordan, Mol and her colleagues collected
data on the surface hardness, resistivity and permeability of rocks,
both at points of impact and undamaged rock. They will combine these
data with 3D images of the surface morphology to calculate the size,
depth and shape of impacts, as well as the fractures that run along the
surface.
In Mol’s lab, researchers will shoot guns at rocks to
test the microstresses caused by bullet impacts from different weapons —
and compare the results with the data to work out which weapons created
which damage, and how that damage plays out in the rock.
But even
with rich on-the-ground data, it can be difficult to determine exactly
who shot at the sites and when. Historical conflict is a likely culprit
for some of the damage at Wadi Rum, says Kaelin Groom, a geographer in
the team who has worked at the site for the past two years. But many of
the impacts, such as the recent AK-47 damage, are known to be acts of
vandalism. The researchers also interviewed local residents to narrow
the time frames and identify possible shooters.
Heinz Ruther, a
geoinformaticist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, says
that he’s not aware of other researchers doing such ballistic work.
Being able to quantify the extent of conflict damage to heritage sites
would be very relevant, says Ruther, who leads a project that creates digital models of African heritage sites. So many buildings are affected or destroyed by war, he says, but partial damage is seldom considered.
Memorial scars
But
there is more to heritage conservation than scientific understanding.
Conservation efforts need the buy-in of local residents and should take
their wishes into account, Mol’s team says.
Some residents think
that certain bullet damage should not be repaired, and should stand as a
warning against vandalism or as a reminder of the conflict that caused
it.
There are local stories and knowledge surrounding the bullet
impacts, and this affects how the sites should be conserved, says Rachel
King, an archaeologist at University College London who was part of the
expedition.
Researchers Lisa Mol (left), Rachel King (centre) and expert Mohammed Al Zalabih examine a site at Wadi Rum.Credit: Lucy Clarke
Mohammad Dmayan Al-Zalabiah’s family has lived in Wadi Rum since the early 1800s. A tour guide, Al-Zalabiah was part of a US programme
aimed at managing and promoting cultural heritage resources in Jordan.
Al-Zalabiah worked to create a database of local rock art and
inscriptions at the site, and helped Mol and her team collect data about
bullet damage. He thinks that the ballistic research has value for the
community, because it highlights the extent of bullet damage and
dissuades vandals.
Groom would like to train Jordanian researchers
and residents to use the rapid-assessment techniques her team hopes to
devise in the country and the rest of the region. However, although they
are already working with the government — a necessity, because Wadi Rum
is a protected area — the team is waiting for more concrete results
before formally trying to partner with the government to expand their
research to other sites and set up initiatives to train local people to
identify heritage damage. (Nature was unable to reach the Jordanian department of antiquities for this story.)
“You
can’t understand something as complex as the physical damage to
heritage — in a very different social context and the conservation
attached to it — without social outreach, ethnography and geology,”
Groom says.
Nature564, 18-19 (2018)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07320-1
sábado, 10 de novembro de 2018
7 Bizarre Ancient Cultures That History Forgot
Credit: Creative Commons, Courtesy of Wikipedia
Long-Lost Cultures
Os antigos egípcios tinham suas
pirâmides, os gregos, suas esculturas e templos. E todo mundo sabe sobre
os maias e seu famoso calendário.
Mas outros povos antigos têm pouca atenção na história do mundo. Aqui
estão algumas culturas há muito perdidas que não recebem o
reconhecimento de nome que merecem.
The Silla
O reino de Silla foi uma das dinastias reais mais antigas de sempre. Governou a maior parte da península coreana entre 57 a.C. e 935 d.C., mas deixou poucos enterros para os arqueólogos estudarem.
Uma recente descoberta de Silla deu aos pesquisadores uma pequena visão, no entanto. Os ossos intactos de uma mulher que viveu até os 30 e poucos anos foram encontrados em 2013 perto da capital histórica de Silla (Gyeongju). Uma análise dos ossos da mulher revelou que ela provavelmente era vegetariana e consumia uma dieta rica em arroz, batatas ou trigo. Ela também tinha um crânio alongado.
