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Sacred Pools, Badass Prehistoric Women, and Giant Cave Art - TAS 171
339 Plays3 years ago
We've got a few articles that are all over the place - literally - this week. The first is about a re-analysis of what was thought was an ancient harbor in Italy. Turns out there's more to it. Next we talk about, well, the prehistoric world in general as it pertains the role of women. As with everything, there's more to that story and it's way more complex than early researchers would have liked. Finally we have a story of massive cave art in a hard-to-access area in Alabama. The figures are massive and would have been difficult to see in their entirety.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
Links
- An Ancient 'Harbor' Was Actually a Sacred Pool Designed for Scanning the Stars
- The sacred pool of Ba'al: a reinterpretation of the ‘Kothon’ at Motya (Antiquity)
- Prehistoric women were hunters and artists as well as mothers, book reveals
- Discovering ancient cave art using 3D photogrammetry: pre-contact Native American mud glyphs from 19th Unnamed Cave, Alabama (Antiquity)
- PHOTOS: Mysterious humanoids carved by Native Americans found in Alabama
- Ancient cave art: how new hi-tech archaeology is revealing the ghosts of human history
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- Chris Webster
- chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
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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.
Preview of Episode Topics
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 171. On today's show, we talk about sacred pools, badass prehistoric women, and massive cave drawings. Let's dig a little deeper.
00:00:33
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. How's it going?
Personal Stories from the Hosts
00:00:36
Speaker
Pretty good. So we're here in the birthplace of somebody that's kind of a big deal, I think. Somebody who thinks he's kind of a big deal. I was born literally five miles from where we're sitting right now. Ah, so your hometown. My hometown, Monroe, Washington, or Washington, or depending on who you talk to. Yeah. Yeah.
00:00:58
Speaker
Oh, I'm editing and posting this episode, right? Yeah. Maybe I'll like sneak in that adorable little picture of you that I found in your grandma's bathroom. It's you and your brother in the bathtub together. It's so cute.
00:01:11
Speaker
Everyone has embarrassing juvenile naked photos of themselves in their grandparents' bathroom. You will not post those on the internet. I really want to, though. Oh my god, you're so cute. Unless we get 500 new subscribers by June 1st, then you can post it. OK, deal. What's the plan? So if you want to see juvenile adolescent me and my brother. Not even juvenile or adolescent toddler. I know, we're like two. Yeah, you're like three. I don't know kids' words. Jason's probably one. Yes.
00:01:41
Speaker
then become a member of the archaeology podcast network and tell your friends. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, we were in a bathtub, you know, where we weren't a sacred pool.
Misinterpretation of a Sacred Pool
00:01:52
Speaker
This is another news show. And the first article we're going to talk about here is basically called, well, the one source we're linking to. There's a lot of them. In fact, two articles from today come from American antiquity or sorry, antiquity, as they're calling it.
00:02:07
Speaker
and not American Antiquity. This is a different journal, but for some reason I just insert the word American because I'm used to saying that. But Antiquity is a different journal. Anyway, from Antiquity, we'll post the original source and a couple of other sources related to some popular sources. Yeah, we have the Antiquity link for this one, but I found the Smithsonian article just more readable. They always are, but we've got both of them. And that's the thing, you don't often have access to the primary resource, and even if you do,
00:02:35
Speaker
They're not written for us. They're written for people who are in that field, whatever it is, and there's a lot of jargon, and sometimes it can be hard to wade through that and figure out what you're actually looking at. We've talked about that many times in the past. That's why we do these, because we like to pick through that stuff and break it
Discovery of a Temple to Ba'al
00:02:52
Speaker
down.
00:02:52
Speaker
Anyway, this one's called In Ancient Harbor was actually a sacred pool designed for scanning of the stars. They kind of just go straight to the punchline. So that's pretty much it. Sigma 2 will be about. It's like one of those trailers for like the whole movie, isn't it? It's like a 48 minute long trailer. Yeah. So this is really cool. It's a man-made pool in Mocha, Mo-ya.
00:03:17
Speaker
Sure. Motoya. Motoya? Sure. Motia. M-O-T-Y-A. M-O-T-Y-A, Italy. It's on Sicily. It's on actually the modern island of San Pantaleo, which I think is in the Sicily region. Yeah. And so this manmade pool was first discovered in 1906 by an archaeologist named Joseph Whitaker. And then in addition to the pool, he also found a manmade channel that goes out to the ocean. And because of these two things, he basically was like, ship harbor!
00:03:46
Speaker
So, much like we're going to find in segment two, archaeologists of the time would find like two pieces of evidence and craft an entire narrative out of it that we still believe today. Yeah, it's so hard
Astronomical Observations at the Pool
00:03:57
Speaker
as an archaeologist to like reel yourself in because you just want to know why they did it, what they did and why they did it. You have the what, you don't always have the why and this is a really good example of not having the why.
