all Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology stories

Peabody teams will scan other endangered monuments

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:47:31 -0400

By January, the Peabody Museum’s Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program hopes to be in Copán, Honduras, scanning the imposing but fragile hieroglyphic stairway, the longest inscription in the New World.

The stairway, a long, broad stone step that leads up the side of the site’s main acropolis structure, tells the story of Copán’s ancient Maya ruling dynasty and is unlike anything in the Maya world. Marked with glyphs and sculpture, the stair retains an intimidating quality even today to those who stand at its foot and gaze up to where Copán’s rulers once stood. The stairway is the reason UNESCO declared Copán a World Heritage Site in 1980.

Ancient knowledge

705287540 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:11:03 -0500

It is 11 a.m. on a sticky tropical Saturday and Ian Graham is lying on his side in the dried grass before a 1,300-year-old stone building in the Maya city of Yaxchilan in Chiapas, Mexico. Propped on one elbow, Graham is digging at the earth with a stick, scraping the dirt from around a stone.

He scrapes for a few moments, dribbles some water from his water bottle to loosen the hard earth, and then scrapes some more.

Archaeological bookends in Copan Valley

90581724 — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:15:07 -0400

COPAN RUINAS, Honduras - A short drive from the main Maya ruins at Copan, a forested hillside holds a cluster of mounds that Peabody Museum archaeologists believe date from near the end of the great Maya civilization that once dominated the region.

On April 17, 2007, Peabody Museum director and Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology William Fash, along with director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program Barbara Fash and two Harvard graduate students, walked the site with Honduran government officials charged with regulating and overseeing archaeological activity in the Central American nation.

Corpus team overcomes scanning snags

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:31:06 -0400

A multicolored tent made of tarps and rope and tree branches and duct tape rose above Yaxchilan's unique pinkish stalactite stela Monday (April 23). On the last day of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology's expedition to the ancient Maya city of Yaxchilan, team members were doing something at which they had proven themselves adept: improvising. The expedition had already achieved its main goal: testing digital scanning technology that could provide an important new way to preserve fading Maya monuments across Central America. Despite some initial hiccoughs, the technology had proved itself over the weekend, when scans of the large flat Stela 11 were completed.

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:39:11 -0400

Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12).

Just days before Monday’s 111th running of the Boston Marathon, Lieberman presented his theories of the importance of running to ancestral humans to explain why we’re the only species that voluntarily runs extraordinarily long distances, such as the 26.2 miles in the marathon.

Harvard researchers head south to preserve ancient inscriptions

705287540 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:09:39 -0500

Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.

The expedition, by the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program (CMHI), will focus on Yaxchilan, an ancient Maya city on the Usumacinta River, which forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The CMHI’s mission since its formation in 1968 is to record and disseminate information pertaining to all ancient Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions and their associated iconography.

Visualization Lab provides data in three dimensions

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:20 -0400

On the second floor of the Peabody Museum, in a darkened room painted flat black, Harvard geologist John Shaw slips on a pair of futuristic goggles as he sits before a 23-foot-wide wrap-around screen.

With a click of his mouse, a rotating yellow outline of Africa seems to jump off the screen and fill the small room. Globular columns of red magma lurking deep below most of the floating image slither in three dimensions up to volcanoes on the surface.

The southern tip of Africa appears to pass within easy arm's reach as the 3-D representation slowly whirls in midair.

"It would be very hard to represent this in any kind of two-dimensional display," says Shaw, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Structural and Economic Geology. "You end up having to show people 13 or 15 slices and try to let their brain do the work of composing this 3-D architecture."

Despite what early explorers feared, the Earth is not flat. And that has long presented a challenge for geologists trying to model and study three-dimensional sections of the Earth's crust on flat maps and computer screens.

The data used by Harvard's Structural Geology and Earth Resources Group are no longer imprisoned in two dimensions, thanks to a new state-of-the-art immersive Visualization Lab, the first of its kind at Harvard and one of few in the world. Racks of powerful computers and graphics processors feed stereo images compiled from scientific data to three digital projectors suspended from the ceiling.

The stereo image looks blurry until you slip on the high-tech goggles, which, in a feat of precision timing, block one eye then the other in time with alternating left and right perspectives projected onto the 8-foot-tall screen. The result is a breathtakingly realistic 3-D image.

Figs likely first domesticated crop

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:14:57 -0400

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated figs to a period some 5,000 years earlier than previously thought, making the fruit trees the oldest known domesticated crop.

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University report their findings in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs likely first domesticated crop

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:27:59 -0400

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and Anat Hartmann of Bar-Ilan University reported their findings in the journal Science.

"Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind - from exploiting the Earth as it is to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," says Bar-Yosef, professor of anthropology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and curator of Paleolithic archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. "People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods. This shift to a sedentary lifestyle grounded in the growing of wild crops such as barley and wheat marked a dramatic change from 2.5 million years of humans as mobile hunter-gatherers."

The research was sponsored by the American School of Prehistoric Research at Harvard's Peabody Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Shelby-White-Leon Levy Foundation, and the Koschitzky Foundation at Bar-Ilan University.

Suzuki's passionate plea for change

50443248 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:33:49 -0400

David Suzuki, the Japanese-Canadian scientist and environmentalist, professed astonishment at having been awarded this year's Roger Tory Peterson medal from the Harvard Museum of Natural History. "I'm not a birder," Suzuki said, referring to the great ornithologist for whom the medal is named. "I've always been an insect and fish guy myself," he told his audience for the Peterson Memorial Lecture at the Science Center Sunday afternoon (March 19).

Evolving ideas

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:17:32 -0400

Is the problem with evolution A) people don't believe in it; B) people believe in it but don't understand it; or C) evolution comes packaged with troubling implications that we don't want to accept? According to speakers at a spirited Askwith Education Forum - "How Do We Teach Evolution" - on Feb. 22 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the answer is "all of the above."

From the point of view of Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor, "The real issue is that large numbers of people don't believe that organisms evolve, and our first problem that we have to integrate into teaching about how they evolve is to begin by convincing doubters that organisms do evolve."

Three weeks in tiny tunnel pay off

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:43:04 -0400

After three weeks in a tiny tunnel 50 feet below an ancient Maya pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, Peabody Museum researcher Bill Saturno finally got to view his prize. Fine lines and dramatic colors emerged from the tunnel's gloom, depicting a story of the gods who created the Maya world.

"It's really like a Mayan book opens up," Saturno said of the mural. "I was awestruck by its state of preservation."

The 30-foot mural depicts the patron god of kings making sacrifices at the four trees that Maya mythology say are holding up the corners of the world. The Maya maize god then emerges and sets up the fifth tree in the center, completing the world's creation.

Human skull is 7 million years old

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:49 -0400

When a 7-million-year-old skull was first found, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, called it "one of the greatest discoveries of the past 100 years." After studying new evidence including teeth and jaw fragments, Lieberman stands by that statement. "The next oldest, reasonably complete humanlike skull we have is just over 3 million years old," he notes. "The Toumai fossils go back close to the time when anthropologists believe our ancestors separated from chimpanzees."

In 2001, Michel Brunet, from the University of Poitiers in France, led a team who found the cracked and distorted cranium, along with two lower jaw fragments and some teeth, in a blisteringly hot, arid part of Chad, in north central Africa. The discovery pulled up the tree of evolution by its roots.

Brunet and his team named the creature Toumai, which means "hope of life" in the local language. It's a name often given to newborns in Chad. The fossils make him out to be about 3 to 4 feet tall, with thick brow ridges, and a flat, somewhat humanlike face. Close examination of the new teeth and jaw parts lead to the conclusion that they are of the same ancient age and belonged to creatures like Toumai.

The fossils were pictured and described in two articles in the April 7, 2005, issue of the journal Nature. The two reports are the product of an international collaboration among Brunet and his colleagues at the University of Poitiers; Lieberman; David Pilbeam, a professor of anthropology at Harvard; and researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and from Chad.

The accidental 'best friend'

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:35 -0400

Harvard researchers studying Siberian foxes have uncovered evidence that the ability to interpret human expressions and gestures that helped transform the wild wolf into humankind's cooperative "best friend" may have occurred by accident. The research casts doubt onto a previous theory that domestic dogs' ability to interpret human communication results from generations of selection for that specific trait by ancient breeders. Rather, the research indicates that the "social intelligence" shown by dogs may have been an unintended byproduct of wolves becoming domesticated and losing their fear and aggression toward humans. Previous research with both wild wolves and nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees shows the dog is superior at being able to interpret human gestures such as pointing to hidden food sources. But the Siberian research shows that foxes bred only for tameness are the equal of the domestic dog in the task.

Reading ancient campfires

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:50 -0400

Ofer Bar-Yosef, Harvard's MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and head of the Peabody Museum's Stone Age Laboratory, is working in the New Stone Age, known as the Neolithic, when Homo sapiens first domesticated plants. He's particularly interested in the rise of agriculture, dubbed the Neolithic Revolution, a transforming event in human history that set the stage for early villages and the larger civilizations to come. It's his interest in an earlier prehistoric revolution that spurs Bar-Yosef's investigation of the Neolithic. Bar-Yosef believes it was some type of technological revolution that gave Cro-Magnon humans the upper hand over Neanderthals some 35,000 years ago.