US Archaeologists Accused Of Plagiarism

GGG Ping.

(This is a CNN article reporting on the Nature article)

New insight into ancient Americans

By Simon Hooper for CNN
Tuesday, January 4, 2005 Posted: 6:26 AM EST (1126 GMT)

Archaeologists have uncovered fresh evidence of a civilization more than 5,000 years old in Norte Chico. Image:

(CNN) -- New research has shown that the oldest civilization in the Americas was far more complex than previously imagined.

Ancient Americans settled in the Norte Chico region of Andean Peru more than 5,000 years ago, abandoning hunter-gathering and quickly developing a society that featured monumental architecture, agriculture, housing and a barter-based economy, recent archaelogical excavations have revealed.

The Norte Chico civilization existed for roughly 1,200 years from around 3,000 BC and spread to include 20 major residential centers across 700 square miles, according to the work of a team led by Professor Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago and his wife Professor Winifred Creamer, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University.

The pair's research, based on new radiocarbon datings from excavation samples, was published this month in the scientific journal Nature.

The importance of Norte Chico, a dry and inhospitable region 100 miles north of Lima, has been largely overlooked in the past because of the absence of ancient artifacts or treasures, art or writing. Unlike other ancient civilizations, its inhabitants failed to develop ceramics.

But Haas and Creamer said their work proved the existence of a widespread and thriving community.

At the same time that the Egyptians were building pyramids, the ancient Andeans were beginning to construct momuments of their own. Each of the sites studied by Haas and Creamer's team featured large platform mounds where rectangular terraced stone pyramids would have stood.

They also uncovered evidence of circular plazas and houses built from adobe, wooden poles, cane and mud. Radiocarbon dating performed on plant remains showed that reed and wild cane were woven into bags to carry rocks to construction sites.

"This wasn't a single site where people were doing something really unusual, but a whole region, a whole culture, where people were organized to produce large pyramids and sunken plazas -- something the Americas hadn't seen before," said Creamer.

"The people who built the first of these structures had no model to go by, no precedent to use in building a monument. It's a bit like deciding to build a functioning spaceship in your back yard, and succeeding."

Haas and Creamer also said their work challenged existing assumptions that early Andean development was driven by a maritime culture.

Early communal large-scale construction, between 3,200 BC and 2,000 BC took place both inland and on the coast. But subsequent centuries were characterized by the occupation of inland sites watered by irrigation canals, which enabled the growth of cotton and food plants such as squash, beans and avocadoes.

But inland settlements and coastal communities remained economically linked by a system of regular exchange. Shellfish and fishbones have been recovered inland, where inhabitants also ate anchovies and in return provided cotton for fishing nets.

As well as lacking pottery, art and writing, the Norte Chico civilization also differed from other ancient cultures in its lack of dependency on a staple grain crop.

"This early culture appears to have developed not only without pottery, arts and crafts but also without a staple grain-based food, which is usually the first large-scale agricultural product of complex societies," said Creamer. "The ancient Peruvians took a different path to civilization."

Haas and Creamer hope further excavations will uncover more about the life in the communities of Norte Chico. They also hope to explain how civilization developed in such a harsh environment and why it came to an end.

"Why did this happen here of all places? It's not a particularly easy environment, but the big moment may have been when someone discovered that irrigation wasn't that difficult," said Creamer.

"You can use irrigation to explain both the rise and fall of the Norte Chico region. By 1,800 B.C., when this civilization is in decline, we begin to find extensive canals farther north. People were moving to more fertile ground and taking their knowledge of irrigation with them. The Norte Chico ultimately became something of a frontier zone between northern and southern centers of influence and political development."

But Haas and Creamer are convinced that Norte Chico was the crucible of American civilization.

"The scale and sophistication of these sites is unheard of anywhere in the New World at this time, and almost any time," said Haas.

"The cultural pattern that emerged in this small area in the third millennium B.C. later established a foundation for 4,000 years of cultural florescence in other parts of the Andes."

Winifred Creamer

Project Publications
Ruth Shady, Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer 2001 "Dating Caral, a Preceramic Urban Center in the Supe Valley on the Centray Coast of Peru". Science 292:723-726.

One of my good friends worked with Haas and Creamer on a dig in New Mexico. She was nice, but Haas was a jerk.

One of my good friends worked with Haas and Creameron a dig in New Mexico.

Neat!

I just read you tagline & my jaw dropped. Do you think that is what happened?

"Who talking to me? You talking to ME?"

