 Okay. Okay. Here we are for today's Wednesday Brownback. That should start by asking for an announcement. Meg and I would just comment that there are a lot of talks this week. So check those out online. I know this evening at 8.00, 7.00, Carl Knapp, the genius of Toronto's, I have a major figure in material culture studies and archaeology. I'm going to talk to you about his research creed, an AIA talk, and that's usually, whatever that room is, 360 or 370. But I look it up because I don't have any details, but that would be worth attending. Meg said there's another talk. Well, Matt describes a major figure in the scientific archaeology as giving a talk on some of the material culture, materialism in the first museum, and what they have and how that's prompted other kinds of things. Maybe you know about that. Anyway, that was in this amazing list that Sarah sent out. It was like the Who's Who of contemporary archaeology, almost of a major figure, and also from Merced. The editor, yes, Mark Oldenberger, who's the editor of current anthropology. I mean, somebody that people would think he had publishing there should go in there with the dying things. So it was just like... And for fans of Roman concrete, which I'm sure is most of you, John Olson, British Columbia, I think he's talking to you too, and Davidson's that engineering? That's probably findable. But there are maybe other announcements? Yeah. Yeah, I have an announcement about the Society for California Archaeology, which is meeting next week, Thursday to 12th through Sunday to 15th in Riverside. I'm driving down, if anybody wants to ride, let me know, or Sarah, possibly. You clarified the spree, so it happened just on Monday. Oh, it happened on Monday. I'd like to highlight that our panel about working at archaeological... working at agencies that hire archaeologists, it's happening on Friday, everyone. So if any of you teach... if any of you teach undergrads, could you please announce to them? And I'm going to send another email out to everybody about this. Later on today. Yeah, at least one of the persons who's coming is one of our PhD students, former PhD student, David Cohen. Yes. He'd be a good one to talk to about, if you are getting a PhD here, is this the kind of thing you also want to do and you decided to do that instead of going into the academic? Yeah, the panelists mentioned that from previous years' data, they actually do go on with their leads, and they hire people who come to these things. So these are opportunities for paying jobs. Other announcements? Okay, let's get on with the talk. Today we have a talk from A.J. White, whom probably most of you know. He's in his third year here in the Department of Anthropology. He hails from Orange County. He got a Master's of Science in Geology. He's a chief at Cal State Long Beach, where there's a super great archimetric research in it. He does a lot of work on analyzing fecal remains, and I kind of strain my brain for some kind of pun. There's probably no pun that you can laugh at me, so I'll take a bow all to that. And I'll just point out that he's going to be talking today, I guess, about research in Jordan that is carrying out, I guess, a connection with Lisa Maher, who spoke last week, at the site of Harana. And in particular, in his abstract, he promises he'll be looking at the issue of water and how site contamination, I guess, from donkey feces leads to some difficulties in kind of understanding that. But he promises to engage these big picture issues about what's driving cultural evolution. I don't know if he's related to Leslie White, perhaps. So we could be in for quite an interesting hour ahead of us. So without further ado, I'll turn things over to A.J. so we can hear about what he wants to help us research. Wow. All right. Thank you. I'll first say that you have amazing restraint to not make the poop puns, because everyone else myself included just jumped straight to it. Would it be honest if we kept like one of the lights on in the back, maybe? Like that other one? Yeah. Sorry, just since we got a smoker's site, good to see you a little bit. So, hey everybody. So I've got a little bit of a silly hook to my talk here. Settled down now. A contemplation consternation over the role of water in Heranophore's Protestantism. What I'd like to be talking about is Heranophore, which is a large epipaleolithic hunter-gatherer site from eastern Jordan that dates to the 20th to 19th millennia before present. And assess climatic events that are known to have occurred in the area with environmental changes from around the site itself and see if there might be any connections there to what's happening in terms of the development at this site. So that's kind of the contemplation part. The consternation, you'll know it when you see it. It'll probably involve me saying something like, those damn camels. So you'll know it when you get to it. So before I get much forward, I have a little bit of a disclaimer, which is that when the archaeological site that you're about to be talking about has the world's authority on it in the room about 10 feet in front of you, there's this kind of added layer of pressure. So I don't want to... Some of the things I'm saying here are more of my initial thoughts on this site as I continue along with my dissertation research. So I might be going a little bit far out on some of these things. I'm not trying to bring Lisa down with me. In fact, feel free to jump in if you think it's need to moderate. Yeah, so yeah. Just want to put that disclaimer out there. Now that it's out there, I can say whatever I want. Is that how it works, legally? Okay, so the first thing I'd like to announce is that I am the first person ever to consider climate change and cultural developments in the Middle East. So it's a pretty big, pretty good accomplishment. Got