I am feeling immensely cheered.  It’s not just that I had a fine holiday season with family and friends, and that I’m now completely revved up for another year of exploring the labyrinthine world of archaeology.  Something grand has happened today: after eight years of immensely hard work on the part of underwater archaeologists and diplomats around the world, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage enters into force. 

Nautical archaeologists have long sought to put an end to looting and extend some form of legal protection to archaeological sites on the bottom of the sea.   It has been and continues to be a herculean fight, one that they’ve waged against increasingly sophisticated treasure hunters and—more depressingly still—against governments around the world that have made Faustian pacts with treasure hunters,  allowing them to plunder historic wrecks in exchange for a cut of the profits.   

Perhaps you think that only impoverished third-world countries would agree to such deals, but you would be very mistaken.  The United Kingdom, for example, a nation whose illustrious history rests on the strength of its Royal Navy, betrayed its past in exactly that way in September 2002.  To its great shame, it secretly issued a contract to the American treasure-hunting firm, Odyssey Marine Exploration, to salvage one of its historic, treasure-bearing warships, HMS Sussex, from waters off the Gibraltar coast.

In recent years, heritage conservationists have used all their powers of persuasion to convince 20 countries to sign on to the UNESCO Convention.  Twenty was the magic number needed to put the convention into force in the waters off these countries.  By accepting or ratifying the convention, these countries—ranging from Cambodia and Lebanon to Spain and Portugal—have now agreed to honor several key archaeological principles:  the most important, however, is to prohibit any commercial exploitation of underwater wrecks.  This means no more treasure-hunting in these waters, pure and simple.

This is a happy day for everyone who loves archaeology and the study of the ancient past.  Conservationists have won a key battle.   But the war is by no means over.  Notably missing from the list of countries currently ratifying the agreement are the United Kingdom; the Netherlands which has also signed deals with treasure-hunters;  Canada which has permitted treasure-hunters to operate freely off the coast of Nova Scotia;  and the United States,  where the current administration bizarrely views treasure-hunters as legitimate stakeholders who need to be consulted before drawing up heritage plans.  As Larry Murphy, chief of the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center, told me,  “This is very similar to attempting to accommodate ivory- and horn-hunters in game management plans.”

I think we should break open the champagne and celebrate the UNESCO success.   But let’s not let it go to our heads.  There’s a whole lot more work ahead in many other nations in the world.

Hardly a day seems to go by when I don’t read a news story about a group of desperate migrants risking their lives to flee a war zone in search of more peaceful and prosperous lives.  I find it wrenching to read about refugees from Afghanistan cramming into small boats and sailing all the way to Australia in search of security, or the 200,000 people from Darfur who are now crowded into tent camps in Chad.  Given a choice, people will vote with their feet every time, abandoning all that is familiar in order to make a better future for kith and kin.

Two articles I’ve just read on prehistoric migrations shed some fascinating new light on this phenomenon. In the December 18^th issue of Nature,  two experts on cultural evolution–Peter J. Richerson from the University of California, Davis, and Robert Boyd from the University of California, Los Angeles–write about the powerful effect that migrants have always had on human societies.  “People move to societies that provide a more attractive way of life and if all other things being equal, this process spreads ideas and institutions that promote economic efficiency, social order and equality,” note the pair.

In other words, given the slightest opportunity—even a leaky, overcrowded boat in typhoon-ridden seas—people will always try to flee oppressive, impoverished regimes in favor of those that offer a better chance at prosperity, happiness and justice.  And as both history and archaeology shows us, this has had a major impact on political landscapes.  Empires that offered prosperity, security and rule of law for their citizens, such as the Roman Empire, grew by attracting migrants and assimilating border peoples.  These empires were long-lived.  But those that conquered and exploited many of their subjects, such as the Mongol Empire or the old Soviet Union, fell apart relatively quickly.  Often their subjects wanted little to do with them:  when they saw an opportunity to escape, they packed their bags and headed for the door.  “As long as they vote with their feet and hearts,” write Richerson and Boyd, “immigrants are a more powerful engine for social change than armies.”  I find this a very intriguing thought.

