Winter 2009 Issue

 

Lynn Fisher

Lynn Fisher

By Amy Spies Karhliker

Ah … the romance
The work of archaeologists has long been romanticized and glamorized. Even before Indiana Jones, many a romance novel’s hero was the fiercely independent rogue-cum-archaeologist, a larger-than-life man who not only got the girl, but then returned to “civilization” with truckloads of priceless trinkets and relics.

Reality
UIS anthropology professor Lynn Fisher researches the less dramatic but deeper and more significant questions of human occupation of the landscape. Her research takes her to Tübingen, Germany, and to New Philadelphia, Ill., in Pike County. While the Amazon jungle and African deserts are out of her research considerations, Fisher’s work is changing what archaeologists understand about late Stone Age peoples.

Fisher has been working with archaeologists from the University of Tübingen for more than a decade. She originally went there to take advantage of the opportunity for independent research. The UIS-Tübingen relationship is Fisher’s and UIS’ formal collaboration with top-notch international archaeologists and archaeological institutes. The seminal work Fisher has accomplished here is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Since she’s been at Tübingen, Fisher and her colleagues have been working to map the movements of hunter-gatherers of the latter period of the last Ice Age, known as the Mesolithic period, from about 10,000-7,500 years ago.

For Europe, this period of human history meant stone tools were in use and people were organized in primarily nomadic hunter-gatherer groups. However, transition occurred as the climate changed. With warmer temperatures, glaciers receded, people moved around, perhaps saw benefits to more permanent settlements and an agricultural life, and, in some places like the Near East, domesticated animals.

The hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period and the early farmers of the Neolithic period (from about 8,000 years ago until about 4,000 years ago) made their stone tools from chert, a sedimentary rock with a microcrystalline structure that allows it to break in specific ways and retain very sharp edges. Early people discovered chert’s natural breaking habits and realized its usefulness in making blades, points, scrapers and darts; thus chert was an important resource for making tools and trading.

By 7,600 years ago, farming was well established in Central Europe. The farmers brought cultural patterns from the east, but it’s unclear how much contact occurred between the indigenous hunter-gatherers and the expanding farming population. Early European farmers – whose earliest artifacts include Central Europe’s first pottery vessels, polished stone axes and settled longhouse villages and whose presence slightly overlaps in time with the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers are thought to have migrated from the East. But there is debate among archaeologists about how many migrants there really were: Perhaps farming resulted from the spread of ideas among the indigenous hunter-gatherers. Regardless, early farmers domesticated both plants and animals for economic purposes (dogs were domesticated long before), but harvested wild plants and animals, as well. Their settlements became more permanent and are generally understood to have been located in fertile river valleys.

But Fisher’s research was focused on finding where the nomadic hunter-gatherers were living, and, given the overlap in time with the development of agriculture, whether or not hunter-gatherers were in contact with farmers.

2004 survey field crew takes a break near Ulm, Germany (Fisher sitting in front)

 

Fisher and her colleagues started by looking at private collections and interviewing local collectors on what they found and where they found it. Then, Fisher took her colleagues and her students walking over field after field, looked at all of the surface-level artifacts and mapped their locations. “People haven’t really studied surface stuff,” she said. “We found dozens of these sites and were able to map where people were spending their time to get a regional perspective.”

It was further presumed that hunter-gatherers and farmers occupied different locations in the landscape: Hunter-gatherers took advantage of wetlands, known watering holes and known rocky resources, and farmers took advantage of rich, fertile river valleys. Although they possibly knew of each other’s existence, they were not competing for the same resources – theoretically. But this is where Fisher’s field work surprised her.

When Fisher and her research group arrived at a chert outcrop in an upland area of the Upper Danube, they were logically expecting to find artifacts associated with the nomadic hunter-gatherers, the stone tool-makers. Further, this specific site was rocky upland – the opposite of what was thought to be a prime agricultural area.

Imagine their surprise to find early agricultural artifacts carpeting the area.

Archaeologists have presumed that farmers would automatically seek sites that were more conducive to farming, like the rich and flat, rockfree, river valleys. But in this case, that theory did not hold true. The group is still investigating what, exactly, the farmers were doing in that location. One possibility Fisher and her colleagues are considering is that early farmers visited uplands seasonally to find fresh pastures for their cattle. Another hypothesis is that the Neolithic farmers came to this area because the locally available chert was such an important resource for them, for tool-making and for trade. “We are beginning to work on understanding how the Neolithic settlements and a quarry site we found fit into a broader regional picture of the Neolithic,” said Fisher. “Did they, for example, trade with lowland villages, exchanging chert for other resources?”

Although this surprise was outside the area of her Mesolithic expertise, Fisher was not disappointed: “Pursuing this development meant learning a new time period,” she said.

