During my first couple of months in South Carolina, I've been working to develop a plan for my research here and to move quickly on getting it going.  An important component of what I plan to do involves identifying Archaic Period (ca. 8000-2000 BC) deposits with enough integrity to extract information relevant to understanding the behaviors and decisions of families and small groups. That means finding sites with features and artifact scatters that haven't been deflated, truncated, and chewed up by agriculture, logging, erosion, etc.

​A desire to find intact deposits and the contextual information they offer underlies a lot of archaeology. You can do plenty of interesting and useful things with artifacts and sites that don't have that kind of information, of course, but there are some questions that you really can't ask of surface assemblages of projectile points or flake scatters that are contained completely within the plowzone.

There are several different kinds of landforms in this part of the country that have good potential to contain well-preserved Archaic occupational deposits: sand dunes, rockshelters, near-shore islands, and overbank deposits built by river flooding.  Those overbank deposits (specifically long, linear, sandy natural levees) are where I started my search, and that search has already paid off.

The photo to the left shows a profiled section (about 2 m wide and 2.3 m deep) of the interior of a levee that my colleague Al Goodyear took me to look at last month.    At some point in the not-too-distant past, someone had machine-excavated some sediment out of the side, exposing a more-or-less vertical section perhaps 8-10 m long. Even with a rain-washed and slumped surface, cultural material was visible in several locations. At least two possible pit features were visible, and there was a cluster of lithic debris deep in the profile.

The landowner, generous enough to let us on the property to begin with, was excited about what we saw and agreed that I could go back and do some work to clean and document the profile. I returned to the site last week and worked on the 2 m section shown in the photo.  The pieces of orange flagging tape mark the locations of in situ cultural materials in the wall.  The deep zone with most of the artifacts (most of which are quartz debris) is slightly darker than the sediment above and was (I think) probably formed during an occupation of the levee some 6000-5000 years ago. That guesstimated date comes from the single diagnostic artifact recovered so far: a Middle Archaic Guilford point. The point, also of quartz, wasn't found in the wall but came out of the slump (screened) immediately in front of the wall. I think it probably came out of the artifact zone and therefore probably dates that zone to the Middle Archaic. If the point fell out of the wall from higher up, however, that means that the artifact zone pre-dates the Middle Archaic (which would also be awesome).  It's a win no matter how you slice it. And the whole deposit is sand. That's a win-win.  Or maybe even a win-win-win.

Weather permitting, I'll be back out at the site tomorrow to try to grab another 2-3 meters of profile.

I think there are tremendous and varied possibilities for excellent research at places like this, and I'm pretty happy to have been directed to a site with such obvious potential so soon after I got here. I owe a big thanks to Al and to the landowner for making it happen. Stay tuned!

I've been writing publicly about pseudo-archaeology for almost a year now.  While I've grown used to some of the nonsense out there, I'm still surprised by how tenaciously some self-proclaimed fringe researchers cling to pieces of "evidence" that are either known or probable frauds.  Why do they do this?

Can you do "science" about the past based on hoaxed evidence?  A reasonable person (especially one who actually does science) would of course answer "no."  If you have bad data that you know are bad data, you throw them out.  To do otherwise would be . . . what?  Stupid? Self-defeating?  You can fill in the blank for yourself.

​Here are a couple of examples.

Example 1: The Helenwood Devil

I wrote this post about the Helenwood Devil in March (and then this follow-up post and this one a few days later). The so-called Helenwood Devil was a "horned giant" from Tennessee that was "discovered" in 1921.  It turned out to be a clay statue that was sculpted in an abandoned coal mine by Cruis Sexton prior to being toured around and exhibited as a curiosity. You can judge the quality of Sexton's handiwork for yourself by looking at the photo.

I found accounts of the Helenwood Devil as a legitimate "horned giant" on two sites: The Rundown Live and The Greater Ancestors World Museum (GAWM). Kristan Harris corrected his story, but the GAWM chose not to. Chris Lesley commented on on this post last night:

"The first logical fallacy committed here is called a "strawman". I don't judge the articles, the GAWM website is there for Giant Hunters as an exhaustive resource, even though there is about 500 yet to be loaded to the site. I have compared the Helenwood devil with the plaster apeman skull called "Peking Man" which still exists in evolutionary examples. Are we to assume that you as an evolutionist who criticize others beliefs, hold to a different standard. I suggest you look into "Peking Man" and lets see how that level of criticism stands. So I am to assume that plaster skulls are acceptable when they fit your beliefs. The next problem is that you have brought the label "runt-hunter" on yourself.  You pick out the easiest target and generalize all the articles as such. This is like trying to prove real apples do not exist by showing the public one "plastic apple." I let the public decide which ones are plastic, I am not arguing for the authenticity of the Helenwood Devil, I remain neutral my scientific model is not only safe but its superior to the lesser belief of Common-Ancestry". So you say this one (Helenwood Devil) is fake, . . .great! I am not threatened in any way. It will remain, instead of controlling what people think, as academia does, I suggest that each person judge for themselves in each case and ignore fallacious arguments such as cherry-picking, runt-hunting, double standards and Strawman attacks that misrepresent the motives of others. . thanks." 

