In January of this year, Peabody Institute staff were kicked out of the Peabody Institute building as the start of renovations loomed near. Fortunately, construction elsewhere at Phillips Academy meant that the Dean of Students moved into new digs, leaving available their suite in the basement of George Washington Hall to claim as our temporary-own. A Goldilocks fit, the space had five desks available for five Peabody folk, plus a bonus meeting room for meetings.
Or – could it be a meeting room for classes? Lore tells of Peabody staff moving into the School Room on the Abbot Academy campus for the first phase of building renovations. To continue teaching classes, staff valiantly packed up boxes of collections, carrying them from classroom to classroom along with all their teaching supplies: gloves, ethafoam, trays, and, goodness help them, laptops.
I wasn’t at the Peabody yet, so I have only heard the tale. It sounded very impressive and intrepid and like quite the adventure, and every lazy bone in my body knew I wanted nothing to do with it. And so, with my colleagues, I began carefully planning every piece of furniture we would bring over to our GW bonus room, with every permutation of every collections activity thought out. We measured twice and cut once, determined to make this suite available for teaching.
There is nothing more satisfying than a carefully considered plan that actually goes exactly as intended. Is it sometimes maybe slightly cramped? Yes. Does it always work? Yes. Am I a little smug? Oh, heck, yes.
Trying our hands (and waists and legs) at some new instruments with MUS410 Your Musical Brain.
Meeting the Inuit who met the Vikings with HSS100B Sojourns Across a Connected World.
Prepping for the ceramics studio with ART302 Clay and the Ancestral Pot. (What? Room to stand up and walk around? Incredible.)
Imagining the world of the New Testament with PHR330 New Testament.
Hanford and reactor as seen from across the Columbia River. PHOTO: by nblumhardt
In the late 1940s, former Manhattan Project scientist and Nobel Prize chemist, Willard Libby, developed a powerful tool for dating archaeological remains using radioactive decay. Organic materials, such as wood, absorb radioactive carbon-14 isotopes from the environment. Upon death C-14 decays at a steady rate of ½ every 5,730 years, a phenomenon called a half-life. To simplify the process massively; the remaining C-14 in organic remains can be measured to determine the date of death.
This dating method was complicated by nuclear testing, which doubled the amount of C-14 in the environment. The global impact of human activity on the climate and environment, including nuclear testing, led to the proposal of a new geologic era that began in 1950, the Anthropocene. Although not officially accepted as a new epoch due to lack of consensus regarding the start date, there is no denying the atomic age has changed the planet.
When I was a baby archaeologist, freshly graduated with an undergraduate degree, the second project I worked on was an archaeological survey on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. The Hanford site was part of the Manhattan project and home to reactors and processing plants that supplied plutonium to the military during the Second World War. After the war, plutonium production at the site was fueled by the cold war arms race and continued for almost thirty years. It is now considered the most contaminated site in America.
Map of the Hanford Site: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
By the time I worked at the Hanford Site, the reactors were decommissioned and entombed in steel sarcophagi, a process called ‘cocooning.’ Cleanup at the site had been going on for decades. Our survey area, though large, was located far away from the reactor sites. From my perspective, the nuclear reservation was huge, seemingly empty and very quiet.
The survey project covered thousands of acres and included mile-long transects. The landscape of the Columbia Plateau is beautiful. The ground is covered in sandy soil and dotted with sage brush. On hot days the smell of sage is dizzying.
We found and recorded can dumps, historic artifact scatters, and a handful of isolated stone tools. The area has an Indigenous history that dates back at least 11,000 years. More recently, the site was used as ranch land and was home to homesteads, farmsteads, and townsites. When the site was commissioned, the existing communities were evicted and the towns razed.
If I had concerns about working on a nuclear reservation, hours of safety training helped quiet some anxiety I had going into the project. I was still new to archaeology, so my attention was mostly focused on learning and doing a good job. We had one heat-exhaustion scare, so hot temperatures seemed like the project’s most pressing danger.
However, one day while working on the banks of the Columbia River, where the post-eviction remains of the town of Hanford looked like they were bulldozed into the river, nuclear activists in kayaks came close enough to ask us what we had witnessed on the site. This encounter, along with others like test wells and magenta and yellow barricades denoting radioactive hazards cut through the seeming normalcy of the project.
