When did humans start deliberately disposing of their dead?

Research continues to reveal that non-human animals recognize death and express what we would call grief for the loss of a group member. There is no doubt that this narrows the perceived gap between humans and other animals and reinforces the continuity of life. As far as we know, however, we humans are the only species that is fully aware of our own mortality. With this realization comes the ability (or curse?) to anticipate and contemplate our death and the deaths of others. We express this "mortality salience" (to use the term of social psychologist Jeff Greenberg and his colleagues) in part through elaborate mortuary rituals. When did humans develop this mortality salience, and how might we tell?

While much of the symbolic meaning associated with these rituals does not fossilize, some behaviors, such as the creation and interment of grave goods, the intentional modification of human remains and, most pertinent to this post, the deliberate disposal of the dead, can potentially survive in the archaeological record. There is a growing consensus that by ~120,000 years ago Neandertals and other Middle Paleolithic humans intentionally buried their dead and, in some cases, perhaps even collected the bones of the dead for secondary burial (the evidence for grave offerings remains equivocal). The case for deliberate disposal before the Middle Paleolithic is more contentious, and the present debate revolves around the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain and the Dinaledi Chamber in the Rising Star Cave System of South Africa. Dated to between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago, these remarkable fossil assemblages are composed nearly exclusively of human bones. What is more, the skeletons are found in difficult-to-access chambers deep within the cave systems. These are extraordinary finds, and it is reasonable to ask: (1) if they represent the remains of corpses that were deliberately disposed of and, if so, (2) whether the process of corpse disposal was infused with some deeper cultural meaning, as it is among modern humans.

My colleagues and I recently put in our two cents worth on this topic in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (the study has garnered some modest publicity in Spain and the United States). Thankfully, both the Atapuerca and Rising Star research teams have published extensively so that their data are available to other paleoanthropologists. After my friend, colleague, and former PhD adviser Travis Pickering pored over the frequencies of skeletal elements from the Dinaledi Chamber, he told me the pattern was not what one would expect if complete bodies were being deposited in the cave. We therefore decided to put together a small database of skeletal element data from other sites with primate remains. I eventually found over 30 datasets that ranged from modern forensic cases and leopard-consumed baboons to 3.2-million-year-old autralopiths. Another good friend and colleague, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, argued that a machine-learning approach would be appropriate here, since these sorts of algorithms might be able to distinguish among the different types of assemblages based on patterns of skeletal element preservation.

Essentially, we found that the pattern of bone preservation in the Sima de los Huesos and the Dinaledi Chamber is different from that seen in complete skeletons. Now, this in and of itself does not refute the hypothesis that the Sima and Dinaledi remains were deliberately disposed of--even intentionally buried bodies can be scavenged or moved around after their original deposition. (In fact, we think it is likely that carnivores consumed some of the softer bones at both sites.) What was most intriguing to us, though, was the fact that both the Sima and Dinaledi consistently clustered with an assemblage of baboon bones from an active cave system in South Africa called Misgrot. This cave, which was investigated by two other colleagues, Jason Heaton and Colin Menter, preserved over a thousand baboon bones, some of which were found as partial skeletons. Since the baboons aren't being intentionally dropped into the cave by conspecifics (the cave is used mainly as a sleeping site), it stands to reason that you don't need to invoke deliberate disposal to explain the skeletal part frequencies of either the Sima or Dinaledi. It is, in other words, possible to get a collection of partially complete, large-bodied primates into a cave through natural processes.

We are careful to note that these findings don't disprove the deliberate disposal hypothesis at these sites. Is it possible that some time before 300,000 years ago early humans were intentionally dumping bodies into caves? Sure. Is it even possible that this behavior had some sort of symbolic meaning behind it? Absolutely. But, as the aphorism made famous by Carl Sagan goes, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." So, to quote our paper, neither the Sima or Dinaledi "currently qualifies as unequivocal evidence for emergent mortality salience in the human lineage."

