Cultural Beginnings #7

Turkish archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a well-developed toilet and sewer system in a prehistoric building in the eastern province of Van. The waterworks are in a castle built by the Uratian king Sarduri II in 764 BC. "'We revealed that Urartian architects had formed a sewer system before building the castle. The toilet and sewer system in the castle is similar to today's toilets,'' announced Istanbul University Eurasian Archaeology Institute Director Prof. Dr. Oktay Belli.

It appears that certain nationalists in Finland don't like the idea -- maintained by most scientists -- that their people emerged about 6,000 years ago in the Volga region of Russia. They would rather posit the existence of a trans-Polar Finnish people ruling the northern European roost from about 10,000 years ago. In a fascinating paper on how linguistics is caught up in this grandiose fantasy, Merlijn de Smit notes that the new methodology departs "from both the 'rational' and the 'inquiry' parts of rational inquiry."

A world away, in the south seas, archaeologists are moving forward in their understanding of how and when the far-flung islands of the Pacific were colonized by humans. "[T]races of the Lapita people, who are the ancestors of all Pacific Islanders beyond the Solomons, had been found in more than 100 other archaeological digs across the region." But human remains had been scare until a recent discovery of a graveyard in Vanuatu. "Pottery found at the site dates back to 1200 BC - 200 years earlier than it was previously thought the Lapita people had arrived in Vanuatu, and the discovery of 13 skeletons has suddenly opened a rich vein of information about these ancestors of all Polynesians," Prof Matthew Spriggs said in a statement.

In the Near East, evidence for human occupation goes back much further, of course. Evidence for trade is less abundant but slowly emerging. Recent excavations, for instance, are throwing light on the movement of goods between the islands in the Gulf with the discovery of 7,000-year old mainland pottery on the island of Marawah near the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.