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Early Stone Tools, a Unique Burial, and a Stone Circle - Ep 256
3.1k Plays7 months ago
This week we have 3 interesting archaeology news stories. First, we discuss a new dating technique that researchers in Ukraine are using on early human tools. Then, we head over to Mexico where a construction project has uncovered a uniquely arranged group burial. And finally, we head down to Peru, and the gorgeous city of Cajamarca, where researchers have found the stone circle that was built over 4,000 years ago.
Links
- Archaeologists Just Uncovered The Oldest Evidence of Humans in Europe - Apple News
- East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago - Nature
- Trove of ancient skulls and bones found stacked on top of each other during construction project in Mexico - Apple News
- Archaeologists discover mysterious stone circle built before great pyramids - Apple News
- A monumental stone plaza at 4750 B.P. in the Cajamarca Valley of Peru - Science Advances
Contact
- Chris Webster
[email protected] - Rachel Roden
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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. Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 256. On today's show, we talk about the oldest stone tools in Europe, a CRM project in Mexico, and a stone circle in Peru. Let's dig a little deeper. Ah, really, nothing. Underneath the stones?
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. I know you're doing fine. Go ahead, ask me how it's going.
Exploring San Juan National Historic Site
00:00:42
Speaker
So we took a week off last week, but we were on a cruise down in the Southern Caribbean, which is pretty fun. We actually got some archaeology in there, too. I mean, this is a first for me, I think, for you, too. We went to our first national park outside of the 50 United States.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, we did. We were in San Juan. That's where the cruise took off from. And I'm a little bit of a national park junkie. You are too, but I feel like I'm a little bit more intense about it than you are. And I really like getting the stamps in my little national park passport book. So when we saw there was one in San Juan, we were like, well, we have time to kill before the cruise, so we have to make this happen. That's San Juan, Puerto Rico. Yes, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
00:01:23
Speaker
And that's where the cruise was taking off from. So we spent a whole day wandering around, not a whole day, like a whole morning wandering around the forts that make up the San Juan National Historic Site or something like that. I think it's historic park or whatever. Yeah, whatever it is. And that was really cool. It was really fun and beautiful. Gosh, just like views for miles everywhere you walk.
00:01:44
Speaker
I mean, hot, but views for miles. Yeah. I thought it was cool. And one of the forts, you can go into these tunnels and they had these tunnels just for getting around and to different areas of the fort without being exposed, because, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of people trying to take this fort many, many times. And it proved to be untakeable most of the time, just because the walls were so thick and it was pretty easily defended. So yeah, it was a cool place. Yeah, very cool.
Oldest Evidence of Humans in Europe
00:02:10
Speaker
But we enjoyed that for sure. So that was fun.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, you know who didn't have a fort to protect them. Aha, go on. These early Ukrainians. They're not really Ukrainians, though. They're early homo erectus, very early humans. So this first article is from Science Alert, and it's called Archaeologists Just Uncovered the Oldest Evidence of Humans in Europe. And we also have the Nature article linked in the show notes, so go check that out.
00:02:40
Speaker
All right. So again, oldest evidence of humans in Europe, and I'm glad they kind of worded it that way because it doesn't mean it's the oldest humans in Europe, but that's the oldest evidence that we have. That's a very important distinction because you only know what you have evidence for, right? So they could have been older, but, or there could have been older occupations. We just don't know about it yet because we don't have the evidence.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And you have to assume that if you find evidence of humans, especially early humans in one spot. Now, if you find evidence of 20th century humans somewhere, yeah, they probably flew there or took a boat, right? So they could have just arrived. But if you find evidence of any humans 30,000 years ago or more, or even 5,000 years ago or more, you have to assume that they've been there for a long time. You're not like finding evidence of the advance party.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah. The chances of stumbling on the first time a group arrived some place is very unlikely. So you kind of have to assume that you're coming in in the middle of the occupation somewhere. Probably. We'd never know it. We'd never know it was the first one. Yeah. That's impossible really to say unless you have like migration paths and you can kind of like see what direction people are going. Kind of.
00:03:48
Speaker
Even so, what counts as first? Because chances are there was some party of people or even a single person that went somewhere first and then died or didn't make it or it was hundreds or thousands of years before somebody tried it again and it's just, when did it stick basically? When was that first camp or whatever that was successful and then people married and had kids and did whatever they did. Maybe not married. Well, whatever they called it. Everybody's had some form of marriage. Whatever they called it, I guess.
00:04:18
Speaker
I guess I shouldn't say marriage, yeah, they partnered up. But anyway, point is, it's not the first, but it's the oldest evidence that we have. So this was found at Korolev Okori in Ukraine. And again, this article is from 10th of March, 2024. And I don't know if it says in the Nature article, because I don't remember reading that. I read this a couple of weeks ago.
00:04:42
Speaker
Like when this excavation was actually done like is it a part of Ukraine? That's like okay to be in I'm not really sure how they're putting new evidence out of Ukraine right now Yeah, they didn't even talk about like it being in danger from the war So I guess it's probably either someone that's fine or it's just lab analysis at this point in a safe place So yeah, yeah, so this is a quarry. So as you can imagine What they found here was stone tools, right?
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, these stone tools were created and used by Homo erectus, at least that's what they think. And again, this is the earliest evidence of hominid habitation on the European continent.
Debate on Human Migration Patterns
00:05:16
Speaker
Andy Ferris is an archaeologist at La Trobe University in Australia. According to him, the researchers here used to think that our earliest ancestors couldn't survive in these colder northern climates without fire or complex stone tools. Every time we think people couldn't survive somewhere, turns out that girl. Yeah, definitely. And as usual, this find seems to disprove that idea.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah. And I was kind of wondering when I was reading this article that they didn't find any evidence of fire in this particular area or this excavation or whatever, but that doesn't mean one of two things. Either A, that doesn't mean that there was no fire use in the area. Maybe they just didn't find it. Or B, that it's so old that the fire, the evidence of fire has just dissipated into the ground. It's just gone. There's no charcoal left. There's no
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah, and it could just be the preservation of the area, too. Like, charcoal doesn't stick around really well in all areas. Some places it does, some places it doesn't. So it could just be that the evidence is gone. It's totally a possibility. Yeah, now, when we start talking about the exodus out of Africa is what people really kind of refer to this as. Because Africa is where the real cradle of humanity is. Well, the early seeds of humanity, I guess. But people are always debating,
00:06:28
Speaker
Did humans spring out of Homo erectus and Homo erectus spread all over the place? Because we found Homo erectus in China, in northern Europe, and in France, Spain, stuff like that. We found Homo erectus all over the place. But did Homo erectus lead into the other hominid versions and then humans eventually all over the place, or did humans spring up somewhere and then spread out across from wherever they sprang up?
00:06:52
Speaker
But some still think that humanity evolved out of a single cradle, they call it, in one part of the world. This find, and to be quite honest, many others, provide evidence that Homo sapiens may have been moving across Europe much earlier than thought. Now we're talking about Homo erectus here, but Homo erectus is an ancestor of Homo sapiens.
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah. And I was just wondering, you know, are we really shocked at all that human migration is way more complicated than we previously thought? I know. Like we're dealing with sites that are so old and there's so few of them and you're filling in gaps as you find things, of course, but like there is just so much unknown about what happened in this really long stretch of time, a very long time ago. So of course it's more complicated than we thought. And of course it's more interesting even than we thought too, you know, it's great.
00:07:42
Speaker
Most of what we find that is that old are stone tools, obviously, because you might have some bones, they'll be fossilized if you do find them. There are other artifacts maybe that might, if the preservation conditions are favorable, they might be preserved, but mostly what you find are stone tools. And that is kind of a problem for dating though, because
00:08:03
Speaker
you can't really date stone tools. So you have to rely on relative dating, which is the stuff around stone tools, probably with stuff this old, you're talking about like geological layers and stuff like that is what you're using to pinpoint where this stuff, you know, dates to.
00:08:19
Speaker
At least you couldn't date stone tools. At least you couldn't. This article is really cool. It almost belongs on archaeotech. I feel like you and Paul need to talk about this because this technique is crazy. I've never heard of it before, but it's really cool. We'll get to that in a minute.
00:08:36
Speaker
The site in Ukraine is 14 meters deep and contains thousands of artifacts dating back many millennia. There's at least seven separate periods of hominid occupation across at least nine paleolithic cultures. This goes back about 30,000 years on this one site, so long time. There are no biological remains which they've found, so that rules out radiocarbon dating. Typical in such a good site, so not surprising.
00:09:00
Speaker
And over the years of excavation, researchers have relied on the positions of the artifacts to say that these ones are deeper and older, therefore they're deeper because they're older, or they're older because they're deeper. It's actually long-accepted law in geology, which is the law of superposition, which means generally if something's lower, it must be older.
