Publication of ‘Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care’ by Lorna Tilley

There is a new publication out by the bioarchaeological researcher Lorna Tilley, a PhD graduate from the Australian National University in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, which introduces the theory and practice in the bioarchaeology of care methodology.  The methodology aims to investigate and identify instances of care provision within the archaeological record through case study analysis of individuals who display evidence for physical impairment, either through disease process or acquired trauma, of a disabling nature which may have required care in order to survive to their age-at-death.  Focused, for the moment, on the prehistoric periods, the publication introduces a number of case studies spanning the Palaeolithic (including Homo neanderthalensis) to Neolithic periods from a variety of geographic and cultural contexts.  An introduction to the model, the background and the four stages of analysis, can be found here.

As a matter of disclosure I should add here that I helped to (briefly) edit the second chapter of the publication for Lorna and that my name, and this site, are mentioned in the acknowledgment section.  (I have to admit it is pretty awesome seeing my name in print!).

The cover of the publication, as a part of the Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series published by Springer, and series edited by Debra L. Martin, is now available. The hard back volume retails for the sum of £90.00 and in ebook form for £72.00. A paperback version will be released at some point and will be cheaper. Image credit: Lorna Tilley/Springer.

Without further ado here is the abstract to the volume:

Abstract

‘Characteristics of the care given to those experiencing disability provide a window into important aspects of community and culture.  In bioarchaeology, health-related care provision is inferred from physical evidence in human remains indicating survival with, or recovery from, a disabling pathology, in circumstances where, without such support, the individual may not have survived to actual age at death.  Yet despite its potential to provide a valuable perspective on past behaviour, caregiving is a topic that has been consistently overlooked by archaeologists.  Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care presents the ‘bioarchaeology of care’ – a new, case study-based approach for identifying and interpreting disability and health-related care practices within their corresponding lifeways context that promises to reveal elements of past social relations, socioeconomic organisation, and group and individual identity that might otherwise be inaccessible.  The applied methodology, supported by the Index of Care (a freely-available web-based instrument), consists of four stages of analysis, with each stage building upon the content of preceding one(s): these stages cover (i) description and diagnosis; (ii) assessment of disability impact and the corresponding case for care; (iii) derivation of a ‘model of care’ provided; and (iv) interpretation of the broader implications of the provision and receipt of this care.

This book looks first at the treatment of health-related caregiving in archaeological research, considering where, and why, this has fallen short.  Succeeding chapters establish the context and the conceptual foundations for undertaking bioarchaeological research into care provision, including defining and operationalising terminology surrounding ‘disability’ and ‘care’; examining debate around social and biological origins of care, and considering the implications for addressing caregiving motivations and practice; and presenting a theoretical framework for exploring the collective and individual decision-making processes involved in caregiving.  Two chapters then detail the four stages of the bioarchaeology of care methodology and application of the Index of Care, and these are followed by three case studies that illustrate the methodology’s application.  These chapters explore, respectively, the care given to Man Bac Burial 9 (Neolithic Vietnam), the Neandertals La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1 and La Ferrassie 1 (European Upper Middle Palaeolithic), and Lanhill Burial 7 (early British Neolithic), and they demonstrate the variety, richness and immediacy of insights attainable through bioarchaeology of care analysis.  Most importantly, these studies confirm that the bioarchaeology of care’s focus on caregiving as an expression of collective and individual agency allows an engagement with the past that brings us closer to those who inhabited it.  The final chapter discusses some future directions for bioarchaeology of care research, and considers how research findings might inform modern values and practices.’

Next Steps

As exciting as the above publication is I can also confirm that there will be a multi-authored edited volume, which is presently titled as New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care: Further Case Studies and Extended Theory, to be published mid next year by Springer.  The volume is the culmination of a session on the topic held at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting back in April 2015, which was held in the beautiful city of San Francisco (see the list of presenters, and their topics, here).  I have also contributed a chapter to this volume on the topic, and the importance of, public communication within bioarchaeology of care research.  I am pretty excited to read the other contributions from a range of bioarchaeologists, historians and philosophers.  So keep your eyes peeled for that!

If there are any potential bioarchaeological researchers out there that are interested in analyzing the evidence for care provision, then I’d recommend checking out the above publication and utilizing the Index of Care tool within your own research (see also Tilley & Cameron 2014).  Only by other researchers incorporating the above methodology, and improving upon it when and where possible, are bioarchaeologists going to be able improve our own understanding of care in the archaeological record as a response by past populations and individuals to instances where care may have been provided.  Care, and the archaeological and osteological evidence for care provision, has been, and continues to be, a contentious issue within the discipline (Tilley & Oxenham 2011).  However it is also an area where a range of investigative research strands and new scientific techniques can be brought together to provide a fuller holistic approach, to both the archaeological record itself and to the individuals who populated it.

Further Information

• The online non-prescriptive Index of Care tool produced by Lorna Tilley and Tony Cameron can be found here.  Researchers are very much welcome to use the step by step process during the analysis of case studies and are asked to provide critical feedback that will help improve the tool for future users.

• Read an interview here with Lorna and myself, which was conducted back in 2013, where we discuss her work with the bioarchaeology of care model and the importance of using it to deduce the evidence for care provision in the archaeological record and the importance of recognising this.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Tilley, L. & Oxenham, M. F. 2011. Survival against the Odds: Modelling the Social Implications of Care Provision to the Seriously Disabled. International Journal of Palaeopathology. 1 (1): 35-42.

Tilley, L. 2012. The Bioarchaeology of Care. SAA Record. 12 (3). (Open Access).

Tilley, L. & Cameron, T. 2014. Introducing the Index of Care: A Web-Based Application Supporting Archaeological Research into Health-Related Care. International Journal of Palaeopathology. 6: 5-9.

Tilley, L. 2015. Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care. New York: Springer.

Guest Post: An Archaeologist, an Anthropologist and an Anarchist Walk into a Bar… by Stuart Rathbone

Stuart Rathbone is a field archaeologist with considerable experience in the UK, Ireland and the United States of America in excavation and project supervising a number of important prehistoric and historic archaeology sites.  In conjunction with field work, Stuart has also held academic positions and writes regularly on a broad range of topics in archaeology for varied audiences.  Stuart has recently left the role of an archaeological project officer, based in the Orkney islands in northern Scotland with ORCA, to pursue an archaeology career in the United States.  His Academia profile, with links to Stuart’s published papers, can be found here.  A previous These Bones of Mine interview, on the nature of archaeological field work and the issues surrounding this, can be found here .  He also runs the Campaign for Sensible Archaeology group on Facebook and is also quite fond of hardcore jungle music.

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There are many different ways of classifying societies based for instance on levels of technology, on economic organisation, on the size of their area of influence and so on.  A very fundamental scheme is to divide societies into those that are organised hierarchically and those which are organised anarchically, i.e. without a hierarchic class or power structure.  Anarchic organisation has long been recognised but it took a surprisingly long time for anthropologists and archaeologists to develop a convincing understanding of them.  The ‘segmented lineage systems’ that were the focus of research by the likes of Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard’s and Meyer Fortes between the 1930’s and 1950’s represent early attempts to understand how complex societies could exist without obvious hierarchical power structures (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1945).  Reading these accounts it becomes clear that a major problem was the frequent presence of defined leaders within societies that were not organised hierarchically.

A major breakthrough occurred when Harold Barclay developed his ‘limited leadership’ model which highlighted the widespread phenomenon of anarchic communities that utilised leaders with very defined levels of power and authority, whose rewards from claiming the leadership role are rather difficult to determine, and who are essentially beholden to the collective will of their community (Barclay 1982; 1986; 1989).  The existence of a chief in the limited leadership model is more akin to a spokesman than a ruler.  The leader must discuss with the group to gauge the collective feeling and then present what has essentially already been agreed to as the leaders decision.  With no equivalent to a police force or military guard to call on to enforce their will limited leaders have little individual power.  Attempts to take actions against the prevailing mood fail, and the leader ends up undermined and in danger of ridicule or dismissal, and, in extreme cases, in danger of being killed.  Similarly attempts by such a leader to consolidate their power or to exploit the power they have by claiming too many rewards will likely lead to their expulsion or death.  As William Geddes pointed out in regards to the Dayak tribes of Borneo, “the Dayaks are anarchists” who are led by the nominal headman “only when they agree to be led” (Geddes 1957).

A second very important model was developed by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (Clastres 1977; 2010).  Whilst Clastres covers some of the same ground as Barclay, in particular demonstrating eloquently the dangers of a limited leader in over extending their authority, the main thrust of his work is his notion of the ‘Society against the State’.  Clastres argues that the constant levels of warfare seen amongst many ‘simple’ societies should not be seen as an unfortunate social factor restricting the development of more complex social forms.  Rather Clastres proposes that it is a deliberate strategy that has developed specifically in order to stop societies adopting hierarchical forms that would ultimately lead to state formation.  In this model warfare is a vital process that is used specifically to maintain individual and community autonomy, at the cost of forfeiting whatever benefits hierarchical organisation might bring.  Interestingly this model interferes with the commonly used social evolutionary schemes, such as the influential model promoted by Elman Service that sees society progress from band to tribe to chiefdom to kingdom before arriving at the ‘goal’ of statehood.  Instead Clastres model divides all societies into States and Societies against the State which are not stages in a linear progression.  Instead societies switch between the two forms, with the switch to hierarchical organisation often triggered through outside influences.  A switch from hierarchic to anarchic forms can occur through various circumstances, either violent resistance, migration or through social collapse.

Typical ideas of social evolutionary progress as promoted by the likes of Elman Service and Colin Renfrew.

The work of both Clastres and Barclay remained somewhat peripheral until quite recently when a number of researchers began building on the foundations they established.  Recently David Graeber, Charles Macdonald and Brian Morris have all produced interesting work that explores different aspects of anarchic anthropology (Graeber 2004; Macdonald 2008 & 2009; Morris 2005).  In 2012 Bill Angelbeck and Colin Grier published a paper that represented the first time that archaeological data was explicitly examined from an anarchic perspective (Angelbeck & Grier 2012).  The paper reviews historical records of the Coast Salish Indian groups of the pacific coast of North America and identifies a complex limited leadership system that boarders on being a class structure.  The ‘inverted pear shaped model’ takes anarchic organisation to the very limit.  The majority of each group belonged to an ‘elite’ class that are supported by a tiny lower class stratum consisting of war captives held as slaves, and outcasts from other groups.  A clear leadership strata was present, but these positions were held by merit and the boundary between the ‘elite’ majority and the leadership group was permeable in both directions depending on performance.  The paper goes on to examine archaeological data from the Salish Coast area over a two thousand year time span.  The authors identify a repeating pattern of shifts between hierarchical organisation and anarchic organisation with periods of increased warfare apparently preceding each shift towards anarchic conditions.

The curious inverted pear shaped social system of the Coast Salish groups.

At the start of 2015 Robert Bettinger published a book length account of Californian societies based on a large review of archaeological evidence (Bettinger 2015).  The narrative describes a gradual reduction in social group size, linked to developments in technology and changes in the environment.  Bettinger argues that these changes led to the widespread and prolonged existence of small non-hierarchical social groups he characterises as ‘orderly anarchy’.  A symposium was organised at the 2015 Society for American Archaeologists conference to discuss the implications of Bettinger’s work and this suggests a widening interest in the archaeological use of anarchist theory.

Anarchic Archaeology in Britain and Ireland

Given the much greater separation between archaeology and anthropology that exists in Britain and Ireland than is found in America and Europe it is perhaps unsurprising that developments in anarchic anthropology have attracted little attention.  Earlier this year I published a short paper that might represent the first attempt to produce an anarchic archaeology in either Britain or Ireland, although there may well be earlier examples that I am not aware of (Rathbone 2015).  My ongoing research is attempting to fuse the developments in anarchic anthropology with ideas and theories culled directly from political anarchist literature.  Anarchism as a political movement developed in the mid-19^th century and there is a vast body of anarchist literature, a substantial proportion of which deals with an anarchist reading of history and archaeology.  This material can be quite wayward and is often an unrealistic reading of the data.  Nevertheless anarchist history is interesting in that it offers different interpretations of well-known events, presents different motivations for why things may have occurred, offers sympathetic accounts of groups and individuals widely criticised in main stream history, and looks at topics that attract little interest elsewhere.  In addition to anarchist history I have been attempting to understand anarchist political theory with the aim of seeing if any of the numerous proposals (and the smaller number of real world examples) of how complex societies can operate in the absence of centralised government might have useful applications in archaeology.  Whilst this is all very much a work in progress, here I want to present four examples of how such a fusion of anarchism and archaeology might be usefully applied, two dealing with prehistoric subjects and two dealing with the post-Medieval world.

Identifying state formation

I suspect most archaeologists would be comfortable with the idea that anarchic groups were present throughout the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods when we suspect only small mobile hunter gather groups were present.  On the other hand it is clear that several centuries before the Roman invasion of Britain state formation had occurred across large areas and that a reasonably stratified society was in place.  What can be gleaned from the proto-historic accounts relating to the Late Irish Iron Age also indicate that the county was dominated by a number of small states with each community enmeshed in a complex network of obligations and responsibilities to their states rulers.  An important question is therefore whether we can identify the process of state formation somewhere between the onset of the Neolithic period and the end of the Early or Middle Iron Age.  It would seem likely that such a process would be complex and occur in different parts of Britain and Ireland at different times.  This may not have been a simple evolutionary process along the lines of Service’s model.  Instead we might find a repeated flipping between anarchic ‘anti-states’ and hierarchical states.  Such a process could explain the oddities in the settlement patterns where we can observe repeated failed attempts at introducing villages to areas dominated by dispersed settlements (Ginn & Rathbone 2012; Ginn 2013; Rathbone 2013a, Rathbone 2013b & 2015).  Each location where villages began to develop could mark the beginnings of a transition towards hierarchical organisation.  The abandonment of villages in a given area might mark a society rejecting the existence of the hierarchies and choosing to return to an anarchic state.  If so we might expect to find evidence of increased violence coinciding with the end of village life at a particular time and place.

Central to the ‘Society against the State’ model is the use of violence between neighbouring group as a method to stop the formation of hierarchical power structures.  Violence is also a common feature within non-hierarchical groups where consensus building and sanctions such as taboos, gossip and mockery have failed to resolve a problem.  Contrary to the utopian visions of political anarchists it seems that when no method to exert authority exists and an impasse in opinions has been reached violence may be the only solution.  Steven Pinker has explored the level of violence in societies across a great span of time and demonstrated rather convincingly that as hierarchical control expands the aggregate level of violence declines (Pinker 2011).  Pinker argues that as state authority has spread across the world and states have claimed ever increasing levels of control over their populations the effect is a drastic reduction in overall violence that he dubs ‘the civilising process’.  Despite the ability of modern states to kill tens of thousands of people in a matter of moments, the monopoly they have claimed over the application of lethal force has led to ever decreasing death rates.  It would seem therefore that decreasing levels of violence can be directly related to the development of hierarchical authority.  There have been numerous attempts to determine the level of violence present at different points in the archaeological record but it remains a difficult task given the incomplete nature of the burial record.  However it does seem that actual skeletal evidence of violence is most common in the European Early Neolithic period and declines after that point, although both the Late Bronze Age and Late Iron Age do seem to also be particularly violent periods (Heath 2009; Rathbone 2015).

This is clearly not the place to present a full interpretation of several millennia’s evidence.  Instead a few elements from a single time period, the Early Neolithic, are offered as an example of how such analysis might proceed.  Martin Smith and Megan Brickley’s study of the skeletal remains from Early Neolithic long barrows revealed a high level of violence that is certainly consistent with anarchic societies (Smith & Brickley 2009).  Similarly the number of Early Neolithic enclosures in Britain that seem to have been attacked by massed forces are exactly what we might expect among neighbouring anarchic societies.  Recent C14 analysis suggests that the use of large long houses in the Early Neolithic came to an abrupt end around 3600 BC.  Jessica Smyth has detailed the high proportion of Early Neolithic longhouses that were burnt down, but favours this as a ritual burning at the end of the occupation (Smyth 2010 & 2014).  However such burning is consistent with anarchic violence and the number of arrowheads and axes associated with these buildings may be more important in terms of their relationship with violence rather than ceremony.  This evidence would be consistent with a widespread implementation of ‘the Society against the State’ and the far less impressive settlement pattern that follows the Long House horizon may therefore mark a shift to smaller anarchic communities.

Anarcho-Federalist Henge Builders?

The monumental construction projects that form such a prominent part of Late Neolithic archaeology are often described as being the work of a specialised ‘ritual elite’ capable of designing and project managing such great undertakings.  In fact much of the language used in discussions of this phenomenon seems curiously anachronistic, with terms like engineers, architects and man hours appearing jarringly misplaced.  Whilst clearly large scale projects involving sizeable groups of people, the evidence to support the presence of these ‘ritual elites’ is curiously absent.  In general the monuments are not associated with either large settlements or large elite residences, and the designs of the monuments themselves seem ill-fitted to be used for the aggrandisement of particularly powerful individuals or groups.  If an elite was really present they seem remarkably restrained in terms of their desire to emphasise their personal power and authority.  There has been little discussion of the mechanisms through which an elite could coerce a large workforce into undertaking decades long construction projects without leaving any obvious traces of a military force or an economic system that would allow for suitable payment of a willing workforce.  The monumental complexes certainly provide ample evidence of an ability to co-ordinate a large number of people working on a significant task, and an ability to utilise resources drawn from a considerable area.  In the 1970’s there were important debates about the existence or absences of elites throughout the prehistoric periods of Britain.  This seems to have reached somewhat of an impasse and a default position of accepting the presence of elites was adopted in lieu of a better explanation (Parker Pearson 2012).

