Science correspondent Andrew Lawler has won the 2015 Society for American Archaeology’s annual Gene S. Stuart Award for his story on the ancient Indian Ocean trade routes that rivaled the famed Silk Road.

“Sailing Sinbad’s Seas,” published in the 27 June 2014 issue of the journal, describes how these immensely important but overlooked trade routes are being retraced in archaeological sites ranging from East Africa to Sri Lanka to Cambodia. The markers of these routes lie in newly uncovered shipwrecks, glass beads, walled cities, and even the genes of the Indian Ocean’s present day populations. The evidence suggests that an intercontinental, networked world isn’t just a modern invention, Lawler writes.

LAWLER’S STORY COVERED ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES ALONG MANY COASTAL AREAS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN. | SCIENCE/ AAAS
“The breadth of history in the Indian Ocean is astonishing,” Lawler said, “and the links between Africa and Asia are critical to understanding the emergence of the first seafaring trade and how ideas, technology, and people spread around this vast region.”

Lawler , who joined Science in 1994, has reported on archaeology in the Middle East, Central Asia, and China since 2000. After covering the analysis of a 2nd century B.C.E. Sri Lankan shipwreck for the journal, Lawler said he was curious to know more about the southern trade routes. The Indian Ocean, he noted, “gets far less attention from archaeologists than, say, the Mediterranean, though it is a much larger area and arguably the most important maritime region in the ancient world-and again one of the busiest today.”

“Andrew’s ability to spot this story and pull it together from many different sources is a credit to his deep background in archaeology, which few other reporters can match,” said Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller.

ANDREW LAWLER
Given annually, the Gene S. Stuart Award recognizes the author of the most interesting and outstanding original newspaper or magazine story published in the past year that enhances the public understanding of archaeology. Lawler received $2,000 and a plaque at an awards ceremony at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting, held 15-19 April in San Francisco, California.

Lawler also won the 2009 Stuart Award for his collection of News Focus articles on the Indus civilization, which were published in the 6 June 2008 of Science. He is currently touring for his new book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, published last year by Atria Books.

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CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM—At midnight on 24 August, 410 C.E., slaves quietly opened Rome’s Salaria gate. The waiting Visigoths poured through the narrow passage, trumpets blaring and torches held high. The first sack of Rome in 8 centuries has often been cited as the moment when one of the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated empires died a violent death. For researchers struggling to understand how societies collapse, Rome’s fall has served as a model and a touchstone.

And yet an eclectic group of scholars who met recently at the University of Cambridge* argues that true social collapse is actually rare. They say that new data demonstrate that classic examples of massive collapse such as the disintegration of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the end of the Classic Maya period, and the vanishing of pre-Columbian societies of the U.S. Southwest were neither sudden nor disastrous for all segments of their populations. “Collapses are perhaps more apparent than real,” says Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew.

Rome, for example, didn’t fall in a day, as Edward Gibbon recognized in the 18th century in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. More recent work underscores the fact that the sack of Rome was just one step in a long and complex spiral of decline that affected peoples of the empire differently. For example, archaeologists in northeastern England have recently uncovered post-Roman villages that clung to the empire’s ways while their neighbors swiftly abandoned the Latin language, Roman-style kitchenware, and construction practices. “There’s a bewildering diversity that is only magnified as the system falls apart,” says Cambridge archaeologist Martin Millett.

This emphasis on decline and transformation rather than abrupt fall represents something of a backlash against a recent spate of claims that environmental disasters, both natural and humanmade, are the true culprits behind many ancient societal collapses. Yale University archaeologist Harvey Weiss, for example, fingered a regional drought as the reason behind the collapse of Mesopotamia’s Akkadian empire in a 1993 Science paper. And in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles—who was invited to but did not attend the meeting—cites several examples of poor decision-making in fragile ecosystems that led to disaster.

Renfrew and others don’t deny that disasters happen. But they say that a closer look demonstrates that complex societies are remarkably insulated from single-point failures, such as a devastating drought or disease, and show a marked resilience in coping with a host of challenges. Whereas previous studies of ancient societies typically relied on texts and ceramics, researchers can now draw on climate, linguistics, bone, and pollen data, along with better dating techniques. The result, they say, is a more nuanced understanding of the complicated and often slow-moving processes behind massive societal change. “The rarity of collapse due to the resistance of populations to environmental changes or disease is considerable,” says Cambridge historian John Hatcher, who studies the Black Death; that plague ravaged medieval Europe and Asia yet did not overturn the existing social order.

Yale’s Harvey Weiss thinks climate has often spurred societal breakdowns.

The change remains the same

Societal collapse is a slippery concept that defies a strict definition. Renfrew contends that it involves the loss of central administration, disappearance of an elite, decline in settlements, and a loss of social and political complexity. Collapse implies an abrupt end rather than a long, slow devolution.

That description would seem to fit the demise of Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2200 B.C.E., after a 1000-year reign of pharaohs. As far back as the 1800s, researchers found texts and archaeological evidence pointing to a nightmarish era of civil war, drought, famine, and anarchy. This collapse, which brought down the all-powerful kings who built the pyramids, long appeared to be a relatively sudden event that ushered in a century dubbed the First Intermediate Period. Earlier work suggested that a massive drought, the same one that may have laid the Akkadian Empire low, struck at this time and dropped the level of the Nile.

But the latest climate data from the northern Ethiopian highlands—a key source of the Nile—do not support a severe drought, says Richard Bates of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. “Likely, climate change was not as much of an impact as perhaps first thought,” he says.

Searching the jungle. UCL’s Elizabeth Graham (top) sees continuity where others see collapse, as Mayan potters continued to make sophisticated wares (above) after the Classic period.

An increasing number of Egyptologists also now posit a more complicated and drawn-out decline—and one that ultimately had limited impact on the population. Miroslav Barta of Charles University in Prague notes that by the 25th century B.C.E., important changes in Egyptian society were already afoot. Smaller pyramids were built, nepotism within the royal families diminished, royal princesses married nonroyals, and the move from a centralized, pharaonic kingdom to a more regionalized structure was well under way. “The idea that this was sudden is nonsense,” he says.

The changes were accelerated rather than caused by the drought, says Barta, citing details such as species of beetles in a 2300 B.C.E. tomb that thrive only in desert conditions. “There’s a sense that the climate change was more gradual,” agrees Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who works at Giza and sees drying as early as the 24th century B.C.E. “It is already happening earlier in the Old Kingdom.”

For Barta, the 22nd century B.C.E. shift away from a single leader lacked the disruptive effect imagined by 19th century C.E. archaeologists and their 21st century descendants who are focused on a short and brutal drought. “There was no collapse,” he insists. While the unified state disappeared and large monuments weren’t built, copper continued to be imported from abroad and the concept of maat or kingship continued to be used at a more local level. “The peasants may never have noticed the change,” he adds.

Not all scholars agree. Some hold fast to the idea of a more rapid climate-based change. “It’s hard to eat when there is no food,” says Weiss. But John Baines of the University of Oxford says Barta’s view of a more gradual transition is “more or less a consensus these days.” He adds that the changes that took place prior, during, and after the Old Kingdom’s demise “were about redistribution of power and wealth more than about collapse.”

Like the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the close of the classic Maya period around 900 C.E. has long been a poster child of collapse. Huge cities in the northern highlands were abandoned, monumental architecture ceased, and royal inscriptions halted. Foreign invasion, epidemics, social revolt, and the collapse of trade have been identified as key factors. Richardson Gill, a Texas businessman and archaeologist, argued a decade ago that the worst drought in 7000 years afflicted the Yucatán Peninsula between 800 C.E. and 1000 C.E., an idea with widespread support. Some researchers now favor a more nuanced version, in which environmental, political, and social changes combined to ravage the society.

But Elizabeth Graham, an archaeologist at University College London who works in the lowlands of Belize, says “there’s not a blip” in the occupation of the Maya areas she has dug along the coast, which lie about 300 kilometers from major inland centers to the north. Graham is convinced that additional settled areas existed during and after the end of the Classic period but that archaeologists haven’t found them yet, due to the uncertainties of preservation in the humid tropics and the difficulties of spotting low mounds in tropical forests.

Coastal sites like Lamanai and Tipu were admittedly smaller than the great inland cities, but Graham says there is no sign of crisis there at the end of the Classic period. Skeletons show no increase in dietary stress, populations seem constant, terraces and check dams are maintained, and sophisticated pottery continues to be crafted. The drying of the climate doesn’t appear to trigger any societal rupture. Such new conclusions are “staggeringly important,” says Norman Yoffee, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and co-editor of a 2010 book called Questioning Collapse that challenged many of Diamond’s ideas.

