This week more than 3000 archaeologists from around the world are converging on Atlanta, Georgia, to chat up their latest research at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting. For five brief days, conversations in the corridors of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis hotel will be studded with esoteric talk of Basketmaker II coprolites, Dorset slate tools, and human remains from Belize’s Midnight Terror Cave. (The latter, I think, wins the prize for the coolest name for an archaeological site.)

Archaeologists are fond of complaining about the SAA meeting. Each participant gets just 15 minutes at the podium to present what might be years or even decades of hard work, and session organizers ruthlessly police these time limits. The media is equally ambivalent. Reporters must dash frantically back and forth between thirty or more sessions in an afternoon, cellphones in hand as they relay findings to their editors and scramble to ferret out the best story.

I’m following the conference from afar this year, but I spent several pleasant hours yesterday thumbing through 400-odd pages of SAA abstracts. I was amazed by the scope of the new research.

Curse Tablets from Roman Carthage. Archaeologists have long studied the inscriptions on these homely looking pieces of metal, fascinated by the ways in which ordinary people appealed to the gods to influence human events. Now University of Georgia archaeometallurgist Sheldon Skaggs has done something different, analyzing the metal in 90 curse tablets from Carthage to see where it came from. The tablets, he discovered, were made of Tunisian lead, suggesting that the Romans were mining a lead ore known as galena in the African colony.

An Upper Class Delicacy. The lowly sea urchin, a creature resembling a pin cushion, litters ancient coastal refuse-heaps around the world. But archaeologists seldom pay it much attention, viewing it as a meal of last resort for prehistoric peoples. Not true, says Victoria Stosel, an archaeologist at California State University. Stosel has finished a new study on sea urchins, finding evidence of them in places as important and diverse as the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the acropolis of ancient Corinth and in an elite burial cave in the Aleutian Islands. She now thinks these creatures —which are rich in calcium, phosphorus, iron, and vitamins A, B1, B2 and B12—were prized foods of the elite in many parts of the ancient world.

Birds of a Feather. Some have called the scarlet macaw, a resident of the subtropical rainforests of Central America, one of the world’s most beautiful birds. More than five centuries ago, the inhabitants of Paquime in arid northern Mexico raised these birds for their scarlet and light blue feathers, which could be traded far and wide. But archaeologists have long debated the source of these birds, whose northernmost habitat lies 300 miles to the south. Did the Paquimeños breed them or obtain them from southern traders? A new study by an Arizona State University team led by Andrew Somerville sheds key new light. By studying the bone chemistry of macaw skeletons from Paquime, the team found that the Paquimeños did indeed breed most of the birds –an early example of aviculture in the Americas.

I think 2009 is a very strong year for research at the SAA and I’ll present more of the findings in blogs to come.

This entry was posted by Heather Pringle on Friday, April 24, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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