A team of NYU engineers and archaeologists is working on open-source AI tools that piece together broken stone tools, pottery and bones and fill in what's missing, so that fragments sitting unmatched in collections can become evidence about how people in the past lived.

Researchers studying how economic inequality became a durable feature of societies often point to factors such as agricultural intensification or the rise of the state, but a new study by Dongdong Li and colleagues suggests inequality can have much deeper roots. In their analysis of previously published mortuary data from more than 2,300 burials across 6,000 years of settlement in the Central Plain of China, Li et al. conclude that inequality was shaped by social-relational networks that long preceded the rise of the state. The differentiated social positions within these networks could not be explained by agricultural intensification or the size of the population, they found. But the networks did control an individual’s access to labor, resources, and symbolic capital such as ritual objects. The researchers reconstructed these networks in prehistoric China using isotopic, osteological, and zooarchaeological data from sites dated from 7000 to 1500 BCE. Burial wealth as well as signs of skeletal health and dietary variety were proxies for relational inequalities. Li et al. say that differential access to valued but scarce items initially produced unequal social-relational networks in the region, but that changes in subsistence, the rise of mobile wealth, and escalating violent conflict may have reorganized these networks to concentrate ritual, political, military, and technological control. Early states then “stabilized rather than created these pre-existing disparities by institutionalizing control over resources, violence, and network-based access,” the authors conclude.

 

New archaeological discoveries at Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, a 13,800-year-old base camp site in interior Alaska, may provide evidence for a trans-Beringian cultural link with other sites to the west, according to Kelly Graf and colleagues. Their research helps to clarify how and when people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to the Americas, as New World archeologists continue to debate the details of this dispersal. Graf et al. provide a first description of the stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, animal and plant remains, and more than 80,000 artifacts from the oldest layer at Shég’ Xdaltth’í, a name that means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan. The evidence demonstrates how the site became a settled base camp that saw more than two centuries of sustained use. Its tools, including a distinct hafted-biface form, resemble those from Beringian sites further to the west, possibly suggesting a trans-Beringian cultural connection. Other artifacts at Shég’ Xdaltth’í resemble those found at pre-Clovis, Clovis, Folsom, and Late Paleoindian sites further south in temperate North America. In a related Focus, Spencer Pelton discusses why sites like Shég’ Xdaltth’í are bringing back an old idea in New World archaeology: that Beringian explorers who entered the North American continent between 20,000-15,000 years ago were halted until the retreat of the ice sheets allowed them to continue journeying to the south.

New discoveries from Australia's oldest known underwater archaeological record reveal how First Peoples lived, transported goods and used different places within a vast cultural landscape that was submerged when rising seas transformed the continent after the last Ice Age.