Not everyone accepts that most of the Maya thrived at the end of the Classic Period, however. “It depends where you are standing,” says Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University. He digs inland, in areas like northern Guatemala, where he says “there absolutely is a collapse.” But he adds that “the image of people dying in the streets is a caricature of what was taking place; these cities just become not very attractive places to live,” in large part because of the loss of an elite. “People voted with their feet.” Houston suggests that the drought took place over a long period of time and that different parts of the Yucatán were affected differently. Even Diamond acknowledges in his writings that the Maya collapse was most intense in the highlands with its more fragile soils. Houston says that archaeologists must look more closely at how regional events may affect local areas in radically different ways. Rising from the ashes?

Ancient ruins and canals prompted the founders of Arizona’s future capital to name their city after the mythological sacred bird that is reborn in its own ashes every 500 years. Five centuries prior, the Hohokam had lived in the Phoenix basin, creating a complex society from 750 C.E. to 1450 C.E. with vast irrigation systems, ball courts, plazas, platform mounds, and polychrome pottery. Then the population vanished, the canals were forgotten, and even outlying areas were abandoned. The abandonment appears total.

Archaeologists have long blamed a sudden onslaught of flooding that destroyed the canals and suggested that field salinization and overpopulation contributed; some see European diseases, arriving after 1500 C.E., as the ultimate culprit. But archaeologist Randall McGuire of Binghamton University in New York state argues that the data don’t support any of these theories.

He says that the lack of remains after 1450 C.E. make the disease idea untenable and that there is no evidence for the destruction of the life-giving canals. Drawing on data from the Center for Desert Archaeology in Tucson, Arizona, he instead links the Hohokam’s disappearance with broader changes across the Southwest between 1250 C.E. and 1450 C.E., when the population shrank by as much as 75%. “This is not a catastrophic event but a slow process over 150 years or more,” he says. “Were [the Hohokam] even aware that this was a ‘collapse’?”

The data show clusters of populations gradually vanishing or migrating during the 2-century period; one cluster in northern New Mexico, by contrast, gradually increases. McGuire suggests that Southwest pueblo structures based on rival clans that kept each other in check survived, while the Hohokam, who increasingly favored a more rigid hierarchical system, eventually failed. So although a drying climate no doubt played a role in the dissolution of societies and the migration of peoples, McGuire believes that a complex combination of religious movements and elite interactions were also important factors and that they took place over a much longer period than previously imagined.

Paul Fish, an archaeologist at Arizona State University, Tempe, says that McGuire “is certainly correct in that no simple environmental, economic, or social explanation is satisfactory.” But he notes that the final years of the Hohokam remain the least understood phase. “I don’t believe we have the dating evidence to know how rapid the decline actually was,” he adds.

Such appeals to “complex factors” have their critics. Weiss, for example, insists that “mushy 1960s multicausality collapses” in the face of hard “21st century paleoclimate data” that definitively pinpoint serious droughts. But other researchers argue that scientists have been too quick to overlook sociological explanations and turned to environmental change “as the snappy explanation” for collapse, as Poul Holm, a historian at Trinity College Dublin, puts it.

Holm decries what he sees as an industry of apocalypse that pervades religion, academia, and even Hollywood, with its blockbusters like 2012. He argues that societies under stress have actually shown surprising resilience in overcoming crises. An old way of life may quietly continue in a revamped but world-changing form, such as the way some Imperial Roman traditions survive today in the Roman Catholic Church.

Unlike the dangers faced by many past societies, however, today’s big threats—global climate change, war, peak oil, economic dislocation—are nearly all due to human choice rather than natural causes. Like Diamond, Holm sees awareness of our predicament as the key to not repeating past mistakes. “At the end of the day, trying to understand how humans cope with change is about how we think,” he says. Immediate threats to individual as well as societal existence may be what humans require to change outdated thinking. We may, after all, need those barbarians at the gate.

↵* Crisis, what Crisis? Collapses and Dark Ages in Comparative Perspective, The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, 24–26 September.

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(Notable)

For those seeking life on Mars, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Nearly 35 years after NASA’s twin Viking robots eased down onto its ruddy surface, there is still no incontrovertible evidence that living organisms ever existed on the fourth planet from the sun. Few researchers accept one scientist’s claims that the 1976 Viking experiment detected life. The brief frenzy over possible fossils in a Mars meteorite has fizzled. And even after billions of dollars’ worth of adorable rovers and eagle-eyed orbiters have prodded and probed the planet, the results have been at best ambiguous and at times downright confusing.

Yet a growing number of space scientists are upbeat, even buoyant, about the likelihood that Mars is a living world. “A variety of discoveries are creating a kind of buzz,” says Chris McKay, an astrogeophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “And people seem more enthusiastic. It’s group psychology.” There has been no single major breakthrough in the search, but a subtle change is taking place within the clubby community dedicated to finding and bringing back organisms—dead or alive—from the Red Planet.

It is not now considered a stupid idea to look for life on Mars,” says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “In recent years the case has been made again and again that life is or was possible there.” Undergirding this new optimism are reams of data—from Earth-based telescopes as well as Mars orbiters, landers, and rovers—that have slowly painted a much more complete and complicated picture of the Mars environment stretching back billions of years, providing intriguing hints that microbes might have once evolved there, and might yet endure.

For younger researchers who were children when Viking landed, it is hard to conceive of a solar system where Earth is the only life-bearing place. They take it for granted that organisms can endure extreme environments. Weird and wonderful forms of life have been found deep within the Earth’s crust, swimming in boiling pools, and clinging to vents deep under the ocean surface. That versatility heartens those looking beyond our own planet. “If it smells like life and looks like life, then it could be life,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a 46-yearold astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman. “There’s a strong sense that we should get missions going to nail this down. I’d be surprised if Mars were sterile.”

That assessment would have raised eyebrows 10 years ago, but it is no longer outside the mainstream. Even William Schopf senses a shift in attitude. The UCLA paleobiologist was the house skeptic at NASA’s 1996 press conference introducing the Mars meteorite and its alleged fossils of microbes. While he remains skeptical, Schopf believes that if biology ever took hold on Mars, it is probably still there. “If we’ve learned one thing in recent years,” he says, “it is that life is resilient.”

No one knows that better than John Baross, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. A very resilient life form nearly killed him. When the bacteria attacked, his body turned as red as a fireplug as his temperature climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. In eight days he lost 38 pounds as the invader released a toxin that ate away at the muscles in his legs and back. While doctors frantically pumped his bloodstream full of antibiotics, the organism hid behind a thin protective skin of sugary slime that made it impervious to the medicine.

Baross at the time happened to be studying just such slime, known as a biofilm. His graduate students sent the hospital extensive information on the bacterium and its protective cloak to share with the puzzled physicians. “We knew more about it than they did,” Baross recalls wryly. Finally, an exhaustive battery of tests pinpointed the invader’s primary location: the liver. Doctors were then able to tailor the meds to overwhelm it. Even so, it took Baross seven painful months to recover.

Baross’s personal encounter with the bacteria deepened his belief that such biofilms might extend from the bottom of the ocean into interplanetary space. Two thousand feet below the sea, in the cracks of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, he and his students recently discovered single-celled organisms flourishing in highly alkaline water close to the boiling point. The gooey film encasing these organisms is the key to their survival.

Such sticky mucilage is among the oldest of known organisms, dating back more than 3 billion years. And Baross’s lab work shows that the mid- Atlantic biofilms have an astonishing capacity for transferring genes. That facility may have been just what early life needed to give rise to the widely varied genomes that walk, swim, and fly on Earth today.

Other researchers are busy scouring our planet to test the limits to organic life. They have found Cephalosporium (fungi that live in highly acidic environments), Euglena and Chlorella (algae that grow in heavy metals), and a cockroach that can survive massive doses of gamma radiation. Some archaea—a domain of microbial life that was little understood when the Viking landers reached their destination—live in even more extreme situations, flourishing in temperatures far above the boiling point of water and surviving in thick brine.

The many extreme-life discoveries led NASA to ask the National Academy of Sciences for help in knowing what to search for beyond our planet. Baross chaired the investigating committee. The group reported that carbon-based life dependent on liquid water and using DNA “is not the only way to create phenomena that would be recognized as life.” Quickly dubbed the “weird life report,” the study dramatically concluded that many locales in the solar system could support life drawing on a variety of liquids and energy sources. “I think life existed on Mars,” Baross says. And if it did, he—like Schopf— thinks that it, or evidence of it, is probably still there.

