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Rogue Archaeology, Lava Tubes and Castle A - TAS 266
512 Plays10 months ago
You guys answered our call, and this week we have 3 (kinda) news stories that were sent in by listeners! First, a rogue researcher doing interesting work in the Chesapeake Bay. Then, we look at ancient lava tubes in Saudi Arabia and how they were utilized by ancient people. And finally, a follow up to the Castle A fire at Montezuma’s Castle!
Links
- Ancient Chesapeake site challenges timeline of humans in the Americas
- 22,000-year-old artifacts could rewrite ancient human history in North America
- Parsons Island Maryland Synthesis of Geoarchaeological Investigations 2013-
2020 Darrin Lowery FINAL 7-2-2021 low resolution version - Archaeologists Found Human Remains in Lava Tubes, Filling in a Secret Historical Gap
- First evidence for human occupation of a lava tube in Arabia: The archaeology of Umm Jirsan Cave and its surroundings, northern Saudi Arabia (PLOS ONE Article)
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.
Pre-Clovis Site Controversies
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 266. On today's show, we talk about a controversial pre-clovis site, humid remains in lava tubes, and what really happened at Castle A. Let's dig a little deeper, but I'm not publishing this article. Everybody,
00:00:37
Speaker
welcome to The Archaeology Show.
Travel and Recording Challenges
00:00:40
Speaker
We're here. We missed a week again. So apologies. It's just been a lot of travel. That was our last 600 mile drive weekend for a while. It was for like the rest of the year, probably. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. The rest of this calendar year anyway. Yes. Yeah, so that was it's really hard to record on those weekends, and we work so much during the week that it's hard to record during the week. So, although, ironically, now that we're on the East Coast and a lot of our work schedule is West Coast based, our kind of new recording time is Monday mornings.
00:01:16
Speaker
yeah We'll see how how well that goes for us because it means we have to be prepared to record ah before Monday morning, so we'll see. But we get an extra day on the weekend and do that. That's true, because we're not driving every day. Also, as we're entering New England, we're not driving every weekend anymore either. True. We've got some two-week days here and there. Yeah, yeah but we are going to be traveling around quite a bit, just trying trying to see stuff and do things and
Mosquitoes at Lake Michigan
00:01:41
Speaker
and have fun. so yeah And you know, I don't know if we'll make it because we're currently being consumed by mosquitoes in northern Michigan. yeah It turns out like mosquitoes are a thing here, which I suppose we knew, but oh man, they are particularly bad at this park that we're in right now. I don't know if we've just been lucky or what, but I've seen more squi mosquitoes in the last 24 hours here in in Northern Michigan. We're literally sitting within view of Lake Michigan right now yeah in Upper Michigan, and I've seen more mosquitoes in the last 24 hours that I've seen since probably 2020, at least. Yeah, it's the worst we've had for sure. Granted, we try to stay away from places like this generally speaking. The high desert doesn't have mosquitoes. but Not generally. But this is a part of the country we haven't spent any time in, so we're really excited to see some new things up here. Sounds like there might be a reason for that. You need to calm down, you know?
00:02:34
Speaker
I'm pretty chill about mosquitoes. I just sort of like smack them or swat them away, but like they don't eat you you Like are enraged by them and I on the one hand feel bad for you on the other hand I'm like just calm down. It's a mosquito. Just so our listeners know I have delicious skin Rachel does not I don't give it I don't I really don't skin is acid to mosquitoes Mine is delicious I don't know why. I did hear a story a long time ago about different like body chemistry. like Some people are just more tasty than mosquitoes and others, and apparently I'm poisoned because they don't bite me. right
00:03:11
Speaker
yeah Okay, yeah, anyway. Well, we probably picked a bad article to start with, given our intro length and things like that, because this is going to go long.
Listener Articles and Chesapeake Site
00:03:19
Speaker
This is a long one, this is a big one. Our next, our last two articles are a little shorter. so But the premise of the show today? Oh yeah, the premise of the show is a list of requested news. So we've asked last time for people to send in articles and guess what they did? Yeah, it's great. We love hearing from you guys. We love hearing what you guys want to hear us talk about. And this first article is so perfect, because even if it hadn't been sent to us by two listeners, thank you Max B and Irva G. Which sounds like a cool band name, by the way. It does. But we would have absolutely talked about this no matter what, because when these kind of stories pop up, they are just like food for our brains. We love them. So what's this first article? Yeah, this is going to be fun.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, so this was prominently reported in the Washington Post. but In fact, they've got a very long, thorough article about this. They do. They really, really do. It's a good one. Yeah, and it's called, ancient Chesapeake site challenges timelines of humans in the Americas. And there's a little subtitle here. And Island eroding into the Bay offers tantalizing clues about when and how humans first made their way into North America. And it's by Carolyn Johnson on May 19th, 2024. And I would say one of the, if not the biggest question in North American archeology, if not North and South American archeology, if not Western hemisphere archeology, is when the hell did people get here? Yeah, when did we when do we start populating this these continents? When did people get here? And that's a huge, huge, huge question. yeah so And we don't know the answer. We don't know the answer, but we have sites that represent the oldest occupation in the country. And because of that, it has built this sort of like old guard, I guess you could say, around it, a little bit of gatekeeping, a little bit of this is what we know. And so therefore there couldn't be anything else about it. It couldn't be older. So a lot of these newer sites, these pre-Clovis sites, which we've talked about in previous episodes,
00:05:20
Speaker
A lot of these pre-Clovis sites are really challenging the old guard notion of Clovis first, and this is another example of that, but he this researcher is approaching this in a different way that is really not giving... Other scientists don't like the way he's approaching this, so let's just talk about what it is.
