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Did early colonials were armor? - Ep 254
3k Plays1 year ago
We’ve got three great news stories for you this week. We start with the oldest rock paintings in South America. They might be conveying a message. Next up is a tale of discarded armor from the first capital of Maryland. Finally, we talk about a 10,000 year old wall that was used to hunt reindeer. It’s now under 70 feet of water!
Links
Segment 1
- This Ancient Cave Art Passed Survival Information Across 130 Human Generations in Patagonia, Study Suggests
- Earliest directly dated rock art from Patagonia reveals socioecological resilience to mid-Holocene climate (Science Advances)
Segment 2
Segment 3
- Stone Age Wall Discovered Beneath the Baltic Sea Helped Early Hunters Trap Reindeer
- Research Paper: A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Highlights of Episode 254
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 254. On today's show, we talk about Patagonian cave paintings, armor discarded by early colonialists, and an ancient game drive fence found underwater.
00:00:28
Speaker
Let's dig a little deeper. Don't forget to check in the lake or something, because there could be something cool in there. There could be. I know. You never know. You never know. Let's swim a little deeper.
Hosts' Mexican Adventure
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. How's it going? You know how it's going. I just like the awkward silence. Like, man, I have to weirdly answer this question again. Hey, you open the show.
00:00:56
Speaker
Um, maybe, maybe I should, we should try something different. No, we're doing this now. Okay. All right. Speaking of trying something different, we're going to try something different than Mexico because we've been here for 30 days and we're leaving today. We are leaving today. It has been quite a trip. The weather's been gorgeous. It was amazing, but it seemed to go off to do things, different things. So yeah.
00:01:19
Speaker
Yep. And before we forget, you will have an interview next week, which
Upcoming Interview in Saudi Arabia
00:01:24
Speaker
will be pretty good. She's over in Saudi Arabia, our guest, and we're talking about all the really cool things that they're finding over there. So that's mostly because we'll be out of the country and not wanting to podcast. Yes. We're taking a real vacation next week. So we prepped ahead for once and have an interview. Indeed.
00:01:42
Speaker
If the rest of our colleagues on the Archaeology Podcast Network are listening to this and don't prep ahead, then they will not have an episode that week. So if you don't hear one from them, that's why. Yeah, there you go. All right, so let's do some news items.
Patagonian Cave Art: Communication & Survival
00:01:56
Speaker
This first one is called, this ancient cave art passed survival information across 130 human generations in Patagonia, study suggests. Found this on Apple News.
00:02:07
Speaker
and the real articles in Science Advances, but this one was pretty cool because, I mean, this is kind of what Rock Art does. It can communicate information, typically it does, because somebody reading it can understand what it says, even if that's just saying, hey, I had a religious experience here, that could be what it communicates, but maybe something else.
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's cool. So the cave is called Cueva Juanol 1, and it's situated about a thousand meters above sea level in the desert of northwest Patagonia in Argentina.
00:02:39
Speaker
Patagonia has got to be amazing. Oh god, it's gotta be amazing. I would love to go there. I know it's like way down at the tip Yeah, and this is you know in Patagonia right, but it's still a thousand meters above sea level Yeah, you must shoot up from the sea the Andes are I am assuming to see Andes all the way down there But they are insane. I've been to Peru to the Andes in Peru and like is it the Andes all the way down there?
00:03:00
Speaker
Maybe there might be a couple mountain ranges coming together, but all I know is that in Peru, it was just like shocking how tall the mountains were there. So I imagine it's very similar.
00:03:11
Speaker
This particular, I don't know, site, I guess. Cave? Yeah. There are 895 different rock paintings known as pictographs because they're painted on, that's pictographs. Pictures. I don't know where they get that word, but pictographs. Petroglyphs are usually carved, etched, packed somehow. You remove material to make a petroglyph. You just paint to make a pictograph. And sometimes you have painted petroglyphs, but they're still petroglyphs by default. Yeah, they can do a combination of the two, yeah.
