Rogers Archaeology Lab

New Publication: Assessing Human Global Impact

By J. Daniel Rogers

 

When our team has a new publication we post a brief announcement.  I cannot claim much credit for the publication mentioned below, but I was glad to be part of the project.  I am author 13 of 120.  Yes, 120 co-authors!  The core research team was led by Lucas Stephens and included my Smithsonian colleague Torben Rick.  The article was recently published in the journal Science.

 

Stephens, L., et al. 2019 Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use, Science, 30 Aug 2019: Vol. 365, Issue 6456, pp. 897-902.  DOI: 10.1126/science.aax1192 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/897

 

A couple weeks ago the article was named one of the 10 most popular scientific discoveries from the National Museum of Natural History for 2019.  Every year the staff of Natural History produce hundreds of publications and we are honored to be singled out.  You can find details here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural-history/2019/12/31/10-popular-scientific-discoveries-2019/

 

In fields ranging from biodiversity, to environmental modeling, to human ecology it is routinely recognized that on-going research would benefit from a deeper historical knowledge of how and when humans began having a serious impact on the environment.   Although archaeologists around the world routinely study human interaction with the environment, there was no systematic assessment that brought the diverse information together.  Using a crowd sourcing strategy, the authors collected a standardized set of information in order to measure the timing, locations, and extent of human impacts.  All 120 co-authors contributed to some aspect of the research process; either planning recommendations, data, writing, and/or editorial input.  A total of 255 archaeologists contributed data reflecting their regional expertise.

 

            The results of the study show that major transformation of the planet by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and herders occurred by 3000 years ago, much earlier than expected.  The changes accelerated with the wide-spread adoption of agriculture.  At the regional level the results provide a starting point for comparative analysis and a baseline for further study of the long history of how humans have changed the world.

 

Sheep herding and maize cultivation in the Toluca Valley, Central Mexico, 2000. Photo by Bruno Frohlich.

February 2019 Lab Update

By Lotte Govaerts and J. Daniel Rogers

Although we haven’t been very active on our blog or our Twitter, we have been pretty busy these past few months, both in and out of the lab (mostly out of the lab during the month of January, because the government shutdown closed our lab for most of that month, along with the rest of the Smithsonian). In this post we’ll discuss some of the things we’ve been working on recently.

Happy faces upon our return to the lab at the end of January. Selfie by Lotte Govaerts.

 

The cataloging work on the 39BF2 (Medicine Crow) collection continues, though the project was unavoidably on hold during the shutdown. Since our last update on that work, Lotte has finished numbering the Archaic components and moved on to other Plains Village components of the collection, which include a variety of ceramic, lithic, and bone artifact types as well as some metal. We will be posting more updates on the 39BF2 project as the work progresses.

Aside from cataloging, Lotte has been working on her dissertation, as well as several manuscripts which are in various stages of publication. So far only one of those has been published: a short review of Michael M. Casler and W. Raymond Wood’s “Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau: Journal and Letter Books 1830 – 1850, which appeared in North Dakota History Vol. 83, issue 2. We will share information on the other publications once they are in print as well.

Additionally, she presented on her thesis research at two conferences. Most recently at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s annual meeting, which was held in St. Charles, Missouri in early January. A few months before that, she spoke at the 2018 National Fur Trade Symposium. This meeting, hosted by the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation, the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, and the State Historical Society of North Dakota, took place in late September in Bismarck, North Dakota. The National Fur Trade Symposium is a triennial event where fur trade historians, archaeologists, and other scholars gather. The event is held at various locations across the West. It includes research presentations, field trips to fur trade-related sites, and living history demonstrations.

 

Lotte Govaerts speaking at the 2018 National Fur Trade Symposium. Photo credit: Northern Plains National Heritage Area, North Dakota.

 

Dan, meanwhile, has been busy writing his book. The book’s working title is In the Age of Empires. Over the last three months he has drafted sections on the Natchez, Arikara (Sanish), and Pecos Pueblo. While on an extended stay in Santa Fe (Dan is retired now) he was able to consult with experts on the archaeology and history of Pecos Pueblo.

