Posted on 02/25/2008 10:07:04 AM PST by blam
Antarctic may hold the future of archaeology
Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent
It is a truism that archaeology begins yesterday, and now with only the archaeology of the future to plan for, the discipline has been expanding into areas of the globe where material culture has hitherto played little part.
Antarctica is one of these new areas: more than two centuries of human occupation have left plentiful traces. At least five successive and partly overlapping phases of activity can be defined: sealing, whaling, polar exploration, scientific investigation and tourism.
Sealing began in the late 18th century, when Captain James Cook’s account of his voyages in the Southern Ocean, published in 1777, included his discovery of South Georgia with its enormous population of fur seals. Sealers from England and the eastern United States swarmed to raid the seal rookeries.
Wooden clubs and iron-tipped lances were used to kill the seals for their pelts, which were scraped clean of fat before being salted for shipping. Sealers lived in primitive camps, traces of which survive on South Georgia. The skins were shipped to China to have the dense fur removed and made into felted clothing: in the 1800-1801 season the Aspasia, out of New York, took 51,000 pelts.
Elephant seals were also hunted for their thick blubber that was used to make oil: some of the large iron trypots in which this was done can still be seen. As overkill took its toll on South Georgia, the sealers moved south, and their characteristic artefacts have been found on the Antarctic mainland and adjacent South Shetland Islands.
The industry continued throughout the 19th century, and on South Georgia sealing licences were issued until 1965, but whaling had long overtaken it in economic significance. Steamships and explosive harpoons made a once-chancey industry much more cost-effective. First the humpback whale and then the great blue, sei and fin whales were hunted to within an ace of extinction. Their bones can be seen on King George Island and elsewhere.
The Norwegians set up the Grytviken whaling station on South Georgia in 1904 before expanding south to Deception Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula, in 1912. Houses, boilers and oil tanks from the Hektor station survive, interspersed with the remains of a later phase of occupation, the secret British base for Operation Tabarin during the Second World War. In 1944 this became the first scientific base in Antarctica.
Volcanic activity in 1969 launched a mud flow that buried many of the structures and artefacts, as well as the whalers’ cemetery, creating an Antarctic Pompeii for future study. Whaler’s Bay has been designated as Historic Site and Monument (HSM) 71 in the Antarctic inventory, while the nearby Chilean Cerda base, which was destroyed at the same time, is HSM 76. The Chilean Government has done a certain amount of cleaning up, reducing its archaeological integrity.
The advent of factory ships in the 1920s moved much whale-processing offshore, so that whaling’s archaeological presence diminished long before the industry was wound down: Grytviken, which serviced the ships, is the best-preserved site (and the initial casus belli of the 1982 Falklands War when Argentine scrap merchants began raiding it).
Remains from the epic age of polar exploration exist at Hope Bay, on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where a stone hut built in 1903 (HSM 39) marks Otto Nordenskjöld’s Swedish expedition, which was forced to overwinter there. A second stone building (HSM 41) survives on Paulet Island just to the north, where the crew of the Swedish support ship Antarctica was trapped.
On the far side of Antarctica, at Ross Island, where huts from Shackleton’s and Scott’s expeditions before the First World War survive on McMurdo Sound, some of the provisions still remain. Nothing is left of the temporary camp of 1916 on Whale Island, where Shackleton’s men survived for 105 days under two upturned boats while he sailed to South Georgia for help. But one of the few ceremonial monuments in Antarctica is there: a bust of Luis Pardo, the Chilean skipper who eventually brought relief. A cross on Petermann Island commemorates three members of the British Antarctic Survey lost in the sea ice in 1982. The age of scientific investigation has created a substantial material culture base: some of the research stations (which often double as political markers, in case the Antarctic Treaty should break down) date back more than half a century, while the large American base at the South Pole is probably the most substantial area of human material presence on the frozen continent.
Increasing numbers of tourists have led to new material resources: at Jougla Point a whale skeleton has been reconstructed from the bones of several different animals to provide a focus for photography, and the British base at Port Lockroy near by has been restored by the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust and turned into a museum.
Although Antarctica is unlikely to be colonised in the same way as other continents, children have been born there, as part of Argentina’s effort to establish its claim; the dead lie there, from Scott and his companions somewhere in the moving icefields of the mainland to Shackleton in the tidy graveyard at Grytviken; and solid and substantial traces of industry and exploration abound. So far there has not been the rigorous systematisation of sites and application of analytical theory that mark archaeology elsewhere: but an archaeology of Antarctica is on the brink of being written.
