Book Launch Tour: The Vesuvius Isotope, by Kristen Elise, Ph.D.

This post is part of a book launch tour for the release of The Vesuvius Isotope, a new book by drug discovery biologist Kristen Elise.  This book might be of interest to those of use that enjoy a thriller with a bit of archaeology thrown in :)  All the posts on Kristen's blog tour are related in some way to the content of her new novel - see below and be intrigued, maybe you've found your next Summer read!

The Crocodile Library of Tebtunis

[F]or some of the Egyptians the crocodiles are sacred animals... and each of these two peoples keeps one crocodile selected from the whole number, which has been trained to tameness, and they put hanging ornaments of molten stone and of gold into the ears of these and anklets round the front feet, and they give them food appointed and victims of sacrifices and treat them as well as possible while they live, and after they are dead they bury them in sacred tombs, embalming them.

-The Histories, Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) 

In the winter of 1899/1900, an expedition into the Fayoum Oasis outside of Cairo, Egypt was initiated. The expedition was led by the University of California at Berkeley and the Hearst Foundation. Its goal was to excavate an ancient site: the ancient city of Tebtunis. The researchers were looking for human mummies; what they found instead were mummified crocodiles.

One of the workers from the expedition was so disgruntled that he took a machete and began hacking at one of the mummified crocodiles. And this was how it was discovered that within some of the crocodiles, an incredibly large collection of papyrus documents had been preserved for two thousand years. Papyri were found both in the crocodiles, where they were sometimes used as part of the mummification process, and within the city itself. More than 30,000 ancient texts were eventually recovered from Tebtunis, comprising the largest collection of ancient papyri that exists in the United States today.

Mummified crocodile, Naples Archeological Museum

The majority of the texts date to the second century BC, although others hail from the first or second centuries AD. This is the same era that produced the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, offering an Egyptian counterpart to the Roman resource that is still mostly buried beneath the ash from Mount Vesuvius. And, like the texts from the Villa dei Papiri, the ancient papyri of the Tebtunis excavation are still legible to this day.

Mummified baby crocodile, Naples Archeological Museum

Within the library were more than a dozen fragments of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. Also found were birth, death, and tax certificates, and petitions to Queen Cleopatra from her subjects. It is unfortunate that no texts have ever been found - either in this database or any other - that were actually written in the hand of Egypt's enigmatic last pharaoh.

Also excavated at Tebtunis were several scientific and medical texts, including at least one example of an illustrated treatise on the medicinal properties of plants. Contrasting with these are a number of astrology and magic texts. The juxtaposition between magic and medicine in the same era underscores a critical transition that was underway at that time - the transition from superstition to true science.

Tebtunis illustrated medical text

It is interesting to note that the Tebtunis papyri are written in both Egyptian and Greek - sometimes within a single document. The demotic Egyptian language was common among earlier pharaohs but rarely used in the later years of the first milleneum BC. A gradual replacement of Egyptian with Greek evolved with the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and the Roman conquest of Egypt brought with it an increase in the use of Latin.

Cleopatra, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, was the only one to speak all three languages.

For more information about the Tebtunis Papyri, visit the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri.

This blog post explores a non-fictional theme or locale that is incorporated in The Vesuvius Isotope, a novel by Kristen Elise, Ph.D. Order your copy at www.kristenelisephd.com.

Kristen Elise, Ph.D. is a drug discovery biologist and the author of The Vesuvius Isotope. She lives in San Diego,  California, with her husband, stepson, and three canine children. Please visit her websites at  ww.kristenelisephd.com and www.murderlab.com. The Vesuvius Isotope is available in both print  www.kristenelisephd.com and www.amazon.com) and e-book formats (www.amazon.com for Kindle, www.barnesandnoble.com for Nook, www.kobo.com for Kobo reader.) 

The Vesuvius Isotope:
When her Nobel laureate husband is murdered, biologist Katrina Stone can no longer ignore the 

secrecy that increasingly pervaded his behavior in recent weeks. Her search for answers leads to 

a two-thousand-year-old medical mystery and the esoteric life of one of history’s most enigmatic 

women. Following the trail forged by her late husband, Katrina must separate truth from legend 

as she chases medicine from ancient Italy and Egypt to a clandestine modern-day war. Her quest 

will reveal a legacy of greed and murder and resurrect an ancient plague, introducing it into the 

twenty-first century.

Exavation en France à Menez Dregan!

This August I will be off to beautiful Brittany in France, to dig at a Lower Palaeolithic site called Menez Dregan for 6 weeks. 

C'est un éclat!

The site has layers rich in stone tools dated to between 350,000 and 500,000 years BP.  It also has some of the earliest evidence of controlled use of fire.

I've never dug at a Lower Palaeolithic site before, which makes it exciting, but I'm also excited for working outside in some (hopefully) good weather, and getting to practice my French.  And eating French food.  Lots of it.