My memories of the project at Hanford have been freshly recalled because I’ve been listening to the Time Zero podcast. Time Zero tells the tale of the nuclearized world. Its creator, Sean J Patrick Carney is an artist, writer, and composer.
Carney tells the story of nuclear development through the eyes of Indigenous and non-native activists, historians, downwinders, artists, and archaeologists. Rather than a dry retelling of the history of nuclear development, the people and locations he presents keep the content engaging. At times the podcast delves into a critique of pop culture and at other times revisits catastrophes both well-trodden and lesser known.
As an example, growing up in eastern Washington State, I heard whispers of cancers attributed to but never concretely pinned to the Hanford site. Time Zero briefly covered the Green Run, the 1949 planned release of radioactive Iodine-131 from Hanford that would allow the government to develop technologies for tracking nuclear particles in the environment.
A National Parks Service history of the Green Run explained that the experiment was botched, releasing twice the amount iodine than planned. Unforeseen weather conditions blew the particles all across central Oregon and eastern Washington. While this release was considerable, the total amount of radioactive iodine over the three decades of work at Hanford was nine thousand times that of the Green Run.
The podcast is dense and full of too many facts to recount in this blog. If you are a fan of reading, the podcast has an accompanying Substack with free access. It includes images that provide context for readers and listeners alike.
The relevancy of Time Zero is particularly potent now, as the tech sector is seeking energy for data centers central to the development of AI technologies. Nuclear is often mentioned as a clean and safe option and advocates of nuclear energy argue for ramping up construction of new power plants.
Yet, the history of nuclear technology across the world, and in the United States specifically, includes instances of removal and contamination of people caused by extraction, production, and testing of nuclear products. As Carney and his Indigenous collaborators point out, no one in the U.S. has borne the burden of the Atomic age more directly than the Indigenous communities.
Indigenous lands have been and still are considered expendable to the nuclear industry. Most of the uranium mining, bomb-testing, and planned storage of waste materials has targeted Native lands. It’s a legacy that is at risk of being repeated if the tech industry is to be believed.
The Anthropocene dawned somewhere between 300 and 70 years ago. The lasting impact of the epoch is outsized compared to its young age. Half-lifes of spent nuclear fuel are geologic in scale and almost unfathomable. Plutonium decays at a rate of ½ every 24,100 years. It will be considered safe in 240,000 years. Uranium decays at ½ every 4.46 billion years (roughly the age of our planet). Nuclear’ s longevity is probably the most impactful takeaway from Time Zero.
Go check out the podcast and site. Though the material is heavy, there is hope that comes from art and activism.
AI seems to be everywhere these days. A recent real-world example of AI creep came during this year’s Super Bowl where roughly 25% of the ads that aired were about AI or utilized AI to generate ad content. In general, the ads promised increased productivity and greater inclusion of AI in our everyday lives.
Aside from the occasional Google Lens image search, I haven’t found a productive use for artificial intelligence in my everyday life. A recent study of ChatGPT interaction logs illustrated that, by rank, people engage AI most for creative composition, “romantic” role-playing, planning, and as a source of general information. Productive uses for AI, including coding and academic composition, came in farther down the list.
In my work at the Peabody, I engage in data management tasks that are repetitive or deal with large amounts of data. I have learned to use Excel tools to make my work more efficient (VLOOKUP- if you know, you know). However, some tasks are more complicated and in recent years we have explored AI as a tool for processing them.
Example of catalog card with provenience information to extract.
One such complicated process is transcribing institutional records. We have roughly 50,000 catalog cards that are associated with our collections that were accessioned between the 1930s and 1970s. These cards hold valuable information on provenience and provenance for our collections and should be included in our database. Extracting the text from these cards would normally require time-consuming transcription of text by hand into an excel document.
As an example, in 2019 we were awarded an Abbot Academy Fund grant to hire a temporary staff member to transcribe our handwritten accession books. The process took a little over a year and, eventually, three staff members were tasked with completing the project. By comparison, the catalog cards would likely take just as much or more time to process.
Unlike the handwritten ledgers, the typed catalog cards have the benefit of being able to be converted to searchable text through the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Many of us have converted a PDF into a searchable document with OCR. The technology is standard in many PDF readers these days.
Various attempts have been made over the years to use OCR to extract the text from our catalog cards. The process is complicated because, in the case of these cards, a block of text is useless unless it can be related to the field it originated from. OCR is also an imperfect technology; it can include a lot of errors. Despite these problems, it can be helped with a bit of training.