00:04:10
Speaker
Now, I read this, but not probably as closely as you did. I just read it kind of in prep for this because you're the one that took our notes on this one. But one of the notes says the statue was discovered in the middle of the pool in 1933. Yeah. I'm wondering, how was it just discovered? Was it collapsed and they've reinstated it? Because in the picture, in the photograph, the statue is actually standing. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't find out the details about that, like how it
00:04:34
Speaker
if it was standing the whole time or if they put it back in that arrangement or what. But it wasn't until 1933, so 30 years after it was initially found, the pool was that they realized that there was a statue in the middle of it. And the whole like harbor narrative had been written at that point. And they're like, ah, well, guess it fell off of a boat or something, right? And I think that was sort of what they were thinking at that point. But the next guy.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, the next guy, this is another 50 years later, another archaeologist, he looked at it, looked at the pool, looked at the statue and was like, it's a little small for a harbor, but maybe it was for ship repair. Maybe they pulled the boats in here one or two at a time and worked on them.
00:05:16
Speaker
Right, and the article even states, because it's probably an antiquity too, depending on certain times of the year and things like that, it would have been pretty tough to navigate a ship in here, even if there was good access to it. But in the actual Little Harbor itself, it would have been pretty tough. And it's not like they had guide boats and tugboats back in the time. I mean, they may have people that rode out into the harbor and said park there, but it's not like they're towing these ships around. So that would have been tough. And with the statue sitting right in the middle of it, it's like, who put this statue here?
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it would not make sense to have a statue in the middle of a Harbor if ships were actually intending to use it as a Harbor. And honestly, you couldn't even bring real big ships in there. It would only be for like small sailing vessels. Maybe, you know, well, they would have all been sailing vessels, but yeah. I mean, there's robots.
00:06:02
Speaker
The whole interpretation, both harbor and like ship work area, they're both questionable just because it's so small. And it's only five feet deep. Yeah, that's pretty shallow.
The Pool's Historical Context
00:06:13
Speaker
That's another thing to take into account. I took a little bit of a question on the five feet deep thing. It's like, was that historically, was that figured out through excavation? Because five feet deep might be what it is now, but even today,
00:06:25
Speaker
If you've got a harbor or anything that was either man-made or is fed by tributaries or something like that, you're constantly dredging this thing. You're constantly trying to dig it out. If they know it was man-made, then they know they have the ability to dig it out, so the depth now would not have been the depth prehistorically or historically.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, very true. And I don't know how they got that five foot measurement. I was thinking maybe they have some kind of wall on one side of it and they're using like a wall measurement, but it could have been a lot deeper in the middle cause things often like get shallower up to the sides. So not really sure about that. Is that all the information that we have? That that's, Oh my God.
00:07:07
Speaker
You almost missed that one. I did. You're the worst. So that's not but all the information that we have. That is not. Not. You are so bad. Okay. So that was the sort of accepted but also people were skeptical of it belief.
00:07:29
Speaker
You're still cracking up at your really bad joke. Can we get to why it's a really bad joke here? About 12 years ago, archaeologists went looking for proof because of the skepticism around this actually being a harbor of some sort. And they were looking for the remains of the kind of buildings you would see around a harbor or a marina or whatever. And instead, they found the remains of a temple to Ba'al.
00:07:51
Speaker
Now we have all of the story. And because we know this now, the statue makes sense, right? So Baal is a Phoenician god that is sort of similar to Orion in that whole like
00:08:10
Speaker
constellation thing, that's always a little unclear to me and I honestly didn't go deep diving the different gods and what they mean to different people. But Orion, you know, is a constellation and it seems like Ba'al was associated with Orion and also with that constellation. Well, I mean, constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and Cassiopeia, we know those by names today, but they've been visible, obviously, since the creation of the planet.
00:08:36
Speaker
Right. So all beings throughout time have seen these shapes and seen other shapes and some of those really prominent ones like Orion, you can't miss Orion. Yeah. It's probably been given different names throughout the years. I get that impression. Yeah. And I don't know that they necessarily like worshiped as a God exactly, but they did make some sort of temple to it in this scenario. Yeah. Yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
So our y'all just drained the pool to kind of get a better idea of what was going on. And they found that it was never actually connected to the sea in Phoenician times. So you definitely couldn't have gotten a ship in there. There was no connection to any major waterway.
00:09:14
Speaker
So not used for shipping, not used for repairs, not used for anything. No, no, it was just a part of this temple, most likely. So that's where the speculation comes in. And honestly, this is like modern archeologists drawing, making another narrative here. But I feel like it's coming from a pretty informed place, probably, given that the temple is too ba'al. But the speculation is that it could have been used for astronomical observations of some sort. So alien landing pad.
00:09:44
Speaker
Clearly. Clearly. No, the pool is oriented toward the point in the horizon where Orion, the constellation associated with Baal, rises on the winter solstice. And there's other like arrangements and things around the temple. There might be some stile that they found that were related to the temple that are all sort of like solstice and equinox and, you know, all of the solar type of things related to that kind of stuff.
00:10:11
Speaker
It seems like the reflections of the water and things like that could have been used to help map the stars. Star mapping helps aid sailors, of course, but you have to know where the stars are and what's going on with them. I'm not
Challenging Gender Roles in Prehistoric Societies
00:10:22
Speaker
totally convinced that you need a reflection pool to be able to do that. It's not like you're going to lay a bunch of paper out on it and say, let's trace this out. I'm not really sure how that helps. It seems like kind of a stretch to me.