Darren Lowry's Parsons Island Discovery
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, the guy who this is all about and who wrote this paper, his name is Darren Lowry, and he's actually a geologist by training, but he calls himself an amateur archaeologist as well, because anybody who finds an artifact on the ground as a child or an adult calls himself an amateur archaeologist, which is super irritating to professional archaeologists. Now, that's not to take away from people who are, I would say, avocational archeologists. I don't like the term amateur archeologist. There's no, like, because I, you know, I don't know, took a sliver out the other day and maybe put a band-aid on, am I an amateur doctor? Like, does that make me an amateur doctor? No, it doesn't. Like, because I look at WebMD and, you know, diagnose myself, am I an amateur, you know, physician? No, I'm not. Because why are there amateur archeologists? That term really just, like, rose me the wrong way. I think that it's journalists that use that term more than the people himself. There's a lot of people out there that call themselves amateur archaeologists. Well, there are. But I don't think Darren Lowry is calling himself an amateur archaeologist. And he's got the chops, the academic chops behind him from his geology background to go past the amateur standing. This guy is really unique. Well, for geology he does.
00:06:48
Speaker
for geology, but geology and archeology have so much crossover sure that he really does have expertise over what he's looking at, not the actual artifact part of it, although maybe he does now after researching there for 10 years. But yeah I mean, so he does have a lot He's got a better foot to stand on than a lot of other people that we've talked about who are amateurs just throwing things out there. Like, you know, our favorite, Graham Hancock. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even even Graham Hancock, well, not.
00:07:21
Speaker
I guess academically trained in these sciences. i mean Given his age, he's almost studied more than some people you know even younger than him. But you've got to have the am and academics to put behind it. At least Darren does have a tangential field yeah that he has a PhD in. right Anyway. You'll learn you learn a little later why we're not giving him full credit here. yeah anyway All right, so let's talk about the place that we're talking about
Pre-Clovis Artifacts Dating
00:07:44
Speaker
here. Parsons Island in Maryland has a bluff on it that kind of rises above the beach and the bluff itself is sort of crumbling and eroding away. This is pretty typical of the Chesapeake Bay area, I think, is these bluffs like this, right?
00:07:58
Speaker
Now, Darren Lowry is local to the area, and ever since he was a kid, he's walked the beaches, picked up artifacts when he found them. You know, like you said, one of those people who, like, has been interested in it since he was a kid and maybe, yeah, maybe thinks he's got a little bit more expertise in it than he actually does. Like, that kind of a situation, right? He became a trained geologist specializing in the coastline of the Chesapeake Bay. And this is where the academic chops that we're talking about come into play. He did publish an article in 2010 in Quaternary Science Reviews, describing the deposition of windblown silt between 13,000 and 41,000 years ago at Miles Point in Eastern Maryland. So right in this area. And he's also working in the time period when early people were coming to this part of the continent. You know, yeah so yeah, so like he does have experience that crosses over into archaeology.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, and he's been looking for areas that have a better picture of the geological record in this area because there's a lot of erosion going on here. I mean, there's hurricanes, there's some pretty severe sea erosion going on pretty much continuously in this area. So he's looking for places that have just better geology, basically. And in boating around with a colleague, he found Parsons Island, which is actually privately owned by the Cochran, or Corcoran family, I guess it's pronounced, Corcoran family. And with their permission, he started studying some of the bluffs in geological layers on that island. Yeah. By the way, who owns an island in freaking Maryland? They are likely very rich and they use it as like a retreat. They don't even live there. So, yeah, of course they do. So he built a team around this work that he wanted to do with filling in like the geological picture of this area. And it sort of seems to be like this motley crew of collaborators working together. Right. That's how it started anyway. Yeah.
00:09:46
Speaker
And then in 2013, they found a leaf shaped prehistoric stone tool jutting out of the eroding bluff. So kind of still in context at that point. Sounds like it's in context. Yeah. And so this is where they use their geological expertise to sort of like be able to start saying things about this. They think it's in context and then based on its location and what they already knew about the dates of the geologic layers above and below it. They knew that it was older than the Clovis time period, which is in the, what, like 10 to 12,000 years ago date range, right? They knew that this was older. It had to be older because of the layer, the stratigraphic layer that it was embedded in, okay? yeah
00:10:29
Speaker
Yeah, they used two different methods to date the sediment around the artifact, both of which came in around 20,000 years old. Which is much older than Clovis. Yeah, which is quite a bit older. yeah They conducted a formal top-down excavation and recovered 286 artifacts. yeah They set the sediment out to labs to study ancient pollen and microfossils, which is you know pretty well-established sciences. Yeah. and I don't think they have the results back of that yet, either, because they didn't really talk about it anymore, just that they have done it and are waiting awaiting yeah Well, I mean, if they did this in 2013, I hope. Well, they've been excavating since then. The paper that this is based on was actually published in 2021. And we'll talk about where it was published in a second here. But yeah, so it's it's ongoing work. but Yeah, and he does think some of the artifacts may have been transported downslope on that bluff a little bit before they were buried and may have a date range of 15,000 to 20,500 years old, give or take, yeah which is possible.
