ANTH 102 SU 23
Lab 6: Environmental Archaeology Breakout Activity
Summaries for each team (take care to pick the correct story assigned to you by Shilpa)
Story 2:
Recent excavations at Ageröd, a famous peat bog archaeological site dating to the Mesolithic, have determined that climate change and pollution have been causing bones and other biological remains to decay faster than ever before. Peat bogs, a kind of wetland with lots of moss and dead plant material, usually preserve biological remains very well because they protect the remains from oxygen, which could cause decay. However, archaeologists had begun to suspect that modern climate change and pollution may be re-exposing these remains to oxygen and causing rapid decay. To test whether this was the cause, archaeologists from Lund University, excavated a few test pits and compared what they found to excavations that were conducted in the 1940s and 1970s. The result was that all of the bones they excavated were significantly more decayed than in earlier excavations, and the bones of small animals and birds were destroyed completely. The researchers argue that steps must be taken to protect this site and others like it before all of the important archaeological contexts are destroyed.
Story 3:
Archaeologists studying the Illinois archaeological site of Cahokia have combined lake sediment cores, the dating of archaeological artifacts and molecules (called fecal stanol) which are found in human poop to show how climate change may have contributed to population decline at the famous site. The researchers used archaeological artifacts in different sediment layers, and the amount of fecal stanol they found in lake cores to determine the population of Cahokia at different points in its history. They then correlated that with climate data about flooding and drought from other information gained from the lake cores. This allowed them to show that summer rain levels were falling steadily at the same time that Cahokia, a city that relied primarily on corn for food, began to decline, up until 1400 when it was abandoned completely as people moved farther and farther away. The authors argue this study has important implications for climate change today.
Story 4:
Using 3 types of paleo-climate change data, archaeologists have substantial evidence that the collapse of the world’s first empire, the Akkadian Empire, was due, in part, to significant climate change. The Akkadian Empire lasted for approximately 100 years, and covered a large territory, but it relied on the grain of farmers in the north to feed many of its people and to supply its army. Climate data from sediment samples, marine cores, and a new method of studying and dating stalagmites show that the Empire was hit by droughts and windblown dust at the time of the Empire’s collapse. Further archaeological evidence that this was a massive climate disaster is
found in a 180km wall, called the “Repeller of the Amorites”, which was built by the local populations to prevent migrants from the south who were fleeing the region’s droughts.
