Ancient Cultures of Middle America Midsemester Exam Fall 2008, Page 1
Anthropology 3618 Ancient Cultures of Middle America
Final Exam
18 December 2008
This exam is available in electronic form
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Answer SIX (only 6) of the following questions. Keep in mind that there is more than one approach you can take in answering these questions. Each question is worth up to 100 points.
Follow these guidelines:
¨ Organize your answer before you begin.
¨ Be sure to state:
1. What or who something is
2. Where it occurred or is located (if appropriate)
3. Why it is important
3. When it occurred
¨ State YOUR position or approach clearly.
¨ Cite specific examples or references to support your statements.
¨ Mention problem areas or other relevant materials which you would like to consider further in a more thorough statement.
¨ Summarize your argument or discussion.
¨ Wherever appropriate use materials from more than one region of the world.
¨ Remember that each of your responses should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Note: Do not discuss any topic at length in more than one question.
1. From the MAforum:
Where have the ancient Americans gone? Discuss the transmission of Meso-American culture from the fall of the Classic Maya to the conquest of the Aztecs to the Mexican people of today. What aspects of the ancient cultures can be seen in modern Mexican culture? What has been lost? What has been preserved?
2. From the MAforum:
We have taken in a lot of information about Mesoamerica. Based on the information you've been shown, did these great civilizations rise independently? When they did rise and what was the general course of cultural evolution that led to present-day Mesoamerica?
3. From the MAforum:
Teotihuacán was a city of great power and wealth. Describe the different features that were of the architectural style of the city and what the significance was behind the detailed outer sides of temples.
4. The film series Spirits of the Jaguar includes two features on Ancient Middle America. Compare and contrast the video Spirits of the Jaguar: Episode 2 "Forests of the Maya" with the video Spirits of the Jaguar: Episode 4 "The Fifth World of the Aztecs," indicating as part of your answer why you think it might have been important to see both of these, rather than just one or the other.
5. The film series Out of the Past also includes two features on Ancient Middle America. Compare and contrast the video Out of the Past: "The Collapse" with the video Out of the Past: "New Worlds," indicating as part of your answer why you think it might have been important to see both of these, rather than just one or the other.
Do not select this question if you also choose to answer question #6.
6. What basic characteristics of anthropology (as discussed in class on Week 1) does the video Out of the Past: "New Worlds" illustrate. How specifically does Ancient Middle America fit in?
Do not select this question if you also choose to answer question #5.
7. What is the importance of the video The Sweat of the Sun in understanding Ancient America? Be sure to indicate why or why not.
8. The video Secrets of the Dead: "Aztec Massacre" was advertised as portraying “a . . . discovery . . . in Mexico [which] is turning history on its head. ‘Aztec Massacre’ paints a new picture of the . . . relations between the Aztecs and the Conquistadors and rewrites much of what we thought we knew about the Aztec civilization.”
Discuss the “new picture” portrayed in “Aztec Massacre” and why the producers of the film think it “is turning history on its head” and rewriting “much of what we thought we knew about the Aztec civilization.”
9. The video Lost Kingdoms of the Maya showed archaeologists digging at a rather unusual Mayan site. Describe this site and discuss its relevance and importance to Middle American archaeology in general.
10. Cracking the Maya Code was considered one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century. Discuss the 2008 video of the same name, Cracking the Maya Code. Indicate as part of your answer whether you agree with the assessment of the importance of the event (including why or why not).
11. Identify two civilizations in ancient Mesoamerica other than the Olmec, and compare and contrast the use of art and art making as a means of depicting religion, hierarchy, power, ritual, belief doctrines, and the like.
12. Optional Take-Home Question:
NOTE: Essentially you may make up ONE question total. You may either do that as a take-home and bring it to class with you, or you may do that in class the day of the exam. If you elect to do the optional take-home exam and bring it with you to class, then you must choose five (5) additional of the remaining questions presented on the actual exam, as they are presented on the exam.
If you do not like these questions, make up and answer a question of your own choice relating to a topic which you have not considered in your other answers. Answers should contain specific information supporting your position. Both your question and your answer will be evaluated. If you like these questions but simply prefer to make one of your own, go ahead.
If you elect to make up and answer a question, you may prepare your question and answer in advance and bring them with you to the exam. If you prepare your question and answer in advance you only need to answer five (5) midterm exam questions in class.
13. On Current Affairs:
On 4 December 2008 the Associated Press reported “DNA Secrets: Cave's latrines yield new evidence about prehistoric North America.” The full article follows.
Question: What is the significance of old Oregon latrines to the study of Ancient Middle American cultures?
DNA Secrets: Cave's latrines yield new evidence about prehistoric North America
By Jeff Barnard
4 December 2008
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PAISLEY, Ore. -- For some 85 years, homesteaders, pot hunters and archaeologists have been digging at Paisley Caves, a string of shallow depressions washed out of an ancient lava flow by the waves of a lake that comes and goes with the changing climate.
Until now, they have found nothing conclusive -- arrowheads, baskets, animal bones and sandals made by people who lived thousands of years ago on the shores of what was then a 40-mile-long lake, but is now a sagebrush desert on the northern edge of the Great Basin.
But a few years ago, Dennis Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, and his students started digging where no one had dug before. What the team discovered in an alcove used as a latrine and trash dump has elevated the caves to the site of the oldest radiocarbon-dated human remains in North America.
Coprolites -- ancient feces -- were found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots and radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. That's 1,000 years before the oldest stone points of the Clovis culture, which for much of the 20th century was believed to represent the first people in North America.
The idea that coprolites contain valuable information is not new, but extracting DNA from them is. When the findings were published this year in the journal Science, they plopped Jenkins and his colleagues in the middle of one of the hottest debates in North American archaeology. Just when did people first come here, and how did they get here?
For many years the prevailing view was that the Clovis people walked from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge exposed by the Ice Age and spread south through an ice-free corridor down the center of the continent exposed 10,000 years ago by warming temperatures.
The Paisley coprolites indicate that people had found another way, perhaps crossing the land bridge but then walking down the coast, or even crossing the ocean by boat, the way people went from New Guinea to Australia thousands of years earlier. The findings kill the suggestion that some of the earliest Americans came from Europe. And they almost didn't get to tell their story.
Bill Cannon calls himself a "used archaeological site salesman," but is really the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Lakeview District archaeologist. Cannon knew that Luther Cressman, a University of Oregon archaeologist, had dug here in the 1930s, as did numerous looters.
Cannon can show you the rusty nail Cressman drove into the wall of Cave No. 2 as his data point, from which the locations of artifacts are measured, as well as recent illicit excavations.
Cressman found evidence -- a dart point, basketry, sandals and animal bones -- that people were here before Clovis and that they hunted large animals. But he could make no strong conclusions, and he saved no coprolites.
Cannon could see that there was a lot that hadn't been dug, and figured that Jenkins was the guy to do it.
Jenkins is a senior research associate at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the head of its Northern Great Basin Archaeological Field School. His office in a Quonset hut on the campus in Eugene is decorated with the antlers of mule deer he shot in the high desert east of the Cascade Range. His arm carries a tattoo from a motorcycle club in Las Vegas, where he grew up and went to college.
Jenkins has never found one of the distinctively shaped, fluted, stone spear points that mark the Clovis culture, named for a site near Clovis, N.M., uncovered in 1929. But in three digs at Paisley -- 2002, 2003 and 2007 -- Jenkins has gathered 700 coprolites, perhaps a third of them human.
The coprolites contain pollen, seeds, chipmunk bones, sage grouse feathers, trout scales, things that ancient people would have been eating, but Jenkins couldn't be sure that they weren't coyote. He had estimated their age at 1,000 years before Clovis from dating bone and obsidian flakes found nearby.
Unlike bone, obsidian cannot be radiocarbon dated. But the time since a flake was broken off can be estimated from how far moisture has penetrated, leaving a visible band. The distance depends on temperature, so to refine the measurements, archaeological consultant Tom Origer and his team from Santa Rosa, Calif., tracked the underground temperatures for a year.
At $600 a shot, Jenkins still didn't want to get any of the coprolites radiocarbon dated until he knew they were human.
Then in the fall of 2003, he received an unexpected e-mail from Alan Cooper of Oxford University, who was looking for sites to test with techniques he was developing to extract ancient DNA from soils.
Cooper and Jenkins arranged for Eske Willerslev, then a Danish postdoctoral fellow working for Cooper at Oxford, to deliver a paper on his work with ancient DNA before the Northwest Anthropological Conference. They also wanted Willerslev to pick up some samples from Paisley Caves.
In 2003, Willerslev extracted from Siberian permafrost DNA of mammoths, bison and mosses that proved to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old. More recently, he teased out DNA from silt-crusted ice cores from Greenland that showed forests, beetles and butterflies had lived 800,000 years ago where a glacier stands today.
Willerslev took home 14 coprolites, though he was not very interested.
"To identify if humans were using caves as a toilet, I didn't see that as important," he said.
For years, they sat in a freezer at Oxford. Willerslev took them with him when he took a professorship in biology at the University of Copenhagen, and in 2006 turned them over to a graduate student who needed a project. She found DNA from two of the five Native American genetic groups. Both have links to Asia.
Radiocarbon dating -- at two different labs -- showed three were more than 14,000 years old.
"It is the oldest evidence of human presence" in North America, said Willerslev, now director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at the Copenhagen school.
Vance Haynes, a professor emeritus of geoarchaeology at the University of Arizona, has spent his career studying the Clovis people.
While there is a growing body of evidence and acceptance of the idea that people were in North America before Clovis, the evidence remains skimpy and confusing, with no coherent thread like a common way of flaking obsidian into spear points, he said.
He would like to see dates further confirmed by another radiocarbon dating because if it is accurate, the find offers important evidence that early people traveled down the coast as they spread through the continent, and then moved east, and did not need the ice-free corridor.
Jenkins figures that the caves have much more to tell. An obsidian flake and a duck bone have been dated to 16,000 years ago. And he can't wait to dig beneath some boulders that apparently fell from the roofs of the caves between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, guarding whatever lies below from looters and other archaeologists.
When Jenkins returns, probably next spring, the diggers will be dressed like technicians in a silicon-chip plant with face masks, latex gloves and bunny suits to reduce the chances of contamination, making it possible to analyze the DNA with greater resolution. The coprolites could reveal how many individuals lived in the caves at any one time, how many were men and how many women, how closely they were related, and even what time of year they were there.
"It raises the hair on the back of my neck to think what they destroyed and had no clue," Jenkins said of those who dug before him. "In the process of digging this to get artifacts, they throw out coprolites that had so much information in them."
http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/dec/04/dna-secrets-caves-latrines-yield-new-evidence-abou/