Fisher is working on other sites in Germany, also. These other areas resulted from the dozens of sites discovered by avocational archaeologists and by the ground surveys she and her students originally conducted.

One important site they are working on is a chert quarry where Neolithic farmers mined that resource, as evidenced by the pits that remain today. Early agriculturalists here dug, covered and re-dug repeatedly over the course of 2,500 years between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago. Fisher doesn’t think this site has ever been farmed by anyone. “This site has been protected since the Medieval time period as a forest. It was previously an elite hunting preserve and is now held by the state,” she said. While that protection does not mean that farming didn’t occur prior to the Middle Ages, there is no evidence of farming activity at all. This single-use site is unique from an archaeologist’s perspective and provides information about a different facet of the lives of early farmers: “Not their farming activities,” explained Fisher, “but their industry and use of mineral resources.”

Fisher’s and her colleagues’ discoveries have obligated archaeologists to consider the possibility that their ideas about where people lived and why are incomplete. This discovery establishes early farmers’ existence in much broader environmental and geographic contexts than was previously recognized. Early farmers’ decisions to live in areas not immediately apparent as “good” agricultural areas demonstrates, perhaps, that other conditions existed to influence site selection.

In the lab
The physical labor of field work, and the glamorized excitement of excavation, must, at some point, end. Once artifacts are collected and catalogued, the analysis must begin.

In Fisher’s case, the number of artifacts she and her colleagues found is in the tens of thousands and have to be analyzed, compared and ultimately stored. The University of Tübingen has provided the space for storage, as well as the labs for analyzing the artifacts.

Fisher will put a hold on collecting more artifacts for a brief period to focus on analyzing the artifacts and writing the reports.

The analysis for these projects will likely take a number of years. While some big-picture information is already known, the analysis often results in smaller but equally revealing information about the site and the people who inhabited it. Fisher is asking some big questions in this phase of the project: “How did the techniques of quarrying and tool production change through time as Neolithic farming society changed? Were specialized workers in charge of tool production? How was trade organized and how far into the surrounding lowlands did trade systems reach?”

New Philadelphia
In Illinois, Fisher is also involved in the prehistoric site found at New Philadelphia in Pike County. The excavation of New Philadelphia – the first town in the U.S. to be founded by a freed slave – is a long-term project between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois State Museum, where Fisher is an adjunct researcher. While the historic aspects of the site receive the most attention, the results of the ground surveys revealed more than 1,000 prehistoric artifacts.

Even a chert source exists there. “This source is much different than the one in Germany,” she said. “The chert here erodes out of the limestone and collects in the stream valley where it occurs on gravel bars, which is much easier to find and work with.”

Archaeology at UIS
“Students interested in archaeology can pursue those interests in UIS’ sociology/anthropology program,” said Fisher.

“As at many liberal arts colleges,” Fisher said, “anthropology at UIS is offered in a joint degree program with the closely related field of sociology. Our interdisciplinary program includes both anthropology and sociology courses.”

While a small department, UIS’ sociology/anthropology program offers a solid curriculum to prepare students for a variety of careers or for graduate school. Fisher was attracted to UIS, she said, “because I wanted to teach in a liberal arts program.”

Fisher notes that UIS’ sociology/anthropology department was deliberately planned to have a common curriculum, requiring both anthropology and sociology students to take social research methods and senior seminar courses. The anthropology-specific curriculum includes archaeology, human evolution, cultural anthropology, even ethnomusicology. This foundation allows UIS’ sociology/anthropology graduates to confidently move forward to graduate school – especially if they are able to take advantage of a summer field school.

It so happens that Fisher provides her students a field experience, both locally and internationally. She provides local field experience for her students at the New Philadelphia site, where they have the opportunity to work for short periods of time. So far, two UIS students have taken advantage of the New Philadelphia experience.

Her real field school emphasis, though, is at the German sites. She takes six to eight students – some from UIS – for a month-long school in the summer, during which students have the opportunity to dive into the work of ground surveying, excavating and lab work, as well as experiencing the local culture. These field experiences often help undergraduate students get into graduate schools and allow them to get real work experience, realize research interests and make connections with professional archaeologists. For this reason, the field school experience is vitally important to students.

In the end …
Of course, in reality, little of the stereotyped archaeologist is true. While there may be truckloads of trinkets, the vast majority of those trinkets are shards of ceramics and chert, too numerous to count – and worthless, from a monetary standpoint.

But, from the standpoint of learning about who we were – and are – these small pieces of someone’s life, or a group’s life, these intimate details of a way of living provide invaluable insight into how we got where we are. Fisher’s interpretation of these data will provide important understandings for future generations of students in our quest to find ourselves.