Quartz, Cretan handaxes and Paleolithic seafaring

A couple of months ago, I posted on the recent discovery of quartz hand axes on Crete by Strasser and Runnels. That post spurred quite a bit of discussion, and I also provided some additional thoughts shortly thereafter, based on the colonization of Cyprus. Since then, we've learned that these implements will be described in detail in the June issues of the journal Hesperia, and some decent photographs of some of the implements in question were published, which provides some more convincing data to sink your teeth into. Spurred by a paper I recently read (Broodbank 2006 - free pdf here), I figured I'd post my last impressions on this discovery until the paper actually comes out.

First, here's what one of those handaxes looks like (views from the front, two sides and back of the piece):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16archeo.html

More photographs are also available in a nice slideshow provided by Boston University press release, and they give you an idea of the size of the handaxes and of how they might have been handled. The thing with quartz, however, is that it's very hard to see flaking landmarks on photographs. For what it's worth, I still think that at least that handaxe looks very rough in craftsmanship (e.g., uneven thinning, apparently no basal thinning, very sinuous edges). Although that's not too unusual for pieces on quartz, I really hope that this one's not their best looking one!

To summarize the debate a bit, Strasser, Runnels and company have found these quartz implements whose morphology is reminiscent of that of handaxes in deposits dating to ca. 130,000 years BP on Crete. This is significant because Crete appears to have remained an island detached from the European mainland for most of the Pleistocene, which implies any tool maker on the island must have originally arrived there through some form of seafaring.

The record of Lower Paleolithic finds on Mediterranean islands is largely unconvincing. As Broodbank (2006:204) states:

"Claims of Lower and Middle
Palaeolithic finds on the islands divide, as
Mussi (2001: 86) notes, into those that are
reliably documented but derive from locations
that were not insular at the time (such
as Capri [Mussi 2001: 86]), and those found
on definite palaeo-islands but that are contentious
in terms of their identification as
artefacts rather than geofacts, or whose dating
is uncertain, due to either the low diagnosticity
of the material itself, or the lack of a
scientifically dated context. A few cases, such
as a possible Lower Palaeolithic find from
Corfu (Kourtessi-Philippaki 1999: 283-84; cf.
Runnels 1995: 235 n. 48), fit both categories.
Where such claims have been subjected to rigorous
analysis, including re-examination of the
material and findspot, the conclusions have
tended to be negative."

Perhaps not insignificantly, one of the authors Broodbank cites as urging caution about accepting some of these early find uncritically is C. Runnels, who's one of the discoverers of the Cretan handaxes. Given their age, however, these implements are not really relevant to the question of a Lower Paleolithic settlement of Crete. However, they are very relevant to the question of Middle Paleolithic settlement of those landmasses. On this topic, Broodbank (2006:204-205) proposes that:

"Slightly more convincing, and therefore
intriguing, are a handful of findspots of probable
Middle Palaeolithic stone tools from
several of the smaller Greek islands, notably
in the Sporades (Efstratiou 1985: 5-6, 56-59)
and Ionian islands (Dousougli 1999; Kavvadias
1984; Kourtessi-Philliapaki 1999), but
potentially also on Melos in the Cyclades
(Chelidonio 2001). In the first and second
cases, the findspots lie close to foci of Middle
Palaeolithic activity in, respectively, Thessaly,
and Epirus/Albania/Dalmatia (Runnels
1995: 238-39; Runnels et al. 2004). In most
instances—probably all of the Sporades, save
the perhaps erroneous case of Skyros, for
which the only report is a newspaper article
written almost half a century ago (Cherry
1981: 44), plus Corfu and Lefkas in the Ionian
group—the islands concerned were almost
certainly joined to the mainland at the lower
sea levels that existed after the last interglacial
(Oxygen Isotope Stage 5e, dated to 128-
118,000 years ago). More interesting is the
case of Kephallonia (and probably conjoined
Zakynthos [Kourtessi-Phillipaki 1999: 284-
86]), where the tools, albeit not associated
with dated contexts, do seem bona fide, and
the island, although in a fault zone subject
to massive vertical movement, is likely on
bathymetric grounds to have been separated
from the mainland by one or more gaps of a
few kilometres (less than the 20 km reported
in Cherry 1990: 171). Still more surprising, but
unsupported by detailed study of material and
context, or independent dating, are the finds
from Melos, which would have been attainable
only via a chain of inter-island links, including
sea-crossings in the order of 10 km at average
Middle Palaeolithic sea level stands."

There therefore seems to be some prior evidence of potential evidence of a Middle Paleolithic on some of the Greek islands, albeit somewhat debatable and mostly found on islands relatively close to the mainland. That being the case, it may be that, if the Cretan material is shown to be unambiguous, it represents one more instance of fleeting island hopping. No matter, how fleeting, however, this behavior has profound implications for the behavior of the hominins (most likely Neanderthals) who engaged in it.