 

The ruins of the church at Pecos National Historical Park. Photo credit: Dan Rogers.

 

The three newly drafted sections of the book are part of a larger case study about European expansion into North America.  Next up for the book project is the fascinating story of the Aztec Empire’s encounter with Cortez and his expedition.  Dan directed excavations at Aztec-era sites in the Toluca Valley back in the 1990s.  He has plenty of material to draw on for this chapter of the book.

Stay tuned for more updates on the book project.

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References

Casler, Michael M., and W. Raymond Wood, eds. Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau: Journal and Letter Books, 1830 - 1850. South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017.

Govaerts, Lotte E., Review of Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau: Journal and Letter Books, 1830 - 1850, by Michael M. Casler and W. Raymond Wood. North Dakota History 83(2), 2018.

National Park Service, Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico, https://www.nps.gov/peco/index.htm

Northern Plains Heritage Foundation, 2018 National Fur Trade Symposium - "Old Forts Never Die" The Middle Missouri Fur Trade, 1738-1850, http://www.northernplainsheritage.org/2018-national-fur-trade-symposium.html

 

New Publication—Building a Better Past…

By J. Daniel Rogers and Wendy H. Cegielski

 

 

Last week the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science published our commentary, “Building a better past with the help of agent-based modeling” (www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718277114).  Our topic is computational modeling and trends in how archaeology and other historical sciences conduct research.  We focus on a methodology called agent-based modeling.  This is a kind of complex simulation that creates agents, typically having characteristics of humans.  The agents interact, make decisions, and changes take place over time.  The results are accumulated and compared to real-world information about some aspect of a social system, depending on the question being investigated.

Our back story for writing on this topic comes from a convergence of perspectives plus the inevitable power of opportunity.  First of all, although we work at different institutions (the Smithsonian and Arizona State University) and study different topics in different parts of the world, we both come from an American tradition of archaeological research that values both scientific and humanistic perspectives. While our graduate training took place 40 years apart, we still share foundational thinking, although our knowledge base is quite different.  A good collaboration creates an opportunity to make the most of shared and divergent perspectives and allows an awareness of certain trends that we might not have recognized individually.

In the PNAS Opinion we note that the current generation of sophisticated computational methods creates the context for a major change in thinking, similar to a paradigm shift.  We are not the only ones to comment on the significance of simulations and ABMs (Banks 2002; Epstein 2006; Farmer and Foley 2009; Lake 2015).  Until recently, however, the conceptual revolution has remained marginal, largely due to the scarcity of practitioners.  Now there are several universities training interdisciplinary scholars who make routine use of high-level computational methods. The emerging potential of computational modeling provides the methodology from which to consider how we do our work as archaeologists.

Our original title was Building a Better Past, which was a bit too grand but it did reflect our interest in engaging with the social sciences and other historical sciences, ranging from paleobiology to astrophysics.  To some extent we see archaeology as a proxy for the social sciences more broadly and agent-based modeling as a proxy for a wider variety of computational methods. The Opinion published in PNAS was preceded by an article we wrote on trends in the archaeological use of agent-based modeling (Cegielski and Rogers 2016).  In that article we analyzed publishing patterns, topic areas, and gave examples and descriptions of the fundamental workings of an agent-based model. From that survey of the literature it was easy to recognize that as a profession, archaeology had crossed a threshold.  Computer simulations were no longer seen as a novelty, but rather as an emerging core methodology.  

Bibliography

Bankes, Steven C. 2002 Agent-based Modeling: A Revolution? Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99, no. Suppl 3: 7199–7200. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.072081299.

Cegielski, Wendy H. and J. Daniel Rogers. 2016 Rethinking the role of agent-based modeling in archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 41:283-298.  DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2016.01.009

Farmer, J. Doyne, and Duncan Foley. 2009 The Economy Needs Agent-based Modelling.” Nature 460: 685–86.

Lake, Mark W. 2015 Explaining the Past with ABM: On Modelling Philosophy. In Agent-based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology, edited by Gabriel Wurzer, Kerstin Kowarik, and Hans Reschreiter, 3–35. London: Springer.