00:11:23
Speaker
so And at the time that the artifacts were deposited, were you know supposedly deposited, I guess we have to put that in there. yeah The area would not have been coastline at that time. they they were It was like ah a swale where water would have collected, kind of creating like a small pond. And then it was protected by a dune with trees on it. So it was near the coast, but not actual coastline at that time. This would have been during the last glacial maximum, which means the peak amount of glaciers in the world, which means the lowest sea levels. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. yeah And right now we're we're on the rise again. and So yeah that's part of why these sites are in danger is because because of light bulbs. We're on the rise again. yeah
00:12:08
Speaker
But yeah, the water is is rising. We'll talk about how bad the erosion has been on this island to shortly here. But yeah, like they're these sites are being lost quickly due to erosion. yeah So in general, archaeologists working on pre-clovis sites, right? yeah It's been tough. It's been 20 or 30 years of the institution pushing back against them in the early days, even outright dismissing their work. There was the Clovis First thing where they there couldn't possibly have been people here before that. they had There's a lot of reasons why the institution just didn't believe these older sites. But I think at this point, it's very well established that there was people here before the Clovis people. oh yeah And all we're doing what we're doing now is just trying to fill in that picture, right? So yeah these guys here think that that's what they're doing, that they're going to be able to help fill in this picture.
00:13:04
Speaker
Which sounds great. There's a lot of evidence in the west of pre-clovis occupation. There's the western stem tradition. there's the yeah i mean There's just a lot. There's the Paisley Caves in Oregon, yeah which dates 14,000, 15,000 years. so There's a lot of pre-clovis stuff. So pre-clovis is not really a question anymore. It's
Publication and Peer Review Debate
00:13:23
Speaker
not. i mean and yeah and We'll get into this again a little bit more. but One of the reasons people kind of stick to their guns in academia is because they but a lot of people build their careers on these things. They do. And it's difficult to walk back something you built your career on because you've got a lot of academic integrity built on it. And and you know the minute you start saying, oh, I guess I was wrong, it's like, now what do you do with your career? It's like, you know yeah. You're 60, you published 58 papers on this thing, and then 10 books, and you're like, ah, crap. Yeah. Now what do I do? The proper way to view it is not that you were wrong, but that you're evolving as you have more evidence and more study. But I just think a lot of academic people are just not able to view it that way. They just see this black and white right and wrong thing, which has been the problem. right But our buddy here, Darren, he's a bit rogue.
00:14:13
Speaker
Now, as we said, he was part of the academic community. He's published in geological papers, so he can be part of that if he wanted to. And he could bring in the right experts to make this a fully peer-reviewed, you know, academic thing that is accepted by the archaeological community. I'm not sure he could publish in most academic archaeological journals. If he brought in the right co-authors, he could. Well, sure. If they worked together, then he definitely could. yeah He'd be the geological expert. Somebody else would be the cultural, you know, like that. Somebody else would get all the credit. No, it would be a, it would be a, well, you know what? Maybe that's part of it. I mean i guess that's possible.
00:14:52
Speaker
yeah But he's definitely rogue and it does really seem like he's doing some pretty decent work, right? Like the top down excavation and getting sending out to independent labs to have dates verified, like doing all this stuff. He's bringing in archeologists to help verify what he's doing. Like it does really seem like he's doing good work, but he refuses to publish it in a peer reviewed journal and and let it be critiqued like it should be. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely getting critiqued, which is an interesting thing. Yeah. And in fact, back when I used to blog more before I started the APN, there was a huge discussion around peer review and ah what and the fact that blogs aren't peer reviewed. Yeah. And the interesting thing about that was there was ah there was a blog post that kind of sparked that off, and I can't remember what it was, but it was like, hey, these aren't peer reviewed. How do we give this any credit? But ah the literal fact that we were discussing that was peer review.
00:15:46
Speaker
Oh, that's true. like It was like, it was like ah are aren we peer reviewing this like right now on Twitter and and in the comments? like like this and like this is This is peer review, right? this is it's just not it's just not you know Actual peer review happens when you when you find people that are in the same field and you anonymously well you the journal actually seeks them out, but the peer reviewers are generally anonymous to the to the article writers. yeah And then they read them and then they give their comments back, right? And then they you know they give feedback and then they make changes to the article or whatever the case may be. yeah But peer review, I don't know, it's kind of BS sometimes, depending on the article. and yeah yeah Anyway, I don't want to really focus too much on that for this whole thing here because there's a whole lot more in here that we need to really talk about. so
00:16:32
Speaker
But, I mean, he is affiliated with the Smithsonian. He has published in other things. And the fact that he doesn't want to want to write this up in a peer-reviewed article, okay, great, fine, whatever, you know, doesn't take away from the research that he's actually done. And what he it doesn't mean what he's done is not there. Yeah, you know it's true. I mean, I do kind of understand that as well. But it does mean that it is not getting the like the institution stamp of approval or whatever. Doesn't matter. It's published in the Washington Post. Well, that doesn't matter. show me Show me something in in you know ah American Antiquity that was published in the Washington Post.