Life’s resilience and the sheer diversity of terrestrial organisms were not obvious on July 20, 1976, when the first Viking lander touched down on Mars’s Chryse Planitia lowlands, programmed to find life as we then knew it. At the time, that meant looking for water, warmth, and the right nutrients for delicate organisms. Scientists didn’t dream that life could flourish in brine pockets of sea ice or in mine water filled with heavy metals. “In hindsight, what we did with Viking was incredibly naive,” Jakosky says. “We have since learned that life can be exceedingly difficult to detect.”

And yet one man insists that the Viking search yielded a positive result. “In my mind the question is resolved,” says Gilbert Levin, the leader of one of the Viking experiments, the Labeled Release Life Detection Experiment. Ever since the data came in from Viking, he has argued that his tests gave evidence consistent with life on Mars; now, after further analysis, he believes they prove its existence. His colleagues have responded with doubt, even derision, over the years. But growing knowledge about extremophiles on Earth and the environment on Mars has given Levin, who just turned 86, hope that his assertion will finally be taken seriously.

Levin’s recipe for smoking out Martian life was elegantly simple: Scoop up Martian dirt with the Viking arm, seal it in a chamber, add an organic compound with a trace of radioactive carbon, and wait. Any bacteria similar to those on Earth would exhale radioactive gas. Next, take a second sample and subject it to high heat to kill off any microorganisms, then add more radioactive compounds to the chamber. If there is no subsequent radioactive release, that demonstrates that there are living microbes on Mars.

Indeed, the chambers on both Viking landers signaled a radioactive reading in the first round followed by none in the second. Levin celebrated with champagne and cigars. But within days that finding was contradicted by results from the gas chromatograph spectrometer, which detected no sign of organic compounds, much less evidence of life. And without organic compounds— molecular combinations of carbon and hydrogen—life as we know it is not imaginable.

Scientists assumed that a nonbiological reaction had caused Levin’s instruments to register life, and the lack of organics seemed to seal the deal. NASA lost interest in what seemed a quixotic quest, and Mars exploration was abandoned. “And from then until now, the gospel is that Mars doesn’t have any organics in its soil,” McKay says. The irony is that we now know such compounds litter the solar system, present everywhere from Saturn’s moon Titan to common meteorites; organics are probably present even on Mars’s little moons, Phobos and Deimos.

In 2008 the NASA Phoenix lander added fuel—literally—to the debate. The robot detected perchlorates, charged particles consisting of a single chlorine atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms, in the arctic soil taken from near the planet’s north pole. That molecule helped Phoenix get to Mars in the first place, since perchlorate is a powerful rocket fuel. Some researchers took the presence of perchlorate as another sign that life on Mars’s surface is unlikely, since the compound is a powerful oxidizer, acting like a bleach at high temperatures.

But McKay believes the find is an exciting hint of life’s presence. “This is the most important discovery since Viking,” he contends. “This made our whole world change.” In his reading, the Viking gas chromatograph scooped up soil, heated it, and in so doing activated the perchlorate, which then destroyed the very organics the spacecraft was searching for. Only a single type of molecule, which could have been produced by the perchlorate reacting with organics, appeared in each sample. “The results were misinterpreted,” McKay says. “And our whole community is in denial.”

Schulze-Makuch agrees, saying the Viking gas chromatograph lacked sensitivity; it also failed to register life when a version of the device on Earth was fed a sample from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, a seemingly barren place that actually hosts some microorganisms. He adds that perchlorates could serve as a potent energy source as well as a way for life to access water. In the Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the world’s most desiccated spots, perchlorate in the soil can condense water out of the atmosphere. Intriguingly, small droplets—which appeared to be water—were spotted in photos on the legs of the Phoenix lander.

Micrograph of a Mars meteorite on Earth; the rim of Concepcion, a young Martian crater; Viking 2 gathering Mars soil for analysis

So while some researchers see the perchlorate find as another sign of life’s unlikelihood on Mars, Schulze-Makuch is positively elated. “From an extremophile perspective, this story is a plus for life,” he says. For example, instead of using a water-based substance as a basis for its cellular processes, a Martian organism might use hydrogen peroxide, a molecule similar to perchlorate that is abundant on Mars. The debate may finally be resolved when NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory arrives in the autumn of 2012. “Our great hope is that we will find organics either in the soil or inside rocks” drilled by the robot, McKay says.

The renewed possibility of organics on Mars has led researchers to reconsider the conclusions of Levin. “The community is not convinced he’s right, but he’s a first-rate scientist, and you can’t just dismiss what he says,” Jakosky notes. At UCLA, Schopf argues that laboratory tests long ago showed how nonbiological soil chemistry could have produce the results seen on Viking. But he admits that the mainstream view could prove false. “Levin isn’t necessarily wrong,” he says. “There are lots of examples of people who stick to their guns and are proved right —think of Alfred Wegener and continental drift.”

Like Levin, the team that claims it found evidence of life in a Mars rock dubbed Allan Hills 84001 remains unbowed in the face of widespread scientific skepticism. That rock was blasted off the surface of the Red Planet millions of years ago and fell to Earth as a meteorite landing in Antarctica. At its famous 1996 press conference, a group from NASA Johnson Space Center led by David McKay—no relation to Chris—laid out four lines of chemical and physical evidence that they believed made a strong case for life on Mars.

After years of further analysis and debate, many astrobiologists think that three of those four can be shown to be the result of nonliving chemical or geological activity. The fourth line is tenuous but more intriguing. The meteorite is full of grains of an iron oxide mineral called magnetite, each grain a mere 20 to 120 nanometers across. On Earth, organisms called magnetotactic bacteria routinely manufacture such tiny crystals. But in 2003 two papers noted that there are other ways to make magnetite crystals, such as slamming a rock from space onto the Martian surface. The intense heat could degrade carbonates and form similar structures.

In November 2009 the McKay team struck back with a new paper. Using advanced microscopy, they noted that the crystals in the Allan Hills sample are too pure to be explained by a thermal event. “We do not believe it is too incautious to restate our original hypothesis that such magnetites constitute strong evidence of early life on Mars,” said lead author Kathie Thomas-Keprta at the time. A member of the original Allan Hills team, she insists that there is no longer an alternative to the existence of life in the formation of the crystals. “We’re left with only one hypothesis standing,” she says. Her next step is to find corroborating evidence in other meteorites.

Baross argues that if Earthlike life-forms created these crystals, they would have to be highly sophisticated organisms. Given the harsh environment, he finds it unlikely that any Mars life evolved far beyond simple biofilms. Other researchers say that any number of chemical processes might be responsible. “It’s almost a fool’s errand,” Jakosky says. “You could spend the rest of your life altering formulas to show what can or cannot make magnetite.”

Baross argues that if Earthlike life-forms created these crystals, they would have to be highly sophisticated organisms. Given the harsh environment, he finds it unlikely that any Mars life evolved far beyond simple biofilms. Other researchers say that any number of chemical processes might be responsible. “It’s almost a fool’s errand,” Jakosky says. “You could spend the rest of your life altering formulas to show what can or cannot make magnetite.”

Thomas-Keprta believes the data and the momentum are on her side. “As a group, scientists now consider Mars to have once been habitable, and it may still be so,” she says. “We’re a long way from the dry and desiccated deserts of the past. Mars could have supported a biosphere.”

Some researchers believe the mere presence on Earth of a meteorite from its distant neighbor underscores the possibility that life has been transferred from planet to planet.

Perhaps the most intriguing sign of life since the Allan Hills announcement was the detection of methane in the thin Martian atmosphere. The discovery by a number of research teams did not grab headlines around the world as the Mars rock did, but it may prove more important in the quest to find life. On Earth, methane is emitted by two sources: living creatures, such as cows, and geological formations, such as mud volcanoes. So the methane on Mars may be the result of geological activity or life—or both.

Methane on Mars may be the result of geological activity or life—or both.

Last year, using groundbased telescopes, a team led by Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reported that Mars’s methane is concentrated in vast plumes. The team charted the spread of several plumes across the northern hemisphere as summer approached and noted that they seemed to originate above volcanic regions. One plume expanded to include more detecthan 20,000 tons of methane, comparable to the output of the Santa Barbara seep, one of the largest geological methane sources on Earth.

There is no doubt Mars once rumbled and spewed. The planet is home to the solar system’s largest volcano, Olympus Mons, which is as tall as three Mount Everests. But geologists have found little evidence of activity in recent eons; the newest volcanic deposits date back millions of years. Besides, volcanoes typically give off not just methane but a host of other gases, and those have not been detected.