00:03:38
Speaker
Anyway, they're grouped into 46 motifs. 446. Sorry, 446 motifs. So you've got all these different paintings and areas, and then you've got these groupings called motifs. So that's how they're looking at that. One of them in particular is a comb-like pattern that was drawn over and over again for thousands of years. And if you look at the pictures, they've got a bunch of them kind of side by side here in a group of six pictures, and there's just like a
00:04:04
Speaker
a line at the top, if this is oriented kind of up as you're standing looking at it. Yeah, you're looking directly on it. Right. Yeah. There's like a line with relatively evenly spaced, but differently length lines coming down from it. And they look, I mean, two of them actually, well, they're doing de-stretch on it. Yeah. So those are exactly the same. Yeah, there's actually three images. Yeah. I just realized that.
00:04:26
Speaker
Anyway, they do have different length lines on them and they're kind of different shaped, but the overall theme here is basically the same. And to me, that middle one looks like a kipu, like the codex is from the Maya area, you know, that's got like a rope with knots coming down from it. So anyway, this is what they're talking about, having been there a long time and written over and over and over again.
00:04:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. Their reporting in Science Advances and the lead author Guadalupe Romero Villanueva is an archaeologist with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council.
Long-Term Use of Patagonian Pictographs
00:05:00
Speaker
He says the pictographs turned out to be several millennia older than they expected. Yeah. Yeah. So that's cool.
00:05:06
Speaker
the earliest date to 8,200 years ago and span 3,000 years, which is about 130 human generations. And still like headline that grabs you. That is insane though, to have a place that was used for the same purpose for that long. That's, that's crazy. Yeah. There's another picture in the Apple news article, which I'm sure they pulled from the report, but this cave is like the opening of it. You can see it from miles away. It's gigantic.
00:05:34
Speaker
We could drive our RV into there judging by the people standing there. And it's technically life science, not Apple News that's reported on this. Life Science is the name of... I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just looking at it in Apple. Yes. We'll find the actual Life Science link and share it. Well, and it's actually from the Smithsonian and they're saying what Life Science said. Oh, really? And Life Science is saying... Oh my gosh. Yeah, Science Advances. And it's just like this whole... Yeah. Oh, it is. Somebody out there next week is going to be saying, according to the archaeology podcast... Right.
00:06:05
Speaker
who read the article from the Smithsonian, who talked to the guys from Life Science. But that's how journalism goes, so yeah. The second cousin of the sister of the lead author said,
00:06:17
Speaker
Anyway. Anyway, these are the oldest known pigment based cave art on the entire continent. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. Yeah. And that is kind of the most interesting part for these researchers. It's that this one motif was drawn so many times over 3000 years. Like why the same motif and why for such a long period of time? What does that mean?
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, they're throwing some stuff out there and they think it may have been a way to preserve some sort of cultural knowledge, like how to get somewhere, you know, here's what this thing looks like or here's how you do this. I mean, we would never know because our abstract symbology that we have in our heads and that people down in Patagonia today have in their heads is very different than 8,000 years ago.
00:07:02
Speaker
They just, their brains were just wired a bit differently because of their surroundings and how they lived and just, you know, time. So Patagonia was the last area of the continent to be settled by people of the late Pleistocene.
00:07:15
Speaker
And that ended 11,700 years ago. Okay. They're saying that, but I'm not sure where that sentence comes from. Yeah. When I saw that in our notes, I was like, really? Cause I think we have some really, really old sites down there, right? Right. So this is using the textbook party line of probably people came down from Alaska, the Bering land bridge and all that stuff and down through the ice free corridor and then eventually made their way all the way to the tip of Patagonia.
00:07:39
Speaker
And that has been the common party line for a long time. However, there are sites in South America that date to much older. And there's a lot of relatively convincing evidence that, you know, some of the South Pacific Islanders made it to South America. Right. And maybe they didn't live there very long. Maybe they didn't make the journey. And, you know, once they got there, they died. Who knows? But it's every possibility that they could have spawned a civilization and just kept on going.
00:08:03
Speaker
And I think that we have talked about this. We did a series on pre Clovis sites in the Americas, and we did talk about at least one of the sites that's in South America that might be older than what, like you said, the party line is. So I'll find that and link to it in the show notes too, so that you can go listen to that if you're interested.