00:17:11
Speaker
I mean, you have peer review for a reason, though. And the place that he published this is called Research Gate. And I actually was like, I'm not sure exactly what that is. I'm on Research Gate. Are you? Yeah. So I looked up Research Gate and I was like, what is this place? What are the academic institutions saying about it? you know what What is it? According to American University in Washington DC research gate is a business that hosts open access research It's either publisher nor a journal and it's a popular hub on the web for sharing academic publications But there is no editorial review board and they don't require that the articles be peer reviewed no So it's basically like a social network for research the blog. It's yeah, I know it's like a slightly more official blog. Yeah, so
00:17:55
Speaker
his thesis here is or his paper is, you know, 200 and some odd pages long. Like, yeah, that's great. He put a lot of work into it. It's just that if he made mistakes, if he did things wrong, if he drew conclusions or made assumptions that he shouldn't have because he's not an archaeologist. There's, there's nobody stopping that from getting published, right? Like you would have in a peer reviewed situation where they send back their notes and review, right? So that is not happening. So you do kind of have to take everything in there with a grain of salt. You just do. Right. I mean, again,
00:18:31
Speaker
I will say this one more time. First off, plenty of articles get through the peer review review process that probably shouldn't. Oh yeah, it happens. And second, the peer review process came around in an era before the internet when this had to happen. So somebody could check through your results. So somebody could check through this thing. When this is now on the internet, it was published by the Washington Post and who knows who else. This is getting read by archeologists. This is on the Archeology Podcast Network, which let's face it, now he's arrived somewhere. um i mean The Washington Post is one thing, but now it's on the APN. Sorry, Darren, for your new fame, but here it is, ready for followers. but ah i mean the The point is, it's now out there and if there. If there is anything, it's going to be found. and all these All these people that are quoted in the article are saying, oh I'm not going to lend any credence to this because it's you know not peer reviewed. well
00:19:23
Speaker
That's fine. You can sit there in your little ivory tower and not do that, but like a thousand other people are going to read it, right? And they are going to look at this and they are going to, you know, say something about it. So somebody's going to find something and that's how the internet works. That's how the modern day of 2024 works. So yeah, well, you're not wrong about that like that. And that is definitely happening already. Right. So like, If you look at the paper on ResearchGate, like it's been read according to this number 17,511 times. So people are reading it or access that many times. Yeah. So people are reading it and there is some criticism that's coming out that was quoted in the articles that we link to. I think Washington Post and then Business Insider was the other one. They both did a really good job of covering the article. Yeah. But, you know, some of the skepticism, some of the criticism is that the artifacts were found after they had eroded out of the bluff and therefore were out of geological position. They say that nine of the artifacts were found in situ and then of those nine, only three were able to be dated by charcoal found near them. right So you're taking like a really big sweeping statement and talking about 200 and some odd artifacts and then boiling it down to three that you're actually able to pull dates off. I mean, that's not the first archaeological site to do that. I know. I know. But like you're really hoping that those artifacts were actually in place, were actually in situ, and didn't get dragged around by water movement or erosion or or wind or whatever before they got deposited where they were. so i mean I'm pretty sure the entire Clovis type site was based off of one artifact, pre-carbon dating. I know, but there's been so many more since then that I think we're good. I know. Also, and this this was the thing that was almost the biggest takeaway for me, because like yes, he's doing work that seems pretty good, but he refuses to allow his peers to review it before publishing, so like that's a little bit problematic, but whatever.
Erosion Threats to Archaeological Sites
00:21:23
Speaker
gets me here is that we are losing these sites quickly. yeah And if people like Darren don't go out and excavate them, then we might not get that information at all. So if researchers had gotten to this site even just a couple years sooner, they might have had a more intact site to uncover. you know The coastline is eroding by about an acre a year. The island was 173 acres in 1899, 98.4 acres in 1993. 76.1 in 2013 and now and well not now but six years ago in 2018 70.1 like this island is rapidly disappearing and as it disappears it's taking its artifacts with us so like global warming is real our
00:22:09
Speaker
Coslines are eroding and if we don't get to these coastline sites before they're gone Then we're losing all this information that could be filling in the picture for us So there's a part of me that's like good for you Darren like at least you got this information collected before it disappeared Yeah, yeah it is something and and let's let's talk about that and and I know we're we're going super long on this segment But I got a lot more to say yeah because there's a lot of stuff that we talked about in here and there's a lot more this article actually talks about because the They actually bring up DNA in this article as well.
Genetic Clock Theory Discussion
00:22:42
Speaker
One of the really strong pieces of evidence for the earliest peopling of the Americas is the genetic clock theory of Native Americans. right so When you test Native Americans, and Joe Watkins, actually, who has been interviewed on ah numerous occasions on the APN and different shows, so who was a former president of the Society for American Archaeology, who was also on Time Team America.
00:23:02
Speaker
He's, I think, currently working for a CRM firm or something like that in the Southwest. He was quoted in his article about Native of American DNA. But the genetic clock theory, when you look at DNA, says if you walk back DNA for people who are smarter than me and actually understand this thing, you can look at it and say, well, the DNA of Native Americans, when tested in general, looks like it came from people in you know Siberia and and and you know north Northern China, that kind of thing. right like When you walk it back, the the DNA is 10,000 to 15,000 years old, which fits with some of the Clovis and slightly pre-Clovis stuff. right So that all fits.
00:23:42
Speaker
And it does fit with the population explosion, when you look at it, of, hey, we've got you know we've got Clovis showing up on scene, and it and it Clovis explodes across the North American continent, explodes across South America, it goes all over the place, bam, all of a sudden we have people all over North and South America. yeah What the hell happened? right And then we've got these sites like Monteverde and all these other stuff, I mean... Meadowcroft. Cerruti.
