in your mouth,â one archaeologist told me; and burialsâwell, we would be crawling into a few on this journey. The people of Jericho kept their dead close, under their living areas, and buried their children as well. Hunter-gatherers of even a few thousand years ago threw the bodies of their dead infants in the trash.
Painted, decorated human skulls were found at Jericho, along with stone bowls, obsidian, and cowrie shells originating from distant places; and there really was a wall around it, and a tower, too. But Shea, naturally, bored in on the lithics , the stone weapons. A few different kinds of points were found in Jericho: tiny stone arrowheads, long ones with many notches that did terrible damage to their prey, but also âginormous arrowheads, super-sized, and almost guaranteed to break when they slam into something,â Shea said. âMaybe these were designed to cripple the targetâbut you donât want to wound an animal that then runs away. When would crippling be preferable to killing?â I looked around at the blank faces on my classmates. We were people who bought our hamburger already ground, if not cooked, and were clearly at a disadvantage in this game. âAny military veterans here?â he asked. âHow about shooting to wound or maim, as in combat? Shoot to kill, you take out one person. Shoot to wound, you take three people out of the fight. These werenât weapons for hunting, they were weapons for war.â
Shea dialed back the time machine 25,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic, when people started spending huge amounts of time crafting tools and making art, and told us about the exotic site of Dolnà VÄstonice in what is now the Czech Republic. Mammoth bones littered the site and framed the round dwellings built on stone foundations. The people of Dolnà VÄstonice loved their mammoth bones, which they burned for fuel (imagine the stink!).They also carved stout little figures out of ivory and other materials, giving them small heads, big breasts and hips, a slit for the vulva, and stylized feet. This was not unusual; such âVenus figuresâ have been found from one end of Europe to the other. What was unusual about Dolnà VÄstonice was its pottery, which was made, not into vessels for food or drink, but into statues of animals. These earliest potters also made round balls of clay spiked with copper oxides and salts. Heating the animal figures made them durable; heating the balls made them explode in colored flames, like ancient firecrackers.
The burials were the oddest part of this odd site. Most striking was what Shea told us about three young bodies, arranged so deliberately that I couldnât help but think that those who buried them were trying to tell us a story. Shea described the scene: on the left, a male skeleton in his early twenties, his skull covered in powdered red ochre, rests one of his hands on the pelvis of the middle figure, apparently female. The figure in the center has a crippled back and is slightly curved toward another male on the right; their arms are interlocked, and both of their heads, too, are covered in red ochre. A soap opera, a love triangle, an ancient version of Romeo and Juliet? Mostly, it was a mystery, in meaning and in the details. Take the ochre. We can guess why ochre made great chalk for pictures or body paint, but why would people be buried with it? Yet both Homo sapiens humans and Neandertals buried their dead with such mineral pigments. Who knows why? Who knows why Venus figures appear across Europe? Who knows why big piles of hand-axes are found littered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia? Thatâs a phrase that should crop up in every archaeological paper: Who knows why?
Archaeologists live with mystery. Teasing open a site and studying it from all angles not only doesnât answer all our questions, it mainly leads to more questions. So we study archaeology to gather authentic fragments
Painted, decorated human skulls were found at Jericho, along with stone bowls, obsidian, and cowrie shells originating from distant places; and there really was a wall around it, and a tower, too. But Shea, naturally, bored in on the lithics , the stone weapons. A few different kinds of points were found in Jericho: tiny stone arrowheads, long ones with many notches that did terrible damage to their prey, but also âginormous arrowheads, super-sized, and almost guaranteed to break when they slam into something,â Shea said. âMaybe these were designed to cripple the targetâbut you donât want to wound an animal that then runs away. When would crippling be preferable to killing?â I looked around at the blank faces on my classmates. We were people who bought our hamburger already ground, if not cooked, and were clearly at a disadvantage in this game. âAny military veterans here?â he asked. âHow about shooting to wound or maim, as in combat? Shoot to kill, you take out one person. Shoot to wound, you take three people out of the fight. These werenât weapons for hunting, they were weapons for war.â
Shea dialed back the time machine 25,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic, when people started spending huge amounts of time crafting tools and making art, and told us about the exotic site of Dolnà VÄstonice in what is now the Czech Republic. Mammoth bones littered the site and framed the round dwellings built on stone foundations. The people of Dolnà VÄstonice loved their mammoth bones, which they burned for fuel (imagine the stink!).They also carved stout little figures out of ivory and other materials, giving them small heads, big breasts and hips, a slit for the vulva, and stylized feet. This was not unusual; such âVenus figuresâ have been found from one end of Europe to the other. What was unusual about Dolnà VÄstonice was its pottery, which was made, not into vessels for food or drink, but into statues of animals. These earliest potters also made round balls of clay spiked with copper oxides and salts. Heating the animal figures made them durable; heating the balls made them explode in colored flames, like ancient firecrackers.
The burials were the oddest part of this odd site. Most striking was what Shea told us about three young bodies, arranged so deliberately that I couldnât help but think that those who buried them were trying to tell us a story. Shea described the scene: on the left, a male skeleton in his early twenties, his skull covered in powdered red ochre, rests one of his hands on the pelvis of the middle figure, apparently female. The figure in the center has a crippled back and is slightly curved toward another male on the right; their arms are interlocked, and both of their heads, too, are covered in red ochre. A soap opera, a love triangle, an ancient version of Romeo and Juliet? Mostly, it was a mystery, in meaning and in the details. Take the ochre. We can guess why ochre made great chalk for pictures or body paint, but why would people be buried with it? Yet both Homo sapiens humans and Neandertals buried their dead with such mineral pigments. Who knows why? Who knows why Venus figures appear across Europe? Who knows why big piles of hand-axes are found littered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia? Thatâs a phrase that should crop up in every archaeological paper: Who knows why?
Archaeologists live with mystery. Teasing open a site and studying it from all angles not only doesnât answer all our questions, it mainly leads to more questions. So we study archaeology to gather authentic fragments
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