This time the excuses are multiple. I’ve been on two short trips, one to Newport Beach Nautical Museum to give a lecture, the second to talk about ancient emergencies to a hospital group in San Francisco. Both audiences were enthusiastic and pleasant, which makes all the difference. Then I caught a short but nasty cold, which has laid me out for a week.

Fortunately, I’ve recovered just in time to fly to the UK for Current Archaeology’s Archaeology Festival in Cardiff. They asked me to go last year, but I couldn’t make it owing to a conflict, so it’s Cardiff instead of the British Museum. I’m going over a little early to adjust to jet lag, see colleagues in Durham, and, if the weather allows, take a walk on Hadrian’s Wall. I haven’t been there in a decade and certainly not in mid-winter. The forecast is for rain and snow, so we will see.

It’ll be a relief not to be writing for a change. I’ve just delivered the advanced draft of my latest book to my publisher for their detailed editorial comment, so the pressure’s off until they send me their comments for the final version. It’s a book on the Cro-Magnons, a subject that’s fascinated me since I was an undergraduate and was able to see some of the cave paintings by acetylene lamp—a memorable experience. I also visited the original Lascaux, although the replica is absolutely superb. The book is not about art—everyone writes about that—but about the Cro-Magnons as people. Of course the art factors into the story, but there is no much more than cave paintings and artifacts. I guess the book will appear either late this year or early next. Much depends on what the editor says and how long it will take me to revise it. The book was a fascinating and arduous project, involving not only extensive traveling but also a prolonged journey through some of the most intricate and obscure literature I have ever read. Anything will be much easier after this project, but I learned a huge amount.

And now for the legendary hospitality of United Airlines….

The classical archaeologist David Meadows, based, I think, in Canada, does us a wonderful service with his weekly Explorator bulletins that cover discoveries and headlines of the week. (You can subscribe for free by sending a blank e-mail message to Explorator-subscribe@yahoogroups. com) How he locates some of the stories, I know not, but he covers an astonishing range of topics, everything from paleoanthropology to obituaries, looting tourism, and blogs. He keeps me up to date on all kinds of important and more esoteric finds, as well as the hyped claims often put out by well-known academic journals, who should know better. David has a discerning eye and a nice sense of both the ridiculous and the downright zany, as well as a touch of skepticism. This is very much a labour of love, for which we should be very grateful. Did you know that gladiatorial performances are returning to Rome and that warfare practices in New Guinea may throw light on Ohio earthwork design? Thanks to David Meadows, you do now.

Yes, I have been quiet again, but with good reason. I have been finishing a book manuscript and developing the illustration program, always one of the worst jobs with any book—and archaeology is a picture intensive subject. Add to that the long Christmas break and its distractions. So I have plenty of excuses. Over the holidays, I had a chance to read the paleontologist Dale Guthrie’s magnum opus, The Nature of Paleolithic Art. This is a stupendous work, which draws on Dale’s expertise as a working paleontologist and talented artist. He’s spent a lifetime piecing together bones and other materials to study ancient human behavior and prehistoric environments. His central thesis argues that Cro-Magnon and other Stone Age art is a mode of expression that we can understand much better than we often assume. This is because a natural history perspective is a central part of any interpretation of an art tradition that depicts so many members of the late Ice Age bestiary. The book is really a series of essays that combines ethology, evolutionary biology, and human universals as a way of gaining access to the intangible realm that surrounded the art. Dale shows how the art was created by people of different ages, not just by male shamans, boosting his often-controversial ideas with his own observations in the field. Just the chapter on the so-called Venus figurines is worth the price of admission—the essay on voluptuous women is both insightful and right to the point. Time after time, Dale breaks new ground in what is one of the most important, if controversial, books on Paleolithic art to appear in many years. Doubtless many rock art aficionados will hate it, which is their privilege. But they should not set it aside without a thorough reading, for there is rich treasure in its pages, apart from a great deal of excellent, clear, and often funny writing. You’ll never look at rock art the same way after reading Guthrie.

Another long silence, alas. My apologies once again. I’ve been completely preoccupied with finishing the first draft of a book manuscript (of which more in a few months), which is now being disemboweled by experts. I promise more regular blogs in coming weeks.

A momentary distraction came with the announcement of the discovery of tools made with blade technology dating to at least 285,000 years ago. Startling at first glance, especially when you reflect that there is pretty general agreement that Homo sapiens, ourselves, first appeared in tropical Africa about 200,000 years ago. The date, obtained by the argon-argon method, which is far more accurate than the long-established potassium argon technique, comes from Gademotta in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, known to be a crucible of human evolution. It coincides remarkably well with a second site, Kapthurin in Kenya, which dates to about the same time.

Both Gademotta and Kapthurin have yielded small and sophisticated blades and spear points, very different from the large hand axes and cleaving tools so widely used in Africa at the time. The Gademotta tools are made from obsidian, a fine-grained volcanic glass and come from below and above a volcanic layer, which yielded the date of 280,000 years ago.

For generations, archaeologists have equated stone technologies based on small, basically parallel-sided blades with modern humans. They’ve found them in Southern Africa dating to around 70,000 years ago, where such tools appear and disappear, as if the technology was used, then abandoned, perhaps in response to changing environmental conditions, notably drought. Now what is claimed to be blade technology dates back thousands of years earlier. What does this mean in human terms? Did the cognitive skills associated with modern humans develop gradually over a long period of time, or are these artifacts temporary developments, reflecting times of experimentation or purely local needs, or even the availability of exceptionally find raw materials?

We don’t know, of course, but it’s clear from Gademotta and Kapthurin that the development of modern humans both culturally and biologically was more complicated than perhaps we realize.

And so the archaeological dance goes on. . . .

I’ve gotten interested inEskimo and Inuit ethnography, in some of the early accounts of hunting in someof the harshest environments on earth. What got me on this journey was a visitto the museum in Anchorage, which boasts of a magnificent display of Aleut andEskimo material culture. Anoraks made of bird membrane and seal stomach bags gotme into a quest for truly authentic accounts of hunting in the north and,almost immediately, to two books written by anthropologist Richard Nelson. His Hunters of the Northern Ice, publishedin 1969, is a study of Alaska’s Wainwright Eskimos at a time when manytraditional behaviors, hunting methods, and technologies were still in use. Hisessay on the qualities displayed by the hunter—collaboration, estimating risk, passingon information, and so on, go far beyond the sterile accounts of northernartifacts that you encounter in the works of earlier anthropologists likeCornelius Osgood. Osgood describes spears and awls, traps and houses, but yourarely get a sense of the people behind the artifacts. His books are like manymuseum displays—sterile and devoid of interest to anyone but a fellowspecialist. Even the people themselves would have had trouble deciphering his drearycatalogs. In Nelson’s study, the people and their frustrations, their successesand failures, come alive in a way that illuminates both present and pastbrilliantly.

He did a later studyof the Koyukon of the boreal forest, which is equally perceptive , as itrevolves around their world view. He describes how they would talk to bears asthey hunted them, of the great dependence of the people on caribou, of the traditionalpractices and beliefs that still were at the core of society.

Read Nelson and theclassic works of Farley Mowet. You’ll emerge with a profound appreciation ofthe skill and ingenuity of historic northerners. Not as sterile objects ofstudy, but as human beings. And where else will you learn that the best hidefor boot uppers comes from caribou legs?

Yes, I know, I know—too longsince I last blogged! All I can plead is an excuse is travel, a great deal ofit, and impending book deadlines. The fall is usually very busy with lecturesand other commitments on the road, this time to a wide variety oforganizations. These included a faculty retreat at Columbia Community Collegein Pasco, Washington, lectures to National Geographic and the SacramentoArchaeological Society, and to a conference of hospital administratorsresponsible for emergencies. All this time on the road culminated in a superbvisit to the University of Western Ontario at London, Ontario. Apart fromgiving a public lecture, I was corralled into answering questions about The Little Ice Age from amultidisciplinary group of graduate students for two-and-a-half hours. Theyasked perceptive and sometimes humbling questions. I realized once again howlittle I know about climatic and environmental issues.

Why a conference onemergencies you may well ask? This is actually the fourth time I’ve lectured tosuch groups and was the question I asked first time. The answer they gave wasthat human nature has not changed and that responses to emergencies in humanterms have probably remained the same. When I looked into it, indeed they had.Decisive leadership, controlling borders, rationing food, and the importance ofkin and family all resonated from history, issues as important then as they aretoday.

On this subject, if youhave not read Mike Davis’s Late VictorianHolocausts, with its harrowing descriptions of 19^th-centurytropical famines caused by monsoon failure and inept governance, do so. Davisestimates that between 20 and 30 milliontropical farmers perished of famine and famine related diseases during the nineteenthcentury—and that at a time when there were many fewer people living onagriculturally marginal lands. You’ll never think the same way about famineagain.

Something to think about inan era of impending drought and global warming.