00:24:10
Speaker
You know, I thought we were gonna get away with this whole segment without you using that stupid word. Anyway, we've got all these older sites that are just, and and let's say Chesapeake maybe even, but we've got all these older sites that are these like one-offs, and it's extremely probable that they were just, that we got kind of lucky hitting a needle in the haus haystack, archeologically speaking, when we found, you know, an initial contact point when people tried to tried to get here, tried to populate in this in this this really harsh environment, this glacial maximum timeframe, when you know glaciers were really far down into North America, it was a really harsh environment and and they just simply didn't survive, or they didn't survive in quantities that were
00:24:58
Speaker
identifiable in the archaeological record. And then when the glaciers started to recede, more people started coming through the ice-free corridor and then possibly down the so-called Kelp Highway down through yeah Alaska and Canada there and really started populating in that the archaeological record started filling in more and and we could really start seeing people expressed more like that. That's when that's where we can really see the DNA expression. If we could find human remains that were 20,000, 40,000 years old, we might see a different genetic yeah piece of information there. but That's going to be unlikely, though. That's going to be very unlikely. right but it's just I firmly believe that two things happen. One,
00:25:39
Speaker
This continent and South America has been visited by humans from the other continents many times over the last 100,000 years possibly, yeah accidentally or on purpose. And two, some of those lasted and are just not archeologically expressed because they weren't big enough populations. And two, well, that was it. I think that was the two. that They were visited and either didn't last or they lasted and weren't big enough to be expressed archaeologically. Yeah. I i mostly agree with that. I'm not sure about 100,000 years. That goes back a little far for me. But there's been multiple ice ages, multiple times when that could have happened. There has been. But it does seem more like the 20,000-ish year mark seems more likely just based on the evidence that we have. Even these really old pre-clovis sites,
00:26:26
Speaker
don't tend to go back too much further than that. and you know The footprints in white sands are in the 20,000 range. so And a lot of these these sites, are the methodologies are sometimes questionable, the conclusions are drawing are sometimes questionable. But the thing is that all of that was true of Clovis when it first popped up too, because um it was brand new and we were still trying to figure out you know, the whole picture. And then we filled in that picture with more sights. And I almost feel like we're in the middle of doing that right now. We're filling in the picture of the earlier people in of the Americas than than Clovis. And it seems... unsure right now it doesn't seem totally clear and we're still trying to fill that in but I think I think it's happening and it's coming soon it would be great if everybody got on board with like the same you know put it through the academic wringer and publish in a place that makes sense so that it can all be grouped together because this research right here regardless of how good it was done regardless of
00:27:34
Speaker
you know, how many people think that it's legit, it's never going to be included with everything else because it didn't pass academic muster. They didn't try to. They could still try. Somebody could go there and try to do this or or do work after the fact. But the you know being a rogue like this might be great for taking credit. He gets credit for it. It's his name, not some archaeologist's name on this paper. So great for that, I guess. But it will never be included with the rest of the pre-Clovis sites, not in the same way.
00:28:09
Speaker
It'll be a footnote as maybe, but they didn't do they didn't do it the right way, so we can't say for sure. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the court of public opinion is much bigger than the academic community is. And the academic community might might never throw this in a textbook, and they might never you know speak about this at a conference or something like that. but So it's a pretty small group of people when it comes down to it. And if if the if the public at large or whatever gets wind of something and and they want it to be true, it will be true. right just look at Just look at people who get canceled, whether it's whether it's valid or not. If Twitter says it's true, it's true. right I mean, that's just how the public works. So I think if the academic community doesn't shift and change how they see things and do things, not that you should get rid of peer review, but peer review has a lot of problems.
00:29:00
Speaker
Peer review has a lot of problems. Yeah. Nobody's disputing that. I mean, there's been, there's been talk before about how peer review, you know, people have shot down articles because they see it as competition yeah because they know they're anonymous. like Totally. Totally. So I think the peer review system very much has a problem and I understand why he wasn't interested in submitting this work ah to that, you know, institution. I get it. Yeah. but I still think like, yeah, okay, public opinion might feel like this is a real site, but in the end, they're they're not the ones that are doing the future research that is filling in this picture of of the peopling of the Americas and the people that are doing that work, the academics that are doing that work are going to look at this, think, can I cite this? Can I include this in my work as as actual research? a citation? No, you can't because it's not in an in a peer-reviewed journal and it it it detracts from your credibility if you cite somebody who didn't do credible work. So I think it's going to fade away. 10 years might just have a thousand more Darren's citing this and who's and then who cares?
00:30:07
Speaker
ah Maybe, maybe not. you have i mean This guy, Darren, published a 260-page report. How many people are going to do that and get no credit for it? The more people that get published in the Washington Post, the more people are going to do that. and i just I don't know. so And he works with the Smithsonian. He doesn't work at it. He's been affiliated with it. They might have given him some money is probably what that sounds like. Well, they don't just give anybody money. yeah so All right. and will I think somebody buried all the secrets in a lava tube. Let's go find out what's in there. Back in a minute.
Human Remains in Arabian Lava Tubes
00:30:42
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 266 of The Archaeology Show. And after that marathon session. I know. I just kept talking. A lot of disagreements in the last segment. That's cool. Whatever. All right. So we're headed into another Max B submitted article. Thanks, Max. Yeah. So this one is called, archaeologists found human remains in lava tubes filling in a secret historical gap. And this was published in Popular Mechanics. Yeah. This is another one where I saw this article and I thought that's really cool. and Then I was super glad to see that a listener was interested in hearing about it too. so yeah yeah This is also published in Plus One, an academic journal, unlike Darren's article.
00:31:24
Speaker
and
00:31:26
Speaker
We've linked to that as well, so you can check that out. But this is a tunnel system in northwest Arabia, so that's pretty cool. Lava tubes. Actually looks like it could be any lava tube just about anywhere we've been. Just looking at the pictures. We went into a lava tube not too long ago. It was out in Idaho, I think, right? Yeah. Lava beds, creators of the moon. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And he slaps you guys might hear by the way, or us just destroying mosquitoes as they try to destroy us. It's a constant battle here. Yep. We are engaged in a warm. Yeah. We're inside and yet somehow they're coming in. So yeah anyway, so this article.
