Posted on 10/13/2005 1:44:56 PM PDT by blam
Contact: Lori Stiles
lstiles@u.arizona.edu
520-626-4402
University of Arizona
Radiocarbon dates reveal that New Guinea art is older than thought
When the de Young Museum reopens in a new, earthquake-resistant building in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park next Saturday, Oct. 15, it will debut what curators consider the largest and most important private collection of New Guinea art in the world.
Gregory W. L. Hodgins and A. J. Timothy Jull of The University of Arizona will attend the gala event. The scientists have radiocarbon dated some of the collection that New York-based entrepreneur John Friede and his wife, Marcia, are giving to the de Young Museum as the Jolika Collection.
The Friedes amassed an unparalleled collection of almost 3,000 objects from the South Pacific island of New Guinea during the past 40 years. Many of the pieces were originally collected during European anthropological expeditions into New Guinea in the early 20th century.
Two years ago, John Friede asked UA scientists to date some of the masterpieces at the university's National Science Foundation - Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) facility in Tucson. Hodgins visited the Friedes's Long Island Sound home three times last year to sample 145 objects now among the Jolika Collection.
Results of this first large-scale dating project on New Guinean art and artifacts are preliminary, Hodgins and Jull say. But their findings so far have stunned museum curators and anthropologists. Their findings challenge previous assumptions that such objects are inherently ephemeral, perhaps surviving only a few generations.
Of the objects dated, 78 contain wood that pre-dates the 18th century and 33 contain wood older than 1670 A.D. "A small percentage of this collection are pieces that are very old -- 600, 700, 800 years and older," Hodgins said. The oldest mask in the collection dated at between 660 A.D. and 860 A.D. "These measured ages imply that a few of the objects were in use for more like 50 to 100 generations."
Humans first occupied New Guinea 35,000 years ago, according to the earliest archaeological records. People sparsely populated the landscape for most of that time, living as hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. But with the introduction of the sweet potato 400 years ago, according to archaeological and ethnographic evidence, the population exploded dramatically and diversified to the point where New Guinea has the highest cultural and linguistic diversity in the world.
"The significance of objects now in the de Young Museum is that they offer a glimpse at the time before this agricultural revolution began," Hodgins said.
"The ages for this art totally change the bias that says Stone Age peoples living in isolated communities do not develop art with that kind of complexity," Jull, director of the NSF-Arizona AMS Lab, said.
"It is a tribute to John Friede's vision that he thought seriously about dating his collection," Hodgins said. "It's not customary to radiocarbon date these materials. In fact, when I initially talked to John, I told him that I didn't think it was a particularly good application of this method, because he assumed that most of the pieces were probably less than 500 years old. New Guinea is a tropical environment, where wood decays rapidly. Also, radiocarbon dating doesn't work very well over the last 500 years because of a combination of natural and man-made phenomena. But this is certainly going to make museums from all over the world think about dating their collections."
Hodgins, an assistant research scientist at the NSF-Arizona AMS Lab, is also a UA assistant professor of anthropology who earned his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1999. He contacted Chris Gosden, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England, and an anthropologist who specializes in the archaeology and anthropology of New Guinea and its surrounding islands.
"Chris agreed that the dates, if correct, are absolutely extraordinary and will have a significant impact on the New Guinean people as well as the region's anthropology and archaeology."
Clearly, art and artifacts like those found in the Jolika Collection have influenced European art and culture, Hodgins said. Even the casual observer can see the resemblance in trends in early 20th century French and German painting and sculpture, he said, so that much New Guinean art seems simultaneously exotic and familiar to those from Western cultures.
Scientists at the NSF-Arizona AMS Lab need only milligrams of material - wood shavings, in this case - for radiocarbon dating. They burn the sample and use a huge machine called an accelerator mass spectrometer to measure how much radioactive carbon, or carbon 14, is present in the carbon dioxide given off by combustion. The researchers convert the carbon 14 measurement to calendar dates by comparing the amount of radiocarbon in the sample to radiocarbon contained in tree rings of known calendar years.
GGG Ping.
NG art is older than thought? Wow, they were making art before they were thinking. I think some artist are STILL making art without thinking.
LOL! You beat me to it!
"Radiocarbon Dates Reveal That New Guinea Art Is Older Than Thought"
How were they able to make art before they were able to think about it?
And you both beat me. How much you want to bet this ends up on Best of the Web?
/sarc.
Like, they will come down from the trees? This must be hugh!
They had figured out farming well before your ancestors.
"The gardens of the New Guinea highlands are ancient, intensive permacultures, adapted to high population densities, very high rainfalls (as high as 10,000mm/yr (400in/yr)), earthquakes, hilly land, and occasional frost. Complex mulches, crop rotations and tillages are used in rotation on terraces with complex irrigation systems. Western agronomists still do not understand all practices, and native gardeners are notably more successful than most scientific farmers. Some authorities believe that New Guinea gardeners invented crop rotation well before western europeans. "
There are about 6000 languages in the world; 800 in New Guinea.
The more diversity there is usually equals the oldest.
The diversity of languages, as you have said before, is not surprising as the cultures today survived the ancient flooding of the subcontinental shelf where most of the earliest cultures originated. The lack of early high cultures and then the "explosion" of highly developed Ban Chiang and Vietnamese Don Song Cultures between 3,500 and 5,000 years ago point to possible multiple centers of early civilization. Just now, the University of Pennsylvania is expanding their study of the Ban Chiang Culture to include Mekong sites going back 10,000 years. Along the great rivers and under the ocean seem the be the locations of the oldest peoples -- as one would expect.
Even the Chinese are -- reluctantly -- moving away from their dogmatic insistence on a Yellow River origin of all Eastern Cultures. They are pushed by the Southwest China discoveries -- Sichuan and Yunnan.
"...the University of Pennsylvania is expanding their study of the Ban Chiang Culture to include Mekong sites going back 10,000 years. "
The Ban Chiang Culture will have some more suprises.
Wasn't it in a Ban Chiang site that the oldest bronze smeltering in the world was found?
Yes. There has been some controversy as the dating was contested by the Chinese and French (believed the bronze had "sifted down" from more recent graves into older graves also contested dating procedure). The bronze was used mostly for decorative and farming implements. There is not much sign of warfare until the Iron Age (500 BC) and the culture fades out around 200 AD with the Indianized Cultures and the Khmer gaining the upper hand. The Vietnamese are depoliticizing their studies so we should soon know more about the Dong Son culture and its relationships with other surrounding areas. It is a remarkable culture going back to the neolithic and had very early bronze casting such that the Dong Son drums have never been equaled.
I think I remember posting articles about the Dong Son drums here on FR.
I remember your posting them as well. If I recall correctly, it was a couple of years back when two or three drums, cast in today's Vietnam, were found in Hunnan.
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LOL. I'm saving myself for Skara Brae.
For the proponents of ID, here is your smoking gun.
Humans are much smarter, and beauty of our art and culture is much deeper than evolution could possibly call for. This depth developed much earlier than anyone imagined in nearly all peoples.
It may not be a scientific argument, yet, but it is a strongly intuitive one that jives with my faith. I need no further "proof" of God's hand in the development of our souls.
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