00:10:32
Speaker
The idea behind it is interesting, but in practice, I'm like, how do you actually do that? Well, I'm wondering, like, you know, we were just down in Seattle today and we actually went up in the Space Needle and can see down around the Seattle Center there. And that was put together in 1962 for the World's Fair. And there are just weird things down there, like this half dome that squirts water out.
00:10:58
Speaker
flower petals that are like 15 feet across that also have water. Yeah. Well, somebody's looking at that later on going, well, I've got this pool here. They couldn't have fit a ship here, even though Puget Sound is right there. Like what's going on? Is it possible this was just artistic? It could have been. It's like the city putting something up going, Hey, look at this. Yeah. It's neat.
00:11:18
Speaker
Well, Motia was a, it was a thriving Phoenician colony. And a little bit more about the Phoenicians is that they were more of like a confederation of seafaring communities. We actually like don't know a lot about them at all. It's a really big hole in our sort of historical knowledge. I wonder if that's because they were seafaring. So they're mostly along the coasts and that kind of stuff is the sort of thing that gets covered by water over time.
00:11:42
Speaker
Who knows? But we do know that they thrived from around 1500 BCE to 300 BCE, and Motea was one of their colonies. So that being said, maybe it was some sort of artistic expression in one of their thriving colonies. Who knows?
00:12:00
Speaker
I mean it could have been whoever the statue is in the middle, it could have been just a, I mean there's the temple on the side of course, but whoever the statue is in the middle is the same person or whatever. I mean it really could have been just an expression of faith or spirituality. Or money. Look how rich I am, look how powerful I am. Could be any of those things for sure. Who knows, I don't know.
00:12:22
Speaker
But now we know it's not a ship harbor, a tiny little pool. Definitely not a ship harbor. So good for modern archeology, bad for past archeologists, make up stories. Well, whoever made this, we know that it probably wasn't women because they were out being badass and hunting and not sitting at home just crafting sculptures and feeding children from their
Lady Sapiens: Book and Documentary Discussion
00:12:43
Speaker
breasts. We'll find out more about that on the other side of the break.
00:12:46
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeology show. Capital TV. Episode 171, TASS as we like to call it. TASS. TASS. TASS. TASS. TASS. TASS. All right. So everybody's seen, well actually I don't know if I've actually seen it, but like the movie One Million B.C. with Raquel Welch. And Clan of the Cave Bear was kind of what, I feel like it's kind of what that was based on a little bit.
00:13:12
Speaker
A little bit, all of that, the books itself feel a little bit better, the portrayal of women in them. Yeah, except that everything in the world was invented in like four chapters in Clan of the Caber, from what I understand. Yeah, different issues with that book, that series.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, similar to all prequels in science fiction and stuff like that. Like everything happens in the prequel that we do now. It's so stupid. Anyway. But all of those have helped to create this image of prehistoric women as basically just baby carriers and objects for men to have and rape and do with as they will.
00:13:49
Speaker
I mean, listen, what I mean, I've been an archaeologist since 2005, both of us about the same time. And I can't I don't know the time when I would have stopped saying if somebody who is not an archaeologist asked me, well, what would prehistoric life in this time would have been like? Well, the women would have been, you know, gathering and doing the things and taking care of children. The men were out hunting and setting up camp and doing stuff like that. That is the narrative now. It is. It still is. Yeah.
00:14:18
Speaker
And I'm not sure that that's entirely wrong. It's just that I think that the, well, we should, we should, we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves here. But the article is called prehistoric women were hunters and artists as well as mothers book reveals.
00:14:33
Speaker
And it's based on a French book and documentary. The documentary is coming to the UK in September. And basically it seeks to debunk the simplistic division of gender roles. Like we were just talking about the hunter and the gatherer coming in September. Yeah. These guys are ripe for advertising. We should get them on the APN as guests.
00:14:53
Speaker
I would love to interview them, yeah, because this sounds so interesting. This is a French book and documentary, and it says it's coming to the UK in September. I don't know if it's coming to the US at all. Yeah, that's a good question, but there's ways to get UK stuff in the US, and not even illegal ones. I think there's legal ways to make that happen.
00:15:10
Speaker
Either way, I think if anybody, because we have a pretty big audience here, if anybody listening to this actually knows anything about this and can put us in touch with these people, that would be fantastic. We'll do our own research obviously, but it'll be great to get them on to talk about this. Yeah, because the book is out in French and the documentary in French is also out. That whole part of it has come out already. It's just the English version. The English versions are coming. I think the book might be out in English already and then the documentary is coming. Not positive about that.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's been pretty proven in the last couple of years that if it's not on Netflix, it doesn't count. So until it's on, once it gets on Netflix. I mean, I'd even be willing to say any of the streaming services. Netflix is kind of like where it's at. So the book is called Lady Sapiens, The Women in Prehistory. I love that title. Lady Sapiens is my favorite thing I've heard. I love that.