Normally, OCR spits out text in a single block, which is not helpful for isolating fields of text.It also includes many errors.
PA students embarked on the first attempt to read and extract the catalog card data. They created a computer program which read and extracted text from the cards and placed the text in corresponding fields. Even better, their model could be trained through the use of Machine Learning thereby improving the program’s accuracy over time. OCR, on its own, utilizes pattern-recognition which does not qualify as Artificial Intelligence. Once Machine Learning was incorporated the program fell squarely within the realm of AI.
This is an example of the PA student’s program user interface. The output could be improved by editing the text fields above the image of the catalog card.
Output from the program was quality checked by humans; this was one of my weekly tasks when I first started working at the Peabody. In theory, the errors I and others corrected were fed back into the program. Once the output was loaded, the program would improve with subsequent readings.
Unfortunately, the student who spearheaded this program graduated and the project fizzled out without seeing results from the Machine Learning. Not long after, I found that I was consistently going to the catalog cards for provenience information. I realized that the project had serious benefits for our data management and I decided to take it on in my free time.
I found Tesseract OCR, a free and powerful tool for extracting text from images. I learned to use it in concert with tools to target specific areas of the cards so that the extracted text could be associated with its field of origin. The results were not great, so I learned how to improve the quality by correcting errors and feeding them back into the program. I basically recreated a very crude, inelegant and less functional version of the student program.
Kull, a free tool for pointing Tesseract at specific fields to read.OCR output with field separation.So many errors in my Tesseract output.To train Tesseract, box files are created around each character to correct the programs output. Way too much work!
Early training showed that the program was probably not going to improve without a lot of input. I decided to stop working on the project at that point.
In the intervening years, AI tools have been developed that can read text with greater accuracy. We learned of a museum professional using Microsoft’s Power Automate to read catalog cards. We reached out and got a basic roadmap for how we could make the program work.
This is the visual workflow I set up. Once an image is placed in the folder, the model reads the card and extracts text into an excel file.This data is still a bit messy, but it is a huge improvement over what I obtained using Tesseract.
Very briefly, the AI Hub within Power Automate allows you to create a visual workflow that skips the need to write code. In addition to the workflow, I trained a model on ten examples of catalog cards. The training process allows you to select fields for the model to read. With the model trained and a workflow created, I was able to generate an Excel document where the extracted fields would be output.
The process of understanding how to set up the workflow, how to trigger it, and how to send the output into Excel were challenging. It required tinkering and several YouTube videos to get it function. It was not easy, but it was achievable, eventually.
And now, the Peabody has entered the AI age. If you need any advice on how to set up a workflow for reading documents, please feel free to reach out to me. Best of luck in your AI exploits.
Front page of the Illustrated London News. January 26, 1901.
Margaret Mead stamp, US Postal Service souvenir sheet, Celebrate The Century: 1920s. May 28,1998. Copyright United States Postal Service. All rights reserved.
British and Japanese forces engage Boxers in battle.
“Melbourne Rejoices in the Commonwealth.” Parliament of Australia.
Booth’s vacuum cleaner at work, 1903. Science Museum Group Collection.
Jagtime Johnson’s Ragtime March; 1901 sheet music cover.
1901 Chicago White Stockings.
Nobel Prize medal.
1901 Kidder Steam Runabout, Kidder Motor Vehicle Company advertisement. New Haven, CT.
Spread from the 1901 Circle, Abbot Academy Yearbook.
Hitting a major birthday like a 125th is no small thing. Even institutions established to preserve history in perpetuity – like, say, an archaeology museum – rarely last even a fraction of that time. The Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology reaches this milestone on March 21, and it offers a moment for introspection: how did we manage to make it this long? What has the Peabody done in that time? What from our past continues to inspire us today – whether as something we seek to sustain or that guides us toward new directions?
I hope you aren’t now looking at me to answer any of these questions. These are thoughts to let tumble around the entirety of this anniversary year, and beyond. (Possibly we should all start our quasquicentennial with a (re)reading of “Glory, Trouble, and Renaissance at the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology” – because, yes, Emma, I am fancy!).
Instead, I want to go all the way back to the beginning. If we are going to ask how far the Peabody has gone, we have to know where the Peabody started. This makes me wonder: What was the world the Peabody was born into? What did 1901 look like? With the help of Google, below is an absurdly partial snapshot of life as the Peabody came onto the scene.