And it’s possible that this mechanism could be far older than anyone previously suspected.  In the new issue of Nature Genetics, Harvard Medical School geneticist Alon Keinan and three colleagues have published a study of differences in the human genetic codes found in populations of Africans, Asians and northern Europeans.  The team’s ingenious technique—which focused on variations in both the X chromosome and the non-gender chromosomes—allowed them to calculate the sex ratio of the Out-of-Africa migrants.  According to the findings,  more men than women took part in that early migration, and this evidence, says Keinan, fits with many anthropological studies. In hunter-gatherer societies, long-distance migration tends to be a male affair.

It is certainly possible, as Keinan has suggests, that our ancient male ancestors weren’t above raiding other bands and carrying off a few women along the way as they journeyed to a new land.  But I can imagine another possibility.  What if our ancient African ancestors were actually the victims of raiding parties in a time of environmental stress, losing some of their precious women?  And what if they, like many migrants today, just wanted to find somewhere else to live in peace?  Could that have been an incentive to pull up stakes in Africa and set off to new lands in Asia? 

Maybe migration is one of the most powerful instincts that we have inherited from our wandering ancestors.

In between mass-producing sheets of Nanaimo bars,  taking our exuberant 10-month Labrador retriever on his first explorations of the world of snow,  and pouring myself a large Scotch after all the guests depart on Christmas Day,  I plan to spend as much time as possible over the holidays curled up with good books.  At the moment, I am deep into a wonderful novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, which has nothing whatsoever to do with archaeology and everything to do with dogs, but I have a stack of books about the past that I’m dying to get to. 

If you are planning to dive into a good book or two over the holidays, I’d be happy to recommend a few that I’ve recently enjoyed. Most aren’t new, but I can pretty much guarantee that each will appeal to the archaeologically minded.  Here they are, in no particular order:

In Ruins by Christopher Woodward.  I’d definitely put this book on my all-time favorite list.  Woodward is a British art historian who writes beautifully about the enduring appeal of ruins, and the joy that writers and artists have long taken in them.  My favorite passage concerns the Colosseum in Rome.  In the mid-19^th century, a British botanist, Richard Deakin,  catalogued 420 species of plants flourishing in the Colosseum’s 6 acres, including some flowers that were incredibly rare in Western Europe.  According to Woodward,  Deakin believed “that the only explanation for their presence was that 2000 years before their seeds had been scattered in sand from the bodies of animals brought from the mountains of Persia or the banks of the Nile for the gladiatorial games.”  That’s probably pure poetry—I imagine climate change could account for changing plant ranges, too—but it’s a lovely thought. 

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World  by Roger Atwood.  If you haven’t read this book, which was published in 2004, you are really missing out on something.  This is an amazing piece of investigative journalism by a very talented writer.  Early in the book, Atwood, a former Reuters reporter, accompanies a group of huaqueros, or professional grave robbers, on a looting foray in southern Peru.  I couldn’t put this down.  I’ve seen myself what the huaqueros have done to major sites in southern Peru—some look as if an army had mortared them—but this is the first detailed account I’ve read of the guys doing all the damage.

Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet: In Search of a Legendary Armada by James Delgado.  Delgado, as you may know, is a marine archaeologist and the current president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Texas.  Among many other things, he’s an entertaining story-teller, and in this new book he regales us with the tale of the fleet that Khubilai Khan sent to invade Japan. It’s a book about hubris, a divine wind, and a terrible defeat, and it’s packed with fascinating details.  I particularly relished Delgado’s account of how a team of Japanese archaeologists pieced together the fate of the invasion force.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.  Rather than delving into the past, Wiesman looks to an imagined future—a future suddenly swept clean of all living human beings.  He then methodically traces, like the good journalist he is, what would happen to places like New York City, as they reverted to ruin and wildness.  Within short order, Manhattan’s subway tunnels would fill with water, streets would crater and a river would roar down Lexington Avenue:  in other words, New York would be well on its way to becoming a very eerie archaeological site, or, to put a more positive spin on it,  exactly the kind of place that Christopher Woodward writes about so evocatively. 

Happy holidays,  everyone!