Out of the Dust: Finding Things Where They Are “Not Supposed to Be”

Out of the Dust: Finding Things Where They Are “Not Supposed to Be”

Less than one lifetime ago, school textbooks considered ancient civilization as that of the Greeks and Romans, with bits on the Egyptians and Mesopota­mians thrown in. Periodically since then, successive cohorts of students have been exposed to one or another “canned” version of history that they have accepted uncritically as truly “what hap­pened.” But in recent years the pace of discovery has quickened; new finds exceed the abilities of the textbook writers to even come close to keeping up. Here are a few items of “news” about the old.

In the extreme northeast tip of Syria at the site of Hamoukar, an international archaeological team has discovered evidence that a genuine city existed by 3700 B.C. A widely accepted theory has been that cities developed in northern Mesopotamia well after those in the south, where Uruk, “the Rome of ancient Mesopotamia,” gives its name to the archaeologi­cal period around 3500 B.C. Yet, Hamoukar already had a wall around it, indications of an elite class and government, and signs of specialized division of labor, like large ovens that hint at in­dustrial cooking and brewing.¹

Far to the south, archaeolo­gists are unearthing a temple and city that appear to have been the home of the fabled Queen of Sheba. The Mahram Bilqis tem­ple near the ancient city of Marib has long been thought to be asso­ciated with “Sheba.” Recent finds there prove that the sanctuary, also known as the Temple of the Moon God, existed as early as 1500 B.C. and was in continuous use until the sixth century A.D. It likely was a pilgrimage center during the famous queen's rule and also a significant political and economic force at the time Lehi's party was in the area. If Lehi's and Ishmael's families were “in bondage” in that vicinity for several years, as S. Kent Brown has argued,² then the new excava­tions should shed light not only on relations between King Solo­mon and the “Queen of Sheba” but also on conditions prevailing when the Book of Mormon group was thereabouts. Bill Glanzman, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary, is heading the excavation of the sanctuary. He says that the site is packed with artifacts, pottery, artwork, and inscriptions. The full extent of the site, which is mostly covered with sand, has been revealed by ground-pene­trating radar.

Near this capital of the king­dom of Saba is the ruin of a 2,230- foot-long dam, built in the sev­enth or eighth century B.C., that allowed irrigation of a large area of Saba for centuries. It could take another 15 years to get a full picture of the city. Excavation first began in 1951 under Ameri­can archaeologist Wendell Phil­lips, but within months members of his party were forced to flee for their lives because of threats from the local governor who accused them of failing to deci­pher inscriptions that, he claimed, told where gold was buried. Dan­gers exist even today for the new excavators because the central government is not in full control of local tribesmen, who have been known to take hostages for ransom.³

“Noah's Flood” has been a renewed topic of discussion also. In 1998 geophysicists William B. F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman published a daring but heavily documented claim that they believe explains many questions about ancient life in the center of Eurasia. Building on the work of many other physical scientists and archaeologists, they have uti­lized sea-bottom cores and other underwater data that have al­lowed them to reconstruct a plausible geophysical history of the Black Sea and Mediterranean basins over many thousands of years along entirely new lines. From Ice Age times down to 5600 B.C., the Black Sea basin contained a freshwater lake—400 feet lower than today's Black Sea—around which flourishing ancient cul­tures grew up. But due to changes involving the melting of the ice and the rising of the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, the basin was overwhelmed by torrents of salt­water that flowed in from the Mediterranean through the Bos­porus (adjacent to today's Istan­bul). The filling of the Black Sea basin with saltwater took only a few years.

The impressive spectrum of physical and cultural data gath­ered by these two scientists and their colleagues at the Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and abroad casts dramatic new light on a whole range of ancient pheno­mena. The heavily documented book by Ryan and Pitman that reports their fascinating discover­ies and inferences, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event That Changed History,⁴ became an immediate must-read for all students of ancient history. The two scientists think that the stories of Noah's Flood in the Bible and compara­ble tales in Mesopotamian tradi­tion and elsewhere hark back to the catastrophic event they describe. The Sumerians, who inhabited Mesopotamia from about the sixth millennium B.C., passed on their own version of a flood tale very much like that in the Bible about Noah.

The reigning interpretation of the “development of civiliza­tion” has been that that level of human attainment was reached earliest in the Near East, whence it spread into Europe and else­where. Ryan and Pitman's picture calls much of that explanation into question. The Near-East-was- first notion also fails to meet the challenge of other new data. For example, the earliest pottery in the world is now known to have been developed in northern Japan by the Jomon people about 12,700 years ago.⁵ (They are con­sidered to be ancestors of the non-oriental Ainu people of Japan.)

Other archaeologists are now claiming a role for Africa in the pottery sweepstakes. The first African pottery is now claimed to date to the eighth millennium B.C., within the zone now known as the southern Sahara and Sahel.⁶ That is long before any such craft is evi­dent in the Near East.

