The archaeology thread

Yes-no: there's a lot of interrelation. Some of which occurred within the waves, but not all.

A lot of it depends on how megatribes, smaller tribes and clans split and converge/ remerge over time (which often isn't peaceful, but can occasionally be).

Culturally, they shared many broad similarities (because however huge it is, they came from a particular area). Even over time, they shared recognisable touchstones. Simply because... Well, they broadly were culturally related and often even actually related (even if some of the supposed blood ties were pretty tenuous, disputed or flat out made up or outright denied to serve politics).

This movement took centuries, had phases and was immensely complicated and included merging with... um... other people met along the way (mostly through bride capture, but not exclusively *uncomfortable cough*). Many of those people? Part of the same general movement south, and had got there before. But... in order to take their stuff/ acquired know-how, denying any possible relationship can be a handy move (even if it's blatantly obvious that, say, their language is still quite similar). <sighs> Alternatively, all hail-cousin-well-met and then undercutting them? Also popular.

Like most mass migrations will have been.

It's just one example.

Anybody who thinks a large group of people moving vast distances over time is going to do it in full solidarity and with a single unifying anything... isn't thinking of real people.

You can share a broad culture while have massive differences (often explosive ones) within it (like "being Western", whatever that means).

It's why I tend to put "Bantu" in inverted commas. It's... way more complicated than that.

I really don't think the past did people any more simply than currently, to be honest. Technology might differ. How much of a mess can be made, too. But, people will people.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 23rd 2020 at 10:35:15 AM

But again, just because people were building Catalhoyuk while Doggerland still existed does not mean these people were also building things on Doggerland. That would be even farther away than Portugal.

Those megalith builders in Catalhoyuk eventually spread westwards, but it took them thousands of years, by which time, Doggerland was long gone.

Also, just because hunter gatherers travel around a lot does not mean they do not consider a territory "home". They would have to have a very good reason to pack up everything and leave for unfamiliar lands thousands of miles away.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 23rd 2020 at 1:15:15 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Euo, that is a very good description of the Bantu expansion, and probably the Neolithic one as well, its just that all the evidence so far points to an origin in the Middle East, not Northwestern Africa. Its interesting to note that Neolithic cultural practices spread across Europe much more quickly than it did across Africa.

Relatively quickly, I should add. We are still talking centuries of spreading at a snail's pace here.

Optimism is a duty.

Since when did I suggest that pastoral and agricultural cultures came from North Africa? <confused>

Africa couldn't manage pastoral cultures until it could get hold of herd animals that wouldn't trample, maim, kill and jump fences in a single bound from other people.

Until chickens became a thing, nobody had thought to try rearing guinea fowl deliberately. (The chicken argument was no joke: it took centuries for most people to fully decide that the meat wouldn't cause problems and was safe outside of ritualized muti — they were mainly used for eggs. Think Europe meeting the tomato. Of course, some almost immediately ate chicken regularly upon getting them — the heretics.)

Hunter-gatherer =/= unsophisticated cultures. Or lack of coordinated caretaking of their environment to aid both hunting and gathering.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 23rd 2020 at 5:34:27 PM

We never said that they were unsophisticated, or that they couldn't take care of their environment. We are just saying that the hunter gatherers living on Doggerland did not build megaliths, and likely did not leave any sort of monument or settlement there.

Optimism is a duty.

Wood, reeds, clay, sod, turf, willow... To get to freaking large stone piles, it helps to work the basics out with something that 1) floats, 2) can get huge and 3) is easier to shape than a massive lump of stone you need to work out how to quarry, first.

Wattle-and-daub can also act as a model for ideas, you know. Not just as a screen you can throw up as a hide.

You won't find a wooden henge either, if you mean that. Again, that culture hadn't arrived yet.

Optimism is a duty.

Yes, I know.

But, to work out what to do with honking great big oaks, yews and elms when what you have at first is flint, horn, a nice fire bow (or whatever starter of choice) and way too much ambition... also takes a while.

And starts with easier things to shape.

It's that while I'm looking forward to seeing more of.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 23rd 2020 at 6:57:36 PM

On the Other Hand—megaliths may not have originated in the Middle East, either, but in France about 4700 BCE (keep in mind the usual caveats about over-trusting single studies). Given other studies and the timing, it's very likely that these were the same culture group that brought the neolithic to Britain in the first place, a few hundred years later.

What all these studies are suggesting is that the arrival of the neolithic to Britain wasn't a gradual process, relatively speaking, but happened by means of the arrival of a new group of people who brought these practices with them, and largely replaced the original ethnic group.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jun 23rd 2020 at 4:03:39 AM

What complicates that is, I think, that megalithic culture may have arisen several times in different places. There are megaliths in Korea, for instance. But the megaliths of Western Europe at least all seem to stem from a single culture moving into the area.

Optimism is a duty.

Well, it's not as if it's all that hard to figure out. Lift up a big stone, impress the people. Not surprising that it was invented multiple times.

necklace tells of the origin of string: String may have been invented between 160,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Optimism is a duty.

