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Revealing
Deep History
Why does archaeology matter? Why should we spend precious resources
on the study of the human past? What possible benefit is archaeology to
society? This book is about tackling these questions. While a steady stream
of television documentaries, newspaper stories, and websites bombard us
with the sensational discoveries of archaeology, many people have no idea
of what most archaeologists do, or of the subject’s value to society. There
is still a widespread impression that archaeology is a luxurious endeavor
or a frivolous hobby, of no benefit to society at a time when there is a
global poverty crisis, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a host of
environmental challenges.
Archaeologists aim to study, conserve, and interpret all aspects of our
human past, the results of which can help us face these challenges. Such
an enterprise is driven by the idea that one cannot fully understand the
present, or attempt to look to the future, without a knowledge of what went
before. “Study the past if you would define the future,” asserted Confucius
2500 years ago. “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat
it,” noted Churchill in 1948. “You have to know the past to understand the
present,” said astrophysicist Carl Sagan in 1980.
Unfortunately, the notion of archaeology as a luxury pursuit even
permeates the lofty heights of college and university education. It is
often high on the list of programs to be cut on the grounds that it is non-
essential, does not bring in large grants, and is not a way to guarantee
employment for graduates. Yet this ignores the fact that the study of
archaeology produces informed people capable of making rational
CHAPTER ONE
decisions about such fundamental issues as climate change, diversity and
equality, governance, and sustainability—^just a few of the areas dealt with
by archaeology today.
Yes, the past is another world but, as we will show, a knowledge of the
past illuminates the dimensions of often challenging issues and decisions
in the present. It lets us examine ourselves over a long-term perspective, on
a global scale, with all the cultural continuity and change that this entails.
This in turn allows us to question modern behavior—particularly when
justifications for attitudes on particular issues are assumed to have ancient
or natural origins, as is the case for such ideas as racial differences, ethnic or
national identities, economic or sexual inequality, or the ways we ought to
express our gender. In all of these areas, which we will discuss, archaeology
certainly has something to say. And more often than not, the conversation
has far-reaching implications.
Bigger than History
Tutankhamun was an obscure Egyptian pharaoh, who died young in 1323
BC, and was buried hastily in a richly adorned tomb. Ironically, this little-
known, short-lived ruler became world-famous after Howard Carter and
Lord Carnarvon discovered his undisturbed sepulcher in 1922. The opening
of the tomb caused a global sensation, as did the excavations of the royal
burials at Ur in southern Iraq by Leonard Woolley four years later, and
those of the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship burial in the UK in the late 1930s.
These, and other spectacular finds before World War 11, captured public
imagination and showed how archaeology was able to reveal important
information about otherwise forgotten people and their worlds. Yet an
archaeologist of the 1930s would be amazed by today’s practitioners. We
now rely heavily on high-technology science and on researchers from
all kinds of academic disciplines, from biology, genetics, and geology to
physics and zoology, to mention only a few. The complex combination of
techniques and disciplines that make up archaeology masks its unique role
in today’s world.
The most distinctive quality of archaeology is the timescale with which
it deals. Archaeologists think in millennia, in hundreds of thousands of
years, and only rarely in centuries or smaller units of time. By contrast,
historians—who work primarily with written and documentary sources—
14
REVEALING DEEP HISTORY
tend to focus on a given century, year, or even day, hour, or minute. And
since historians rely on written sources, they do not study prehistory—the
great span of time before writing—nor do they study places or people for
whom no written or oral records exist. Archaeology is never limited to the
words of literate people, by geography, or time.
We explore all physical remains related to past human behavior.
Reaching into the far past, archaeology is therefore sometimes called “deep
history.” Our archives include anything humans left behind, including
tools, food remains (whether animal bones or plant remains), human
skeletal remains, inscriptions and other written records, art, temples,
and the total detritus of deserted human settlements. Many years ago,
an eminent British archaeologist, Stuart Piggott, memorably called
archaeology “the science of rubbish.” But it’s far more. We alone among
all students of humanity study human biological and cultural change
over the entire stretch of human existence.
The greatest developments in archaeology have come since the 1960s,
with a growing reliance on a variety of scientific approaches. Within
academia, this has resulted in a much more specialized archaeology,
with subfields ranging from Assyriology to ethnoarchaeology,
paleoanthropology, underwater archaeology, and zooarchaeology. This
research, while often crucially important, can be obscure, esoteric stuff,
effectively impenetrable to the wider public. Indeed, as with all scholarly
disciplines, academic archaeology is often swamped by jargon and theory,
much of which is fully intelligible to only a handful of acolytes.
In many countries, however, including the USA and UK, academic
archaeology exists alongside a second major strand of archaeology:
developer-funded work. The latter goes by various names, including
commercial archaeology (UK), or cultural resource management (USA).