00:09:23
Speaker
They thought that a long time ago, but then when they started realizing that, hey, entire plates could flip themselves over, you got to be careful with that. Yeah, you do have to follow the threads of the geology to make sure that everything is in place the way it was 30,000 years ago. But luckily for us, that takes millions of years, not 30,000 years to do. So we know that deeper stuff is generally older. Now, there are things
00:09:44
Speaker
From an archeological standpoint, that could move stuff older and out of context. And that's animals, it's tree roots, it's water action. It's all kinds of stuff that could transport artifacts from where they were initially deposited. Yeah, you kind of have to look at it as a whole. And if you have one artifact that's way deeper than everything else, then you need to really
00:10:04
Speaker
examine how that could have gotten there. And if it looks like it's at the bottom of like a rodent burrow or something, then, you know, maybe it just got dragged there by accident, by animal activity. So there's a lot of like interpreting the context I think that goes along with this as well. All right. So what
New Archaeological Dating Techniques
00:10:21
Speaker
they use to date this is like we've set up brand new dating technique that we'd never heard of. It's been around for a while in other areas, but I don't, it doesn't seem like it's been applied to archeology very often. Yeah.
00:10:31
Speaker
A team led by the archaeologist Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences used a new precision dating technique called cosmogenic nuclei burial dating. Yet another unmemorable and hard to pronounce dating technique. I find that they all just like jumble around in my brain. So yay, one more to roll around in there.
00:10:53
Speaker
This dating technique relies on the fact that when a rock is on the surface, it is bombarded with cosmic rays. Okay. This is just literally cosmic rays from the universe. Right. Just hitting it. Yeah. Not visible. Just like, well, you're being hit by cosmic rays. Exactly. Just like existing on the surface. This is what happens to everything.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah. They use this to look at the decay rates of specific atomic nuclei and then measure the amount of time that's passed since burial. Now this is the same as radiocarbon dating. It's the transformation of carbon 12 into carbon 14. And there's other types of
00:11:25
Speaker
dating techniques like uranium thoron dating and potassium argon dating, that potassium argon is used in like Africa. Anytime you've got like a basalt layer, it's the decay rate. And that relies on what's called the half-life, if you've never heard of that. And all of these like radiometric particles that emit radiation, they have a half-life, which means that over a given unit of time, half of it will be left.
00:11:49
Speaker
And if you know what the half-life is of the chemical, then that's the further back you can go. And this is why you can't use radiocarbon dating back more than, it's about 50 to 60,000 years because the half-life is only something like 5,600 years or something like that. And so in 5,600 years, half of what you had is gone. And by the time you hit about 50,000 years, there's not enough of it left to really do anything with. But the half-life of some of these other things,
00:12:14
Speaker
is extremely long, sometimes in the millions of years. So it's a lot easier to say that there's stuff that's left in to measure. You have to kind of know how much was left when you measure these ratios. But at this one, they measured the concentrations of the cosmogenic nuclei of beryllium 10 and aluminum 26. And these of course have different half-lives. The nuclei accumulate in quartz grains and begin to decay as soon as they are buried. So as soon as
00:12:43
Speaker
They're no longer exposed to the atmosphere. Then they start decaying. The ratio of these two gives the researchers the length of time that the rock was buried. Oh, so they need two different ones and then they're looking at the ratio, basically. Yeah, that's how all these half-lives work. Because one's decaying into the other, basically. Well, actually, in this case, they're not decaying into the other. They're each decaying separately, but they know the half-lives of these things.
00:13:07
Speaker
I guess if you have two, it just makes your dating more precise because you're looking at two different things.
00:13:15
Speaker
they used a mathematics based model to determine the age of the sediment layers. And apparently this is the first time this technique was used for archeological dating, not like a mathematics based model. We do kind of stuff like that all the time, but this particular cosmogenic dating technique. So the earliest age they observed with this method was actually 1.42 million years. Wow. This is the date of the oldest tools in the assemblage is what they said. So that's actually quite old. Yeah. Super old.
00:13:41
Speaker
It looks like Homo erectus was in Europe by 1.4 million years ago and then got there by migrating through Asia about 1.8 million years ago. When we mentioned all the thousands of artifacts earlier, that was obviously the more recent artifacts.
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah, okay, because we talked about it going back 30,000 years, but this is the whole assemblage for this area. Yeah, this is Paleolithic cultures that we are aware of, and then the oldest stone tools we're talking about. So anyway, these are the oldest ever Homo rectus fossils, date to around 2 million years ago, and these were found in a cave in South Africa, where all the good stuff is found.