Writing History in Premodern Java: an article about writing materials used on the island and why so little survived from beyond the 18th-19th centuries (hint: organic materials don't preserve well in the tropics).

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Oh, and found an article on the contents of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum. Warring States China is kind of a black hole to me, but the gist of it is:

• The use of miniatures and scale models as spirit/burial objects dates back all the way to the Neolithic, while the use of bronze objects in particular can be traced back to the 8th century BCE-ish, during the Western Zhou period, with the earliest artefacts found being the burial objects at the Marquis of Jin's tomb in Shanxi.
  • For those unfamiliar: large-scale ferrous metallurgy reached China quite late, around 6th century BCE, and it took a few more centuries for iron to spread across the Yellow River valley/Central Plains cradle and displace bronze as the main working metal. Bronze and iron were used side-by-side for weapons and armour throughout the Warring States era.
• Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum includes a pair of 1:2 bronze models of war chariots, which stand out as all the other burial objects in the complex were life-sized (including the Terracotta Army).
  • What's more, these model chariots can move, with rotating wheels and all. Burial objects were often meant to be used by their "owner" in the afterlife, which would explain the degree of the craftsmanship... though I do wonder if the departed emperor would've found a half-sized chariot a comfy ride.
• Other ancient Chinese tombs have been found with features that seem to be meant to assist the departed in "travelling" through the afterlife, like holes and passages allowing the spirit to escape, or wheels symbolically placed near their final resting place. So it does suggest that the model chariots might've been meant to fulfil a similar purpose.
• The rest of the mausoleum complex displays bits and pieces of the Qin Empire in still life: the Terracotta Army, clay figures of courtiers, bureaucrats and animals and yet-to-be-excavated dioramas of seas and waterways flowing with liquid mercury. So it would seem that the chariots were meant to carry the emperor across his empire in the afterlife.

A historian friend of mine at the NUS who's actually familiar with the setting offered some additional context: the popular image of the mausoleum is that it's a vanity project by a brutal, possibly insane emperor that drove the nascent Qin state into bankruptcy and then disappeared under the surface, never to be seen again until the modern day. But:

• The "above-ground" layout of the mausoleum suggests that it was meant to be open for the public.
• Later correspondences by his successor, Qin Er Shi, talked of lowering the tax rate, which certainly doesn't paint the picture of an empire in bankruptcy, and
• The Qin state was big on rewarding its soldiers for their battlefield exploits, and the suits of armour displayed in the mausoleum seem to suggest that it was meant to honour the emperor's fallen soldiers, too.

So her view on the matter is that the mausoleum might've been a feel-good stimulus project meant to solidify the citizens' bond to their state and emperor. Sucks if you're one of the forced labourers who died building it, though.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

If he made dioramas with liquid mercury, no wonder he went insane.

Optimism is a duty.

Cross-posting from the China threde: Archaeologists just found a trove of Bronze Age stoneware and ceramics near Guanghan, Sichuan, including this thing◊ that looks suspiciously like the pigs from Angry Birds.

Alright, so first things first: early Bronze Age China (else known as the Shang culture or "dynasty") started a bit later than in the Near East, dating around 1700-1000 BCE. The great Near Eastern bronze cultures flourished in places that supported large-scale agriculture and trade, like the Fertile Crescent, the Nile and the Aegean coasts. So naturally it followed that the early Chinese bronze cultures sprouted in the region's agricultural cradle: the Central Plains of the Yellow River valley.

In this region, we've found a series of palace-states comparable to their Mediterranean contemporaries, possibly operating on a similar command economy model. The largest of these was the titular Shang state, which at its height spanned across the modern-day Henan province. These early states were connected by alliances and trade - and yeah, occasionally war. And they were the inventors of the first known form of Chinese writing: the Oracle Bone script, so-called because of its use in divination rituals using animal bones.

Outside their territories were roving groups of non-state "barbarian" peoples, which they referred to with this◊ character - written in modern Chinese as "羌" and pronounced "Qiang". The Shang states went to war with these peoples on a regular basis, in a fashion not unlike the later "Flower Wars" of the Aztecs. The goal was rarely conquest, since these "barbarians" were living on marginal lands anyway; mostly it was for loot, slaves and prisoners for human sacrifices. Human sacrifice rituals were a major part of the Shang religion, performed on occasions ranging from routine worship to the funerals of kings and nobles. The burial pits we've found around the Shang capital, near modern-day Anyang, shows that dozens to hundreds of captives were sacrificed at a time in various grisly ways.

Aside from that, the Shang culture produced intricate bronze objects in the form of tools, weapons, ritual vessels and grave goods. These bronze objects contained many decorative elements that would evolve into mainstays of Chinese art in later periods.