So there you have it.  According to Lesley, the Helenwood Devil, despite being made of clay in 1921, persists as a possible piece of evidence that Creation Science should consider. I guess we should each make up our own minds about what a clay statue from the Roaring Twenties has to do with creation or evolution.

There are several other interesting things in Lesley's post.

First, he's mentioned "Peking Man" before, but I wasn't sure exactly what he was getting at.  I checked around and it turns out that it is a popular contention among creationists that the plaster casts of the Homo erectus fossil material from Zhoukoudian are not accurate because they were made by evolutionists with an agenda (the originals were lost during World War II).  You might be able to get a little traction with that argument if the Zhoukoudian skulls were the only remains of Homo erectus that we have to look at, but they're not.  Not even close (there are many from across Asia and Africa).  

Lesley is familiar with a "straw man" argument because he is making one about "Peking Man."  Why not go after all the fossils of Homo erectus that are not plaster casts?  

If there was a purported Homo erectus that was built out of clay in an abandoned coal mine, I think I'd want to throw it out of the analysis and try to focus on cases that may actually have something to do with reality. But maybe that's just me. I'm not even sure our understanding of Homo erectus would change that much at this point if we just threw out the Zhoukoudian material.  This is because a robust understanding of the past, generally, doesn't depend on any single data point:  we can throw out the ones that are suspect and still arrive at a plausible interpretation that can be evaluated in the light of new evidence. And we're much better off doing that than holding on to unreliable data and incorporating it into an analysis.

Finally, Lesley accuses me of "cherry-picking" and "runt-hunting" because I single out and examine cases that are not credible.  It should go without saying, but it probably won't so I'll say it: that's what scientists do.  We actually try to find and throw out bad data.  

So far, I have yet to meet a case for a "giant" that I think is strong.  And I haven't just looked at the "bad" ones (if they're so bad, why are we even talking about them anyway?) -- I've looked at many that are put forward as "strong cases."  I've looked at the case for "three rows of teeth" from Amelia Island that Lesley himself challenged me to look at.  I've looked at the case for the "eyewitness account" that Jim Vieira and Fritz Zimmerman published on.  I've looked at many others that have been the subject of articles, blog posts, television programs, etc. Where are all the good cases that I'm missing?  Are there any that are not "runts" besides the large skeletons reported by the Smithsonian (the institution accused of covering everything up)?  

Back to the Helenwood Devil: if you're really just "putting it out there" so that people can decide, why not at least include the picture of the actual Helenwood Devil (and a link to the story) rather than an unsourced, unrelated image of horned skull that is probably also a sculpture? 

Keeping the Helenwood Devil in the mix is almost as clear a marker of silliness as you could put on yourself.

Almost.
​
Which brings us to the second example.

Example 2: Hutton Pulitzer's Embrace of the Fake

It appears to me that the non-existence of a mechanism for detecting and throwing out fakery is an important component of the "fringe" game in eastern North America.  In my last post about the continued silliness of Hutton Pulitzer, I discussed the strange misconception of science among "fringe" theorists that seems to omit any possibility of proving your ideas wrong. That misconception, whether intentional or not, is coupled with an embrace of just about every fraudulent "artifact" that has ever come down the pipe: Newark Holy Stones? Bat Creek Stone? Kinderhook Plates? Soper Frauds? The reluctance or inability to critically examine individual pieces of evidence means that everything counts as evidence: good, bad, real, fake . . . throw it all in the pot, stir it up, jabber about it, try to sell books, etc.

In this post from July I wrote about the allegedly fake copper artifacts that Pulitzer includes in his video of "Copper Culture Artifacts."  They're still there, and the video is still there.  Fake artifacts? Someone who was really interested in answers and analysis would have removed artifacts that could be fake.  So either Pulitzer doesn't care, or he has decided they're genuine.  I don't know which it is. If I had to bet, I'd go with Curtain Number 1.

