Timothy Taylor

Stable isotope and DNA evidence for ritual sequences in Inca child sacrifice

Four recently discovered frozen child mummies from two of the highest peaks in the south central Andes now yield tantalizing evidence of the preparatory stages leading to Inca ritual killing as represented by the unique capacocha rite. Our interdisciplinary study examined hair from the mummies to obtain detailed genetic and diachronic isotopic information. This approach has allowed us to reconstruct aspects of individual identity and diet, make inferences concerning social background, and gain insight on the hitherto unknown processes by which victims were selected, elevated in social status, prepared for a high-altitude pilgrimage, and killed. Such direct information amplifies, yet also partly contrasts with, Spanish historical accounts.

Archaeological, radiological, and biological evidence offer insight into Inca child sacrifice

Examination of three frozen bodies, a 13-y-old girl and a girl and boy aged 4 to 5 y, separately entombed near the Andean summit of Volcán Llullaillaco, Argentina, sheds new light on human sacrifice as a central part of the Imperial Inca capacocha rite, described by chroniclers writing after the Spanish conquest. The high-resolution diachronic data presented here, obtained directly from scalp hair, implies escalating coca and alcohol ingestion in the lead-up to death. These data, combined with archaeological and radiological evidence, deepen our understanding of the circumstances and context of final placement on the mountain top. We argue that the individuals were treated differently according to their age, status, and ritual role. Finally, we relate our findings to questions of consent, coercion, and/or compliance, and the controversial issues of ideological justification and strategies of social control and political legitimation pursued by the expansionist Inca state before European contact.

Believing the ancients: Quantitative and qualitative dimensions of slavery and the slave trade in later prehistoric Eurasia

This paper briefly examines two types of slavery in the first millennium Aegean, Carpatho-Balkan and Pontic regions – branded silver-mine slaves and blinded milk-processing slaves. The first is examined primarily in quantitative terms, to attach economically sensible order-of-magnitude figures to the trade in people. The second is examined qualitatively, to show how indigenous forms of dependence and subordination were caught up in the emergence of Graeco-Roman chattel slavery. In both cases I have taken the rather unusual step of trusting what the classical authors tell us they knew. Finally, a symbolic connection is made between shackles and torcs.

Gristhorpe man: an early bronze age log-coffin burial scientifically defined

A log-coffin excavated in the early nineteenth century proved to be well enough preserved in the early twenty-first century for the full armoury of modern scientific investigation to give its occupants and contents new identity, new origins and a new date. In many ways the interpretation is much the same as before: a local big man buried looking out to sea. Modern analytical techniques can create a person more real, more human and more securely anchored in history. This research team shows how.

The Origins of Human Sexual Culture: Sex, Gender and Social Control

Abstract There is a series of common assumptions about prehistoric sex, associated with the prejudice that it must have been more natural because it happened closer to our evolutionary origins. The development of primate studies reveals a high degree of social variation between and within primate species, along with evidence for the practice of non-reproductive sex both recreationally and for expressing dominance relations. Yet, hypotheses about the behavior of human ancestors and early modern humans have been hampered by a lack of an integrated methodology. Although there is no single trajectory for either the elaboration or restriction of sexual behaviors after the emergence of culture, I argue here that it is possible to identify key turning points with more or less universal validity. These points include the reasons for and implications of brain size increase at the time of the emergence of genus Homo, the crystallization of impersonal gender by mid-Upper Paleolithic Ice Age societies, the early development of systems of control over both fertility and the projection and alteration of sexual identity, and the inferred emergence of homonegativity in early, reproduction-oriented farming societies. Further, archaeological data allows naturalist assumptions to be effectively refuted.

Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in Southeast Europe before the Roman period

Abstract There are many problems associated with the modern cross‐cultural classification of settlement types. Even greater difficulty is experienced in dealing with the prehistoric period, and this is especially true in southeast Europe, for at least four reasons: 1) few regional surveys or large‐scale excavations of settlements have been undertaken, 2) various Thracian language terms relating to settlements have been preserved in ancient texts and modern place‐names, 3) prehistoric settlement appears to have been remarkably diverse, and 4) some types of settlement can be inferred which do not survive archaeologically.

The Problem of ‘Darwinizing’ Culture (or Memes as the New Phlogiston)

The neologism ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins as a cultural counterpart to the gene. While the meme has not been widely adopted in the social sciences, neither has it gone away, having survived (‘memically’ its supporters might say) despite significant philosophical and anthropological objections. This may be because the concept seems to promise to ‘Darwinize’ culture, providing an understanding of human life in reductivist terms, that is, terms consonant with neodarwinian selection and inheritance theory. It is suggested here that culture, far from being understandable memically, can be uncontroversially understood as one of those factors extending beyond natural selection that Darwin himself believed also operated. Here, various meme concepts are outlined along with objections to them. An alternative view is proposed that focuses on material technology, which, it is argued, although it has a biological dependency in historic and prehistoric perspective, is irreducible to biology and capable of subverting its logic. Implications for the orthodox views of human evolution are signalled. (The title of this article references Robert Aunger’s balanced edited work Darwinizing Culture: the Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000). The subtitle is also slightly second-hand (although unwittingly so when I presented the paper): Alister McGrath, in Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, calls memes ‘the new ether’(Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p. 133), having made the comparison to other fictional concepts including ‘calorific’ and ‘phlogiston’ a couple of pages earlier.)

East-Central European Iron Age

Generally similar to present-day climate: harsh winters freeze the lower Danube; hot summers, moist to the north of the Stara Planina, and dry to the south; Aegean and Black Sea coastal climatic variations; 2800 b.p. and 2300 b.p. mark cool points in the cycle of postglacial average temperature fluctuation, with the warmest period centering on 2400 b.p.

Soviet archaeology in the steppe zone: Introduction

The steppe region, the temperate grassland of the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of kilometres practically from the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the great zones of human settlement. It offers archaeology on the large scale, where local adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of whose work is inaccessible to those many of us who have no Russian. The steppe is novel in a second way also, for Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in its ideas and how it works with them; there are concerns and terminologies that do not quite correspond with the common concepts of west European scholars.

Northeastern European Iron Age

Generally similar to present day: cold winters, with the middle Danube and Vistula icebound; hot, moist summers. Northern climate moderated by Baltic; sharp altitudinal variations. 2800 b.p. and 2300 b.p. mark cool points in the cycle of postglacial average temperature fluctuation, with the warmest period centering on 2400 b.p.