Two areas of anarchist theory seem to offer useful lines of research.  The first is the idea of the anarchist federation which was initially promoted by Pierre-Joseph Proudhoun and enthusiastically taken up by Petr Kropotkin amongst many others (Marshall 2008).  In the anarchist federation individual groups co-operate in order to undertake tasks that would be beyond their own abilities.  The federation is organised in such a way that the individual groups retain most of their autonomy and only grant the federation the authority to organise for the specific agreed tasks.  Whilst a fully developed federation might superficially resemble a hierarchical power structure the emphasis on consensus building and the limitations placed on the power of its members mean it operates quite differently.  A large number of autonomous groups living over a considerable area might form such a federation in order to accomplish specific tasks, such as the monumental religious building projects seen in the Late Neolithic.  Interestingly there is a significant decrease in the skeletal evidence for violence in the Late Neolithic (Heath 2009).  As explained above this could have resulted from a more authoritarian political structure, but it could potentially have derived from the presence of a non-hierarchical structure that allowed neighbouring groups to co-operate without surrendering their autonomy, thus reducing the need for constant aggression.

Nick Card has suggested that variations in the individual buildings within the oversized settlement at the Ness of Brodgar in the centre of Orkney might indicate that each building belonged to a particular group living in a particular part of the archipelago that came to gather at the site for seasonal gatherings (Card 2013).  The use of distinctive architectural differences between the buildings could have been used to signify the autonomy and independence of the different communities whilst residing in such close proximity.  The colossal construction projects undertaken in the area around the settlement would be a testimony to how successfully such a federation could operate.  Based on a series of early C14 dates it has been suggested that Orkney may have been the origin of the religious practices that came to dominate much of Britain and Ireland during the Late Neolithic.  If this is correct then perhaps the key to the successful spread of the ‘Orkney style’ was not the content of the ceremonies or the design of the monuments, but the development of social schemes that allowed larger scale communal projects to be undertaken without necessitating the surrender of individual and group autonomy to an elite strata that might trigger violent resistance.

The second part of anarchist theory that seems useful in this area is the idea of ‘zerowork’ as promoted by Bob Black in his highly influential essay “the abolition of work” (Black 1986).  This line of argument has considerable ancestry within left wing writing and elements of it can be found in Paul Lafargue’s “the right to be lazy”, in Bertrand Russels, “In praise of Idleness” and even George Orwell’s “Down and out in Paris and London” (Lafargue 1907; Russel 1935; Orwell 1933).  The central theme is that much work is essentially pointless, once you remove the need to generate an excess of wealth to be turned over to an exploitative elite.  If the need to generate surplus profit is removed the overall workload on a society would be vastly reduced.  With an overabundance of labour the remaining work could be evenly shared out between the whole group leading to a vastly reduced amount of work hours for each individual, and given that the work had an obvious utility and was not of an arduous length, work would be transferred into something far more enjoyable, akin to a form of play.  The principles of zerowork do seem to have some justification in the anthropological and archaeological record; it has been repeatedly suggested that the shift to agriculture from hunting and gathering or horticulture can be identified with a large decline in the health of a population and a considerable increase in work hours (Diamond 1987).  Furthermore many accounts of traditional societies clearly demonstrate that many tasks were infused with a very un-work like sense of fun and play, and many societies that were not part of a developed economic system seem to have spent much of their effort creating surpluses in order to throw feasts and parties (Metcalf 2010).

The Late Neolithic monument complexes have produced extensive evidence for feasting at a quite excessive scale.  Traditionally these have been seen to be feasts that took place once the construction phase was completed.  A zerowork interpretation would turn this idea around and see the monuments as something that happened as a side effect of communities getting together to hold feasts.  Rather than attempting to calculate the number of ‘man-hours’ that it would take for a group to complete a construction project perhaps it would be better to try and estimate the number of parties that had been held.  Alex Gibson has argued that timber circles were seldom ‘completed’ and that the building process was what was more important than the finished product, which might conform better to zerowork rather than modern notions of a construction project (Gibson 1998).

The recent discoveries at Durrington Walls would certainly make an interesting example to review in terms of Anarchist Federations and Zerowork; not only was there evidence for co-operation of communities from a wide area, the settlement evidence does not so far support the presence of a defined elite, and the associated animal bones assemblage not only suggests feasting on a phenomenal scale, it is clear that the feasting at the site had begun long before the construction of the main bank and ditch (Parker Pearson 2012).

The author, centre, on a recent trip to the Arbor Low henge and stone circle in Derbyshire, accompanied by Gareth Evans and Sarah Harrison. Co-incidentally Gareth is a practicing anarchist whilst Sarah runs a very hedonistic bar.

Island Paradises

Islands have special characteristics that have long made them the focus of Utopian thinkers, from Plato to Huxley.  During the development of travel writing and antiquarian investigations during the 18^th and 19^th century the accounts of the Atlantic Islands around the coast of Britain and Ireland often fall into two camps, those that are horrified by the primitive conditions and those that idealise the rugged isolation and the simple lifestyles of the islanders (O’Sullivan 2008).  Recent archaeological accounts of the Atlantic Islands have presented rigorous re-evaluation of the isolation of island life, contending that the islanders were neither peripheral people nor particularly isolated from the contemporary world (Flemming 2005; Dwyer 2009).  Flemming’s review of St Kilda seeks to reduce the isolation of the island and show that despite the distances involved St Kilda was part of an aristocratic territory, entangled in local politics and in particular subject to enthusiastic taxation and rent collection.

The political organisation of the St Kildans is particularly interesting.  The morning meeting, dubbed ‘the parliament’ by 19^th century visitors, involved all the men on the island gathering to discuss any issues and make plans for the days activities.  The ‘parliament’ had no formal offices and each man had an equal right to speak an equal vote.  Apparently the woman of the island organised their affairs through a similar meeting, although this features far less prominently in the literature.  According to Tom Steel when there were no tasks that required urgent attention the meeting could last all day, breaking only for lunch, as the men essentially slacked off and gossiped (Steel 1975).  The resources of the island were shared out equally among the community and many aspects of life were subject to communal ownership. A nominal leader, the maor, was a non-hereditary title awarded through merit.  The maor had some ability to resolve disputes but the principle duty was to take the lead during climbing expeditions.  The maor also had the unenviable task of conducting negotiations with the Steward during the annual visit to collect tariffs.  The maor was expected to represent the islanders wishes to such an extent that the steward would strike him three times about the head with a cudgel in a ritualised act of violence.

Despite the predatory relationship with the adjacent state it seems very clear that St Kildan society was organised anarchically, complete with a limited leader.  The relationship with the neighbouring state was clearly exploitative but the St Kildans did receive goods and equipment from the state that they were not able to provide for themselves.  In addition they were able to actively resist the state to some degree. Flemming includes several brief description of such resistance; when a taxman attempted to apply a new tariff he was driven off by the men of the island, when a policeman arrived to arrest a suspected sheep thief the islanders formed a protective cordon around the man and the attempt was abandoned, when the islanders refused to renegotiate a measurement of corn being taken from an advantageously worn vessel, the way the islanders habitually disguised the quantities of various resources from state officials and, more sinisterly, several tales of suspected spies being murdered to protect the islanders privacy and secrets.

Other Atlantic islands also seem to have aspects of anarchic organisation, particularly the presence of limited leaders such as the Rí Thoraí (king) of Tory Island, County Donegal and the ‘Kings’ of the Blasket Islands, County Kerry and the Inishkeas, County Mayo, which seem to be perfect examples of rulers without power.  At present it is not clear how many of the small Atlantic Islands had anarchic political structures and when these individually came to an end.  Although technically owned by large landlords, it seems that many of the smaller island communities were largely left to organise themselves as long as they continued to pay their annual dues.  Had they offered strong resistance to the state authorities they would surely have been harshly sanctioned and the same sort of compromise was used that we see in place with the essentially anarchic Anabaptist communities in North America (Shuster 1983).  The small Atlantic islands might therefore be seen to lie somewhere in between what Hakim Bey has defined as Temporary Autonomous Zones and Permanent Autonomous Zones (Bey 1985 & 1993).

A secluded harbour on the remote island of Inish Turk, County Mayo. We know that in the post Medieval period many of the Atlantic Islands were involved in smuggling, but how many of them might have been the locations of truly anarchic societies?

Pirate Utopias

The anarchist idea of pirate utopias seems to have derived from the writing of William S Burroughs, who developed a whole pseudo mythology based on the account of Captain Misson found in “A general history of pirates” published in 1724 by Captain Charles Johnson (suspected to be a pseudonym of either Daniel Defoe or the publisher Nathaniel Mist).  The account details the apparently fictitious life of Captain James Misson, the ‘articles’ under which his ship sailed and the colony they founded on the coast of Madagascar, Libertaria.  Piracy is a complex subject that has many incarnations around the world, and was often a state sanctioned or sponsored activity.  The anarchist interest in pirate utopias principally focuses on the ‘golden age of piracy’ in the late 17^th and early 18^th century and centres on the possibility of pirate crews that rejected state authority, organised themselves in a manner consistent with anarchist principles and established communities where they were free to create their own ‘lawless’ anarchies.  Whilst this might seem a ridiculous fantasy, especially given the suspect nature of the original source material, there may be something to it.  Peter Lamborn Wilson has argued that the story of Captain Misson may indeed be fictitious but given how little critical commentary it attracted at the time it was presumably consistent with some common understanding of pirate enclaves (Lamborn Wilson 2003).  In fact the ‘articles’ under which Misson sailed and Libertaria functioned are a reflection of the wide spread codes of conduct used amongst pirates that were indeed referred to as articles.

In the Bay of Honduras these rules of conduct and obligations were eventually formalised by a British Naval officer in 1765 and this version is referred to as Burnaby’s Code.  Crucial to the anarchist reading of pirates, Burnaby’s code operated without empowering individuals with titles such as magistrate or judge, it was an example of a formalised collective justice (Finamore 2006).  The archaeology of piracy is in some regards a new subject, leaving to one side the hunt for the wrecks of known pirate vessels, few of which have been successful until very recently.  A limited amount of work has been undertaken on pirate settlements and the results of some of this work are rather surprising.  Lamborn Wilson has written at length about the history of the Pirate Republic of Salé, a large settlement located across the river from Rabat in Morocco (Lamborn Wilson 2003).  Whilst Salé may have been a pirate utopia of sorts, it is hard to see how it may have operated in a manner consistent with anarchist principles, particularly given the role it had in the slave trade.  It seems that Salé is best regarded as a curiously late example of a European city state which depended on piracy to support its economy.  Ultimately Salé may not pass muster, but historians and archaeologists have been able to locate more convincing examples of pirate settlements that fulfil the utopian requirement to a reasonable degree.

A large number of settlements were established by English pirates along the coast of Belize as the golden age of piracy came to its end.  These settlements relied on trading contraband logwood and the settlement of Bacarades, located along the Belize River, is unique in that it has been subject to detailed archaeological investigation (Finamore 2006).  The archaeological research agreed with historical accounts that describe these settlements as consisting of dwellings of only the most simple forms. Nonetheless the range of artefacts present, and in particular the misappropriation of fine goods, especially ceramics, seems to represent an enactment of Hakim Bey’s  notion of ‘radical aristocracy’ (Bey 1985).  Historical accounts suggest the life of cutting logs may have been tedious and dull in the extreme but the one of the main aims of the work seems to have been to provide alcohol for communal drinking, something entirely akin with traditional anarchic horticultural and hunter gathering groups.

If the port of Salé seems little different to a hierarchical city state and the logging camps along the coast of Belize ultimately seem a little dull, the settlement created by English pirates on St Mary’s Island off the east coast of Madagascar really does seem to meet every expectation of a pirate utopia (de Bry 2006).  In a secluded bay on the islands western coast numerous pirates were resident between the 1680’s and the 1720’s including the well-known Captain William Kidd.  The base was used for activities across the Indian Ocean, and during the monsoon season many pirates spent extended stays at the settlement.  As with the Belize pirates the dwellings were generally of the simplest kind, but the pirates apparently fulfilled every stereotype when it came to bedecking themselves in flamboyant clothes, gold and jewels, another enactment of the radical aristocrat theme.  Eventually a merchant based in the settlement, Adam Baldridge, made enough money to construct a sizeable dwelling on Ils des Forbans (Pirate Island), a small islet located in the centre of the bay, which apparently really was underlain by a mysterious system of tunnels that have yet to be explored!  The settlement on St Mary’s Island so closely resembles the anarchist idea of Libertaria it is difficult not to think that this may have been the real world source for the fictional Captain Misson.  One interesting element of the Misson story is the friendly relationship established with the native groups around Libertaria.  Remarkably St Mary’s even lives up to this and the pirates routinely married local Malagasy women, who they draped with “gold, diamonds, sapphires and rubies”.

The real Pirate Bay? Google Earth image of the bay on St Mary’s Island (Ile Sainte-Marie in Madagascar) which was home to a large pirate enclave. Ils des Forbans can be seen in the centre of the bay.

Moving away from exotic locations half way around the world, Connie Kelleher has examined the archaeological remains of pirate communities along the coast of County Cork (Kelleher 2009 & 2013).  These pirate settlements were initially occupied by English pirates and their families who had relocated from Devon and Cornwall after piracy was outlawed in England at the start of the seventeenth century.  The pirates operated with the tacit approval of the crown, and the pirate settlements were essentially an early stage in the Munster plantation.  Acting in a semi-official capacity and not beholden to the indigenous Gaelic Lordship whose authority had finally collapsed after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, these pirates enjoyed a rather privileged and secure position.

It could be argued that the close links to the crown removes them from the anarchist ideal, but on the other hand the lack of persecution can actually be seen as adding to the utopian nature of the occupation and they might therefore represent Permanent Autonomous Zones (PAZ).  This official sanction is quite different to the traditional forms of piracy previously operated by the Gaelic Lords around the Irish coast, and from similar forms operating around the Scottish coast.  Gaelic piracy was organised and controlled by hereditary aristocracies and does not therefore meet the anarchist ideal, despite the romanticism attached to characters such as Grace O’Malley, the so called Pirate Queen of Clew Bay.  Furthermore the West Cork pirates operated under the same sorts of codes of conduct utilised during the Golden Age of piracy.  Each crew operated individually but the codes provided a format through which they could combine forces for more ambitious projects, returning us again to the idea of anarchist federations.  The numerous remains of the pirate occupation that Kelleher has recorded may therefore represent the most extensive remains of a pirate utopia that have so far been the subject of archaeological examination.

Conclusion

Obviously what has been presented above are merely brief summaries of complicated arguments.  They were not intending to convince anyone that these anarchic interpretations were correct, rather the intent was to demonstrate how much potential anarchic approaches might have for a whole range of topics. Each of the examples discussed here is worth a much fuller examination, and as it happens I am currently working on a book that will explore many aspects of anarchic anthropology, anarchic archaeology and various aspects of political anarchism that might be usefully appropriated.  These examples will be explored in that book, alongside many others, although serious questions remain as to whether I can ever find a publisher for such an unruly tome.  In the meantime I hope you have enjoyed this brief introduction to the subject and that some of you might also consider hoisting the black flag over your areas of interest.

Learn More

•  For an excellent in-depth introduction to the theoretical underpinning, history and figures involved in anarchism, I highly recommend reading Peter Marshall’s 2008 publication Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism.

Bibliography

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Barclay, H. 1982. People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchism. Sanday: Cienfuegos Press Ltd.

Barclay, H. 1986. Anthropology and Anarchism. In the Anarchist Encyclopaedia. Sanday: Cienfuegos.

Barclay, H. B. 1989. Segmental Acephalous Network Systems: Alternatives to Centralised Bureaucracy. The Raven. 7: 207-224.

Bettinger , R.L. 2015. Orderly Anarchy: Sociopolitical Evolution in Aboriginal California: Origins of Human Behaviour and Culture. Oakland: University of California Press.

Bey, H. 1985. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia.

Bey, H. 1993. Permanent Autonomous Zones. Dreamtime Village Newsletter. (Open Access).

Card, N. 2013. The Ness of Brodgar. More than a Stone Circle. British Archaeology. January/February 2013. 14-21.

Clastres, P. 1977. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Clastres, P. 2010. Archaeology of Violence. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). (Open Access).

de Bry, J. 2006. Christopher Condent’s Fiery Dragon: Investigating an Early Eighteenth Century Pirate Shipwreck off the Coast of Madagascar. In R.K. Skowronek & C. R. Ewen (eds) X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy. Gainsville: Florida University Press. 100-130.

Diamond, J. 1987. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Discover Magazine. 8(5): 64-66. (Open Access).

Dwyer, E. 2009. Peripheral People and Places: An Archaeology of Isolation. In A. Horning & N. Brannon (eds) Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic World. Dublin: Wordwell. 131-142.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Finamore, D. 2006. A Mariner’s Utopia: Pirates and Logwood in the Bay of Honduras. In R.K. Skowronek & C. R. Ewen (eds) X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy. Gainsville: Florida University Press, 64-78.

Fleming, A. 2005. St Kilda and the Wider World: Tales of an Iconic Island. Macclesfield: Windgather Press.

Fortes, M. 1945. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geddes, W. R. 1957. Nine Dayak nights. The Story of an Dayak Folk Hero. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ginn, V. 2013. Power to the People: Re-interpreting Bronze Age Society. Emania. 21: 47-58.

Ginn, V. & Rathbone, S. 2011. Corrstown: A Coastal Community. Oxford: Oxbow books.

Gibson, A. 1998. Stonehenge and Timber Circles. Stroud: Tempus.

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. (Open Access).

Heath, J. 2009. Warfare in Prehistoric Britain. Stroud: Amberley Books.

Kelleher, C. 2009. Connections and Conflict by Sea. In A. Horning & N. Brannon (eds) Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic World. Dublin: Wordwell. 53-82.

Kelleher, C. 2013. Pirate Ports and Harbours of West Cork in the Early Seventeenth Century. Journal of Maritime Archaeology. 8(2): 347-366.

Lafargue, P. 1907. The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies. Chicago: Charles H Kerr Ltd.

Lamborn Wilson, P. 2003. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegades. New York: Autonomedia.

Macdonald, C.J.H. 2008. The Gift Without a Donor. Unpublished Manuscript. (Open Access).

Macdonald, C.J.H. 2009. The Anthropology of Anarchy. Occasional paper No. 35 of the School of Social Science, IAS, Princeton. Unpublished Manuscript. (Open Access).

Marshal, P. 2008. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial (Open Access).

Metcalf, P. 2010. The Life of the Longhouse: An Archaeology of Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morris, B. 2005. Anthropology and Anarchism: Their Elective Affinity. Goldsmith Anthropological Research Paper 11. London: Goldsmith College. (Open Access).

O’Sullivan, A. 2008. The Western Islands: Ireland’s Atlantic Islands and the Forging of Gaelic Irish National Identities. In G. Noble, T. Poller, J. Raven and L. Verrill (eds) Scottish Odysseys: The Archaeology of Islands. Stroud: Tempus. 172-190.

Orwell, G. 1933. Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Victor Gollanz.

Parker Pearson, M. 2012. Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stoneage Mystery. London: Simon & Shulster.

Pinker, S. 2011. The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. London: Penguin.

Rathbone, S. 2013a. A Consideration of Villages in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.  Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. 79: 39-60.

Rathbone, S. 2013b. The Village People? An Early History of Neighbourly Disputes. Past Horizons Website. Posted August 1st 2013.

Rathbone, S. 2015. It’s All Gone Pear Shaped. Urbanism, Active Resistance and the Early settlement pattern of Ireland. Proceedings of the Spring 2014 I.A.I conference. (Open Access).

Russell, B. 1935. In Praise of Idleness. London: George Unwin.

Shuster, E. M. 1983. Native American Anarchism. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited.

Smith, M., & Brickley, M. 2009. People of the Long Barrows: Life, Death and Burial in the Earlier Neolithic. Stroud: History Press Ltd.

Smyth, J. 2010. The House and Group Identity in the Irish Neolithic. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section C 111 (1): 1-31. (Open Access).

Smyth, J. 2014. Settlement in Neolithic Ireland: New Discoveries at the Edge of Europe. Oxford: Oxbow.

Steel, T. 1975. The Life and Death of St. Kilda. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.

The Trials and Tribulations of Homo floresiensis: A Quick Introduction

I haven’t wrote about palaeoanthropology much recently, but I have been meaning to write about Homo floresiensis for a while now.  The diminutive hominin, most likely a new Homo species although this is still debated, was discovered by chance on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 during the excavation of the Liang Bua cave site, which was led by the now sadly deceased New Zealand archaeologist Mike Morwood (Brown et al. 2004).  The team that excavated at Liang Bua cave found the remains for a probable 12 separate H. floresiensis individuals dating from around 95,000 years ago to around 13,000 years ago (1), making H. floresiensis one of the last hominin species to live in conjunction with our species, H. sapiens (Brown et al. 2004: 1055).  One of the most complete individuals found at the site is LB1, an adult female aged around 30 who has almost both lower limbs, upper right arm, pelvis and cranium surviving (see image below).  It is this individual that has become the holotype, or type species, for H. floresiensis and on who most of the current research has, and continues, to focuses on (Brown et al. 2004, Brown 2012, Falk et al. 2005, Henneburg et al. 2014).

The majority of this research has been focused on the skeletal remains themselves and archaeological context as attempts to extract ancient DNA (aDNA) from the remains has not been successful, likely due to the cave environment that the skeletons were excavated from and the fragmentary nature of the surviving aDNA.  Morwood’s team formally announced the details of the skeletal remains in 2004 and stated that the remains included primitive and derived features resulting from long term isolation and endemic dwarfing (Brown et al. 2004: 1055-56).  It is important to note here that up until the excavation of H. floresiensis in 2003 it was thought that only H. erectus and H. sapiens were the only Homo hominins present in Late Pleistocene Asia (Brown et al. 2004: 1056).  Later hominin finds, such as at the Denisova Cave excavations in Siberia in 2010 and the announcement of the Denisovan species, have highlighted that other unknown hominins were present in Late Pleistocene Asian contexts helping to fundamental change, and challenge, the way that we think of the evolution of our species H. sapiens (Reich et al. 2010: 1053).

The species holotype is LB1, found in 2003 in the Liang Bua cave site on Flores, Indonesia. The adult female individual dates to 18,000 years old, stood 3.5 ft tall and represents one of the most complete H. floresiensis individuals found. Notice the large dentition relative to the overall cranium size. Image is not to scale. Image credit: Jennifer Clark (Human Origins Program) and Chip Clark (Smithsonian Institution).

There are many issues surrounding the remains of the H. floresiensis hominins that serve to obstruct and help obfuscate the research that has taken place into understanding the origin and anatomy of the floresiensis hominin.  Inevitability this is ongoing as McVie (2014) highlights in a recent Guardian newspaper article.  Thus it is pertinent to highlight them here to help understand where we are at with understanding the remains of the Flores hominin.  Indeed the H. floresiensis case has all the unfortunate tropes of a spectacular palaeoanthropological find (2) (the unexpectedness of the finds, the bickering academics, mishandling of remains etc.) and continues to show no sign of abating.

As is indicative above, H. floresiensis is a unique and interesting recent hominin ancestor, even more so as the only physical remains of the species are the 12 individuals found and excavated at the Liang Bua cave site in Indonesia.  It is the opposite to our modern notion of the (much maligned) Neandertal, being gracile, petite and small in statue and body.  Perhaps inevitably it was labelled a ‘hobbit’ species (although this word has led to problems with the Tolkein estate).  The type specimen LB1 was quickly repudiated as a H. sapiens individual with a pathology by several researchers and others who have, at various times, stated that all the H. floresiensis individuals, and in particular LB1 and partial skeleton LB6, display attributes varying from myxoedematous endemic cretinism (Oxnard et al. 2010, Brown 2012), Laron Syndrome (Falk et al. 2009, see Hawks 2007), or Down Syndrome (Benton 2014, Henneburg et al. 2014).  There have also comparisons even being made of the singularity of the Late Pleistocene epoch species being compared to the K/T impact boundary event 65 million years ago (Eckhardt et al. 2014), which frankly is a little mystifying.

McVie (2014) has highlighted a potential conflict of interest with regards to both the Eckhardt et al. (2014) and Henneburg et al. (2014) publications, as there is a suggestion that Henneburg (who helped author both articles) picked his reviewers to help favour his research team’s hypothesis and investigation.  The journal that both of the articles were recently published in, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (or PNAS), does not operate a peer review policy in the recognised sense, as most of the other respected journals use, but uses its own specific and trusted system (see here).  Perhaps most surprising is the fact that this team have now published 3 separate papers each focusing on different pathological conditions each time in their continued belief that the H. floresiensis remains are probable members of H. sapiens and represent pathological processes (Henneburg et al. 2014).

Regardless of the ongoing new-species-or-not debate there must be further investigation of the context of the remains.  As Hawks (2007) highlights it is the exact nature of where H. floresiensis fits in both the evolutionary tree and the archaeological context of Asia that remains to be thoroughly demonstrated.  This can only be determined by further finds with consolidated archaeological contexts over an extensive period of time and, with luck, further specimens of this hopeful new species.  The specimens of this population found on Flores, Indonesia, are both tantalising for the human evolution implications and frustrating for their apparent uniqueness in location and time.  As such the Flores H. floresiensis remains are surely one of the most interesting and divisive points of interest in the palaeoanthropological world today.

Notes

(1). A new analysis of the chosen radiocarbon samples and the stratigraphy of the cave site by Sutikna et al. (2016) has led to a serious revision in the chronology of the Homo floresiensis fossils.  It seems that all fossil evidence of H. floresiensis is older than 60,000 years, which is a major revision and leaves a lot of questions regarding the contextual material culture and faunal remains and their association with the fossil hominins.  John Hawks has covered the implications that this new article by Sutikna et al. has in a detailed and interesting read, check it out here.

(2). An excellent counter example of this is the University of the Witwatersrand and National Geographic funded Rising Star project currently underway in South Africa, where the remains of a spectacular palaeoanthropological site (with the evidence of numerous hominin individuals of some importance) has been well and truly open to researchers and members of the public to take part in and to learn about.  This has included an extensive and on-going social media presence and an open call for researchers to join collaborative workshops to study the remains.

Lean More

• The Smithsonian Institute has a handy guide in introducing the hominins of human evolution at the Human Origins website and, as a part of this, there is a nice guide to H. floresiensis.

• Over at EvoAnth Adam Benton  maintains an up-to-date blog on evolutionary anthropology, and he has discussed the H. floreisensis remains in several interesting entries.

•  For a full round of the issues involved in the research of H. floresiensis and the LB1 type fossil, I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on the species which covers all pertinent academic articles published.

• Beauty in the Bones has a detailed entry on the presentation of Down Syndrome in a more recent osteological context, highlighting the fact that no features of Down Syndrome are pathognomonic in themselves.

Bibliography

Benton, A. 2014. Was the “Hobbit” a Human with Downs Syndrome? Probably Not. EvoAnth. Accessed 19/08/14. (Open Access).

Brown, P. 2012. LB1 and LB6 Homo floresiensis are Not Modern Human (Homo sapiens) Cretins. Journal of Human Evolution. 62 (2): 201-224.

Brown, P., Sutikna, T., Morwood, M. J., Soejono, R. P., Jatmiko, Wayhu Saptomo, E. & Rokus Awe Due. 2004. A New Small-Bodied Hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia. Nature. 431 (7012): 1055–1061.

Eckhardt, R. B., Henneburg, M., Weller, A. S. & Hsu, K. J. 2014. Rare Events in Earth History Include the LB1 Human Skeleton from Flores, Indonesia, as a Developmental Singularity, not a Unique Taxon. PNAS. 111 (33): 11961-11966. (Open Access).

Falk, D., Hildebot, C., Smith, K., Morwood, M. J., Sutikna, T., Brown, P., Jatmiko, E. W. S., Brunsden, B. & Prior, F. 2005. The Brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis. Science. 308 (5719): 242-245.

Falk, D., Hildebolt, C., Smith, K., Jungers, W., Larson, S., Morwood, M., Sutikna, T., Jatmiko, E. W. S. & Prior, S. 2009. The Type Specimen (LB1) of Homo floresiensis Did Hot Have Laron Syndrome. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 140 (1): 52-63.

Hawks, J. 2007. Another Diagnosis for a Hobbit. John Hawk’s Weblog. Accessed 24/08/14. (Open Access).

Henneberg, M., Eckhardt, R. B., Chavanaves, S. & Hsu, K. J. 2014. Evolved Developmental Homeostasis Disturbed in LB1 from Flores, Indonesia, Denotes Down Syndrome and Not Diagnostic Traits of the Invalid Species Homo floresiensis. PNAS. Early View: 1-6. (Open Access).

McKie, R. 2014. Homo floresiensis: Scientists Clash Over Claims ‘Hobbit Man’ was Modern Human with Downs Syndrome. The Guardian. Accessed 19/08/14.

Oxnard, C., Obendorf, P. J. & Kefford, B. J. 2010. Post-Cranial Skeletons of Hypothyroid Cretins Show a Similar Anatomical Mosaic as Homo floresiensis. PLoS ONE. 5 (9): 1-11. (Open Access).

Reich, D., Green, R. E., Kircher, M., Krause, J. Patterson, N., Durand, E. Y., Viola, B., Briggs, A. W. & Stenzel, U. et al. 2010. Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature. 468 (7327): 1053–1060. (Open Access).

Sutikna, T., Tocheri, M. W., Morwood, M. J., Saptomo, E. W., Awe, R. D., Wasisto, S. … & Storey, M. 2016. Revised Stratigraphy and Chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia. Nature. In Press. doi:10.1038/nature17179.

Anatomically Modern Humans: A Brief Introduction

The imperative of  the human species to ‘Know Thyself‘ has developed into a rapidly expanding field in palaeoanthropology.  The exploration of our species, Homo sapiens, is a particularly active field which utilizes multi-disciplinary approaches to untangle the evolutionary threads of our beginning.  The following essay introduces concepts and approaches used in this field, whilst raising current research issues.

——~…~——

“For a species that is both narcissistic and inquisitive, Homo sapiens has so far done a remarkably poor job of defining itself as a morphological entity”, Tattersall and Schwartz (2008: 49).

Thus starts the opening sentence to Tattersall and Schwartz’s 2008 article on the problems of clarifying the morphological distinctiveness of anatomically modern humans (AMH or the species Homo sapiens).  It is perhaps applicable not just to the morphological characteristics but also the fossil record and origins of AMH themselves (Pearson 2008: 38).  This paper, then, will discuss the principles behind the definitions and evolution of AMH in context with reference to its behaviour and morphological traits.  In turn, the dominant models of the origin and subsequent dispersion of AMH will be discussed, with reference to where Homo sapiens ‘fit’ in the palaeoanthropological record.

A wealth of new genetic research data and fossil finds has considerably opened up the treasure chest of hominin information, which is having a considerable impact on our understanding of the H. sapiens place in the evolutionary records (Bowden et al. 2012, Curnoe et al. 2012, Krause et al. 2010, Prat et al. 2011, Wood 2005: 42).  It is directly as a result of how the reporting of evolutionary science has changed in the past few decades (McEwan 2012), and how technological approaches have uncovered so much genetic data in reconstructing fossil record relationships (Jurmain et al. 2011: 270), that the definition of AMH is not so easy.  This paper will conclude with a talk on how the biocultural evolution of H. sapiens is now impacting both our environment and localised populations in certain contexts (Le Fanu 2009, Hawks et al. 2007, Jurmain et al. 2011).

It is important to note that H. sapiens are the last species of the genus Homo, with the first species tentatively dated in Africa to nearly 2.5 million YA (years ago), which led to the first dispersal of hominins (largely H. erectus) from Africa around 1.8 YA (Jurmain et a.l 2011: 240); AMH dispersal occurred much later.  It was once thought that AMH were defined by modern anatomy and behaviour at the junction of the Upper Palaeolithic around 40,000 YA (Nowell 2010: 438), however, recent palaeoanthropological finds and research have discovered a distinct ‘decoupling’ between early AMH anatomy and later symbolic/modern behaviour, with anatomically similar traits of AMH in fossils pinpointed to east and south Africa to around 200,000 YA (Rightmire 2008: 8, Wood 2005).  However there are problems concurrent with the dating of the hominin fossil record, as Millard (2008: 870) concludes that ‘the dating evidence for many key fossils is poor’.

Typically there are a number of assigned morphological features that mark out Homo sapiens compared to other species in the Homo genus (Table 1).  As Tattersall and Schwartz (2008: 51) note, however impressive the suite of features ‘not all of them are expressed with equal emphasis in all living humans’.  When this is combined with the fossil record of AMH, with individuals often taken as examples for their own long lost skeletal population and the problems inherent in the preservation of skeletal elements (geological pressure, scavenging etc), we should rightly be wary of definitively assigning a species name before comparison with relative contextual remains, stratigraphic layers and other similar period sites (Millard 2008, Pettitt 2005).

General Characteristic Morphological features of AMH
Cranial Cranial capacity in excess 1350cc (variable). Distinct chin (inverted T). Relatively veretical frontal bone Relatvely flat non-projecting face. Brow ridge expressed more clearly in males. Round occipital region. Small incisor teeth.	Post Cranial Narrow thorax. Small and narrow pelvis. Straight limb bones. Typically less ‘robust’, more gracile, then recent ancestors.

Table 1. General morphology for Homo sapiens (Pettitt 2005: 132, Tattersall and Schwartz 2008: 51, Wood 2005: 110). NB see also Pearson’s Table 2 (2008: 39).

Using a cladistics framework, Pearson (2008: 38) highlighted the fact that there are specific difficulties in using statistical measurements of metrical and discrete measurements as having been conceptualised as derived features in AMH crania, with comparison to Neandertal and H. erectus crania.  However there are further problems when trying to establish if the earliest H. sapiens African fossils of Omo Kibish, the Herto crania, or Near Eastern Skhul and Qafzeh fossils fit within the 95% rate of modern features, with results not even reaching the 75% fit of the modern features for AMH (Pearson 2008: 39).  In part this is due to fossils, such as the Herto crania, which are used as the mean of that particular population, which ultimately ‘conflates individual, within-population variation and between-population variation’ (Jurmain et al. 2011, Pearson 2008: 39).  Other problems of quantifying such long chronological morphological differences include the lack of various populations of modern (Australian aboriginals, for example) and certain prehistoric peoples being outside of the 95% confidence to fit the given morphological concept of AMH.  Clearly there needs to be a control on the temporal/geographic population of the AMH under consideration in such studies, when carrying out both the statistical analysis with other fossil hominins and when taking the defining measurements.