According to internet chatter, his books about treasure hunting are just as meticulously researched as his informational videos about archaeology.

Pulitzer's embrace of the fake went up a notch with his attempt at a defense of the Burrows Cave artifacts. If you don't know anything about Burrows Cave (and the connections between Russ Burrows, Frank Joseph, and Ancient American), please read some of Richard Flavin's posts that I linked to on my Burrows Cave page. There is perhaps no faster way to identify yourself as someone who is not interested in critical thought than by rushing to the defense of Burrows Cave.

Keep up the good work, guys!

Over the last couple of mornings on my walk to work I listened to this recording of Hutton Pulitzer interviewing Jim Scherz at the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS) conference that was held in Michigan October 9-11.  There was a lot of complaining and not a whole of substance in the interview, so I'm going to file it in the "take one for the team" category.  I did find a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk while I was listening, though, so at least there's that. And there were some comments that I think are worth discussing.

About halfway through the interview (30:20), Scherz explains his view of "the scientific method:"  

"You take the data, you take all the data, you analyze the data, and you come up and see where that analysis goes: that is what is truth."

Pulitzer follows up by bemoaning the fate of "our young people" who are not being taught science. Throughout the interview the pair discuss how "science" will eventually render archaeology and anthropology obsolete.

It's very dramatic. 

It's also very wrong. Neither of these guys seems to actually understand what science is. There are a lot of different definitions and conceptions of science, but most of them share some core components.  Science is a systematic way of acquiring knowledge about the natural world. It has to have embedded somewhere in it a mechanism for falsification (proving things wrong).  Falsification allows science to be cumulative: it builds on itself because we can discard ideas that have been shown to be false.

In the quote above, Scherz is not describing "the scientific method," he's describing induction. Induction is an important part of science. When you're working on the inductive side, you have a pile of information in front of you and you sort through it and try to construct a story that makes sense and accommodates all that information.  
Inducing things (constructing general explanations that accommodate data) is great, but it's only half the battle when you're actually trying to do science.  After you construct that general explanation, you need to figure out a way to test it. You need to deduce what the implications of the general explanation are and then try to test those implications. You need to say something like "if my explanation X is correct, I would expect a, b, and c to be true." Then you actually need to go and check if a, b, and c are true.  If they aren't, there's something wrong with your general explanation (i.e., it isn't complete or correct) or your underlying assumptions.

When archaeology is done as a science, it includes a back-and-forth between induction and deduction.  It doesn't really matter where an idea comes from as long as you can test it. 

When Scherz says that science is basically the distillation of "truth" from looking at a bunch of data, he is betraying the presence of a fundamental misunderstanding that I think is shared by many "fringe" theorists. If you're one of those people, ask yourself this question:  what piece of evidence would prove your idea wrong?  If you can't think of one, you've got a problem.

A single good site in the Americas would falsify the idea that people from Civilization X or Civilization Y made it to New World before Columbus.  Discovery and excavation of the site of L'Anse aux Meadows, for example, pretty much sealed the deal for the idea that the Norse made it to North America. When you phrase the hypothesis as "The Norse never made it to North America," you can falsify it by finding a site that proves they did. In other words, evidence can be used to falsify the hypothesis.

The reverse is not true. The hypothesis "The Minoans made it to North America" cannot be falsified because neither I nor anyone else can produce a piece of evidence that proves that the Minoans weren't here. All I can do is ask "what is your evidence that it did happen?"  If that evidence is some re-labeled photos, or some tablets that have been shown to be fraudulent, you really haven't met even the minimum threshold for having a serious discussion about the merits of your idea.  If the strongest "evidence" that you can produce is a laundry list of problematic artifacts (some of which are known frauds), can you really be that surprised that very few people outside of the "safe zone" of the AAPS conference take your work seriously?

If there's no mechanism for evaluating an inductively-constructed explanation, the quality of the evidence of the source of the idea matter. In the last half of the interview, Scherz rattles off a list of "evidence" that includes the Kensington Rune Stone, the "Detroit plates" (he may be referring to the Michigan Relics aka the Soper Frauds), the Newark Holy Stone, and the artifacts from Burrows Cave.  It's the same list we've heard for years.

I presume that not all "fringe" theorists accept as genuine all of the artifacts and sites that are put forward as evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact.  If that's correct, then by what mechanisms do you determine what is genuine and what is not?  Is there any interest in critical examination of pieces of evidence? Are there any artifacts out there that all "fringe" theorists agree are fake?  Do you take into account the possibility that fake artifacts exist?  If so, what do you do about it?

