10 Recently Deciphered Ancient Writings

10 Recently Deciphered Ancient Writings - Listverse

History The ancients recorded their knowledge on scrolls, artifacts, and even cave walls. In some cases, the passage of time has erases our ability to understand a disused alphabet. In other cases, knowledge is purposely encrypted in complex codes understood by only a select (and long dead) few.

Examples of the Importance of Experimental Archaeology

A well-published experiment, in such a way that many people could share in the knowledge and insights learnt from this activity, was the building of a Stone Age house in Denmark in 1958 by Hans-Ole Hansen. He describes the successes and setbacks in an accessible, lively manner. Such activities, based on trial and error, cannot follow a planned script, because many details are unknown from the drawing table. They are more about gaining experiences and counting how much material and how much time goes where (the way `we' build it). The fact is, 50 years later, we still meet surprises each time we build a `prehistoric' house somewhere; surprises that mean we need to improvise and solve problems on the spot. For example, one needs to have tried cutting trees with both a stone axe and a steel axe before you can compare them in usability. It takes some experience in using both kinds, as they need to be handled differently.

Overview over the Iron Age village at Lejre Experimental Centre, Denmark. Picture: Roeland Paardekooper.

Building an Iron Age house in the present day might say little about how it was to build such a house over 2000 years ago, but it is up to experimental archaeologists to find out what we actually can learn from it. By dismissing the human element and measuring the time it costs for someone to reach a goal does not mean that registering time is useless. Some processes have always led to the same results, both in the past and in the present. That is why it is good to measure how much time it takes, for example, for ceramics to be baked at a certain temperature, within the context of the variables, such as the kind of clay and the kind of kiln. 

In the 1950s, knowledge of how to smelt iron without using a modern blast furnace had almost vanished in Europe, although hundreds of archaeological sites were already identified as iron-smelting sites. Without exact knowledge, the evidence of the different stages would be impossible to compare and to discern. In the past 60 years, ethnoarchaeological reports from Africa and Asia have found their way to many people interested and, combined with the archaeological data sets, literally thousands of experiments with shaft furnaces and other prehistoric and early historic types were executed across the world. Especially in the United States, groups of archaeologists/craftspeople are very active in iron smelting. One of the advantages of iron smelting is that it was executed in many regions across the world which makes it easier for people to become familiar with it in their local environment. More clearly, these experiments and the vast amount of reports of them have made it possible for archaeologists to discern the different steps, methods, and their by-products. 

In 1967, a construction built in Lejre (Denmark) resembling an Iron Age house was deliberately set on fire and excavated later. Such experiments take time, courage, and a stable physical environment. 

The scene for the fire was planned in detail, with inventory and stock put in place where needed. Small porcelain cones were mounted across the house as part of the registration of temperature. Surprisingly for the experimenters, the house burnt down in as little as 30 min. A few days after the fire, small test pits were excavated. In this excavation, different layers of ash were discernible as well as different sources of clay and loam (walls, floor, etc.). 

These different features were much more difficult to recognize in the 1992 excavations. The people excavating in the second phase were unaware of the documentation of the fire in 1967, just like archaeologists nowadays excavate houses without knowledge of what exactly they will find until they do make finds. To everybody's surprise, they made only very little finds, even if the house was only burnt down 25 years before. After the 1992 excavations, the undisturbed parts are left for the future.

The pity of this famous experiment is that there has been no money available to date to process the complete documentation of the constructing phase, the phase of use of the house, the burning down, and subsequently the excavation. Even if this could be done, the work comparing the data with original archaeological information on burnt-down houses has to be started first of all. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, different wooden ships were built in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, resembling a medieval cog-like vessel. This kind of ship was used in the late Middle Ages in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea as trading vessel. As is often the case, money was acquired through European unemployment funds. The building of such new ships of old design has an important added value, namely promoting interest in the past, and therefore strengthening the position of archaeology. 