Silla foi fundada pelo monarca Bak Hyeokgeose. Diz a lenda que ele nasceu de um ovo misterioso na floresta e se casou com uma rainha nascida das costelas de um dragão. Com o tempo, a cultura Silla se transformou em uma sociedade centralizada e hierárquica com uma classe aristocrática rica. Embora os restos humanos do povo Silla sejam raros, os arqueólogos desenterraram uma variedade de produtos luxuosos feitos por essa cultura, de um punhal de ouro e granada a um Buda de ferro fundido a jóias de jade, entre outros exemplos realizados no Museu Nacional de Gyeongju. na Coreia do Sul. [See Images of the Long-Headed Woman's Facial Reconstruction]
Credit: suronin / Shutterstock.com
The Indus
O Indus é a cultura urbana antiga mais conhecida, com a terra do povo que se estende do rio Indo no atual Paquistão até o Mar da Arábia e o Ganges na Índia. A civilização do Indo persistiu por milhares de anos, emergindo por volta de 3300 a.C. e declinando por volta de 1600 a.C.
Os Indus, também conhecidos como os Harappans, desenvolveram sistemas de esgoto e drenagem para suas cidades, construíram muros e celeiros impressionantes e produziram artefatos como cerâmica e contas de vidro. Eles até tiveram atendimento odontológico: os cientistas encontraram 11 molares perfurados de adultos que viveram entre 7.500 e 9.000 anos atrás no Vale do Indo, de acordo com um estudo publicado em 2006 na revista Nature. Um estudo de 2012 sugeriu que a mudança climática enfraqueceu as chuvas de monções e secou grande parte do território de Harappan, forçando a civilização a se dispersar gradualmente e migrar para climas mais úmidos.
Credit: Creative Commons
The Sanxingdui
Os Sanxingdui eram uma cultura da Idade do Bronze que prosperou no que hoje é a província de Sichuan da China. Um fazendeiro descobriu artefatos do Sanxingdui em 1929; escavações na área em 1986 revelaram esculturas de jade complexas e esculturas de bronze de 2,4 metros de altura.
Mas quem eram os Sanxingdui? Apesar da evidência das habilidades artísticas da cultura, ninguém realmente sabe. Eles eram fabricantes prolíficos de máscaras pintadas de bronze e ouro que alguns arqueólogos acreditam ter representado deuses ou ancestrais, segundo o Museu Sanxingdui, na China. O local de Sanxingdui mostra evidências de abandono há cerca de 2.800 ou 3.000 anos atrás, e outra cidade antiga, Jinsha, descoberta nas proximidades, mostra evidências de que talvez os Sanxingdui tenham se mudado para lá. Em 2014, pesquisadores da reunião anual do Sindicato Geofísico Americano argumentaram que, por volta dessa época, um grande terremoto e deslizamento de terra redirecionaram o rio Minjiang, o que teria cortado Sanxingdui da água e forçado a realocação.
Credit: Wynne Parry
The Nok
A misteriosa e pouco conhecida cultura de Nok durou cerca de 1000 a.C. a 300 d.C. no que é hoje o norte da Nigéria. Evidências do Nok foram descobertas por acaso durante uma operação de mineração de estanho em 1943, de acordo com o Metropolitan Museum of Art, em Nova York. Os mineiros descobriram uma cabeça de terracota, insinuando uma rica tradição escultural. Desde então, outras elaboradas esculturas de terracota surgiram, incluindo representações de pessoas usando joias elaboradas e carregando bastões e manguais - símbolos de autoridade também vistos na arte egípcia antiga, de acordo com o Instituto de Arte de Minneapolis. Outras esculturas mostram pessoas com doenças como elefantíase, disse o Met.
Contribuindo para o mistério em torno do Nok, os artefatos foram retirados de seu contexto sem análise arqueológica. Em 2012, os Estados Unidos devolveram um depósito de estatuetas da Nok para a Nigéria depois de terem sido roubadas do museu nacional da Nigéria e contrabandeadas para os EUA.
