THE Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology last Friday disclosed the results from its training in Ceramic Analysis, Collections and Database Management, and GIS mapping conducted by Archaeologist Dr Isaac Shearn. 

His report on the recently-concluded project of 3-D kite-mapping areas along the Berbice Plains where Terra Preta (a type of very dark, fertile anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon Basin) mounds were found during a previous project was also highlighted.
The origin of the project dates back to 1986 with the observation of Major General (ret.) Joe Singh who noticed on one of his flights to the GDF Battle School at Tacama, that the surrounding savannahs were covered with small mounds. He subsequently visited the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and met with Guyanese archaeologist George Simon and his colleague from the University of Wisconsin, Neil Whitehead.
Work began with the mounds with Whitehead focusing on the cultural anthropology of the area and Simon on the archeology of the mounds.

BIG PROJECT
Seventeen years later, they turned it into a big archaeology project, recruiting archaeologists from universities in the United States to bring their expertise to thoroughly investigate the project.
In 2009 expert archaeologists from the University of Florida, Michael Heckenberger and David Steadman, an expert in neo-tropical zoology, were available to assess these sites and while they expected to find evidence dating back to a couple hundred of years they astoundingly found that the ancient pottery, when carbon-dated, was approximately 5,000 years old.
Upon receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2011, a bigger excavation was done involving people from the local communities, the University of Guyana and the University of Florida. A four-meter-deep terra preta mound was excavated, which showed alternating layers of light earth and dark earth. These findings showed that within 100 years, the mounds were made. The ceramics found within the mound illustrated that as the layers moved upwards, they became increasingly more complexly decorated and dense, suggesting that the population within the area was growing and settling during that time.

KITE-MAPPING
Dr Shearn, who focuses on pre-Columbian civilization and regional interactions in the Caribbean and the Amazon, previously worked on the 2011 excavation. On his return earlier this year, he and his team aimed at mapping the mounds and the spacing between the mounds and the varying sites that the mounds were found. They used a technique based on kite-mapping photography.
A camera with a GPS was attached to a kite. The camera constantly took pictures providing high quality spacial data when the kite was flown over the areas mapped.
“Kite-mapping photography itself is not a new technique; it has been around since the late nineteenth century. The software, however, is new as its takes the pictures from various angles and stitches them together by mapping points together. Using Stero-scopic imagery, 3D images were created and turned into 3-D maps,” Dr Shearn noted.
Dubulay, on the Berbice River, and Redhill were among the areas that the mapping was done. The resulting map showed the precise locations on the mounds, hinting that they were made on the slopes of creeks that are now dried out. The map additionally unveiled the vegetation difference on and off the mounds and their varying heights.
As Dr Shearn is a ceramic specialist, the anaylsis of the ceramics found in the mound was directed by him and done at the museum by volunteers from the University of Guyana and others who were interested in the field of anthropology.

SOCIAL CHANGES
The information from the analysis of the ceramics would be beneficial to discovering the social changes that may have accompanied settling down, indicated by the cultural practices of ancient Amerindian peoples. Amerindians are widely regarded to have been small mobile autonomous groups. These findings conveyed the addition of stable agricultural practices to hunting, showing that Amerindian people along with other great civilizations developed agriculture right here in Guyana.

(By Raveena Mangal)