I've made a list of a bunch of French words that one might come across in an archaeological situation, that I'm trying to remember.  Here's a sample:

• Pierre (stone)
• Caillou, galet (pebble)
• Feu (fire)
• Ancien (ancient/old)
• Niveaux (levels)
• Charbon de bois (charcoal)
• Silex (flint)
• L'industrie lithique (lithic industry)
• éclat (flake)
• Chantier (site)
• Fouille (excavation)

Another exciting aspect of this trip is that I (and my husband who will be there too) will effectively be homeless - we finish the contract on our flat days before we leave, so everything's going into storage, and then we're off!  We have a place secured for when we return, but not until a few weeks after... so there might be some couch surfing!  

Catch-up: France and Flint

Last summer I decided to pull up my socks and be a REAL archaeologist.  No more of this ‘watching time team and casually reading about Anglo Saxons’ stuff (which probably wont stop, but anyways)!  I volunteered for the Les Cottes dig in France directed by Marie Soressi, and for a month from half July to half August, I spent an amazing time crouched over on a meter square of dirt developing my right bicep.

It was a fantastic dig – giant cave, giant pit, giant piles of finds – and I felt like I learned so much, this being only my second excavation.  I will definitely try to go again.  The flint in France is gorgeous (pretty translucent ochre colour flint banded with red, and some a lovely raspberry, or deep violets that were almost black) – the area of Poitou we were in is renowned (by flint enthusiasts anyway) for the quality and abundance of material, and the area is rich with prehistoric cultures going back deep into the Palaeolithic. 

Les Cottes itself was first excavated in the 1800s, and again in the 50s.  This excavation led by Marie Soressi took place out in front of the mouth of the cave, in in-situ deposits that held amazingly rich layers of not only classic Aurignacian materials, but Proto-Aurignacian, Chatelperronean and Mousterian as well!  There were vertical walls where you could see the layers, full of flints and antler sticking out, and some layers were red with ochre or black with manganese.  A European Palaeolithic archaeologists’ dream!

Nodular flint we dug up from fields nearby

There were also opportunities while we were there to collect some nearby flint and try our hand at knapping.  I’ve tried knapping obsidian before, and this was my first time trying with flint.  I’ve realised I am a terrible knapper, and although I love lithic technology and the look and feel of flint and the amazing things it can do, I am going to need 5x as much tuition as the next person to be a competent flint knapper.  Lesson one: not putting a hole in the thigh of my trousers.

I met some amazing people on the dig and hope to keep in touch with many of them.  Most of all it’s made me fall in love with flint – although British flint is interesting, I find it a bit more cold and masculine – icy black Norfolk flint, or the steely grey of the south, or the dull orange patina some old flints get here – it’s definitely not as sexy as the French flint!!!

Here's a link to the description of Les Cottes on the Max Planck Institute website:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/files/les-cottes.htm

And here's a paper on Les Cottes if you are interested:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440311003463

European Palaeolithic Conference: 21-23 February

For a closer conference (temporally and geographically), the European Palaeolithic Conference will be held at the British Museum.  It includes free entry into the current exhibition on Ice Age Art which should be good.

http://www.ahobproject.org/announcements.php

Here is a program as well, to see if anything tickles your fancy:

http://ahobproject.org/downloads/European%20Palaeolithic%20Conference%20programme.pdf

The Final Fall of the Pre-Clovis Barrier?

New 15,500 tools found in Texas

Back when I was an undegrad and I was learning about New World archaeology, I became fascinated with the topic of the peopleing of Americas.  I loved how it involved not only archaeological data, but linguistic and genetic as well.  SFU's own Knut Fladmark had popularised a theory which I found more plausible than the common idea of the first peoples entering North America through Beringia and down through an 'ice-free corridor' down near the British Columbia-Alberta border into the States, between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets.  Fladmark proposed that first peoples could have came through a coastal migration along the coast, island hopping and living in refugia - areas not covered by mountains of ice, such as Haida Gwaii.

Haida Gwaii (previously known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) have a unique ecology because they have a few thousand years less time spent under the ice than the rest of Canada.  Apparently I've been there when I was very yound, to Sandspit, but I have no memory and would love to visit what I imagine to be Vancouver Island but a bit more rugged and desolate.

Perhaps I like the coastal migration theory a bit because as a west coast Canadian girl, it puts my homeland right in the way of the first migrations, but it also sounds more plausable for a number of other reasons.  One is that the ice free corridor might not have been open at the time - and if it was, the harsh environment between the glaciers would offer a puzzling mystery of why people ventured down between into a stormy place with no fish in the rivers and high mountains of ice on either side.  Where did they think they were heading?

Another reason I find the ice free corridor idea imnplausable is the archaeological and linguistic evidence do not support it.  The oldest accepted site (until now) in the New World has been Monte Verde, a 12,500 year old site at the bottom tip of South America - nothing near that old has been found on Beringia or Alaska.

