When you get right down to it, archaeology is the study of dead people.  It tells us about vanished lives—how the dead once painted ibexes and aurochs on cave walls, sowed wild grass seeds,  quarried sandstone for cities,  designed caravels for exploration,  and carved ivory by the light of soapstone lamps.  Archaeology is driven by our intense curiosity about the people who are little more than bones and dust now, and for archaeologists, every day of the year is Day of the Dead.  (As an aside, I recall that the best Hallowe’en party I ever attended was thrown by an archaeologist.)

So I was surprised some years ago to learn that archaeologists are often unhappy when they find a human body in their sites.   Many worry about the ethics of disturbing the dead;  others are often hounded by the clock.  It can, after all, be very time-consuming to excavate a skeleton or mummy properly, mapping and drawing each bone, brushing away nearby sediments in search of shreds of textiles or tiny grave goods, gently lifting the body from the grave and transporting it to a place where it can be reburied or stored respectfully.  Modern technology—particularly GPS and digital surveying systems—is speeding up the process, but still archaeologists would often just prefer to avoid bodies.

I certainly understand their reasoning.  But I feel at times that we are missing something important.  Tiny samples taken from ancient human remains can tell us an enormous amount about life in the past, as I was reminded this week by two intriguing news stories related to mummies. 

The first of these stories came from northern Chile.  There a chemical archaeologist from the University of Tarapacá,  Juan Pablo Ogalde, found  traces of a psychoactive drug from a jungle vine,  Banisteriopsis caapi,  in  hair from two naturally mummified bodies unearthed from a Tiwanaku site in the Atacama Desert.  The Tiwanaku Empire, as you may recall, rose to glory between A.D. 500 and 1000 and flexed its muscles from the Bolivian rainforests to northern Chile and Argentina.  The new mummy finding  is interesting in all kinds of ways.  Andean archaeologists long suspected that the Tiwanaku people sniffed hallucinogenic  powders from the vilca tree during their sacred rituals.  But this is the first conclusive evidence of drug use—and it comes from a very different plant.  Moreover, the results clearly suggests that Tiwanaku people in northern Chile were connected by trade networks to the Amazon,  300 miles away.  All this is very cool stuff. 

The second story has emerged from a team of European geneticists who have been examining DNA samples from Oetzi, the 5300-year-old frozen body discovered in the Eastern Alps in 1991. Over the years, specialists have pored over every square inch of Oetzi  and his clothing and possessions—with fascinating results.  Samples from his digestive tract, for example, revealed that he dined on bran from a primitive wheat known as Einkorn, while an analysis of his hair unexpectedly turned up traces of arsenic and copper,  suggesting that Oetzi had been involved in smelting copper.   

Now 17 years after his discovery, a team of European geneticists led by Luca Ermini at Italy’s University of Camerino has come up with new findings.   In a paper published today in Current Biology,  the team announces that they have now successfully sequenced Oetzi’s entire mitochondrial DNA genome.  It is the oldest complete Homo sapiens mtDNA genome to date—and will undoubted become important grist for many genetic and medical studies.  But already, it has yielded a surprise.  While examining Oetzi’s genome, the team discovered that the prehistoric shepherd belonged to a rare genetic lineage that appears to have gone extinct. 

All this clearly suggests that we are nowhere near exhausting the research possibilities in tiny samples taken from Oetzi and other ancient human remains.  As technology advances, we can go back to the lab time and again, and come up with new insights. 

I find this exciting.  Talk about the Undead. 

This entry was posted by Heather Pringle on Friday, October 31, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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