References:

Egeland, CP, Domínguez-Rodrigo, M, Pickering, TR, Menter, CG, Heaton, JL (2018). Hominin skeletal part abundances and claims of deliberate corpse disposal in the Middle Pleistocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718678115

Society for American Archaeology meetings 2017

This year's Society for American Archaeology meetings were held in Vancouver, British Columbia from March 29th to April 2nd. I flew into town on Thursday night (the 30th) and had to run out on Saturday night. It was a whirlwind trip for me, as I presented a paper, co-chaired a special session, and supervised two undergraduate researchers who also presented at the meetings. As always, there was too much going on to see everything that was of interest, but I'll present my highlights:

• Way back in June 2016 I was invited by Karen Ruebens to contribute a paper to a symposium entitled "Connecting Middle Paleolithic Datasets: the Interplay of Zooarchaeological and Lithic Data for Unraveling Neanderthal Behavior," which was co-organized by Geoff Smith, Theresa Steele, and Tamara Dogandzic. Around that time I was reading an interesting paper by Marie-Cécile Soulier and Eugène Morin about the use of cutmark orientation to reconstruct planning depth in the Paleolithic, and this sparked my interest because, in 2014, we published a paper suggesting that cutmark orientation might be used to identify the skill level of prehistoric butchers. So, I thought the symposium would be a great venue to explore this issue further and I happily agreed to participate. The paper I presented with my colleagues Chris Nicholson, Kevin Covell, Robert Sanderford, Kristen Welch, and Metin Eren "Cutmarks, Lithics, and the Identification of Skill and Tool Utility in Experimental and Middle Paleolithic Contexts," turned out to be slightly different than what I had originally submitted in our abstract (a not unusual situation given that abstracts are due a full seven months, yes SEVEN MONTHS, before the meetings), but our major findings were (1) that inexperienced butchers tend to create more cutmarks and more variation in cutmark orientation than do more experienced butchers and (2) that Levallois flakes (which were produced by Metin, who is a world-class knapper and lithic technologist) are ideally suited to butchery because of their versatility. 

The preparation of cores for the removal of Levallois flakes.
From Eren and Lycett (2012: Figure 1).

While both conclusions are interesting, the latter was of particular note in the context of the symposium, since the creation of Levallois flakes is a labor intensive, not to mention difficult to learn, process (see figure above). Our results suggest that Levallois flakes' utility and durability as butchery implements may partially offset the energy expended to create them. In other words, it might make sense to spend an hour or two preparing cores (and wasting a lot of raw material in the process) if it results in the production of three or four Levallois flakes that can butcher a couple of carcasses without being replaced. I slipped out briefly after our talk to visit the poster session down the hall since my student, Liat Lebovich, was presenting on some landscape taphonomy we've conducted on the savanna just north of Olduvai Gorge, but returned for the symposium's first question break and the remainder of the session. Several questions were thrown my way, relating mainly to the application of our cutmark data to archaeofaunal assemblages (we have not yet taken that step). One interesting query, I believe from Eugène Morin, involved cutmark frequencies: we found that novice butchers produce more cutmarks within each "cluster" (defined by us as a group of cutmarks separated from other groups of cutmarks by at least one centimeter) than do experienced butchers. He asked if I thought that novice butchers would create more, or fewer, cutmark clusters. After thinking about it for second, I responded that while novice butchers create more cutmarks per cluster, they probably produce fewer clusters since the marks they create tend to be scattered across relatively expansive portions of the bone surface rather than the few discrete clusters (that make anatomical sense) created by more experienced butchers. I hadn't thought to examine this variable, and I certainly will do so as we move forward with our study. The rest of the papers were interesting, and the integration of faunal and lithic data is obviously critical to understanding Neandertal lifeways. Very honored to have been invited to participate in the symposium.


