UMaine Archaeologists Dig for History with New Technology Tools

Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756

ORONO — Using tools of the future, a group of University of Maine archaeologists hope to discover more about tools of the past, specifically cutting and carving tools made from obsidian about 13,000 years ago by Peruvian Indians.

Professor Dan Sandweiss this week left with a five-person team from UMaine to meet up with colleagues from a New York college and from Peru to venture deep into the mountains and canyons of highland Peru.

Their quest is to explore early camp sites near the source of obsidian, a black stone that can be chipped and sharpened, which Sandweiss had located several years ago in an ancient fishing village on the nearby Pacific coast.

The project is unusual in that it has the potential to break new archaeological ground and build new stepping stones for better understanding of early South American inhabitants. But the tools Sandweiss will be using in his work include the prototype of a new global position computer that will contain a unique database for mapping and an organized information retrieval system like nothing that exists in the world today.

Called OspreyNav by Intelligent Spacial Technologies (IST) at Target Technology Center in Orono, the laptop computer is outfitted with a global positioning system (GPS), a digital compass, a sophisticated data entry and retrieval system and a solar panel to recharge its battery.

Still under development, the device holds significant interest for several United States organizations or agencies assisting with funding its creation, but IST founder Chris Frank, a former UMaine graduate student, wants to field test the device.

And a month in the arid highlands of the Peruvian mountains is a good place to start, say Frank and his former assistant Helen Duckham.

“We’ve sort of been testing it,” says Duckham, “and seen that it really works. Next is to take it to the real world.”

The computer will help Sandweiss and his team in their search for signs of habitation still around after 13,000 years. The new device will allow them to mark those spots precisely in the computer and log their findings for future use, including returning to the exact spot in the future, according to Sandweiss.

“This will be a very useful piece of equipment for us,” says Sandweiss. “It will make navigating much easier because we’ll have real time position and orientation displayed on an image-based background.”

Once coordinates and other information are entered into the computer, a team member can point the computer at an area or object. The computer, which knows through the GPS and the database exactly where it is and which direction it is facing, records information.

In the areas where the device will be used in Peru, Sandweiss’s information will start to build the database for that area, which future archaeologists also can use to quickly relocate the sites and continue the research.

When fully developed, the OspreyNav will have commercial value for everyone from tourists to emergency personnel navigating buildings or even neighborhoods. With its layers of information, for instance, an operator could point the OspreyNav at a building and, assuming the data has been entered, learn everything from the number of businesses in the building to the number of people who work there, floor plans, construction information and historical notes.

Tourists could use the equipment as an electronic personal tour guide to find facilities like restrooms, emergency services or coffee shops, not to mention reams of other information about a specific area, according to Frank.

Sandweiss, though, has a different mission.

“What we want to do is understand what people were doing in the past,” he says.

The question he seeks to answer is how did the obsidian, or volcanic glass, used for cutting tools by the inhabitants of the fishing village of Quebrada Jaguay get from the mountains to the coast, a distance of more than 150 kilometers?

In his earlier expedition to Quebrada Jaguay, Sandweiss found discarded chips of obsidian, and established that they came from the mountainous area near the highlands village of Alca.

Having already visited and studied Quebrada Jaguay, Sandweiss knows how old the village is and a fair amount about how the Paleo-Indians there lived. By studying the Alca sites, Sandweiss hopes to compare whatever tools, bone fragments or charcoal from prehistoric cooking are found in the ground with evidence and artifacts from the coastal Quebrada Jaguay.

He wonders whether the coastal inhabitants traveled to the Alca region to get the obsidian or whether they traded with other people who either lived in or traveled through the Alca region.

“This material came from the highlands,” Sandweiss says. “Either the Quebrada Jaguay folk were going to the highlands or they were trading with people who were living there.”

The information will help Sandweiss solidify theories about migratory patterns of early South American people.

“Our (Alca) site is clearly a site of contact” between two regions, he says, “but was there one group of people or two?”

Some of the answers also may lie in the ways in which the tools were crafted.

“We need to look at the way they were making the tools. That differentiates the habits of different groups,” he says. “Who was there and when? At the Alca sites, we hope to find suitable material for radiocarbon dates to compare ages.”

The information will be of tremendous value to archaeologists worldwide. “This is going to be something new,” he says.

The successful testing of OspreyNav will be something new for Chris Frank and his colleagues at IST.

According to Frank, the Peru test “is an extreme environment. This is putting it into the deep end, really.”

The challenge for IST, say Frank and Duckham, is to manage the huge amount of information that will go into the unit. By layering data, an OspreyNav operator can selectively call up information, rather than being overwhelmed by too much or even irrelevant information.

Ultimately, Frank would like to see the OspreyNav developed to the point it can be reduced to the size of a cell phone or palm pilot.