J. Louis Giddings

The story of prehistoric cultures from the Bering Straits to Greenland, by a distinguished American archeologist whose wilderness excavations in the Far North combined science and adventure on the sites of early man's most remote settlements. J Louis Giddings is one of the icons of Arctic Exploration. This book was published shortly after his death in 1964 and is a description of his decades of work uncovering (literally) archive cultures through space and time. A dendrochronologist (tree-ring dater) who helped establish the validity of the field, Gidding also had a genius for observation, and that most useful of archeological skills, luck. In chapter after chapter he reveals the modes of observation, discovery, excavation and analysis that helped him identify a succession of arctic cultures from historic Inuit villages to archaic Denbigh Flint knappers, to the paleo peoples of the caribou crossing at Onion Portage. Gidding's stories range across the arctic and through time comparing art and artifacts. Equally interesting (and uncomfortably colonial at times) is his description of interactions with the indigenous peoples with whom he worked. Two things about his work that stood out to me, were his discovery that cultures who lived primarily from sea sources could be dated by following the succession of shorelines from the present backwards. Rather than vertical stratigraphic dating (as at onion portage), the dating along the beach sites (Ipituak, Norton, Denbigh, et al) were dated horizontally away from the shore. There are sad stories revealed bye archaeology (the mother and children who died in a fire trying to dig their way out of a cellar basement some thousands of years ago), and funny stories as well. Perhaps because this was written before visual culture replaced the need (or at least the patience) for lengthy textual descriptions, the boo sometimes seemed plodding and redundant. But as a foundation for understanding archaeology as a non-specialist, this is a one-off place to start. Giddings, by the way, was at the Haffenreffer Museum and a professor at Brown.… (lisätietoja)