Mumma says he stands by his data. But some scientists— Chris McKay, for example—see it as highly unlikely that the Red Planet is active enough to produce methane and believe there is no explanation for its high rate of dissipation in the atmosphere. “I’m forced to conclude that the methane data are probably wrong,” McKay says.

Baross, however, is excited by the possibility that the methane results from a chemical process called serpentinization, which can provide a rich environment for life. “It’s a driving force for recycling nutrients in the Earth system,” he says. Cold water reacts with oxidants to crack rock, producing heat and a host of mineral compounds. “It’s a really dynamic process, and if it is going on on Mars, then you may be circulating a lot of liquid water through rock.” That is a purely chemical process, but it is the same one that led to the growth of slimy organisms along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Back on Mars, NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers have found evidence of minerals associated with serpentinization.

The topsoil of Mars is probably dead, due to the intense radiation and extreme temperatures (–195° to 70°F), but the prospects for life look much better below the surface. Baross wants a mission that drills below the places Mumma has pinpointed as methane sources, and that goes far deeper than the drilling planned for future missions. He envisions a sophisticated robot that could do the equivalent of deep-sea drilling, boring down hundreds of meters. Only then, he believes, can scientists answer the heady question of life on Mars.

For most life seekers, the ultimate goal is getting a few pounds of Martian rock back to a lab on Earth. “What we need is a sample return,” Jakosky says. NASA and ESA currently envision a joint mission to bring back the Martian goods around the middle of the next decade. But the cost—possibly $8 billion— makes that a tough sell in the current economic climate. Baross is also wary of grabbing a few rocks and repeating Viking’s legacy of ambiguous, yet-to-be-understood results.

In the meantime, Jakosky’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe is slated to arrive in 2013, two years after the Mars Science Laboratory. If all goes as planned, joint European- U.S. projects will yield an orbiter ready for launch in 2016 and two rovers in 2018. None of these probes is likely to find the direct evidence of life that will settle the debate, though. “My guess is that skepticism will remain in the science community almost regardless of what is found,” Schopf predicts. “That’s not to say the missions won’t lead us in the right direction.”

A slow, steady pace is just what is needed, NASA managers insist. “The key is to do careful, long-range homework,” says Michael Meyer, lead scientist of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. Gathering more detailed data on surface chemistry, the history of liquid water, climate cycles, and the exact constituents of the atmosphere are critical to building a case for—or against—life.

That approach may seem conservative to some, but it takes into account the hardlearned lessons of Viking. And it will provide the foundation for the extraordinary evidence required to support the most extraordinary of claims. “This could lead to the most stupendous discovery in the history of human existence,” Schopf says, speaking with the practiced patience of a scientist. “Little steps add up.”

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About Gene S. Stuart Award

An award to honor outstanding efforts to enhance public understanding of archaeology, in memory of Gene S. Stuart (1930-1993), a writer and managing editor of National Geographic Society books. The award is given to the author of the most interesting and responsible original story or series about any archaeological topic published in a newspaper or magazine.

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The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2008 First Churches of the Jesus Cult / Archaeology Magazine
(Winner)

As dusk approaches, Korean pilgrims in white baseball caps blow horns and sing hymns atop Tel Megiddo. This crossroads in northern Israel–also known as Armageddon–is where the New Testament says the final battle pitting good against evil will begin. Below the huge mound, tour buses idle, throngs of visitors buy postcards, and a nearby McDonald’s does a thriving business at its drive-through window.

On the opposite side of the busy highway are the grim brick walls and coiled barbed wire of a high-security prison. It is an awkward place for an important archaeological site. Unlike at the mound, visitors are not welcome here. Even archaeologists must apply well in advance for access–something I wasn’t granted–so I am left standing outside the gates with Yotam Tepper of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The mosaic floor that he and a team of inmates discovered under the prison yard may mark one of the earliest known places of Christian worship.

Franciscan archaeologists contend that the disciple Peter’s home lies beneath this octagonal shrine built after Constantine’s reign. Today, a modern church with a glass floor shelters the ancient buildings. (BauBau PhotoWire)

This site in the city of Aqaba on the Red Sea may contain the ruins of a pre-Constantinian church. (Courtesy Thomas Parker)

Although the site may date to a full century before the Roman emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan transforming Christianity from a disparate group of Jesus-worshipping cults to a powerful state religion in A.D. 313, these early followers of the controversial faith weren’t hiding their beliefs. “There were Samaritans and Jews and Romans and Christians all living together in just this small place,” says Tepper. A Roman soldier paid for the mosaics, and members of the congregation may even have baked bread for Rome’s sixth legion, stationed nearby.

The find at Megiddo is a key piece of evidence in a radical rethinking of how Christianity evolved during its first three centuries, before it was backed by the might of empire. Until recently, scholars had to rely on ancient texts that emphasize the vicious persecution of the church–think lions dining on martyrs in Rome’s Colosseum. A growing body of archaeological data, however, paints a more diverse and surprising picture in which Christians thrived alongside Jews and the Roman military. These finds make this “a definitive time in our field” since they appear to contradict the literary sources on which historians have long depended, says Eric Meyers, a biblical archaeologist at Duke University.

Megiddo is only the latest in a series of recent digs in the Near East revealing a more complex history of the early Christian era. Near the Red Sea in the Jordanian city of Aqaba, archaeologists have uncovered what the dig director, Thomas Parker of North Carolina State University, argues is a pre-Constantinian prayer hall. At Capernaum, just an hour’s drive from Megiddo, Franciscan monks believe they have excavated a pilgrimage site dating to as early as the first century A.D. on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Such discoveries are unusual; the only undisputed early Christian worship site is at Dura Europas, on the Euphrates River in modern Syria, which was excavated in the 1920s and ’30s by French and American teams. How the most recently discovered sites were used and dated, however, is hotly contested.

Andrew Lawler is a staff writer for Science magazine.

The post The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2008 First Churches of the Jesus Cult / Archaeology Magazine (Winner) appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2007 Inside the Restoration of the Amirya Madrassa /  Discover Magazine
(Notable)

With foundation walls three feet thick, the Amiriya, a 16th-century palace and mosque in Rada, Yemen, has weathered earthquakes, monsoons, and tribal warfare. The ruler who sponsored the monument, Sultan Amir ibn Abd al-Wahhab, had a residence on the second floor. The first floor contains this courtyard.

It took almost 15 years of labor with wooden tools and dental instruments to clean the stucco in the prayer hall. Beneath the whitewash, every crevice was filled with dried carpet-beetle larvae.

The Amiriya is by far the most exuberant of Yemen’s 48 surviving painted mosques. Koranic inscriptions and a multitude of brilliant geometric and floral patterns animate the walls of its prayer hall. Above, the hall before and after restoration. Archaeologist Selma al-Radi calls the hall a pattern book of designs. Some, like those shown below, resemble textile designs from India.

But before construction began, Portuguese ships were spotted off the coast of Yemen, retracing the course of Vasco da Gama, who had sailed to India in 1498. Soon the Portuguese had taken control of shipping routes in the

Indian Ocean. The Mamluks who ruled Egypt solicited help from Sultan Amir to fight the Portuguese. sultan’s reluctance to join them led to battles that ended his reign. Trapped by the Mamluk army, was captured and his head impaled on a pike at the entrance to Sanaa, a town about 150 miles from Rada. The Tahirid’s ancient enemies, the Zaydi imams from the north of Yemen, took power. They eschewed contact with infidels, and thus the sea trade. For the next 400 years, the imams and the Ottomans of Istanbul vied for control. The Amiriya fell into disrepair.

When al-Radi took on the restoration in 1983, she didn’t know where to begin. She consulted with Izzi Muhammad Gasaa, a master stonemason in town, who agreed to work at half his rate. “Ifollowed him,” she says, “and learned from him.”

He died in 1987 at the age of 62, long before the project’s completion. But his son, Muhammad Gasaa, continued the work. Al-Radi used the project to foster traditional building skills among a cadre of workers whom she hopes will rescue the region’s heritage. “Eventually, these people will export their knowledge of plaster, wood, masonry, mud bricks, and waterproofing,” she says.

Al-Radi despises the common practice of using cement to repair ancient buildings. “Slapping on cement is easy and cheap, but it actually pulls a building apart,” she says. “I’ve told officials in Syria and Jordan and elsewhere that we have the knowledge and techniques to do this correctly, but they think I’m the funniest thing they’ve ever met.”

Using a mortar called qudad, made from a mix of quicklime and volcanic cinders, al-Radi’s workers pound a layer into the cracks between brick or stone, then smear a thin layer over the entire external surface of the building. Workers spend months polishing the surface with smooth river stones. Hairline cracks mean that large expanses must be redone. Once completed, qudad can last centuries with little maintenance.

On a recent afternoon, a local man seated in the shade across from the Amiriya called out sharply to al-Radi, asking when he will once again be able to pray in the Amiriya. “It will be a museum,” she replied, just as brusquely.

From the April 2006 issue, published online April 2, 2006

The post The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2007 Inside the Restoration of the Amirya Madrassa / Discover Magazine (Notable) appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2006 Damning Sudan / Archaeology Magazine
(Notable)

The Land Rover is stuck, and the Manoosir tribesmen aren’t lending a hand. In Sudan, where African generosity meets Arab politeness, this means trouble. Even our easygoing Sudanese driver tenses. A few miles downstream from this dusty mud-brick town on a remote bend of the Nile River, Chinese engineers are building the massive Meroe Dam that as early as next year may flood the villagers’ homes, fields, and more than 100 miles of fertile valley. And archaeologists working to save what they can of this largely unexplored region before the waters rise are not welcomed by the locals. With our car and our equipment and our pale skin, we are harbingers of the end of their way of life.

Unable to move forward through deep sand, we’re forced to back up through a narrow alley as it fills with silent and unsmiling onlookers. But hospitality overcomes animosity, and an old man directs us to another dusty street, which leads to a slightly more passable sand track and the open desert beyond. Our driver guns it out of town. We’d been told in Khartoum not to stop while passing through Manoosir territory. A few months earlier, anger erupted on nearby Sherri Island when tribesmen—many of whom will be forced to relocate to barren desert—led marches and burned offices belonging to the dam project. In April, less than a month after our visit, militiamen killed and wounded more protesters in a bloody shootout in nearby Amri. And this past winter representatives of the Manoosir, who live on a long swath of the riverbank, politely but firmly told archaeologists to stay away. Foreign and Sudanese excavators are taking that advice seriously, and they are not sure if they can return.

The Meroe Dam already poses a humanitarian crisis. It will displace more than 50,000 people who live along this isolated region of the Nile, growing dates and herding sheep and goats. But the project is also creating a cultural heritage disaster largely ignored by the international media, UNESCO, and private preservation groups. Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of ancient sites are likely to vanish underwater as early as next year without even cursory examination.

That impending destruction comes just as a half-dozen Sudanese and foreign teams discover that the obscure region was not the backwater archaeologists long imagined. During the past few seasons of hurried salvage work, the teams pinpointed hundreds of settlements and cemeteries spanning four millennia, rock art depicting everything from Neolithic giraffes, to Greek crosses, to an ancient pyramid. “We thought it was inhospitable and poor,” concedes Derek Welsby, a British Museum archaeologist who has spent five seasons digging in the region and hopes to return this winter if the violence subsides. “But what we’re finding causes us to rethink that. This area is so incredibly rich in archaeology.”

Just getting here—300 miles north of Sudan’s capital Khartoum—illustrates why excavators have long ignored the region. Crammed into our Land Rover is Geoff Emberling, director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute’s museum, his colleague Bruce Williams, Sudanese archaeologist Rihab Khedir, our driver Mohammad, as well as me and our camping gear. Emberling invited me to tag along on the spring visit as he searches for a place to dig in the coming season. After a day’s driving, the road gives out. The northward-flowing Nile makes a great bend here, twisting west and then south before straightening on its way into Egypt. The surrounding landscape is dramatic but barren, and the river in this section runs through the Fourth Cataract, a rocky stretch with rapids, shoals, and islands. Traveling along the cataract requires a sturdy truck and an experienced driver to cope with rocky plains, steep hills, and deep sand. A British-built railroad punctuated by nineteenth-century depots still crosses the region; when the sand becomes too deep, Mohammad hops the vehicle onto the tracks to make time. We jump off at the sight of a train hauling a heavily armored caboose, a sign of the tension that pervades the entire country. Countless lush date-palm groves, fields of wheat and barley, and small villages hug the river. The inhabitants lack electricity, phones, or cars, but the villages have a clean and prosperous feel. The Fourth Cataract initially drew Paleolithic and Neolithic hunters and gatherers in a wetter era, when the African savannah reached this far north. When the climate grew more arid, people settled along the river’s banks. In the first and second millennia b.c., the region was part of ancient Nubia, which served alternately as conqueror, vassal, and economic partner to Egypt, and as a critical link between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean, with its own proud indigenous culture. The more famous and accessible Nubian sites—such as the ancient capital of Napata, which flourished from the ninth to the third century b.c., and Meroe, its powerful successor, which predominated for the next 600 years—lie just upstream and downstream of the Fourth Cataract. Though the Meroitic kingdom disintegrated by the end of the fourth century a.d., leaving behind an undeciphered script, small Christian kingdoms in the region survived until about 1500. When archaeologists first examined the area in the nineteenth century, they focused on sites, including Meroe and Napata, with their royal burials (“The Other Pyramids,” September/October 2002). A century later, the Fourth Cataract remained largely unsurveyed and unexcavated.

President al-Bashir of Sudan, center, watches as dam project director Osama Abdalla and Qu Zhe, head of China’s Harbin enginering company, complete a $400-million deal to build a power plant at the dam.

Talk of damming the Fourth Cataract goes back a half-century, so the actual start of construction caught both local residents and foreign archaeologists off-
guard. For nearly 30 years, the Sudanese government has tried to jump-start the effort, but a brutal civil war in the south and the country’s dire financial straits kept the project on hold. But the discovery of vast reservoirs of oil in the late 1990s caught the attention of energy-hungry China. With its newfound oil revenues—largely from China—Sudan was able to begin the dam in earnest in 2003. It gave Beijing’s International Water and Electric Corp. the lead on the $1.5-billion project, with Germany’s Lahmeyer International and France’s Alstrom as key subcontractors. Despite the genocide in Darfur to the west, a peace treaty last year ending the north-south civil war, combined with the drive for oil development, has made officials in Khartoum eager to increase the desperately needed electrical capacity of Sudan. To them, the price of doubling that capacity—drowning a remote region inhabited by farmers and herders—seems small.

After their owners are paid compensation for them, the government burns palm trees in the area to be flooded to prevent farmers from harvesting dates.

Once completed in 2008, the dam will rise 220 feet above the riverbed and stretch more than 5 miles across the Nile Valley, creating a lake more than 2 miles wide and 108 miles in length. The archaeological impact will not be limited to the flooded valley. Construction of massive transmission lines and relocation sites for displaced people will disturb large areas, and a planned network of canals radiating from the new lake will raise groundwater levels downstream, posing a hazard to a host of famous sites like Meroe and Napata. “It all seems very ominous,” says Timothy Kendall, a Northeastern University archaeologist with long experience excavating in Sudan.

Despite the enormous impact, international organizations such as UNESCO—which played such an important role in Egypt during the Aswan High Dam salvage efforts of the 1960s—are missing in action. In the late 1990s, the renowned French Egyptologist Jean Leclair took UNESCO officials on a field mission to drum up interest, but nothing came of it. Today, UNESCO instead is focused on building cultural heritage centers in devastated southern Sudan and in placing Napata and Meroe on the list of World Heritage Sites. When I met her in Khartoum, UNESCO representative Chiara Dezzi-Bardeschi was not aware of either the humanitarian or cultural heritage problems associated with the dam. Even if UNESCO were to get involved now, it would be too late to assist in the salvage. Though the dam won’t be finished until 2008, the waters will begin rising next summer.

Etchings reflect a changing climate: the elephant an earlier, wetter one, and the camel a later, drier one.

What’s Going Under       While the people of the Fourth Cataract region lacked the wealth, monuments, and political muscle of the inhabitants upstream and downstream, they appear to have been more intimately tied to the surrounding cultural currents than scholars had guessed. Rock art discovered along the river depicts giraffes and ostriches, a sign that early hunter-gatherers found the savanna of that period rich and hospitable. A 2005 expedition funded by London’s Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa uncovered two Paleolithic sites with thousands of flakes and cores, which may have produced material for long-distance trade.       In the fourth millennium b.c., dryer conditions concentrated the population in the river valley, and agricultural societies developed up and down the banks of the Nile. The Kerma culture—named after the settlement just above the Third Cataract—began to emerge in 2500 b.c. Archaeologists long thought this culture never had an impact farther upstream, in the Fourth Cataract. But to their surprise, a team led by Derek Welsby of the British Museum found remains from early Kerma, which lasted until 2050 b.c. A team led by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum working on the Nile’s right bank also uncovered extensive Kerma remains from the era that began about 1700 and lasted until 1550 b.c., at an astonishing 90 sites, including 30 cemeteries. One settlement located near the villages of Argub and Khosh covered 150 acres and boasted stone buildings and Egyptian pottery imports, as well as locally made pots in a Kerma style. Though apparently lacking major urban centers, the area clearly was tied to the Kerma culture and its trading network.       Material recovered from the later Napatan and Meroitic periods is sparser. But Welsby’s team discovered a pyramid with an offering chapel and enclosure wall near the village of el-Kenisa typical of those built between the eighth and fifth centuries b.c. The structure is 18 feet square and would have risen 18 feet high, with a capstone of yellow Nubian sandstone quarried from a site more than 30 miles away. The area appeared to revive in the early centuries a.d. Working on the Nile’s left bank near the town of Hamdab, a team from Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) found a large post-Meroitic cemetery.       Digs by NCAM and foreign teams also reveal a surprisingly vibrant Christian period, which lasted for a thousand years after the collapse of Meroe. A host of medieval Christian forts dot the river, remnants of small kingdoms that fended off each other or the Muslim tide that followed the Nile upstream. On Us Island last season, Humboldt University’s Claudia Naesser excavated a small late-thirteenth-century church complete with intact altar, baptismal font, and a foundation inscription consecrated in Greek to Jacob and Mary. The inscription includes an unusual ending that might be a rare remnant of Old Nubian, Naesser adds. Such a structure, along with its adjacent cemetery, provides critical new evidence about a largely unknown period. “No one knows the role of the Fourth Cataract in late Christian times,” she says. “But clearly there was a very active community life.” She hopes next season to examine another larger church, which appears fortified and could be a medieval monastery, on nearby Sur Island.

While the people of the Fourth Cataract region lacked the wealth, monuments, and political muscle of the inhabitants upstream and downstream, they appear to have been more intimately tied to the surrounding cultural currents than scholars had guessed. Rock art discovered along the river depicts giraffes and ostriches, a sign that early hunter-gatherers found the savanna of that period rich and hospitable. A 2005 expedition funded by London’s Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa uncovered two Paleolithic sites with thousands of flakes and cores, which may have produced material for long-distance trade.

In the fourth millennium b.c., dryer conditions concentrated the population in the river valley, and agricultural societies developed up and down the banks of the Nile. The Kerma culture—named after the settlement just above the Third Cataract—began to emerge in 2500 b.c. Archaeologists long thought this culture never had an impact farther upstream, in the Fourth Cataract. But to their surprise, a team led by Derek Welsby of the British Museum found remains from early Kerma, which lasted until 2050 b.c. A team led by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum working on the Nile’s right bank also uncovered extensive Kerma remains from the era that began about 1700 and lasted until 1550 b.c., at an astonishing 90 sites, including 30 cemeteries. One settlement located near the villages of Argub and Khosh covered 150 acres and boasted stone buildings and Egyptian pottery imports, as well as locally made pots in a Kerma style. Though apparently lacking major urban centers, the area clearly was tied to the Kerma culture and its trading network.

Material recovered from the later Napatan and Meroitic periods is sparser. But Welsby’s team discovered a pyramid with an offering chapel and enclosure wall near the village of el-Kenisa typical of those built between the eighth and fifth centuries b.c. The structure is 18 feet square and would have risen 18 feet high, with a capstone of yellow Nubian sandstone quarried from a site more than 30 miles away. The area appeared to revive in the early centuries a.d. Working on the Nile’s left bank near the town of Hamdab, a team from Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) found a large post-Meroitic cemetery.

Digs by NCAM and foreign teams also reveal a surprisingly vibrant Christian period, which lasted for a thousand years after the collapse of Meroe. A host of medieval Christian forts dot the river, remnants of small kingdoms that fended off each other or the Muslim tide that followed the Nile upstream. On Us Island last season, Humboldt University’s Claudia Naesser excavated a small late-thirteenth-century church complete with intact altar, baptismal font, and a foundation inscription consecrated in Greek to Jacob and Mary. The inscription includes an unusual ending that might be a rare remnant of Old Nubian, Naesser adds. Such a structure, along with its adjacent cemetery, provides critical new evidence about a largely unknown period. “No one knows the role of the Fourth Cataract in late Christian times,” she says. “But clearly there was a very active community life.” She hopes next season to examine another larger church, which appears fortified and could be a medieval monastery, on nearby Sur Island.

National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), a government organization based in Khartoum that oversees archaeology. Thanks to NCAM’s urgent pleas, small teams of Polish, German, Hungarian, British, and American—as well as Sudanese—archaeologists began surveying and excavating over the past five years. To entice the foreigners, NCAM’s leaders took a bold step. Foreign archaeologists could take home half of the museum-quality goods, aside from those that are unique, as well as nearly all the potsherds and animal and human bones they uncovered. Such exports are difficult if not impossible in most of the Near East and northern Africa today, so the prospect of a scientific and collection bonanza made it easier for researchers to raise money to pay for their digs.

A Greek text on a foundation brick excavated at an early church site identifies the sanctuary as the Church of Jacob and Mary, mother of God.

Such enticement is necessary. Nubia itself was long considered by archaeologists to be peripheral, a poor cousin to ancient Egypt, and the Fourth Cataract was on the margins of that margin. More recently scholars have begun to reenvision Nubia as a remarkably long-lasting society that was a key player during more than three millennia of war, diplomacy, and trade in the Mediterranean and eastern Africa. Welsby and others working on the salvage effort say the evidence gleaned during recent seasons paints a much more complex picture. For example, a team led by Henryk Paner of Poland’s Gdansk Archaeological Museum, working on the Nile’s right bank, cataloged 711 sites—from Paleolithic to Islamic—in its 2003 season alone (see “What’s Going Under,” page 39).

The eagerness of the archaeologists to explore this region fully is being thwarted not just by international indifference, but by violence and bloodshed. Thousands of small farmers, mostly members of the Hamadab, Shagiya, and Manoosir tribes, who eke out a living tending date palms and small fields and herding goats and sheep, face imminent eviction. Though the Sudanese government is building new housing for the displaced, much of it is on barren land far from adequate supplies of water. “There is nothing there,” says Kendall, who visited one new development. “There are mud-brick cubicles by the thousands in the middle of the desert that are absolutely horrific.”

The Manoosir tribe has been particularly outspoken in insisting that they be allowed at least to resettle on the banks of the new lake, and government officials say that some will be permitted to remain along the Nile. But last November, Chinese engineers refused locals access to a well; when livestock died as a result, a riot ensued. And in April three farmers were killed and 50 injured in the town of Amri along the river. Conflicting reports by news organizations and humanitarian groups say that government soldiers or armed militiamen opened fire on protestors gathered at midday at the town school.

The increased tension and outbreaks of violence prompted senior members of the Manoosir tribe to ask archaeological expeditions to leave their territory this past winter. In November, Manoosir representatives warned a Warsaw University team that they were not safe, so they cut their season short. And Claudia Naesser, director of excavations for Berlin’s Humboldt University, had only been at her site for one week in February when she got wind of a meeting of Manoosir elders in the nearby market village of Salamat to discuss whether her group would be permitted to stay. At a small flour shop where a dozen of the Manoosir leaders had gathered, she showed a film about the dam project and the Manoosir that aired in Germany, as well as a website her team developed that provides ethnographic data on the tribe. Outside the little shop, she recalls, “hundreds of people were trying to find out what was going on inside, and jostling to catch a glimpse of the images on the laptop.”

But the elders had already voted to ask her team to depart. “They had a stupid idea that by preventing archaeologists from doing their work, they will prevent the completion of the dam and the flooding that will follow,” she says. She could not convince them that halting archaeology would have no impact on the dam’s schedule. The Manoosir insisted that the team go, arguing that it would be dangerous for them if a foreigner were hurt and they were blamed. Naesser says that she respects their decision, saying that “what happens to the people is more important than what happens to the archaeology.” She hired a truck and moved her dig to Mugrat Island upstream, an area that will not be affected by the dam.

Other archaeologists likewise are moving their operations away from the areas certain to be inundated. Emberling of the University of Chicago, for example, received a concession in Manoosir territory. But when we arrived in Khartoum, NCAM officials warned it would not be safe to work there. Instead, we examined an area at the far upstream end of the future lake, where a team from the University of California at Santa Barbara led by Stuart Smith has been working without incident since 2003. Whether and when the area is in danger of flooding, which would make it a priority, is unclear. “There are no reliable models for how quickly the lake will rise,” explains Naesser.

An archaeologist excavates an early Christian burial in a cemetery site that will be flooded as early as next year.

Even the villagers who live there are uncertain. In Ginefab, a small town on the north bank, an elder in a thin cotton robe offered to lead us on an afternoon stroll through the date-palm plantations that stretch down to the fast-moving river. Every family has 70 or 80 date palms, he explained through an interpreter as we walked through the cool grove. He expects the water to rise perhaps as high as it does during the biggest annual Nile floods, which would ultimately drown the trees, but he doesn’t expect the flooding to occur for seven or eight years. In a neighboring town, however, a farmer complained that “the government has not told us anything,” and in a third village downstream called Al Qir, another farmer said he would be happy to move if he received compensation.

While I’m chatting with that farmer, Emberling and Williams excitedly crisscross one of his fields along the banks of the Nile. They quickly turn up flints and sherds that hint at occupation from Neolithic to Christian times. But this evidence may be gone by winter; the farmer has recently plowed up a field that likely was also part of the site. Even if it is still intact, the lack of roads and supplies in the region makes any expedition a trial. “Doing justice to this area is going to be tough,” says Emberling. “The logistics are just so hard.” And if the government resettles the locals, it may prove hard to find the labor needed to assist in excavations.

How much will be lost in the impending inundation is anyone’s guess. Welsby says there are many thousands of sites to be studied, and adds that the restrictions posed by the resettlement fracas will certainly mean that a large number will vanish before even surveys can be done, much less excavations. Each salvage team is taking a different approach; some are making broad surveys, while others, like Welsby’s, are focusing on a few promising digs.

NCAM’s Abdelhai Abdelsawi, deputy field director of the Fourth Cataract effort, says he is confident that an agreement will be reached and the violence will subside by autumn. 

Meanwhile, however, the dam’s construction is moving ahead, whether or not there is a deal. Abdelsawi says flooding will start in August 2007, though it will be not until 2008 or 2009 that large sections are underwater. With time short and larger forces at work, archaeologists are watching closely to see what they can rescue before it is too late. “I just don’t know what will happen, and whether they will agree to let us return, but I’m not very optimistic,” says Claudia Naesser. Whether or not the salvage teams resume their work, however, the Fourth Cataract—after a brief emergence into the archaeological limelight—seems destined to slip back into obscurity, this time for eternity.

The post The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2006 Damning Sudan / Archaeology Magazine (Notable) appeared first on Andrew Lawler.

The Best of Science and Nature Writing  2003 Treasure Under Saddam’s Feet / Discover Magazine
(Winner)

You are drifting down the sluggish, muddy Tigris River on a reed raft, headed for a prominent spur of rock rising from a broad plain. Upon the rock stand the massive walls of brightly painted temples. Just behind them soars a brilliantly colored temple tower, or ziggurat, nearly 200 feet high, with a pair of smaller ziggurats in the background. Beyond sprawl the roofs of vast royal palaces housing magnificent reception halls and sealed underground tombs.

As the boat docks, sunbaked sailors and stevedores unload goods and tribute, everything from African ivory to Anatolian metals to Afghan lapis lazuli. Traders, donkeys, pilgrims, horses, artisans, priests, and diplomats pass through the dozen gates above. This is bustling Assur, a town of perhaps 30,000, one of the most dazzling sights in Mesopotamia and in the entire ancient world.

Assur was the birthplace and spiritual center of Assyria, the mother of all empires. At its zenith in the seventh century B.C., Assyria’s rule stretched from the southern borders of Egypt to the Persian Gulf and north to the Turkish highlands. Although largely forgotten, Assyrians assembled the first truly multicultural empire, built the first great library, and designed some of the first planned cities. They were the first to divide the circle into 360 degrees and gave the world technologies ranging from aqueducts to paved roads. The Assyrians also laid the foundation for the more famous Persian, Greek, Roman, and Parthian empires.

Today Assur is nothing more than a desolate mound. Countless seasons of rain and desert wind have eaten away at the mud-brick ziggurat, and 19th-century Ottoman barracks cover the once-holy promontory. Nonetheless, this is a troubling site. Although there is great promise of archaeological treasure beneath the rubble here, the area faces even greater obliteration. The Iraqi government is planning to complete a massive dam downstream on the Tigris. Within four years, the ancient metropolis—the oldest and most revered site among a chain of Assyrian cities—will become a muddy stump of an island in a vast lake. And Assur’s hinterland—the cities and towns and villages that are buried nearby—will be sunk, their wealth of artifacts left to dissolve. All of which has German archaeologist Peter Miglus in a state of despair. He and his team have waited years, through the Gulf War and its aftermath, to resume digging at Assur. Now he looks sadly across the Tigris valley and says: “This is the core of Assyria, and we have far more questions than answers about life here.”

Were a dam to threaten a well-known ancient site like Pompeii, the international outcry would be compelling. But Iraq’s status as an international pariah, not to mention Assur’s obscurity, has so far doomed efforts to seek the empire’s roots. The desperation among Assyrian scholars over the impending loss is made only more acute by the recent spectacular discovery of tombs in the newer Assyrian capital of Nimrud. That find—which includes the skeletons of the consorts to the most powerful Assyrian kings as well as caches of finely worked gold and precious stones—rivals even the 1920s discovery of King Tut’s tomb and the royal graves of Ur. The Nimrud tombs, along with new texts, translations, and computer simulations of Assyrian palaces, provide a look at what might soon be lost in Assur.

Assyrians appeared relatively late on the Mesopotamian stage—around 2000 B.C.—by which time the great city-states of Sumer and Babylonia had already emerged. By the 13th century B.C., they had firmly established themselves as a regional power. With the help of a growing professional military equipped with swift horses, chariots, and iron swords and lances, Assyria secured and expanded its trade routes. Paved roads—a novelty—provided easy transport year-round for traders and soldiers alike.

By 800 B.C., the lands under Assyrian control came to embrace a far larger territory than any previous empire. Assyria’s great cities—Assur, Nimrud (then known as Calah), Khorsabad, Nineveh—were unrivaled in size and magnificence. Aqueducts watered gardens for palaces covering grounds the size of a football field. Massive walls—stretching seven miles long at Nineveh—protected tens of thousands. But in 614 B.C., a coalition of Babylonians from the south and Medes from the Iranian plateau to the east swept through, laying waste to Assur and damaging Nimrud. Two years later, the combined armies destroyed Nimrud and laid siege to Nineveh; after the battle, Nineveh was burned.

Still, some ancient treasure remained. In 1988 Iraqi archaeologist Muzahem Hussein noticed that bricks on the floor of a palace room at Nimrud looked out of place. While putting them back into position, he discovered that they were sitting on top of a vault. When he looked for an entrance, he found a vertical shaft and a stairway that led into a tomb. After two weeks of hauling out dust, he caught a glimpse of gold jewelry. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalled. Muzahem, a lean and quiet man who grew up in nearby Mosul, didn’t then realize he had made one of the most spectacular discoveries in archaeological history.

By the time the Gulf War began, in 1991, Muzahem had uncovered three additional tombs, each with its own collection of skeletons, gold jewelry, and personal items—the richest find from the ancient world since the heady days of the 1920s, when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt while Leonard Woolley excavated the royal graves in the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur.

“In terms of sheer spectacle, there has been nothing like this in Mesopotamian archaeology” since Woolley’s finds, says Joan Oates, a British researcher who worked at the site in the 1950s along with Agatha Christie, who was married to the excavation’s director. The finds include a finely wrought gold crown topped by delicately winged female figures, chains of tiny gold pomegranates, dozens of earrings of gold and semiprecious stones, even gold rosettes that decorated the dresses of the deceased.

The war, however, interrupted further study, and for the past decade Iraq’s political position has made excavation nearly impossible. Then last year, the government gave permission for foreign scholars to excavate. But any archaeologist working here must contend with much more than the blistering heat and biting flies. Armed looters roam the desert, and local archaeologists—those who didn’t die in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s and who didn’t flee in the aftermath of the Gulf War—routinely carry rifles while at dig sites. And while most Iraqis treat scholars with great respect, some Western practices, such as photography, are looked upon with suspicion. This is a land where, in the words of one foreign archaeologist, “anyone with a camera is either a spy or stupid.”

In 1500 B.C., Assyrians controlled only local lands (dark green), but over time various rulers extended the empire’s reach. Assyria assembled the largest standing army ever seen in the Mediterranean, equipped with chariots, metal armor, iron lances, and battering rams. By the seventh century B.C., the Assyrians had created one of the largest of the ancient world’s empires. Ultimately, they fell to neighboring Babylonians and Medes.

The importance of the sites in Iraq became public only this spring when Muzahem and other Iraqi archaeologists presented the contents of four tombs at a London conference. The first tomb held a still-sealed sarcophagus, with the remains of a woman of about 50 years old and a collection of exquisite jewelry of gold and semiprecious stones. The second, found less than 300 feet away, proved more sensational. Two queens—consorts to kings rather than rulers in their own right—were laid to rest here, one on top of the other in the same sarcophagus, wrapped in embroidered linen and covered with gold jewelry including a crown, a mesh diadem, 79 earrings, 30 rings, 14 armlets, 4 anklets, 15 vessels, and many chains.

The second tomb included a curse, threatening the person who opened the grave of Queen Yaba—wife of powerful Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 B.C.)—with eternal thirst and restlessness. The curse specifically warns against disturbing the tomb or placing another corpse in it. Strangely, despite this curse, the second corpse was added after Yaba’s death. Forensic specialists determined that both women were 30 to 35 years old; the cause of death is not clear. But the evidence indicates that Yaba was buried first. At some later date—20 to 50 years after the first interment—the second corpse was placed on top of the first.

On the upper body was a gold bowl with the inscription “Atalia, queen of Sargon, king of Assyria,” who ruled from 721 to 705 B.C. Another bowl mentions “Banitu, queen of Shalmaneser V,” who ruled from 726 to 722 B.C. Because the second corpse was placed in the sarcophagus last, researchers assume the remains are those of Atalia. But what of Banitu? An alabaster jar in the tomb contains organic material that some archaeologists suspect may be Banitu’s remains.

Oxford scholar Stephanie Dalley proposes an explanation for the two corpses and three names. She suggests that Banitu and Yaba are the same woman—yaba being a Western Semitic word meaning “beautiful,” while Banitu is a name in Akkadian, the language from which Assyrian is derived. Moreover, Atalia may be a Western Semitic name, indicating that both women may have been foreigners married to the Assyrian king. The theory remains controversial with scholars.

Atalia’s presence poses an additional riddle: The body was apparently dried or smoked at temperatures of 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. This could have been a burial practice or an effort to preserve a body for a long trip. Whatever its function, it provides the first evidence of mummification in ancient Mesopotamia.

A third tomb, uncovered in 1989, is even more mysterious. The main room had been robbed in antiquity, but an inscription named it as the resting place of Mullissu-mukannisat Ninua, queen of Ashurnasirpal II and mother of Shalmaneser III. The grave robbers missed the antechamber, packed with three bronze coffins containing human remains and jewelry. One contained bones of six people, including a young adult, three children, a baby, and a fetus. A second coffin contained a young woman—most likely a queen, given the magnificent gold crown she wore—as well as a child. A third coffin held five adults, including a man 55 to 65 years old in unusually good physical condition at the time of his death. A golden vessel with the name of Samsu-ilu, an illustrious field marshal who served under at least three kings, was found in the third coffin. Some, if not all, of the bones in the coffin appear to have been buried elsewhere and then reinterred together later. Why and when remains a mystery. Multiple burials are not common in Assyria.

Fearing looters would get wind of the finds, Iraqi archaeologists had to excavate so quickly that fragile clues such as textiles and pollen were lost. But German forensic specialists, working with what is left of the human remains, have turned up some hints about the health of royal Assyrians.

The five adults with dental remains had healthy teeth, probably reflecting the better nutrition and softer foods available at the top of the Assyrian social structure. Only one, Atalia, suffered from cavities. Yaba and Atalia, however, also suffered from dental abscesses at some point in their short lives. In addition, all the adults suffered from chronic sinus infections.

Five out of eight skeletons showed signs of health problems ranging from high fevers and infections to poor nutrition. And out of seven skeletons that could be studied for changes in the skull, six—including Yaba and Atalia—showed telltale areas of thickened skull, indicating they had survived a bout with meningitis. “The Assyrian queens have just begun to speak to us,” says Michael Müller-Karpe, a German archaeologist. “And we are looking forward to more answers—especially to those which can be expected from DNA analyses.” That will include finding out if they were daughters of distant kings or native royal Assyrians. Or if Atalia is the daughter of Yaba.

The royal tombs at Nimrud contained spectacularly crafted gold objects. Among the most impressive are (A) a mesh diadem with tigereye agate, lapis lazuli, and a fringe of tiny gold pomegranates; (B) a child’s crown decorated with vine leaves, grapes, and winged female deities; (C) a pouring vessel showing scenes of hunting and warfare; and (D) a bracelet inlaid with semiprecious stones and held in place by two pins. Photographs: A, C, and D, courtesy of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Baghdad/Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz; B, courtesy of D. Hansen/the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

For millennia, the Assyrians have been remembered through the legends of their enemies. The biblical prophet Isaiah railed against “the king of Assyria’s boastful heart, and his arrogant insolence.” The prophet Nahum speaks of the “unrelenting cruelty” of Assyrian leaders. And the second Book of Kings warns that “the kings of Assyria have exterminated all the nations, they have thrown their gods on the fire.” According to John Malcolm Russell, an art historian and archaeologist at the Massachusetts College of Art, “it’s like a history of the United States written by the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Yet what British and French explorers found nearly two millennia later seemed to confirm that image. Stone friezes from Nimrud and Nineveh depict war chariots trundling over the bodies of enemy soldiers, women and children deported from their homes, and an Assyrian king and his queen relaxing over wine and fruit in a verdant garden while an enemy leader’s head swings from a tree nearby. The repetitive carvings of muscled, bearded, and warmongering princes that appear on the friezes have remained the best-known emblem of Assyrian society.

Russell, however, views the images as carefully positioned propaganda. While working at Nimrud and Nineveh in the 1980s, he noted that images of plunder, brutality, and war are reserved largely for the reception and throne rooms, where foreign diplomats and leaders met the Assyrian king. “The reliefs are at their shrillest in the public rooms,” he says.

In rooms reserved for the king and his retinue, the walls are covered with less intimidating figures. These emblems, says Russell, may be designed to ward off evil spirits. In the king’s own bedchambers, there are no images at all, merely cuneiform inscriptions asserting the ruler’s sovereignty. Russell speculates that the writing may have served as a protective talisman for a vulnerable Assyrian leader. A few rulers, like Sennacherib, were known to have died at the hands of relatives in palace coups.

“I don’t think the Assyrians were any more bloodthirsty than their contemporaries,” says Nicholas Postgate, a professor of Assyriology at Cambridge University. “Mind you, I would rather not have been on the other side.”

Like those who ruled the Roman Empire, Assyrian kings welcomed subjects who were willing to become part of the empire. Those who resisted were conquered. The men were often killed, while the women and children were sometimes abducted and relocated to distant regions. Joan Oates and her archaeologist husband, David, have found tablet inscriptions that say displaced civilians were equipped with food, oil, clothes, and shoes. Refugees were also encouraged to marry. “Under the Assyrians, the entire area became a vast experiment in cultural mixing,” writes Washington State University historian Richard Hooker.

The excitement among Assyrian scholars about the reopening of Iraq to archaeological excavation is tempered by concern about the damage to Assur should the dam be completed. Iraqi officials have discussed building a giant wall to surround the site or taking steps to prevent the waters from rising above a certain height, but Peter Miglus is skeptical.

“You can’t save Assur if it’s in the vicinity of a dam,” he says. The clay underneath Assur will wick up water, he believes, destroying what lies below, even if the surface is above water.

That solution also ignores dozens of other sites in the valley never examined by archaeologists. The best that can be hoped for, says Miglus, is a quick Iraqi call for international help or that senior Iraqi officials—perhaps Saddam Hussein himself—will halt or delay the effort. The Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Humam Abdul Khaliq A. Ghafour, backs the creation of an Assyrian research center in Mosul to draw international scholars and encourage a new generation of Iraqi researchers. Drowning Assur could prove internationally embarrassing. “We will do our best to hinder, or at least delay, the inauguration of this [dam] project,” he said recently in his Baghdad office. “We don’t want the slightest damage to Assur.”

The dam, however, is under the control of the powerful Irrigation Ministry, and work is well under way. Foreign help is unlikely, given the growing fears that the United States will wage war against Saddam. All Miglus can do is wait and organize another season of digging before the waters rise.

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Knight Science Journalism Fellowships are designed for self-motivated journalists who hope to improve their coverage of science, technology, medicine or the environment.

About Knight Science Journalism Fellowships

In 1982, MIT established what were first named the Vannevar Bush Fellowships for mid-career science journalists, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. Victor K. McElheny, a former reporter for The Charlotte Observer, Science, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, became the first Director.From the beginning, the Fellowships have been designed to recognize talented science journalists of high achievement. The program exists to expand their skills and sources, thereby helping to raise the standards of coverage of news about science, medicine, technology, and the environment.

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