00:14:19
Speaker
So, it's clear that more needs to be done and more Homo erectus needs to be found in Europe and more sites like this, but it's also pretty clear that Homo erectus was a pretty significant player on the European landscape. I think we've already known that, but we just keep solidifying that thought. Well, like we said earlier, it's really hard to date stone artifacts. Obviously, you have relative dating, but that's not always real great depending on the context you find it in.
00:14:43
Speaker
being able to use this kind of dating. Now I imagine if this is only going to work if you
00:14:50
Speaker
So you're measuring the cosmic rays, basically, right? The amounts of two different nucleons. Yeah. So when you're collecting these artifacts for dating, they can't be exposed to the atmosphere again, because that would skew the dating, right? Good point. So are they like collecting like a chunk of dirt and just keeping it enclosed in the dirt and taking it somewhere where it can be protected from exposure?
00:15:17
Speaker
Well, and I'm not sure how much of a penetrating factor these cosmic rays actually have. We're talking 14 meters deep here at the lowest levels. So chances are there wasn't a lot of daylight down there to begin with, depending on how big the excavation was. And if they covered over the top, is that enough to prevent the cosmic rays? Like I'm inside an aluminum RV right now, or cosmic rays, anyway? Or are they blocked by that?
00:15:40
Speaker
It depends. Yeah, I guess so. But it does make you think that if you're going to plan to use this kind of dating, which it seems like anybody who's trying to look at early human anything, anywhere would want to use this because it's great for stone artifacts, right? That they're going to have to plan for how to protect the artifacts from contamination before they can get to the testing. So yeah, really interesting. And I also imagine you won't be able to go back and do this kind of testing to artifacts that have been found already because they've been
00:16:10
Speaker
Sitting out exposed wherever so this is like a moving forward new excavation kind of technique that you would have to use Yeah, this just goes to show that you never know what kind of future techniques are gonna be yeah, so it's always handy to
00:16:24
Speaker
I would say probably if you can almost just preserve in as much a way as you possibly can some sort of block of soil or even some artifacts untouched until possibly something you don't even know is invented or has been invented but not applied to archaeology comes around and then somebody could test this later on because there's so many things that you just can't
00:16:44
Speaker
You just don't know. You can't contaminate. You could even leave a portion of the site unexcavated just for future excavation with different technology. You wouldn't want to excavate it with the same technology 10 years from now, but maybe 20, 30 years, things have really moved forward. It might be a good time to revisit a site and do new different processes. Of course, the risk you run into there is if you leave it unexcavated, you don't know what's there. You don't know. You could be leaving nothing.
00:17:09
Speaker
You're true. Yeah, that's true. You got to have a good bet that there's something there that you're not excavating. Right. Which is why I personally think that you should just take a block or a portion of the excavation and just record it or excavate it in such a way that you're minimizing exposure. You're dressed up in suits, you're in gloves and all kinds of stuff because you literally have no idea what kind of technique could be used later on.
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah, you can do the best you can. It's just, you never know what's going to come in the future. How could any of anybody have guessed that they'd be measuring these particles and like how they need to be dealt with and handled in a way to, to keep contamination from happening, you know? So yeah, crazy. Well, just like you never know when you're digging a sewer project, whether or not you can find a pile of skulls like the Mexicans did. Let's talk about that on the other side of the break.
00:17:58
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 256 of The Archaeology Show. And again, this time we're talking about a CRM project.
Complex Burial Practices in Mexico
00:18:04
Speaker
And it was a construction project in a small town of Pozo de Ebarra in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History were monitoring the construction of a sanitary sewage network. I would hate to see an unsanitary sewage network.
00:18:22
Speaker
Monitoring is often used in archeology, we've both done it, to observe construction and protect any cultural artifacts that might be found. Because sometimes you might be working in an area that doesn't necessarily warrant excavation because things weren't found there, but maybe a lot of stuff has been found in the area or you know it's a, you know like in England, I'm pretty sure they monitor everything because you can't drop a spoon in the ground without finding a Roman artifact or something like that, right?
00:18:45
Speaker
Well, and with construction work, you might not be able to do a typical archaeological survey because it's all paved or the whole area has been disturbed. So all you can really do is let the construction equipment get in there and start doing what they're doing, and you watch as they do it and stop them if it looks like they're disturbing a site or something important needs to be protected, basically.
00:19:12
Speaker
Well, in this case, they really kind of hit the mother lode here. What they found was they're calling a funerary system where a series of bones were arranged. There were long bones like tibias and femurs placed in one part of the system. And they're all actually kind of close to each other, wouldn't say system, but they're just calling it that. And then there was a whole bunch of skulls just like stacked on top of each other in another part of the system. And I guess not a whole bunch. There's about seven complete skulls, each belonging to males. So they said.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. They are of different ages and some show signs of cranial modification. And this would be a practice where the shape of the skull was modified for aesthetic purposes. I'm thinking like where you do like a flattened back of the skull, potentially you can do it like when the person is a baby. You can put a board against their head and flatten the skull that way and things like that. So I guess I imagined something like that, but they didn't really describe what they meant by the modifications exactly.
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah. And it looks like the bones were placed in this funerary system after the flesh and other soft materials gone. So they didn't bury a bunch of heads and legs. No, they did not dismember them. There would have been cut marks if they were dismembered and put this way. So for some reason, they let all the flesh, you know, decompose away and they were left with just a pile of bones and then they organized the bones like this. It's so strange, right? Like why do that?
00:20:31
Speaker
I guess that's what makes this a complex funerary system in their terms. Yeah. Well, they definitely did something with intention here. Yeah. It also appears that all the bones were buried at the same time. They can probably tell that because they do look like they're literally buried on top of each other, like in a pile. Yeah. The picture's neat. Yeah. Definitely check out the article so you can see the picture.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah. If these were buried at different times, there would be layers of dirt and things like that. So it looks like a hole was dug and these were tossed in there, but not tossed in. They were definitely placed in a way that was thoughtful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
00:21:05
Speaker
The INAH has no idea why the bones were buried this way. And there's no precedent for it that they've read about or seen in the area. So which kind of strikes me as odd. There's been a lot of like funerary complex type things found in Mexico and Central America. And I'm just surprised they never found anything like this.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, this feels more like the European crypt situation where you have skulls displayed in an underground tomb situation. But that was a more specific burial practice where that was your final resting place like that. So this is different because it's buried, it's underground.
00:21:44
Speaker
the different bones are separated. I can almost like see like that sort of logical human thing though. Like, like maybe they had the remains of these individuals that they had to bury. They had to move them for some reason, whatever that reason might've been.
00:21:59
Speaker
And when you're doing that, you know, it's just easier to grab up a bunch of long bones, like sticks in your arms almost, you know, like maybe it was just as simple as that. You know, do we have to assign a ritual or a meaning or a ceremony to it? People are still people. You know, I think researchers like to forget that sometimes. Well, that being said,
00:22:21
Speaker
what they think might be happening because there is, I guess, they said there was no precedence for this, but then they go on to say, yeah, but we've kind of seen this before, sort of, but maybe just not buried this way. But I guess what they're suggesting is that the seven men might be from one family and that they were buried there as part of a right to found a settlement. And that practice may date back to the Amapa cultural era, which was from about 500 CE to 800 or 850 CE. So apparently they have seen that kind of a thing before where
00:22:49
Speaker
Your ancestors are buried somewhere. Yeah, you're just putting a hold on this place for you and saying, hey, but I'm like, did they have to sacrifice seven people for that? Or were they already dead and they reburied them over there? Yeah, and they just moved the bones. Because if they had dug up graves, because maybe they were moving from one place to the next, I'm just guessing here. But if they moved from one place to the next, they could have dug it up. Then they would have had all the bones. And they would have just organized them and said, OK, we'll put all these here, since we don't know who they belong to.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, and then we'll just put all the heads here. You know, I don't know. Yeah, it that is interesting I mean, I guess I could see that I still think that my previous statement holds though like I don't We need a lot more evidence to know why they put all the long bones together why they put all the heads together and I think it could just Be as simple as like hold your arms out, right? Let me pile all these here and like the long bones just naturally like go into your arms like firewood
00:23:41
Speaker
They just do, you know, or sticks or something. And then you can just put them all together and the heads are easy to carry, like one, two, or three together. I don't know, like I could see it just being like natural human behavior to just pick them up and carry them like that. Now as to why they did it though, that is really interesting to think that they might've been marking their territory somehow.
00:24:01
Speaker
from a from a physical standpoint like this is my land and I now own it or like from a spiritual standpoint like yeah this is anchoring them yeah yeah it could probably be either thinking yeah yeah they
00:24:16
Speaker
It sounds like this was a relatively recent discovery and there was a news release that was about this, not a paper. So they're still working on it because they did find ceramic vessels and figurines and that may help them actually date this complex a little bit later on. I would assume those would be burial goods because this was all kind of one shot. It doesn't seem like it was buried in context with something else. Totally. I wonder if they can do DNA analysis on the bones themselves too to find out if they are actually related
00:24:41
Speaker
as they are indicating they might be in their sort of hypothesis, right? They don't say they're fossilized and something can fossilize in that shorter period of time if the conditions are right, but it's unlikely. Yeah. So they probably aren't fossilized. So yeah, they might be able to. Yeah. Cause I mean, they might not be able to date necessarily the bones that way, but they
00:24:58
Speaker
could do DNA analysis to find a relationship potentially. Well, and I believe it's strontium isotope analysis they can do on the teeth. I can actually see teeth in some of these skulls here. They can do that to kind of find out what the diet of the person would have been and then to find out whether they're actually from that area or from some other area. So maybe if they're all from some other area, maybe it would indicate that a group came from somewhere, came to somewhere else and they needed this tied to the land.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, their ancestors there. Yeah or sacrifice seven people who knows Maybe maybe this is the family that used to live on this land and they're like bye guys Man who knows it's so hard to know the intention of people in the past right so we just have to like guess
00:25:46
Speaker
And the one thing I hate that researchers do, and we've talked about this before, is to give a reason or a possibility and say, this is what they did exactly. You just don't know. But they're not saying that. You have to crack the door a little bit more. They're not. They're suggesting. Yeah, they're saying it might be this. Yeah, they don't know what it is. And they clearly have said that they need to do more research. So yeah, for sure. But definitely that door cracked, because we don't know at all.
00:26:14
Speaker
All right. Well, some other archeologists that are guessing are down in Peru because they've got a mysterious stone circle that they're trying to figure out what it was for. We'll talk about that in the other side. Welcome back to the archeology show episode two 56.
Stone Circle Discovery in Peru
00:26:27
Speaker
And this article was actually reported in Newsweek and it's archeologists discover mysterious stone circle built before the great pyramids. I feel like everything is either in context of the pyramids or Stonehenge. It's like how we measure everything in football fields.
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I guess it gives context to people who may not necessarily know when things happen, but everybody knows Stonehenge and the pyramids are old, so I guess related to that. Sure. So this is a circular stone plaza that is two thirds of a football field wide.
00:27:00
Speaker
Is that even right? And 1,000 football fields above sea level. Ridiculous. Right. Actually, it's 100 football fields above sea level. Anyway, so it's a circular stone plaza measured about 18 meters or 60 feet in diameter, which is about two-thirds of a football field. And it's been discovered in these mountains of Peru.
00:27:22
Speaker
I legit have no idea how big a football field is. So you're right. It's a hundred yards. Oh, I'm completely wrong. 60 feet is not even close. Yeah. A yard is three feet. So yeah. So 60 feet would be like 20 yards. So it's like an, it's a, it's a fifth of a football field. I'm really glad that we went through that. Now that we've established the football field size. Great. Okay. So,
00:27:48
Speaker
The structure consists of two concentric walls made from unshaped stones, which just means they weren't modified, set vertically into the ground. And you can see this on a nice aerial view picture in the article. So take a look at it. It seems pretty obvious. You can probably see it from a satellite image if you knew exactly where it was. Yeah, you probably could. I can't believe you haven't been scrolling around on the map to find it. I just thought about that. So the site is in northern Peru's Cajamarca Valley at the Calakpuma archaeological site.
00:28:18
Speaker
And the site is at about 10,000 feet above sea level and it's near the summit of a peak in the Andes. And I was super excited about this article because I've actually been to Cajamarca. It's a really cool town in Northern Peru, like they said. And it's got just like a great, I don't know, like Andean vibe to it. It's all hills everywhere you walk in that city. Now this is outside of the city. You can kind of see the city in the background. I think probably that's Cajamarca.
00:28:47
Speaker
And it's just like all mountains, high elevation. Every step is like a little bit painful because you're at such a high elevation, but it's beautiful and the culture is vibrant and amazing and they have wonderful hot springs there. So it's a really cool place. I have no idea what an Andean vibe is.
00:29:04
Speaker
Well, you've got like all these little old ladies that are dressed in like the vibrant clothing of the Andes, the big tall hats, you know, that you see like the Indian women wearing and the men too. I think they wear those like crazy tall hat things. And yeah, there's a market around every corner and the food is fresh. And I don't know, it's just got this cool like vibe to it.
00:29:24
Speaker
I loved going there. It was, so I did field school in Peru three times and the like final little like, yay, you did it trip was always to Caja Marka. And we'd spend the last like day or two there and go to the hot Springs and experience the city school place.
00:29:37
Speaker
Nice. Well, they did find some charcoal near the bases of some of these stones. So of course, what does that mean? Radiocarbon dating. So they analyzed the radiocarbon there and found out, this is another thing. I don't know if Newsweek is reporting this this way or if they really said this because I can't imagine they did. But they're saying that that means the construction took place around 4,750 years ago. And I'm like,
00:30:01
Speaker
somebody, somebody 4,750 years ago could have just gone up there and burned a fire next to the structure and had some other reason for being there. Well, that's why I would want more information about the, the context that this carbon was found in. Is it like slightly underneath the stone as in it was there before the stone was put into place? I feel like that would be different, right? I feel like they'd have to pull the stone off completely to see that because it was just on the edges. It could have washed in, you know, there's a lot of ways it could have gotten in there.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It would be hard to say that this is exactly when the construction took place. Now, one thing that might help make their point though, is that if they, if there was like a lot of charcoal samples and they did it on all of them and they all came out with around the same date, that was like the only time somebody was there then maybe, but it's also like, well, did they have to burn fires to make this thing? You know, or was it used in a, was it used in some sort of ritual capacity? We'll talk about this later, which might include fires and things like that. It's hard to say if it had anything to do with the construction or just the use.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, or natural, right? Like fires happen too. You can't count out. You can't assume that carbon you find is based on something done by people. It could just be from a natural fire. That's true. But if it's from a natural fire, I think you're going to find it all over the place.
00:31:14
Speaker
True. Yeah. Very true. There'd be like a whole layer. And like looking at this image, it's a pretty barren landscape. So like a natural fire would, it would be difficult for a natural fire to start up there probably. And here we go. We've got both the cultural markers in one statement here. According to researchers, it was built about a hundred years before the great period, which is oddly specific and of Egypt and about the same time as Stonehenge. Yeah. So. Okay.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah. So, and also a hundred years before the pyramids, that is, I don't even think within the error bars of radiocarbon dating, like it could have been built at the same time or a hundred years later, you know, maybe, or, or unless their error bars have it solidly within a hundred years before, but I don't know, it depends on.
00:31:53
Speaker
If they have a lot of overlapping samples, maybe they're able to narrow down the date range better. It seems like it was made just so they could make the statement that it was built before the pyramids. Well, they do love to compare. Structures like this, prehistoric structures like this, using large stones are known around the world as monumental megalithic architecture. And I feel like monumental megalithic needs to be the name of a heavy metal band. That's a good string of words there.
00:32:21
Speaker
This is one of the earliest examples of such a structure in the Americas, though, so that's kind of cool. There are some few slightly earlier examples in the Andes themselves and lots more recent ones, but this is the earliest in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru. This one is distinct, however, because the construction method using large, free-standing and vertically placed stones is distinct from other monumental plazas in the Andes. I'm guessing they used it for Dramteral.
00:32:48
Speaker
Time travel. Yeah, sure. Whatever you say. I was going for an Outlander vibe there. Oh, you were? Oh, okay. Gotcha. Yeah, definitely pass through the stones right there. Yeah, absolutely.
00:33:05
Speaker
So the people in this area at this time lived in relatively small groups and were mostly still mobile. They were likely to still be hunting and gathering most of the time. So kind of moving around the landscape and going where they needed to go to get the resources that they needed. They did begin experimenting with agriculture and food production at this time. So maybe a little bit of a hybrid model going on, you know, settling down to grow some food here, but moving to follow game, you know, kind of that sort of situation maybe.
00:33:33
Speaker
maybe some animal domestication. Yeah. Yeah. So a little bit of settling. So kind of sounds like a hybrid situation.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah. At this particular site, they didn't find any domestic artifacts and you know, that and the fact that didn't really find anything else except for this, these, uh, charcoal samples means they don't really know what the function of this Plaza would have been. Yeah. Yeah. Like apparently there's no more recent examples with ethnographic evidence either. So ethnographic is just somebody physically talked to or wrote down an account of somebody, you know, back in the 1600s or something. Yeah. You know, that's, that's one way we can learn stuff, but apparently there's none of that.
00:34:08
Speaker
Well, I mean, this is 4,000 years ago, right? I'm just saying, if this kind of practice persisted through time, they might have an idea, at least how they were being used a few hundred years ago, but obviously nobody was. An archaeologist associated with the project thinks it served as a gathering place and ceremonial location. Take a drink.
00:34:28
Speaker
for some of the earliest people living in the part of the Caja Market Valley. Now that does actually kind of probably make a little sense because this is really high elevation, probably relatively difficult to get to. I don't care when it was and what kind of people you were, you would still have to get used to staying at that elevation. It was probably a little bit of a challenge.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know why you would have just stayed up there for long periods of time. I mean, that being said too, we have examples in Nevada's white mountains of people like villages at 10,000 feet and above. So people did it. You just adapt to that elevation and it's not really a problem anymore, I don't think. I mean, it seems like plenty of people around the world did it because there's plenty of high elevation cultures in the past and today too that live at those kind of elevations. So yeah.
00:35:15
Speaker
I also had a problem with them calling the earliest people living in the Carmark Valley, only just because the article didn't really get into what the, I guess, ethnographic evidence around there is. Is about 5,000 years really as old as people were down there? You know, is that the oldest evidence of people in that valley that we have? I don't really know. Yeah, I guess I don't really know either, but I mean, it is pretty old, right? So I could see that being some of the oldest people in the valley for sure.
00:35:43
Speaker
I wrote down a quote from one of the researchers directly from the article. I'm just going to read it right now. I suspect, and I am not the first archaeologist to propose this kind of idea, that people came from one group or members of several nearby groups, either came together under the leadership of some aspiring person or, and just as likely, that they came together more collectively in order to build this monument.
00:36:05
Speaker
We may never know exactly what happened and why the monument was built, but at a time when people were just beginning to settle down, there might have been some desire to make a physical, material claim to local resources and lands. This seems like a pretty high altitude area to claim anything down in the valley, first off. True, but if he's talking about a bunch of groups coming together,
00:36:27
Speaker
Yeah, they would need some sort of neutral place to maybe do that. Yeah. And like, you're not going to be using that high elevation spot for anything other than maybe grazing animals or something, right? So not living for sure. So it could be, yeah, a place for you to come together, but not impact where you're trying to actually settle down and build your communities. I guess I could see that.
00:36:47
Speaker
And also it's high up on like a ridge, so if you're talking about a place with ceremonial or spiritual significance, then those higher places are, you know, the kind of places that you've seen in other cultures. So I guess, yeah, I mean, I can see that. It's reaching, but it's reaching in a direction that makes sense based on what they found or didn't find.
00:37:07
Speaker
And one of the reasons why they're going towards the multiple groups coming together thing is because monumental architecture of this size is often associated with relative social complexity just because of the organization and planning you would need for construction, the sheer number of people, the vision. Somebody has to have the vision and direct people and guide where it's going to go.
00:37:26
Speaker
You know, that's that's tough to do unless you've got some sort of organization going on Yeah and like the idea that it's under the leadership of a person makes sense too because like How in the world could you get enough people to come together to move these ridiculously heavy stones into place in a large monumental? Yeah
00:37:47
Speaker
architecture thing like this, unless it is a really inspiring person who has a really good reason for you to do it. Coming together under the leadership of one person does kind of make sense to me. You see it with the pyramids in Egypt is a really great example of that. On a massive scale. On a massive scale, yeah. So like, sure, under the leadership of a really strong person, that does make sense to me too. Yeah.
00:38:12
Speaker
Their next steps are to use non-invasive remote sensing techniques, probably something like ground penetrating radar, or depending on the surface, resistivity and some other stuff that they could use, depending on the soil, I guess. And they're going to try to find buried walls or other features that may be associated. So that's what they're going to do next. Yeah, because if they can find some places where people were living, then that might change this completely, right? Or help narrow in on what the function of the circle was.
00:38:39
Speaker
Yeah. And the other thing is this wasn't, like we said, easy to get to. So they suspect when people came to this site, possibly periodically that they did live nearby and they'll be trying to find evidence of that as well. Yeah. Like a temporary living situation as opposed to a permanent one, maybe. This wasn't a day trip. It was 10,000 feet in elevation. Yeah. Yeah. It was hard to climb. Yeah. You had to get there and like chill for a minute before you could even function probably. Well, and it might've taken a, you know, I mean, it could have taken somebody in really good shape a day to get there, but
00:39:05
Speaker
the whole family, a whole bunch of people, lugging up all their stuff. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but they could have taken their time to get there depending on where they were coming from. And then when they did get there, it could have been, you know, a longer period of time that they were staying there. So for sure. All right. Any final thoughts on this?
00:39:20
Speaker
No, I mean, it's a really cool part of the world. So it's neat to see this kind of monumental architecture in a different way than we hear about it usually coming from Peru. You know, you hear so much about Machu Picchu and the stuff that was built by the Incans, you know, but this is much older and just probably for a totally different purpose. So really, really cool. All right. We'll see you next week. OK, bye.
00:39:49
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.
00:40:13
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his 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.