00:16:00
Speaker
I mean, you've kind of got no room for men, because you've got lady sapiens, you've got homo sapiens, and if you're using a current definition, I'm just saying. Like, where are the male sapiens? Male sapiens. With homo sapiens and lady sapiens, there's like no reproduction. Dude sapiens? Dude sapiens.
00:16:18
Speaker
So like we've been saying, women in prehistory have been portrayed as sort of having a supporting role to men, right? Like they were the ones who were gathering, they were hiding with their children from the violent world, sexual objects to be exploited by men and just generally portrayed as weaker members of the group and they needed to be protected.
00:16:37
Speaker
An interesting thing about that, we just, in the last month or so, finally binged the series Yellowstone, which is actually entertaining in its own right. I don't think it's historically accurate in a lot of ways. It's a little problematic, but yeah. And then we also watched the prequel to that, 1883.
00:16:56
Speaker
And in the prequel, they show every single TV show and movie that depicts Native Americans in their, I want to say, natural setting, which means they weren't living in a city or on a reservation. There was a handful of times in that show where they depicted the women and children were left behind at camp while the men went out hunting. And I think, like we're saying at the beginning of this,
00:17:19
Speaker
They're not actually saying that in all societies, women were just as, I don't want to say equal is the right word, but didn't equal share the living responsibilities as men. They didn't necessarily divide that way. There were some sexual divisions of labor, that's always been a thing, but there were some, definitely some in Native American societies, and there's been some in other societies throughout the world. It's just not everywhere.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's not a universal truth. Yes. And I think what they're getting at here is not necessarily that there weren't sexual divisions of labor because of course that was going to happen because the one thing that women differentiated them from men is children. They had babies and children to take care of. And that I can't imagine that was any different in prehistoric times. But I think the difference is, is that their contribution to the society
00:18:06
Speaker
as far as sustaining it, providing food, getting all the things that society needs in order to live and thrive. The contribution of women is on the same level as what the men were doing when they were going out and hunting. And that could have been through fishing, it could have been through hunting as well, whatever it was. But I think their contribution shouldn't be on like a lower pedestal is kind of what their argument is. If I had to guess,
00:18:33
Speaker
The right way to think about this is in the context of how you go from small hunter-gatherer tribes and bands, well tribes really, to bands, to what is the next one up, like groups, and then all the way up to state-level societies, right?
00:18:51
Speaker
The one commonality when you're progressing up this economically evolutionary chain is the ability for some people to simply do different tasks and really specialize. Whether that specialization is art, religion, or making bricks, or doing something, and instead of going out to get all your food every day while you're also making bricks all day long, you buy them.
00:19:16
Speaker
It's trade. You trade or you buy your things. And I would say that any society who is at the hunter-gatherer level, if you want to eat, everyone's going to be hunting and everyone's going to be gathering. It might be the stronger of the group. And maybe in some cases that's a woman. In most cases that's probably a man.
00:19:34
Speaker
But if you've got to hulk a spear into a mammoth or you've got to take down a buffalo, you're going to want the stronger of your group, whoever that is, to be throwing that spear, pulling that arrow back, the atlatl, whatever it is, because it's just sheer might that's going to take these things down. So there's that. But when it comes down to gathering and doing the nuts and the seeds and the stuff for winter, you're not going to hunt a lot of bison in the wintertime here in the plains. So you're going to have to store some resources. And it's going to be all hands on
Prehistoric Societal Structures
00:20:03
Speaker
deck for that.
00:20:03
Speaker
It has to be, yeah. And you're talking about getting enough calories into your body and the right kinds too, but the right calories into your body survive. Kind of all the calories back then were the right kinds. Probably, but yeah, you're just trying to survive here. So I think at the end of the day,
00:20:21
Speaker
women were probably bringing in through gathering and fishing and anything else they might have been doing to catching small game, even, you know, that would have equaled out whatever large game they were able to hunt. So I think they are saying that that sexual division still happened, but just don't, don't discount how important what women were doing was to the community as a whole.
00:20:43
Speaker
I think one of the big problems we have is, as anthropologists, we've come up with this term of sexual division of labor to imply that things were divided along sexual lines only because on an average scale, like I said, men are generally stronger and have more muscle on them, and women generally are less.
00:21:04
Speaker
That term also implies that it was men and women. It really should be something more of a strength division of labor or a capacity or some other term division of labor. Because like I said, there's definitely weaker men that just wouldn't have been super great at bow and arrows. Yeah. Like a young single young woman who has no children to take care of. Yeah.
00:21:28
Speaker
prime of her life at that time versus an older man, you know, 40, 45. Hey, come on out. I'm a little too close to that. I'm just saying like, I think that she would probably be a better hunter in that case, depending on what they're hunting. So.
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I've heard before too, women were all doing all the pottery and sure, in some societies you can definitely see ethnohistorical evidence which means basically people took photographs or wrote down notes of literally watching women make pots in the American Southwest because it really was kind of their deal. Older women and stuff like that, they would just sit there and coil these pots around and just make them.