Credit: Massimo Legni/SBAEM/UNITO
The Etruscans
Os etruscos tinham uma sociedade próspera no norte da Itália de cerca de 700 a.C. a cerca de 500 a.C., quando começaram a ser absorvidos pela República Romana. Eles desenvolveram uma linguagem escrita única e deixaram para trás túmulos familiares luxuosos, incluindo um pertencente a um príncipe que foi escavado pela primeira vez em 2013.
A sociedade etrusca era uma teocracia e seus artefatos sugerem que o ritual religioso fazia parte da vida cotidiana. A mais antiga representação do parto na arte ocidental - uma deusa de cócoras para dar à luz - foi encontrada no santuário etrusco de Poggio Colla. No mesmo local, os arqueólogos encontraram uma laje de arenito de 1,2m x 1,2m com gravuras raras na língua etrusca. Poucos exemplos de escrita etrusca sobrevivem. Outro local etrusco, Poggio Civitate, era um complexo quadrado em torno de um pátio. Foi o maior edifício do Mediterrâneo em sua época, disseram arqueólogos que escavaram mais de 25 mil artefatos do local.
Credit: Creative Commons, Courtesy of Wikipedia
The Land of Punt
Algumas culturas são conhecidas principalmente através dos registros de outras culturas. Esse é o caso da misteriosa terra de Punt, um reino em algum lugar da África que negociava com os antigos egípcios. Os dois reinos estavam trocando bens de pelo menos o século 26 a.C., durante o reinado do faraó Khufu (o construtor da Grande Pirâmide de Gizé).
Estranhamente, ninguém sabe realmente onde ficava o Punt. Os egípcios deixaram muitas descrições dos bens que obtiveram de Punt (ouro, ébano, mirra) e as expedições marítimas que enviaram ao reino perdido. No entanto, os egípcios são frustrantemente mãe sobre onde todas essas viagens estavam indo. Estudiosos sugeriram que Punt pode ter estado na Arábia, ou no Chifre da África, ou talvez descendo o rio Nilo, na fronteira do atual Sudão do Sul e Etiópia.
Credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
The Bell-Beaker Culture
Você sabe que uma cultura é obscura quando os arqueólogos a denominam com base apenas em seus artefatos. A cultura de Bell-Beaker fez vasos de cerâmica em forma de sinos de cabeça para baixo. Os fabricantes desses distintivos copos de bebida viveram em toda a Europa entre cerca de 2800 a.C. e 1800 a.C. Eles também deixaram para trás artefatos e sepulturas de cobre, incluindo um cemitério de 154 sepulturas localizadas na moderna República Tcheca.
Os béqueres foram também responsáveis por algumas das construções em Stonehenge, os pesquisadores descobriram: Essas pessoas provavelmente organizaram pequenos arenitos do site, que se originou no País de Gales.
quinta-feira, 10 de maio de 2018
Liver-destroying virus may have been with us since the dawn of civilization
The liver-destroying hepatitis B virus (HBV) kills nearly a
million people each year. Now, a pair of new genetic studies suggests
the pathogen has been with us at least since the dawn of civilization.
Until now, the oldest evidence for HPV was a strain discovered in a 16th century Italian mummy.
In the new work, a team led by geneticist Eske Willerslev of the
University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom sequenced the whole
genomes of 304 people found at archaeological sites throughout Eurasia,
most dating to the Bronze and Iron ages (approximately 3500 B.C.E.
through 500 B.C.E.). They quickly recognized the genetic signature of
HBV in 12 individuals. The oldest sample, from a man, was about 4500
years old and found in an ancient grave in Osterhofen, Germany.
The team then compared the DNA sequences of these ancient viruses
with modern versions of HBV and used advanced mathematical modeling
techniques to estimate how long it would take for these variations to
arise given their prevalence in populations through time. The data
revealed that the virus likely originated roughly between 13,600 B.C.E. and 9600 B.C.E., they report today in Nature.
Another study led by geneticist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, found traces of HBV in the dental pulp of three skeletons from Germany
dating from 3200 B.C.E. to 5000 B.C.E. Considering the results of both
studies, “[HBV] seems to have been pretty common in the past,” says
Krause, whose team reported its work earlier this week in a paper
published to the bioRxiv preprint server. That’s not necessarily a
surprise, he says, but it points the way for future researchers to
investigate other ancient diseases.
One popular hypothesis, based on the fact that chimpanzees and
gorillas have strains of HBV extremely similar to humans, has suggested
the virus may have arisen in Africa, then jumped into humans through
blood-to-blood contact during hunting or cutting their meat. From there,
the virus could have proliferated into different strains as humans
filtered out into Eurasia about 80,000 to 120,000 years ago.
Willerslev’s team’s findings suggest an intriguing alternate
possibility: that HBV may have arisen much more recently in humans
living in Eurasia or even North America, then was transmitted to both
humans and nonhuman primates in Africa, although the mechanism of such a
transmission is murky. This timeline dovetails with the beginnings of
human civilization, when larger populations and trade routes would have
helped the disease spread and transform into novel strains.
Krause, however, is skeptical about estimates of when the virus
arose. HBV recombines genetic material from its host, so typical
molecular dating techniques based on rates of genetic mutation don’t
work, he says.
Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in
Hamilton, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the research, agrees that these
limitations make it difficult to speculate on the chronological origins
of the virus given current data. “Saying anything about the timing of
HBV’s origins is dicey at this point.”
But regardless of HBV’s age, “These papers show really beautifully
that you can find samples of pathogens in DNA that is thousands of years
old,” he says. “This virus’s interaction with humans is a dynamic that
has been playing out over millennia.”
Researchers found an individual infected with the hepatitis B virus in this 2000-year-old mass grave in Ömnögovi, Mongolia.
Alexey A. Kovalev
segunda-feira, 16 de outubro de 2017
Encontrado o túmulo mais antigo de um governante Maia
Encontrado o túmulo mais antigo de um governante Maia
Restos mortais têm pelo menos 1.700 anos !
Uma descoberta arqueológica recente conseguiu determinar que o túmulo de
um governante maia, escavado na cidade de Perú-Waka e conhecido como
“Enterro 80”, corresponde aos primeiros anos da dinastia Wak.
Guatemala - El Perú Waka
Perú-Waka fica no norte da Guatemala, a 40 quilômetros de Tikal, um dos
maiores sítios arqueológicos da civilização Wak, no Parque Nacional
Laguna del Tigre.
Durante o período clássico, essa cidade real dominou as rotas comerciais
mais importantes da região e acredita-se que uma das primeiras
dinastias conhecidas, a Wak, tenha se assentado lá durante o segundo
século da Era Cristã.
De acordo com os resultados preliminares do estudo, o Enterro 80
abrigaria supostamente os restos do rei Te ‘Chan Ahk, um monarca Wak que
governou no século IV. Trata-se do túmulo real mais antigo jamais
descoberto nessa região, com, pelo menos, 1.700 anos de história.
Na tumba, também foram encontrados recipientes de cerâmica, enfeites de
jade, conchas de Spondylus e um pingente talhado em forma de crocodilo.
Além disso, um levantamento topográfico com Laser Scanning 3D permitiu a
descoberta de uma rede antiquíssima de passagens que interligavam as
pirâmides maias do local.
The candidate for political office stood in a plaza, naked,
bracing himself against the punches and kicks. The crowd roared, pulsing
around him like a beating heart. People for whom he had risked his life
in war after war hurled blows and insults from all directions. The
candidate breathed deeply. Trained as a warrior, he knew he had to stay
calm to reach the next phase of his candidacy.
This ordeal, documented by a Spanish priest in the 1500s, was merely
the beginning of the long process of joining the government of the
Mesoamerican city of Tlaxcallan, built around 1250 C.E. in the hills
surrounding the modern city of Tlaxcala, Mexico. After this trial ended,
the candidate would enter the temple on the edge of the plaza and stay
for up to 2 years, while priests drilled him in Tlaxcallan's moral and
legal code. He would be starved, beaten with spiked whips when he fell
asleep, and required to cut himself in bloodletting rituals. But when he
walked out of the temple, he would be more than a warrior: He would be a
member of Tlaxcallan's senate, one of the 100 or so men who made the
city's most important military and economic decisions.
"I'd like to see modern politicians do all that, just to prove they
can govern," says archaeologist Lane Fargher, standing in the shadow of
one of Tlaxcallan's recently restored elevated plazas. Fargher has led
surveys and excavations here since 2007, studying the urban plan and
material culture of a type of society many archaeologists once believed
they'd never find in Mesoamerica: a republic. "Twenty or 25 years ago,
no one would have accepted it was organized this way," says Fargher, who
works at the research institute Cinvestav in Mérida, Mexico.
Now, thanks in part to work led by Fargher's mentor Richard Blanton,
an anthropologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana,
Tlaxcallan is one of several premodern societies around the world that
archaeologists believe were organized collectively, where rulers shared
power and commoners had a say in the government that presided over their
lives.
These societies were not necessarily full democracies in which
citizens cast votes, but they were radically different from the
autocratic, inherited rule found—or assumed—in most early societies.
Building on Blanton's originally theoretical ideas, archaeologists now
say these "collective societies" left telltale traces in their material
culture, such as repetitive architecture, an emphasis on public space
over palaces, reliance on local production over exotic trade goods, and a
narrowing of wealth gaps between elites and commoners.
"Blanton and his colleagues opened up a new way of examining our
data," says Rita Wright, an archaeologist at New York University in New
York City who studies the 5000-year-old Indus civilization in today's
India and Pakistan, which also shows signs of collective rule. "A whole
new set of scholarship has emerged about complex societies."
"I think it's a breakthrough," agrees Michael E. Smith, an
archaeologist at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. "I've called
it the most important work in the archaeology of political organization
in the last 20 years." He and others are working to extend Blanton's
ideas into a testable method, hoping to identify collective states
solely through the objects they left behind.
Democracy isn’t a one-shot deal that happened one time. It comes and goes, and it’s very difficult to sustain.
Back in the 1960s, Blanton's teachers and peers didn't think
collective societies existed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Premodern
republics such as classical Athens and medieval Venice were thought to
be a purely European phenomenon. Conventional wisdom held that in
premodern, non-Western societies, despots simply extracted labor and
wealth from their subjects.
Some Mesoamerican cultures do seem to fit the despotic model. More
than 2000 years ago in the Olmec capitals of San Lorenzo and La Venta
along the Mexican gulf coast, for example, kings had their portraits
carved into gargantuan stone heads and lived in palaces dripping with
exotic luxury goods like greenstone and iron mirrors. Centuries later,
Classic period Mayan kings in southern Mexico and Guatemala recorded
their conquests, marriages, and dynasties in glyphs carved into stone.
Meanwhile, commoners lived humbly in settlements dispersed around the
city's core of pyramids and monuments.
But as Blanton logged year after year of surveys and excavations in
Mexico, he noticed an increasingly long list of sites that didn't
conform to these expectations. For example, Monte Albán, the capital of
the Zapotec people in Oaxaca between 500 B.C.E. and 800 C.E., lacked the
ostentatious representations of individual rulers so common in Olmec
and classical Maya art. It also seemed to be devoid of palaces and royal
tombs stocked with precious goods. Instead, signs of authority were
more anonymous, linked to cosmological symbols and enduring deities
rather than specific individuals.
Intrigued by such outliers, Blanton and three co-authors worked up a
new theory, published in 1996 in Current Anthropology. Based largely on
Mesoamerican examples, they laid out two forms that governments could
take, which Blanton now terms autocratic and collective. Autocratic
governments were based on the authority of an individual ruler and often
supported by wealth acquired by monopolizing natural resources or
controlling trade. Think of the Olmec, who controlled key gulf coast
trade routes, or even present-day Saudi Arabia, Blanton says, "where the
royal family controls the oil industry and uses that to fund the
state's activity. They don't have to be accountable to the people."