Unlike university research-led projects, which can take years of fine-grained
study, such projects usually have a strict timescale ahead of the building or
mining work. Commercial archaeologists usually aim to record (or preserve)
as much of the archaeology as possible ahead of its potential destruction by
development. These are different pressures, but carry the same intention: to
record and understand the past.
In both cases, whether academic or commercial, archaeology is
threatened with funding cuts and competing priorities, and no archaeologist,
whatever his or her background, can work in an ivory tower cut off from
15
CHAPTER ONE
the contemporary world. This is a powerful reality, requiring changes in
the ways in which today’s archaeologists go about their business. More
than ever, archaeologists strive to make their work relevant to the modern
world: questions of human migration, social inequality, or environmental
sustainability are just a few of our concerns today. So, too, is the preservation
of the global cultural heritage of humankind for future generations. Are
these new directions in archaeology a good thing? Most emphatically, yes.
After more than a century and a half of formal discovery and excavation,
we have now uncovered enough to make credible attempts to put our
understanding of the past into practice, and to undertake the daunting
responsibilities of preserving it.
The chapters that follow describe some of the big issues that
archaeologists confront. At this Juncture, it is therefore vital to give
you an impression of the broad scope of deep history, as this is, after all,
archaeology’s primary objective. Let us briefly explore some of the major
developments of the past studied by archaeologists, all of which we will
discuss further in the rest of the book.
Human Origins
We begin with the question of questions. How old are our remotest
ancestors? Were they created on 23 October 4004 b c as the Irish bishop James
Ussher famously calculated from Old Testament genealogies in a d 1650? Or
a more formidable 25,000 years old, 100,000, or even older? Enter Louis and
Mary Leakey, who had long searched for human ancestors at Olduvai Gorge
on Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain. In 1959, they unearthed the large and heavy
skull of a hominin (a term used to describe modern humans, and extinct
human species) they named Zinjanthropus boisei, or, as Mary called it, “Dear
Boy” (see Figure 1). It lay among fragmentary animal bones, and crude stone
flakes and jagged-edged chopping tools by a shallow lake. A new geological
dating method, potassium argon dating, told the Leakeys that Zinjanthropus
was a staggering 1.75 million years old.
This was just the beginning. The Leakeys’ find, and their subsequent
discoveries at Olduvai, unleashed a torrent of new research involving not
only archaeologists but also multidisciplinary research teams, working on
the shores of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, in desolate landscapes in
Ethiopia, and in South Africa. Thus was born paleoanthropology, the study
REVEALING DEEP HISTORY
Figure 1. Zinjanthropus
boisei from Olduvai Gorge,
Tanzania, dating to c. 1.75
million years ago. Found by
Mary Leakey in 1959.
of early human evolution and behavior, which involves specialisms of all
kinds—not only archaeology, but biological anthropology, human genetics,
and geology, too.
We now know that our human (or hominin) lineage split from that of
the chimpanzees around 7 million years ago, while the earliest traces of
human cultural behavior, defined by the making of crude stone tools,
currently date to 3.33 million years ago. It is unclear precisely which hominin
made these first tools, and their makers might not even have been our direct
ancestors. Far from being a neat ladder, human evolutionary models look
more like a series of disjointed brush strokes. To date, researchers have
identified more than twenty ancient hominin species. The relationships
between the various forms, however, are often unclear and thus contested,
with several species coexisting at any given time, and some dying out
without giving rise to later species.
So who are we now and how do we fit into the evolutionary picture?
We are Homo sapiens, the self-named “wise people”: creatures endowed
with advanced cognitive abilities—fluent speech, the ability to innovate,
plan, and think ahead. These abilities may have been shared by other
17
CHAPTER ONE
contemporary hominins, such as our Neanderthal cousins (who lived
between about 400,000 to perhaps 30,000years ago). Yet Homo sapiens took
things further, transforming the world in unparalleled ways.
Africa is our homeland, and the oldest known examples of our species
date to more than 300,000 years ago. Yet the earliest specimens are not
quite fully anatomically modern, something that seems to have occurred
around 120,000 years ago. Controversy surrounds what happened next and
our subsequent movements out of Africa. The Qafzeh Cave in Israel has
evidence for the existence of fully anatomically modern humans—that
is, people whose skeletons are just like ours, and presumably with the
\ same mental potential as any of us—around 120,000 to 80,000 years ago.
A solitary 84,000-year-old modern toe bone comes from the Saudi Arabian
desert, from an area that was better watered than today. From radiocarbon
dates and other dating methods, we know that modern humans were
in Europe by 40,000years ago, and in Australia even earlier. Dozens of
archaeologists and research teams are searching for the earliest modern
humans from the eastern Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, deep
into China, south and southeast Asia, and northeastern Siberia, and in the
Americas as well, where people settled at least 15,000 years ago. After some
7 million years of human evolution. Homo sapiens is the only hominin left
standing, and we are the focus of most archaeological endeavors, and of
this book.