Rogers, J. Daniel and Wendy H. Cegielski. 2017 Building a better past with the help of agent-based modeling.  Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Science 114 (49): 12841-12844.  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1718277114

A free download is available at:  www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718277114

A New Publication on the Architecture and Early Empires of Inner Asia

By J. Daniel Rogers

Over the course of four field seasons, beginning in 2002, I had the good fortune to travel to Mongolia to study the architecture of the early empires. Some of the earlier blogs on the Rogers Archaeology Lab page describe the fun and challenges of traveling in Mongolia (Travels in Mongolia parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). The fieldwork I did there was part of my comparative study of how large social systems form and either stabilize or fall apart. Over the last few years I have written quite a bit about the early empires of Inner Asia. People living in these empires herded animals as their economic foundation and they usually lived in tents. This is very different from the early civilizations that first developed in China, the Middle East, South America, and Mesoamerica.  All of these other places had agriculture as their economic foundation and people generally lived in villages, which later developed into cities. My most comprehensive overview of the Inner Asian empires, ranging from the Xiongnu (199 BCE to CE 155) to the Zunghar (CE 1625 to 1757) was published in the Journal of Archaeological Research (2012). 

Although the people of Inner Asia generally lived in tents, when the first empires began to develop they also built a variety of buildings and other forms of architecture, especially settlements with defensive walls. Within the walls there was sometimes a palace or ordinary domestic dwellings, but generally the walls enclosed a large open space with no evidence of buildings. The open space was probably occupied by tent communities. This year (2017) the journal, Archaeological Research in Asia, published my study of the early architecture and how it related to the emergence and stability of empires.  The full title and abstract are listed below.

This study is a culmination of my fieldwork in Mongolia and was only possible through the dedication and help of dozens of friends and colleagues.  I like traveling in wide open places and sleeping in tents.  I have had the good fortune to encounter many others who feel the same way.

Like any study, this one answers some questions while raising others. Stay tuned for future posts as the research continues.

 

Dan Rogers in 2010 at the Uglugchiin Kherem site of the Khitan empire (photography by Altangerel Enkhtur).

 

Rogers, J. Daniel

2017 Inner Asian Polities and Their Built Environment. Archaeological Research in Asia 11:1-14, DOI 10.1016/j.ara.2017.03.002.  Also published online at   http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2352226716300630

 

Abstract

By 200 BCE the eastern steppe regions centered on Mongolia saw the development of expansive and complex political systems usually referred to as empires. The origins of these polities and the processes of consolidation can be described within the concept of a political community, reflecting the actions of competing groups in expansive social network. For Inner Asia, community was linked to issues of mobility, dispersed control hierarchies, and the economics of multi-resource pastoralism. Together, these patterns offer an alternative vision of the origin and operation of early complex polities. Archaeologically, the pastoralist way of using the built environment provides a window into the dynamics of political processes that operated within a particular polity, but also within multiple polities across long stretches of time. Based on a sample of 76 sites within 13 steppe polities several patterns emerge that highlight how distinctive political processes altered and incorporated community and place in the building of fortified settlements, palaces, military posts, and other constructions. The evidence from these places suggests that these polities operated as inclusive spatial networks that relied more on mobility than the direct interactions seen in urban centers in sedentary societies. The urban centers of the steppe tended to be the byproduct of polity formation, rather than the source.

 Keywords

Inner Asia - Nomadic empires - Polity formation - Architecture - Urban centers

 

Rogers, J. Daniel

2012. Inner Asian States and Empires: Theories and Synthesis.  Journal of Archaeological Research 20:205-256. doi:10.1007/s10814-011-9053-2.

 

Other Reading

Hanks, Brian

2010. Archaeology of the Eurasian steppes and Mongolia. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 469–486.

 

Honeychurch, William

2015. Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire. Springer, New York.