Teotihuacan puzzles archaeologists: It shows signs of both
autocratic rule (this grand avenue and pyramids) and collectivity (a
grid of roads and no depictions of kings).
Collective systems emphasized the office of the ruler, which in
theory could be occupied by anyone in the society: Leaders were made,
not born. Taxes rather than external wealth funded the state and its
leaders. Tlaxcallan, with its political initiation rite to bring people
from all classes into the governing council, had a collective
government. So do the United States and India. "Collective" in this
usage does not mean "socialist," Blanton adds. Most of the collective
societies he has studied have marketbased economies, which create
taxpayers rich enough to contribute to public goods.
Blanton's perspective "was very stimulating," Wright says. "For a
very long time within archaeology, we'd been looking for markers of a
king." Now, researchers had a theory for making sense of seemingly
kingless societies. But to study ancient societies without historical
records, archaeologists need to know what distinctive material traces
such a collective society might leave behind. "What would it actually
look like on the ground—that was a big problem," Blanton says. "How
would we recognize these states?"
"Over there is where we found the house," Fargher says. He skirts the
platform that once held one of Tlaxcallan's largest public plazas and
heads to a patch of bare earth surrounded by green grass. In the
distance Popocatépetl, Mexico's most famous volcano, gently puffs smoke
into the clear winter sky.
Fargher points to faint rocky lines in the sandy earth, where walls
stood 600 years ago. "It was a series of small rooms that were rebuilt
several times, with a patio over here," he says, moving through the
compact space. By all appearances it was nothing special, a typical
house for a typical commoner.
Writer Lizzie Wade talks about her story on democracy in early Mesoamerica
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"But look where we are," Fargher says. "Right in front of a
very public space. In any other Mesoamerican site, next to the principal
plaza you'd have an enormous palace. Here we have a pretty humble
house."
Such reversals are par for the course in Tlaxcallan, Fargher says.
"This is like Superman's Bizarro World. Everything is the inverse of
what you expect for Mesoamerica."
Most Mesoamerican cities were centered on a monumental core of
pyramids and plazas. In Tlaxcallan, the plazas were scattered throughout
every neighborhood, with no clear center or hierarchy. Rather than
ruling from the heart of the city, as kings did, Fargher believes
Tlaxcallan's senate likely met in a grand building he found standing
alone 1 kilometer outside the city limits. This distributed layout is
also a sign of shared political power, he says.
Archaeologists have unearthed versions of this unusual layout in a
handful of other Mesoamerican cities. One is the city of Tres Zapotes
along the gulf coast, which flourished from 400 B.C.E. to 300 C.E., in
the centuries immediately following the fall of La Venta, the last Olmec
capital. Although the citizens of Tres Zapotes retained many Olmec
cultural practices, their city looked nothing like the capitals that
came before, says Christopher Pool, an archaeologist at the University
of Kentucky in Lexington who has spent the last 20 years excavating
there. Instead of being centered on an opulent palace, Tres Zapotes had
four plazas regularly spaced throughout the city. Each one had the same
layout of earthen pyramids and public spaces, and radiocarbon dates
revealed they were occupied at the same time. Pool concluded that during
its height, four factions cooperated to govern Tres Zapotes.
Collective societies tend to lay out their cities in standardized
ways, with the largest ones even using grids, says Blanton, which ease
navigation both for residents and for a government providing services.
In the Indus capital of Mohenjo-daro in today’s Pakistan, for example,
the art depicts few individual people, and houses built with
standard-sized bricks line regularly spaced city blocks. The strict urban plan incorporated wells and allowed thousands of people to use toilets connected to the world’s first sewers.
A tale of two cities
Just before the arrival of the Spanish,
two very different powers battled in the heart of modern-day Mexico.
Tenochtitlan, the autocratic capital of the Mexica Empire, conquered
almost every society in its path, extracting tribute and human
sacrifices from thousands of kilometers away. The only resistance:
Tlaxcallan, a collective republic just over the mountains that fiercely
defended its freedom.