The different cog-like vessels built in the 1980s and 1990s served different levels of authenticity and different goals. Most important, the ships were meant to be used as seafaring vessels in modern ages. 

A major advantage of having these new ships built is that the original archaeological data receives renewed attention, not just from archaeologists, but from a range of other specialists as well, who all `see' things in the original data, which archaeologists did not identify before. Archaeologists do learn to see beyond what they know, but these insights might be limited. 

In some cases, archaeological details were copied into a ship, and people first found out about their use after sailing with the ship. This is the case, for example, for a triangular piece of wood, which decenniums after the excavations had to be planned in the correct location, which could be recognized in medieval depictions as well. It turned out to be a so-called beam-end fender.

The location of the beam-end fender in front of a through-beam on the outer side of the hull. Drawing by Morten Gᴓthche, Maritime Newsletter from Roskilde, Denmark, no. 7, December 1996, p. 15.

The beam-end fenders can be seen clearly on this town seal from Elbing c. 1350. From Maritime Newsletter from Roskilde, Denmark, no. 7, December 1996, p. 15.

Experiments in using such a ship are often restricted to short-term monitoring experiments (``does it work well?''). Longer-term monitoring, using log books and comparing these over the years, would be a cost-effective way of learning more. The different ship projects are in touch with each other and exchange experiences. If the results and experiences with such ships were to be combined, an interesting image would emerge.

New England's 'Lost' Archaeological Sites Rediscovered

Examinations of airborne scans, using light detection and ranging (LiDAR), of three New England towns have revealed networks of old stone walls, building foundations, old roads, dams and other features. Here, an abandoned farmstead in Preston, Conn., is hidden from view in this 2012 aerial photograph and only visible in the LiDAR scan of the area from 2010 (right). Credit: (aerial) Connecticut Environmental Conditions Online (CTECO); (LiDAR) 2010 USDA NRCS

By Wynne Parry, LiveScience Contributor   |   January 16, 2014 02:46pm ET

Take a walk in the New England woods, and you may stumble upon the overgrown remains of a building's foundation or the stacked stones of a wall. Now, researchers have begun uncovering these relics from the air.

Examinations of airborne scans of three New England towns revealed networks of old stone walls, building foundations, old roads, dams and other features, many of which long were forgotten. These features speak to a history that Katharine Johnson, an archaeologist and study researcher, wants to see elucidated.

She and others know the story in broad strokes: After European settlers arrived in the 17th century, thousands of acres of forest were cleared to make way for much more intensive agriculture than that practiced by indigenous people. In the 19th century, people began leaving for industrial towns, allowing the forests to overtake their former farms.

"I think there is a general idea of what was happening, but it is not as well understood as it could be," Johnson, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, told LiveScience. [See the Aerial Images of 'Lost' Archaeological Sites in New England]

New Englanders have long known about these relics of the agricultural past. But Johnson and William Ouimet, her adviser and co-author, harnessed a new way to look for them, one that has proved useful in other places.

They looked at publicly available data collected by using a remote-sensing technology known as light detection and ranging (LiDAR). These scans map the surface below using laser pulses, and they make it possible for researchers to look below tree cover. LiDAR has increasingly been used in archaeology of late, with researchers, aided by the technology, finding the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire, Angkor, was even more massive than previously thought. LiDAR has also revealed a lost city beneath the Cambodian jungle (near Angkor) as well as evidence of Ciudad Blanca, a never-confirmed legendary metropolis, hidden by Honduran rain forests.

In the new study, Johnson and Ouimet focused on parts of three rural towns: Ashford, Conn.; Tiverton, R.I.; and Westport, Mass. In the scans, stone walls showed up as thin linear ridges, forming enclosures that were likely once fields, lining old thoroughfares, and clustering around the foundations at the heart of old farmsteads.

The LiDAR also picks up on modern features, leading to potential confusion. Old building foundations can resemble modern swimming pools, for example. To verify what they see in LiDAR data, Johnson and Ouimet have been visiting sites.