So for most of recorded Chinese history, the story goes like this: "China" began in the Central Plains, achieved technological and cultural superiority over the surrounding "barbarians", and assimilated them through the centuries until it spanned All Under Heaven. There were some oddities in the traditional narrative: for instance, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian (the Han equivalent of Herodotos' Histories) mentions a "Shu kingdom" in modern-day Sichuan, which supposedly held on to the strange ways of its native inhabitants until it was conquered by Qin in the 4th century BCE. Who were these people? What languages did they speak? What were their cities like? We had no idea.

At least, not until 1986.

The Sanxingdui site in Sichuan was accidentally discovered by local farmers that year. First they'd stumbled on a sacrificial pit containing tonnes of bronze ritual goods. Then subsequent digs by archaeologists revealed a larger complex that suggested the existence of a palace-state, dating to around 12th-11th century BCE. And what they found inside was wildly different from what anyone had known about Chinese bronze culture.

I mean, just look at this stuff.

In historiographical terms, this was earth-shattering stuff. It's like if someone found a pit in Finland full of iron sculptures dated to 900 BCE. The spread of states, long-distance trade and bronze working in China is a lot less well-documented than it was in Europe and the Near East. Finding out that people in the far "barbarian" southwest had their own advanced (if pre-literate) bronze-working state basically cancelled a huge part of China's traditional historical narrative and forced us to rework our assumptions.

Did the Sanxingdui people come up with bronze working on their own? Did they trade with the Shang states? Just what exactly happened there in the few centuries between this find and the appearance of the Shu kingdom in later Chinese chronicles? This time and place used to be a black hole for historians, but new finds have been rapidly coming out in the past three decades, from small settlements dating to the same period (just like the one described in the most recent find) to Neolithic communities dating as far back as 5,000 years ago. And it's a useful reminder that the modern "Han" culture is made up of hundreds of native cultures assimilated over the millennia, each with their own stories to tell.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

It's not that surprising. A common feature among ancient civilizations is that they routinely describe their neighbours as uncivilized barbarians, even when this is not the case. The Egyptians did the same thing with their neighbours.

Basically, everyone thinks they invented civilization first, and that everyone else doesn't know how to do it right.

Optimism is a duty.

Thing is, those descriptions usually applied to the people living next to those literate cultures, and we'd usually have a pretty good idea of who they were talking about from context. When the New Kingdom Egyptians wrote of "barbarians", they mostly referred to the smaller Nubian states or the proto-Berber tribes. When the Mycenaeans drew "barbarians" on their frescoes, they were non-state, hill-dwelling peoples in inner Greece or the Balkans. And when the Shang states wrote about the "Qiang", they were writing about non-state peoples living on the peripheries of the Yellow River valley.

The Sanxingdui culture came from beyond the lands that they'd considered "barbarian". We had no written account and next to no material evidence of what society looked like in this part of the world before the 6th century BCE or so. It's usually assumed that the state model and technology like metalworking radiated outwards from the major agricultural cradles, so in the Chinese context, it's pretty unique to see those things being adopted so far back by people who weren't yet recognisably "Chinese" and had no known contact with the Central Plains cultures - though that's bound to change with future discoveries.

Anyhow: a geochemical study of the Stonehenge megaliths has traced their origin to West Woods, south of Marlborough.

And if anyone wants their mood ruined, here's a Greek poem on a stele from the 2nd-3rd century CE.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

My money is on trade. I don't know what the geology of these ancient Chinese states were but one of the major features of Eastern Mediterranian Bronze Age was that there was massive amounts of trade going on, mostly because very few states, both large and small, had access to both the tin and copper needed to make bronze and I suspect that it would be similar in China. (And for the record the one place that did was Cyprus which needed to trade for just about everything else).

Could be! There were small tin (cassiterite) deposits along the Yellow River and in southwest China. But there was no evidence of mining activity in the latter until 700 BCE at the earliest, which does suggest that the Sanxingdui culture could've gotten it through trade.

The most interesting part is that the biggest tin deposits were in Southeast Asia - particularly the Malayan Peninsula, which is still a leading producer today. And in the past few decades, there have been significant finds of bronze cultures in Vietnam and Thailand dating to around 1000 BCE. All in all, though, the archaeology here is a lot younger than it is for the Mediterranean Bronze Age, and the relative lack of written evidences isn't helping.^note Though it's easier for modern Chinese-speaking archaeologists to decipher the Oracle Bone script than it is for, say, modern Greek speakers to decipher the Linear B syllabary. Until we have hard evidences of a long-range trading network, it will remain a mystery.

For what it's worth, the Near Eastern bronze states were known to source their tin from as far away as England, so it seems possible for these bronze cultures to have imported their metals from far-flung corners of Asia.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

This 9,000-year-old skeleton is the oldest cremation in the Near East: The cremated remains are a reminder of what archaeology can, and can't, tell us.

Optimism is a duty.

Looks like the ruins of Mycenae was slightly, uh, on fire today.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Well, not quite, the forest nearby caught fire, and the wind was driving the fire away from the archaeological site.

It only burned some grass on the site, but the museum is safe.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 31st 2020 at 4:09:27 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Seems to have blackened the Lion Gate a tad.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)