00:22:08
Speaker
But again, that couldn't have been universal around the world, because if you look at even going back to Roman times and things like that, ancient Roman times, I mean, it was largely men specializing in those fields as well. And that didn't just develop out of nothing. You know, that would have developed out of a historical capacity for that joining of tasks. And then when you got into a more leisurely society, I'm willing to bet that, you know, women did kind of
00:22:35
Speaker
fall back into that house role and men were out doing other things. And that's kind of, I mean, to be honest, that's where some people are now, you know, in some families that hasn't changed. It still happens. Yeah. Well, let's, let's kind of examine like how we got to this point. The authors propose that it probably began in the 19th century with early researchers, early archeologists and their disregard for women, not just archeology, actually, probably like just science and research in general at that time.
00:23:05
Speaker
Wait, I don't buy that early British researchers had a disregard for women and didn't treat them as equals. No, you don't? No, that seems totally false. Yeah, they did at the time, and they were basically imposing the viewpoint of the time onto the past and the things that they were finding in the past.
00:23:24
Speaker
Even in medical terms and stuff like that too, there's a lot of issues with the medical research that was going on at that time period and the way they were interpreting it for women versus men. All of that was happening.
00:23:40
Speaker
It starts there. It continues on that way into the 20th century. And I think that we've begun like deconstructing that idea because when I read this article, I was like, well, yeah, of course. I mean, prehistoric women were big contributors to society, but I didn't really think about how that the idea that they weren't had come about. So it is interesting that they're kind of pinpointing it back to the 19th century.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
Diverse Roles of Prehistoric Women
00:24:07
Speaker
I mean, there's archaeological evidence, too, if you just look at the evidence of women having different roles than they've been portrayed. They mentioned one where there's etchings found on a stone placket. Yeah, I'm not really sure what that is. I guess like a small stone placket kind of thing. I think it is. Yeah, like a small tablet, maybe. Yeah, but anyway, a woman with a baby carrier on her back leaving her hands free to do other things.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's a little bit of interpretation going on there, because I don't think they necessarily knew that that was what. But having your hands free is certainly helpful in any time period. I mean, if you're British, if her hands are free because she's got a baby on her back and you're a British man in like 1901, she's just making more babies or whatever she's doing. So yeah, keeping that going.
00:24:51
Speaker
But then there's also skeletal studies being serious again. You can see muscle definition reflected in the bones of people. In the upper arms specifically where women have been portrayed as not being very strong, not having a lot of arm strength. So therefore they couldn't hunt. But like actually they probably did have a lot of upper body strength.
00:25:16
Speaker
And to be honest, they didn't know some of the stuff like this back in the times when these interpretations were made, because I'm reminded when I see this upper arm muscle thing of the massive study that was done on that, what was it? That college football team that crashed in the Everglades or something in Florida, like their whole plane went down and it was all college football players and they all died. And there was a huge study done on their, an osteological study done in their assemblage.
00:25:40
Speaker
I don't think I've heard about that. Yeah, I mean they were really like had overdeveloped muscles because they were college football players And there was a lot of stuff that came out of that study of the basically their remains now I don't know how How a lot of the remains ended up in like the scientific record and not buried
00:25:56
Speaker
When was this? Well, I heard about this when I was in osteology class in like 2004. Okay. So it must've been a long time ago. But it was not long before that. So it was probably late nineties or early 2000s. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I just don't remember. I did not hear about that. Yeah, but it was a huge thing and that's where you learn stuff like that. Yeah. You know, who would have known that you can see stuff like muscle definition in bone growth.
00:26:17
Speaker
I know, like in the early 1900s, they were still trying to define race by bones. So they weren't really maybe looking at the other things that you could learn, the things that are not focused on that. So in Peru, there is the burial site of a young woman who is under the age of 20. This is kind of what I was talking about before. And she's buried with a big game hunting and butchering toolkit, basically.
00:26:42
Speaker
all the different points and things that you would need for hunting and then processing big game. So I think that is really cool and it kind of is exactly what we were speculating on before that maybe a young, strong woman would be part of a hunting party and it might go badly for her and then she dies and gets buried with all her stuff.
00:27:02
Speaker
A few more kind of case studies here. We see female burials with hunting tools in the US. There's at least 10 sites from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene between 12,000 to 8,000 BCE.
00:27:15
Speaker
going a different direction. Small game hunting has been sort of under emphasized by past researchers and it probably contributed a lot to the nutrition of a community depending on where they were and what their animal hunting opportunities were. Yeah. And we're sitting up here in Washington state where fish and shellfish and things like that are still a pretty huge part of people's everyday diet. I mean, fish is everywhere in Seattle.
00:27:38
Speaker
salmon, things like that. And fishing and setting up these traps and things like that and processing fish and stuff, there's no sexual division of labor there. That doesn't really require a massive amount of strength. Unless you're talking about the whalers, whaling is a whole other entity. Whole different thing. And not necessarily prehistoric. I'm not really sure that was happening
00:28:00
Speaker
Like 10,000 years ago, right? I don't know. Up in Alaska, they've been taking whales for a long time. Really? Maybe. Yeah, I don't know the history on that one. But yeah, that was probably a huge part of their nutritional intake, and definitely it was in the wintertime when big game wasn't really around.
