More cultural sites have been revealed, presenting new challenges to land managers as well as opportunities for new archaeological research.

As Lake Powell began to fill in 1963, the Sierra Club published a best-selling coffee table book that featured photographer Eliot Porter’s images of Glen Canyon.

The book’s title, “The Place No One Knew,” framed a narrative that would find its way into future conservationist elegies for the Colorado River canyon in southern Utah.

Glen Canyon, the story went, was in such a wild, remote part of the United States that nobody — from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to Bureau of Reclamation engineers to activists like then-Sierra Club director David Brower — fully understood what would be lost when the Glen Canyon Dam was authorized by Congress in 1956.

Bill Lipe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Washington State University, said that while cliff dwellings tend to get the most attention from visitors, the majority of cultural sites in Glen Canyon did not feature free-standing walls, even before Lake Powell.

Lipe was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1958 when he arrived in Glen Canyon to lead a field crew of archaeologists to survey ancestral Puebloan sites that would soon be inundated by the reservoir.

“It was a challenge,” Lipe said, “and an opportunity to actually make a contribution to knowledge in an area that was just incredibly exciting just to be in.” Lipe’s project was an exercise in what is sometimes referred to as “salvage archaeology,” a race against the dam builders downstream.

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The Salt Lake Tribune

Dr. Anne Pisor is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Her research interests include long-distance relationships and resource management, long-distance relationships and the downsides of climate change, and the evolution of human sociality.

In this episode, we talk about topics in evolutionary anthropology, including: long-distance relationships, and how they’re built; inter-group tolerance; studying human sociality in preliterate societies, and the assumptions we have about them; parochial altruism; how people valuate out-group strangers; Dr. Pisor’s fieldwork in the Bolivian Amazon and Tanzania; and climate change, how it affects human societies, how they adapt to it, and what industrialized societies can learn from them.

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The Dissenter

With the rapid, unprecedented pace of climate change, it is time to start seriously considering the worst-case scenarios, warns Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler.

Kohler, an emeritus WSU professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology, is part of an international team of climate experts that argue that although unlikely, climate change catastrophes, including human extinction, should be more heavily considered by scientists.

He and his collaborators discuss how climate change could drive mass extinction events and propose a research agenda to investigate bad- to worst-case scenarios in a new commentary article published Aug. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tim Kohler
“It’s a topic that is too scary for most people to contemplate but that needs to change because the risks we face are very real,” said Kohler, who holds the distinction of being the first archaeologist to contribute to an IPCC report as a lead author. “We are entering a period where the climate dynamics are going to be completely outside the norm of what we have experienced in the last 12,000 years.”

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WSU Insider

“Normally, you are lucky if you find a jade bead.”

Ancient Mayans have been a continuing source of inspiration for their monuments, knowledge, and mysterious demise. Now a new study discovers some of the drugs they used. For the first time, scientists found remnants of a non-tobacco plant in Mayan drug containers. They believe their analysis methods can allow them exciting new ways of investigating the different types of psychoactive and non-psychoactive plants used by the Maya and other pre-Colombian societies.

The research was carried out by a team from Washington State University, led by anthropology postdoc Mario Zimmermann. They spotted residue of the Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida) in 14 tiny ceramic vessels that were buried over a 1,000 years ago on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The containers also exhibited chemical traces of two types of tobacco: Nicotiana tabacum and N. rustica. Scientists think the marigold was mixed in with the tobacco to make the experience more pleasant.

“While it has been established that tobacco was commonly used throughout the Americas before and after contact, evidence of other plants used for medicinal or religious purposes has remained largely unexplored,” said Zimmermann. “The analysis methods developed in collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Biological Chemistry give us the ability to investigate drug use in the ancient world like never before.”

The scientists used a new method based on metabolomics that is able to pinpoint thousands of plant compounds, or metabolites, in residue of archaeological artifacts like containers and pipes. This allows the researchers to figure out which specific plants were utilized.

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Freethink

In the area where the Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexican borders now meet, ancestral Pueblo societies thrived and then collapsed several times, over the span of 800 years.

Each time they recovered, their culture transformed. This shifting history can be seen in their pottery and the incredible stone and earth dwellings they created. During 300 of those years, some Pueblo peoples, who also used ink tattoos, were ruled by a matrilineal dynasty.

As in the collapse of other ancient civilizations, ancestral Pueblo social collapses align with periods of changing climate – but Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, suggesting that there was more to their collapses than just environmental conditions.

“Societies that are cohesive can often find ways to overcome climate challenges,” explained Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler back in 2021.

“But societies that are riven by internal social dynamics of any sort – which could be wealth differences, racial disparities or other divisions – are fragile because of those factors. Then climate challenges can easily become very serious.”

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Science alert