We then excavated the east (right side in this photo) of the midden to see a cross section. This is during the process of removing the rocks from that half.
But in the tale of real life, where men and women who thirst for history and work feverishly to preserve it, there is no specific “X,” just a few broken shards of pottery, a pair of rusty discarded dog tags dating back to World War I or a child’s toy.
“These were lives,” said Sunny Wood, an archaeologist with Fort Hood’s Cultural Resources Management Program. “Some of this stuff people would consider collectors’ items or antiques.”
But there is much more than that, especially when ancient history mixes with the present day.
“What always sticks out in my mind is that we’ll find a projectile point that is 8,000 years old on the same surface as a Pepsi can from last week,” Wood said. “It drives me nuts.”
One man’s trash
A hole in the ground has been Ginny Hatfield’s and Tim Griffith’s office for the last four weeks.
Off the beaten path, and only a few yards from a deeply rutted tank track, Griffith and Hatfield had staked a handful of tiny white and red flags to make a series of shallow digs for artifacts, and into the lives of an ancient people.
Under a canvas canopy, Hatfield had staked several grid squares outlined with twine that stretched 1 yard wide by 3 yards long.
Using a small shovel and a brush, she’d been digging carefully with Griffith, meticulously sifting mounds of sandy soil through a screen.
What they’d uncovered was what’s commonly known in archaeological circles as a rock oven or a roasting pit that ancient people used to cook wild onions, plants and game. It dates from 200 to 1,500 years ago.
In one small square, Hatfield had uncovered only a small part of the oven and hoped to collect some ancient plant materials to determine what was cooked.
“From this one we’ve taken several samples of soil,” Hatfield said.
They also have collected some rock samples to see if residue can be collected from those, Hatfield said.
“We are in the beginning stages of examining all of this,” she said.
Researchers have not just found the large roasting oven, but also stone chips that may have been used to fashion spear points and arrow heads.
Of course, a lot of the discoveries might have remained long buried if it were not for technology.
Aside from shallow digs with tiny shovels, archaeologists use imaging technology to find anomalies.
“What they did is come out here and put a grid over this whole area,” Wood said. “They ran ground-penetrating radar to figure out where these clusters of rocks are, to kind of hone down where we were going to put our focus. Otherwise you are coming out here with a probe or a shovel to see what’s out here.”
Once those anomalies are found, archaeologists get to work digging, and sifting through time itself.
Griffith shoveled a small amount of sandy soil and watched the fine remnants fall back to the earth.
What was left were fragments of rocks that intrigued Griffith.
That’s because the burned rocks that fashioned the oven, when you strike them together will emit a sulfuric scent, much like a match being struck.
Thousands of years ago, prehistoric cultures learned that heated rocks could be used to bake foods, specifically bulbs or fibrous plants.
These were usually cooked at least overnight and sometimes for several days before they could be eaten.
Rocks, heated within a pit and covered by layers of plants and insulating earth, can hold heat for up to 48 hours, and that is why these ovens were so effective. The larger and more numerous the rocks, the more slowly they will dissipate heat and the longer they will stay hot enough to cook the food.
“This is really kind of a neat project,” Wood said. “We’ve got some guys from Texas A&M who are interested in this. We’re going to get some good data out of this.”
The program
The Cultural Management Program, which manages resources representing more than 10,000 years of occupying the land, has been in existence on Fort Hood since 1978 and is one of the stronger programs situated on military posts in the United States.
“We have 98 percent of the installation surveyed for archaeology and cultural resources,” Wood said.
Over the years, there have been some pretty significant finds on post.
In 1970 construction crews who were building the Pershing Creek Housing area discovered the partial tusk of an extinct wooly mammoth.
Discoveries on the more than 2,200 recorded archaeological sites range from prehistoric rock shelters to historic homesteads and cemeteries, early military structures and even a few sites considered sacred by a number of Native American tribes.
Chances are pretty good that researchers and archaeologists have barely scratched the surface since most prehistoric sites go quite deep.
Building goodwill
Fuller coordinates with seven Native American tribes in the United States to ensure their ancient sites remain intact, and as protected as possible.