[Word of warning: despite my best intentions, it turns out that when you’re doing a Google search, in English, with an internet connection in MA, and an education obtained almost entirely in the US, Canada, and Australia; and when you’re trying to find examples of events that you think will be “recognizable” and “interesting” – you end up with a pretty biased list. You would almost think from my snapshot below that the only noteworthy things to happen came out of the US and Great Britain (which I think is wrong?). Please bear in mind AAALLLLLL the other places and people and happenings not remotely referenced here while reading.]
In no particular order and with truly no claims of significance:
A lot a lot a lot of people died. Some of these deaths were noted by historians, and even the general public. These included: Queen Victoria (at the time the longest reigning monarch of Great Britain); President William McKinley (the third US sitting president to be assassinated); and Cecil Franklin Patch Bancroft (the 8th Principal of Andover’s Phillips Academy).
A lot a lot a lot of people were born. Even more than the number of people who died. Eventually history would care about some of them. These included: Louis Armstrong, Walt Disney, Hirohito, Langston Hughes, Margaret Mead, and Ed Sullivan.
As typical, there were far too many military engagements. Such as: the Second Boer War in South Africa (then ongoing); the Philippine-American War (then ongoing); the War of a Thousand Days/Colombian civil war (then ongoing); and the Boxer Uprising/Yihetuan Movement in China (formally ended with the signing of the Boxer Protocol).
Other political-type stuff happened: The six British colonies of Australia federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia. The US’s Platt Amendment made Cuba a US protectorate. The US and Great Britain signed the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, giving the US exclusive right to build and manage a canal in Panama. In his first annual message to Congress, US President Theodore Roosevelt stressed the need to treat Native Americans as individuals rather than as members of separate sovereign nations, and to break up tribal funds in the same way allotment broke up tribal lands.
We got some cool new technologies: Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio transmission; it said “S.” The first United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau was established at Scotland Yard, using Edward Henry’s classification system; it worked way better than phrenology. Hubert Cecil Booth patented a dust removing suction cleaner and started offering mobile cleaning services; his vacuum was large enough to frighten horses (it was also drawn by horses. This sounds messy). Satori Kato introduced his vacuum-dried coffee granules – aka instant coffee – at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. (Also where President McKinley was shot. Yikes.).
There was a bunch of art and culture: Beatrix Potter published the Tale of Peter Rabbit. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche posthumously published her brother Friedrich’s The Will to Power. H.G. Wells got it close with The First Men in the Moon (would have nailed it with first man on the moon…). Anton Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters” premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre. Vincent Van Gogh had his first retrospective, in a gallery in Paris. Pablo Picasso had his first major exhibit, also in a gallery in Paris. Sergei Rachmaninoff composed Piano Concerto No. 2; Claude Debussy offered Pour le piano; and Edward Elgar started his Pomp and Circumstance series with Marches No. 1 and 2 ( graduation ceremonies had no idea what was coming for them). But Americans REALLY loved parlor ballads, ragtime, and marching band music; they still could not get enough of Sousa’s Band’s Stars and Stripes Forever.
Are sports art and culture? Let’s just call it sports: The Winnipeg Victorias edged out the Montreal Shamrocks to win the Stanley Cup. Fútbol Club Atlético River Plate was founded in Argentina. The American League was established and the Chicago White Stockings (adorable!) won the first AL pennant. The Pittsburg Pirates took the National League pennant.
The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm to Wilhelm Röntgen (Physics), Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff (Chemistry), Emil von Behring (Medicine), Sully Prudhomme (Literature), and jointly to Frédéric Passy and Jean Henry Dunant (Peace).
In other odds and ends: J.P. Morgan incorporated U.S. Steel as the first billion-dollar corporation. Mr. Walgreen opened the first Walgreens. The first successful loop-the-loop roller coaster opened on Coney Island (it was called the Loop-the-Loop). Connecticut set the first speed limit law (12 mph in cities; 15 mph on country roads) and forced cars to stop if they were scaring horses. Schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor celebrated her 63rd birthday by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and surviving, proving…something?
Immediately closer to home: fifteen young women graduated from Abbot Academy, and William Clarence Matthews graduated from Phillips Academy. No one knew it yet, but Matthews would go from leading the batting average on Harvard’s baseball team to playing on the Burlington, Vermont team of the Northern League, making him the only Black player in any white professional baseball league at the time. When he was barred from playing in the Major League he had to settle for being a lawyer instead, eventually getting appointed to the Justice Department by President Calvin Coolidge. Big mistake, MLB. Huge.