"One of my good friends worked with Haas and Creamer on a dig in New Mexico. She was nice, but Haas was a jerk."

I saw them in a one hour documentary about this site.

This site was about 10 miles inland when living closer to the coast would have been easier. Tsunami's?

I just read you tagline & my jaw dropped. Do you think that is what happened?

Yes. Several women were kidnapped at about the same time she was....she was almost the only one killed. (I think one unidentified female body was found at that time.) The other women were released. I think someone thought that killing Hassan in a drive-by shooting or a bombing would have been too obvious, so they hid her death among the other Iraqi deaths and kidnappings.

Most of the kidnap victims (males) were beheaded, but it seems like she was executed in the same manner that the mob uses to keep their victims quiet...a shot to the head.

1. Why wasn't she released like other women were?
2. Since she was killed, why wasn't she beheaded?
3. She, more than almost anyone, would have been in a position to see that the oil for food program was not helping the Iraqis. She might have noticed more than she realized and might have been called to testify. I think she was murdered for that reason

Interesting theory...this was the first I heard of it.

>>This site was about 10 miles inland when living closer to the coast would have been easier. Tsunami's?

Could be, but I don't really know enough about the site to comment. But most of the other Peruvian societes were centered around some of the smaller river valleys rather than being right on the coast. I suspect most were brought together by irrigation rather than exploiting the coastal resource only.

But you are right, it would seem to be easier to live closer to the coast, and apparently also someplace other than the Norte Chico area.

from:
http://www.niu.edu/pubaffairs/presskits/peru/release.html

The researchers also want to learn more about why a complex society evolved in the arid, harsh environment of Norte Chico, which today is sparsely populated. “Why did this happen here of all places?” Creamer said. “It’s not a particularly easy environment, but the big moment may have been when someone discovered that irrigation wasn’t that difficult.

“You can use irrigation to explain both the rise and fall of the Norte Chico region,” she added. “By 1800 B.C., when this civilization is in decline, we begin to find extensive canals farther north. People were moving to more fertile ground and taking their knowledge of irrigation with them. The Norte Chico ultimately became something of a frontier zone between northern and southern centers of influence and political development.”

Thanks. I'll post this more comprehensive report. Care to speculate where these people came from?

Archaeologists shed new light on Americas’ earliest known civilization

DeKalb, Ill.— Overlooked for at least a century because there was no pottery or gold, a sand-swept region of archaeological sites in north-central Peru is now believed to be the place where cultural evolution in the Andes—and in the Americas, for that matter—first diverged from simple hunting and gathering into complex society.

Recent archaeological excavations bring into focus a civilization that acrose more than 5,000 years ago in three small valleys 100 miles north of Lima. Over more than a millennium, it spurred the development of more than 20 separate major residential centers. They are characterized by monumental architecture, large circular ceremonial structures, irrigated agriculture and housing.

Researchers publishing in the Dec. 23 edition of the scientific journal Nature used radiocarbon dating to determine the rise and fall of this first complex society of the Americas, from roughly 3000 to 1800 B.C., and document the extent of its influence, which covered an area of nearly 700 square miles (1,800 square kilometers) throughout Peru’s dry and dune-covered Norte Chico region. Monumental architecture was evident at each site in the presence of large platform mounds, also described as rectangular terraced pyramids, which reached as high as 85 feet (26 meters).

“This wasn’t a single site where people were doing something really unusual, but a whole region, a whole culture, where people were organized to produce large pyramids and sunken plazas—something the Americas hadn’t seen before,” said Professor Winifred Creamer, a Northern Illinois University anthropologist. “The people who built the first of these structures had no model to go by, no precedent to use in building a monument. It’s a bit like deciding to build a functioning spaceship in your back yard, and succeeding.”

Creamer is a co-author of the Nature article with her husband Jonathan Haas of The Field Museum in Chicago and with NIU graduate student Alvaro Ruiz, the Peruvian co-director of the project. In 2001, Creamer and Haas were part of the research team announcing that six immense platform mounds at the site of Caral in the Andes’ Supe Valley represented the oldest known man-made monuments in the Americas.

The latest findings demonstrate that sites such as Caral were part of a much larger complex of residential centers in a region that includes the Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza river valleys. The researchers present 95 new radiocarbon dates from test excavation samples at 13 of more than 20 inland archeological sites in Norte Chico, a region that stretches from the Andes to the western coastline of central Peru. Added to previously published dates from earlier research, 127 radiocarbon dates are now available from the region, firmly establishing a civilization thriving in the Norte Chico for more than 1,200 years.