Dating Techniques in Archaeology
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, most of the other cave art is geometric shapes, dots, circles, parallel lines, polygons, and they're all painted the color red, those lines and things like that. There are other colors, and other shapes, because they painted human silhouettes and faces, animal silhouettes, mostly large flightless birds called rays, or rayas, I think it's called. Rayas, yeah.
00:08:41
Speaker
Guanacos. Guanacos. Yeah. Relatives of la llamas. It's like a smaller, it's like a smaller llamas. It's actually a smaller alpaca. They're very cute and they have nice soft fur. That's why I know about them. Ah, I see. And there was also some white and yellow and black pants. So a little bit of variety there, but mostly red.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yes. And so your ear should pick up about the black paint because it's black because it contained burned wood. And that is something that can be dated using radiocarbon dating. So that's how they have such great dates for this stuff. That is not common for petroglyphs. It is more so for pictographs because it is pigment. So sometimes there's stuff in the pigment that they can date. It's nice though to actually be able to date stuff that is painted on walls, right?
00:09:28
Speaker
Right. And I was actually a little concerned with that, hoping to read more when I first read that because I'm like, well, black wasn't used very much, though. But they're using this little bit of black to date the whole entire thing. But no, four of the comb like paintings had reddish black pigments. So they were mixing. Obviously were mixing to get different colors.
00:09:48
Speaker
or something happened and somebody put black over the top of it, that's the other thing. I think they would be able to tell if black was put over the top of red rather than mixing, something like that. But anyway, that black was enough to send in for carbon dating because you only need a very, very tiny amount these days to
Interpreting Symbols & Rituals in Archaeology
00:10:06
Speaker
do that. We're pretty good at it. So they were able to determine the ages of three of them. They don't say why the other one failed. Maybe it just was a corrupted sample or something like that.
00:10:15
Speaker
The era they date to corresponds to an extremely dry period, which would have led to sparse groups of few people in hunter-gatherer groups. So we're talking about people who aren't seeing very many other of their peers. They're saying they'll probably see another group.
00:10:32
Speaker
be like, hey, I haven't seen you guys in a while. I wonder if they would have been, you know, territorial and violent towards each other only because of like, hey, they're coming for our resources. Or if it's the opposite of my God, we haven't seen anybody in five years come over here and talk to us. I would hope it would be the latter, but I guess it just depends on how resource scarce the area is. But yeah.
00:10:54
Speaker
I think the researchers are going for the latter because they're saying the rock paintings could have been a way to maintain cultural knowledge among people that were highly dispersed. They likely visited the site over and over and over again. This could have been on people's round to come through. They just stop in and see what new paintings are on the wall, maybe, if that's communicating information. That's the other thing.
00:11:14
Speaker
First off, how do they know which one is like the most recent? I mean, I guess it would look fresher, but everything looked fresh. But if they're going yearly, then they and they have a good memory for what was there the previous year, then they're like, oh, John drew this one today. Yeah, like this one is new. So this this happened in the last year. What is this telling us now? Right. And it's crazy, too, because I mean, they only put pictures of a few of them up on on the site here, but there were many of them. And.
00:11:39
Speaker
I'm wondering, man, I wonder if they can toss this into some AI and just start coming out with some patterns. We'd never be able to read it and say, this is what it means. I just don't understand. We don't even know what it's actually trying to communicate. Is it representing something geographical? Is it representing some sort of early language type of thing? What is it? The AI would probably have to know that or have an incredible amount of information in order to say, I think it's this. But it might be able to find some patterns.
00:12:07
Speaker
What I'm finding interesting is that the researchers and also this article really focus on the comb-like drawings, right? And because there's so many of them and they cross this huge span of time. But if you look at the picture at the very top of the article, it's almost like
00:12:23
Speaker
It's very geometric, but almost like map-like, right? Yeah. It's interesting. So like, I'm like, what could the combs mean? Why do they use so many of them? Maybe it was some kind of, I don't know, waited to say who you were. Maybe it was a signature of some sort, I guess.
00:12:38
Speaker
No, that doesn't make sense either. I don't know. It's hard to say, but the more elaborate drawings do seem like they could be somehow communicating information that we don't understand anymore. So it's very interesting though. I think they're probably on the right track, these are smart people, of saying something to preserve cultural knowledge. They don't say what that is.