This new information is best used in combination with historical documents, Johnson said.
"On a historical map, you might see just one dot, and a person's name representing a farmstead, but if you compare that with the LiDAR you might see all of the buildings, in addition to the layout, and the fields, and the road leading to it," she said.

Sometimes the past lives on in the modern landscape. Many stone walls that showed up in the scans of Westport, Mass., delineated property lines, both in modern times and on a map from 1712, she said.

This research will be detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, and is now available online.

Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

‘AS LONG AS EVER I’VE KNOWN IT…’ I

On folklore and archaeology by AMY GAZIN-SCHWARTZ AND CORNELIUS HOLTORF

CONSTRUCTING THE PAST IN FOLKLORE AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Everyone concerned with the past—archaeologist, historian, politician, storyteller, priest, parent—constructs ideas and images of the past from materials available in the present. Through these ideas and images, we invest meaning in past events; but these meanings may differ according to our perspectives. We view the past through the lenses of the present; indeed, people have probably always done so. Archaeology and folklore are two of the many lenses through which the past is given meaning, and it is the aim of this article to explore and understand differences and similarities in how archaeology and folklore create, and are created through, ideas about the past. In the intersections between these similarities and differences, we hope to find new lenses, through which we can begin to create alternative images of people’s histories. The articles that follow will explore the meanings people attach to the past, or to artefacts associated with the past. They will demonstrate the value of developing a dialogue between different systems of meaning. What aspects of the past, time, material culture are remembered, retold in folklore, and made meaningful in popular culture? How may such memories, stories and practices inform archaeological interpretations?

We do not seek to define a new field, folklore and archaeology (comparable to zooarchaeology or ethnoarchaeology); rather, we have set out to explore the possibilities of developing an interdisciplinary dialogue, and making this dialogue fruitful to the future development of both disciplines. In contrast to a common archaeological practice of borrowing methods, models or data from another field, we want to open a discourse between the fields, believing that a conversation about the many methods, models and sets of data that already exist in the two disciplines will enrich both, by creating new approaches to thinking about common questions, and indeed by raising new questions. The wide range of authors and approaches in our volume gives an indication of the diverse realms this dialogue may address. The multiple ways in which the connections between archaeology and folklore may serve, stimulate or trouble archaeology reveal the potential for a dialogue at the interface of the two fields.

In our introduction, we will briefly review some of the historical background for a study of folklore and archaeology, outlining the origins of both fields of study in a common antiquarian background and tracing the divergence of the two fields over the past century. We will then outline several lines of inquiry through which a study of folklore can enrich and broaden archaeological constructions of the past. First, we will deal with questions about historical accuracy, which lie at the heart of archaeologists’ worries about the reliability of folklore as evidence or data for archaeological interpretation. We will argue that this concern is based on limited views of both folklore evidence and more conventional archaeological evidence. Next we will address the value of folklore for understanding the history of monuments and the multiple meanings those monuments carry throughout their histories. Finally, we will give a brief overview of other areas where attention to folklore can inform archaeological interpretation and practice: issues of time, of identity, of the politics and sociology of archaeology as a discipline, and of the relationships between academic archaeology and the public. These issues do not define the limits of the dialogue between archaeology and folklore; we merely set them out as first steps in demonstrating the value of these connections.

Our thinking is grounded in four key convictions about archaeology, folklore and the creation of history.

First, our arguments are not based in the belief that folklore contains accurate and reliable representations of past behaviour, beliefs or events. The reliability of folklore for historical information has been, as we will discuss further below, the subject of often contentious argument. Our approach seeks to move beyond this problem. Folklore is not the only field where a concern with historical accuracy is problematic; archaeology too gives us the past as perceived and interpreted by present people. Neither field can be relied upon to tell us about the actual past. Folklore does give us a broader understanding of the past as perceived, remembered, and made significant by both past and present people.

