The Berkeley Science Review: Articles

Peering into the Past
How archaeology informs our modern lives (view PDF)
by Hanadie Yousef

While in some cases archeologists study the evolution of ancient civilizations, archeology is also used to better understand more recent societies. Whether it is the study of ancient Greece or Hawaiian agriculture, Berkeley archaeologists are traveling the globe to dig up the mysteries of our predecessors.

Unearthing history
In a single day in modern Athens, an ambitious tourist can see the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Temple of Zeus, and a number of other ancient ruins. Archaeologists have been uncovering ancient artifacts in Greece for over 100 years, and in some ways the history of the country seems completely exposed. But when UC Berkeley's Classics Department started its own archeological excavation in 1973, there was still an important question to be resolved. Written records suggested that athletic competitions similar to today's Olympics were held in Ancient Nemea, located near Athens but there was no known physical evidence, and the historical events surrounding these games were also obscure.

The search for evidence of the Nemean Games, carried out by Professor of Classical Archaeology Stephen Miller and his team of archaeologists, required a number of phases. First, they had to study the surface debris of stone or ceramics at various sites to choose an interesting place to begin their search. Next, they began excavating the site, digging deeper and deeper to move backwards through time. Each layer of soil was searched for broken pieces of pottery, coins, and other artifacts to determine the time period of that soil deposit. All the materials were collected, labeled, and taken to the site's museum for cleaning, conservation, and cataloguing.

Bits of pottery can provide valuable information through chemical analysis of their composition and residue found on their surfaces, but piecing together an entire vessel provides a much fuller view of its purpose and implications for the societies that used it. "This process is much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle," says graduate student John Lanier, who has worked in Nemea studying ancient Greek pottery under the guidance of Kim Shelton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and director of the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, founded in 2004 upon Miller's retirement. "These same techniques generally have been used in archaeology since the early 20th century," says Shelton. "But work was conducted more quickly, less carefully and by more workers. Less was also known about the historical and chronological context of the finds than we know now."

Over the course of their time in Nemea, Miller and his cohort of graduate students discovered the stadium where the Nemean Games were held, as well as many new historical and cultural facts about the ancient Greeks. For example, the excavation of the stadium proved that the ancient Greeks accomplished far more in terms of architectural complexity than previously thought. "The single biggest, chilling, goose bump-raising thrill was the discovery of the entrance tunnel to the stadium," says Miller. "We proved that the Greeks, at least by the age of Alexander the Great, knew how to build the arch and the vault, a discovery that actually made it into the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook." The arch and the vault are a fundamental construction system used to create roofs or ceilings and span the space between walls and other supports. It had been previously assumed the Greeks used a simpler system that only supported flat roofs.

Miller also discovered an ancient locker room where the Greeks could undress before competing in the nude—the first ever identified locker room from Ancient Greece. When Miller began his excavation, locker rooms were the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, when a student in an undergraduate course he was teaching in 1975 asked him about it, he all but dismissed the question. "At some point in the third week or so, a student put up her hand and said, ÔProfessor Miller, you have told us all about the athletic competitions and various athletic facilities and athletic practices, but you haven't mentioned any locker rooms.' ÔWell,' I responded, Ôyou have learned that the ancient Greeks competed in the nude so you should understand they didn't need locker rooms to put on their uniforms.' Her hand shot back up. ÔBut Professor Miller, where did they leave the clothes they took off?' No scholar, to the best of my knowledge, had ever asked that question, and it came back to me 15 years later when the Nemea locker room began to emerge from the earth."

Besides discovering the physical remnants of the ancient Greek athletics, Miller and his graduate students also uncovered key events that shaped the history of the Nemean Games. They found evidence that Nemea, which began to function as an athletic center in 573 bce, was destroyed in 415 bce and that the destruction was accompanied by fire, bronze arrowheads, and iron spear points. "In other words, a battle was fought in this neutral, apolitical sanctuary, almost certainly with the Spartans," says Miller. "The excavations have also shown that the games did not take place at Nemea for a couple of generations thereafter, even though we know from written sources that they were held during this period."

When the stadium was destroyed, the Nemean Games were relocated to Argos until around 330 bce. The athletic competitions returned to Nemea, together with a major building program including the stadium and its accoutrements that Miller discovered. From this time period, the team unearthed, among other findings, a new Temple of Zeus, a hotel, and a bathing house. Despite this vast construction, within two generations (by 271 bce), the games had left again for Argos and never returned. In the end, according to Miller, the Nemean Games were held in Nemea for only about 25% of their history.

One of Miller's proudest achievements thus far in the study of Ancient Nemea has been the resurrection of the Nemean Games, beginning in 1996. Today's Nemean Games are organized and run by a local group, The Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games, in collaboration with UC Berkeley. "Although the Nemean Games were known previous to Berkeley's arrival at the site, it was Professor Miller who found the location and excavated the stadium, and who was instrumental in creating the society for the revival of the games," says Shelton.

Digging deeper into time
As the current director of the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, Shelton plans to take research in a new direction. In particular, she is interested in why Ancient Nemea was chosen as a site to honor Zeus in the first place. According to myth, the Nemean Games were founded after Opheltes, the baby son of a Nemean king, was tragically slain by a serpent. Apart from a shrine for Opheltes that was excavated by Miller's group and probably built many hundreds of years after Opheltes lived, there is no evidence that Opheltes was ever in Nemea. The history that has been passed through the ages by word of mouth, poetry, and folk tales indicates that the events the myths are based on took place in the Bronze Age, at which point Nemea was a kingdom. By the time the Nemean Games were held, Nemea was not a town with inhabitants, but just a sanctuary for Zeus and a site for the games.

Shelton is making plans for new excavations, beginning in 2010, to find evidence of human settlement in Ancient Nemea before the founding of the games. She wants to know who was in Ancient Nemea during the time of the myths and what their lives were like. She also wants to learn more about the religious history of the site. During the times of the Nemean Games, Nemea contained not only a stadium for the games, but also held temples, gardens, and cyrpus groves that made up an entire sanctuary to Zeus. Was there also a sanctuary in the time of the myths, during the Bronze Age? In other words, do religious practices such as sacrifices and rituals go back to prehistoric times? Shelton's expertise is in ceramics and pottery, and she hopes to study these types of artifacts, along with small metal fragments and any architectural evidence, to separate myth from fact.

Ancient sustainability in Hawaii
Shelton's and Miller's work fits the traditional view of archeologists as researchers uncovering the history of civilizations that existed thousands of years ago, but some archaeologists are studying civilizations that existed more recently. On a different set of islands, these in the Pacific Ocean, Berkeley archaeologists are actively studying native Hawaiian society and its relationship to agriculture. The Oceanic Archaeology Laboratory (OAL), established by UC Berkeley in 1989, carries out research into the archaeology, prehistory, and historical anthropology of the Pacific Islands and their indigenous peoples and cultures in the hope of applying what they learn to modern agriculture.

Since 2001, archaeologists, ecologists, demographers and soil scientists from several universities, including UC Berkeley, have been collaborating on archaeology projects in Hawaii. They are using Hawaii as a model system to understand the link between changing social and political structures of human civilizations and their non-industrialized agricultural production systems. Patrick Kirch, director of the OAL and professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Integrative Biology, is heading the project on the Berkeley end, while his principle collaborator from Stanford is biology professor Peter Vitousek.

Kirch's team is trying to understand how the agricultural systems of pre-European Hawaiians related to the environmental aspects of the landscape, such as soil nutrient distribution and the long term effects on soil properties, and its sustainability. "We are looking at the linkages between agriculture, soils, and human population, through the perspective of archaeology. We are linking natural science with social science to determine the real long term processes associated with changing societies," said Kirch.

Kirch and his colleagues have studied the effect of long term agriculture and the impact of several hundred years of cultivation on soil nutrients on the Hawaiian island of Maui by combining a geochemical method of dating with an archaeological approach. Kirch's team mapped out the landscape of the Kahikinui agricultural zone, locating all temples that operated as centers for controlling overproduction. Based on this analysis, they chose to study layers of soil in various locations once used by native Hawaiians for cultivation, as well as the layers of soil from uncultivated areas as a comparison. They then measured physical characteristics of the soil such as pH, density, color, texture, and the amount of key chemical nutrients. "We were able to get quantitative measurements of key nutrient loss in soil over 300 years of intensive cultivation," said Kirch. The team has found that the soil used by Hawaiian farmers for growing crops has significantly lost its nutrient value, which affects crop yields. In a research project published in Science, they showed that centuries of cultivation resulted in significant loss (28 to 75%) of calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, and phosphorous content.

Kirch and collaborators are also studying the relationship between climate, soil fertility and the kinds of agricultural systems developed on the Hawaiian archipelago by the native Hawaiians before European contact. In another Science paper, Kirch and collaborators analyzed climate and soil fertility on the young and old islands in the Hawaiian archipelago to determine the methods of farming used by native Hawaiians in the past. They distinguished between two kinds of agriculture, one suitable for drylands that depends on rainfall to feed crops, and an agricultural system based on wetland irrigation. They reported that irrigated wetland agricultural systems are found primarily on the older islands due to their well-developed natural drainage networks. In contrast, archeological evidence has shown that dryland agricultural systems are constrained to younger islands.

To determine the factors that confined large dryland agricultural systems to the younger islands, Kirch's team studied the rainfall and soil fertility in the Kohala Mountain area. They found that on the younger islands, the amount of rainfall and soil fertility fell in the boundaries necessary to allow high crop yield from intensive dryland agriculture, while on the older islands, greater rainfall resulted in less fertile soil, as measured by the amount of phosphorous and base nutrients therein. Nevertheless, wetland irrigation agricultural systems allow greater crop yield and are more predictable and controllable.

The differences between rain-fed dryland and irrigated wetland agricultural systems on the younger and older islands of the Hawaiian archipelago give insight into the social and political structures of the native Hawaiian societies that developed on these islands. Dryland agricultural systems are more labor-intensive, have lower crop yields and are more vulnerable to climate perturbations in comparison to wetland irrigation systems. Therefore, Kirch and his colleagues inferred that this may explain why aggressive and expansive chiefdoms developed on the younger islands, while societies on the older islands were more peaceful.

The timing of societal evolution
Berkeley researchers in Hawaii are also studying the sociopolitical and religious changes that took place in Hawaii before European contact. In particular, they are looking at the types of rituals conducted to honor the god of agriculture at the temples constructed at agricultural sites. Coral branches were thought to be sacred to the god and were taken out of the sea and placed on temples to honor him. Based on a precise dating method that measures the decay of the element uranium to the element thorium, known as thorium-230 dating, Kirch's group and his colleagues dated the coral offerings and determined the exact construction period of temples to honor the gods of agriculture at the Kahikinui district on the island of Maui.

The usual method used to date archaeological remains, radiocarbon dating, measures the relative amounts of two isotopes of carbon, one common and one relatively rare, and assigns a date to the objects based on those amounts. While the use of thorium-230 to date objects has been available for some time, this was the first time it was applied to archaeological research. "This technique isn't new," Kirch says, "but its application to dating cultural remains is new. The really neat thing about this is typically when you use radiocarbon dating, you get a high error rate, like plus or minus 50 years. With this coral dating technique, you get plus or minus three to four years! It has really aided in being able to resolve the chronology of these sites."

A more accurate prediction of the time period in which the temples in Maui were built was needed to make inferences about the sociopolitical and religious changes that occurred in pre-contact Hawaii. They used this dating information to determine when the temples were constructed and when the rituals associated with them—such as the collection of surplus food and goods as tribute and the imposition of ritualized controls of production—occurred. They are discovering that the temples in Maui were constructed within a very narrow time span of about 60 years, from 1580 to 1640 ce. The timing of intensive temple construction reflects a fundamental change in the sociopolitical structure of the inhabitants of the Kahikinui district. Kirch concluded that Hawaiian agricultural societies were transformed rapidly from small chiefdoms to larger states that used a religious ideology based on a temple ritual system to control agricultural societies.

Studying the agricultural societies of Hawaii and how they relate to the ecology of the archipelago, as well as studying the sociopolitical and religious aspects of these societies, required the integration of many fields. Alex Baer, a graduate student working on the projects in Hawaii, explains the significance of this interdisciplinary research. "I'm trained as a Hawaiian archaeologist, but to be effective in that pursuit you need to gain a substantial understanding of biology, botany, geology, and even astronomy. All of these disciplines answer different questions and ultimately allow us to better understand how past people, Hawaiians in this case, lived and thought about their world."

"This research is significant because it is relevant not only to Hawaii but anywhere in the world with non-industrialized agriculture, such as Africa and Southeast Asia," says Kirch.

Archaeology and the modern world
Whether they are studying sports from ancient Greece or the more modern native Hawaiian agriculture, archaeologists are unearthing the evolution of human civilization and culture, from the era of hunters and gatherers to advanced societies with complex architectural and cultural foundations. Not only do discoveries about past societies have implications for our current way of life, but sometimes the influence is even more tangible, like when ancient races to praise Zeus are brought into the modern world.

Hanadie Yousef is a graduate student in molecular and cell biology.

Ancient Nemea, like Olympia, was not a city, but a festival center that hosted athletic competitions under the flag of truce. "The Nemean Games represent the first, and perhaps the only, time in the history of mankind that wars were stopped on a regularly recurring and predictable calendric basis," says Miller. "This was not an ad hoc truce-we need to stop fighting next Saturday so we can bury our dead-but a real force for bringing all Greeks together in trading the battle field for the playing field." Many have argued that these athletic and peaceful festivals are the ancestors of today's United Nations and Olympic Games.

The Nemean Games were religious festivals to honor the God Zeus and consisted of specific religious rituals. The festival was initiated at an altar in front of Temple of Zeus, where there would be sacrifices and prayers to the god for good performances, followed by a procession to the stadium. The competitions would last for one to two weeks, with a big sacrifice and feast at the end to thank Zeus for victories. The victors would then dedicate part of their winnings to Zeus in a final show of honor.

The origin of the Nemean games is believed to lie in the myth of Opheltes. When Opheltes was born, his father Lykourgos consulted the Oracle at Delphi to find out how he might ensure his son's health. The priestess replied that the baby must not touch the ground until he had learned to walk. Lykourgos assigned a slave woman the task of caring for the child, but one day when men known as the Seven Heroes passed through Nemea on their way to a battle in Thebes the slave woman placed Opheltes on a bed of wild celery while she went to get the men something to drink. Opheltes was killed by a snake bite, fulfilling the prophecy. The funeral games that were put on by the Seven Heroes in his honor were said to be the beginning of the Nemean games.

"The athletic competitions consisted primarily of stadium races of various lengths, chariot races in the hippodrome, and there would have been some field events, like a discus throw and javelin throw, as well as some wrestling and boxing," says Shelton. The modern and modified Nemean Games are held once every four years, the fourth Nemead having taken place this past summer with record attendance. In ancient times, only men were allowed to participate and watch the competitions, which took place in the nude. Nowadays, men and women of all ages can participate, and competitors wear small chitons (tunics) and run barefoot like in the ancient period. The games consist of 100 meter dashes and 7.5 kilometer races. The longer race starts at the Temple of Hercules in Kleonai and ends in the Nemean stadium.

James Flexner, one of Kirch's graduate students, is conducting an archaeological study of the inmates of the leprosy settlement at Kalawao, which was active from 1866-1900. Leprosy is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae, which stimulate a severe inflammatory reaction by the body that damages the peripheral nerves and upper respiratory tract. The primary external symptoms of leprosy are skin lesions that, when left untreated, eventually lead to permanent damage of the skin, nerves, limbs and eyes. Historically, patients around the world have been quarantined, or forced to live in leper colonies. Kalawao in Hawaii is one such place.

Flexner is studying the historical archaeology of the leprosy settlement at Kalawao. "The goal of my project is to explore the ways that spatial organization and material culture structure the day-to-day practices of social life in situations of lifelong incarceration, as mediated through the stigma attached to leprosy in this case," explained Flexner.

To accomplish his goals, Flexner has conducted surface mapping and excavations at different kinds of house sites from the Kalawao settlement. He's also been analyzing numerous artifacts he has collected from the old inmates of the leprosy settlement and is also looking into numerous archives, researching the relevant 19th century documents to try to understand what people in the past thought about leprosy.

"What's really interesting is the fact that many of the people exiled to Kalawao really worked hard to create a working community, even though many of them were torn away from their homes and families," said Flexner. "The landscape, and the things they left behind, help tell that story in a way that the written documents typically don't. Leprosy is a powerful symbol for stigma and isolation, and it's fascinating to see how people coped with the disease, which causes a number of physical complications in day-to-day life, and with being exiled from the support of their families and communities."

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