00:12:59
Speaker
There's not very many places where you see a variation on the same thing drawn over and over and over again for that biggest span of time. Now that being said, lots of petroglyph sites have your typical swirls, lines, squiggles, but those usually represent common things like snakes or lightning or water or something like that. So some of those things are typically represented in the same way.
00:13:24
Speaker
And maybe we're missing the point on some of those swirls and spirals that we see on different places. You know, like, oh, that's just that's just a spiral. It doesn't mean anything because this little comb like thing that definitely looks like something you don't see in your everyday life. But spirals. Yeah, sure. We know spirals are. So maybe they're being overlooked by researchers as something that's transmitting cultural knowledge.
00:13:44
Speaker
They could be, it's hard though because it's always going to be speculation. Until we get a time machine we can go back and talk to these people who are drawing or carving on the walls, like there's just no way to know what they're doing. It could just be a doodle, you know? Or it could have more significance, you just don't know.
00:14:00
Speaker
But that's one of the last things they say here is that there is a ton of rock art in here in this one cave and in the area, but none of it has the volume and diversity of this cave site. And none of them have this symbol written so many times over and over again. So this is a special. This is definitely something special. Yeah. Whether it, again, whether it's religious or spiritual in nature or communicative in some other way. It's ritual. It's definitely ritual.
00:14:27
Speaker
So, although I heard somebody, or I saw somebody talk about ritual on a Facebook post, an archeology Facebook group post, and somebody was like, oh, why did archeologists always say ritual? They were kind of making fun of it. But this one person actually gave a pretty thoughtful thing and they're like, listen, ritual doesn't have to mean like God and religion. Do you have coffee every morning? That's a ritual. That's a ritual. Do you, you know, whatever you do, ritual is very loosely defined. Yeah.
00:14:52
Speaker
Like, I can't go to sleep at night unless I read my book, and it might only be for 30 seconds, but I have to do it. Yeah, when I hear her head hit the iPad, I know it's time to... Take the iPad away. She's falling asleep. All right. Well, it sounds like you could use something like some rare armor to cover your iPad at night, so it doesn't get hurt. It could be my head, not my iPad. Why are you worried about my iPad and not my head? Come on. Because, you know, heads heal, iPads have to be purchased.
00:15:21
Speaker
Wow. We'll see you in a minute. Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 254. And we are covering a rare piece of armor, but we're also covering a rare article from the United States. Rachel tells me no on that, but I just feel like we never cover anything over here because nothing's ever in the news over here because it's all wrapped up in NDAs and, you know, CRM projects where you can't talk about anything. That is true. There's a lot of that. I wish we did have statistics, though, because I know we talk about it more than you think we do.
00:15:51
Speaker
Sure, but it just feels like not as much. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's find out what's all
Discoveries at the Maryland Colonial Site
00:15:56
Speaker
about this one. This article is called Rare Armor Unearthed at site of 17th century Fort in Maryland. And this is from Apple News. No, I'm just kidding. It's the Washington Post.
00:16:06
Speaker
All right, so this is pretty cool, actually. Archaeologist at historic St. Mary's City pulled a slab of metal out of the ground, and it was slightly concave and about the size of a cafeteria tray, they said. It was covered in surface grit, but an x-ray showed its secrets. It turned out that this was a 300-year-old piece of armor called a tacit. And a tacit, if you can just imagine a knight's armor hung from the breastplate, so the plate that's around your breastplate,
00:16:32
Speaker
and protects the thighs. So it kind of hung over and there was one on each thigh. Oh, I see. Okay. I was not getting that, but that makes sense. So your breastplate would come all the way down and cover your abdomen too. It sounds like these would hang down off of that. And yeah, they're like attached to it probably with, probably with like loops or tied on or something like that. Got it. Yeah.
00:16:53
Speaker
And this one's really cool because you can see the hearts. Like, there's definitely heart symbols on there. Oh, there are. I see them. One's upside down and the other two are not. It probably has to do with some crest or house symbol or something like that. Yeah, probably. Why would you put hearts on your armor otherwise? You know, it was chivalry, right? Like, knights loved and all that. I don't think so. I don't know. It was lightly brought to the site by some of the first European colonists in the mid 1600s, they say.