a lot of people to thank. But I'm getting a nervous look like, okay, that's right. That's not what we talked about. Actually, there's been over a century of intense conversation about this topic. That's yielded perhaps thousands of scholarly works on it. So this is just a very late sort of entry into all of this. Trying to kind of contemplate some of those ideas at this site. And particularly within Hurana for a lot of these ideas have been presented elsewhere as well. And it's kind of just making the most of what I have available now with that. So along that note, let's kind of look at the beginning of some of these ideas of environmental theories in this part of the world. And we can work from there. So if we look back to the early 20th century, you have people like Pompelli, who's a geologist. And he's doing things like going around Iran and saying, if man inhabited the earth during the later glacial or falluvial epochs, Iran would probably have been peculiarly favorable to his development by reason of the relatively warm climate and moderate degree of rainfall, which appears to have enjoyed. So as he's going around, he's seeing all these ruins and thinking, I'm also seeing evidence for a different climate in the past. Maybe that's related. Maybe things were nicer to what my perspective of nice is. And that could be an explanation there. Now, of course, there are people living in these climates that was hot right around them. So that kind of defeats some of that idea just right from the get-go. But we can see this kind of early sort of link between past climates and human populations going on at this point. V. Gordon Child, a much more well-known archaeologist, comes along with what's later called the Oasis Theory. And to set the stage here, he's talking about, in the late Pleisocene, you have these dry conditions. So he's saying, desiccation set in to get food and water, the grass eaters, so the herbivores would have to congregate around a diminishing number of springs and streams in Oasis. And they would be brought up against man, too. So it's a pretty straightforward idea. He's saying, we have these limited water resources that are concentrating both people and animals, and that maybe you get the chemistry for domestication to come from that sort of setting. Simple idea. But to say the least, in the 100 years or so since then, we've been able to say, OK, it's not nearly this simple, right? To kind of just say, this is this one-to-one sort of thing, particularly with the domestication of any one animal, let alone all of them, and he later starts to look at plants as well here. So we can at least say, we've got some problems here and the simplicity of it. And in terms of saying, we have an environmental change and there should be an equal part change in culture, is kind of the thing here. What we later might call these to be determinist ideas in a certain sense, right? So environmental determinism is something that we're today kind of looking back into some earlier ideas and saying, this might fit in this sort of framework. But if I were to kind of say what is at the heart of this issue, it's that, too, in a determinist idea, it's that the environment determines human behavior and shifts in culture and is the primary driver of change. Now, there's been many critiques of this way of thinking since a lot of these ideas were happening in the early 1900s. I'd say that some of the key critiques are, number one, that there's little room for human agency in all of this. The idea is people are basically dust in the wind. And if something happens, then they got to go with it, not a whole lot of room for humans making decisions on their own behalf. And secondly, this is more of a technical problem, but a lot of these environmental relationships, both determinists and perhaps not, really rely heavily on correlations between environmental data sets and archeological data sets. And there's an inherent problem in that they're coming from different chronologies in different parts of the world. So for example, you might be working in the Indus River Valley or something like that, and you want a good temperature reconstruction, which is a hard thing to do. So you might look to Greenland ice cores and something like that and using that data. Now the problem is, can you apply climate data that's taken from another continent at a much different latitude to something going on in another part of the world? Well, that's kind of a big jump, isn't it, to go from wonderful climate data that's being drawn from the poles and then trying to put that in archeologies of other parts of the world. So we have kind of a problem there with this geographical scale. Another one deals with chronology. So each chronology, especially for using radiocarbon dating, has its own quirks, has its own air associated with it. And as we try to add different data sets to that, we compound problems of chronology, such that if we're interested in what's happening on the scale of a human's lifespan, and we have airbars that approach 100 years, can we really say meaningful things about when events happened that mattered to cultural developments, right? So here are these kind of built-in problems. Now since these critiques have been addressed, I think we have gone some way both theoretically and methodologically in addressing them, at least partially. So for one, if we look at various environmental theories in archeology, and don't get too into this chart yet, if this is still kind of a work in progress, what I'm attempting to show here is various environmental archeology theories that relate to a plot of basically the degree of agency afforded to people. And then on the left to right, the kind of emphasis on various factors of human and non-human origin. So as you get this way, I mean emphasis on human factors like ability