British archaeologists have discovered further unexpected facts about the Sahara, although from a much later time. In an oasis zone 100 miles long and 2 to 3 miles wide roughly 700 miles south of Tripoli, Libya, dwelt the Garamantes people mentioned by classical historians Herodotus and Tacitus. The first to fourth centuries A.D. were the heyday of the Garamantes. They constituted enough of a threat to the empire that Rome sent an army against them. The area boasted flourish­ing agriculture made possible by tapping an aquifer with a system of underground channels (the foghara or chain-well system). They traded with both the Roman world and sub-Saharan Africa, and they built tombs shaped like the Egyptian-stepped mastaba structures as well as pyramid tombs. Recent research has identified “a series of signifi­cant botanical horizons in their area—including a late medieval “maize horizon,” which repre­sents the arrival of certain plant species from the Americas (before the time of Columbus). The Garamantes also wrote in a Libyan script, a version of which, called Tifinag has persisted to modern times among the noma­dic Tuareg people of the Sahara.⁷

In the Americas, too, data have come to light about unex­pected human achievements. In a critical reexamination of past re­search on the pottery of the Ama­zon basin, North American ar­chaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt has put together a plausible argu­ment that the making of pottery in that area dates much earlier than has been acknowledged before. To support her case, she has published 22 radiocarbon dates that were done at the Smith­sonian laboratory between 1972 and 1986 but were never pub­lished. It seems that Amazonian pottery began between 5000 and 6000 B.C. (some have suggested that it came from Africa) and is now the most securely dated New World ceramic tradition, existing at least 1,000 years before the next earliest, from Colombia.⁸

Furthermore, a dried-up hu­man corpse, radiocarbon dated to around 5200 B.C., has been found in northeastern Brazil, not far from the early pottery center. There was evidence that the in­testinal tract of this person had been infested with hookworms. The nature of the reproductive cycle of the hookworm rules out their having reached the New World via a cold country (the Bering Strait, as is usually sup­posed). Specialists on parasites are absolutely sure that the only way for those organisms to have reached the Americas from the Far East, where they are known much earlier, was inside human hosts who traveled from East Asia by boat.⁹

Finally, the press, television, and the Internet have widely reported the discovery of a differ­ent kind of city in northern Guatemala. Excavation at a Maya center anciently named (accord­ing to inscriptions) Cancuen began this year. The archaeolo­gists, from Vanderbilt and other universities and the Guatemalan government, report that what they have found is not the usual administrative or holy settlement of the Maya but a very wealthy commercial center. Some mun­dane manufacturing and trading activities not usually associated with sacred places were central to life at Cancuen and its wealth. This is the first time that a spe­cial-function city has been dis­covered in Mesoamerica; small settlements for specific pur- poses—making salt, fishing, and mining—have been found before, but nothing so massive and eco­nomically crucial as this place.¹⁰

All these examples of recent investigations warn us that the string-wrapped packages of knowledge we may have bought at the learning store—our places of education—a few years back may now be out of date. Our old contents need to be reexamined in the light shed by more recent discoveries. How these latest finds and claims will work out over time remains to be seen. Their significance will no doubt change as more research is done. The inevitable tentativeness of scientific or scholarly knowledge displayed in these cases under­lines the wisdom of Brigham H. Roberts in counseling that “we need not follow our researches in any spirit of fear and trem­bling. We desire only to ascertain the truth; nothing but the truth will endure.”¹¹ But it also whets our appetite for further challenging discoveries “out of the dust.”

Notes

1. Craig Savage, “Scientists find civiliza­tion where it isn't supposed to be,” Christian Science Monitor, 25 May 2000, 3.
2. S. Kent Brown, From Jerusalem to Zarahemla (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1998), 55-74.
3. Mike Theodoulou, “Traces of the Queen of Sheba under antiquity's dust,” Christian Science Monitor, 20 September 2000, 7.
4. William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
5. C. M. Aikens, “First in the World: The Jomon Pottery of Early Japan,” in The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies, ed. William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 11-21.
6. Angela E. Close, “Few and Far Between: Early Ceramics in North Africa,” in The Emergence of Pottery, ed. Barnett and Hoopes, 23-37.
7. David Mattingly, “Making the desert bloom: the Garamantian capital and its underground water system,” Archaeology Odyssey 3/2 (March-April): 31-37.
8. Anna C. Roosevelt, “Early Pottery in the Amazon: Twenty Years of Scholarly Obscurity,” in The Emergence of Pottery, ed. Barnett and Hoopes.
9. L. Fernando Ferreira et al., “Encontro de ovos de ancilostom^deos em coprolitos humanos datados de 7,230±80 anos, no Estado do Piaui, Brasil,” in Paleoparasitologia no Brasil, ed. L. Fernando Ferreira, A. Aratijo, and U. Confalonieri. (Rio de Janeiro: Programa de Educa^ao Ptiblica, Escola Nacional de Satide Ptiblica, 1988).
10. See Will Weissert, “Ancient Mayan Markeplace Found,” http://www.abcnews. go.com, 27 Oct. 2000; and Angela M. H. Schuster, “Maya Palace Uncovered,” http://www.archaeology.org, 8 Sept. 2000.
11. Brigham H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God: II, The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1951), 503.