With construction in our building slated to start this month we have been busy packing up the Peabody. The collections are staying onsite in the recently renovated basement, but everything else that isn’t nailed down from the first floor through the attic has been moved to our temporary office in George Washington Hall (known on campus as “GW”) or to an offsite storage facility.
In addition to packing, we have taken steps to protect the collections during construction. Though very little construction is planned in the basement, renovations in the rest of the building will inevitably result in dust and small bits of debris in the collections areas. To keep everything clean, and avoid weeks of post construction cleaning, we have covered the metal shelving in plastic sheeting. The library has been prepared in a similar fashion.
This week, we made the move to our temporary office in the former Dean of Student’s Office in GW Hall. We’re thankful to have been welcomed by many of our new neighbors. Stop by and say hi if you are in the area.
My name is Jack Angelo and I am a board member and Blog Lead in Andover’s Anthropological Society, a student club we created here at Phillips Academy last year. I first became interested in Anthropology because of the many different topics it could cover, allowing someone to perform curiosity-based research about whatever subject matter interests them. When the other board members and I created the club, we knew most of our members’ research and curiosity would be directed towards our more major projects working in tandem with the Peabody Institute. But, understanding that the larger, focused research projects did not allow total intellectual freedom for the whole club, and that it did not spread our club’s messaging to the whole campus, we decided to create the Andover Anthropological Society Blog Site.
Our blog has now run for almost nine months and has served as an amazing display of the various topics our members are interested in, such as Corporate Consumerism in America, The Rise of Digital Tribalism, and the History of Art in Quarantine. Each post reflects what genuinely interests our writers, allowing people to contribute to the club without having to take part in our larger projects. In this way, the blog has developed into exactly the kind of free representational space we hoped for.
Additionally, the blog is a public source for anybody to read to understand our club’s messaging or to just further their interest in anthropology. We wanted to make sure that what we’re doing in AAS isn’t limited to the people who show up to meetings. By putting our work online, we’re giving the whole Andover community access to the topics we’re exploring and the research our members are doing. If someone’s curious about anthropology but doesn’t know where to start, or if they just want to read about a specific topic, the blog is there for them.
Ultimately, the AAS Blog is about making anthropology accessible. We wanted to create something that anyone could engage with, regardless of whether they’re in the club or have any background in the field. By keeping our work public and covering topics that connect to everyday life, we’ve built a resource that’s open to the entire Andover community.
Sometimes it’s hard to be an archaeologist. You tell people what you do and watch their excitement dim as you say “No. Not dinosaurs.” Sometimes people think you’re Indiana Jones, so that’s a little better, but then you have to explain that actually looting’s not ok, and maybe we should discuss the ethics of collecting? Plus, you’ve never once fought a Nazi. (You do, however, wear an awesome hat.)
Not an archaeologist. (Via ChatGPT. I didn’t even need to prompt the pyramid.)
Some would argue this is the greatest real-world problem archaeologists today face. Incredibly, hope for the field has finally arrived – and it’s all thanks to LEGO.
FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) is a global program designed to encourage children in hands-on STEM learning. Among its major activities is the FIRST LEGO League Challenge, an annual competition for students aged 9-16 that has them working in teams to design, build, and code their own LEGO robot and complete a research-driven Innovation Project that identifies and solves a real-world problem related to a specific scientific theme. This year, the Challenge theme was UNEARTHED, inviting FLL teams to learn about the field of archaeology, identify a real-world problem faced by archaeologists, and propose an innovative solution.
Never have archaeologists been so popular! As soon as the Challenge kicked off, the Peabody began receiving requests from teams hoping to meet with an archaeologist and find out what challenges they’d want to see solved. And, of course, we weren’t remotely alone in this. I had a lot of fun this fall checking in with colleagues at other institutions, as we collectively realized how big the FLL Challenge is. The Society of American Archaeologists (SAA) even convened a panel of experts (including our own Ryan Wheeler!) for a webinar specifically designed for participants in the UNEARTHED season, just to help manage all the requests people were receiving. Exploring Archaeological Challenges: A Webinar for FIRST® LEGO® League and Robotics Teams was recorded and posted on the SAA’s YouTube channel, massively eclipsing in viewership all the channel’s other recordings combined.