Another common feature of collective societies is economic
equality, which archaeologists can infer from comparing the goods of
rich and poor people. In autocratic societies like the classical Maya,
luxury goods such as intricately painted pottery and jade are only found
in palaces and royal tombs. In contrast, in Tlaxcallan people of all
classes seemed to have owned and used pottery with ornate, multicolor
designs. "You can't tell rich people from poor people based on their
stuff," Fargher says. Pool sees a similarly narrow wealth gap at Tres
Zapotes. And in classical Athens, perhaps the most famous premodern
democracy, "wealthy people lived in houses that were similar to the
common people," Blanton says.
But ASU's Smith cautions that economic equality doesn't guarantee
that political power is shared at the top. "There is an association
[between them], but that doesn't make inequality a measure of
collectivity, or the reverse," he says. And although he agrees that a
city's layout offers clues to governance, he notes that excavations
often focus on a site's central core and may miss outlying plazas. To
firm up the link, archaeologists need more data from the outskirts of
cities and more rigorous statistical methods to interpret them, he says.
By the time a candidate underwent Tlaxcallan's political initiation
rite, he had already proved his valor in war. For centuries the state
was locked in battle against the Mexica Empire, whose capital
Tenochtitlan lay just over the mountains to the west. There, in what is
now Mexico City, a noble lineage of kings ruled from a grand central
plaza. Tlaxcallan was the only polity in the region that fended off
Mexica control, turning it into something of an economic and political
island.
Historical sources say the Mexica (called the Aztecs today) imposed a
trade blockade to weaken their rivals. Although Fargher has found that
some imperial goods, like salt and green obsidian, still flowed into
Tlaxcallan, out of 10 tons of ceramics he has uncovered in the city,
only three or four pieces are Mexica style. The ratio of carbon isotopes
in skeletons recovered from under the plazas indicates that corn—which
could be locally produced and stored—dominated people's diets to an
exceptional degree, even in corn-rich Mesoamerica. All this suggests
that Tlaxcallan must have relied on its own citizens, rather than trade
or natural resources, to fund its activities.
No written sources chronicle the economy of Tres Zapotes. But there,
too, imported goods were scarce, Pool says, which means that the four
ruling factions also must have relied on internal resources. The pattern
is a stark contrast to its predecessor La Venta, where autocratic
rulers controlled trade and enjoyed exotic luxuries.
Both cities support Blanton and Fargher's belief that the best
predictor of collective rule is a strong internal revenue source—that
is, taxes. Revenue sources are admittedly difficult to detect from
artifacts and buildings. But after surveying 30 premodern societies
documented ethnographically and historically, the researchers found that
states with internal revenue sources were characterized by a high level
of public goods and services, a strong governmental bureaucracy, and
citizens empowered to judge the ruler's actions. "When taxpayers are
paying for the state, then the people in charge know they have to do the
right thing," Blanton says.
Collective states may have another tendency that can be spotted
archaeologically: They attract people from beyond their borders, who
bring artifacts that can be linked to other cultures. "When you have a
collective formation that's funded by internal resources, it's in the
interest of those in government to bring in more people," says Gary
Feinman, an archaeologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, and a
co-author on Blanton's 1996 paper. Economic equality and markets may
also attract immigrants to collective societies. "People move where they
think there's better opportunity—where they can make a living, where
their kids are going to do better than they did. That's always a
motivation," Feinman says.
Tlaxcallan was home to several different ethnic groups, many of whom
were refugees fleeing Mexica domination, according to the Spanish
chronicles. "They were absorbed by Tlaxcallan on the condition that they
defend the state," says Aurelio López Corral, the archaeologist who
leads Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History's work at
the site. The best warriors, no matter their ethnicity, were eligible to
join the senate—if they could endure the initiation. "It's the opposite
of ethnic nationalism," says archaeologist David Carballo of Boston
University (BU).
Tlaxcalteca warriors helped the Spanish conquer the nearby
centralized city of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Conquistador Hernán Cortés
included this map of Tenochtitlan in his second letter to the Spanish
crown.
The evidence isn't always so easy to read, however. About 100
kilometers from Tlaxcallan lies a very different monumental site:
Teotihuacan, which dominated central Mexico between about 100 C.E. and
550 C.E. The broad Avenue of the Dead bisects the city, lined with
imposing structures including the enormous Pyramids of the Sun, Moon,
and Feathered Serpent. "This is a grand city," says archaeologist Saburo
Sugiyama at Aichi Prefectural University in Nagakute, Japan, who has
excavated some of the city's most iconic places, including the pyramids.
"There was a very strong rulership that planned and executed this
monumental project." He envisions this leader as a typical autocrat—a
king who wielded great military might—based partly on weapons and
bellicose imagery found together with the remains of a mass human
sacrifice and burial in the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent.
Yet Linda Manzanilla, an archaeologist at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico in Mexico City who has been excavating at
Teotihuacan since the 1970s, sees the exact same city in a different
way. She notes that it is laid out in a grid, with common citizens
living in standardized apartment buildings distributed regularly
throughout it. Major avenues divided the city into four quadrants, she
says. Each quadrant had its own iconography—flying animals, felines,
serpents, or coyotes—that dominated its art and ceramics; under the
centrally located Pyramid of the Moon, sacrificed animals from each
group were found together. The art depicts no individual leaders or
dynasties, and Manzanilla argues that Teotihuacan was governed by a
council of four leaders, each representing a different quadrant—a type
of collective government. At Teotihuacan, "Groups are more important
than individuals," she says.
The different interpretations highlight the challenges of applying
Blanton's model. Smith notes that there is always some ambiguity about
the political significance of a site's physical features. For example,
the Indus civilization's standardized housing and sophisticated water
control systems can be seen as signs of shared power, but they have also
been interpreted as evidence of totalitarian control. "Until someone
comes up with a model that's rigorous and accepted by everyone, in my
mind this is all going to be fairly subjective and speculative," Smith
says.
BU's Carballo argues that the form of government may not even be the
most important measure of what Blanton terms collectivity. He points to
an enormous obsidian workshop he excavated in an outlying neighborhood
of Teotihuacan as a sign that commoners organized themselves at the
grassroots level, no matter who ruled from the Avenue of the Dead. That
makes Teotihuacan a collective society, even if it turns out to have had
a single king, he argues.
It may be that societies like Teotihuacan simply don't fall into neat
categories, Pool says. Or they may shift strategies over time. At Tres
Zapotes, for example, elite factions may have shared power within the
city, but the capital dominated nearby towns, which all had one central
plaza modeled on the Tres Zapotes layout. Then, slowly, autocracy crept
back into Tres Zapotes itself. Around 1 C.E., the four plaza groups lost
their architectural coherence and individual rulers once again appeared
in the city's art.
Collective governments do tend to rise and fall in cycles, Blanton
says. In Oaxaca, the political pendulum swung between collectivity and
autocracy every 200 to 300 years, judging from shifts in the layouts of
dominant sites and histories recorded by colonial chroniclers.
"Democracy isn't a one-shot deal that happened one time. It comes and
goes, and it's very difficult to sustain," he says.
History had a special irony in store for the republic of Tlaxcallan
when the Spanish arrived. After centuries of resisting the Mexica
Empire, the Tlaxcaltecas finally saw an opportunity to destroy their
enemies. They allied with conquistador Hernán Cortés, helping him plan
attacks on Tenochtitlan and sheltering his army after its initial
crushing defeat, which allowed the Spanish forces to regroup and try
again—this time successfully. "I'm not sure the conquest would have been
possible without Tlaxcallan assistance," Fargher says.
But as soon as the Tlaxcaltecas became subjects of the Spanish crown,
the republic was gone. People abandoned their hilltop plazas and moved
down into the valley, settling the modern city of Tlaxcala. When Mexico
won independence from Spain 3 centuries after the conquest, the
Tlaxcaltecas were cast as traitors, their society almost entirely
forgotten. It took another 100 years before revolution returned
democracy to Mexico's constitution. Now, ambitious candidates once again
fight for their political futures—not in the plaza, but at the ballot
box.