Pettitt (2005: 132-137) argues that H. sapiens should be classed into three arbitrary chronological groups of morphological continuity: 1) those of the earliest H. Sapiens, including material from Bodo (Ethopia), Broken Hill (Zambia) and Elandfontein (South Africa) amongst others; 2) Transitional (or archaic) H. sapiens including Herto, Omo Kibish 1 and 2 (Ethiopia), Florisbad (South Africa) and Jebel Irhoud (Morocco); 3) finally AMH including Makapansgat, Border Cave and Equus Cave (South Africa), Taramsa (Egypt), and Dar-es-Soltan (Morocco) examples (see Table 2 below for dates).  This ordering of morphological continuity defines AMH through the evolution of H. sapien traits with retention of H. ergaster traits (earliest), whilst the AMH group compromise clear AMH dating to less than 125,000 YA (Pettitt 2005: 132).  As Pearson (2008: 44) suggests, ‘the process of becoming modern likely occurred as a series of steps, regardless of whether one considers these different steps to be different taxa in a bushy phylogeny or merely different grades in a single evolving lineage’. Pearson (2008: 44) goes on to say that the ‘evolution of modern man should be viewed as a process rather than an event involving rapid morphological change due to drift during population bottlenecks and selection for new advantageous traits or genes, or a combination of the two’, rather than a singular smooth process.  Therefore we should be wary of relying purely on the often sparse fossil record.  Regardless, it is widely recognised that H. Sapiens are a probably daughter species of H. erectus (i.e. as a result of a speciation occurrence) which spread across Africa and into Western Eurasia at the beginning of,  or just before, the Middle Pleistocene (Jurmain et al. 2011, Rightmire 2008: 8).

Recent research has also led to five majority agreements in regards to the tenets of AMH behaviour (Table 2; Nowell 2010: 447). Wood (2005: 109) makes the salient point that early eurocentrism in the search for AMH behavioural origins clouded certain judgements, such as focusing on Western Europe to the detriment of African archaeological sites.

Points of Consensus on Modern Behaviour

The relationship between modern anatomy and modern behaviour is more complex than once thought. Modern behaviour has symbolic thoughts at its core.  Archaeological record of the African Middle Stone Age has rendered invalid the idea of a ‘human revolution’ occurring for the first time in the Upper Palaeolithic of Western Europe. Later Neandertal sites have demonstrated modern behaviour to either some form or some degree, such as personal adornment or symbolic behaviour. The triad of social, cultural and demographic factors are key in understanding variability and patterning in the archaeology record.

Table 2. Agreed points in visioning the concept of modern behaviour (Balter 2011: 21, Nowell 2010: 447, Pettitt 2005, Zilhao 2006; 2010: 1025).

Research (Jurmain et al 2011, Prat et al 2012) has also highlighted symbolic  behaviour in a number of early H. Sapiens sites throughout Africa and the Near East; Balter (2011: 21) highlights Aterian sites in North Africa where various personal and possible symbolic artefacts have been found, whilst Blombos Cave in South Africa (77,000 YA), and Katanda in the DR of Congo (80,000 YA), have some of the earliest symbolic artefacts recovered including incised ochre, worked bone and beads; almost a full 45,000 years before any such artefacts appear in the European record (Jurmain et al. 2011: 298-299).   Mellars (2006: 9383) proposes a model that indicates climatic, environmental and cultural changes around 80,000 to 60,000 YA as major causative agents of cognitive change alongside population pressures in the dispersal of African H. Sapiens.  However Nowell (2010: 441) states that the gradual emergence of behaviours as a mosaic of features, and not as a single revolutionary package, should be considered within the archaeological record, whilst defining that for the majority of researcher’s symbolic language and codified social relationships define modern behaviour.  Mosaic features in fossil hominids have been noted in recent discoveries of the Australopithecus sediba specimen, highlighting a mix of Australopithecus and Homo anatomical features (Wong 2012: 25).

The origins of AMH living outside of Africa have led to the formation of two major competing models in palaeoanthropolog: the multi-regional continuity hypothesis that proposes already living populations of hominins and local populations in Asia, Europe and Africa continued their ‘indigenous evolutionary development from pre-modern Middle Pleistocene forms to anatomically modern human’ (Jurmain et al. 2011: 281), whilst the complete replacement (or out of Africa) hypothesis  proposes that AMH arose in Africa 200,000 YA to completely replace those in Europe and Asia (Table 3; Jurmain et al. 2011: 279).  Critical to the multi-regional hypothesis are the tenets that i) a level of gene flow between geographically separated populations prevented speciation, ii) all living humans derive largely from the species H. erectus, iii) natural selection in regional populations is responsible for the regional variants found in extant populations, and finally, iv) that the emergence of H. sapiens was not restricted to one area per se but was a phenomenon that occurred throughout the geographic range where ‘humans lived’ (Johanson 2001: 1).

Table 3. Timeline of major H. sapiens discoveries, question marks denote tentative dates (Jurmain et al. 2011: 413) (Click to enlarge).

Critical to the complete replacement theory are that i) H. sapiens arose in one place, highly likely to be East/South Africa, ii) H. sapiens ultimately migrated out of Africa, and replaced all human populations without interbreeding, and that iii) modern human variation is a relatively recent phenomenon (Johanson 2001: 1).

Although not all factors of the multiregional hypothesis cannot be falsified, it seems prevalent that H. sapiens originated in Eastern Africa (with Ethiopia so far providing the most stable dated site), and dispersed to Europe and Asia from 65,000 YA onwards in various waves (Table 2; Jurmain et al. 2011: 282, Mellars 2006: 9381).    The two most securely dated sites in Europe for AMH are Pecstera Cu Oase in Romania at 42,000 YA and Buran Kaya III in the Crimea, Ukraine at 31,900 YA (Hoffecker 2009: 16040, Prat et al. 2011).  Unsurprisingly, Hoffecker (2009: 16040) notes that the issue of the mechanism of transition is a ‘controversial topic in palaeoanthropology’.  Arguments have been made that AMH crossed into Eurasia via a Levantine corridor, with the earliest AMH dates from Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel at around 120,000 to 100,000 YA (Wood 2005: 98), whilst recent work in North African Aterian populations from around the same period are pointed out as being possible ancestors to at least some of the H. sapiens who left Africa during this period (Balter 2011: 23).

The palaeoanthropological evidence suggests that they, the Aterians, possessed the right symbolic behaviour, anatomy and favourable climatic conditions to be at least a contender for contributing to one of the waves of H. sapiens leaving (Balter 2011: 22-23).  There are a variety of sites across Europe after 40,000 YA that show a variety of evidence for AMH presence, including the triad of modern human behaviour with symbolic artefacts and modern skeletal morphology.  However, we should not forget that Europe was already populated with the H. Neandertalensis species prior, and co-existed with H. sapiens for approximately 10,000 years or so (Hoffecker 2009: 16040, Wood 2005: 110).  This subject will be tackled shortly.

The most secured dates found in Asia are from areas such as the Sahul region (conjoined landmass of Australia, Papua New Guinea and Tasmania), where it is possible AMH occupied various areas (Wood 2005: 111-112).  It must be remembered that while the ‘dwarf’ species H. floresiensis survived up until 18,000 YA on the island of Flores with temporal overlap between themselves and H. sapiens, it seems unlikely there was regional overlap from the archaeological evidence (Wood 2005: 111).  Curnoe et a.l (2012: 1) note that the AMH fossil record for East Asia is, at this time, poorly recorded owing to a lack of detailed description, rigorous taxonomy classification and a distinct lack of accurately dated fossils.  However there are a few key sites: Liujiang in Southern China has produced a skeleton which, although it lacks exact stratigraphic position, has been dated to an estimated broad range from 153-30,000 YA, whilst the Niah Cave child in East Malaysia has been dated to 45-39,000 YA for the cranium from a recent field and lab program (Curnoe et al. 2012: 2).  Tianyuan cave, just south of the Zhoukoudian cave, has fragmentary evidence of an AMH crania and teeth which are dated to 40,000 YA, with a possible mix of archaic and modern features; the American and Chinese team who excavated it have suggested it is evidence of interbreeding in China with resident archaic populations, but suggest an African origin for the AMH itself (Jurmain et al. 2011: 287).

The above examples highlight problems in understanding the definition of AMH, both anatomically and behaviourally.  With the advent of dispersals from Africa AMH interacted with other hominids, prominent of which are the Neandertals in Eurasia and the elusive Denisovans in Siberia (Krause et al. 2010, Hubin 2009, Noonan 2010, Zilhao 2006).  Genetic evidence is unravelling what it is to be an AMH (Hawks et al. 2007), and there is evidence to suggest that Neandertals contributed up to 4% of non-African modern human DNA via gene flow (Green et al. 2010: 711, Reich et al. 2010: 1057).

Roughly one third of Neandertal mtDNA genetic diversity, dating from 70,000 to 38,000 YA, is comparable to contemporary human populations (Briggs et al. 2009:  319), although Noonan (2010: 550) and Herrera et al. (2009: 253) raise the flag of caution as the majority of Neandertal remains were not collected with their regard to DNA investigation, whilst modern DNA contamination, despite the safeguards, is still prevalent.  Briggs et al. (2009: 321) postulate that low mtDNA diversity throughout much of the Neandertal lineage may indicate a low effective population size, although it could be reflective of AMH direct/indirect  influences as they spread from Africa (interbreeding or out competing for example).  Herrera et al. (2009: 253) note that there are difficulties such as identifying haplotypes indicative of interbreeding.  Nonetheless, as Zilhao et al. (2010: 1027) points out that a Mid-Palaeolithic Iberian Neandertal sites shows distinct features associated with AMH including symbolic behaviour, with ochre and shells displaying evidence of body paint, and organisation skills, which that studies believes is the outcome of demographic pressure, technology and ‘social complexification’ within the Neandertal species itself (Roebroeks et al. 2012: 2).

Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree of complete mtDNA rooted with chimpanzee and bonobo mtDNA, showing geographic origin of mtDNA samples (Krause et al. 2010: 896) (Click to enlarge).

Meanwhile Krause et al. (2010: 896) provide evidence that the Denisovans split before Neandertal and AMH at around 1 million YA, whilst Neandertals and H. sapiens ancestors split around 690,000 to 550,000 YA (Jurmain et al. 2011: 270).  Pairwise nucleotide differences indicate that Neandertals differ from modern humans at around 202 nucleotide positions whilst the Denisovan individual differs at 385 positions (Krause et al. 2010: 895), which alongside the phylogenetic evidence (Figure 1), supports a deeper divergence of the Denisovan hominin than between the closer related H. sapiens and Neandertal species.

There is the distinct possibility of admixture; this is reinforced by the apparent coexistence of the surrounding area by Neandertals, AMH and Denisovans in the Altai region at roughly the same time periods, and by the fact that Denisova populations contributed roughly 4-6% present day DNA in AMH Melanesian populations; this suggests they interacted with Melanesian ancestors, but probably not in the Siberia region (Krause et al. 2010: 895, Reich et al. 2010: 1053).  The lack of complete remains and its physically limited location from this suspected new species at Denisova Cave limit our knowledge but tests are continuing.  If this hominin, as hypothesised, had a wide geographical range (Reich et al. 2010: 1059), the question must be asked why we haven’t noticed it before?  Interestingly Abi-Rached et al. (2011: 94) highlight that the fact that as the AMH Eurasian populations mixed with archaic hominids, adaptive introgression of vital immune system components (Human Leukocytes Antigen class 1) helped to provide a mechanism for rapid evolution.  The adapted introgression of the genes now represent more than half of the HLA alleles in modern Eurasians, and were later introduced into African populations (Abi-Rached et al. 2011: 89).  Therefore the definition of AMH must include evidence of interbreeding to some degree.  Future genomic studies in other archaic hominins should provide more information relating to the relationships between species; however it seems clear that gene flow was relatively common in the Upper Pleistocene (Reich et al. 2010: 1059).

Increased AMH demographic growth and geographic spread dated from 80,000 YA to the present, has led to rapid genetic evolutionary selective pressures on features including ‘skin pigmentation, adaptation to cold and diet’ amongst others (Hawks et al. 2007: 20756).  Some of the most dramatic have been associated with the uptake of agriculture during the Neolithic period, both in terms of our ability in coping with disease and changes from interaction via population density (Barnes et al. 2011: 848).  This is partly the result of cultural and ecological reasons (i.e. a biocultural pathway), and Hawks et al. (2007: 20756-20757) remark that in their study it was noted ‘new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, (that) the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution >100 times higher than characterised most of human evolution’.

Two examples help highlight the effects of biocultural change in modern population: coevolution of humans and cattle since the Neolithic has resulted in distinct populations of modern humans becoming lactose persistence, such as Europeans, whilst other populations, such as African and Asian adults, are largely lactose intolerant (Jurmain et al. 2011: 313).  This is through active selection of breeding cattle which ‘inadvertently selected for the gene that produces lactose persistence in themselves’ (Jurmain et al. 2011: 313); this example shows the geographical distribution of lactose persistence is often related to a history of cultural dependency on fresh milk products.  On the other hand, modern population pressures include the admixture of populations who have had the pressures of urbanisation, agriculture and gene selection for disease loading (such as Tuberculosis) who then interact with indigenous populations, such as Torres Strait Islanders and Papua New Guinea populations, who are not predisposed to deal with TB because of their lack of long term cattle coevolution (Barnes et al. 2011).  The importance is recognising that there is great variation at an environmental genetic level in modern AMH, and this is highly likely to be the case during the long and concurrent evolution of AMH (Jurmain et al. 2011).

In conclusion the definition of AMH comes to thus; either a strict definition of AMH present at around 40-35,000 YA onwards, with the full suite of the triad of anatomically modern skeletal elements, modern behavioural & cognitive functions, and similar genetics to today’s worldwide population (Tattersall & Schwartz 2008), or we can take the view that H. sapiens evolved with a mosaic of features that they themselves appeared at different times during the evolution of AMH (Jurmain et al. 2011, Pettitt 2005).  It is this author’s belief that the origin of H. sapiens species lies at the Omo Kibish site in Eastern Africa as the earliest evidence so far, and the definition of AMH must be taken with accord of the fossil record (Jurmain et al. 2011).  Throughout this paper, a long chronology has been presented and discussed of H. sapiens in the context of human evolution, and consideration has been given to the relatively modern genetic changes in modern human populations (Hawks et al. 2007).  This view belies the complexity of defining AMH, especially as new hominins are found (Krause et al. 2010, Reich et al. 2010, Wong 2012), as the consideration of the context is paramount.  There is inherent variation in the record, as evidenced between the distinct morphological variation between Omo 1 and Omo 2 fossils, leading up to the palaeogenetic and modern genetic variation and morphological in populations from inside and outside Africa (Briggs et al. 2009, Hawks et al. 2007, Harvati et al. 2012).  In comparison, the origin of the Homo genus is still in dispute (Wong 2012: 24) and the chimpanzee fossil record is distinctly lacking (Wood 2005: 69-70).  Only recently has SNP genotyping revealed the extent of Pan troglodytes ellioti as a genetically distinct species (Bowden et al. 2012: 1).  The importance of this is that we should seek to place the well discussed H. sapiens within a larger framework of where hominins (both extant and extinct) diverged, interacted and evolved (see discussion- Patterson et al. 2006: 1106, Wakeley 2008).  The definition of AMH is therefore but one fragment of our long evolutionary history.

Further Sources:

• A condensed scientific article on the overview of hominin evolution can be found here, as can a number of free articles on specific case studies at the Mermaid’s Tale.
• A Scientific America blog on the importance of the nearly 2 million year old South African hominin Australopithecus sediba in human evolution.

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Updates…

Apologies for the lack of updates; please bear with me.  I’ve had a busy past few weeks & the future doesn’t look any less busy! Preparation for moving down to start the Msc Human Osteology & Funerary Archaeology program at the University Sheffield have begun, but I’m still on the look out for a lab coat!  I move to the city shortly, but I’m still enjoying the time I have left in my hometown.  This year has flown by a bit too quickly!

The next Skeletal Series update will concern the human hip bones, and their form and function.  They are particularly key in both age and sex diagnosis of the individual.  I’ll also shortly start a brief write-up of the German Grampus placement & the activities we got up to, since I’ve finally just got round to finishing their report for the program online.

I did manage to read my way through Waldron’s (2009) ‘Palaeopathology’  manual whilst I was in Germany, and what a delight it was too! I’d highly recommend reading it, especially if you are going to be working with human bones from archaeological sites.  I have a feeling that this book, and the Human Bone Manual, will not be far from my side in the next few months.  ‘Palaeopathlogy’ offers ‘Operational Definitions’ which help to improve the diagnosis of disease in ancient human remains via clinical definitions and backgrounds. I would say this is a must have, especially since a lot of the palaeopathogical literature cannot be cross examined due to the differences in rational & criteria used.

A quick scan of BBC’s online news website reveals that a late stone age skull discovered from Iwo Eleru in Nigeria has some interesting ‘primative’ features associated with human evolution.  The online article can be found here at PLoS online.  The article deals with the chronology and morphology of the Iwo Eleru calvaria.  This is a very interesting article as it deals with a skull that shows similar morphological features present in archaic homo sapiens humans around 100,000 years ago but its found in a  context that is dated to around 15,000BP.  It is also rare that human remains are found during this date in West Africa.  The article states that this cranium fragment represents ‘evidence of deep population substructure in Africa and complex evolutionary processes for the origin of modern humans’, that the archaic homo sapiens didn’t just cut off after Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) appeared.  Frankly, I think this also highlights what is often forgotten in the prehistoric & palaeolithic archaeological record.  It is not just migration out of Africa and the dispersal of AMH that is fascinating and interesting, but also to still keep looking and researching inside Africa to see the evolutionary and populational changes still concurrent with human expansion elsewhere.

I also noticed the other that over at John Hawks’s weblog he has announced the Malapa Soft Tissue project.  This project aims to discover if soft tissues from an ancient hominid has been preserved from the Malapa site cave site, just outside Johannesburg in South Africa.  Recently discussed in the National Geographic magazine, the hominids discovered at this site are believe do to be Australopithecus Sediba, a possible intermediate form between the Australopithecus & Homo genus.  Much information remains to be gleamed from these exciting and relatively complete finds.  Up to date information on the MST project can be found on the John Hawks link.  Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that is it open access science; you are encouraged to take a part and offer your expertise!  Keep an eye on it and see where it leads…

I’ll be back shortly.

Further news on A. Sediba…