Sadly, I've seen very little evidence that there exists much of an appetite among "fringe" theorists to critically evaluate their evidence (or even bother to read the critical evaluations of others).  Pulitzer has already demonstrated that he has no interest in weeding out fakery, and has now become a support of Burrows Cave (apparently based on the argument that a modern forger would have been unable to trace a map of the Great Lakes).  I fear that if there was a good piece of evidence for something interesting floating around out there it would get lost among all shouting about the nonsense.  

It seems to me that the path to "truth" is going to pretty hard to follow if it's paved with artifacts that are made up. Good luck with that.

The Fall 2015 edition of Popular Archaeology contains a story about the Solutrean Hypothesis titled "The Iceman Cameth" by Patrick Hahn. I've seen the story (dated October 2) pop up in a number of groups that I follow online. It contains several obvious errors, including a particularly important one in the first paragraph.  I would have thought someone would have pointed them out and/or corrected them by now, but that doesn't appear to have happened.  So here you go.

This is the first paragraph of the story:

"In his laboratory at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dr. Dennis Stanford hands me a slab of brown plaster. It’s a replica of a bone fragment – from a mastodon or a giant ground sloth – the original having been dredged from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. On the slab is an etching of a mastodon, placed there by some unknown artist long ago. By itself, the find is a truly remarkable one. But more than this, the artifact, dated to a staggering 22,000 years ago, is now part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn everything scientists once thought they knew about the peopling of the Americas."

The first sentence might be correct.  The rest of the first paragraph, however, is wrong.  

Unless I missed something, there is no 22,000 year-old mastodon carving from Chesapeake Bay. The author has conflated the carving of a mammoth on a piece of fossil bone from Vero Beach, Florida (dating to about 13,000 years ago), with the 22,000-year-old mastodon remains that were purportedly dredged up from the mid-Atlantic continental shelf along with the Cinmar biface.

This is not a trivial error: it conflates a discovery that is accepted (Vero Beach) with one that is much less so (Cinmar), casting the case for the Solutrean Hypothesis in a more favorable light than is deserved based on the evidence.  

As far as I know, no-one really doubts the veracity of the Vero Beach mammoth carving: it appears to be a genuine artifact that dates to at least 13,000 years ago (i.e., when mammoths became extinct).  It could have been produced by Clovis or pre-Clovis peoples.  It's pretty cool, but it hasn't been dated to 22,000 years ago and doesn't "overturn everything scientists thought they knew."  If you want to read some scholarly work on the Vero Beach carving, here is a 2011 paper by Barbara Purdy et al. from the Journal of Archaeological Science.  

To say the Cinmar biface doesn't enjoy the same level of acceptance as the Vero Beach carving is putting it mildly. The Cinmar biface, a bi-pointed stone blade that resembles a Solutrean laurel-leaf point, is said by its supporters to be about 22,8000 years old by virtue of its association with radiocarbon-dated mastodon remains. Both the point and the mastodon remains are said to have been dredged up from the continental shelf some years ago. The reported circumstances of discovery of the Cinmar biface have been strongly questioned (you can read a June 2015 paper by Metin Eren et al. in the Journal of Archaeological Science here; you can read Darrin Lowery's response to that paper here; and you can read what I wrote about the whole affair here).

The conflation of the Vero Beach carving (a well-accepted artifact) with the dates and location associated with the Cinmar biface (a much more controversial artifact) is an important mistake.  The Cinmar biface is one of the key pieces of evidence put forward by proponents of the Solutrean Hypothesis. The Vero Beach carving is not. Not a great start to the article.

Moving on.

This is paragraph fourteen:

"Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation antedating Clovis by thousands of years, including sites on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.  Tools associated with these sites have a distinctly Solutrean look."

This paragraph, again, mixes something that most archaeologists accept (the reality of a pre-Clovis occupation of eastern North America) with something that has been asserted but not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of most of us (that there are actual Solutrean sites on the east coast).  More clarity would been helpful - what sites are we talking about here? Presumably, the article is referring to the Miles Point and Oyster Cove sites which were discussed by Lowery et al. in this 2010 paper in Quaternary Science Reviews (and this 2012 Washington Post article).  The artifacts described from Miles Point (reportedly found in sediments of pre-Clovis age) don't look particularly Solutrean to me, and indeed that paper does not suggest any Solutrean affinity (the word "Solutrean" does not appear in the paper). You can read a critique of the evidence for the Solutrean Hypothesis and the data from Miles Point and Oyster Cove in this 2014 Antiquity paper by Michael O'Brien et al.  If there's a paper somewhere that makes a case for the Solutrean affinity of the lithic assemblages from Miles Point or Oyster Cove (or other sites) on typological grounds, I haven't seen it.

Moving on.

The article includes an image of some Solutrean artifacts followed by two images that are supposed to be Clovis points.  Neither of the artifacts represented as a Clovis point actually is.​

The first "Clovis point" is apparently an artifact found in Mexico near the Tepexpan skeleton. It's possible it's a preform for a fluted point, but it clearly isn't a finished Clovis point.

The second image, also not a Clovis point, is apparently a biface from Nicaragua.  The image can be found on Wikimedia Commons, where is described as "NOT A CLOVIS TECHNOLOGY."  

​It's pretty easy to find images of actual Clovis points, so I'm not sure why the Popular Archaeology story chose to use non-Clovis artifacts as examples of Clovis.  In terms of their shape, the artifacts shown at least superficially resemble Solutrean laurel-leaf blades far more to the untrained eye than actual Clovis points.  But they're not Clovis points.  And they're not Solutrean artifacts.  So why are they in the article?

Strike three.

Neither the Solutrean Hypothesis nor the evidence associated with it is really very complicated. I have no idea what the editorial process at Popular Archaeology is like, but the significant errors and omissions in this story don't inspire a lot of confidence. 

I was compelled to write this post because one of the readers of my blog (a non-archaeologist) asked me about this article in particular.  He wanted to know what I thought of Popular Archaeology.  I think there's some room for improvement.

Is it just me? Am I missing something? Let me know if I've gotten anything wrong: I'll gladly correct what I've written.

Scott Wolter, Josh Gates, and Don Wildman may be surprised to learn that, whatever else they may have accomplished, they're just not as popular on social media as J. Hutton Pulitzer (aka J. Jovan Philyaw aka TreasureForce Commander).  This is the startling yet inescapable conclusion one reaches when viewing the "social fan base" data assembled by . . . wait for it . . . J. Hutton Pulitzer. Sorry, TV personalities, you're just not cutting it: the 2015 Award for Most Socially Powerful Explorer goes to . . . wait for it again . . . J. Hutton Pulitzer! 

Well, okay, that's not a 100% accurate statement: I'm not sure what the actual title of the award is, and Pulitzer didn't formally announce that he'd won. I'm also not sure if there's a statue or a plaque or something that goes with the title.  Perhaps I can create some kind of certificate to mark this special distinction. 

I think this comparative plea for recognition (titled "Do Explorers on TV Impact Our Social Lives?"), like many things associated with Pulitzer, is pretty funny. But I also think it reveals something interesting about the struggle for credibility, influence, and identity in the crowded arena of "forbidden history." From the first time I saw Pulitzer on The Curse of Oak Island, my hypothesis about him has been that he's all about getting himself on TV. Nothing I have seen since then has changed my opinion, and this comparison with TV "explorers" reinforces it: this is a person who very much wants to be in the TV club.  But he also wants you to think he can be influential without being on TV. He's working on making his case for being on television even while pretending he doesn't want or need to be on television. It's a little bizarre.

It's fair to ask why television appearances retain such prestige in the internet age. There are, after all, now a lot of ways to spread a message that don't require an investment from a production company or a television network: blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook groups, etc.  My gut feeling is that the combined impact of all of these "ground up" mechanisms and avenues for spreading ideas is probably significantly greater than television programming, especially among people in their twenties and thirties.  There is some evidence suggesting that the popularity of "fringe" television programming ( a growth industry over the last few years) may be starting to decline. Perhaps television appearances retain a special allure as a signal of success not because they are the best way to communicate an idea, but because the outside investment in that communication appears to represent an independent nod of approval.

Divorced from its "I should be in the TV club" subtext, Pulitzer's point is a fair one: influence really can't be measured simply by success on television. I don't think anyone would argue that.  But I also think it's silly to claim that "social power" can be measured by YouTube views (or Twitter followers, or Facebook group membership counts).  Taking YouTube views as the metric, for example, Pulitzer's influence lags far behind such icons of "social power" as Justin Bieber and many anonymous people who systematically reveal things hidden inside toy eggs.  By his count, Pulizer's "social power" is neck-and-neck with this guy who recorded himself in a pumpkin mask and leotard dancing to the theme from Ghostbusters nine years ago. 

But I'm not even sure Pulitzer's YouTube comparison is fair. How does Scott Wolter have a zero?  A search for "Scott Wolter" on YouTube returns a long list of videos, many of which have thousands of views.  Do those videos not count for some reason?

I'm also not sure what videos Pulitzer includes in his own total.  Does he count the 1,439 views of the "Who Is J. Hutton Pulitzer?" video where he states that his "instinct to excel" is "part of his genetic legacy"? Does he include the whopping 249 views of this video about the "Copper Culture" that includes allegedly fake artifacts? 

Lack of clarity about actual data (and what they mean) is not a surprise from Pulitzer: it's typical and, I think, symptomatic of the real reason he doesn't have his own television program.  Unlike Wolter, Pulitzer has neither an idea of his own nor the understanding of how to make a compelling argument about one.  And, in my opinion, he hasn't demonstrated the charisma, personality, or minimal expertise necessary to successfully or credibly host a travel-based program like Gates' Expedition Unknown.  But I'm not a TV producer, so what the hell do I know? I'm just a simple archaeologist who has never been on television (other than a few minutes of local news here and there) and had no part in inventing a product that contributed to the demise of RadioShack. 

I've been criticized in the past for going after Pulitzer's style rather than the substance of his ideas.  My defense to that is simple: what ideas? Show me an actual argument based on evidence and I'd be happy to have a look at it.  I have yet to see anything interesting backing up the fluff and bluster, and I think it's pretty easy to see through all the silliness (it's much easier to simply re-label photographs and do interviews than it is to actually collect data and perform an analysis).  What's left when you strip away the show business?  Not much. For me, Pulitzer's case has become an interesting one to watch to see how far the guy can get by re-inventing himself as an "explorer," growing a beard, and asserting that he is exposing "forbidden truths."  How do you measure success in that endeavor?  Pulitzer seems to be making the argument that you can measure success by "social power" (as well as, presumably, television ratings, paid speaking appearances, book sales, etc.).  There's undoubtedly something to that.  But if YouTube views are supposed to be some kind of indication of substance,  I present to you the Justin Bieber and Pumpkin Dance evidence as Exhibit A of my counter-argument.  And I still can't find Pulitzer's newly-minted term "OOP-gly" on Wikipedia.  So it seems full mastery of the online environment remains an unattained goal, with plenty of room for growth.

The story of a partial mammoth skeleton excavated from a field near Chelsea, Michigan last week made national and international news, showing up on media sites like Fox News, The Huffington Post, the BBC, the Washington Post, and CNN. Articles about the mammoth were posted all over the various archaeology-related groups I follow on Facebook, and I'm pretty sure #mammoth was trending for a while on Twitter.

There's no doubt the unearthing of the mammoth captured the public's attention -- the extent of the press coverage demonstrates that pretty clearly. The images of the enormous, tusked skull being hoisted out of the ground are hard to beat for drama.  But I know from conversations and comments that I saw online that many archaeologists have questions about the excavation that go beyond the "gee whiz" factor that the press and the nonprofessional public love. I'm probably going to get some flack for writing this post, but I'm going to write it anyway and give voice to some of those questions. 

Full disclosure: I met Dr. Dan Fisher when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and I know several of the archaeologists who were involved with excavating the mammoth.

Fisher has spent decades building a case that Ice Age humans in the Great Lakes were hunting mastodons and mammoths, butchering their remains, and storing pieces of the animals underwater to retrieve later.  His argument is based on a pattern of partial skeletons (some with cutmarks) found in wet settings with artifacts suggesting the carcass locations were marked.  He has done experiments to show that meat can be kept edible for long periods of time by submerging it in cold water.  Formal stone tools (such as scrapers and projectile points) are not found at these "sub-aqueous caching" sites, and given the nature of what's being proposed there really isn't any reason to expect that they would be. I haven't read all of his papers carefully, but my general impression is that the case is a good one. And it's interesting. Here is a (somewhat dated) summary article from Mammoth Trumpet that lays out the main points.

Fisher thinks that the Chelsea mammoth unearthed in Michigan last week, like many other sets of remains he has considered, was probably butchered and stored underwater.  The following paragraphs are from the University of Michigan press release:

    "The team's working hypothesis is that ancient humans placed the mammoth remains in a pond for storage. Caching mammoth meat in ponds for later use is a strategy that Fisher said he has encountered at other sites in the region.
   Evidence supporting that idea includes three basketball-sized boulders recovered next to the mammoth remains. The boulders may have been used to anchor the carcass in a pond.
    The researchers also recovered a small stone flake that may have been used as a cutting tool next to one of the tusks. And the neck vertebrae were not scattered randomly, as is normally the case following a natural death, but were arrayed in their correct anatomical sequence, as if someone had "chopped a big chunk out of the body and placed it in the pond for storage," Fisher said."

So the key pieces of evidence are: big rocks next to the remains; stone flake; articulated neck vertebrae.  Check, check, and check.  In my opinion, that all seems to make sense. Even better if the tell-tale cutmarks are present where Fisher expects to find them.

It's not the working hypothesis I'm worried about, however, but whether the information produced by the excavation in Chelsea is going to be sufficient to really evaluate that hypothesis.  I think what bothered many archaeologists about the Chelsea mammoth excavation is what we saw (or didn't see) in the stills and videos from the single day of excavation. 

Yes, they excavated an entire mammoth from 8-10' underground in a single day.

A day.

I once spent at least two days excavating the burial of small dog.

The news articles explain that the Chelsea mammoth was excavated in a single day because that's all the time that was available (the following is from the Washington Post):

    "After establishing that [the landowner and farmer] Bristle could only spare one day for the mammoth extraction, Fisher and his team went into overdrive. On Thursday they were deep in the muck, doing their best to carefully document and extract the bones at top speed.
    “We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt,” Fisher explained. “
We want to get the context for how everything was placed at the site.”
    There are a few things that make this particular mammoth exciting: It’s a very complete skeleton (although it is missing its hind limbs, feet and some other assorted parts), compared with most of the mammoths found in Michigan and surrounding areas. And because it has been carefully extracted by paleontologists, the bone has the potential to be studied much more thoroughly than those that are haphazardly pulled out of the ground.
    "We'll have the potential to say way more about this specimen,” because of the careful excavation, Fisher said."

I wasn't there and I don't know the whole story, but I can tell you that in archaeology the combination of "carefully document" and "top speed" is a tough one to pull off.  As in many technical pursuits, you can't typically find a strategy that optimizes all three corners of the "good, fast, cheap" triangle.

​Non-archaeologists may be impressed (or dismayed) by how much time we can spend picking away at things in the field, drawing maps, filling out logs, arguing over sediments, writing notes, taking photographs, etc.  But the fact is that we're not just wasting time: details matter when you're trying to understand what you're taking apart. The working hypothesis is that the Chelsea mammoth site was the product of human behavior, so, yes, context and associations matter a great deal when you're trying to understand how the site was created. Archaeological work, ideally, is careful and thorough enough to let you more-or-less put the site back together in a virtual fashion based on the information you collect as you take it apart.  Excavation is destruction, and you don't get a do-over.
 
It's hard for me to put aside my feelings about the importance of control and details and get super excited about raising the skull out of the ground when I look at the images from the Chelsea mammoth excavation.  In the video clips I saw, it looked like an incredibly sloppy, irregular operation.  I know that I saw only what TV cameras and news photographers chose to show me, but  I saw no evidence of how spatial control was being maintained (no grid? no total station for electronic mapping?), and no hint of the existence of a level of care that I would normally associate with professional archaeology.  Was there a screen?  How about a profile wall?  I really don't know. I've seen WWF mud wrestling matches that looked more controlled than what I saw in some of the images from that excavation.

If you think I'm being too picky, I invite you to compare and contrast what you see in the images from the Chelsea mammoth excavation with this mammoth excavation in Kansas, or this one in Mexico,or the multiple seasons of work that took place on the Schaefer mammoth site in Wisconsin, or this short 2008 paper about the excavation of mastodons from wet sites in New York.  Those examples are far more typical of what a professional excavation of a human-associated mammoth site generally looks like.  These things are generally not unearthed during the course of single day for a reason:  you lose information.  A story about a mastodon being excavated by amateurs and volunteers in Virginia describes what might be considered a "normal" procedure:

"Scans produced by ground-penetrating radar have shown that bone-size objects are waiting about five feet down. Four feet of soil will be dug out using heavy equipment, then the last foot will be carefully removed by hand."

Why the rush to remove the Chelsea mammoth in just a single day?  I don't really know the answer to that. The news stories report that the farmer "could only spare one day for the mammoth extraction," but they don't say what would have happened if the mammoth had not been removed during that single day.  Was this some kind of "now or never" situation that justified quickly yanking the bones out of the field?  Was the mammoth going to be destroyed if it was left in place? Was it going to turn into a pumpkin if it wasn't out of the ground by Thursday at midnight? 