Second, we are interested in what monuments and other archaeological objects meant (and mean) to people in their respective lifeworlds and how they were (and are) used in the formation of collective identities. In this context, the antiquity of a particular element of folklore is less important than its significance for interpreting meaning. As interpretive archaeologies have come to understand, the past is a creation of everyone who interprets material remains or fragments of tradition from past people’s lives, whether in the form of folklore or archaeological study. This past can be crucial for people’s understanding of the cultural landscape and their identities therein. Where these identities and different approaches to the past conflict, it is important to develop ways of establishing a dialogue among them.

These problems of accuracy and meaning are fundamental to the history of archaeological uses of folklore. Previously, when archaeologists attempted to apply folklore to archaeological materials, they often found that folk tradition and archaeological remains did not match. Rather than simply rejecting folklore as unreliable and inaccurate, several authors deal with these problems and find that, when folklore is analysed (as archaeological materials have to be analysed), it sometimes does provide plausible interpretation for those materials, whether or not they can prove unbroken continuity of transmission.

Finally, archaeological approaches to sites and monuments most frequently focus on the time of their construction and intensive use. However, visible monuments have life histories as well, extending from their construction up until the present. Folklore reflects some of the later interpretations of prehistoric sites, and contemporary folklore constitutes one important part of present-day understandings of monuments. It thus supplements recent concerns about the role and interpretation of the past in the present, which have mainly focused on various aspects of ‘managed’ heritage.

It will be argued throughout that folklore is valuable to archaeologists because it offers us alternative ideas about the past that counter our tendency to portray everyone in all time as versions of ourselves, and because it provides knowledge about the continued importance and therefore the later history of archaeological monuments.

American Journal of Archaeology Online Reviews (July 2010)

 

Online Book Reviews

Beginning in January 2010 (issue 114.1), all book reviews are published here as free downloadable PDFs. While we no longer publish book reviews in our printed fascicle (except for the occasional book review article), all are still listed in the respective print publication's table of contents.

Excavation of Star Carr (1949–1953)

Between 1949 and 1953, Grahame Clark directed the excavation of Star Carr, a lakeside, early Mesolithic site in northeastern Yorkshire, near the town of Scarborough. The waterlogged nature of the site meant that the preservation of the organic artifacts and remains was excellent. Pollen analysis and the remains of trees at the site were evidence of a lakeside, forested landscape, around two hundred years after the ice cap had retreated.

As the expert on the European Mesolithic, Clark was the ideal director of the excavation. Clark had based his revolutionary books on the Mesolithic period, written in the 1930s, on data produced by other people. Here was his opportunity to excavate and interpret new data and to compare it with previous data sets. Star Carr was an exemplary site.

The assemblage recovered from the site comprised simple microlithic (small) stone tools in the shape of barbs and arrows; flint scraps and burins used for working on antlers and bones; awls and axes; barbed spearheads made from red deer antler; elk antler mattocks for digging; scrapers made from wild ox bone; and a number of what appear to be masks made from red deer antlers, which may have been used as hunting camouflage or for ceremonial purposes. The remains of a wooden paddle were also found. Analysis of the animal remains revealed the subsistence patterns of the occupants and the nature of the social groups who used it. The animals they hunted included red deer, elk, roe deer, wild oxen, elk, wild pigs, and water fowl. There were no fish remains—perhaps they were not available in the lake this early, but the remains of two domestic dogs were found, among the earliest remains of this kind in Europe.

Based on the amount of animal bone found it was estimated that the site supported a group of around twenty-five people annually over a six-year period. However, if the occupation had been more intermittent, then the period of occupation was probably longer. The bone and antler technology, such as sickles and barbed points and arrows, was as distinctively Mesolithic as the lithic artifacts. Clark concluded that Star Carr was a specialized seasonal hunting and butchering site rather than a long-term occupation site, probably used by groups who moved on, depending on the season, to other camps on the coast or up onto the moors in the hills.

Excavations at Star Carr was published in 1954, and it reflected the careful analysis and resulting scope of interpretation by Clark and his colleagues. There were chapters on lake stratigraphy and pollen, animal bones, and the flint, bone, and antler tools.

Since 1954 other interpretations (and further excavations) have been made at Star Carr. It is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the significance of the site, and the issues initially addressed by Clark, that it has continued to attract such attention and disagreement.

Further Reading Clark, J. G. D. 1932. The Mesolithic Age in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, J. G. D. 1952. Prehistoric Europe: the economic basis. London: Methuen. Clark, J. G. D. 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. 2001. Grahame Clark: An intellectual biography of an archaeologist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Legge, A., and P. Rowley-Conwy. 1988. Star Carr revisited. London: Birkbeck College. Mellars, P., and P. Dark. 1998. Star Carr in context. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Excavation of Jarmo (1948–1954)

Jarmo is an archeological site located in northern Iraq on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

From the beginning of his career Robert Braidwood (1907–2003) was interested in the theories of Gordon Childe and others about the origins of civilizations. After World War II he began to search for a Near Eastern site that would provide evidence of the “Neolithic revolution.” Following the theories of Childe, this was widely believed to have been the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding communities. As such this transition would represent the first rung on the ladder to the later development of early urban or city-state–based civilization, one likely triggered by environmental and population pressures.

Jarmo was a small village site in northwestern Iraqi Kurdistan, on the “hilly flanks” of the Zagros Mountains. Braidwood deliberately chose a site in a topographic zone where wild resources overlapped with domesticated ones, and where farming without irrigation would have been possible. The data from such a site would be different from what would have been obtained at sites in the “the fertile crescent” closer to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Braidwood and his team discovered that this small village had been occupied by a community between 100 and 150 people for several centuries during the seventh millennium BC. The deployment of a multidisciplinary team comprised of paleobotanists, zoologists and geologists, radiocarbon and ceramic experts, anthropologists, and archaeologists made it possible to recover and analyze plant and animal evidence at the site, along with the more traditional architectural and artifactual evidence.

The people of Jarmo had lived in rectilinear household complexes made from mud bricks. Their economy was based on growing and harvesting domestic emmer and eikorn wheat, barley, and lentils. They also harvested wild plants, such as field peas, pistachio nuts, acorns, and wild wheat and barley, and kept dogs, domestic goats, sheep, and later, pigs. However, they also hunted wild animals, such as cattle, onager, and other small mammals. The bones of lions, leopards, small wildcats, foxes, and lynxes were also found at the site, killed either for their pelts or to protect the occupants and their flocks.

The inhabitants of Jarmo made a variety of flint and obsidian tools ranging from large to very small sizes. Many milling and grinding stones were found as well as small celts and chisel-like implements and some stone beads, pendants, and bracelets. A small amount of obsidian was imported from Anatolia, and then worked at the site. Other imports included turquoise and marine shells. Stone bowls were made from local limestone, and a small amount of pottery was produced (an innovation that seems to have originated elsewhere) there. Many small clay figurines (human, animal, and geometric) were found, along with many bone tools (such as awls or perforators), bone spoons, and beads.

Our understanding of and interest in the transformation from huntergathering to food production has changed since the 1950s, when research focused on the environmental and population pressures that contributed to its occurrence. Prehistorians now focus on understanding the social reasons for the transformation, and the social and cultural consequences of such a major change in lifestyle. However, the importance of Braidwood’s work at Jarmo has not changed. It provided the empirical evidence that such great cultural and economic changes had occurred, evidence as to how these early communities had changed from wild to domesticated resources, and evidence that this evolution had taken place over a longer period than had been thought. For many years Jarmo was the oldest agricultural and pastoral community in the world. The interdisciplinary fieldwork Braidwood pioneered became the model for fieldwork investigations of important regional cultural and economic transitions, not only in western Asia, but also all over the world. The archaeological techniques and methodology Braidwood pioneered at Jarmo became central to mainstream archaeological research design.