00:32:00
Speaker
What it aimed to do was show what kind of human occupation was happening in these lava tubes. yeah And the basic gist of it is that it shows that for the first time that they were occupied by both humans and livestock animals in various circumstances and and throughout you know a long period of time as well. All right, that's it. Segment three will be... No, I'm just kidding. No, they think that this a network of lava tubes provided a crucial place to stop and rest along pastoral routes. So I mean, lava tubes are generally cool yeah all like all the time. Yeah, they're caves basically, right? so yeah And they're but their lava. So they just have this
00:32:41
Speaker
I mean, just, I mean, God, Craters of the Moon was so cool because it was hot out. Yeah. And then you go down inside this lava tube and it's instantly like 30, 40 degrees. So much cooler. Yeah. Yeah. So that would be a really important way to escape the probably pretty brutal heat of the sun when you were going between maybe Oasis, you know because it seems like that was the routes they took was like from one oasis to another Yeah, and also you could like plan to meet somebody or people there and trade information Trade, you know items whatever you might need to do So it could have been like a a place where people are actually like meeting up and interacting with each other as well
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah, they found actual human remains in the tunnels, too, dating from anywhere from 150 years ago to 6,000 years ago. Yeah. so They also found artifacts in the tubes, things like pottery, animal bones. And the oldest of those artifacts are somewhere in the 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. So that shows kind of when people started using these tubes. And then there were several phases of occupation all the way up to the bronze or chocolithic age In addition to the artifacts, they found petroglyphs, which I would expect in a lava tube. I don't know. I'm actually kind of surprised about that, because so like look at the picture, right? The rock walls are so crumbly looking. Yeah, you should get a drawing on them. They look like an oatmeal cookie, right? like It's so rough and crumbly. I'm just surprised that... and I mean, not crumbly, like like the texture. They're very textured. I'm just surprised that there's petroglyphs. Leave your kids in a tube, though.
00:34:10
Speaker
They'll draw on it. They'll find something. Yeah. There's cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, corroborates ah physical evidence left behind. so Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I said, leave kids in a tube, and they're going to draw on the walls. Yeah, I know. like People do it all the time. Yeah. I mean, it could be could be ritual, who knows? but you know know Or just boredom. right That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. right like like the Like the Basque arbor glyphs, right? like Those were just born out of boredom. like John said he was going to meet us in this tube three days ago. Yeah. Where is he? I just remember one one arbor glyph that we recorded that was in from like the 70s I think so it was a later one and it literally said like viva viva rock and roll or something like that and it was like so of the time right and just like a teenager yeah so
00:34:59
Speaker
Okay, so the lack of domestic artifacts in these tubes point towards this just being like a temporary stopover or waypoint between destinations. So I guess they weren't hanging out? Yeah, I don't think they were staying for too long. We didn't have a great understanding of what life was like for these desert nomads because preservation often isn't like super great in these very harsh desert environments. So we didn't really know Exactly. We knew they were going from point A to point B, but we didn't really have a good understanding of what that path looked like and what they were doing along the way. So this is help filling in that sort of blank spot that we had. Yeah, because preservation of tunnels is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. They were able to do isotopic analysis in both human and animal remains. So that's nice.
00:35:41
Speaker
Yeah. And isotopic analysis is basically looking at the, I think it's the teeth, right? And then you can see what their diet was made of. And the human remains showed a protein rich diet with plant consumption increasing over time. And I thought that was interesting because I was like, plant consumption increasing over time. Like what does that even mean? It's a weird sentence. But when I looked into the plus one article a little bit more, they explained that their assumption is that Oasis agriculture was sort of emerging and becoming a bigger part of the diet of the people.
Isotopic Analysis of Diets and Grazing
00:36:15
Speaker
but So that would be why the they see this consumption increasing over time of plants.
00:36:22
Speaker
And then the isotopic analysis of the animal remains to show that the animal diet was made up of wild grasses and shrubs, which means that they were you know being allowed to graze on those things. yeah These are animals that were domesticated, right? So they only ate what they're their herders allowed them to eat. Yeah, yeah and the animals and the humans would have been in the caves together and sometimes, which was possible due to the size. This one cave was 39 feet high, nearly 150 feet wide, and about a mile long. yeah And this is just one. I'm sure there's caves all over the place. so Yeah, totally.
00:36:58
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, anything else to say about the case? No, I mean, that's a pretty straightforward, like little puzzle piece getting slotted right into the history of the people in this area. So yeah I'm sure they have much more work to do. And I'm sure that there are more lava tubes in the area that need to be explored and that will help them fill in that picture even more and maybe even create like migration paths and stuff throughout the area. That would be really interesting to see how that picture gets filled in some more. Right? Yeah. Okay. Well, now we're going to go to segment three and we were sent in by a listener, just ah a paper actually that we we're not linking to because it's not open source, but it's about Castle A at Montezuma's Castle, which we talked about a few episodes ago. Back in a minute.
00:37:42
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, segment three. And we're talking about Montezuma's Castle in Arizona. Again. Yeah. Again, we talked about this a few episodes ago. Yeah. This, I feel like, is a direct result of me begging for people to tell me what happened to castles a at montesumus Castle Castle. And we will link to that last episode if you want to hear it. But basically, it seemed like Castle A was a little bit glossed over at the time when we visited a couple months ago. Oh, and by the way, this was sent in by listener Laura Gale, and she sent us these articles that are not publicly available. So we're not going to link to them, but we'll just tell you all about what we learned in them. so
00:38:22
Speaker
Anyway, we felt like Castle A was glossed over. We visited a couple months ago, but it there was nothing much there except that here it was and then it burned down sign. Like, I just wanted more information. I wanted to know what ah how it was related to the main castle at Montezuma's castle. It's not castle, but structure.
Insights into Castle A's History
00:38:41
Speaker
And yeah, so I begged for more info and Laura was kind enough to share some articles from her undergrad studies. OK, so what is Castle A? If you didn't hear the episode where we first talked about this, it is a structure that was located at the base of the cliff a short distance past Montezuma Castle. ah You probably have seen Montezuma Castle. It's that image of that structure that's like basically attached to the side of a cliff wall, right? Yeah. Well, Castle A was just and ground level and a little ways away from it, basically. Yeah, we talked about it on episode 257.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Mazuma's castle is a national historic monument in Arizona and it's between Flagstaff and Phoenix. The main draw of the monument is the castle itself, which is not really a castle. It's built into a cliff high above a nearby river overlooking the valley though. It's actually pretty impressive. Yeah, it really is. It's ah it's a really cool thing. If you ever get a chance to see it, it's it's worth taking the quarter mile walk around to check it out. yeah The second component, which we're talking about now, known as Castle A, which is located at the base of the cliff, is just a short distance past Montezuma Castle, the the formal part there. Yeah, like when you're walking down the path, yes it's not too much further.
00:39:58
Speaker
And like I said, there wasn't a lot of information about this, not at the park. And I'm like kind of a neurotic sign reader. Like I read everything and I don't really, other than the one sign at the castle itself, there just wasn't a whole lot of information. And then when you look it up online, like the most you could find is that it was at one point a large structure. It had as many as 45 rooms. It was five stories tall and it looks like a fire destroyed it. And like that's sort of like full stop and that's all we know about it. yeah And then we get this gem of an article that Laura sent us and it is great. I just love everything about this article. It has everything that I love about like old archeology versus new archeology and like how our ideas ah evolve over time and that kind of thing.
00:40:45
Speaker
So the article is called Two to ah Four Inches of Lime Dirt, Public Archaeology and the Development of Old and New Interpretations at the Castle A Site, Montezuma Castle National Monument. And it was published by Matthew Gubard. So Castle A was originally excavated by NPS or National Park Service archaeologists in 1933 and 1934. And when they did this excavation, they determined that because there were two to four inches of sediment on the floors of the rooms, this meant that the fire had burned long after it was abandoned.
00:41:22
Speaker
And it's an assumption that seems to make some bit of sense, right? Like there was burning roof material, yeah then these two to four inches of sediment on the floors, and then the actual floor in a lot of the rooms, right? So that was the assumption that they drew at that time. Yeah. I mean, in the desert, it takes a long time for two to four inches of sediment to accumulate on top of something. It can. Yeah, it can. Unless there's like a massive dust storm or something. Yeah, or it can happen quickly. It just depends. But yeah. Yeah. So this new paper, and I'm saying new with big quotes around it, because it was actually published in 2015. So it's been a little bit, a little bit since it was published. But what it did was it looked at the assumption created back in the thirties and
00:42:05
Speaker
sort of argues for a different series of events that culminated in the fire, basically. And this would have all happened at the end of the 14th century. yeah And that's not to take down the work that was done in the 30s either. like They do say in the paper, the paper published in 2015, that these guys in the 30s really did exceptional work for the time. They documented everything they did very well. They have great drawings and everything they did was right in line with the kind of excavation that was happening that time or even better. The only problem was is or one of the problems that was that they just didn't have a
00:42:42
Speaker
They didn't have any previous work in the Verde Valley. Archaeology was very new to that area. So they just didn't have like a body of work to to draw on when when creating their conclusions you know in their papers. So if you don't have previous work or a previous history of the area, it just kind of makes makes it that you so that you're making up your own story, right? So there is a fantastic plan view of the castle in the article. And I'll just kind of try to describe it really quick since we're not sharing this. but If you've seen Montezuma Castle, you see that it's sort of high up in a on the wall, right? Like you have to climb ladders or something to get up there. This one would have been at the ground level. And level one is basically like the like a river terrace kind of a thing. And then they built
00:43:29
Speaker
they built the walls up from there. And the first like three levels are almost more constructed of these built walls with the backside of them into the cliff. And then by the time you get to the fourth and fifth levels, that's where they're really like carving out the holes that become like these rooms that are higher up on the, on the cliff. Right. So that's sort of how it looks in the image. And the early archaeologists in the 30s, they excavated nine rooms, and they also dug several test trenches in the immediate area. and Yeah, they stabilized some of the wall sections and reconstructed a room on level two.
00:44:06
Speaker
Inside, they also found 28 human burials along with many artifacts. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that they found in that time. Yeah. It's pretty common for actually quite a few, I think, Native American cultures to bury some of their human remains within actual living areas. Yeah, true. But there are some interesting things about some of these human remains, which we'll get to in a second here. So the author points out here that the main objective of this excavation was to uncover artifacts for display in the museum. yeah Like that was what they were trying to do with this excavation. So you have to kind of take that with a grain of salt. Like, yes, they were also doing academic study and they published their work on it. But this was, this was like a bit of a salvage operation to get artifacts for display.
Reevaluating Castle A's Destruction
00:44:55
Speaker
yeah So, of the nine rooms they excavated, seven of them had burned roof material, then below that is the sort of contested two to four inches of sediment, and that is what led them to conclude that the structure burned after it had been been abandoned. yeah And the study is sort of reassessing these stratigraphic layers in the rooms, and they use their the artifacts and also the field notes from the initial excavations to sort of reassess and sort of rethink what might have been going on, right? Yeah. And one of the things that the original
00:45:32
Speaker
excavators wouldn't have known is that these rooms sort of went through a kind of common cycle of being used for one thing, falling out of use for a while, and then coming back into use and often for a completely different purpose. So because of this sort of cycle with these rooms going in and out of use, it means that sometimes you would have a natural buildup of soil or sediment or whatever trash from disuse. So that happened and they have evidence of that in other sites that they can cite, which they didn't have available available back in the thirties when this was first excavated.
