THe Windover Bog Site, an Archaic Pond Cemetery

THe Windover Bog Site, an Archaic Pond Cemetery Windover Bog (and sometimes known as Windover Pond) was a pond cemetery for hunter-gatherers, people who lived hunting game and gathering vegetable material between about 8120-6990 years ago. The burials were staked down in the soft mud of the pond, and over the years at least 168 people were buried there, men, women, and children. Today that pond is a peat bog, and preservation in peat bogs can be quite astonishing. While the burials at Windover were not as well preserved as those of European  bog bodies, 91 of the individuals buried contained bits of brain matter still intact enough for scientists to retrieve DNA. Perishable Artifacts of Middle Archaic Most interesting, however, is the recovery of 87 samples of weaving, basketry, woodworking and clothing, providing us more information on the perishable artifacts of Middle Archaic people in the American southeast than archaeologists ever dreamed possible. Four kinds of close twining, one kind of open twining, and one type of plaiting can be seen in the mats, bags, and basketry recovered from the site. Clothing woven by the inhabitants of Windover Bog on looms included hoods and burial shrouds, as well as some fitted clothing and many rectangular or squarish clothing articles. While the perishable fiber plaits from Windover Bog are not the oldest found in the Americas, the textiles are the oldest woven materials found to date, and together they broaden our understanding of what the Archaic lifestyle was truly like. DNA and Windover Burials Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mtDNA lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date. Further attempts to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left in the Windover burials. In 2011, researchers (Stojanowski et al) studied dental variation characteristics on teeth from Windover Pond (and Buckeye Knoll in Texas) that at least three of the individuals buried there had projections on incisors called talon cusps or an enlarged tuberculum dentale. Talon cusps are a rare trait globally  but are more common in the western hemisphere than elsewhere. Those at Windover Pond and Buckeye Knoll are the oldest found in the Americas to date, and the second oldest in the world (the oldest is Gobero, Niger, at 9,500 cal BP). Sources This article is a part of the About.com Guide to American Archaic Period, and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology. Adovasio JM, Andrews RL, Hyland DC, and Illingworth JS. 2001. Perishable industries from the Windover Bog: An unexpected window into the Florida archaic. North American Archaeologist 22(1):1-90. Kemp BM, Monroe C, and Smith DG. 2006. Repeat silica extraction: a simple technique for the removal of PCR inhibitors from DNA extracts. Journal of Archaeological Science 33(12):1680-1689. Moore CR, and Schmidt CW. 2009. Paleoindian And Early Archaic Organic Technologies: A Review And Analysis. North American Archaeologist 30(1):57-86. Rothschild BM, and Woods RJ. 1993. Possible implications of paleopathology for early archaic migrations: Calcium pyrophosphate deposition disease. Journal of Paleopathology 5(1):5-15. Stojanowski CM, Johnson KM, Doran GH, and Ricklis RA. 2011. Talon cusp from two archaic period cemeteries in North America: Implications for comparative evolutionary morphology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 144(3):411-420. Tomczak PD, and Powell JF. 2003. Postmarital Residence Patterns in the Windover Population: Sex-Based Dental Variation as an Indicator of Patrilocality. American Antiquity 68(1):93-108. Tuross N, Fogel ML, Newsom L, and Doran GH. 1994. Subsistence in the Florida Archaic: The stable-isotope and archaeobotanical evidence from the Windover site. American Antiquity 59(2):288-303.

Definition and examples of Alphabet

Definition and examples of Alphabet An alphabet is made up of the letters of a language, arranged in the order fixed by custom. Adjective: alphabetic. The basic principle of alphabetic writing is to represent a single sound (or phoneme) of a spoken language by a single letter. But as Johanna Drucker notes in The Alphabetic Labyrinth (1995), This phonetic writing system is at best an approximation. The orthography of English, for instance, is notoriously plagued by inconsistencies and peculiarities. The First Alphabet In about 1500 B.C., the worlds first alphabet appeared among the Semites in Canaan. It featured a limited number of abstract symbols (at one point thirty-two, later reduced to twenty-two) out of which most of the sounds of speech could be represented. The Old Testament was written in a version of this alphabet. All the worlds alphabets descend from it. After the Phoenicians (or early Canaanites) brought the Semitic alphabet to Greece, an addition was made that allowed the sounds of speech to be represented less ambiguously: vowels. The oldest surviving example of the Greek alphabet dates from about 750 B.C. This is, via Latin and give or take a few letters or accents, the alphabet in which this book is written. It has never been improved upon. (Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. Oxford University Press, 1998) The Greek Alphabet [T]he Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greece, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if youd never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. (Caleb Crain, Twilight of the Books. The New Yorker, Dec. 24 31, 2007)The Greek alphabet ... is a piece of explosive technology, revolutionary in its effects on human culture, in a way not precisely shared by any other invention. (Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton University Press, 1981) While the alphabet is phonetic in nature, this is not true of all other written languages. Writing systems ... may also be logographic, in which case the written sign represents a single word, or ideographic, in which ideas or concepts are represented directly in the form of glyphs or characters. (Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth. Thames, 1995) Two Alphabets English has had two different alphabets. Prior to the Christianization of England, the little writing that was done in English was in an alphabet called the futhore or runic alphabet. The futhore was originally developed by Germanic tribes on the Continent and probably was based on Etruscan or early Italic versions of the Greek alphabet. Its association with magic is suggested by its name, the runic alphabet, and the term used to designate a character or letter, rune. In Old English, the word run meant not only runic character, but also mystery, secret.As a by-product of the Christianization of England in the sixth and seventh centuries, the English received the Latin alphabet. (C.M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed. Harcourt Brace, 1996) The Dual Alphabet The dual alphabetthe combination of capital letters and small letters in a single systemis first found in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule. It was widely acclaimed for its clarity and attractiveness, and exercised great influence on subsequent handwriting styles throughout Europe. (David Crystal, How Language Works. Overlook, 2005) The Alphabet in an Early English Dictionary If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to understand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without book, and where every Letter standeth: as b near the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. (Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical, 1604) The Lighter Side of the Alphabet Educational television ... can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens. (Fran Lebowitz) Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. Its enough to make you lose your mind day by day. (attributed to Richard Price)Dr. Bob Niedorf: Name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds. Ready? Go.George Malley: Hmm. 60 seconds. Well, how would you like that? How about alphabetical? Aardvark, baboon, caribou, dolphin, eohippus, fox, gorilla, hyena, ibex, jackal, kangaroo, lion, marmoset, Newfoundland, ocelot, panda, rat, sloth, tiger, unicorn, varmint, whale, yak, zebra. Now varmint is a stretch; so is Newfoundland (thats a dog breed); unicorn is mythical; eohippus is prehistoric. But you werent being very specific, now, were you, Bob?Dr. Bob Niedorf: Well! Ahh, Ill, uhIll try to be more specific.(Brent Spiner and John Travolta, Phenomenon, 1996) EtymologyFrom the Greek,  alpha  Ã‚  beta Pronunciation: AL-fa-BET