Ancient road found in cave
VietnamNet Bridge, 26 November 2008

Scientists from the Centre for Southeast Asian Prehistory recently made the discovery during an on-going preservation project at the site.

“This is the first discovery of such an ancient road in the Southeast Asian region and a rare discovery in the world,” Nguyen Viet, PhD, centre director told Viet Nam News.

The Xom Trai Cave represents a typical residence of the Hoa Binh civilisation (from 34,100 years ago until 2,000 BC) in the ancient Muong Vang region, which is today’s Tan Lap Commune, Lac Son District in Hoa Binh Province.

Filling In The Blanks Of Southeast Asian Prehistory

As archaeologists in the last half century have set about reconstructing the prehistory of Southeast Asia, data from one country—centrally located Laos—was conspicuously missing. Little archaeology has occurred in Laos since before World War II, and beginning in the mid-1970s, Laos shut its doors completely to outside researchers. International scholars had to content themselves with information from excavation and survey work mostly from neighboring Thailand.

That scenario is beginning to shift—and new data, as well as new collaborative relationships—may forever change our perspective on an area that was once considered a “backwater region” of human civilization.

Dr. Joyce White, Senior Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Director of the Museum’s Ban Chiang, Thailand project, has long believed that the key to understanding the early prehistory of the entire region lay in Laos, especially northern Laos, along the middle portion of the great Mekong River.

For nearly a decade, she has been laying the groundwork for a long-term, international collaborative project with Laos. Today she is co-director, with Bounheuang Bouasisengpaseuth, Deputy Director at the Lao National Museum, of the Middle Mekong Archaeology Project, a collaborative effort of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Department of Museums and Archaeology (DOMA) in Laos.

The Middle Mekong Archaeology Project (MMAP) completed its first test excavation season in Laos in July 2007, two years after a remarkable survey season in 2005, and Dr. White is more optimistic than ever that the region, a virtual terra incognita among archaeologists until now, holds great promise to provide important pieces to the puzzle of human habitation and settlement during Southeast Asian prehistory, a period reaching back into the late Pleistocene at least 20,000 years ago.

In 2001, Dr. White first visited Laos for an archaeological assessment survey of the region around Luang Prabang, by the great Mekong River and its nearby tributaries. She had less than three days to make her assessment: did this area have the potential to aid archaeologists in the reconstruction of Southeast Asian prehistoric history?

“Traveling with Bounhenang, we saw ample evidence of thousands of years—more than 10,000 years—of human prehistory at the edge and on closeby terrain of the Mekong River,” she recalls. “That much evidence, that quickly. It was astonishing.”

The March 2005 month-long survey season, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, and the National Science Foundation High Risk Archaeology Program, bore out that early assessment. The MMAP survey group, a collaboration of U.S., Lao, British, Australian, and Thai colleagues, divided into two separate teams for rapid surveys of three tributaries of the Mekong River in Luang Prabang province. In that brief time, more than 58 archaeological sites were identified in a rugged, 580 square mile region.

The MMAP project is especially interested in finding likely sites from the middle Holocene period (roughly 6000-2000 BC). This period saw a transition from communities based on game hunting and wild-plant gathering to settlements practicing plant cultivation—the time when human settlements shifted from primarily hunter-gatherer to primarily agricultural lifestyles. Of the more than 58 sites identified, 9 held promise as being from this time period.

Training a new generation of Lao collaborators in state of the art archaeological techniques is an important long-term goal of the project, and in 2005 the teams used mobile GIS (Geographic Information System) technology, along with digital photography, to evaluate data from many sites, and to do it more efficiently than would have been possible with more traditional recording methods.

The 2007 test excavation site, the Phou Phaa Khao Rockshelter site, provided Dr. White and her team with new challenges, as she worked with an enthusiastic but variably-trained group of collaborators at this cave 30 miles by mostly dirt road from Luang Prabang city—outside the range of cell phone signals or electricity—during the unpredictable rainy season.

Although there was no specific evidence to suggest this site was used during the middle Holocene period, the site had strong evidence of human occupation and settlement during both the stone age (10,000 to 5,000 years ago) and the iron age, sometime after about 3,000 years ago. Parts of seven human burials, more than 2,300 fragments of stone artifacts, probably from manufacturing stone tools, and a variety of both earthenware and stoneware ceramics were excavated by the team.