“The scale and sophistication of these sites is unheard of anywhere in the New World at this time, and almost any time,” said NIU Adjunct Professor Haas, who is MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at The Field Museum. “The cultural pattern that emerged in this small area in the third millennium B.C. later established a foundation for 4,000 years of cultural florescence in other parts of the Andes.”

The researchers’ findings also challenge the theory that the initial emergence of complex society in the Andes was based on the exploitation of maritime resources rather than agriculture.

“In Norte Chico, the path of cultural evolution in the Andean region diverged from a relatively simple hunting and gathering society to a much more complex pattern of social and political organization, with a mixed economy based on agriculture and marine exploitation,” NIU’s Ruiz said. “With this new information, we need to rethink our ideas about the economic, social and cultural development of the beginnings of civilization in Peru and all of South America.”

The dates show the clear appearance of large-scale communal construction between 3200 and 2500 B.C., corresponding with previously collected construction dates at Aspero, a coastal fishing community with evidence of similar ancient architecture. The researchers did not find an obvious center or starting point for the ancient culture. The next 500 years, however, marked a period of expanded occupation and construction in Norte Chico’s inland sites, which were consistently located adjacent to short irrigation canals watering large tracts of land.

The 13 inland centers studied range in area from 25 to more than 250 acres (10 to more than 100 hectares). Each has between one and seven rectangular terraced pyramids. The largest of these mounds range from 105,000 to more than 196,000 cubic yards (80,000 to more than 150,000 cubic meters) in volume. Rooms were constructed on the tops and upper terraces of the structures. Another hallmark of the sites is the presence of sunken circular plazas, ranging from 22 yards to 44 yards (20 to 40 meters) in diameter and 1 to 2 yards deep.

Radiocarbon dating was performed on the remains of annual plants, including reeds and wild cane, which were woven into mesh bags and used to tote rocks to construction sites. “The inhabitants of Norte Chico seemed to have put all their energy into construction of these massive structures, and they were very frequently remodeling,” Creamer said. “In cases where we have been able to examine the interior of the mounds, we see what appear to be many different periods of construction. You can see the walls and floors and processes of construction and remodeling.”

Together, the Norte Chico sites indicate an advanced civilization that arose without the development of ceramics—a hallmark of other complex societies worldwide. Yet the researchers found indications of a multifaceted economy based on inland irrigation of cotton and food plants, diverse marine resources and a system of regular exchange between inland and coastal sites. Numerous remains of shellfish and fish bones were recovered at the inland sites.

Researchers also recovered botanical remains of domesticated plants—including cotton, squash, chilli, beans and avocadoes—but found almost no evidence of preserved corn or other grains. “This early culture appears to have developed not only without pottery, arts and crafts but also without a staple grain-based food, which is usually the first large-scale agricultural product of complex societies,” Creamer said. “The ancient Peruvians took a different path to civilization.”

More excavation will be required to estimate the population of the residential centers. The sites have large expanses with features indicating residential architecture, and the team found the remains of dwellings, some made of adobe and others of wood poles, cane and mud. “There hasn’t been enough excavation to show if the ancient inhabitants of Norte Chico had things like workshops and marketplaces, and we don’t know for sure whether they lived here year-round or came here only on specific occasions,” Creamer said.

The researchers also want to learn more about why a complex society evolved in the arid, harsh environment of Norte Chico, which today is sparsely populated. “Why did this happen here of all places?” Creamer said. “It’s not a particularly easy environment, but the big moment may have been when someone discovered that irrigation wasn’t that difficult.

“You can use irrigation to explain both the rise and fall of the Norte Chico region,” she added. “By 1800 B.C., when this civilization is in decline, we begin to find extensive canals farther north. People were moving to more fertile ground and taking their knowledge of irrigation with them. The Norte Chico ultimately became something of a frontier zone between northern and southern centers of influence and political development.”

Research for this project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the California Community Trust, The Field Museum, and the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University.

—30—

Nature article authors

Winifred Creamer, Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Ill.
Cell: 630-988-1394
Email: wcreamer@niu.edu
Jonathan Haas, MacArthur Curator of The Americas at
Chicago’s Field Museum.
Cell: 630-992-9289
Email: haas@fieldmuseum.org

Alvaro Ruiz, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Ill.
Email: aarr86@hotmail.com

"Care to speculate where these people came from?"

Maybe related to these folks?

Vintage Skulls

>>Care to speculate where these people came from?