• On Saturday morning, I co-chaired a session with my friends and colleagues Tori Johnson and Ryan Byerly entitled "Ecological Perspectives on Hominin Landuse Use during the Early Stone Age of Africa." Included in the session were papers presented by Julio Mercader, Cynthia Fadem, David Braun, Briana Pobiner, and another of my students, Cory Henderson. The session was well-attended (it wasn't a massive room, but most of the seats we did have, perhaps 75 or so, were full). As I stated in my short introductory remarks, the impetus for the symposium stemmed from Rick Potts's "Variables Versus Models of Early Pleistocene Hominid Land Use" manuscript published in Journal of Human Evolution in 1994. In that paper, Potts argued (correctly, I believe) that paleoanthropologists should resist the urge to force early Pleistocene archaeological sites into specific "types," or, using Potts's terminology, models (e.g., Home Base vs. Refuge vs. Central Place). A more productive approach involves the identification of the ecological variables (e.g., the distribution of raw material outcrops, plant and animal foods, competitors, etc.) that influenced where and when early hominins accumulated stones and bones on the landscape. I also made it clear that our purpose in convening the symposium was not to chastise paleoanthropologists for not taking this approach--it is, in fact, relatively common among researchers investigating Early Stone Age archaeology--but, rather, to highlight the latest work being done from this perspective. UNCG undergrad (and recently accepted graduate student to the biology program at Penn State) Cory Henderson summarized the analyses we've been conducting on raw material outcrops in the Olduvai Basin over the past couple of years. Quartzite dominants a majority of the Bed I and Bed II sites at Olduvai, and it has always been assumed that the source of this raw material is Naibor Soit, a set of three closely spaced inselbergs just north of the gorge.

View looking south at one of the inselbergs (foreground) that makes up the
Naibor Soit quartzite outcrop. Photo by C.P. Egeland.

This is not an unreasonable assumption: Naibor Soit is very close to most of the archaeological sites and would certainly have been a conspicuous feature on the landscape, just as it is today. However, Naibor Soit may not have been continuously accessible, especially when a fully transgressed lake Olduvai likely transformed the inselbergs into islands. There are at least two additional sources of quartzite in the basin, Shifting Sand and Naisiusiu Hill, and we wanted to know if hominins were traveling to other parts of the basin to access this type of toolstone. This is not a straightforward exercise, though, because the quartzite from all the sources is macroscopically very similar. We decided to use X-ray fluorescence to determine if the outcrops could be distinguished based on their elemental composition. It turns out that there is considerable overlap, but samples of known origin can be correctly classified with between 36% and 76% accuracy, which is better than random chance (which would be 33%). When we threw some archaeological artifacts from Bed I into the analysis, most (64%) were inferred to have derived from Naibor Soit. However, a couple were a better match for one of the other quartzite outcrops. So, while hominins appear to have used Naibor Soit a majority of the time, they also visited other parts of the basin to acquire quartzite (from Shifting Sand, Naisiusiu or, perhaps, other sources that are currently buried or otherwise unobservable). The ability to tie artifacts to individual outcrops could potentially reveal very nuanced patterns of movement, which is required to rigorously test various models of hominin land-use at Olduvai. The most interesting paper, at least for me, was presented by Dave Braun on behalf of his co-authors Jonathan Reeves and Matthew Douglass and entitled "Behavioral Inferences from Early Stone Age Sites: A View from the Koobi Fora Formation." Every so often archaeologists, particularly those working in the Paleolithic, need to be reminded of the importance of scale: that is, the scale at which we would like to reconstruct behavior and ecological affordances (months, years or, ideally, days) and the scale at which our proxies of these variables actually permit (months, years, decades, and millennia--rarely, if ever, days). Dave provided exactly that reminder within the context of their on-going work at Koobi Fora, Kenya. They point out that archaeologists continue (wishfully, perhaps?) to apply behavioral models suited for temporal scales that are in most cases simply not reflected in the scatters of bones and stones that litter early Pleistocene paleolandscapes. Cynthia presented the latest geoarchaeological data from our ongoing excavations at DK East (Bed I) and BK East (Bed II). Perhaps most important is her identification of several unnamed tuffs within the DK East sequence. Dating these sediments should allow us to increase greatly the chronological precision in the area and, thus, derive narrower age ranges for the numerous fossiliferous deposits and more accurate estimates of sedimentation rates.    

• The session I most enjoyed, and learned the most from, was chaired by Erick Robinson, Robert Kelly, and Nicolas Naudinot and was organized around "The Future of 'Big Data' in Archaeology." An archaeologist's idea of big data (thousands to hundreds of thousands of records) differs substantially from what is typical in computer science (millions and millions of records), but increased computing power and more sophisticated statistical techniques now permit the aggregation and analysis of huge archaeological databases. I recently received a Digital Partners Grant from the UNCG libraries to collaborate on a database for Paleolithic sites, so I was particularly interested to hear about the latest from folks that have been thinking deeply about data and databases. There are a number of open-access databases, some of which I am familiar with and others with which which I am not, including:
• Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD): a global compilation of 14C dates.
• Ancient Cacao Map: an interactive database for samples of ancient cacao in the Americas.
• ARIADNE: this is a database of archaeological databases spanning many periods and regions.
• The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA): a repository of artifact distribution maps and images. 
• The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA): this site creates interoperability among archaeological site databases in North America. A good friend with whom I attended graduate school, Josh Wells, is one of the senior investigators on this project.  


Some of the major lessons that I drew from this symposium are:
• The longevity of databases is a real issue, since the people who run them retire and the funding that supports them expires.
• There was a lot of discussion about 14C databases. Many people are using them to model demography, for example (the basic idea: more 14C dates for a particular time period = higher population sizes), but the quality of dates remains very difficult to assess. This same issue of data quality applies to many large databases.

• I recently developed an interest in the use of social network analysis in archaeology. In fact, I've begun a collaboration with a colleague of mine at UNCG, Jing Deng, who is a computer scientist that specializes in online networks. We've joined forces to use his technical know-how and my background in archaeology to apply network analysis to the Paleolithic. Our Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creativity Office here at UNCG just funded a proposal we put together to build a social network database for the Magdalenian of western Europe with the aid of Amanda Chase (an anthropology major) and Nathaniel Arnold (a computer science major). The Magdalenian is an ideal test case since there are hundreds of well-dated sites with thousands of artifacts suited to the construction of social networks: portable art. The idea is that stylistic similarities reflect some sort of shared social identity, so if we can identify sites with high frequencies of shared artifacts with shared stylistic variants, we may be able to reconstruct social networks. Jing is adept at using social network software to identify important nodes and relationships between nodes. I do not know much about Paleolithic art and how it is categorized, so I sat in on a "Not Just Good to See: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art" session. While the focus was on rock, and not portable, art, I gained some perspective on how we might organize art into an analysis. Elizabeth Culley, who is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, outlined an ontology of parietal art from France between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago. I listened closely as she discussed her use of the number of distinct scenes, the number of narrative scenes, the theme of the scenes (e.g., fighting animals), and the number of animals as important features that distinguish various sites. The other paper I was able to listen to, from Melanie Chang of Portland State University and April Nowell of the University of Victoria, discussed the (mis)use of gender binaries in interpretations of Paleolithic art. They show convincingly that many images that are traditionally identified as either male or female are, in fact, quite ambiguous when it comes to biological sex. Much of this "forcing" of images into male or female reflects modern western gender biases. This was pertinent to me, too, because I need to be careful about past interpretations of some of these images, since biological sex would be an important trait to use in the classification of images for social network analysis. The last presentation that I visited related to social network analysis was a poster by William Ridge (University of Illinois at Chicago) on social networks in the Early Bronze Age of the Aegean. What I thought was interesting was his use of geographic distance between sites ("nodes" in social network terminology) as the null hypothesis for further analysis. In other words, all else being equal, one would expect sites that are closer to each other in an absolute geographic sense to have stronger social ties than sites further apart. If the network analysis does not show strong ties between closely spaced sites, then other hypotheses (trade routes, etc.) can be explored. I will certainly use this approach with our own work in the Magdalenian.  

Well, that's it from my notes, great meeting!

Paleolithic research in the Armenian Highlands and Anatolia

I returned safe and sound from Anakara a couple of weeks ago (an unexpected overnight stay in Terminal 5 at JFK not withstanding) and am happy to report that the trip was well worth it. It was an intimate event, with 14 papers and perhaps 20-30 audience members. Some highlights:

