Posted on 12/13/2006 3:34:03 PM PST by blam
Field Museum scientists solve riddle of mysterious faces on South Pacific artifacts
Decipher their hidden meaning and religious significance
John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum, and Esther M. Schechter, a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum, have pieced together...
CHICAGO—The strange faces drawn on the first pottery made in the South Pacific more than 3,000 years ago have always been a mystery to scientists. Now their riddle may have been solved by new research done by two Field Museum scientists to be published in the February 2007 issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
What archaeologists working in the Pacific call prehistoric "Lapita" pottery has been found at more than 180 different places on tropical islands located in a broad arc of the southwestern Pacific from Papua New Guinea to Samoa.
Experts have long viewed the faces sometimes sketched by ancient potters on this pottery ware as almost certainly human in appearance, and they have considered them to be a sign that Pacific Islanders long ago may have worshiped their ancestors.
John Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at The Field Museum, and Esther M. Schechter, a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at The Field Museum, have pieced together evidence of several kinds leading to a radically different understanding of the religious life of people in the South Pacific 3,000 years ago. Most of these mysterious faces, they report, may represent sea turtles. Furthermore, these ceramic portraits may be showing us ideas held by early Pacific Islanders about the origins of humankind.
Terrell and Schechter say the evidence they have assembled also shows that these religious ideas did not die when people in the Pacific stopped making Lapita pottery about 2,500 years ago. They have not only identified this expressive symbolism on prehistoric pottery excavated several years ago by Terrell and other archaeologists at Aitape on the Sepik Coast of northern New Guinea, but they have also found this type of iconography on wooden bowls and platters collected at present-day villages on this coast that are now safeguarded in The Field Museum's rich anthropological collections.
Terrell and Schechter's discovery suggests that a folktale recorded by others on this coast in the early 1970s—a story about a great sea turtle (the mother of all sea turtles) and the origins long ago of the first island, the first man, and the first woman on earth—might be thousands of years old. This legend may once have been as spiritually important to Pacific Islanders as the Biblical story of Adam and Eve has been in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
"Nothing we had been doing in New Guinea for years had prepared us for this discovery," Terrell explained. "We have now been able to describe for the first time four kinds of prehistoric pottery from the Sepik coast that when considered in series fill the temporal gap between practices and beliefs in Lapita times and the present day.
"A plausible reason for the persistence of this iconography is that it has referenced ideas about the living and the dead, the human and the divine, and the individual and society that remained socially and spiritually profound and worthy of expression long after the demise of Lapita as a distinct ceramic style," Terrell added.
More research needed
Terrell and Schechter acknowledge that more work must be done to pin down their unexpected discovery. Nevertheless, it now looks like they have not only deciphered the ancient "Lapita code" inscribed on pottery vessels in the south Pacific thousands of yeas ago, but by so doing, may have rescued one of the oldest religious beliefs of Pacific Islanders from the brink of oblivion.
"I was skeptical for a long time about connecting these designs with sea turtles," Schechter said, "but then the conservation biologist Regina Woodrom Luna in Hawaii pointed out that some of the designs match the distinctive beach tracks that a Green sea turtle makes when she is coming ashore to lay her eggs.
"Everything made even more sense when we came across the creation story about a great sea turtle and the first man and woman on earth," she added. "This story comes from a village only 75 miles away from where The Field Museum is working on the same coast of Papua New Guinea."
And the island frogs back then "may" have had square @sses.
It's turtles all the way down
It's turtles all the way down
It's turtles all the way down
"More Research needed."
Gosh. Whodathunk?
I'm not tryna be harsh here. I find this stuff interesting... even though what they claim as "problem solving" is just inventing some theory. I just think this sort of research shouldn't be paid for by the taxpayers.
great site full of lapita photographs:
http://users.on.net/~mkfenn/page6.htm
Or the makers of the pottery just let their kids decorate them, much as some mothers will let their kids decorate cookies. It could have been a tradition akin to refrigerator art.
I'm surprised that Federated Department Stores hasn't figured out a way to have it renamed "Macy Museum".
However, archaeologists are still trying to decipher an image that appears to be a mid-20th century British police call box...
stutter much??? just kidding
It used to happen in the '60's a lot.
"Time is running backwards, Man."
(Long BEEeeeeeeep Tone) Watcha watching?"
I dunno..it's about Indians..It's BORING.."
"It's called a TEST PATTERN".
"In May 2006, a second expedition to Teouma in Vanuatu revealed more skeletons in burial urns some of which were sitting in the lotus position. Geneticist Lisa Matissoo-Smith successfully extracted DNA from the teeth and found that they did not contain any Polynesian or East Asian genes. To date she has not yet determined whether the DNA is Melanesian or from a forgotten civilization of Caucasian seafarers related to the Berber Bell beaker people."
"Lisa Matissoo-Smith in her interview on TV NZ said; "We were able to look to see whether the individual possessed a particular mutation that we see at a very high frequency in Polynesians. It is a 9based pair mutation of Mitichondrial DNA and we found that the Teouma material - the first samples that we analysed did not have that mutation, so they did not look like 98% of the people we see living in Polynesia today."
"The possibility that the Lapita people, a people remembered in legends as tall white bearded men or red men and in carvings - people with large pointy noses - not the flatter nose more characteristic of Pacific cultures these days. Some might say it is a genetic adaptation to drinking coconuts, but I suspect these people were part of a global seafaring culture associated with the obsidian trade before, during and after the Bronze Age. This age of globalization meant connections were made between people from Tamil Nadu, Harappa, The Maldives, Ethiopia, West Africa, Spain, Britain, Sardinia, Greece, Crete, Turkey, North America (Isle Royale) and the Pacific. They were tall Caucasian red heads that were a branch of the same gene pool that gave rise to many other seafaring cultures around the world such as the seafarers of Paracas, the Phoenicians and Celts."
The claims of a New Zealand archaeologist that he's found Celtic structures there don't seem so foreign now.
I was gonna say sea turtles.
;-)
Bad Wolf??
No more research needed. Its turtles all the way down.
Sea turtles?
Sounds like my last date...
3000 years ago?
It IS my last date!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.