00:28:16
Speaker
And then the other side of this thing is women were kind of seen as constantly pregnant. So you've got probably high infant mortality just because of where you're at, the survivalness of it, the whole thing. So trying to figure out, well, how did people just even reproduce? Well, women must have just been constantly pumping out kids.
00:28:38
Speaker
But there's been some pretty solid evidence that they weren't necessarily doing that. And they would sometimes breastfeed until a child was four or probably even later. And something I actually didn't even really think about is that when a woman is breastfeeding her child, she is less likely to get pregnant again.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's basically like ancient birth control. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's modern birth control. I mean, women kind of rely on that these days as well. If you're breastfeeding, basically your period just doesn't come back after you have the baby until you stop breastfeeding. That's not always the case with some people. There's always variability in different bodies or whatever, but I mean, it's basically a form, it's a natural form of birth control, but you have to actually be breastfeeding to work and not everybody breastfeeds these days.
00:29:25
Speaker
Although maybe they should right now. There's a crazy formula shortage going on. Yeah, right. But anyway. Yeah. One of the book contributors says that women can bear children from about the age of 14 to 30, which makes sense biologically and would have generally given that timeframe about a maximum of five to six babies per woman. And that's really like pumping them out. That's more on like a two to three years of breastfeeding rather than four.
00:29:50
Speaker
That sounds like five to six babies that lived because if they have an infant die or something die, then they're no longer breastfeeding and they can get pregnant again. They could. That's true. That's not taking mortality into account. That's probably ones that survived or at least survived past the breastfeeding age.
00:30:08
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, that just goes to show that like it wasn't a constantly pregnant, therefore unable to move around as easily and do things as easily, like a large, largely pregnant or nearly full term woman. That would be hard, but don't think that was the case. No, no.
00:30:26
Speaker
So one last thing is that there's plenty of burials and sites that show that women achieved high
High-Status Woman Burial Site
00:30:33
Speaker
status. And one in particular that the book mentions is the Lady of Cavillion. And she was buried with a skull cap of seashells. And it just was sort of in this way that really showed that she had achieved high status in her community and that she was important enough to be buried this way as compared with the other burials in the area. So that's pretty cool.
00:30:53
Speaker
Well, that's pretty interesting. Looking forward to all that coming out in a way that we can consume it. I know. I'm hoping that we'll be able to watch it because I'm very intrigued for sure. I'd love to see it. Yeah. And again, if anybody knows anybody related to this project, let us know and put us in touch so we can have an in there and maybe talk to them on the podcast. Yeah, definitely. That would be awesome. That would be really cool.
Large Cave Art in Alabama
00:31:13
Speaker
Well, we're going to go from there and see if maybe women were contributing to making giant rock art in Alabama. I'm sure they were, because we're talking tight spaces, and if you're talking sexual division of labor and you need the smaller people to get in there, women and children. Please stand up. There you go.
00:31:32
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 171 of The Archaeology Show and we are talking about gigantic rock art in Alabama. This has been making the rounds so we figured we'd talk about it. It actually made the rounds so far that it was in my nightly weather channel video watching. It has nothing to do with weather.
00:31:52
Speaker
And that might sound weird to you. It seemed weird to me too, but Chris likes to fall asleep to weather channel videos. Listen, they're short. They're informative. I learn about the stars coming up. I learn about weather patterns. I learn about tornadoes. How many times have you dropped your phone on your face?
00:32:11
Speaker
I mean, not much on my face. I'm usually like laying on my side. I have dropped it down like the side of the RV though into the abyss next to our bed. Anyway, again, we are linking to the original antiquity article, but there's a lot of people republishing the article from the conversation because they allow that.
00:32:31
Speaker
And there was a Science Alert one that I was actually looking at originally, but that even says right at the bottom, republished from the conversation, which they didn't even touch it. Oh, really? They just put it on their website. Oh, it's just like a direct copy. Crazy. Yeah, and you can do that. They actually say it on the... I was looking for that on here, and it says through a Creative Commons license, feel free to republish it. Wow. Thanks for the free content, I guess. I think they just want attribution. It worked, because I came back to here instead. Yeah.
00:32:57
Speaker
Anyway, what they found in a cave in Alabama is kind of like the mud ceiling, the really kind of soft, calling it mud, but it's really just kind of softish rock that you can carve into. And it must not have a lot of draining going on because this kind of art would just be muddled and washed away after 2,000 years. It gets that soft, yeah, I don't think it would.
00:33:20
Speaker
Anyway, they say it's the largest known cave images found in North America, and I immediately said, I doubt it. But then I saw it said cave images, because I was thinking rock art in general. This is just in a cave. Yeah, because we saw some really huge ones in Utah. Remember, they were bigger than normal humans. Yeah, the vernal petroglyphs they're called are massive. But to be honest, well, we'll get to it. But some of these are really big inside of this cave here.
