SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Story automatically generated by StoryBot Version 0.2.2 rel Testing.
Storybot ('Arthur T Knackerbracket') has been converted to Python3

Note: This is the complete story and will need further editing. It may also be covered
by Copyright and thus should be acknowledged and quoted rather than printed in its entirety.

FeedSource: [Nature]

Time: 2017-05-15 21:09:04 UTC

Original URL: http://www.nature.com/news/beads-made-from-meteorite-reveal-prehistoric-culture-s-reach-1.21990 [nature.com] using utf-8 encoding.

Title: Beads made from meteorite reveal prehistoric culture's reach

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- Entire Story Below --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Beads made from meteorite reveal prehistoric culture's reach

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [nature.com]:

                                        Nature
                                        |
                                        News
                               

Objects unearthed at Native American burial site are remnants of an ancient space rock.

Washington DC

Chris Maddaloni/Nature

The ancient Hopewell culture made these beads from iron in the meteorite they sit on.

Blackened and irregular, the prehistoric beads found in a centuries-old Illinois grave don’t look like anything special. But the latest analysis^{1 [soylentnews.org]} shows that they were fashioned from an exotic material: the shards of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than 700 kilometres from where the beads were found.

The link between the Anoka meteorite, which landed in central Minnesota, and the Illinois beads confirms that “2,000 years ago, goods and ideas were moved hundreds of miles across eastern North America”, says Timothy McCoy, co-author of the analysis and curator-in-charge of meteorites at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

The beads were made by people of the Hopewell culture, which flourished in the US Midwest from 100 bc to 400 ad — spreading from its epicentre in Ohio to as far as Mississippi. The culture is known for sprawling ceremonial earthworks [nature.com] and for objects made of non-local materials such as mica. The iron beads were discovered in 1945 in a Hopewell grave near Havana, Illinois, alongside more than 1,000 shell and pearl beads. Together, they indicate that the grave’s occupant was of high rank, says archaeologist Bret Ruby of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, Ohio, who was not involved with the analysis. “You’ve got to open a lot of clams to find 1,000 pearl beads.”

Scientists have known for decades that the grave’s 22 iron-nickel beads came from a meteorite, but they didn’t know which one. Earlier research^{2 [soylentnews.org], 3 [soylentnews.org]} had ruled out the Anoka, an iron-nickel meteorite found in 1961 during the digging of a cesspool near Anoka, Minnesota.

Then a second chunk of the Anoka space rock was unearthed in 1983, and McCoy’s museum bought it. When they examined it under the microscope, McCoy and his colleagues could see that the meteorite contained micrometre-sized granules of iron enriched with nickel, just as the beads do. Analysis by mass spectroscopy and other techniques showed the beads’ chemical composition is a near-perfect match for the Anoka meteorite, the team reports in the Journal of Archaeological Science^{1 [soylentnews.org]}.

Chris Maddaloni/Nature

Timothy McCoy, a curator at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, holds a chunk of the Anoka meteorite that was found in 1983.

The team also noticed that the Anoka meteorite is shot through with bands of a brittle mineral called schreibersite. Hopewell artisans could have broken up the lump of iron-nickel along the bands, McCoy says. He made his own bead by repeatedly heating a chunk of the Anoka in a wood fire to some 600 ºC, hammering it flat with a stone and then hammering the sheet into a cylindrical bead. Making the beads “probably took quite a while”, he says. “You wonder how many failed experiments there were.”

The study makes a strong case for the connection between the Anoka meteorite and the beads, says Diane Johnson of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who has studied Egyptian meteoritic artefacts [nature.com] and is not part of McCoy’s team. She notes that the Hopewell techniques are similar to those of the ancient Egyptians, who manufactured almost identically designed tube-shaped beads [nature.com] some 3,000 years earlier.

The analysis is useful because it draws a path from one spot in the Hopewell world to another, says archaeologist Brad Lepper of the Ohio History Connection in Columbus, a non-profit historical and research group. “The more dots on the map we can identify, the clearer the sense of the networks of interaction,” he says.

Lepper and Ruby agree that the Havana Hopewell people probably didn’t engage in anything as mundane as trade to get their chunk of extraterrestrial object. It may have been a gift to cement an alliance, or an offering from religious pilgrims. Perhaps a shaman on a quest found it and transported it, by foot or boat, to Havana. Whatever its path, Ruby says, “it does point to complexity in their society that we tend not to attribute to people living 2,000 years ago” in the Americas.

For the best commenting experience, please login or register as a user [soylentnews.org] and agree to our Community Guidelines [soylentnews.org]. You will be re-directed back to this page where you will see comments updating in real-time and have the ability to recommend comments to other users.

There are currently no comments.

China has a lucrative market for fake research reagents. Some scientists are fighting back.

The best science news from Nature and beyond, direct to your inbox every day.

   

Your browser does not support iframes.

A difference in brain biology between the sexes might render males most vulnerable to autism.

Rise in copyright breaches prompts industry to discuss ways to allow ‘fair sharing’ of articles.

Scientists are split over whether limiting grant support to individuals will help young researchers or hurt collaboration.

There might be more to the reputation of these instruments than can be easily assessed with blind testing.

This week, fake antibodies scupper research, the diversity of cells in a tumour, and what happened before tectonic plates?

DUKE-NUS Medical school

Institute for Basic Science

Mass General for Children at North Shore Medical Center (NSMC)

Springer Nature

Springer Nature

                        © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All Rights Reserved. [soylentnews.org]
                        partner of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, CrossRef and COUNTER [soylentnews.org]
               

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission