HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: chidsey@smoke.brl.mil (Irving Chidsey)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: Hupa Tribal History
Date: 8 Apr 92 18:46:57 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.

In article <1992Apr7.183450.24035@ims.com> johnnyb@ims.com (Johnny Battle) writes:
<An article in yesterday's Orgegonian discussed possible limits
<to be placed on salmon fishing.  It quoted officials of the
<of a Northern California indian tribe as saying that the Hupa
<indian tribe had fished for salmon in the Trinity river for
<10,000 years.  Is there any archealogical evidence to support 
<such a claim?  Or is it just more political hyperbole.  Surely
<tribal migration, reorganization, etc have occurred in that region 
<over the centuries.    

	Probably hyperbole.  Chances are that they can't prove the did,
but opponents can't prove they didn't.  On the other hand, it is likely
that the river was pretty regularly fished by someone for most of that
period.  They may be able to show that the river has been regularly fished,
with only minimal breaks, for several thousand years, and that if they were
not the posessors of the fishing rights for all that period, they were at
least the logical successors of any previous claimants.

	That claim would probably only be weakened if some-one could show 
that a previous posessor of fishing rights had been forcibly evicted by
tribal warfare.

	Just because someone uses hyperbole does not mean that a suitably
de-hyperbolized claim could not be sustained.  Supposing it could be shown
that altho no single site had been continuously occuppied for more than a 
few hundred years, there was evidence of a stable, slowly evolving culture
in the general vicinity for 5,000 years, with no sign of any incursions for
that period.  Would you disallow their claim just because they exagerated
a bit?

								Irv

-- 
I do not have signature authority.  I am not authorized to sign anything.
I am not authorized to commit the BRL, the DA, the DOD, or the US Government
to anything, not even by implication.  They do not tell me what their policy 
is.  They may not have one.		Irving L. Chidsey  <chidsey@brl.mil>
From: bill.grantham@matrix.sbs.com (Bill Grantham) 
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: RE: LARGE FELINES IN GREE
Date: 5 Apr 92 01:20:00 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The MATRIX BBS - Birmingham, AL - 205-323-2016
Reply-To: bill.grantham@matrix.sbs.com (Bill Grantham) 

-> From: rcbi27@muvms3.bitnet (DBRUM)
-> Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
-> Subject: Re: Large felines in Greece and Italy?
-> Message-ID: <91969@muvms3.bitnet>
-> Date: 2 Apr 92 21:00:20 GMT
->
-> I'm not an archaeologist. But I really like archaeology. This is one
-> of my favorite news.groups, warts and all. I feel there are some
-> awfully valuable snibits of information and knowlege to be gleaned
-> from some of the pros here (but then again one must pick and chose;
-> but I see nothing wrong with that; it's life :-).
->
-> Anyway, I read somewhere that it was the Romans, with their beastial
-> gladitorial exhibitions, that depopulated northern Africa of it's
-> lions and Greece of it's Hellenic lions. --Or were they called
-> Asiatic lions? It seems they had shorter manes and were more
-> slimly built than their heavy African counterparts.
->
-> This seems to make sense, just like with the smaller Indian elephant
-> in comparison to the African Elephant.
->
-> As far as real "phisical" evidence, I don't know. That might be real
-> hard to find, I'd presume. After all, historic and
-> just-prior-to-historic times such as you have in mind ("ancient
-> Greece") would not yet be capable of rendering up actual fossilized
-> material, I wouldn't think, and any non-fossilized material (hides,
-> trophy heads, skeletons) would most probably have been lost to the
-> various elements--both Nature's and Man's--long ago.
->
-> Also, while on this subject, I wonder about the "wild marsh bulls"
-> John Romer the TV Egyptologist mentioned the early Pharoes hunted to
-> extinction when they moved their capitol of power north to the Nile
-> Delta. Were they slimmer and more graceful than their big
-> African counterparts, obviously the Cape Buffaloes, I wonder?

With respect to skeletal material surviving - I work with animal bone
remains from the Middle East and bonse there survive much longer than
2000 years.  I have worked with them that are between 5 and 6 thousand
years old and I know that some are much older and in reasonable
condition.  As for the lion bones, there have been a few (very few)
recovered from Israel.  As for marsh buffalo could this refer to
Hartebeast?  Bones from these animals are also recovered in Israel.

Bill
                                            
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: suzanne@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu (Suzanne McCaffrey)
Subject: Aquatic Ape Author
Organization: San Francisco State University
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 22:37:37 GMT

The author of The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution
is by Elaine Morgan.  Publisher Souvenir Press, London, 1982.

Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: t-holland@uchicago.edu (Thomas A. Holland)
Subject: Oriental Institute Publications
Organization: The Oriental Institute Press
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 17:09:44 GMT

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This volume contains: (1) a complete catalog of the twelve series published by the 
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Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett)
Subject: Re: Long-Term Information Storage
Organization: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 16:04:18 GMT

In article <1992Apr8.024315.6808@ultra.com> davec@ultra.com (Dave Chapman {Ultra IBM SW Manager}) writes:
>
>   Thinking about the problem of storing documents for
>several thousand years (about 10 years ago), I came up with
>the idea of steel microfilm.
    -- interesting technical discussion --
>   I would envision a typical "shoebox" intended for long-term
>storage as containing a micro-card viewer, as well as a cartoon
>introduction to English, a dictionary, an almanac, and various
>other general information.  The intent is that someone with
>Neolithic or Bronze Age technology should be able to figure 
>out how to read the cards, 5000 years from now.
>-Dave Chapman


	That's a pretty gloomy thought, isn't it?
				Ed Hartnett
From: platt@watson.ibm.com (Daniel E. Platt)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: RE: Basic Concepts in Arc
Date: 7 Apr 92 14:18:18 GMT
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM

In article <637.704.uupcb@matrix.sbs.com>, kirk.hardesty@matrix.sbs.com (Kirk Hardesty) writes:
|> To:pat@mtl.mit.edu
|>    >that the only cultures I have studied first-hand are
|>    >the Newari of Nepal and local Native American Indians in
|>    >Massachusetts.  My thesis is on the cultural
|>    >evolution of the ideology of the Puritans as
|>    >expressed in their gravestones.
|> 
|> 
|> Forgive my intrusion, but I was not aware that any tribes remained
|> intact in Massachusetts or anywhere in the NorthEast.

There is an active tribe in Connecticut.  They have a reservation
that has been whittled down over the years.  They have been
reclaiming it, re-marking graves, and have opened bingo and other
gambling as a way to raise funds.  (Sorry, I don't remember their
name; I vaguely recall they had some relationship to the tribes
that were found in Massechusetts).

There is a large reservation of Corn Planters (Seneca) in western
NYS (Allegheny reservation).

|> 
|> From what tribe(s) do they descend?  How much of the native culture
|> remains?  Do the children desire participation in native or modern
|> society, or a blend of both?
|> 
|> Native Americans in Alabama are coming out.  I have been told that the
|> grandparents and great-grandparents refused to admit their heritage for
|> their own protection, but today there are many who are proud and angry.
|> 
|> Kirk
|> ---
|>  . SLMR 2.0 . We are all descended from indigenous peoples.
|>
From: lgrant@maths.tcd.ie (Lesley Grant)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: Earliest Building
Date: 14 Apr 92 07:13:34 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

In article <1992Apr13.161431.5303@news.larc.nasa.gov> otten@icase.edu writes:
>In article <1992Apr8.203852.7190@ee.gatech.edu>, ldh@eedsp.gatech.edu (Lonnie D Harvel) writes:
>>Just as a matter of curiosity, when and where were the
>>first buildings (interpreted loosely)?  I guess we need
>>to add a "what" to the above question.
>>
>I believe that ruins of Jericho are considered to be the oldest
>buildings/structures in the world.

	Jericho is believed to have been first inhabited c. 9250 BCE. That's
indeed pretty old.

			Lesley
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: stgprao@xing.unocal.com (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: Two Questions
Originator: stgprao@xing
Organization: Unocal Corporation, Anaheim, California
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 15:24:29 GMT

In article <5APR199204181771@reg.triumf.ca> vincent@reg.triumf.ca (pete) writes:
>1) This ice man character that's recently thawed into prominence;
>presumably his DNA is still present. Is there any plan to test
>for his position in the mitochondrial heredity chain? Would that
>reveal anything insightful?

I think the the standard mitochondia test requires nearly complete DNA
present in only in living cells.  This may be possible for the frozen mummy
but probably not for dried neaderthal blood some people have claimed to
have found.
The standard test goes, I recall, is (1) use emzymes to split the DNA helix
into right and lefts, (2) use emzymes to combine the right and lefts from
two different pools, (3) use a temperature-sensative reaction to split the
combined stuffed.  In #3, the less the compatability, then the less easier
it is to split.
The interpretation of the compatibility number is more difficult.  People
try to fit trees to pairs, e.g. lower compatibilities mean farther away
branches.  There has been some controversy over the fitting methods recently.

The human genome project will have some spinoffs that will allow more precise
comparisions.  These involve comparing "critical points" (markers) on the genes
and actual base-pair sequencing themselves.  These methods are very expensive
compared to the above, but costs are dropping rapidly.  Furthermore, it is
not well understood what is signiificant information in the 1% or so the human
genes sequenced so far, but that situation is always improving rapidly.
So in a few years, more powerful genetic analysis will be available for
archeologial analysis.
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Diet of early humans
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 15 Apr 92 18:11:53 GMT

In article <wadley.703300196@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wadley@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Gregory Robert Wadley) writes:
>Archaeology is not my specialty (as will become obvious),
>but I'm trying to find out the current belief on our early diet.
>
>I get the impression that the older "man the hunter" picture
>of pre-agriculture humans has faded a bit, in favour of a more
>gathering-orientated version.

I hesitate to recommend the books I have in mind, since their titles
will likely scare people off.  Please, if you have a chance, look them
up, and read the first parts of both.

They are Elaine Morgan's _The Descent of Woman_ and Rosalind Miles's
_The Women's History of the World_.  Again, please do not be frightened
off by the titles; you won't find any raging bitches advocating the
castration of all men on the planet.  They are very scholarly works
that, by necessity, relate to women's issues only because the "Man the
Mighty Hunter" thang was used to stomp on women in the past.

Give them a try.

>Did our history go:
>
>Gatherer --> Hunter/gatherer --> agriculture
>(> ?? BP)    (?? BP to 10000BP)  (10000BP to now) ?
 
Beats the sh*t out of me. 

>In other words, was there a significant change from primate diet to
>hunter/gatherer diet?

This may be easier to determine than you think.  Our teeth are
beautifully evolved for omnivores: sharp incisors in the front to tear
meat, and square grinding molars that are good for vegetable fiber.  If
you can find hominid fossils with square molars all over their mouth,
maybe that would mean that we depended on a gatherer-diet long ago.

(I'm not sure about this one, though.  From what I remember, the switch
to eating plants was a forced one for the great apes.  I recall hearing
that their teeth are also omnivore-teeth, i.e. that they have
meat-eaters' incisors.  This would point to plant-eating as being a
later development for them.)

Regards,
Janis C.

P.S.: What the hell is BP?
From: chidsey@smoke.brl.mil (Irving Chidsey)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: Earliest Building
Date: 14 Apr 92 13:58:59 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.

In article <1992Apr13.180556.4246@csun.edu> vfoao07h@VAX.CSUN.EDU writes:
<>>Just as a matter of curiosity, when and where were the
<>>first buildings (interpreted loosely)?  I guess we need
<>>to add a "what" to the above question.
<
<What about the "Step" pyramid in Egypt.
<-----------------------------------
<George Mansoor

	As a guess, that is about 4500 years old or 2500 BC, the oldest
buildings are about twice that, or 7000 BC.  The pyramid could be a few
hundred years older, but I'm mostly guessing.  What about structures in
caves?

								Irv

-- 
I do not have signature authority.  I am not authorized to sign anything.
I am not authorized to commit the BRL, the DA, the DOD, or the US Government
to anything, not even by implication.  They do not tell me what their policy 
is.  They may not have one.		Irving L. Chidsey  <chidsey@brl.mil>
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: otten@icase.edu 
Subject: Re: Earliest Building
Organization: ICASE/NASA Langley
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 16:14:31 GMT

In article <1992Apr8.203852.7190@ee.gatech.edu>, ldh@eedsp.gatech.edu (Lonnie D Harvel) writes:
>Just as a matter of curiosity, when and where were the
>first buildings (interpreted loosely)?  I guess we need
>to add a "what" to the above question.
>

I believe that ruins of Jericho are considered to be the oldest
buildings/structures in the world.

John
otten@icase.edu
From: dsc@gemini.tmc.edu (Doug S. Caprette Bldg. 28 W191 x3892)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: Cave Paintings, Magic or Instruction ?
Date: 16 Apr 92 19:02:13 GMT
Organization: NASA GSFC CDP VLBI

In article <1992Apr10.165348.29845@panix.com> beww@panix.com (Brian Wood) writes:
>
>   Like most people, I suppose, I have seen reproductions of the
>beautiful, (presumably) cro-magnon cave paintings in southern
>France and elsewhere in Europe.
> 
>... 
>   I wonder if perhaps these images were intended for
>instructional purposes. Surely it would be safer to show young,
>up and coming hunters where to aim their throws by using these
>early "graphic teaching aids" than to attempt a marksmanship
>lecture in the face of a charging beast.
> 
>   The deep, remote locations for these works would still be hard
>to explain, but perhaps they were made everywhere from
>trees to sand, and only the remotest of them have survived the
>ages.
> 
I would venture to say that there may have been made to comemerate
historical actions.  Like a time of great success in hunting, or a great
leader's (or great artist's!) first kill etc.  There is some evidence
that neo(?)lithic paintings in the American South West were done to
record astronomical events.  The Anisazi(?) 'supernova of 1054 AD' drawing,
in NW New Mexico and the apparent Chumash solar eclipse N. of Santa Barbara
CA.  Please feel free to post corrections to my terminology, as I know more
about astronomy, than archaeology.
From: terry.mccombs@matrix.sbs.com (Terry Mccombs) 
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: LIVEING NEANDERTHALS?
Date: 14 Apr 92 18:57:00 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The MATRIX BBS - Birmingham, AL - 205-323-2016
Reply-To: terry.mccombs@matrix.sbs.com (Terry Mccombs) 

  Has anyone heard about the suggestion made by archaeologist Myra
Shackley that there could be a small bend of liveing Neanderthals
liveing in the mountainins of Outer Mongolia?
  She claims to have found modern stone tools that look like those
known to have been made by Neanderthals along the edge of the Gobi
desert near the Altai Mountains, asking local herders who made the
objects the answer was always the same, she says she was told they
were made by the Almas, a people that live in high in the mountain
caves and have been seen hunting for food.
  This report was found in the archaeology journal Antiquity, in which
Shackley said "The idea that modern man can be the only surviving
hominid species is outmoded biological arrogance."
                       
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: shapiro-david@CS.YALE.EDU (David Shapiro)
Subject: Re: Cave Paintings, Magic or Instruction ?
Followup-To: Article #2333
Summary: dangers of analogy
Organization: Yale University
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 17:01:27 GMT

It seems to me that an awfully big assumption is being made by saying that 
we can legitimately compare the cave-paintings of Cro-Magnon man and modern hum
man.  We are living in a fundamentally different society, so different, in 
fact, that to try to make comparisons is to push the limits of credibility.
However, I will agree that the tendency among archaeologists to ascribe 
religious meaning to everything mysterious is often disturbing.  This is in
no way to say that there is no possible evidence for ritual activity.  

This is an issue which can be debated for millenia, so I'll stop wasting 
bandwidth.

-----------
David Shapiro
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
From: okunewck@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Phil OKunewick)
Subject: Re: Cave Paintings, Magic or Instruction ?
Organization: Random, at best
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 17:45:08 GMT

   Cave painting is a practice which is still carried on today.

   Unfortunately.

   But, if one believes that a better understanding of the past can be
drawn from what's going on in the present, then ancient cave painting
can possibly be compared to modern cave painting.

   There are two reasons why vandals paint a cave.  First, to mark a
way back to the entrance.  (Ironically, there's usually a much easier
route than the one the arrows point to.  Tossing a coin at an
intersection often has a higher probability of finding the easiest way
out.)

   Second, the painter wants to leave a mark of what he feels is a
great achievement - namely, he feels that he did something that few
other people can do, and decides to leave a monument of his passing.
This is usually his name, his organization's name (fraternity symbols
aren't unusal), or a nickname he has given himself or his group
("Sniper Team").  Bathroom-wall type grafitti is almost nonexistant in
caves, unless the vandals specifically want to annoy somebody. (e.g.
If the owner gates the cave to protect it, and vandals break in, they
sometimes write nasty messages to the owner.)

   Inner-city grafitti is similar.


   So, if we use what's happenning today as a way to draw an
understanding of the past, then we might suspect that primitive man
had a similar motivation - if you can't write your name, what do you
put on the wall as a monument to what you do?


   Incidentally, modern cave painting (a.k.a. grafitti) is highly
illegal in many states.  A teen-ager near Pittsburgh just paid $500 in
fines and court costs for putting his initials on the wall of a
western PA cave.  And the people who caught him got a $400 reward from
The Robertson Association (a caving group, dedicated to preserving
caves and having a good time).
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Long-Term Information Storage
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 14 Apr 92 23:40:59 GMT

In article <1992Apr8.024315.6808@ultra.com> davec@ultra.com (Dave Chapman {Ultra IBM SW Manager}) writes:
>
>   Thinking about the problem of storing documents for
>several thousand years (about 10 years ago), I came up with
>the idea of steel microfilm.

[much of a really neat post deleted to save space]

How about the thin film research going on at a lot of universities,
including UCI in their physics dept?  Deposition of carbon takes place
almost at an atom-by-atom level nowadays, and diamond is damned
long-lived.

Anybody looked into this one yet?

Regards,
Janis C.
From: beww@panix.com (Brian Wood)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Cave Paintings, Magic or Instruction ?
Date: 10 Apr 92 16:53:48 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC


   Like most people, I suppose, I have seen reproductions of the
beautiful, (presumably) cro-magnon cave paintings in southern
France and elsewhere in Europe.
 
   I notice that many of them seem to portray animals with
spears, darts or other weapons protruding from them. I was taught
in school, a long time ago, that these were examples of
"sympathetic magic". Apparently the idea was that by killing the
image of the beast on the eve of the hunt the likelihood of
killing the actual creature would be increased.
 
   This always struck me as a pretty screwy idea. Time spent
sharpening weapons or practicing throws would seem much more
likely to improve hunting results than sitting around in a cave
drawing pictures. The concept that a sharp blade cuts better
would seem a much easier concept for a (primitive?) mind to grasp
then some tenuous connection to painted images.
 
   I wonder if perhaps these images were intended for
instructional purposes. Surely it would be safer to show young,
up and coming hunters where to aim their throws by using these
early "graphic teaching aids" than to attempt a marksmanship
lecture in the face of a charging beast.
 
   The deep, remote locations for these works would still be hard
to explain, but perhaps they were made everywhere from
trees to sand, and only the remotest of them have survived the
ages.
 
   If this is old hat, I apologize. Just wondered what others
might think. 
 
   
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology