VENTURA COUNTY
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Website : http://www.venturaarchaeology.org/index.html
V O L U M E
MEETING PLACE
Chumash Indian Museum
3290 Lang Ranch Pkwy
Thousand Oaks, CA
2nd Tuesday of every
month
Direction: 101 freeway take
Westlake Blvd exit, go to
North Westlake Blvd 4
miles to Lang Ranch Pkwy,
turn right. Museum is on
right hand side
VCAS: WHAT’S
HAPPENING
Feb 11th: 9 am
VCAS Archive Day
Feb 14th: 7 pm
Deborah Roman
“Dating Sites within the
Chumash Ventureno Region”
Feb 25th: 9 am
VCAS Archive Day
Feb 26th:
Last day to submit
items for the newsletter
EDITOR:
Julie Swift
P.O. Box 4172
Thousand Oaks, 91359
thepreciousjewelz
@yahoo.com
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What’s Happening in VCAS
F E B R U A R Y
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VCAS February 2017 Meeting
Our speaker for the evening will be Deborah Rowan presenting “Dating Sites within the Chumash Ventureno Region”.
The dating of sites within the Chumash Ventureno region has been robust for the Late
Period, but less well represented for the Early and Middle Periods. Ms. Roman, as Director of the VEN 632+/Conejo Open Space Archaeometrics Study, will report on the latest
results of the AMS radiocarbon dating on the specific sites of Lang Ranch and Oakbrook
Park and review the correlations of the obsidian sourcing from those specific levels. The
testing performed involves re-analysis of legacy artifact collections from sites located in
the Open Space.
The dating clearly suggests a deep antiquity of occupation- as early as AMS 10,011 rcybpwithin the area and the obsidian sourcing demonstrates distinctive patterning in preferred
choices of lithics. A comparison of data between the site of Tale'pop within the Santa
Monica Mountains and the results from the Open Space is explored in this presentation.
Beyond such data analysis, Ms. Roman will examine the questions regarding assumptions of long distance trade raised
by such theorists as Frederickson, Basgall, Jerkins and others. Our data set will be examined in light of this critical
review of such assumptions. The collections utilized included those from Ventura County Archaeological Society and
the Stagecoach Inn Museum, whose curators graciously allowed her team access to the artifacts.
Deborah Roman is a historian and an archaeologist who currently works in the Southern California archaeology specialty. She graduated from Case Western Reserve University with degrees in History and Teaching. She also has a
Master's Degree in Anthropology/Archaeology with Personal Distinction from California State University Northridge. Her current project focuses on the Archaeometric testing of the multiple sites from the Early Period located
within the broad region of the Conejo Open Space. In particular, she has recently performed AMS radiocarbon dating
on sites within the Lang Ranch and Oakbrook Park, which indicate deep antiquity of occupation in those regions. Her
article soon to be published online will investigate the relative time depth of these sites based upon multiple lines of
evidence, and provide comparative statistics re. Evidence for Early versus Middle Period occupation of the Ventureno
Chumashan peoples. She is currently the Director of the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park, California and is
Project Director for the Testing modules on the above noted sites.
We look forward to hearing Deborah Roman’s presentation on Tuesday, February 14th at 7pm at Oakbrook Chumash Indian Museum in Thousand Oaks. Be sure not to miss it!
Support the Ventura County Archaeological Society!
The Ventura County Archaeological Society will have items for sale at our general meetings. These include VCAS logo tote bags and note cards, as well as coyote and turtle pins. Be sure to pick them up at
one of our meetings!
Just a reminder our VCAS meetings take place on the second Tuesday of each month at the Oakbrook Chumash Indian Museum at 7pm. Please tell a friend and join us at our meetings. We offer an incredible selection of speakers to share their insight and research with our society members, as well as the opportunity
to learn more about the rich history of our area and new developments in our field.
We look forward to seeing all of you at our next meeting!
VCAS January 2016 Speaker
Our January meeting was wonderful! It was a fantastic turnout and we had an excellent presentation
from Dr. Hélène Rougier sharing her research regarding “The Troisième caverne of Goyet, Belgium:
New Neandertal Fossils and their Mortuary Behavior.”
Dr. Hélène Rougier
The Old
Archaeologist says:
You are never too
old to play in the
dirt!
Dr. Hélène Rougier is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University
Northridge. A paleoanthropologist, she specializes in the study of Neandertals during the Middle and Late Pleistocene periods, focusing on
the forms and variations of this early human species, their relationship
with modern humans, the diversity of their mortuary practices, and the
reasons for their disappearance. She is part of the team who has resumed field excavations at the Neandertal site of Saint-Césaire, France.
Her current research projects include the multidisciplinary reassessment of old archeological collections in Belgium and France in
order to potentially identify human remains among them and study
their associated context to bring up new crucial information about late
Neandertal behaviors.
Nearly 150 years after the discovery of Neandertals, a heated debate still exists regarding their cognitive
and symbolic capacities, as well as the terms of their disappearance. Interestingly, the contribution of
older discoveries to these issues may have been hindered due to the absence of modern field methods. Today, we have the ability to reassess
the scientific potential of collections from sites excavated before modern
methods by re-evaluating them using a multidisciplinary approach combining the results of morphometric, taphonomical, isotopic and genetic
analyses. This approach was applied to the Troisième caverne of Goyet,
Belgium, and resulted in the discovery of new Neandertal remains, thus
making the Goyet collection the largest Neandertal collection of Northern Europe. Furthermore, Goyet represents the first evidence of Neandertal cannibalism in Northern Europe, as well as the first example of
multiple Neandertal bones being utilized as tools at a single site. Placed
in the context of Northern Europe, the Goyet discovery highlights considerable diversity in mortuary behavior among late Neandertals, and
thus brings new essential data towards understanding the period immediately preceding their disappearance.
Here is an excerpt from her research: (by Hélène Rougier, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Cédric Beauval, Cosimo
Posth, Damien Flas, Christoph Wißing, Anja Furtwängler, Mietje Germonpré, Asier GómezOlivencia, Patrick Semal, Johannes van der Plicht, Hervé Bocherens & Johannes Krause)
“Neandertal funerary practices remain at the forefront of palaeoanthropological research, generating
heated debates following the revision of old data and new excavations at key sites such as La Chapelle
-aux-Saints, Roc de Marsal, Saint-Césaire and La Ferrassie. More generally, attention has focused on
the variability of Neandertal mortuary practices to evaluate their cognitive and symbolic implications,
especially as they may provide insights concerning the social systems of this fossil human group. Neandertals are known to have buried their dead and are associated with mortuary behaviors that are often difficult to interpret in Palaeolithic contexts. The site of Krapina (Croatia) is an instructive example in this sense. Evidence for cannibalism was first proposed for this site as early as 1901 based on
the fragmentation and traces of burning from a large collection of early Neandertal remains. This evidence has since been disputed by proponents of alternative explanations for the human bone modifications who argue for natural processes while others maintain that the anthropogenic manipulations are
best interpreted in the context of secondary burials. Several studies dedicated to cannibalism have
proposed that securely identifying anthropogenic modifications related to this practice should incorporate evidence for the similar treatment of both faunal and human remains in the interest of extracting
nutrients. In addition to Gran Dolina (level TD6; Early Pleistocene) in Spain, which has produced the
earliest undisputed evidence for cannibalism, further examples have also been documented at several
Western European Neandertal sites, including El Sidrón and Zafarraya in Spain, and Moula-Guercy
and Les Pradelles in France.
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Here we provide new data on the diversity of Neandertal mortuary behavior, focusing on a small area of their
known range, Northern Europe, during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 (ca. 60 –30 thousand years ago), in order to
identify small-scale processes during this short period that witnessed the disappearance of the Neandertals. We present 99 new Neandertal remains recently identified among the collections from the Troisième caverne of Goyet
(Belgium), some of which exhibit anthropogenic modifications, and discuss their implications.
The Troisième caverne (or “Third cave”) of Goyet, excavated in the latter
half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and again at the end of
the 1990s, is part of a large cave system located in the Mosan Basin. The
most extensive excavations were carried out by Edouard Dupont in 1868,
who described five “fauna-bearing levels”. The Troisième caverne yielded
a rich archaeological sequence with Middle and Upper Palaeolithic deposits containing Mousterian, Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ),
Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian artifacts as well as Neolithic and
historic period material. Whether the Mousterian material derives from a single or multiple phases of occupation is currently impossible to discern. Unfortunately, the excavation methods did not meet today’s
standards, and it appears that the levels described by Dupont actually represent a mix of material from different periods.
Several human remains from different levels were published by Dupont and Hamy, although
only a few figure in the Catalogue of Fossil Hominids, all of which were attributed to the Magdalenian. In 2004, we identified both a Neandertal mandible fragment and an isolated tooth
among the human material recovered by Dupont from the Troisième caverne and currently
housed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), making Goyet one of the
few Northern European sites north of 50° N to have yielded MIS 3 Neandertal remains.”
We would like to thank Dr. Rougier for her in depth and enlightening presentation and sharing her research with the
Ventura County Archaeological Society!
Educational Outreach Program
Our Education Outreach group is going to be doing a couple of school outreach programs during the next couple of
months. We will be going out to school science nights and in class rooms at elementary, junior high and high
schools to do outreach and explain what archaeologists do and what archaeology is all about. It is a really fun opportunity to participate in. If anyone is interested in helping with our outreach committee, please contact Darlene Deppe
through VCAS. We can always use volunteers!
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Upcoming Local Events
There are many upcoming events in Ventura County and surrounding areas that might interest you:
Tomol Crossing Journey
Date: Sunday, February 12, 2017
Time: 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Location: Rancho Sierra Vista / Satwiwa
Fees: Free
Chumash elder Alan Salazar will present an in-depth lecture on the tomol crossings that he has been involved
in the previous years. Learn about his first hand experiences of the tomol crossing and its importance to the
Chumash culture. Please be on time. All ages welcome.
Make your own Dreamcatcher
Date: Sunday, February 26, 2017
Time: 10:00AM to 12:00PM and 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Location: Rancho Sierra Vista / Satwiwa
Fees: Free
Come make a dream-catcher with Witchita tribal artist Michael Williams. He will teach the basics of creating your
very own dream-catcher. RESERVATIONS REQUIRED. To make reservations please email:
[email protected] or call 805-418-3163. Please include how many in your party, the name for the reservation
and contact info.
Bruker Portable X-ray Florescence Seminar
Date: Thursday March 16, 2017
Time: 8:00 AM to 4:00PM
Location: Anderson Hall at the Stagecoach Inn Museum
Fees: Free
Bruker Portable X-ray Florescence Seminar for archaeologists, geologists, University students and Professors will be all day Thursday March 16, 2017 at Anderson Hall at the Stagecoach Inn Museum.
The program begins at 8 am and ends around 4:30; there is no charge for the seminar. Please bring with
you a portable laptop/tablet and if possible your phone with optional mobile hot spot.
Dr. Bruce Kaiser the physicist and inventor of the machine will be teaching the Modules.
VCAS Meeting Raffles
Don’t forget, VCAS will be having raffles of archaeological themed items that will be put out at each of our meetings! Items
include books, pictures, figurines, etc. and will be a surprise each month. All proceeds from the raffles will go to support our
Ventura County Scholarship fund.
Archival Research Opportunities
The Stagecoach Inn Museum in Thousand Oaks will open their Ventura County collections on first and third Saturdays of each month. They will be open from 1-4 pm, and there is a full lab and office for archival research in the
basement of Anderson Hall. For more information please contact the museum at 805-498-9441.
Ventura County Needs Your Help!
The Albinger Museum in Ventura would like to stay open and have longer hours throughout the year.
They need volunteers to help work at the museum. If anyone is interested in giving volunteer hours, please contact
Darlene Deppe at VCAS for more details.
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What Caused the Maya Collapse? Archaeologists Uncover New Clues
JANUARY 25, 2017 By Sarah Pruitt
Scientists have long wondered what exactly happened in
the ninth century A.D., when the flourishing Maya civilization in Mesoamerica fell into what would be a permanent decline, its once-great cities reclaimed by jungle.
More recent research revealed the Maya also experienced
an earlier collapse, in the second century, about which
scientists know even less. In a new study, based on the
largest set of radiocarbon dates ever obtained from a single Maya site, a team of researchers argues that both collapses were preceded by similar patterns, as waves of social instability, warfare and political crises swept over the
civilization and caused it to deteriorate.
For more than a decade, a team led by researchers from the University of Arizona has been working at the archaeological
site of Ceibal in northern Guatemala. After assembling a record-setting 154 radiocarbon dates, the researchers have been
able to develop a highly precise chronology that illuminates the patterns that led up to the two collapses that the Maya
civilization experienced: the Preclassic collapse, in the second century A.D., and the more well-known Classic collapse
some seven centuries later.
One of the most dominant civilizations in Mesoamerica, the Maya reached their peak around the sixth century A.D., constructing impressive stone cities and making advances in agriculture, calendar-making and mathematics, among other
fields. But by A.D. 900, those great stone cities were mostly abandoned. Theories about what caused the Classic Maya
collapse have ranged from overpopulation to ongoing military conflict between competing city-states to some catastrophic environmental event, such as an intense drought—or some combination of all of those factors.
The radiocarbon dates from Ceibal, a major Maya center, as well as highly controlled excavations at the site of its ruins, allowed the researchers to trace changing
population size, along with decreases and increases in construction. While earlier,
more generalized timelines of the Maya civilization have suggested the society collapsed gradually, the new study’s far more precise chronology shows just how complex the process of collapse was.
“It’s not just a simple collapse, but there are waves of collapse,” explained the
study’s lead author, Takeshi Inomata, a University of Arizona anthropology professor and archaeologist. “First, there are smaller waves, tied to warfare and some political instability, then comes the major
collapse, in which many centers got abandoned. Then there was some recovery in some places, then another collapse.”
Though it doesn’t completely solve the mystery or break down exactly which destabilizing events triggered the two Maya
collapses, the new study marks an important new step in that process, revealing the similarities in the patterns leading up
to both. In each case, the waves of collapse began small and grew in intensity, eventually leading the Maya to abandon
their city centers.
“It’s really, really interesting that these collapses both look very similar, at very different
time periods,” said Melissa Burnham, one of three University of Arizona anthropology
graduate students who co-authored the paper. “We now have a good understanding of what
the process looked like, that potentially can serve as a template for other people to try to see
if they have a similar pattern at their (archaeological) sites in the same area.”
Inomata and his team published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. In addition to Inomata and his Arizona colleagues, researchers from
Ibaraki University, Naruto University of Education and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan, and Guatemalan archaeologists and students collaborated on the
project. The carbon dating was done at Japan’s Paleo Laboratory Company and the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Library at the University of Arizona.
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Fieldwork Opportunities
If you are looking for volunteer fieldwork, look at an online forum. There is an Archaeology Volunteer Opportunities listing where you
can read volunteer announcements or post your own inquiry.
The link is http://www.archaeologyfieldwork.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi
This website is an excellent resource for volunteer fieldwork as well as field schools.
If you are interested in working for a week in a National Forest doing free archaeology, excavation and surveying, then this is the best
site: http://www.passportintime.com/ The Passport in Time project is hosted by the US Forest Service. Certain forests throughout the
US that have a heritage team working for them will provide weeks during the summer for volunteer crews to come out and help on
excavations. Volunteers from all over the world come to participate and it is a great program.
If you are interested in obtaining field school experience for your archaeology/anthropology class work, then you can find field schools
here: http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10016 Most charge a fee for tuition and/or lodging and equipment.
Board of Directors
Karen Clericuzio - President
Rachel Olsthoorn - Past President
Julie Swift - Secretary - Pres. Elect
Noel Van Slyke - Treasurer
Dr. Andrew Kinkella - Membership
Advisors to the Board
Bob Lopez - Archivist
Barbara Tejada - Webmaster
VCAS:
http://www.venturaarchaeology.org/index.html
MEMBERSHIP NOTES:
Membership requires a pledge to adhere to the Society’s “Code of Ethics” ,
Dues run from January to January and are Regular $25, Family $30, Student $18. The dues are prorated for
the summer applications. Mail Dues, with check made payable to:
Ventura County Archaeological Society (Attn: Membership Chair)
P.O Box 4172, Thousand Oaks, Ca 91359
Chumash Indian Museum
Archive Work Day
The work day for the archives is generally both the second
Saturday and the fourth Saturday of each month.
VCAS Work Days for the month of February are planned for the
11th and 25th, in an effort to put the Archives back in order. We
welcome volunteers on any or all of the planned Work Days, whatever help we can get will be appreciated.
Meetings Tuesday at 7 PM
The storage container is located behind the Chumash Indian
Museum. By checking with Bob first rather than just showing up,
you can be given directions to open the gate and drive near the
storage containers.
RAIN CANCELS
If you plan to come, please check with
Bob Lopez - [email protected]
805-647-4823
By checking with Bob first rather than just showing up, you can be assured there is enough work for everyone.
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