00:17:20
Speaker
And this same project discovered a long lost, palisaded fort erected in Maryland by the first white settlers in 1634. So that is a very long time ago. They also found the skeleton of a teenager with leg fractures. And other finds include a pair of 17th century scissors, a decorative braid made of metal thread, and the outline of a large building that was erected shortly after the settlers arrived. So pretty significant early site, early colonial site.
00:17:49
Speaker
I feel like there's not a lot of those because they've, you know, gone away through time. But yeah. Yeah. And it's really cool because calling us back then, you know, kept journals and things like that. So we actually know quite a bit about how they got here, when they got here, what they did when they got here. So yeah.
00:18:05
Speaker
You know, there's still a little conjecture about the armor, which we'll talk about, but it's pretty cool. This building, by the way, is one of the largest of this earlier period that's ever been found. And they're really not sure what the purpose of it was. They say it could have been a home, public building, religious, civic, military, pretty much anything. They kind of contradict their own opinion here a little bit later. We'll talk about that. Yeah. So historical accounts have the colonists living in the ships that they arrived in while building a storehouse and guardhouse. Yes. And I have heard that before because... I mean, why not?
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, you've got a good, safe space, even though you have to go back and forth on little boats to get to it. But you know. Why are there so many mosquitoes here? Back to the water. They're going to stay on the ship. Right.
00:18:47
Speaker
Researchers originally found what they thought was a cellar, and that led them to the larger building. So when we've done block excavations before, you're typically starting in areas that some previous research had said, hey, something is here. And a lot of times on our CRM projects, if you've got the funding to do full different phases, you'll typically start with a shovel testing survey spaced 20, 30 meters apart. If you find something in a shovel test that's positive, then you do this cruciform test they call where you go kind of a
00:19:14
Speaker
in between. Yeah. North, south, east, west kind of thing, depending on how your transects are oriented. You're trying to just like narrow in on where the edges of the site are. Right. And you're doing it in a very pockmarked kind of way because this is not a full scale excavation. But it is systematic. It's on a grid so that you can. Yeah. Yeah.
00:19:30
Speaker
And then the next phase, some call phase two, but those phases are arbitrary. But the next phase is often some sort of like one by one unit, one by one meter unit excavation or trench excavation, or depending where you're at, it could be a backhoe or something comes in and says, let's dig this up and see what's here.
00:19:48
Speaker
And then if it still just like keeps going, then you'll do a full scale block excavation and you'll probably start where these hotspots are. And then if you find these features, you will just continue to excavate out. And if you find something that goes into the sidewall of the one by one unit that you're digging in, we almost always dig in one meter by one meter units, then you'll just expand another one by one meter unit in
Understanding Site Usage in St. Mary's
00:20:09
Speaker
that direction. And that's how these block excavations kind of spider web out. They look like a nerve center almost. So it's just like, I'm just going out. And that's how they found this stuff.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. So the building had the remains of large timbers used as support and it was large enough that they think the building had a second half or whole floor. Yeah. So it could have been like a, like a storage area up there. Yeah. Or like a balcony that would like look over below something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
00:20:37
Speaker
They're like, why else would you use such big timbers? Yep. Yeah. But this is where the contradictory part comes in from before. There was no fireplace that they can find. No evidence of a fireplace indicating that probably wasn't a home or a guard house because one of those would have had a fireplace in it. If you're living there, you have to have a source of heat, especially in Maryland in the winter. So yeah, for sure. Now it's possible that they just didn't find it, I guess. I think you know where the fireplace was at this point. If you know where all the walls are. Yeah. Yeah. You would find something.
00:21:05
Speaker
Inside, they also found musket parts and 1,200 pieces of lead shot. I didn't actually put this in the notes, but it was lead buckshot, which is not used for warfare. It's used for hunting. This wasn't like a military fort. They call it a fort because they had to protect themselves and it's palisaded, but this isn't a military operation. They weren't there to wage war.
00:21:27
Speaker
They also recovered many glass and stone trade beads from Europe and Asia. They were likely used as trade items with the local Native Americans. And then the tasset was found in the cellar. Yeah. As we mentioned, it was decorated with rivets in the shapes of three hearts and probably included the second tasset. You know, one for each leg, like you said.
00:21:47
Speaker
This may have been, this is the crucial part here, it may have been just discarded and the tassets and the other armor because they deemed it unnecessary for the environment. This isn't England. You're not going to comfortably wear armor in Virginia. Right. Unless they were fighting other people who were also wearing armor, then why would they need it? Those arrows can hit you from a distance.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose, I suppose. And some of them can get through that armor. Yeah. I also feel like armor kind of started to go out of, not fashion exactly, but it just wasn't the style, you know? That could be true. Yeah. You know, when, when, you know, warfare was big and people had to defend their homes, like in the UK, in England, in that area, on their own land, you know, then yeah, it's probably beneficial to have some armor, a suit of armor, so to speak. But also,
00:22:36
Speaker
I always kind of wondered that. I didn't think about that until we read this article. I always kind of wondered why, you know, most of the United States in those early days were settled by British settlers. So why don't we have more castles and armor? Why doesn't it look like little UK on the entire east coast of the United States? It's because the environment was so vastly different. They didn't have the stone or nowhere was to build like castles and things like that, the things that they're used to. And it wasn't the people who live in castles that came over anyway.
00:23:04
Speaker
Right. It was none. Yeah. And also it was probably the people who didn't own armor that originally came over either, right? They just, it just wasn't their thing, but some people obviously did. And they're like, it is too hot for this. Yes. I mean, in England, sure. Like you could probably wear armor almost year round and like,
00:23:25
Speaker
It might get warm sometimes, but you'll be all right. But in the States, no. Sometimes I'd just put on my dinner armor if I was over there. Like, you know, just lounging around by the gigantic fireplace. Right. So. Well, St. Mary's became Maryland's first capital and was home to the first state house. So it's a pretty important place, which does make me wonder if they had an idea of where this fort was going to be kind of sort of just based on the importance of the area. They probably kind of knew that this was a significant building and that they were going to find things there. So, yeah.
00:23:54
Speaker
Interestingly, though, the fort only lasted from 1634 to 1642. At least we think so because it's no longer mentioned in any records after 1642. That is crazy. Well, which probably means that this place was successful and it grew quickly. Other settlers probably came. They expanded it out. I mean, this became a city. Maryland's first capital, as you said, and first state house.
00:24:17
Speaker
So maybe they just didn't need this building anymore? It just seems unlikely in a resource poor environment, not really poor, but like, you know, where you had to construct everything yourself, right? Yeah. And maybe the city to expand it in a different direction, or maybe they needed the pieces for something else and they tore down. Oh yeah. That's possible that they just reused it to build something else. Yeah.
00:24:38
Speaker
one of the first buildings they built, it was pretty poorly or inefficiently built. It's cool and all. Let's just take those supplies. That eight foot wide beam that you used doesn't have a second floor. Let's use it in a building that does.
00:24:54
Speaker
All right. Well, that's about it for that one. Pretty cool. It's always cool to see some of that older stuff. That's like prehistoric in the United States. It's super old. Right. And it's nice to talk about something from the colonial period in the United States. It's not like Jamestown or like all the places you've heard of before. I've never heard of St. Mary's. I didn't realize that it was an early colonial settlement. Maybe that just shows that
00:25:17
Speaker
my studies in school were not directed in that, you know, I just didn't learn about that kind of stuff or I don't remember it. Maybe we'll have to go through it because I've, Maryland is one of the states that I have never been to. Oh really? Yeah. So I think I've been through like the corner of Delaware or something like that, but that whole little area there.
00:25:34
Speaker
We'll have to go through there on our trip down to East Coast this summer. Yeah. I mean, I've technically been there, but not spent very much time. So it would be fun to do that. I want to go to Annapolis. All right, we're in off track. Yep, off track. All right, so you know one thing that got people on track a long time ago was big stone walls actually got the deer on track so they could die. Oh, wow. Back in a minute. That's the whole article. Done. See ya.
Stone Age Hunting Techniques Underwater
00:25:59
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 254. This is our last article for the day, and it is from Smithsonian Magazine. Again, stone age wall discovered beneath the Baltic Sea helped early hunters trap reindeer. And when you're reading an article title and an ad comes up, Smithsonian,
00:26:18
Speaker
It doesn't really help me out that much. You know how you can get rid of that by paying to be like a member. If you have an iPad or something, hit show reader and get rid of all that stuff. Or support the good work they do. Support the good work we do too. It's a big ask. Support us instead. We're little. They're big. That's true. They are big.
00:26:42
Speaker
Anyway. So first off, this is a totally accidental discovery. Yes. Not archeologists or anybody else like that found this. Right. But a research vessel, which they didn't say what they were doing, operating off the coast of Germany, noticed a submerged stretch of stones that they weren't looking for at all and had no idea what it was. So they reported it out. And it turns out it could be Europe's oldest known manmade megastructure. And it's basically a wall built by Stone Age hunters. Yeah, that is super cool. Yeah.
00:27:11
Speaker
It was named Blinkerwall, which is the most badass name ever, and has 1,300 stones and about 300 large boulders. I think you said the name wrong.
00:27:22
Speaker
blinker wall. So it's over half a mile long. It's about one and a half feet tall. So not super tall and we'll, yeah, it doesn't need to. We'll talk about that in a minute, but, and it's about 70 feet underwater, which these, these like shoreline sites like this are always so crazy to me because it's like, man, when they built this thing and it looks like it was about 10,000 years ago, they're saying,
00:27:49
Speaker
It was that was land that you know, you can't have a better example of that happening than in archaeological sites because people lived here and they did stuff here and now it's all underwater, which is crazy.
00:28:01
Speaker
Yeah, like you said, it's 10,000 years old, and like you said before that, it was 70 feet underwater, and that's kind of how they're dating this, if you're wondering how they got the dating of it. It's because we have pretty good knowledge of how the ice sheets melted and how sea levels rose and when those happened. So if you're like, well, when was this not underwater?
00:28:21
Speaker
probably this much time ago. That is such an interesting way to date a site, right? Again, these shoreline underwater sites are always so crazy to me because yeah, you have access to a totally different data method that you do not have on dry land. That's really cool. So here is why they think it was obviously not natural and built by humans and what it could have been used for.
00:28:42
Speaker
reindeer reindeer they used it to trap reindeer because that was the common sort of animal up there reindeer aren't just in christmas stories they actually exist and uh yeah but but this is the baltic sea right which is like pretty far north yeah so and yeah reindeer territory yeah
00:28:59
Speaker
But this also applies to other types of deer and some other animals too. They just have really tiny brains and they think really simply, right? And so something I didn't actually know, I mean, I kind of knew because we've talked about this kind of stuff before in Nevada and we've seen them all over the United States.
00:29:17
Speaker
These kinds of animals, they typically travel along straight elements of the landscape. It doesn't matter what that is. So straight elements of the landscape. So this area right here, they can tell because of the morphology of the sea floor, what's now the sea floor, but would have not been later. This wall was built near a lake.
00:29:34
Speaker
Uh-huh and the lake edge, you know, you think the reindeer would be over getting water, you know They're there or whatever, you know stuff that's growing by the lake and they're just eating and doing whatever having their salads and The hunters would come by probably scare them and the deer wouldn't jump even though they easily could it's a step over the wall. Yeah what did I say one and a half feet tall like yeah, they could easily get over that but I
00:29:57
Speaker
So they scare them, start chasing them and probably have people along the way doing the same thing. And then at some point near the end, there's a group waiting for them and they're all going to get spears. And so I'm looking at the reconstruction image, which is really cool, by the way. I love when they do stuff like that. And so you can really see how that fence would have run along the edge of a lake potentially.
00:30:19
Speaker
But I'm like, where does it end? Cause like thinking about desert kites, right? That are completely different way of doing this in a different place, but the same idea. And we'll talk about this more with our guests next week a little bit. And we've talked about it in the past, but those are the same idea where you push a herd animal of some sort and they don't jump the fence because they just think it's best to keep going straight. But at the end of it, it's like a pit or something that they fall into. And then it's just like,
00:30:45
Speaker
mass murder, but also like dinner for the next month for the village. Right. Right. Where are these animals getting pushed to? Well, they don't have to be getting pushed. There could have been something slightly bigger at the end or maybe they're just lying down next to the end of the wall or maybe it's all along the wall. When the deer go by, they throw a spear in their back.
00:31:03
Speaker
Oh yeah, they're just like lying in wait and they know they're coming. They can just, you know, take out a bunch of them when they go by. They were probably pretty good at camouflaging themselves if I had to guess. Yeah. So they were probably just lying in wait somewhere and it doesn't have to be an end point necessarily. It just has to be a distraction. Yeah. Yeah. Get them all in a line and make it a distraction. You only really need to hit one of them.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Especially a larger animal like this too. It's much bigger than the ones that they were hurting in the desert areas that we were talking about. So realistically, I mean, this is an area that gets really cold. So realistically, they probably could have preserved some of the meat, but I don't think they were doing that 10,000 years ago. No, probably not. Probably a later thing. Yeah. But the cool thing about this is we've seen game drive fences all over Nevada. I mean, that's what they're for. I mean, people got onto this idea real early and pretty much all over the world.
00:31:46
Speaker
And they figured it out. They really did figure it out. And there's one famous site in Wyoming, I want to say, called Buffalo Jump. Oh, yeah. And they literally drove these buffalo off a huge cliff. And at the bottom, it is just bones of buffalo just littering the area. And they would just, herds of buffalo would just go off of this thing. Just go off the edge. And it would just be this huge feast for a big village or lots of villages. It would be a thing. Because again, they couldn't really preserve the meat unless it was approaching winter and it was already cold.
00:32:16
Speaker
I am curious about that now. It makes me want to go do a deep dive of the research. When did smoking meet and doing preserving techniques, when did that really start for early peoples? We were even just having it frozen if you killed it in the wintertime and then cooked it later, because they had fire. That is true. In the wintertime it might, yeah. But you're running the risk, but they wouldn't have known, but you are running a risk of causing illness. Their entire lifestyle ran the risk of dying any moment.
00:32:43
Speaker
Anyway, one other thing I wanted to mention here, because I just remember reading this a long time ago. There's no way I could find the article. But under Lake Michigan, I want to say, somebody also found a game drive fence under Lake Michigan, because those lakes weren't there the whole time. They were not there. They were carved out by the glaciers, all the Great Lakes were, as they came down and formed. And when they were treated and melted, then they started to fill up with water. But before then, people lived there. And they're like, oh, look, this whole nice little area that the glacier revealed. No, they didn't do that.
00:33:12
Speaker
But they lived there and they had, there was a game drive fence right underneath there. And they don't have to be long either. If you're someplace where the animals are, they don't have to be tall, they don't have to be long, they just have to be guiding to something. That's the other thing is you have to be ready for when the herd comes, right? I mean, somebody has to be, if like going back to the example in this article,
00:33:32
Speaker
somebody has to be watching this lake edge for when the herd of animals show up. Now maybe they have an idea of that just from like watching the cyclical movements of these herd animals. We know that they are very cyclical like my parents do because the deer would come through and eat their roses on the side of their house every day.
00:33:50
Speaker
at the same time. So my dad knew when to expect them out there. And I think the animals are much the same in this scenario. So anyway, but they had to be ready, right? Like they had to watch for it. They had to know when they were going to be there and then had to be ready to take advantage of it when the pack came through or the herd, not the pack, the herd.
00:34:06
Speaker
All right. Well, I think that's all we have for this week. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Like I said, tune in for our episode next week, an interview with Dr. Rebecca Foote, and it's going to be pretty interesting, the stuff she's doing over there. Not just her, she's with an entire massive team. Yeah. Working in Saudi Arabia. Doing some cool work. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has got a really big push on doing some good cultural stuff over there right now, and lots of people are working over there.
00:34:28
Speaker
And if you're interested in learning about an area you've never heard about, check out the Heritage Voices episode from this week, too. They talk about Nubia, which was an area I had never heard about. And I really enjoyed listening to the conversation that they had there, too. So kind of a similar thing to our conversation next week. So yeah, really neat. Awesome. All right, with that, we'll see you guys later. Bye. Bye.
00:34:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:35:18
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.