What would you do if you had 100,000 artifacts from a Neolithic settlement?
Organize them, of course. That's what Lisa Fontes '09 (West Danville, Vt.) and Heather Otis '10 (Fort Mill, S.C.) are doing this summer, working under Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale. The "teaching and reference assemblage" of artifacts forms only a small fraction of the 1.7 million artifacts discovered at the 12,000 year-old semi-permanent site of Dhra', in what is now Jordan. The students are spending the summer numbering, identifying, and re-bagging each artifact, as well as entering information about the finds into a database.
The Dhra' assemblage is particularly important because it comes from a transition point in human history. As a semi-permanent site, Dhra' was inhabited for nine to 12 months out of the year, and thus helps to illustrate the shift from a hunter-gatherer to a sedentary society. There are 18 such semi-permanent sites known to exist in the Jordan Valley, but only six of them have been excavated, so the information to be learned from Dhra' is crucial to our understanding of how human civilization began. Also, the artifacts at Hamilton are some of the only materials from the Dhra' site to be allowed outside of Jordan, and since they are only on temporary loan, it is important to analyze them as thoroughly as possible.
In addition to organizing the Dhra' assemblage, each of the students is also working with Goodale on an individual project. Otis is looking a type of stone tool used to cut grain called a sickle blade, of which 65-70 examples exist in the Dhra' collection. She is using a new method to study the blades' use wear. Previous studies investigated use wear by studying the sheen on the blades, but Otis explains that her project uses a scanning electron microscope to look at edge wear, instead. By studying the use wear on sickle blades, she can hopefully begin to determine why so few blades were found in a settlement that contained an entire building set aside for grain storage, and by establishing how long the blades were used, she might then be able to estimate how much wheat the inhabitants of Dhra' were able to harvest.
Fontes is pursuing research that will culminate in her senior thesis, studying the migration of the Athapaskan people by investigating their material culture. Anthropologists have already traced the migration from Alaska through the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest using linguistic similarities, but Fontes is trying to use material culture to corroborate these findings. She is using projectile points such as arrow and dart heads, examining the notched bases of points from different areas to determine whether the similarities echo the linguistic patterns already observed. The most difficult aspect, she says, is trying to take all of the disconnected information about the points and find away to fit it together. She compares her work with stone tools (lithics) to the common use of pottery as a way to study ancient cultures. "Many archaeologists like to use pottery because it's expressive, and because it was used in day-to-day life," she says. "Lithics are important because they were the height of technology."
Both students say that their projects are heading for publication next year. Otis hopes to work in a federal museum after she attends graduate school, although with a minor in chemistry, she is also considering conservation work. Fontes intends to pursue a Ph.D. and continue to research lithics used by peoples during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. She is particularly interested in knowledge transmission amongst these groups.
Stone tools may seem simple, but Fontes and Otis have an important piece of advice: don't underestimate the Paleoindians. Both students took a class where they tried flintknapping, or creating stone tools as was done thousands of years ago. The process involves striking one rock against another, usually a piece of chert or obsidian, to break off useable shards. "It's really tough," says Otis. She should know. For her project on sickle blades, she made her own blades from materials similar to those at Dhra' and spent 16 hours cutting wheat.
-- by Laura Bramley
Organize them, of course. That's what Lisa Fontes '09 (West Danville, Vt.) and Heather Otis '10 (Fort Mill, S.C.) are doing this summer, working under Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale. The "teaching and reference assemblage" of artifacts forms only a small fraction of the 1.7 million artifacts discovered at the 12,000 year-old semi-permanent site of Dhra', in what is now Jordan. The students are spending the summer numbering, identifying, and re-bagging each artifact, as well as entering information about the finds into a database.
The Dhra' assemblage is particularly important because it comes from a transition point in human history. As a semi-permanent site, Dhra' was inhabited for nine to 12 months out of the year, and thus helps to illustrate the shift from a hunter-gatherer to a sedentary society. There are 18 such semi-permanent sites known to exist in the Jordan Valley, but only six of them have been excavated, so the information to be learned from Dhra' is crucial to our understanding of how human civilization began. Also, the artifacts at Hamilton are some of the only materials from the Dhra' site to be allowed outside of Jordan, and since they are only on temporary loan, it is important to analyze them as thoroughly as possible.
In addition to organizing the Dhra' assemblage, each of the students is also working with Goodale on an individual project. Otis is looking a type of stone tool used to cut grain called a sickle blade, of which 65-70 examples exist in the Dhra' collection. She is using a new method to study the blades' use wear. Previous studies investigated use wear by studying the sheen on the blades, but Otis explains that her project uses a scanning electron microscope to look at edge wear, instead. By studying the use wear on sickle blades, she can hopefully begin to determine why so few blades were found in a settlement that contained an entire building set aside for grain storage, and by establishing how long the blades were used, she might then be able to estimate how much wheat the inhabitants of Dhra' were able to harvest.
Fontes is pursuing research that will culminate in her senior thesis, studying the migration of the Athapaskan people by investigating their material culture. Anthropologists have already traced the migration from Alaska through the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest using linguistic similarities, but Fontes is trying to use material culture to corroborate these findings. She is using projectile points such as arrow and dart heads, examining the notched bases of points from different areas to determine whether the similarities echo the linguistic patterns already observed. The most difficult aspect, she says, is trying to take all of the disconnected information about the points and find away to fit it together. She compares her work with stone tools (lithics) to the common use of pottery as a way to study ancient cultures. "Many archaeologists like to use pottery because it's expressive, and because it was used in day-to-day life," she says. "Lithics are important because they were the height of technology."
Both students say that their projects are heading for publication next year. Otis hopes to work in a federal museum after she attends graduate school, although with a minor in chemistry, she is also considering conservation work. Fontes intends to pursue a Ph.D. and continue to research lithics used by peoples during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. She is particularly interested in knowledge transmission amongst these groups.
Stone tools may seem simple, but Fontes and Otis have an important piece of advice: don't underestimate the Paleoindians. Both students took a class where they tried flintknapping, or creating stone tools as was done thousands of years ago. The process involves striking one rock against another, usually a piece of chert or obsidian, to break off useable shards. "It's really tough," says Otis. She should know. For her project on sickle blades, she made her own blades from materials similar to those at Dhra' and spent 16 hours cutting wheat.
-- by Laura Bramley