Further Reading Braidwood, R. J., and L. S. Braidwood. 1950. Jarmo: a village of early farmers in Iraq. Antiquity 24: 189–195. Braidwood, R. J., and G. R. Willey, eds. 1962. Courses towards urban life. Chicago: Aldine. Watson, P. J. 1999. Robert John Braidwood, 1907-. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: The great archaeologists, ed. T. Murray, 495–506. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Willey, G. R., ed. 1982. Archaeological researches in retrospect. Washington, DC: University Press of America.

Godwin and the Fenland Research Committee (1932--1948)

The first successful use of pollen analysis to explore vegetation history was by the geologist Lennart von Post, in Sweden in the 1920s. By identifying the relative abundance of pollen grains of different trees and plants in different strata, the ecology of an area during prehistoric times, that is, its climate, forest composition, and agricultural practices, and any changes to these over time, could be elucidated. This new scientific technique spread rapidly throughout Europe, so that by 1927 more than 150 papers about its use and the mapping of prehistoric ecologies had been published. In 1923 Harry Godwin began to employ pollen analysis for archaeological ends in England. Godwin (1901--1985) studied botany and geology at Cambridge University where he worked for the whole of his career.

During the 1920s and 1930s researchers began working together using pollen analysis to discover and map the impact of climate and human activity on the history of woodland (tree and shrub) vegetation. Refinements in technique led to the identification of many different kinds of pollen, such as the pollen of herbs and weeds and cereals, many of which were important indicators of past human activity. These refinements permitted the interpretation of certain features seen in pollen diagrams from natural deposits as the faint traces of the activities of the first farmers of the Neolithic period. One such feature is elm decline, which appeared in pollen diagrams as a noticeable and widespread reduction in elm pollen at a particular point, and was used to divide the Atlantic pollen zone from the succeeding sub-boreal one. Was this elm decline the result of human activity or climatic change or both? Many pollen diagrams revealed changes just above or after the decline horizon, which probably represented prehistoric episodes of woodland clearance, farming, and abandonment.

As pollen analysis developed across Europe, and its results were compared and tabulated, so could diagrams of different pollen compositions be mapped and divided into zones representing different phases of time, thus providing a means of dating suitable sediments. Precise correlations could be made within climatic, geographic, faunal, botanical, and archaeological pollen and sediment sequences. This chronology was used for the next twenty years until the advent of radiocarbon dating in 1950. In September 1931, a fishing trawler dredged up a harpoon from the Lenan and Ower Bank in the North Sea. Godwin analyzed a sample taken from the North Sea bed and found it was boreal in age (that is, from before the sea-level changes after the last Ice Age). The harpoon was examined by members of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia in 1932 and identified as an example of a finely barbed antler point, similar to those found at many Mesolithic Magelmosian sites across northern Europe and as far east as Estonia. What was even more interesting was that the sediment surrounding the harpoon was from fresh water. So this harpoon from under the sea was originally from a freshwater site, on hilly land that had been covered by the melting ice sheets at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Baltic and North seas had joined. What this proved was that the prehistory of Britain, prior to the end of the last Ice Age, was similar to that of northern Germany and Scandinavia, whereas its postglacial prehistory was unique. To further elucidate these thousand or so years of ecological changes and their impact on human populations and settlements, British archaeologists, following the example of their Scandinavian colleagues, began to work closely with paleobotanists, geologists, geographers, and biologists.