00:33:47
Speaker
Anyway, we'll get with the interpretations. Of course, because it's in a cave that is not really lit from the outside very well, you gotta bring torches in. They say it may represent spirits of the underworld. Of course. It's always religion. Yeah. I mean, I could see that, though. I mean, I could see that. Why else would you draw in a dark cave where humans can't really see it very well, or at all, unless they have a torch? Who's it for? Unless you were in prison to there.
00:34:14
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's dark. Who knows? Who knows? I don't know. I guess I can kind of see the whole underworld spirit connection. Yeah. Well, some of the inscriptions that they talk about in the article, one of them is a diamondback rattlesnake, which was sacred to the people of the Southeast. And that was almost three meters long. Gross. That's big.
00:34:36
Speaker
In real life, super gross. Yeah, well, we're talking prehistoric times here, so maybe they were giant rattlesnakes. No, that's not quite old enough. No, I don't think that's how that works. Yeah. Three meters, though. I mean, you could have a snake that long, right?
00:34:48
Speaker
You can, but I don't know about a rattlesnake. Yeah, maybe not that long. They don't get that big. Yeah, probably not. Three meters is about 10 feet, and you can definitely get a rattlesnake that's approaching five, six feet right now. So maybe 10 feet. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But there's other reasons why it may be three meters long, which we'll get to in a minute. There's a human figure, sort of an anthropomorph we call it, just kind of a human figure. Yeah, kind of like blocky and square looking, right? Yeah, wasn't really good. But that was 1.8 meters long.
00:35:17
Speaker
Which again, 1.8 meters, two meters would be about seven feet. 1.8 meters would be about the size of a tall person. So that's not too crazy. So how do they know how old this is? They're saying it's about just under 2,000 years old. Yeah, because caves.
00:35:34
Speaker
Cave or rock art is notoriously hard to date. So how are they dating
Dating Cave Art with Radiocarbon
00:35:39
Speaker
this? And they didn't date the rock art, which is why I'm a little skeptical here. Now, they did say that, of course, you would have needed to light the inside of the cave in order to see what you're drawing. Right. Right. And they say the cave was lit by because they've got evidence of this prehistoric people using a flaming torch of American bamboo. First off, I didn't even know there was American bamboo. Second,
00:36:00
Speaker
No, but that makes sense because it grows here. In order to keep these kinds of things going, you've got to kind of stub them against the wall to kind of reignite them. Oh, knock off the end that's burned or whatever. Off the end that's burned, and then you get the embers down inside the bundle of sticks, you know. Okay, sure, yeah. So it just kind of keeps going. Well, that stubbing in the carbon that was left behind is what they radiocarbon dated.
00:36:21
Speaker
Well, hey, that's pretty good evidence that they that's pretty good. But can you really correlate that with the actual record don't know for sure over the original where the original inscribers of this rock art either lighting it in a different way or Lighting it in the same way But then people have come through there centuries beyond and had to light their own way And so now we're getting this layering of you know potential layering and and maybe the old stuff washed away and the new stuffs on top of it I don't know there's
00:36:51
Speaker
I wouldn't say it's conclusive. Yeah, it's definitely a bit of an interpretation, but I don't know. It seems pretty good. If they have evidence of multiple occupations by different peoples at different times, then that would definitely call it more into question.
00:37:08
Speaker
Well, in the radiocarbon dates have a 300-year span, 133 to 433 CE, so definitely multiple groups of people potentially, but that is within the error bars of radiocarbon dating, too. I don't know if anybody's saying this was a one-time event where these things were just made and then that was it, but I would be guessing that that's not the case. Probably not, yeah. People usually revisit areas like this over and over.
00:37:32
Speaker
Interesting thing is there is pottery that was found in the cave and the pottery is dated basically. Well, there are some ways you can date pottery, but one of the ways is dated through a stylistic representation. What does it look like? And one of the ways that correlates with the dates they found. So that either means one of, I would say, two primary theories.
00:37:53
Speaker
Either A, this stuff was made well into prehistory and we don't know when, and these people for 300 years revered it and saw it as a sacred site, came in, celebrated it with their torches, looked at it, left their pottery behind for whatever reason, and that was it. Or the pottery and the torches were left there by the people who made the rock art.
00:38:16
Speaker
So the rock art is probably either contemporaneous with or older than the pottery and torches. Though it could be newer too, but that seems less likely. Hard to say. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I'm just like being a little skeptical. Kind of spiraling down like the possible options. But it's hard to say.
00:38:40
Speaker
Right. I mean, the thing is this wasn't like something people would come and just sit back and admire either. The ceiling of this cave is in general only about two feet high. Oh, wow. Very, very low. Yeah. So you're like laying on your back to carve these things in. Yeah. And you're scraping yourself along and to even see it in full. I mean, you would have had to have a lot of light in there and be able to kind of like interpret and look down or whatever.
00:39:05
Speaker
It would have been something you more, from a spiritual standpoint, that you more just sat with and knew it was there, and you could see parts of it, but you wouldn't really be able to sit back and look at the whole thing. So, I don't know. I don't know what was going on there. Yeah, so if it was spiritual use, I see what you're saying, if it was for spiritual use after they were carved, then you would just almost be experiencing it in the dark probably, or with a small portion of it lit up. Yeah, for sure.
