January/February 2012 Issue

Digs & Discoveries

Stone Age Art Supplies

A cave in southwestern South Africa was used as a paint production workshop, where ancient artists made a liquid ochre pigment. The toolkit of shells, stone, and bone from Blombos Cave suggests Middle Stone Age humans were capable planners.

Digs & Discoveries

Migrating Away from Clovis

In mid-October 2011 the journal Science published a reexamination of a mastodon bone originally excavated in the late 1970s at the Manis site in northwestern Washington State. Embedded in the bone, one of the mastodon's 19 ribs, was the tip of a bone projectile. Using DNA analysis, a team led by Texas A&M University archaeologist Michael Waters determined that the point was itself fashioned from mastodon bone.

Digs & Discoveries

Drawing Paleolithic Romania

Radiocarbon dates from Coliboaia Cave in Romania show that animal images drawn on the cave walls are among the oldest visual art in Europe and further confirm that early humans did indeed create art.

Digs & Discoveries

A Low-Flying Bird's-Eye View

A group of researchers at Ghent University in Belgium has tested a new and inexpensive method of taking low-altitude aerial photographs and creating 3-D computer models of archaeological sites. The team chose to use a remote-controlled drone "quadro-copter" —a highly stable helicopter with four sets of rotors.

Digs & Discoveries

Libya's Forgotten History

Thanks largely to research conducted by a team led by David Mattingly of the University of Leicester, there is new evidence that the Garamantes were a highly sophisticated civilization who built state-of-the-art water extraction systems in the desert and constructed more than 100 fortified farms and villages, most dating to the first five centuries A.D.

Digs & Discoveries

The Incredible Shrinking Grouper

Fish in the Mediterranean aren't what they used to be. Commercial and recreational fishing have decreased population sizes and also made individuals smaller, since big fish are kept and smaller ones thrown back.

Digs & Discoveries

A New Look with Neutrons

Scientists have developed an imaging device that uses a beam of neutrons, a particle found in the nucleus of most atoms, to make three-dimensional images of archaeological artifacts.

Digs & Discoveries

The Precious

Digs & Discoveries

Convict Mothers

In the first half of the nineteenth century, 12,000 British female convicts were sent to the prison colony in Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania. Convicts, held in work camps called "factories," were forbidden to have contact with their babies except for breastfeeding. But a recent find at the Ross Female Factory shows that they skirted that rule, and may have actively resisted separation from their children.