We also heard from teams once they had their projects and were ready for feedback on the problems they’d selected and the solutions they’d proposed. Projects broadly sought either to help archaeologists do their jobs more easily with sustainable solutions, or to help non-archaeologists better understand the field and access archaeological information. Ideas included such products as a Swiss Army trowel, and an artifact cleaning and processing machine with residue-testing capabilities. They sought to help people grasp the size of ancient monuments through comparison with a football stadium for scale, and harnessed the sun to power absolutely anything you could imagine. They ranged in size, scope, and ambition, and all were far more sophisticated than I have represented here.
We might have initially been both a little concerned and a little amused when we first learned about this competition (an FLL reel Ryan found on Instagram had a lot more fire and explosions than we generally like to associate with archaeology!), but the projects that teams have come up with have truly been impressive. Most impressive of all has been the amount of thought and attention these young students have put into learning about the field of archaeology, and the care they have put into making it better for the future. I can only imagine what might be the long-term impacts of this program on the next generation of archaeologists.
Though perhaps their biggest problem will be convincing people that, no. Usually they do have thumbs.
In a past blog post, I shared that we regularly monitor glue traps for signs of insect activity around our building. The traps are not a method for controlling insect populations, rather, they alert us to the presence of unwanted pests that pose a danger to the collections. When unwanted bugs are found we have a set of tools we can employ to remove them while minimizing risk to the health of our collection and colleagues. These tools include vacuuming and freezing collections.
Now, I imagine that many readers (probably most of you) are not excited by pictures of bugs, but earlier this fall, we trapped an unknown insect that I felt was worthy of the spotlight.
Unknown Beetle removed from glue trap for easier identification
This remarkable beetle is the largest insect that I’ve seen in our traps. Beyond it’s massive size, any new or unknown bug is cause for excitement for a few reasons. First, we typically see the same three or four insects throughout the year. Second, we need to find out whether the insect is cause for alarm.
I snapped a few pictures and loaded them into Google’s ‘search by image’ function. Pretty quickly I learned that this guy is a Hermit Flower Beetle (or that is my best guess). They pose no danger to the collection. The larva live inside dead or rotting logs and play an important role in recycling wood and the nutrient cycle. The adults are frequently found around flowers. Somehow this one wandered into our building and ended up in one of our traps.
The University of Minnesota Extension webpage is a helpful identification resource
Unfortunately, once in our trap, the beetle died and became a food source for a carpet beetle, an insect we absolutely do not want in our collection. Even if an insect is not actively detrimental, it can always pose a risk.
Previously unknown Hermit Flower Beetle still in glue trap with carpet beetle outlined in red
Figure 1. Visiting researcher, Dr. Rademaker taking samples for isotope analysis.
Last May the Robert S. Peabody Institute hosted visiting researcher, Dr. Kurt Rademaker. Dr. Rademaker is an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans Laboratory at Texas A&M University. His research interests include early human ecology and settlement dynamics of the central Andean highlands.
Dr. Rademaker came to the Peabody to view materials collected by Richard “Scotty” MacNeish from the Ayacucho Valley in the Andean highlands. Between 1969 and 1972, MacNeish led an interdisciplinary team that searched for evidence of the origins of agriculture and civilization in South America.
Based on previous work conducted on the Peruvian coast, MacNeish and others hypothesized that agriculture originated in Peru’s Andean highlands. The Ayacucho Valley encapsulates diverse habitats spanning a range of elevations. It also contains dry caves with long stratigraphic sequences, two criteria MacNeish utilized in his study of the origins of agriculture in the Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley.
Botanical remains discarded by humans, including domesticated plants, can be well-preserved in dry caves, while long stratigraphic sequences give archaeologists the ability to see how things change over long spans of time. MacNeish was looking for evidence of human cultural development, including domesticated plants across time and habitats.
Figure 2. Pikimachay Cave as seen from the east.
Interestingly, and unrelated to the question of plant domestication, MacNeish’s summary of excavations at one site, Pikimachay, concluded that humans and now-extinct Pleistocence animals may have interacted. This was based on the presence of artifacts and extinct animal remains in the same pre-ceramic stratigraphic layer. The claim was supported by radiocarbon dating which returned dates of roughly 14,000 and 23,000 years before present. However, this conclusion has always been somewhat controversial since the dating methods do not meet scientific standards of quality control, not to mention they contradicted widely held notions of the peopling of the Americas.
Radiocarbon dating, at the time, required a large amount of sample material. MacNeish gathered material from several sources spanning a wide area. In the intervening years, isotope analysis has improved to the point where only one gram of sample material is needed. Now a single bone with clear stratigraphic origin can be sampled.
Additionally, sample preparation can now isolate carbon from the item being dated and remove carbon from the surrounding sediment. Previous methods couldn’t parse these sources and may have resulted in dating the burial environment. This can help determine if the sample was moved from it’s original stratigraphy by burrowing animals or other natural forces.
The story of when people arrived in the Americas has changed over time as new discoveries led archaeologists to question existing hypotheses. At the time of MacNeish’s Ayacucho project, the commonly held belief was that the first people arrived at the end of the Ice Age, by way of the Beringia land bridge and ice-free corridors. The earliest evidence of human presence was at Clovis, New Mexico, dated 13,250 to 12,800 years before present. His discovery meant that people may have arrived in North America much earlier if they were established in Peru 14,000 to 23,000 years ago.
Revisiting MacNeish’s Ayacucho materials offers an intriguing opportunity to confirm his findings. Recent work has revealed that the stone tools found in the lowest strata (see figure 3) were naturally occurring and not made by people, perhaps ruling out the oldest dates MacNeish obtained. However, the researchers confirmed that human-made tools and cut animal bones are present in earlier layers (strata h, h and h1).
Figure 3. Stratigraphy from the South Room in Pikimachay. Samples will be taken from pre-ceramic layers. Layers above the pre-ceramic strata are heavily disturbed by pot hunting, animal activity and construction from animal corrals.
Dr. Rademaker has proposed sampling as many animal bones as possible from pre-ceramic stratigraphic layers. If any remains are from the Pleistocene Epoch, then MacNeish’s results will be supported and will add further support to a pre-clovis peopling of the Americas. If the remains are younger, from the Holocene Epoch, then it is likely that they were deposited in lower strata through some manner of disturbance.
Figure 4. Pikimachay samples arrayed for processing.
During Dr. Rademaker’s visit he spent several days reviewing archival materials including field notes, radiocarbon sample data and correspondence. The final day of the visit, Dr. Rademaker collected a sub-set of samples; roughly 1/3 of the total proposed. The bones they were taken from are quite old and may not contain the collagen necessary for isotope analysis. If these samples prove to have viable collagen and they return good dates, Dr. Rademaker will return to collect the remaining samples.
This summer I went to visit a friend in Vienna. I hadn’t seen her in [*cough*] years, so my inspiration was mainly just to hang out with her. It was only after I had my plane tickets and the trip was drawing near that I actually started looking into what there was to do in Vienna.
Turns out, the Venus of Willendorf is there. For a museum nerd I don’t tend to visit that many museums when I travel, but the Venus of Willendorf is famous enough (there’s even a cast of the original here at the Peabody) and I am nerd enough for that to justify seeking her out. This meant dragging my friend to the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.
If you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the place, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’m familiar enough with the broad-strokes histories of museums and their ties to imperialism: As nations started to push further and further out into the world during the Age of Exploration, voyagers brought back evidence of their encounters with new environments in new places, creating displays that combined minerals, plants, animals, and man-made “curiosities.” These collections offered opportunities for viewers to learn about the world, as centered by their home locations, but equally they offered opportunities for displayers to demonstrate their status and wealth, the power of their influence and access – not just how they saw the world but how they wanted others to see them in it. If you look for it, this history is written into the architecture and design of museums, and I have been academically trained to look for it. So maybe if you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the Naturhistorisches Museum I would have said “nothing new.”
Reader, I was wrong.
This place was every piece of museum history I had ever learned, jacked up on steroids. It was everything I had been taught to expect dialed up to a ten, with a little extra more thrown in just for fun. It was contemporary best practice crammed into 19th century display cases surrounded by imperial displays of awe and wonder, and I was there for every moment of it. Just please don’t ask me much about the exhibits themselves! I was far too distracted to notice.
Just the front doors…Looking across to the Kunsthistorisches MuseumInterior domeThe (very) grand staircaseTraditional 19th century displayPlanet Earth couldn’t fit into 19th century display cases?Neither could this dude?The chickens couldOh, right! The Venus was…fine.
The Peabody 
#/media/File:1901_Kidder_Steam_Runabout.jpg){kind=link}