Those tribes include the Apache, Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Tonkawa, Mescalaro Apache and Witchita.
“Obviously, some are more interested than others, it just depends on the tribe and how active their cultural resources division is,” Fuller said.
When tribal remains are located or stolen remains recovered, Fuller contacts the tribes to see what they’d like done, and often they will agree to come to Fort Hood to perform a sacred ceremony.
Many of the tribal remains are reburied at the Leon River Medicine Wheel, which is regarded as a sacred ceremonial site, or at the Comanche National Indian Cemetery, both of which are managed and protected by Fort Hood.
But coordinating and cooperating is not just about reburial, it’s also about learning, especially when archaeologists find something new.
“We provide them all of our stuff and they give us feedback on what they think the archaeological site means,” she said. “As opposed to us telling them what it is, we want them to tell us what they think it is, too. It’s very much a cooperative effort.”
These sites are sitting on Paluxy Sandstone formation which was once the coast of the Gulf of Mexico something like 80 million years ago. I am standing on this bedrock in the photo shown below . . .
No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals.
Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge, in England, agreed and went on to remark on the obvious. By modern standards, he said, the figurine’s blatant sexuality “could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.”
The tiny statuette was uncovered in September in a cave in southwestern Germany, near Ulm and the Danube headwaters. Dr. Conard’s report on the find is being published Thursday in the journal Nature.
The discovery, Dr. Conard wrote, “radically changes our view of the origins of Paleolithic art.” Before this, he noted, female imagery was unknown, most carvings and cave drawings being of mammoths, horses and other animals.
Scholars say the figurine is roughly contemporaneous with other early expressions of artistic creativity, like drawings on cave walls in southeastern France and northern Italy. The inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering have long been debated by art historians.
Commenting in the journal on the discovery, Dr. Mellars, who did not take part in the research, wrote that the artifact was one of 25 similar carvings found over the past 70 years in other caves in the Swabian region of southern Germany, “a veritable art gallery of early ‘modern’ human art.”
These sites, he concluded, “must be seen as the birthplace of true sculpture in the European — maybe global — artistic tradition.”
Scholars say the large caves were presumably inviting sanctuaries for populations of modern humans migrating then into Central and Western Europe. These were the people who eventually displaced the resident Neanderthals, around 30,000 years ago.
Dr. Conard reported that the discovery was made beneath three feet of red-brown sediment in the floor of the Hohle Fels Cave. Six fragments of the carved ivory, including all but the left arm and shoulder, were recovered. When he brushed dirt off the torso, he said, “the importance of the discovery became apparent.”
The short, squat torso is dominated by oversize breasts and broad buttocks. The split between the two halves of the buttocks is deep and continuous without interruption to the front of the figurine. A greatly enlarged vulva emphasizes the “deliberate exaggeration” of the figurine’s sexual characteristics, Dr. Conard said.
The object reminded experts of the most famous of the sexually explicit figurines from the Stone Age, the Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria a century ago. That Venus is somewhat larger and dated about 24,000 years ago, but it is in a style that appeared to have been prevalent for several thousand years. Scholars speculate that these Venus figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals.
Sexual images in early Homo sapiens European art: A. A "Venus" figurine from Willnedorf, Austria, 105 millimeters in height, dated about 28,000 years ago; B. Female "vulvar" symbols carved on a limestone block from the La Ferrassie rock shelter, southwest France, dated about 35,000 years ago; C. A phallus, carved from the horn core of a bison, from the Blanchard rock shelter, southwest France; the carving is about 36,000 years old and is 250 millimeters long.
The Hohle Fels artifact, less than 2.5 inches long and weighing little more than an ounce, is headless. Carved at the top, instead, is a ring, evidently to allow the object to be suspended from a string or thong.
By John Horgan
SALT LAKE CITY—As deep as scientists peer into human history and prehistory, they have found evidence of violence. That was the bad news from 17 researchers in anthropology and other fields at “The Evolution of Human Aggression: Lessons for Today’s Conflicts” conference, held at the University of Utah at the end of February. The good news is that much can be done to reduce lethal conflict in the world today. As participant Frans B. M. de Waal of Emory University put it, humans are not “destined to wage war forever.”
De Waal, who studies primates, noted that observations of lethal group encounters among chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, have promulgated the fatalistic belief that “war is in our DNA.” But chimps are also “peacemakers,” de Waal pointed out; they reconcile after fights by hugging, mouth and hand kissing, mutual grooming and food sharing. Humans engage in such behavior, too, de Waal said, flashing a photograph of John McCain and George W. Bush embracing—albeit with hideously insincere grins—after their bitter primary contest in 2000.
Reconciliation takes place, de Waal contended, “whenever parties stand to lose if their relationship deteriorates.” Chimpanzees from different troops, which compete for territory and hence treat one another with lethal hostility, rarely if ever reconcile, he noted. Among humans, however, “interdependencies between groups or nations are not unusual.” To promote peace, he suggested, nations should foster economic interdependence through alliances such as the European Union. Although the E.U. has “not created love between Germany and France” and other former adversaries, de Waal acknowledged, it has greatly reduced the likelihood of war in Europe.
Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham agreed with de Waal that primate violence is not compulsive, or “instinctual,” but is “extremely sensitive to context.” One of the most robust predictors of violence between two groups of primates, Wrangham proposed, is an imbalance of power. Chimps from one troop invariably attack individuals from a rival troop when the attackers have an overwhelming number advantage and hence a minimal risk of death or injury.
Although humans are much less risk-averse than chimps, Wrangham asserted, human societies—from hunter-gatherers to modern nations such as the U.S.—also behave much more aggressively toward rival groups when they are confident they can prevail. Reducing imbalances of power between nations, Wrangham said, should reduce the risk of war.
So should controlling population, according to anthropologist Polly Wiessner of the University of Utah. Wiessner is an authority on the Enga, a tribal people who raise crops and pigs in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Warfare first surged among them 200 years ago, Wiessner said, after the introduction of sweet potatoes led to food surpluses and rapid population growth. Mortality rates subsided after Enga elders instituted stricter rules for warfare, such as bans on killing of women and mutilation.
The introduction of modern medicine into Enga society some 25 years ago decreased childhood mortality, triggering another “youth bulge” and surge in tribal conflict. Mortality rates have soared, Wiessner explained, because Engans now fight with shotguns and automatic weapons rather than clubs, knives and spears, their traditional weapons. Moreover, young mercenaries called “Rambos” hire themselves out to tribes in exchange for cash, young women and other booty. Together with promoting birth control, giving young men “a meaningful way forward in life” should decrease violence, Wiessner proposed.
Climate change has also driven conflict. This lesson emerged from Patricia Lambert’s studies of the Chumash, hunter-gatherers who inhabited the coast of southern California for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. Many Chumash skeletons display signs of violence, including skull fractures and embedded arrow or spear points. Analysis of tree rings and other evidence, said Lambert, an anthropologist at Utah State University, suggest that violence among the Chumash escalated during periods of drought.
Lambert warned that droughts, which are expected to increase as a result of global warming, are already triggering conflicts around the world today. To drive this point home, she flashed a photograph of a well in Somalia; so far 250 Somalians have died battling over control of the well. To forestall such conflicts, Lambert said, governments must ensure equitable distribution of water and other resources.
The most upbeat speaker was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who argued that—contrary to what many scientists once believed—levels of violence are much lower in our era than they were before the advent of modern states some 10,000 years ago. According to ethnographic surveys and archaeological evidence, Pinker pointed out, 30 percent or more of the members of tribal societies died as a result of group violence; that percentage is some 10 times greater than the proportion of Europeans and North Americans killed by war-related causes during the cataclysmic 20th century.
Pinker identified several possible reasons for this trend. First, our increased life expectancies make us less willing to risk our lives by engaging in violence. Second, the creation of stable governments with effective legal systems and police forces has eliminated what British philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the “war of all against all” among pre-state humans. Third, mass media and travel have boosted understanding of, and empathy toward, those beyond our immediate family and even nation. This may be the best news of all: civilization, which has often been blamed for war, is actually helping us achieve peace.
This story was originally published with the title "Taming the Urge to War"