Godwin began to study the fens (or swamps) of East Anglia and Cambridgeshire with archaeologist Grahame Clark. The Fenland Basin of East Anglia was an ideal place to begin to study and map the history of British vegetation since the last Ice Age and to correlate this with geographic and demographic settlement changes at the same time. The area had been flooded by the North Sea and then covered by postglacial waterlogged deposits. During the sixteenth century AD the fens had been drained for agriculture, and by the twentieth century their upper peat beds had worn away in some places, so that banks of marine silt could be found. Air photographs (with O. G. S. Crawford) and ground surveys mapped the original fen waterways and the flat and built-up areas used for agriculture and settlements. In 1932, inspired by Godwin's expertise in pollen sampling and paleobotany and Clark's interest in using both for archaeological ends, the Fenland Research Committee (FRC) was established to conduct foundational research into the reconstruction of ancient British landscapes and environments. The FRC has been described as 'the first truly modern prehistoric project, because of its interdisciplinary scope.' At its peak, as Pamela Smith noted, it comprised forty-two specialists, including faunal, mollusk, and charcoal experts.

Godwin established the relationship between pollen zones and the stratigraphy of the peat by identifying the relative abundance of the pollen grains of different trees and plants in different strata. These analyses delineated the ecology of the area during prehistoric times, specifically its climate, forest composition, and agricultural practices. Godwin's pollen analyses of the peat deposits of these swamplands (or fens) elucidated the history of changes to their vegetation, and from these data Clark could interpret their impact on human occupants and geographic development. The FRC worked throughout the 1930s until 1948, when it became part of the subdepartment of Quaternary Studies at Cambridge University.

Clark and members of the FRC excavated and analyzed material from a number of different types of sites. At the site at Peacock\u2019s Farm Clark excavated flints from a Bronze Age level, and underneath that pottery from a Neolithic level, and below that a typical Tardenoisian core with other stone tool flakes and pieces from the Mesolithic period were found, the first time such a culture sequence had been demonstrated on a British site. The final report set the cultural remains in an environmental context. Other sites, such as Mildenhall Fen and a Bronze Age foundry, were explored for different reasons but in every case there was a conscious attempt to integrate archaeological and ecological information.

Other archaeologists at Cambridge, such as O. G. S. Crawford, Christopher Hawkes, and Stuart Piggott, all participated in the FRC's working committee. During the 1930s many undergraduates and postgraduates, such as Glyn Daniel, Thurstan Shaw, Charles McBurney, and J. Desmond Clark, had their first experience of fieldwork on FRC surveys and excavations. The FRC published five reports on archaeological excavations and thirteen studies of postglacial history by Godwin, in preparation for his classic History of British Flora.

Godwin became a global leader in ecological thought and practice. His work in the fenlands with Clark and other scientists, along with their data and interpretation, was finally published in 1950 in The History of British Flora. In 1948 he became the founding director of the subdepartment of Quaternary Studies. In this position and later, as professor of botany, he contributed to the uses of radiocarbon dating, to the geological history of changes in land sea levels, and to the archaeological implications of this work. Palynology and paleobotany have long since become essential to the reconstruction of past climates and ecologies and central to the business of archaeology. Godwin was knighted in 1970. Clark was to become Disney Professor of Archaeology in Cambridge and was knighted as well.

Further Reading Clark, J. G. D. 1989. Prehistory at Cambridge and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, B. 2001. Grahame Clark. An intellectual biography of an archaeologist. Boulder, CO: Westview. Smith, P. 1997. Grahame Clark's new archaeology: the Fenland Research Committee and Cambridge prehistory in the 1930s. Antiquity 71: 11--30.

Establishing Dendrochronology (1929)

The growth rings of an unknown tree species, at Bristol Zoo, England.

Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1867–1962) had a long and eminent career in astronomy, helping to establish and operate three major astronomical observatories—the Harvard College Observatory at Arequipa, Peru; the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; and the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson—before he became involved in archaeology. And who would have thought that such an esoteric subject as astronomy could provide the dirt discipline of archaeology, at the other end of the scientific spectrum, with a scientific dating system that would change the writing of prehistory and history itself?