Photogrammetry Revealing Hidden Art
00:39:31
Speaker
These images were pretty hard to see and even by archaeologists and in fact they weren't actually seen by archaeologists. We knew about this cave apparently but nobody knew there was anything on the roof for a long time on the ceiling and that's until they did photogrammetry. Now we've talked about photogrammetry before but just a quick primer on that. You basically take
00:39:50
Speaker
hundreds if not thousands of photographs at different angles and this would have been Really difficult to photograph given its distance, you know between the wall and the ceiling Yeah in the darkness we can pretty well light it I'm sure yeah, but using photogrammetry they were able to basically stitch together a 3d representation of the ceiling and then essentially Pull the floor away by up to about four meters. So you could digitally stand back and look at it
00:40:14
Speaker
Oh, that is so cool. I didn't quite understand what that meant, but that makes more sense now that, cause they, yeah, okay. That's really cool. Yeah. So that's how they were able to see all these things. And then they more than likely, I didn't read the original article, but they more than likely use something like D stretch to essentially
00:40:34
Speaker
Altered or change the color profiles and saturation and exposure rates. Yeah in order to make the images come out You know D stretch is a program that was set up. In fact, you can download the D stretch app I'm sure I don't know if you still can but D stretch was a program set up to just do that on a photo with preset Conditions that we know work But people who are really doing this would probably start with a preset and then tweak it until images start to come out Yeah, so
00:41:02
Speaker
That's cool. It is interesting though, like they must have been able to see a little bit of them to even know to do the photogrammetry to begin with, right? Well, I think that if I had to guess, I mean, maybe, but if I had to guess, even if they didn't know anything was there, researchers and archeologists like to just over document stuff. So if you found pottery and you found
00:41:24
Speaker
these smudgings and carbon dating and stuff, you're going to come in with other funding and you're going to map the entire thing. Photogrammetry is a really inexpensive tool right now that we have. If you just have to come in there and lighting it would have been the most challenging part, but just taking a whole bunch of digital pictures, to be honest, you can do it with your phone. As long as you know where those pictures are, that's the challenge with photogrammetry too. You have to know
00:41:48
Speaker
You don't necessarily have to know, but it helps to know the distance and all that and the time and space where the pictures are actually taken from. Because when it stitches together, it helps create this accurate representation of what you're looking at. I mean, it's a really cool tool. And like I said, you could download an app right now and do photogrammetry in your coffee mug sitting on your table and make a 3D representation of it. It won't be super great. It'll be a little curvy and blocky. But it'll be pretty much exactly what these guys did, just with more precision.
00:42:19
Speaker
That's really cool. Yeah. It's neat seeing all these tools being used in interesting ways and the stuff that we can do with them. And the article kind of goes down a rabbit hole on
00:42:31
Speaker
the rock art that we don't know exists, like how much cave rock art and other stuff is out there in the world that we've just like, we're not even aware of. Yeah, because we can't see it without, because the cave is dark, because the cave is inaccessible, because there's so many reasons why we wouldn't be able to see. We can't get the right angle. Yeah, yeah. Well, do you remember going to Petroglyph National Park? Yeah, in Arizona? No, in New Mexico. In New Mexico, yeah, outside of Albuquerque. And we were walking along the path and it was one of those out and back hikes. And I feel like it was,
00:43:01
Speaker
at a time of day where the sun changed quickly, and we were seeing different things on the way back than we were on the way out, not just because it was the other side, but because the light had changed so much that it was just making different things pop out of the rocks, because there's petroglyphs everywhere in that park. Yeah, and it was mid to late afternoon that we started, and the sunlight was straight on some of those things, and you couldn't see anything. You just couldn't see anything. It just looked like a shiny-ish rock.
00:43:29
Speaker
So if you are going to something like Petrogoth National Park, I would say go in the early morning or the late afternoon. Yeah, definitely. Little tip from us. Pro tip. Pro tip. All right, well, that's pretty much it. Again, if anybody knows anyone associated with that documentary and book coming out about prehistoric women's, Lady Sapiens. Did you say women's? Women's. Prehistoric women's. Women's. The women's folk.
00:43:57
Speaker
Then yeah, please put us in touch chris at archaeology podcast network comm or connect with us on all the socials Wherever you find our pod net or wherever you listen to this
00:44:07
Speaker
All right, well, thanks a lot. Be sure to look down at your phone and click on any of our affiliate links. There's a really cool one in there called Motion, which I use and Rachel uses for all of our task and calendar scheduling. It's pretty sweet. They've got a free version, and then you can use the paid version as well, which gives us a little bit of a kickback, but also other stuff in there. Yeah, even just clicking on these links is really helpful to us, even if you don't do anything with it. It's just clicking on the link shows the advertiser that people are looking at the things that we're putting in there, so it's helpful.
00:44:36
Speaker
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00:45:01
Speaker
getting it in front of and on the podcast that, you know, share your audience, whether that's ours or not. Doesn't matter. It's across the whole Zancaster platform. Definitely. All right. With that, we will see you guys next week. Bye.
00:45:21
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.
00:45:45
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 Chris Webster and 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.