Getting Domesticated
As the subsequent millennia unfolded, our nomadic hunter-gatherer
ancestors began to move slowly across the globe. The rate of cultural
change started to quicken. For the first time in hominin history, the late
Ice Age (c. 30,000 to 12,000 years ago) saw bursts of extreme artistic
creativity, exemplified by the exquisite rock art of southwestern Europe
and western Eurasia. Although it’s easy to feel a profound human connection
with these early artists, the late Ice Age world was unimaginably different to
that of today.
Global sea levels were 300 feet (90 meters) below modern levels, Siberia
and Alaska were connected, and Britain was part of the European continent
because the North Sea was dry land. As ice sheets melted and the world
warmed, sea levels rose and forest vegetation spread northward across
18
REVEALING DEEP HISTORY
Europe and North America with the increase in temperature. Late Ice Age
hunters adapted to a more environmentally diverse world where warmer
and cooler temperatures fluctuated in irregular cycles. But at about 12,900
years ago, a thousand-year cold snap settled over northern latitudes of the
world. The near-arctic temperatures brought arid conditions across Europe,
as they often had during the late Ice Age, and triggered an extensive drought
in southwestern Asia. Hunting populations there were forced to cluster
near permanent water sources, but the drought was one of a number of
major factors that influenced the development of a new form of subsistence:
animal husbandry and agriculture~what today we call food production.
Water shortages, and scarce grazing lands and plant foods, brought wild
herd animals and humans into much closer association. Human societies
clustered at close quarters and thus became more anchored to the territories
they were now inhabiting.
Agriculture and animal farming may seem mundane to some, but
food production was one of the great catalysts of human history. Few other
cultural developments can be considered to be of greater importance.
It meant a regular source of food and, in many cases, led to population
booms: villages swelled, and farmers looking for more space migrated
across continents, replacing or merging with native hunting communities.
Agriculture also meant that, once invested in a crop, people were for the
first time tied to their land all year round, leading to new forms of social
organization, and raising complex questions about inheritance, kin ties,
and access to food surplus and wealth. In some parts of the world, intensive
agriculture did not lead to population booms, but eventually brought
about environmental changes that forced populations to migrate or perish.
Animal husbandry meant that people lived in close association with their
animals. Their lives were closely interconnected with their herds, especially
in environments with frequent droughts, when people relied on kin living in
better-watered areas to look after their herds. For humans, living in the first,
crowded, villages meant that infectious diseases spread readily. As did such
conditions as dysentery, caused by contaminated water supplies. Agriculture
and animal husbandry constituted a two-edged sword, but an unprecedented
engine for change.
Food production is known to us from subtle archaeological clues—
changes in wild grasses that became the wheat, maize, and rice of today;
from DNA and minute anatomical differences in the bones of wild and
19
CHAPTER ONE
domestic cattle, goats, and sheep caused by captive breeding; and major
changes in human settlements. With this evidence, archaeologists still ask
many questions about the origins of agriculture. What social and economic
changes resulted? Was the shift from hunting to agriculture a ready
transition, or did some societies switch back and forth between, say, cattle
herding and hunting? The changeover, it seems, was sometimes rapid, but
often occurred gradually over many centuries—even millennia; yet, in the
end, food production became the dominant means of subsistence. But the
ultimate, and fundamental, question of great relevance today is how did
farmers address the complex issue of sustainability?
Complicated, and still little understood, factors played a role in
this dramatic economic shift, which took hold independently in widely
separated hunter-gatherer societies throughout the Old World and the
Americas. Potatoes were cultivated in the Andes as early as 10,000 years
ago, maize and beans in Central America somewhat later. We know that the
new economies spread like wildfire in some regions—from the Near East
into Europe by 6000 b c . into the Nile Valley at about the same time. The
same was true wherever farming took hold. Within a few millennia, many
small settlements in all regions became evcr-larger villages, then towns.
Town populations could number in the lower thousands. By 4000 b c , many
much more complex towns were becoming what archaeologists loosely
define as cities, with populations of 10,000 or more in the Near East; less
than a millennium later, some of these cities became the first large urban
centers, emerging between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, and
along the Nile.
Building Cities
After 3000 BC, the compass of human existence widened beyond the confines
of villages and towns. As populations grew, some people began to live in
ever-larger and more complex settlements, which archaeologists define as
“cities.” The size of the city varied, but populations were still low compared
to today—in 2000 b c , Ur in Mesopotamia was the largest city in the world,
with an estimated population of 65,000. How cities functioned and looked
also varied depending on time and place, but most were divided into
different zones {rich, poor, industrial, and so on), and usually contained
public buildings; they had written records, and their inhabitants produced
20
REVEALING DEEP HISTORY
works of art. They tended to be dominated by a ruling class or religious
authority, and their people usually engaged in wide-ranging trading,
strengthening or initiating political and social relationships with
distant communities.