"Could it be that
the markedly indented coastline and mass of
offshore islands in the Ionian and Aegean seas
triggered a slight ‘stretching’ of behaviour?
Visits to the nearby Ionian islands from the
large base camps identified on the opposite
mainland are certainly compatible with what
we know of Neanderthal short-range mobility
(Gamble 1999: 239-43, 266), and also with
some simple propelled floating technique, but
visits as far afield as Melos are less so in
both respects. The potential implications for
the earliest Mediterranean maritime activity
and, equally, for Neanderthal cognitive and
learning abilities (Stringer and Gamble 1993;
Mithen 2005), are therefore quite substantial.
A thorough investigation of the Kephallonian
and Melian finds, combined with scientific
dating of their contexts, is clearly essential.
(Broodbank 2006:205)"

This echoes (and explains!) a lot of the press coverage that's been focused on these finds, and clearly underscores the potential significance of these stone tools. With that in mind, then, the Hesperia paper will need to clearly do the following in order for the finds to be considered credible:

1. Provide some radiometric ages of the deposits in which the tools were found;
2. Explain how the tools ended up in these deposits (i.e., are they in primary or secondary context? If secondary, where was the primary context?);
3. Discuss why quartz seems to have been the raw material of choice when there are other sources of better quality workable stone on the island, which were exploited by later occupants;
4. Present some information on the production sequences of these implements showing patterned human action;
5. Distinguish this material from later (i.e., post-agricultural) occurrences of 'rough' stone tools made on coarse-grained raw materials; and
6. Explain why a Middle Paleolithic industry should be comprised predominantly of Lower Paleolithic type implements (unless, of course, the handaxes got all the glory in the press reports and there actually is more to this assemblage).

Personally, I'd be very excited if these turned out to be credible, as it would provide further evidence of the flexibility of Middle Paleolithic hominins and force us to rethink how they engaged with their larger ecological realities. Also, it'd probably spur some new research on Paleolithic-age deposits in Mediterranean islands. This last point would be especially important, in my view, because even with the Cretan evidence, the record of Lower and Middle Paleolithci island living remains very scant, which begs for an explanation, since hominins should now be assumed to be capable of seafaring in the deep past.

References

Broodbank, C. (2006). The Origins and Early Development of Mediterranean Maritime Activity Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 19 (2) DOI: 10.1558//jmea.2006.v19i2.199

Lower-Middle Paleolithic island living?

There's a lengthy report describing some preliminary findings of Middle and perhaps even Lower Paleolithic artifacts on the Greek island of Crete that Thomas Strasser presented earlier this week. The report stresses especially that "ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between."

If they're correct, Strasser's interpretations agree exactly with the results of work reported by Mortensen (2008) and which I already discussed a couple of years ago. Specifically, Mortensen argued that the implements he discovered "suggest that the first humans reached the island across the sea from Libya. That an early contact between northern Africa and southern Europe existed already during the Palaeolithic periods is a hypothesis now supported by most scholars."

Archaeoblog is skeptical about the findings, especially since no illustrations are provided that would help assess how 'Paleolithic' the implements look, while Hawks is also skeptical but suggests that fleeting human occupation may have occurred on Crete in the Middle Pleistocene as it may have on other large Mediterranean islands.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, apparently large numbers of artifacts appear to have been found, on at least four distinct terraces as well as some rockshelters. Given that the team comprises a bona fide Paleoltihic archaeologist (C. Runnels), I see no reason to challenge the human-made nature of these implements. And, by referring to the Mortensen report, the current report certainly suggests that there was some sizeable human population on Crete at least during the Late Pleistocene (i.e., after ca. 130kya). That said, based on the description in the report, the stone tools in question appear to be handaxe-like things made on quartz (I recently discussed handaxes here). Quartz can be an impractical material to work, mainly because of its coarse crystalline structure, though in some cases, it can be fine-grained enought to yield decent knapped products. In other words, the structure of quartz often limits the range of formas that can be made from it, usually restricting them to relatively 'coarse' ones similar to some Lower Paleolithic types, which may account for some of the similarities mentioned in the text. Without some good illustration and photographs of these artifacts and of the quality of the quartz used to manufacture them, it's hard to make any kind of definitive statement.

Moving to the issue of the colonization of Crete, the whole 'they came straight from Africa' model is unconvincing to me. For one thing, the Greek mainland is much closer to the island than North Africa, and lower sea levels during cold periods of the Pleistocene would have made Crete more visible and accessible from there than from, say, Lybia. For another, the amount of finds and their time-transgressive nature (that is, they were found on four terraces spanning at least 90,000 years) suggest that people permanently settled the island for long stretches of the Middle Paleolithic. Both of these observations argue for hominins arriving to the island purely by chance. The question is whether or not they reached through seafaring. If they came from Europe, complex seafaring is unlikely to have been critical, whereas if they came directly from Africa, it would have been essential.

In a recent post, I detailed how seafaring - as inferred from the colonization of islands - has been argued by some to represent evidence of 'modern human behavior' (Norton and Jin 2009). However, in that case, colonization through seafaring was demonstrated by the presence of foreign lithic raw materials at specific site. If I understand the report about the finds by Strasser's team, however, the raw material of the Cretan finds appears to be exclusively local. The report states that

... hand axes found on Crete were made from local quartz but display a style typical of ancient African artifacts.

“Hominids adapted to whatever material was available on the island for tool making,” Strasser proposes. “There could be tools made from different types of stone in other parts of Crete.”

Strasser has conducted excavations on Crete for the past 20 years. He had been searching for relatively small implements that would have been made from chunks of chert no more than 11,000 years ago. But a current team member, archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University, pointed out that Stone Age folk would likely have favored quartz for their larger implements. “Once we started looking for quartz tools, everything changed,” Strasser says.

This local provisioning of raw material, in my view, argues against colonization by seafaring to a degree. Reference to the stylistic similarities of the Cretan handaxes and those from Africa is, again in my view, a non-argument, since handaxes are very similar in morphology and technology pretty much throughout the Old World (McPherron 2000).

References

McPherron, S.P. 2000. Handaxes as a Measure of the Mental Capabilities of Early Hominids. Journal of Archaeological Science 27:655-663.

Mortensen, P. 2008. Lower to Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from Loutró on the south coast of Crete. Antiquity 82(317): http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/mortensen/index.html.

Norton, C.J., and J.J.H. Jin. 2009. The evolution of modern human behavior in East Asia: current perspectives. Evolutionary Anthropology 18:247-260.