00:46:06
Speaker
So for example, room 1A had two surfaces, right? It had a bedrock floor above that, the two to four inches of compacted sand and lime dirt. And then above that, a layer of fill containing pottery, sherds, and trash. And the new article is arguing that this indicates that the room was abandoned, accumulated some sediment, and then briefly reoccupied and used as a trash dump until you know it was destroyed by the fire. In a couple of other rooms, 3 and 3A, abandonment seemed, abandonment seemed hasty and important domestic items were found on the floor, including an intact ceramic bowl, a spindle whorl, and a bone needle. It's as if they dropped their belongings and ran like you would as if there was a fire. Yeah, those are, yeah those are my words or our words, but that is kind of what that seems like, right? Those are important artifacts that you don't just like leave. You don't just abandon those and go, right?
00:47:02
Speaker
So the other thing that they ah bring in as evidence that maybe this couple inches of sediment got there in a different way is that there's water activity that affected the stratigraphy and that can throw doubt on whether or not are not the two to four inches of soil was you know put down was put down by abandonment. It could have been put there by water activity. sure And then the final thing they did is they reexamined some of the human remains that were found. And this is so fascinating to me. This is the the biggest indication that perhaps something different went on here. There were several unburied skeletal remains that showed evidence of trauma. And one of these was an articulated skeleton. It was found under burned roof debris. And this is in room 3A.
00:47:52
Speaker
And there's no evidence of a grave or burial artifacts. This person was not purposely put there. It's as if they they fell and died right right where their body fell, right? And then below that is the the floor of the room and all that. so So that's interesting, right? It's kind of like somebody just, they they died in a fire, sort of what that seems like, right? But they also had evidence of trauma on their skeleton. And then the last thing they looked at is two cyst burials, and a cyst burial is just like a burial shaft yeah that has remains in it. And there were four individuals, and they reexamined three of them. They found that there were cut marks, fractures on the skull, and burn marks that are consistent with the singeing of live bone.
00:48:39
Speaker
so it seems like these people were injured in some kind of violence, some sort of violent attack, and then also were burned in the fire. yeah And that is some combination of those things is what caused them to die. And then later on, they were buried by the people that lived here, presumably, into these cyst burials. So it's sort of like cleaning up in the aftermath of of this violent event, whatever it was. man Yeah, so basically the conclusion of the paper is it seems like Castle A was destroyed by a large fire. This is true. But there probably was some kind of associated violence with this fire. And we don't know if the fire was set intentionally, if it was accidental as a result of the violence that was going on. But there are definitely human remains that show like fractures and hits as if they were in some kind of battle.
00:49:33
Speaker
Oh, and I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but they were all male remains too, which kind of fits that theory that men were doing the fighting. And yeah, so, yeah so it could have been an attack by a group nearby. I don't know, but it does. It's The story of the fire is not as easy and and cut and dry as it seemed when they first did this the excavations in the 30s. There seems like there's some kind of violence that went along with it as well. So yeah, that's a little bit more about cassoulet. Sorry, that was like a lot of words that I just sort of threw at you because I'm the one who did most of the research for this. Any thoughts?
00:50:09
Speaker
I mean, that seems to all make a lot of sense. I mean, settlements like this, if there was some sort of, I guess, takeover or some sort of violence or somebody came in trying to get some resources, you know, say, hey, we're going to take all your food or maybe even we want your settlement or something like that. You know, fires are often probably kept burning pretty continuously. you know it's It's not super easy to to create a fire, you know yeah so you you're probably going to keep it going a lot of times if you can. Unless you're just like really good at setting fires, which i mean true, there's a lot of easy to burn stuff out there, so maybe it is easy to set a fire. yeah
00:50:44
Speaker
But if there is one going you know pretty much continuously, like you're cooking, you're baking, you're doing whatever you're doing, and then violence starts. I mean, it's easy to just burn the place to the ground. Yeah, it can happen accidentally, for sure. And then you know your people are dying, and i mean people are going to get burned. So um i can I can see it being pretty easily just ah having it get out of hand. That happens in history in cities all over the world. Yeah, like an attack happens, and you stop paying attention to the daily activities. And then all of a sudden, the fire is burning, and everything is is burned down, and it just becomes part of a part of the attack basically, right? So they didn't mention whether or not the injuries to the skeletons could have just happened because of the fire. Like they were trying to get stuff out and maybe stayed in there a little bit too long and like ah something collapsed on them and caused the injuries. yeah But I don't know, it does seem like, it seems like the violence was interpersonal, like one person on another person. That's that's what they're thinking. So yeah.
00:51:39
Speaker
All right. Anyway, interesting. Cool. Well, again, thanks to those who sent the articles in. Keep them coming. Yeah. Find our contact info on your show notes. Just look down at your device and you can send us in articles. You can send us to either of us or both of us. You got a better chance of us seeing it if you send it to both of us because sometimes things just get pushed down in the email. Oh, yeah. And I'm like notoriously bad at replying to emails, too. I don't think I replied to Laura and said thank you until like a couple days ago, even though she sent them to me two months ago. So again, Laura, I'm sorry. I'm just like really bad at email. Yeah. If we don't reply, sorry about that. But we did get it. We did. and yeah But anyway. Anyway. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks again. And we'll see you next week. Bye.
00:52:28
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment in 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.
00:52:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural 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.