In many cases, cities depended for much of their lifeblood on long
distance trade and exchange. Imagine a square-sailed river boat carrying
grain from the fertile Nile delta to the temple of the sun god Amun at Waset
(now Luxor); a small caravan of donkeys carrying bundles of textiles from
the River Tigris deep into Turkey; or llamas carrying sacred mollusks along
mountain paths in the Andes. With the rise of civilization came a much
more interconnected world: the Sumerians and Babylonians of the Near
East traded far and wide, engaging in a major third millennium b c trade
route between “Meluhha” (the Indus Valley of today’s Pakistan) and the
Arabian Peninsula. By 1200 b c their network encompassed the entire eastern
Mediterranean. These links are evident in a remarkable cargo aboard a
heavily laden merchant vessel wrecked on the rocks of Uluburun in southern
Turkey in 1305 b c (see Plate 1). Its cargo came from nine different areas,
including ebony wood from the Nile, and enough copper ingots to equip a
regiment from Cyprus.
The trajectory of deep history includes the people of the Indus
Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Chinese dynasties, the Persians, the
Mycenaeans, the Greeks, the Maya, and those of many other societies.
For those whose scripts we can read, we know the names and dates of
their rulers, and sometimes much about their achievements. Yet one of
archaeology’s key values is its ability to explore beyond the written accounts
that were so often about, or by, the elite few. We range beyond palaces, or
kings and queens, to look for signs of the anonymous—farmers, fishers,
weavers, tillers, the ill, the poor, the miscreants, and the marginalized.
Many new techniques are helping to improve our knowledge of everyday
people in the past. One of the most exciting is laser imagery, known as
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which has the ability to pierce the
thick rainforests and reveal the hidden ruins beneath. LiDAR has exposed
the intricate hinterlands of great Maya centers and the magnificent Khmer
temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. For a long time archaeologists thought
that such great city centers were isolated and self-sustaining, dominated
by extensive temple complexes. Thanks to LiDAR, we now have maps of
entire neighborhoods and elaborate water-management systems that
21
CHAPTER ONE
surrounded the ceremonial precincts over an area of 6.6 square miles (17
square kilometers) or more. For the first time, the surrounding forests have
been removed electronically, so we can peer through the dense forest cover
to what lies beneath. LiDAR scanning revealed that Maya cities were in fact
interconnected by networks of wide, elevated causeways, peppered with
smaller communities and hamlets. More than 60,000 Maya structures—
among them houses, fortifications, and causeways—have been found in
Guatemala so far. These discoveries have exploded previous estimates of
the size of the Maya population, and given us a better sense of the ordinary
people living around the famous Maya temples.
Archaeology has also shed light on other anonymous groups: Viking
settlers in Greenland, colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, and those living
in small farming villages in East Africa. It adds new dimensions to the
understanding of ancient pueblo societies in the American Southwest,
uncovers the strategy behind 8,ooo-year-old bison hunts on the Great
Plains, or details of an eighteenth-century Maori earthwork in New Zealand.
Archaeology has a scope that extends from simple hominin stopping-places
in East Africa’s Rift Valley to a pickle factory in Victorian London. No other
form of historical inquiry can, for example, tunnel into the base of Maya
pyramids and use deciphered glyphs to reconstruct their architectural
history. Archaeologists study the history of everyone and provide a unique,
broad understanding of the past.
Today’s archaeology is detail obsessed, but this obsession is often
necessary in order to record accurately the details of past cultures.
Archaeologists strive to document the past as scientifically and meticulously
as possible: we dig according to careful protocol, and we scrutinize the data
using scientific methods, including carbon-14 dating and DNA analysis.
The results can mean that accepted historical facts are overturned, which
is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that much of history was
written {and therefore embellished) by the victors and the elite. Indeed,
time and again, archaeology provides a far more complete, and potentially
more objective, picture than if we relied solely on historical written or oral
accounts. In addition, while archaeology has its famous sparkling treasures,
we’ve seen how it works to reveal the whole human experience in its
sometimes unglamorous detail, and to include all our ancestors from every
corner of the world. It is a vital step to understanding others and, through
them, ourselves.
22
REVEALING DEEP HISTORY
What makes us human? How are you and I different or similar? How did
we do things in the past? What lessons can be learned from the past? How
can we use the past to improve our present, or even our future? It is this wide
perspective of our deep history that archaeology brings to bear on the issues
of today.