Then what were you talking about that was so cogent and well-argued?
It’s a full letter at the bottom, that was broken up to respond to. If you read the whole thing, the context of the letter-writer’s argument that the map was based on “much older” information is that the info came from when Antarctica was “very hot,” which is patently ludicrous.
When I said “the first argument” I meant the website linked in #6. I should have been more precise. The accuracy of the Peri Reiss map is also demonstrated at the website linked in #12. What remains is a very weak rebuttal that you linked to which rests on a main premise which is false.
I’m afraid that doesn’t make things better for you. The first link rails against “official science” for saying Antarctica has been covered with ice for millions of years, arguing that the Piri Reis map shows it wasn’t. Then out pops from nowhere the assertion that Antarctica was ice-free 6,000 years ago, and off the writer goes into lunatic land, absolutely failing to show that its premise of Antarctica being depicted is even correct.
The second link might as well be a pathetic mumble. Yeah, it’s a map of Antarctica, it claims .... but first you have to accept that the map omits 5 degrees of longitude here, 16 degrees of latitude and 20 degrees of longitude there, 9 more degrees of latitude and an entire sea passage here filled in by imaginary land. Procrustes would be in awe.
It doesn't say that.
“The official science has been saying all along that the ice-cap which covers the Antarctic is million years old.
The Piri Reis map shows that the northern part of that continent has been mapped before the ice did cover it. That should make think it has been mapped million years ago, but that’s impossible since mankind did not exist at that time.”
The bad grammar was present in the original.
It goes on. Here’s a beaut: “Charles Hapggod, in 1953, wrote a book called “Earth’s shifting crust: a key to some basic problems of earth science”, where he made up a theory to explain how Antarctic had been ice-free until year 4000 BC. (visit the Bibliography )
The theory summing up is as follows:
The reason Antarctic was ice-free, and therefor much warmer, it is to be found in the fact that, at one time, its location wasn’t the south pole. It was located approximately 2000 miles further north. Hapgood says this “would have put it outside the Antarctic Circle in a temperate or cold temperate climate”.
Cogent and well-argued?
But the author at your link made an easily provable false premise which makes the rest of his theory so much bunk. Interesting that your responses have ignored that and focused on finding fault, by spinning and paraphrasing out of context, in the other website's materials.
The two essays you consider “cogent and well-argued” are an oafish mass of pseudoscience that condemns yourself as much as the two people who wrote them.
Your complaint about the article I linked to is irrelevant; if you don’t like the way the author configured the Piri Reis map with modern maps, arrange it another way all you like. It’s not going to bear out the phony assertions that the PR map accurately depicts Antarctica. That the Piri Reis map connects the supposed “Antarctica” with Brazil in one single, solid land mass ought to be a major clue.
Your complaint about the article I linked to is irrelevant;
Of course it is. Premises are so overrated.
Some images to consider and an article that might need a grain or two of salt...but FWIW I find it all extremely interesting.
http://www.geocities.com/aleph135/PiriReisMap.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/crustal.html
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/tour/pirireis.gif
http://www.paradoxplace.com/Perspectives/Maps/Images/Old_Maps/Piri-Reis/PReis-BR750.jpg
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/FredNerks/AntarcticSouthAmerica.jpg
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Thanks Blam. Ice to see this is finally happening. |
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“...children have been born there, as part of Argentina’s effort to establish its claim;”
Gee. I guess when the Falklands caper didn;t work out, they had to look elsewhere.
I believe they now have the evidence that confirms the existence of a sub continental lava flow that is the reason for the slipping of the Ice Shelf in the North Western part of the Continent. (Algore’s favorite example of the ice melting from Goebbels’s Warming.)
thanks for that brilliant graphic.
It’s hard to argue with rebuttals like that alrighty. lol
I personally do not believe that there is anything redemptive about whaling and sealing. I would love to see the US Navy, or any other navy, sink any ship that is engaged in whaling. If Greenpeace confined their activities to combatting whaling, I would give them money. I don’t even like Moby Dick. So, in my opinion, the archaeology of whaling is a massive waste of time and money.
OTOH, the idea of exploring a sub-glacial world sounds fascinating.
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