• The first paper was by Amilié Vialet and her colleague M. Cihat Alçiçek, who discussed the Kocabaş skullcap. I was particularly interested to hear this talk, as I knew next to nothing about this important hominin fossil. The remains consist of the frontal and parietal of a hominin that were recovered in 2002 during quarrying activities in the travertines of the famous Pammukale (Turkish: "Cotton Castle") hot springs (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) in western Turkey. (I actually visited this area, which also includes impressive ruins from Greek and Roman times, on a vacation way back in 2001.) The top of the skullcap was literally shaved off by heavy equipment (unfortunately, the rest of the skull, nor any other part of the skeleton, have ever been recovered) but, thankfully, the recovered bones were brought to the attention of Alçiçek, who recognized their importance. John Kappelman and his colleagues had previously published on the remains and suggested that (1) they dated to ~500,000 years ago, (2) provisionally, they represented H. erectus; and (3) the individual suffered from the earliest known case of tuberculosis. Vialet (who, apart from being a world-class paleoanthropologist, is a genuinely nice person) summarized more recent work on the fossil. Perhaps most importantly, they push back the age of the remains using a variety of dating techniques to ~1.4 million years ago, which makes them among the oldest in all of Eurasia. An audience member asked Vialet about tuberculosis, and she vacillated, saying that a confident diagnosis from their team would need to await further analyses. Their 3D reconstruction of the cranium, however, suggested a closer affinity of Kocabaş to Homo ergaster fossils from Africa rather than early Homo (including the crania from Dmanisi) fossils or later, classic Homo erectus populations from Asia. Vialet suggested, then, that Kocabaş represents an "expansion [from Africa that is] different from that represented by the Dmanisi fossils". It is becoming increasingly clear that the movement out of Africa by hominins ca. 2 million years ago was a complex series of events (emphasis on the plural) that involved many populations, some of which were able to establish long-term occupations and others that quickly went extinct. The new information from Kocabaş certainly reinforces this idea.
• What followed was a series of papers by our Turkish colleagues that summarized the Lower and Middle Paleolithic of Anatolia. What struck me is that apart from a few notable exceptions (Kaletepe Deresi 3, Karaïn Cave, Yarımburgaz Cave, and Üçazğlı Cave), much of what is known is based almost exclusively on surface assemblages that lack key contextual information (chronometric dates, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, etc.). For example, Kadriye Özçelik reported on surface surveys that documented for the first time the presence of Paleolithic material in the Denizli Basin of southwestern Anatolia (this is the same region in which the Kocabaş fossil was uncovered). It is quite amazing, if you think about it, that it took until 2014 to officially recognize the presence of Paleolithic tools in this region, especially since, as I later learned, handaxes have been known in Turkey since 1896. While those of us working in Armenia faced a similar situation−that is, a dependence largely on surface finds−a great deal of progress has been made on this front in the last 10 years, due largely, I think, to the support of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, which has done much to nurture Paleolithic research in Armenia. My conversations with Turkish researchers revealed that it is extremely difficult to acquire permits to even examine and collect surface assemblages in Turkey, much less excavate stratified sites. Until that changes, I fear that our knowledge of Paleolithic settlement in modern Turkey will continue to lag behind that of other nearby countries.
• Our paper summarized work on Bagratashen 1, and we officially announced OSL dates from the Middle Paleolithic horizon of around 35,000 years ago. While Middle Paleolithic sites of this age are not unusual, the types of stone tools uncovered from the deposit look like artifacts from other parts of the southern Caucasus and the Levant that are much older, somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (see my previous post on Bagratashen 1 here). So, either our dates are way out of whack (which is possible), or we have an example of technological convergence where culturally and temporally unrelated hominin groups independently converged on similar tool types. There is a long history in archaeology of viewing stone tools to track human populations. That is, particular cultures made particular types of tools, so if you find similar tools, you have the same people. However, folks have long pointed out that, as complex a technology that lithic manufacture can be, there are only so many ways that one can reduce a chunk of rock into different shapes. Dan Adler and his colleagues made precisely this point in their paper about their excavations at Nor Geghi 1 in Armenia. What they found is that at about 330,000 years ago, folks in Armenia were creating both bifacial artifacts typically associated with the Acheulean and Middle Paleolithic Levallois products at the same time. This shows definitively that, at least at Nor Geghi 1, making Acheulean bifaces has little to do with being part of an Acheulean "culture" that represents a particular group or species of hominins. Likewise, it seems that the appearance of Levallois technology, again at least in Armenia, need not necessarily represent a new group or species of hominin. Perhaps it is time, as Dan simulated with a humorous slide, to flush many of these stone tool "cultures" down the toilet.

I should also point out that Phil was able to bring together Turkish and Armenian researchers to discuss Paleolithic archaeology. This shows the power of science in general, and archaeology in particular, to transcend political and ethnic enmity and bring together people with common goals. I was honored to be part of such a momentous event.

Off to Turkey!