 

Recent Happenings in Roger's Archaeology Lab: Collections Updates and New Publications

By Kendra Young

 

The new year seems to be flying by for us at Roger’s Archaeology Lab. As 2016 drew to a close we began the final step of the cataloging process for the Larson collection. This step involves applying special archival marks to each artifact containing an identifier, in which we use the catalog number. We have to make certain these marks are fade-proof, rub-proof, and waterproof so the catalog number can be read for decades to come. It is very important that these marks can be removed if needed and are not made with products that damage the specimen, therefore we work with the Anthropology Conservation Laboratory to obtain the correct basecoats, paints, inks, and overcoats. As you may remember from our previous posts about the Larson collection, the size of the collection encompasses ten storage units with about a dozen drawers inside each. So far we have already completed over half of the storage units for the collection! The following images shows how we lay out objects to apply the numbers. Some objects are already labeled  with numbers they received when they were excavated in the 1960s. In those cases, we add our new numbers near the old ones.

 

Most days we complete the marking process for over 1000 objects. Pictured here is a lot of potsherds. Photo by Lotte Govaerts.

 

Some sherds were mended during the original RBS project. Most of those mended sections have only one "old" number written on them. We add the new numbers to all the mended sherds so that we can still identify sherds in case they become separated. In this photo we have just applied the base layer for the new numbers. Photo by Lotte Govaerts.

 

 

In more recent news, we have two new publications to announce!

Dr. Rogers has a new article published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory titled “Dynamic Trajectories, Adaptive Cycles, and Complexity in Culture Change.”

Abstract: “Trends in interdisciplinary research over the last two decades have opened new perspectives and pushed forward our understanding of how complex social systems function. This study explores several theories of social change that have emerged from increasingly interdisciplinary perspectives in combination with complexity theory. Resilience theory and related concepts of adaptive cycles and panarchy are now being applied extensively to the study of a variety of human social systems. However, there is still the need to further explore the implications of how human systems differ from the ecologies of other species. A case study drawn from early polity formation in Inner Asia is used to assess the effectiveness of differing approaches. Certain theoretical gaps are described and a series of concepts within a theory of dynamic trajectories are proposed that focus on high-level patterns of social change. The basic elements of the theory include dynamics of the scope and scale of polities, the probability space in which change occurs, and the strands or bundles of social and cultural characteristics that represent the substance of trajectory. As the trajectory patterns manifest, they envelop constraints and opportunities influencing future patterns. Agent-based models are used to illustrate aspects of the dynamic trajectory theory, especially economic decision-making within specific landscapes and control hierarchies in the context of competing polities. Rather than repeating cycles, the results reveal reorganization modes highlighting the significance of continuity and opportunity in social change.”

Click here to access the full article.

 

Lotte has written “Transformative Consequences of Garrison Dam: Land, People, and the Practice of Archaeology” in the Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 36/No. 4.

Abstract: “This essay examines the history and impact of Garrison Dam and its reservoir, Lake Sakakawea. The focus is historical issues related to dam construction, as well as the environmental and social impacts of large dams in general and of Garrison Dam in particular. Most importantly, included is an investigation as to how archaeology in North America was influenced by the construction of Garrison Dam and the other large dams on the Upper Missouri River.”

For the full article, click here.

 

Also, the catalog for the Larson collection was uploaded into our collections database. Now researchers and the public can search the collection with the keyword ‘Larson’ for all the artifacts we have been working on.

 

In the coming months we will be researching more about the Larson collection’s artifacts, specifically the stone objects and a deeper look into the bone tools present. So stay tuned to the blog!

New Publication on Computational Modeling in Archaeology

Across the social sciences there is an emerging shift towards greater inclusion of computational methods in research. Agent-based modeling is one of the new approaches. In a new publication Wendy Cegielski and Dan Rogers describe how the field of archaeology is rapidly incorporating this new method. Their study, "Rethinking the Role of Agent-Based Modeling in Archaeology" published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology describes the trends in research and the challenges faced when using a complex new methodology. Cegielski and Rogers also use the article as a way to introduce the basic concepts of agent-based modeling, including a glossary of terms.

The link below will take you to a free pdf provided by the publisher:

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Sa2S-JVbYIbs