to have burning and domestication of animals and things like that that are mostly on humans' behalf. And then environmental factors that are non-human, such as things like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that we have very little to do with. Now again, don't look too far into this, but what we see is as we have determinism kind of in the bottom here, what I see is as we get close to the present, it's kind of migration ideas towards allowing greater amount of agency and greater emphasis on what people are doing to the environment and making that a two-way street. So not just like the environment does one thing and humans have to respond. As an example of that, if we look to historical ecology, among other things, the environment has shown not just as a thing apart from humans, but something with humans. The environment is this complex web of human and non-human entanglement where one affects the other, the other affects one. So we talk a lot about burning on this campus, for example, and I think that fits well nicely into sort of looking at human impacts on the environment, not just the other way around. You can look to human eco-dynamics, which is good at looking at things like persistence. So you can look at how in the face of environmental perturbations, which is a way of saying just like big climate events, like all of a sudden, or environmental events like a tsunami or an earthquake, we often find that humans can take those punches and that there isn't a distinct cultural change after these events. People go back to what they were doing, which is definitely a departure from saying if there's a big change in the environment, there must be an equal part change in what people are doing, right? This is saying, no, it doesn't have to be like this. So here's sort of these ways that we've gotten at that critique of allowing more human agency. But how do we get at that second part, which is looking at these problems of different conologies and different geographical scales and putting together archaeological environmental data? And I think the answer here, which has been put forward by other people as well, is to try to get these two data sets as close together as we can. So instead of just relying on climate data from far away, let's make it from the site that we're interested in. And what I want to stress in particular is getting these two data sets from the same source. And what I mean by that is actually the same dirt that you submit to the lab for whatever sort of paleo-environmental analysis, you're taking half of that and you're looking at maybe some sort of indicator of humans through a biomarker perhaps, or maybe you're looking at the artifacts that are in that same sample. And what that does is that kind of gets rid of this problem of chronology because it's coming from the same place and you can use stratigraphic relationships to kind of look at change through time and you can throw out these different radiocarbon-dated chronology problems away, right? We can make these direct relationships. And so what I'm showing here in the graph to the right is something that I showed at last year's Brown Bag, which is a human biomarker from a type of molecule that we're calling the fecal stanels in blue in relation to oxygen isotope data, which can be suggested of the amount of precipitation in area. And what I'm trying to push for is that we can make this comparison between these more datasets that deal more with the environment and more with people. We can look at them together because it's from the same sediment source and we can just use stratigraphy to look at changes and be pretty confident about their relationships. So on that, I'm going to now briefly talk more about this human biomarker, the fecal stanel molecules because it's a brown bag and someone's got to be putting the brown in the bag. So we will see. I couldn't resist. I couldn't do it. So you've seen this before and a couple of the other talks. And this is not the emphasis of today's discussion. So I'm going to kind of push through this. If you have questions, it's the end about this method if you're talking about it. I've been doing this before. I already kind of pros at this. Basically, fecal stanel molecules refer to a suite of molecules that start in the gut from the ingestive cholesterol and cholesterol becomes degraded into a form called coprosinol, which is a waste product of bacteria. And so it's something that the bacteria don't want. Your body doesn't want. It becomes poop. And it becomes actually a significant part of poop. Up to half a percent of a human stool could be this one molecule, coprosinol, which is a lot. And then it can get buried and sit you or transport somewhere, but the point is when it ends up in the ground, it will stay there and will persist for hundreds of thousands of years. And the reason that is is because no one wants it. It'll just sit there. The bacteria don't want it. They won't have nothing to do with it. It'll just sit there forever. Just like Mike Bloomberg, you know, like after, you know, just sit there forever. No one wants it, but it's there. I'm sorry, last night was crazy. So anyway, we have these molecules that can persist in nature for a very long time. And what makes them useful to us is that we can look at changes in their concentration over time as a proxy for human population change. And so that's kind of something that might relate to the archeological data sets. And we can plot that data right alongside paleo-environmental data from the same source. So I'd argue that we did that to some good effect from Cahokia, which is what I talked about here previously, that are able to show that right when we see a decline in the fecal-stainable values shown as the top trends, we see evidence for, oh God, for drought in the oxygen isotopes from this lake sediment and also a uptick in flooding happening at the same time, which seems to suggest that there might be climate change being a partial reason for why people are starting to decide to leave the site. So that's what we talked about there. And we had some success with that. Now, what we wanted to do is say, can we bring this to Herana 4? And can we try this in this much older context? And it's something that people hadn't really tried before. So we thought it's worth a shot. So we're going to now transfer over in the world to Herana 4. So whee! All right. So we are in the eastern Jordanian desert. And Herana 4 is, you know, by satellite. Basically, this smidge in the desert doesn't look like a whole lot from a bird's eye view. But from the surface, it's a very impressive site. It's incredibly dense. So everything in the foreground is an artifact. And it's very sudden and apparent. So you just go from almost no artifacts to just a big, huge spike. And Jordan and Felicia and I kind of tested that this summer and we did a survey. And indeed, it seems that there just is nothing around. And then it just suddenly bumps up right when you get to Herana, both on the surface and subsurface. So this is an incredibly tight and dense archaeological site. And we thought it would be a good place to try out this poop method. So we did. And here are our initial results from last year. And what we found is that things look good. We found the molecules in a measurable amount in the upper strata of the site. And what we found is that right when you hit this contact with what we're calling the wetland deposits, which is a marl, it's very clay-rich, very compact as well, they drop down to zero to depth. And that makes sense because the upper deposits are where we have cultural material at this site. So we thought, hey, where we have the artifacts, that's where we're finding the fecal molecules. We did it. But then you keep going. And so we thought, okay, this is promising. Let's try it in different parts of the site. And let's also try it offsite. And all four locations sowed pretty much the same trend. We have some at the surface. It goes down a little bit. And it spikes right at this contact between the more permeable, cultural-rich silts to the impermeable, relatively impermeable clay layer beneath there. And then it goes to zero beyond that. And this happens throughout this, not throughout the site, but in the places that we did test on the site. And also in an offsite location, about 100 meters away. So not very far, but still not within the site's stratigraphy. And so there are two sort of possible explanations here. One is that this is, in fact, in situ molecules that relate to what was happening at the time of the site's occupation, both offsite and onsite. Or, but it's a little suspicious, because everywhere keeps showing this kind of build up right at this contact. So another hypothesis is that there might be some sort of contamination and modern stuff is percolating through the permeable material and collecting at this boundary right here. So one thing that we thought, so what could be possible contaminants at this site? And it turns out that there's a lot of camels that go by this site all the time. And you know, around the desert, you see them probably once every two or three days, something like that. Frequently going by. And camels make a lot of poop. A whole lot of it. That's some of it. Did anyone bring their lunch? Yeah, Bill. I'm trying to make this hard on your life. Okay. Anyway, so yeah, so we thought maybe we should test this camel poop to see if it is one of the small handfuls of animals that we know, that we know that there are small handful of animals that can make fecal-stainable molecules that we make as well. But it's a small group and they make a very small amount compared to us. And we didn't know if camels were part of that group or not. So we decided to test it. So I'm pretty sure that we have invested more time, money, and energy in camel poop than any other lab on Earth. So you can't say that I didn't go to Berkeley and do nothing. You know. So this is a, we actually, so this isn't a lab. This is a language state. It is a lab that I'm very familiar with. And it's easy to work there. So we had it undergo extraction. And so what you're looking at, this thing smelled really weird, is basically the lipid extract of camel poop. Also another quick funny story, because the thing I have time for it, is that, so we picked it up in the field desiccated and dried out. And we put in a little plastic baggie and it got kind of crushed up. Dried camel poop looks a lot like weed. And I didn't know that. And then so we, we shifted over and it all worked out fun. But it was, I was really worried that we wouldn't be able to bring it to America because it looks so suspicious. But sure enough, we're able to, to analyze it and take it to a mass spectrometer to find out how much of these molecules are contained in it, if any. And what we find here is that camel, which is shown here in red, does make a small amount of these molecules. And this is compared to sort of the other animals that have been mostly tested. There's not a whole large body that have been. And as you can see, it's so much smaller compared to humans, which is this, this, you know, this towering bar right there. But you could imagine how after hundreds, even thousands of years of herders going over this place, that small amount might add up and be so much that we can't at this moment say whether or not our record is a tribute to people or not. So that's the consternation part of them. That's the damn camels coming in and making our life a little bit harder. So this is not the end of the story, though. I think first of all, it's important for method development to go out and show, hey, we really need to think about other animals that can contribute to this molecule. And so there's a whole like animal cracker study to be done, where we think about going out and just sampling a bunch of animals. So that's kind of at the back of our heads and just seeing, you know, in the wide world of animal poop, what's going on. But in terms of understanding heronophore archaeologically, right now there's not a whole lot we can say from it. So what else can we turn to? And so for that, we can do it the old fashioned way. And we can look to, you know, what's going on at this site. So what I'll be showing you now is some very preliminary, not even data, but more just observations from the past season's excavation, in particular from this hole that was dug. In June. And it's called a robber hole one. So Lisa's very good at making lemonade from lemons. And we had a bunch of sort of looter pits all throughout the site when we showed up this past summer. And there's one particularly deep one. And which is too bad because this poor person was just digging there trying to find something important. I just kept on going through bones. I just kept going and probably breaking their back to do so. Because this is very difficult things to dig through, those of you that have been there, there's a head nod. So she was like, let's open this up as a unit and take advantage of what's already been dug. So the upper deposits are a little bit disturbed and I won't really be presenting data from there. But we can look to the lower deposits as a good sort of thing about what's happening in the build up to the occupation of this site, particularly in regards to the environment. So if we look at sort of the stratigraphy here, in general what we're seeing is we have these, I'm sorry that this isn't, this isn't, yeah, maybe for this one, yeah, I'm sorry, my experiment isn't working as well as that. We have these brown clays towards the bottom that are interrupted by this pure white fine sand that seems to extend to other locations in the site as well. Now that requires a lot more investigation. It's a really interesting unit and I don't have a whole lot to say about it because we really need to get some measurements on it I'm just going to go ahead and we're not going to discuss this too much. What we see is in general we have these kind of darker colored material down here, these brown clays with kind of slightly more silty material, more cultural material as you go to the top. And my interpretations of this are what I'm showing here. Now this isn't real data. I want to be clear about that. This is what it seems based on filled notes is going on. So this is, it's not real numbers but what I assume it will look similar to this once we get some measurements back. And so what we're seeing is that in general due to the dark coloration of these lower soils as well as things like root traces and freshwater stales, things like that we're seeing a fair amount of organic content and these lower most deposits at the site. And we get a transition to this much lighter colored material at the top. There reflects this tradition from much more fine grain material, again, ignoring these white sands which are pretty interesting but don't have a whole lot to say yet, to more silty material towards the top. And so a preliminary interpretation here which has been backed up by multiple other researchers at this site is that these lower deposits seem to indicate a fair amount of, or some amount of water with those freshwater stales, with those root chases. There's some bits of soil that appear glade and might be anoxic, so at least standing water and not completely dry. And as we get out into these deposits we find evidence of desiccation. So we find precipitate minerals, we find gypsum roses, we find carbonate ribbons that are coming through there and a decrease in the amount of just kind of darker colored material as well. So all that seems to be shifting to a wetland that is retracting and perhaps getting smaller as we get into the development of the site. And this holds up throughout the site stratigraphy. So what I've attempted to do now here is show some of the deeper excavations at this site and this is not to scale so these sections are much further apart than they're shown here. But in general you can see this kind of transition from wetland deposits to the upper cultural deposits. Now what you'll see is that there doesn't appear to be a lot of obvious continuity between strata here. And it's very difficult to actually try to link any sort of one layer that you find at the bottom of the site to anywhere else. So my interpretation from that is that what you're seeing is kind of a patchwork of wet, dry, vegetated, not vegetated landscape similar to any modern wetland where it's more like a mosaic sort of pattern and you're not going to find just uniform beds throughout, right? And in general what we're seeing is something that's perhaps more wet, more vegetated that's starting to get drier it's starting to retract as we get closer to the occupation of the site. So that's this kind of interpretation that has been put out before I should mention that seems to be backed up by what we're seeing this summer at RH1 at that robber hole deposit. Now we can't look to fecal stanels to sort of have this parallel what's happening with humans because of those damn camels that I told you about, right? So what else can we look to to try to link archaeological and environmental information? And to that we can at least look to artifacts and say what's going on there. So what I have here is the lithic density of two excavations from the site. The one on the left was compiled by Felicia de Peña and is very nicely allowed me to use these data today. So thank you very much for that Felicia. And what we're seeing is that basically you have next to next to no artifacts there's occasional artifacts and some of these deeper layers. But where things really get off and running at this site is where you see this sort of inflection point here towards more artifacts. And that inflection point happens about at this transition from what I'm saying is going from clearly kind of wet to starting to get pretty starting to dry out at both places. So that's kind of further sort of indicating that what seems to be going on is that as this area is drying out that's when people start to really show up in big numbers. Not just occasional coming by but really make the start of this decent sized archeological site. And there's that correlation there with what's happening with environmental factors in the strata. So that's where I'd like to go with there. Now the next sort of question is if you agree with me that that's what that appears to show then could people have been doing this anywhere in the landscape about 19,000 and a half years ago? And so for that we need to think is the environmental context of Harana is there anything that's kind of different about it? So this is something that I've been telling you so you know I want to be this is my more disclaimer moment where this is very just like circumstantial would not hold up in a court sort of thing but let me put on my crazy hat and say that for one we see a difference in the depth to bedrock in this wadi. So at the northern side of the wadi bedrock is in the valley floor basically there's no depth to bedrock it's totally exposed. If we go closer to the site we know that it's at least three meters down we don't know how far bedrock is down from where the site is. Another funny little story this is this mysterious hole that just showed up in the desert in one of the tournament representatives almost fell into it and told us about it and were able to say well this is a great opportunity to see what the stratigraphy is like so at least a very nicely arranged ladder to come in so you go down and see it and what we see is just three meters of alluvium basically with bedrock not in sight so there's a discrepancy here in the depth to bedrock of at least more than three meters who knows and maybe that discrepancy might act as some sort of barrier to groundwater flow if there is this kind of you have one area where the bedrock is right at the surface that's going to push stuff up to the surface that's going to push water up and perhaps make this area akin to a spring and spring is one of those kind of loaded words where there's a lot that goes with it but the reason why I think I want to say that is because it makes it seem like this place is something that is here for a very specific geological reason now again this is totally still crazy hat but as we look at the geology of the region there are many fault traces that trend from northwest to southeast throughout here and so this took like three days to get this these geologic maps so we earned them but you can see how in general you have these trends that aren't mapped here but people have identified them in the region coming nearby so we don't have a smoking gun here but it just suggests that there might be offset and bedrock that could account for that difference that we see and act as some sort of barrier to groundwater flow now again further maybe things here is that there's some interesting things about the site's geomorphology so for one is that it kind of dips almost to the south about seven degrees so when you look at the edges of the site the layers kind of fall down a little bit so it seems like there's some deflation going on here and it's uneven so if we look back at this figure it seems like it's not falling down in unison it's kind of coming down and deflating unequally throughout the site itself and what could account for that deflation possibly if groundwater was higher in the past and I was going away that could account for some adjustments in the sediment that would cause deflation from that groundwater going away there has been a lot of groundwater going away very recently by the way so when we think about this area it is in the Azraq sort of watershed which is very large and that's a groundwater pool that has been largely depleted through the explosion of Amman as a world city and so there's been a huge sort of loss of groundwater here and that might explain why it's so hard to kind of think about where the water is at Hurana now so Lisa brought this to my attention and I thought it was a wonderful kind of anecdote here when we were talking about what's going on with the water at the site and she pointed me to this work by Harding who was a British archeologist involved with Jordanian archeology in the sort of early to mid 20th century so here's this little story and he's talking about, oh by the way, sorry in the early 20th century in the city of Hurana which is a early Islamic period it's called a desert castle but it's more likely probably a caravan stopping point which is located very close to the site perhaps, I don't know, maybe a mile away something like that from two kilometers yeah so you've got you've got multinational accelerations for how far it is so very close to the site and this archeologist is talking about here in Hurana is that there seems to be no provision for a supply of water neither well nor cistern that there is water somewhere in the vicinity is strongly suggested by the following episode a small white dog this is how crazy I'm referring I'm using dog evidence a small white dog was wondering about the site and obviously at home though there were no human inhabitants within miles of the place two months later the same small dog was still there haha after all the dog and after all dogs must drink apparently the dog had succeeded in solving the problem that still defeats us where the inhabitants of Hurana got their water so this little anecdote shows that okay where is this water coming from how's this dog surviving and again today water pools up in the air mostly just from rain right and it's ephemeral but if we have this lowered of the water table that's happened more recently you can see how perhaps if we did have a much more elevated water table that would start to be much more affected by any sort of groundwater barrier and making this place more of a specific source of water alright now again if you follow with me there which maybe I've got 10% of the audience now we can keep going into kind of leading this up to what's happening regionally now I did warn about the danger of looking at regional evidence for site specific things but in this case they agree because what we're seeing is that this is because we're seeing is that speedily with them oxygen isotope data from caves in Israel show a notable increase to about the endless gracial maximum which is right when this site starts to really become occupied heavily and that's an inflection point there where then it starts to go into decline now how some paleoclimatologists have interpreted this signal is one of drawing as we get more positive in these isotopic values and so that corresponds to what we see at the site itself with evidence for drawing of those wetland deposits right before we see the archeological material really exploded the site you can see that in another regional speed with them here from Turkey and also from Lake Lausanne which is paleo dead sea and so what we see is a decrease in the dead sea levels right about to where the site starts to be occupied and then things kind of plateau for a little bit suggesting that while Harana was occupied there wasn't dramatic changes either way really and then towards the end of its occupation there seems to be another important climatic shift going on in the region that does correlate to or coincide at least with the end of our occupation at Harana 4 now we can't talk much about the end of the occupation because that is a big erosional unconformity and we don't have strata beyond that to say what was happening after Harana 4 but at least we can talk about what happened before it so I would like to say at this point that it seems to be that there might be a connection, a time of change and what was happening in terms of decisions being made to occupy this particular area now to continue with kind of pushing some buttons here can you then consider Harana 4 as a sort of proto-sedentism now this is something that I think it's hard to say one way or the other but what we can say is that there is evidence to suggest that occupation here is perhaps semi-annual at least multi-seasonal that we have here so people are here for not just very short amounts of time, they seem to be here for some part of the year, perhaps a good part of the year, the artifact concentrations here are incredibly dense further suggesting a high investment in this one area we have other investments hut structures which have been said to be homes things that are not ephemeral as well, things that are meant to be durable and meant to last perhaps and drying racks here I'm drying infrastructure that's a weird word to use but more sort of investment in being one area we find a bunch of shell and ochre we find interesting things like in size, sewn and bone all at this site and I do wonder if perhaps you can conceive of that as a moving towards the direction of sedentism at this site so if you did you could conceive about are there any correlations there that might be happening with climate change that we just discussed now all have the last sort of leg of this talk kind of be considering how is it that we present climate change in archaeology to the public, because I think it's important and I think it's something that we need to consider whenever we bring this up so the reason I bring this up, I've been thinking about a lot that, I think the way that we talk about archaeology and climate change a lot of the times in terms of how it's introduced to the public by third party journalists and popular science writers is one of, almost like a scare tactic like we had something and then it was lost do you want that or are you going to do something about it right and it's something that kind of focuses on the negative like you know things went away you know and it's something that's supposed to be scary kind of that can be very effective sometimes think okay yeah that works on me I'm really interested in trying to you know hopefully change my habits to to help combat climate change but it doesn't work on a large sector of the American public so this headline here is a headline about one of those Cahokia studies that I'd put out and it's in Fox News I'd share this with a couple grad students here but you know if we are kind of, if the takeaway is here's an example of climate change in an archaeological sense where we should be kind of scared of it you know something is lost a lot of people are just sort of mocking that and so if you don't really think that climate change is scary in the first place it's going to be a very ineffective argument to the public right so you find things like climate change effective population of Cahokia so the climate change are there any fascinating machines exist or not? Interesting looks like that nasty global warming back in the 1400s drove them away if only they had parked their cars and made their cows stop farting they could still be here today so these sort of comments make it clear that this message isn't connecting with everyone now you might say you naive little man like of course that's not going to work it's Fox News but I would argue that this represents a fair amount of the United States that we can't in good faith try to move forward in combating climate change unless we get as many people as we can under that umbrella so maybe it's worth considering how can we maybe restructure the argument instead of maybe going on a negative and saying something is lost something that you should be scared of can we throw it as a positive as an opportunity for some sort of innovation and so if it's a big if if you agree that there might be some involvement of climatic changes in what happened at Huron-a-Four what happened at Huron-a-Four didn't have to happen and that's why I want to bring up the role of human agency in all this they didn't have to decide to live in greater numbers in this smaller area and perhaps have different things come of it they could have run for the hills they could have lived in smaller population sizes in many ways that people can can navigate this but through their agency they chose to innovate perhaps and what I'd like to end on is maybe that is a message that we can put forward in terms of instead of just looking for examples of scary things in climate change and archeology what if we look for examples of things where people are innovating and it's like this is a way for us now and what's the take away well you don't have to you know don't think of this as a scary thing this is a thing where you need to get in on it too and then we restructure the energy grid for a whole new world and maybe throw it in a positive light so with all those crazy things concluded I will end there thank you very much for your time if so I hate it it's the best evidence I got there you go thank you for being with me yeah and then I died in the desert three days later because the water went away so yeah great point hopefully towards graduation which is I have very little data right now and we kind of got thwarted a little bit by some of the fecal stainless evidence which again it's not useless I think there's going to be some good stuff that comes from it so now we really need to fill in with paleoenvironmental data that RH1 I told you about so we have that sampled I just need to get into the lab and start getting data to back up what I think is happening and get actual data from not just that excavation but from multiple throughout the site to try to say can we really securely say that this this desiccation is happening and it fits in really nicely with regional events as well so that I think that just requires more data and so that's what I'd like to do tell me about it that's right that's a very good point we have a lot to consider about all of that and I think a whole paper on the camel stuff that is not written as you can probably tell very good points I agree hey Jordan yeah so I think one place to start is just like in terms of the setting in the first place so a lot of the stamina work has been done in in lakes and sediments where there's relatively not much movement of material so there is of course some bioturbation with snails and things like that but compared to a terrestrial kind of sense where you've got all sorts of stuff all sorts of stuff digging around mixing things up and just the fact that there's in poor spaces and water constantly flushing stuff down makes me think that maybe in general archeological sites writ large are not the best place to directly try this method which is kind of another thing that we might try to say that so far it's been mostly at the bottom of lakes maybe there's something to say for sticking to that so does that kind of answer that question though yeah yeah so that's what I'm thinking yeah in terms of like you know they're charged yeah yeah yeah and a lot of it too there hasn't been a lot of testing of this method in general so looking at different sediments would be really rewarding hey Kevin sure so people have so people have addressed this question like okay can we know that there's this confusion just to fecal snails alone are there other things we can do to help answer that question some things that people have done is basically just looking at testing as many of these gut molecules as you can and looking at different ratios between them and the idea that camels will have a little bit of this but they'll have a lot of something else right now another problem there is that might be for herbivores and then you have to say okay well how do you tell the difference between a cow and a camel at that point it starts to get a little more complicated so there has been work to try to say like human versus other work looking at biolacids as well just trying to get as many sort of molecules in a line and then trying to see if there's characteristic ratios between them that's kind of where we're at but there isn't been something where we can say almost like DNA to say this is indeed this one species and I mean yeah I mean however you know genetic stuff is going crazy I know nothing about it but I might be the best answer of this yeah so another big like question that could totally be tested to my knowledge hasn't I think the way you do this is by testing yourself and so again maybe I go like totally just Atkins diet and just eat a bunch of meat and then test my own feces and see does that actually change the amount of molecules that are provided because cholesterol is the parent material so the amount of cholesterol should have some sort of reflection on the amount that's coming out however we make cholesterol anyway right so you can be totally vegetarian and you're still going to be making some so I think you're right that there could be something with diet as to whether or not that would be throwing off those numbers so much that it would look like you know a person who was vegan was looked like an animal or something I don't know if that would be that dramatic but it's testable so I don't know what you're doing after class we could bring a sample vial anyway so yeah it's possible alright well thanks everybody