Demos
Choice of slavery institutions in Ancient Greece: Athenian chattels and Spartan helots
George Tridimas
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ancient Greek city-states were slave societies, but the institutions of slavery differed across them. The slaves of democratic Athens were foreigners bought as chattels labouring in agriculture, craftsmanship, banking, mining, and domestic services and were often given some limited freedoms and extra pay. On the contrary, the helots, the slaves of oligarchic Sparta, were indigenous of the lands they cultivated for their masters and were treated harshly. The study offers an economic explanation of the different slavery systems. Modelling the slaveholder as a profit maximiser, it attributes the different systems to differences in the probabilities of the slaves running away or revolting, the dependence of output on effort-intensive or care-intensive production technology, which depends on the fertility of the soil and affects whether the slave is treated kindly instead of harshly, and the cost of guarding slaves under different regimes.
Sex identification of a Late Iron Age sword and mirror cist burial from Hillside Farm, Bryher, Isles of Scilly, England
Simon Mays et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, forthcoming
Abstract:
A burial dating to the 1st century BCE was found in 1999 in the Isles of Scilly, south-west England. As well as being the most richly furnished burial in the region, it has grave goods considered to have oppositional gender associations: martial items (sword, shield) plus a bronze mirror. The inability to determine sex from the poorly surviving skeletal remains, using morphological or the available genomic methods at the time of its discovery, has been recognised as a key difficulty in the interpretation of this significant burial for Iron Age studies. Here, we apply high throughput DNA sequencing and analysis of dental enamel peptides to the highly degraded human remains in efforts to determine sex. The former effectively showed that no useable aDNA survived in the remains; the latter identified the sex as female with ca. 96% probability. This demonstrates the value of dental enamel peptide analysis for establishing the sex of ancient remains in circumstances where survival of skeletal remains is marginal and when diagenesis has effectively eliminated aDNA. Understanding symbolism in ancient burial rites, and hence making inferences concerning the social identities of the deceased is very difficult. These difficulties are not resolvable by biomolecular analyses. However, the sex identified from the proteomic work adds to the reconstruction of the biological identity of the interred individual, and helps to provide a firmer basis upon which debates concerning her social identity can be conducted. We discuss the funerary treatment of the interred individual in terms of her possible social persona, especially the meaning of the martial items for her potential role in Iron Age warfare.
Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages
Paul Heggarty et al.
Science, 28 July 2023
Abstract:
The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.
Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community
Maïté Rivollat et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social anthropology and ethnographic studies have described kinship systems and networks of contact and exchange in extant populations. However, for prehistoric societies, these systems can be studied only indirectly from biological and cultural remains. Stable isotope data, sex and age at death can provide insights into the demographic structure of a burial community and identify local versus non-local childhood signatures, archaeogenetic data can reconstruct the biological relationships between individuals, which enables the reconstruction of pedigrees, and combined evidence informs on kinship practices and residence patterns in prehistoric societies. Here we report ancient DNA, strontium isotope and contextual data from more than 100 individuals from the site Gurgy ‘les Noisats’ (France), dated to the western European Neolithic around 4850–4500 BC. We find that this burial community was genetically connected by two main pedigrees, spanning seven generations, that were patrilocal and patrilineal, with evidence for female exogamy and exchange with genetically close neighbouring groups. The microdemographic structure of individuals linked and unlinked to the pedigrees reveals additional information about the social structure, living conditions and site occupation. The absence of half-siblings and the high number of adult full siblings suggest that there were stable health conditions and a supportive social network, facilitating high fertility and low mortality5. Age-structure differences and strontium isotope results by generation indicate that the site was used for just a few decades, providing new insights into shifting sedentary farming practices during the European Neolithic.
Reassessing the terminal ballistic performance of trilobate and quadrilobate arrow points on Iron Age battlefields
Devin Pettigrew & William Taylor
PLoS ONE, July 2023
Abstract:
In the Eurasian Iron Age arrow points comprise a prominent class of artifact. Projectile experiments are useful for studying the ballistic performance of ancient arrow points and implications of arrow point innovations in warfare and shifting socio politics in Eurasia. However, when projectile experiments are not representative of past weapon use, they can lead to misinterpretations of the archaeological record. Notable problems arise when homogeneous target simulants used in controlled experiments are not representative of the targets past weapons were designed to encounter. This article explores the relationship between arrow point morphology and design choices in the Iron Age using different target media. Shooting arrow points into pottery clay leads to the conclusion that more blades reduced penetrating performance on ancient battlefields, but a very different result obtains by shooting the same points into thick tooling leather as a simulant for leather body armor. The results help explain patterns observed in the Eurasian archaeological record, where trilobate arrow points–initially developed by lightly armored horse archers on the Eurasian steppe–were increasingly adopted by a wide range of societies across Eurasia throughout the Iron Age.
La Sassa cave: Isotopic evidence for Copper Age and Bronze Age population dynamics in Central Italy
Marco Romboni et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2023
Abstract:
This study focuses on the changes in diet and mobility of people buried in the La Sassa cave (Latium, Central Italy) during the Copper and Bronze Ages to contribute to the understanding of the complex contemporary population dynamics in Central Italy. To that purpose, carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses, strontium isotope analyses, and FT-IR evaluations were performed on human and faunal remains from this cave. The stable isotope analyses evidence a slight shift in diet between Copper and Bronze Age individuals, which becomes prominent in an individual, dating from a late phase, when the cave was mainly used as a cultic shelter. This diachronic study documents an increased dietary variability due to the introduction of novel resources in these protohistoric societies, possibly related to the southward spread of northern human groups into Central Italy. This contact between different cultures is also testified by the pottery typology found in the cave. The latter shows an increase in cultural intermingling starting during the beginning of the middle Bronze Age. The local mobility during this phase likely involved multiple communities scattered throughout an area of a few kilometers around the cave, which used the latter as a burial site both in the Copper and Bronze ages.