In the 1920s Douglass’s interest in the effect of sunspots on the earth’s weather led him to investigate the annual growth layers of Arizona pine trees to ascertain if there were any variations in tree-ring width. He discovered a relationship between rainfall and tree growth, and between cyclical variations in tree growth and sunspot cycles. Looking for extensive tree-ring records to help to substantiate his theories, Douglass asked archaeologists in Tucson for pieces of wood from the ruins of a Southwestern pueblo. Within a decade Douglass was able to date some of these wooden remains back to AD 100 and others to AD 700.

For the first time in the development of archaeology, here was a scientific way of determining the date of wooden material from sites, and therefore of the sites themselves. In achieving this, Douglass created a chronology that was independent of other chronologies devised from ceramics, stratigraphy, and of course, the written record.

Douglass went on to develop the study of tree rings into the science of dendrochronology or tree-ring dating. This type of dating made substantial contributions to archaeology in the Arctic, Britain, central Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin. Douglass also provided dendroclimatic and dendroenvironmental reconstructions for archaeology. He retired from astronomy to found and direct the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, which he helped to establish as the preeminent center for dendrochronological research.

Further Reading Douglass, A. E. 1946. Precision of ring dating in tree-ring chronologies. Tucson: University of Arizona. McGraw, D. J. 2001. Andrew Ellicott Douglass and the role of the giant sequoia in the development of dendrochronology. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Nash, S. E. 1999. Time, trees, and prehistory: Tree-ring dating and the development of North American archaeology, 1914–1950. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Publication of Air Survey and Archaeology (1924)

Bradbury Rings, Dorset, seen from the air, from O.G.S. Crawford and Alexander Keiller, Wessex from the Air (1928).

O. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957) combined his degree in geography with his experience as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I to pioneer the use of aerial surveying in archaeology.

In 1920 Crawford was appointed the British Ordnance Survey’s first archaeological officer. Since the early nineteenth century when the survey had begun mapping Britain, it had recorded all of the monuments and earthworks that were visible from the ground. Crawford provided a different perspective. He began by locating archaeological features on military aerial photos, then he consulted the records of other institutions, and finally he undertook new field surveys mapping the traces of earthworks in the English landscape that were only visible from the air and recorded on photographs. In this way archaeological evidence—prehistoric, such as Celtic field systems; historic, such as Roman military camps; and even medieval and more recent disturbances to the earth—could be located, researched, and recorded. These traces of the past were sometimes in great danger of disappearing because up until this point they were “invisible.” Crawford’s aerial surveys and mapping ensured that they would survive and be recorded and protected.

Crawford’s first book, Man and His Past (1921), described as a “topographical landscape history,” established the new subfield of landscape archaeology. In the book Crawford classified human settlements according to their function and position in a structured landscape and provided them with a chronological framework. Crawford went on to demonstrate how effective the relationship was between aerial photography and archaeology, publishing Air Survey and Archaeology in 1924 and Photography for Archaeologists in 1929. He also surveyed for and drew up a remarkable series of period maps such as Roman Britain (1924) and Britain in the Dark Ages (1935).

Thanks to Crawford, mapping a site from the air became a standard tool of archaeological survey, and over the next few decades it was used to great effect all over the world. Aurel Stein flew over Iran with the Royal Air Force to map the Roman limes, and Sylvanus Morley hired a plane and a pilot in Guatemala to enable him to find Mayan ruins in the jungle. In the late twentieth century, computer and satellite-generated geographic information systems (GIS) mapping provided archaeologists with an even more accurate tool in locating and describing features in cultural and natural landscapes.

Further Reading Chippindale, C. 2001. O.G.S. Crawford, 1886–1957. In Encyclopedia of archaeology: History and discoveries, ed. T. Murray, 384–386. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Crawford, O. G. S. 1924. Air Survey and Archaeology. Southampton: Printed for H.M. Stationery Office at the Ordnance Survey. Crawford, O. G. S. 1955. Said and done: The autobiography of an archaeologist. London: Phoenix House.