An old undergraduate essay I wrote, back when I was even worse at academic essays, wrote about this coastal migration hypothesis and the evidence supporting it.  The linguistic evidence was one of the most interesting supporting factors.  The longer people have been in one place, the more languages and language isolates you usually find.  If one follows the ice-free corridor hypothesis, you would expect to find the most linguistic diversity in the central area of America, but you find it along the west coast of North America.

If a coastal people entered America with watercraft, it wouldn't be too suprising if their migration south was a bit quicker than overland - making the Monte Verde site less of a mystery.  But now, a 15,500 year old site, quite a bit older than even Monte Verde, has been found in Texas.  The reason this is so special, is that if people entered North America at this time, there was probably no open ice free corridor at the time.  There has been a well known resistance to sites with suggested dates that put them at a pre-Clovis date, such as Meadowcroft and Pedra Furada.  If this new site is accepted by the archaeological community though, perhaps the coastal migration hypothesis will be lent new support.

Dreams of Neanderthal Paintings at Chauvet

An article in the guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/24/cave-of-forgotten-dreams-review) discusses a new documentary on the Upper Palaeolithic paintings at Chauvet cave in France, called Cave of Forgotten Dreams and directed by Werner Herzog.

I looked forward to reading about this documentary, but my excitement was soon overshadowed by a glaring error by the reviewer, Peter Bradshaw.  To be fair, he is a film critic, not an archaeologist, but I'm suprised after having viewed the documentary he's still left fuzzy about who the artists of Chauvet's paintings were:

"...the extraordinary Chauvet cave in the south of France, named after Jean-Marie Chauvet, the explorer who in 1994 made a Tutankhamun-level discovery: hundreds of pictures of animals drawn with flair, sophistication and detail by Neanderthal man around 32,000 years ago."

I don't think I'm being a pedant by being offended by this error...!  At 32,000 years ago, in current understanding, Neanderthals were limited to the Iberian peninsula - and have never been associated with cave paintings of any kind.  Until recently, no form of art was attributed to Neanderthals with any consensus at all - so the attribution of this equvalent of the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a bit suprising to anyone who has had a passing interest in human prehistory.

I think this is a good example of the public perception of human prehistory, our own ancestry - we see titles in newspapers about Neanderthals wearing makeup and how Neanderthals never died out because they live on in our genes, and these are the sort of ideas we carry around in our heads about our past.  Cave men - were they Neanderthals or humans?  Did humans evolve from Neanderthals?  What was the difference?  I suspect most peoples answers deviate quite far from current (or even past) research.  Readers have picked up on the error in the comment section, but further misunderstandings about Neanderthals are quickly raised. 

Solutions?  Do we need one?  This makes me wonder how prehistory is covered in school...

Neanderthal innovation or acculturation: did aliens build the pyramids?

I have a (bad?) habit of making flaky analogies, and they occasionally crop up in my writing as well- generally near the end, and they generally read like a poor attempt at introducing stylistic flair in order to bring an essay to conclusion and leave my reader stroking their chin!

One analogy I used that I'm particularly fond of compared speciation and rainbows.  In another, I compared attitudes towards the debate over the origin of late Neanderthal tool industries to19th century anthropologists' incredulity to New World earthworks and Central and South American pyramids- the Hopewell and Mississippian mounds, for example, were attributed by some anthropologists as having built by an advanced race that was destroyed by the Native American tribes.

This incredulity at the cognitive capacities of the indigenous population associated with the complex material culture is echoed in both instances.  Neanderthals are found essentially with a Chatelperronean backed blade in one hand, and a perforated wolf's tooth in another, and the suggestion immediately arises that Neanderthals attained these skills by acculturating themselves with modern humans, generally because Neanderthals are viewed as having inferior cognitive capabilities.  Why IS that (other than humans are egotistical beings!)? 

It's true this is a possibility, that Neanderthals gained Chatelperronean tool technology from contact with modern humans.  But there is also the possibility that Neanderthals simply developed these tools themselves.  After all, we see examples of Neanderthal symbolism before evidence of modern human arrival such as with the ochre covered shells in Spain 50,000 years ago, uses of black manganese, burial, deep cave use, and complex tools like throwing spears and hafted points, well before Neanderthal use of a 'typically Upper Palaeolithic' toolkit.

As a sister species that branched apart only 4-500,000 years ago, we can expect there to be some cognitive differences between modern humans and neanderthals, but I expect there were also large similarities.  Both species seemed to use technology to adapt to their environments to a large degree, and I do not believe things such as symbolic thought, language, and complex tool manufacture to be out of the realm of the Neanderthal mind.

To me, jumping to a conclusion that if Neanderthals did have complex tool sets resembling what was once thought unique to modern humans then it must have been a borrowed or copied technology, is reminiscent of 19th century anthropologists incredulity that indigenous populations built great momuments and fine architecture.