I am leaving tomorrow for Ankara, Turkey, where my colleague Phil Glauberman has organized a workshop entitled "Palaeolithic Research in the Armenian Highlands and Anatolia". I am honored to be included in this event, which will bring together an international contingent of researchers that work on the Lower and Middle Paleolithic in a very under-appreciated and understudied region. I'll be presenting on our recent work at Bagratashen 1. It's been 15 years since my last visit to Turkey, so I'm looking forward to the trip. Check back soon for a post that summarizes the event...  

Preliminary results from Bagratashen 1

I returned from Yerevan on Sunday night, having been forced to sprint to my last connection into Raleigh/Durham because Air France was unable to get the cargo hold open to release our baggage. This was my first experience with an Armenian spring, and there were some brisk days at ~3,000 feet (I'm usually there in the summer, when it can be broiling, particularly in the arid north where we work).

As I mentioned in my previous post, the goal of this trip was to conduct a preliminary analysis of the stone tools from Bagratashen 1 and, after having looked at them over the past two weeks, it appears as if they are going to be very interesting indeed. My colleague, Boris Gasparian, and I examined over 500 pieces from our excavations.

The Bagratashen 1 lithic material laid out for analysis.

While it's obviously going to take some time to sort out what's going on (not to mention additional excavations to recover a larger sample size−this stuff came from a small 6m² excavation), I can relate some observations:

• There's definitely (and unsurprisingly) Levallois technology represented. 
• We've got quite a few points and point fragments in the assemblage (over ten). What's interesting is that we have both unretouched and retouched Levallois pieces and non-Levallois pieces. So, MP folks used different techniques to produce stone tools with the same characteristic; i.e., pointy ends. I took some measurements on tip cross sectional area, which can, according to John Shea (2006) and others, help determine whether a point could have been used as an effective projectile (note that this attribute cannot say that a point definitively was used as such). A couple of these points look, at least in a general morphological sense, very similar to the elongated retouched points found in Levels 1 and 2 at Djruchula Cave (Georgian Republic) and Lower E at Hayonim (Israel). This is potentially significant for us, since we have yet to successfully date the Bagratashen 1 sediments and Djruchula and Hayonim have been dated to between about 300,000 and 150,000 years ago. We have to be careful here, though: morphological similarity does not necessarily mean temporal similarity, since technology, especially lithic technology, is subject to independent development. 
• Boris and I noticed that a number of the artifacts, most of which are dacite, display a "rotted" surface texture, and some even feel lighter, as if they've been leached somehow. Boris suspects that this may be related to thermal damage and, sure enough, another colleague of ours, Dmitri Arakelyan, told us that he has tossed dacite into fire before and it does indeed show this sort of modification. More systematic experiments are of course in order, but we may have some indirect evidence for fire at the site (whether its natural or anthropogenic is also another issue).
• Nearly all the pieces were covered by carbonate crust, likely imparted well after the materials had been buried. We recorded what face of each artifact was facing skyward before it was pulled out of the ground and, because carbonates tend to form on the "downward" faces of clasts, we should therefore get an idea of whether or not they moved around in the sediment post-depostionally.
• There also appears to be quite a bit of truncation going on. In essence, this means that after knocking off a flake, hominins chose to subsequently remove, either through a single, massive blow or finer retouch, one or both ends of the piece. Why one would bother to truncate a seemingly well-made flake is another question. One possibility is that this truncation provides a new platform for the removal of smaller flakes from the original piece. The knappers may have wanted to remove the old platform and/or the bulky bulb of percussion to artificially thin the piece, for instance. Whatever the reason, people were doing it at Bagratashen 1.

Alright, enough chatter, let's get to the analysis....

References:

Shea, JD (2006). The origins of lithic projectile technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 33, 823-846.

Off to Armenia

I just arrived in Yerevan yesterday evening. As part of my spring research leave, I will be here studying the lithic collections from sites that our team excavated between 2010 and 2011. I'll concentrate on Bagratashen 1, which is an open-air site discovered during our 2009 survey. Excavations in 2011 and 2012 recovered several hundred well-preserved Middle Paleolithic artifacts from a discrete find horizon. Unfortunately, no fauna has yet been uncovered; we are pretty excited about it the site nonetheless, since geological work suggests that the assemblage is largely undisturbed. So, we hope to extract some fine-grained behavioral information.

Look out for more updates as the analyses proceed....