Can't really say. Peru is an area of interest for me, but I've been out of the game too long to have kept up with any recent finds.

But those skulls you mention in the other post are pretty old, far older than this society. But with Monte Verde down in S America, who knows, these areas in Peru could have been settled a lot longer than anyone thought 10 years ago. That's what makes it all so interesting.

"Care to speculate where these people came from?"

Maybe related to these folks?

Vintage Skulls

Thanks Blam. More to come, the browser went kablooey after I'd built about half of what was supposed to be a pretty good post for this topic. Egad.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

Okay... the problem (whatever it was) recurred when I again closed the tab which had the New Scientist article I'm going to quote any second now...

poor Max Uhle... discovered the site 100 years ago... at least he didn't live long enough to witness this credit grabbing fistfight...

Mountain metropolis
Jeff Hecht
New Scientist
27 April 2001
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn674

Discovered in 1905 by archaeologist Max Uhle, Caral is 23 kilometres from the ocean in the Supe Valley of central Peru. Early archaeologists recognised its mounds as ancient monuments, but turned their attention elsewhere after finding no ceramics.

Ruth Shady of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima took a closer look several years ago, and her excavations revealed six giant platform mounds spread over a 65 hectare area; the largest mound is 160 by 150 metres wide, and 18 metres high.

The absence of pottery indicated Caral was old, but Haas's carbon dates were a surprise.

Peru Holds Oldest New World City
Bruce Bower
Week of April 28, 2001; Vol. 159, No. 17 , p. 260
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010428/fob1.asp

Although archaeologists discovered it in 1905, Caral had attracted little scientific attention until now. It lies in a remote area with no paved roads or basic amenities. Moreover, the site contains no pottery, since its residents didn't make ceramic vessels. This has discouraged both archaeologists and looters.

Creamer makes headlines with Peru research
by Tom Parisi
Last Updated: May 3, 2001
http://www.niu.edu/PubAffairs/NT/2001/may7/creamer.html

...Researchers also have surmised construction methods. Creamer said the ancient Peruvians used shicra, or reeds, to weave mesh bags. They filled the bags with rocks from the nearby riverbed and hauled them to the construction sites. "They would carry this to the building site and throw the whole thing in," Creamer said. "In her excavations, Ruth Shady has actually been able to retrieve the rocks from individual bags."

Anthropologists Establish Date and Importance of the Americas’ Oldest City
Greg Borzo
Thursday, April 26, 2001
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/museum_info/press/press_hass.htm

CHICAGO – New radiocarbon dates indicate that the site of Caral (120 miles north of Lima, Peru) was home to the earliest known urban settlement – with monumental corporate architecture and irrigation agriculture – in the New World. The surprising evidence pushes the development of these important advances in the Americas back to as early as 2627 B.C. – a time when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.

In a report published in the April 27, 2001 issue of Science, Dr. Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima and her colleagues, Jonathan Haas, Chicago’s Field Museum, and Winifred Creamer, of Northern Illinois University and Field Museum Adjunct Curator, describe the results of the testing of plant fibers taken from excavations conducted by Dr. Shady at Caral.

Caral: Oldest City in the New World
A conversation with Dr. Ruth Shady
The Archaeology Channel
http://www.archaeologychannel.org/caralint.html

Dr. Ruth Shady of the Museum of Archaeology at the National University of San Marcos, Lima, Peru, is Project Director for ongoing research at Caral. She is working closely on this project, in the field and in analysis and publications, with the Field Museum, represented by Dr. Jonathan Haas.

First City in the New World?
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues02/aug02/caral.html

Research developed by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís of San Marcos University suggests that Caral, as the 150-acre complex of pyramids, plazas and residential buildings is known, was a thriving metropolis as Egypt's great pyramids were being built. The energetic archaeologist believes that Caral may also answer nagging questions about the long-mysterious origins of the Inca. Caral may even hold a key to the origins of civilizations everywhere... Shady's team found 32 flutes made of pelican and condor bones and 37 cornets of deer and llama bones. "Clearly, music played an important role in their society," says Shady. Eventually Caral would spawn 17 other pyramid complexes scattered across the 35-square-mile area of the Supe Valley. But based on Caral's size and scope, Shady believes that it is indeed the mother city of the Incan civilization.

Overlooked for at least a century because there was no pottery or gold, a sand-swept region of archaeological sites in north-central Peru is now believed to be the place where cultural evolution in the Andes—and in the Americas, for that matter—first diverged from simple hunting and gathering into complex society.

Oh. I get it now. :)