Francisco Estrada-Belli poses at the bottom of a Maya chultun, an underground storage chamber, at Cival. Photo courtesy of Francisco Estrada-Belli.

The Society for American Archaeology is holding its annual conference in Vancouver, Canada from March 26 through March 30 and I’m lucky to be here, along with what I overheard are 8,000 other people interested in the subject. Over the course of four days there are somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 presentations covering anything from million year-old rhino teeth from Chinese caves to how to teach soldiers in Iraq about archaeology using playing cards. This is the kind of place where I come to look for stories.

Fortunately, I have a lot of help. Aside from my colleague Christina Elson, who is also here at the conference, there are scads of archaeologists here who have received research grants from the Society’s prestigious Committee for Research and Exploration. Most are thankful for the support they’ve received and are eager to help.

Here’s how a day at a conference like this goes:

I started off the day having breakfast with Francisco Estrada-Belli, a charming and energetic fellow who has received eleven grants from the Society for his research on the Maya. He’s currently doing great work at several different Maya sites; a lot of it relates to National Geographic’s August 2007 cover story on the Maya. That breakfast made me miss grantee Jon Erlandson’s presentation on a Viking longhouse at Hrisbru, Iceland, but I caught the presentations of others working on the same project. The longhouse was a boat-shaped building apparently covered with turf. You can see still see some old turf-covered farm buildings in Iceland today.

Lunch was with five-time grantee Bill Folan, a veteran of some fifty years of archaeological research in Mexico. National Geographic funded him to work at Calakmul, a major Maya site with over 6,000 structures. He’s currently working at Oxpemul, a site relocated by another grantee, Ivan Šprajc.

After lunch I wanted to be in two places at the same time. Grantee Mike Parker Pearson was speaking about Stonehenge in one room at exactly the same time that grantee Gregory Possehl was speaking about the complexities of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in another. I opted to listen to Possehl, because I wanted to hear him say “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” five times fast. I think I made the right choice. There was good stuff in that session, including a presentation on Jiroft in Iran.

From there I plunged into a session organized by a new grantee, Chris Norton. The topic was early humans in East Asia and Australasia. It was great to hear about Chris’s research in person. As I was leaving the session I bumped into another grantee whose work I have been interested in for a long time. It was Paul Tacon, who was funded by National Geographic to explore the Wollemi region of the Blue mountains in Australia in search of early aboriginal rock art.

Every one of these grantees had a story to tell, in fact they all had many stories. I’ll be thinking hard about how to get their stories to you. In the meantime, I’d better prepare myself for tomorrow!

Like this mandible, some of the bones of small-bodied people found in Omedokel Cave in Palau were embedded in calcite flowstone created by water dripping though limestone. Such embedding can occur quickly, but the older bones in Omedokel Cave were dated by radiocarbon to 2300 years ago. Bones from another cave, Ucheliungs, were dated to 2900 years ago, a time when the Pacific was first being colonized. Photograph by Chris Sloan/© 2008 National Geographic

Peculiarities found in prehistoric human bones discovered in July 2006 on Palau have caused much head-scratching for National Geographic grantee Lee Berger and his colleagues over the last year. See the story at National Geographic News and the scientific paper at PLoSOne. 

Berger found the bones, mostly the fragmented skeletons of many individuals, in two island caves, Omedokel and Ucheliungs, not far from Palau’s capital, Koror.

While analysis of these bone caches is still in its early days (it will take decades to complete), Berger thinks it is likely that the bones are the remains of islanders brought into the caves for burial long ago.

One might ask why Berger, an American researcher at Wittswatersrand University in South Africa, is leading a dig in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is because it was he who, while on vacation in July 2006, stumbled upon the unusual bones in steamy Ucheliungs Cave. Inside the cave, he flicked on his flashlight. “It illuminated a scene from out of a horror movie or an archaeologist’s dream,” he said. “Thousands of fragmentary human remains were scattered about the cave floor.”

By August of 2006, funded by the National Geographic Society, Berger and a small crew of anthropologists, geologists, and archaeologists, including Palauans, were back in the caves. The team dug a one meter by one meter test pit in the cave floor, and soon realized that the bones were not only spread wide, but deep. They collected almost 1,200 bone samples.

Here are the results: The oldest bones dated (by radiocarbon) were from people that died between 2,900 and 1,400 years ago. They were all tiny humans. Berger and his team were perplexed by the odd mixture of traits they saw. Some of the traits were used by scientists to classify prehumans and others were used to classify Homo sapiens.

To make a long story short, this led the scientists to entertain a maverick idea; the primitive traits in the earliest Palauans are not archaic at all, but rather a consequence of a type of extreme shrinking never observed in humans before.

Small-bodied Homo sapiens abound today in places like the Andaman Islands and the Ituri Forest of Africa. But their heads and faces are large and well within the normal range set for modern humans. Berger and his colleagues suggest that when the early Palauans shrank, their heads and faces shrank in proportion to their bodies, producing faces much smaller than those of living pygmoid groups.

But, according to Berger, this is not the case with the Homo floresiensis, knick-named the hobbit. It may have experienced the same type of shrinking as the Palauans. If Berger and his colleagues are correct, then some small-bodied human ancestors with these “primitive” traits, including the hobbit, may have them because they are small, not because they are primitive.

If these early Palauans turn out to be everything Berger and his colleagues claim they are—and not children, as the report at Nature.com  suggests—then either the little folk crossed 370 miles of shark-infested deep ocean to get to Palau or large folk did it and, due perhaps to insular dwarfism, became dwarfed once they arrived. Neither scenario can be proved at this early stage of study, but either way, it was a fantastic voyage.

This photo compares a modern human female mandible with one of the small ones from Palau. The vertical depth of the jaw and the reduced chin are two "archaic" features Berger points to. Photo by Stephen Alvarez/© 2008 National Geographic.

Despite the tranquil beauty of Rapa Iti's bay and surrounding mountains, this landscape was the setting for violent confrontations between groups competing for resources in a degraded and overstretched environment. Photo courtesy of Doug Kennett.

One of the most fascinating stories about the Peopling of the Pacific I encountered while helping to develop the magazine article on that topic this month (see Pioneers of the Pacific) is the story of Rapa Iti. It was told to me early on by Doug Kennett, an archaeologist whom National Geographic had funded to study the island back in 2001.

Rapa Iti is a tiny island in French Polynesia (in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). It takes a lot of effort to get there. At last report, a supply ship visits every other month and that's pretty much it. The reason why it is so interesting is that because it was so difficult to access, it was only colonized once—around 1200 A.D.—and was never contacted again until Europeans stumbled across it in 1791.

Rapa Iti can be seen as a sort of controlled experiment, or as Kennett called it, a "well-bounded microcosm," to see what happens if you deposit a few souls on an small island  (35 square kilometers) and leave them there for a few hundred years.

I'm not going to go into the details here, but when Europeans arrived they encountered about 1500 people living in "heavily fortified hilltop communities." What seems to have occurred prior to this is that the island's first colonists rapidly altered the swamp forest and  surrounding environs and replaced it with taro agriculture. This led to rapid and extensive soil erosion from hill slopes. This in turn led to pond agriculture, since nutrients had been flushed from slopes into the valley bottoms. Soon after this, folks were competing for land and dividing into opposing groups. They built hilltop fortresses, complete with pallisades and defensive ditches, that overlooked their fields. By the 1700s there were as many as 15 of these forts in operation. That's not much more that a couple square kilometers per group.

If anyone ever questioned whether environmental health has anything to do with war, well here's an experiment that provides strong evidence. Conservation is not just about protecting the birds and the bees, it is about protecting us from each other. Thanks, Doug, for bringing this to our attention.

For video interviews from experts on the Peopling of the Pacific, see this link and for some great maps that tell the story, see this link.