Maybe leaving the mammoth in the ground until it could be carefully excavated in the spring (or a year or two down the road) really wasn't an option.  Maybe whatever plan there was for drainage was actually going to totally destroy the site and there was no way to simply avoid the mammoth until arrangements could be made to do what has been done in the past for similar finds: use probes or geophysics to delimit the bone scatter, use heavy equipment to strip off the overburden, and then treat the remains as an archaeological site using standard excavation methods. Maybe the single day, salvage-style excavation really was the best option.  I honestly don't know. 

What I do know, however, is that I'll be surprised if the manner in which the Chelsea mammoth was excavated has no adverse impacts on how the analysis and interpretation of the remains are regarded by archaeologists in the Midwest and elsewhere.  The nature of Clovis and pre-Clovis occupations in the Great Lakes is still controversial, and I'm concerned that the potential of the Chelsea mammoth to contribute important information to the debate has been lessened by the speed and style of the excavation. It's hard to look at those pictures of the excavation, know that it was all done in one day, and not wonder what would have been different if more time and care had been taken.  

I know from social media that I'm not the only one asking the "why" and "what if" questions about the Chelsea mammoth excavation, but I am the one writing them down and I'll be the one to take the heat for them. I probably won't make any new friends with this post.  I may even get told that I'm out of line.  That's fine.  Calling me names won't make the questions go away, and I've been called names plenty of times. I think the discovery is exciting, and I hope my "outsider" impressions of the excavation are incorrect. I look forward to reading the published results.

How tall was Adam?  

If you've been following along at home, you know that Ben Carson's comments about creation and evolution have reinvigorated my interest in understanding how the history of ideas about giants articulates with religion. Right now, I'm trying to trace what I call the "degeneracy doctrine:" the idea that (1) the first humans in the biblical creation account (i.e., Adam and Eve) were significantly taller than us and (2) that the narrative arc of the human past has been characterized by a "degeneration" from those "bigger, smarter, stronger" humans to the "smaller, dumber, weaker" humans of today (to paraphrase Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind).  

The "doctrine of degeneracy" can be seen clearly in the writings of Ellen G. White (1827-1915), founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. White's extensive writings, based on a series of prophetic visions she reportedly received beginning in the mid-1800s, specify that Adam was about twice as tall as modern people, and that "the inhabitants of earth had been degenerating, losing their strength and comeliness" through a process of Satanic deterioration that was initiated in the Garden of Eden (Spiritual Gifts, Vol. 1, 69.2).  In addition to a decrease in height, strength, and physical beauty, White's post-Fall degradation of humans included shortening of lifespans and greater susceptibility to disease.

Where did Ellen White's ideas about the height of Adam originate?  The Old Testament says nothing directly about the height of Adam or the other patriarchs, placing all ideas about the stature of the first humans into the realm of extra-biblical speculation. 

To the archives!

A Google Ngram of "Bible Dictionary" suggests temporal trends in the publication of works meant to thoroughly augment the Bible.  These works begin appearing in relatively small numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, increasing in popularity from perhaps the 1830s through the 1870s.  The relative popularity of Bible dictionaries appears to decline during the first half of the twentieth century.  The Ngram shows a sharp increase in the representation of Bible dictionaries in 1980s and 1990s.  I wasn't expecting the late twentieth century rise, but I'll have to investigate that later.

French Benedictine monk Antoine Agustin Calmet (1672-1757) is recognized as one of the first theologians to attempt to place the entire Bible in a literal (rather than allegorical and/or mystical) framework.  His 1720 work Dictionnaire Historique, Critique, Chronologique, Géographique et Littéral de la Bible was translated into English by  John Colson and Samuel d'Oyly and published in 1732 as An Historical, Critical, Geographical, Chronological and Etymological Dictionary of the Holy Bible.  Either Calmet's original work or (more likely) the English translation formed the basis for various editions of the Bible dictionary that were produced by Charles Taylor beginning in 1797.  Numerous Bible dictionaries were being produced by the mid-1800s, many reportedly based at least somewhat on the writings of Calmet. 

Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to locate a copy of the first (1732) English translation of Calmet's dictionary or the first edition (1797) of Taylor's version.  The earliest Taylor version of Calmet that I have been able to find so far (and therefore the earliest example I can find of what would have been available to English-speaking audiences in Britain and the United States) is the second edition (1812) titled Calmet's Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible.  

Note (10/4/2015): We're currently experiencing historic-level rainfall here in Columbia, South Carolina.  My family and I are fortunate to live on high ground - we're in much better shape than many others in this city and across the state.  I've been working on this post for a while and wanted to be done with it one way or another, so I'm posting it now even though it is not as polished as I'd like.  I need to pay attention to other stuff on the home front today and don't have time to work with it any more. It is what it is!