For the next step, the MMAP team hopes to continue test excavations at additional sites on other tributaries of the Mekong River, looking especially for Middle Holocene evidence, but carefully collecting whatever data is unearthed. The research will simultaneously help develop infrastructure for Lao archaeology and train the next generation of Lao archaeologists. “It is in these excavations, strategically selected and painstakingly carried out, that we will build a lasting understanding of human settlement prehistory in this region of the world,” said Dr. White.

Related Books:
- Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History by P. S. Bellwood and I. Glover (Eds)
- The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia: From 10,000 B.C. to the Fall of Angkor by C. Higham
- Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia
- The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge World Archaeology) by C. Higham
- Ban Chiang: Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age by the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania by J. C. White

Mouse click reveals ancient coastline
Anna Salleh

The changing shape of Australasia can now be seen in a new interactive digital map that mimics the rise and fall of sea levels over the past 100,000 years.

The map also has pop-up images and text about key archaeological sites and possible routes humans took from Asia to Australia during the last ice age.

View the map here.

“What I’ve done is take a lot of the paradigms of Google Earth and extend them by the extra dimension of time,” says designer, Matthew Coller who presented his map at the recent Australasian Archaeological Conference at the University of Sydney.

Understanding the effect of sea level changes over time is fundamental to archaeology, says Coller, a Monash University multimedia lecturer with an interest in archaeology.

He wanted to find a way to visualise such changes to help both the general public and archaeologists better understand routes of human migration and other archaeological questions.

Coller used data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Geoscience Australia of the sea floor and changes in sea level around Australia and Asia.

He then embedded other information into the map, which can be made to appear at different periods through time.

By sliding a marker back and forwards, you can see how coastlines changed, when it might have been possible for humans to cross land bridges or to island hop between continents.

By hovering over or clicking on various icons possible migration routes from Asia to Australia become visible.

It is also possible to see photographs of various locations as they appear at times and information boxes on archaeological theories.

Important archaeological sites such as Lake Mungo are also tagged at the appropriate time.

Theories come to life

The map is called Sahul Time, after the name for the ancient continent of Australia and New Guinea.

Coller hopes it will be useful for archaeologists in visualising their data and testing theories.

“Often the process of concretising these difficult concepts makes it easier to form a mental model so you can analyse things at a deeper level,” he says.

As well as helping archaeologists, Coller hopes the map will help to communicate archaeology to the public.

“It puts archaeologists’ discoveries into the geo-morphological context,” he says.

He hopes ongoing input from archaeologists will help him improve the map.

“It’s not a piece of crappy multimedia that doesn’t change,” he says. “It will be updated as theories change.”

Related books:
- Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History by P. S. Bellwood and I. Glover (Eds)
- Glances: Prehistory of the Philippines by J. T. Peralta
- The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia by N. Tarling (Ed.)
- East of Wallace’s Line : Studies of Past and Present Maritime Cultures of the Indo-Pacific Region (Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, V. 16)
- Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago by P. Bellwood
- Indo-Pacific Prehistory 1990. Proceedings of the 14th Congress Held at Yogyakarta. Vol 1 & 2. by P. Bellwood (Ed)
- Man’s conquest of the Pacific: The prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania by P. Bellwood

Homo Floresiensis skull, creative commons image by SBishop

New Research Sheds Light on “Hobbit” Smithsonian-led Study Published in Science

An international team of researchers led by the Smithsonian Institution has completed a new study on Homo floresiensis, commonly referred to as the “hobbit,” a 3-foot-tall, 18,000-year-old hominin skeleton, discovered four years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. This study offers one of the most striking confirmations of the original interpretation of the hobbit as an island remnant of one of the oldest human migrations to Asia. The research is being published in the Sept. 21 issue of Science.

The team turned its research focus to the most complete of the 12 skeletons discovered and specifically toward three little bones from the hobbit’s left wrist. The research asserts that modern humans and our closest fossil relatives, the Neandertals, have a very differently shaped wrist in comparison to living great apes, older fossil hominins like Australopithecus (e.g., “Lucy”) and even the earliest members of the genus Homo (e.g., Homo habilis, the “handy-man”). But the hobbit’s wrist is basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist—nothing at all like that seen in modern humans and Neandertals.

The lead author of the study, Matt Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist in the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, was completely surprised when he first saw casts of the hobbit’s wrist bones. “Up until then, I had no definitive opinion regarding the hobbit debates,” said Tocheri. “But these hobbit wrist bones do not look anything like those of modern humans. They’re not even close!”

The evidence from the hobbit’s wrist is extremely important because it demonstrates further that the hobbit indeed represents a different species of human as was originally proposed by its discoverers. It is not a modern human with some sort of pathology or growth disorder. The distinctive shapes of wrist bones form during the first trimester of pregnancy while most pathologies and growth disorders do not begin to affect the skeleton until well after that time. Therefore, pathologies or growth defects cannot adequately explain why a modern human would have a wrist that was indistinguishable from that of an African ape or primitive hominin.

This evidence suggests that modern humans and Neandertals share an earlier human ancestor that the hobbits do not. Tocheri continued, “Basically, the wrist evidence tells us that modern humans and Neandertals share an evolutionary grandparent that the hobbits do not, but all three share an evolutionary great-grandparent. If you think of modern humans and Neandertals as being first cousins, then the hobbit is more like a second cousin to both.”

Caley Orr of Arizona State University and a co-author of the study said, “Wrist bones have a lot of complex anatomy, which makes them particularly useful for understanding the evolutionary relationships of living and fossil species through detailed comparative analyses.”

The international team used cutting-edge 3-D technology to compare and quantify the shapes of the different wrist bones. Many of the sophisticated 3-D techniques used for the analysis were developed during the past few years at the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling at Arizona State University. Tocheri and Orr both worked as graduate research assistants at PRISM, where they learned how to apply these 3-D techniques toward their research interests in paleoanthropology.

The other authors of the paper are Susan Larson (Stony Brook University, New York); Thomas Sutikna, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo, Rokus Awe Due and Tony Djubiantono (National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology, Indonesia); Michael Morwood (University of Wollongong, Australia); and William Jungers (Stony Brook University, New York).

Various aspects of this research were funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the National Geographic Society, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Smithsonian’s Fellowship Program and the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Related Books about Homo floresiensis:
- A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia by M. Morwood and P. van Oosterzee
- Little People And a Lost World: An Anthropological Mystery by L. Goldenberg

Prehistoric human skeleton unearthed

Archaeologists have unearthed a prehistoric human skeleton buried in a cave in northern province of Tuyen Quang.

The skeleton, which measures 1.65m in length, was buried lying on its back with its hands facing downwards. A number of prehistoric tools were also found lying in the grave in Phia Mon, Son Phuc Commune in Na Hang District.

Archaeologists from the Viet Nam Archaeological Institute and Tuyen Quang Museum said the skeleton dated back to the late Stone Age, around 4,000 years ago.

They said stones had been piled up around the grave to make an oval shaped burial mound that is very unusual for the period.

…

Read more about the prehistoric skeleton of Tuyen Quang.

Books about Vietnamese prehistory:
- Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology) by M. Oxenham
- The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia: From 10,000 B.C. to the Fall of Angkor by C. Higham

4,000-year-old remains found in Tuyen Quang province

The remains of a person which archaeologists believe were interred around 4,000 years ago have been found at Son Phu commune in Na Hang district of the northern mountainous province of Tuyen Quang.

The remains along with artifacts that were also discovered were found in the Phia Mon cave by members of the provincial museum and the Vietnam Institute of Archaeology.

From measuring the remains, archaeologists believe the person was around 1.65m in height and that the hundreds of discovered artifacts are between 6,000-7,000 and 4,000 years old.

Books about prehistoric Vietnam:
- Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists by E. A. Bacus, I. Glover and V. C. Pigott (Eds) – has a paper on establishing C14 dates for Vietnamese prehistory
- Burnished Beauty. The Art of Stone in Early Southeast Asia by C. J. Frape