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brdgtScientist at Work | Randall White: Falling in Love With France and Its Troves of Ancient History
By MICHAEL BALTER, The New York Times, April 10, 2007
LES EYZIES-DE-TAYAC, France — A few miles upstream from this red-roofed village in the Périgord region of southern France, the meandering Vézère River flows past the entrance to the Gorge of Hell. A trail runs along the base of a limestone cliff to a locked steel door. Behind the door, which can be opened to a visitor only by appointment, is the oldest depiction of a fish ever discovered.
About 25,000 years ago, a prehistoric artist carved the yardlong, bas-relief sculpture into the yellowish ceiling of a shallow rock shelter known today as the Abri du Poisson. The image is so vivid and detailed that experts have been able to make out its species, Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon.
The fish is framed by a rectangular pattern of deep, closely spaced holes, which, according to Périgord lore and guidebooks on sale at the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies, are the remnants of an abortive attempt by a Swiss archaeologist to remove this precious artwork and sell it to Berlin’s prehistory museum.
Conventional accounts of the episode, which dates to 1912, maintain that this treachery was stopped just in time by the valiant efforts of French prehistorians led by Denis Peyrony, a local schoolteacher who founded the Les Eyzies museum and conducted some of the Périgord’s most important archaeological digs.
On a crisp evening in March, however, the archaeologist Randall White of New York University stood at the lectern of the museum’s 126-seat auditorium and told the capacity crowd a very different story. The Swiss archaeologist, Otto Hauser, was innocent, Dr. White argued, the victim of an ugly press campaign that included vicious anti-Semitic and anti-German slurs, even though Hauser was neither Jewish nor German.
As Dr. White maintains in his new book in French on the scandal, “L’Affaire de L’Abri du Poisson,” the attempted abduction of the fish was carried out entirely by local French citizens, including the owner of the surrounding land.
As for Peyrony, Dr. White concluded that he was not such a steadfast champion of France’s cultural heritage after all. In the midst of the Hauser affair, Peyrony, who died in 1954, sold 1,200 prehistoric artifacts from his Périgord excavations to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for a sum equal to about twice his annual schoolteacher’s salary.
Dr. White’s book on the affair, which is based on five years of research in French, German and American archives, is the culmination of more than three decades of archaeological work in France, during which he has become one of the world’s leading experts on the cave paintings, sculptures, carved figurines, and necklaces and other personal ornaments that prehistoric humans produced here by the thousands.
“He has done a huge amount to clarify the unique and unprecedented nature of Cro-Magnon behavioral expression,” says Ian Tattersall, anthropology curator for the Museum of Natural History. “His research has allowed us to understand what a break with the past it truly represented.”
Currently, Dr. White is director of an international team excavating at the 35,000-year-old site of Abri Castanet in the Vézère Valley, which was first investigated by Peyrony and has provided some of the earliest evidence for the dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa to Western Europe.
Peyrony found hundreds of personal ornaments and dozens of paintings and engravings at Abri Castanet. Dr. White’s new excavations, financed by the National Science Foundation, are intended to address several unanswered questions about these first migrations of modern humans, including how and why they replaced the Neanderthals who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years.
Meanwhile, Dr. White himself has become an ardent defender of France’s cultural heritage and a fierce opponent of the antiquities trade. In early 2006, for example, he publicly protested the $200 million donation from the antiquities collector Shelby White (no relation) to N.Y.U. that is to be used to create a new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, on the ground that some objects in Ms. White’s collection are alleged to have come from illicit excavations.
His work on personal ornaments has taken him to museums all over the world, but particularly in the United States and Canada, where he has studied and published analyses of artifacts from France that had languished for decades in dusty drawers. Over the years, he has made France his second home, putting down deep roots in the country and its culture. He spends several months each year in the Périgord. Recently, he bought a stone farmhouse and several other buildings on 113 acres of land just outside Les Eyzies, which he shares with his longtime French companion, Hélène Talenton, who owns a beauty salon in a nearby community.
Dr. White is “well accepted by the French archaeological community,” said Alain Turq, curator of the Les Eyzies museum. “He lives here and he speaks our language very well, which is very important.”
Today, the Périgord region is probably best known to tourists for its truffles, foie gras and wine. But during the Upper Paleolithic period, about 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, the caves and rock shelters carved out by the Vézère and its tributaries some two million years earlier were buzzing with artistic activity.
A dozen miles upstream from Les Eyzies, prehistoric artists were painting the magnificent images of bulls, horses, reindeer and rhinoceroses at Lascaux Cave. Just north of the town, 19th-century archaeologists found a rich trove of art and bone tools, including the head of a mammoth carved on a piece of ivory, in a rock shelter called La Madeleine, which gave its name to the so-called Magdalenian culture that marks the epitome of the Upper Paleolithic in France.
Between these two sites, at Le Moustier, Hauser in 1908 found the skull of a Neanderthal adolescent, along with characteristic Neanderthal stone tools from what is now referred to as the Mousterian culture.
Dr. White, 54, who was born and grew up in Canada’s Alberta Province and has maintained his Canadian nationality, came to the Périgord in 1974 while an undergraduate anthropology student at the University of Alberta.
“I fell in love with southern France, its archaeology, and its ambience,” he said. “I discovered that I was a francophile.”
For his doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, Dr. White conducted the first topographical survey of all the 180 known Upper Paleolithic sites in the region. “I still get calls from people asking where is this or that site,” he said.
Dr. White was hired by N.Y.U. in 1981, and the next year published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology that made his reputation. In that and subsequent publications, he has argued that modern humans were able to replace Neanderthals in Europe not necessarily because they had superior cognition, but because they developed long-range social networks that allowed them to better adapt to local conditions.
The dramatic explosion of art in Upper Paleolithic Europe, and especially the creation of uniformly designed personal ornaments that early humans seemed to use to identify themselves as part of the same group — behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in only minimally, at best — allowed the Homo sapien newcomers to out-compete their rivals, Dr. White maintained.
His ideas have been challenged by archaeologists who think that Neanderthal symbolic expression has been underestimated, as well as by researchers who think that the supposed “explosion” is really a continuation of nascent symbolic behavior in Africa going back at least 75,000 years. Nevertheless, Dr. Tattersall of the Museum of Natural History says, Dr. White’s work has demonstrated that “the Upper Paleolithic is a remarkable period, as much for the density and vividness of its creative manifestations as for the contrasts it provides with the cultures that preceded it.”
Despite Dr. White’s early success, he found it difficult to begin a dig of his own in the Périgord. Dr. White says that the French prehistorian responsible for issuing permits to excavate in the area preferred that he work as part of his team rather than independently.
“I was shut out of working in France the way I wanted to do it,” Dr. White said. Rather than agree to work as part of the team, he began to look at collections of artifacts stored in museums in Canada and the United States, where he found thousands of objects from digs by Peyrony and other archaeologists, including artifacts from the Abri Castanet, sometimes stored in terrible conditions.
“I saw Upper Paleolithic engravings with drawers on top of them,” Dr. White said, adding that these experiences fueled his early anger about the antiquities trade.
In the late 1970s, Dr. White had met René Castanet, a local landowner and the son of one of the region’s most celebrated amateur archaeologists, Marcel Castanet, after whom the Abri Castanet was named. The two men soon developed a close friendship. In the mid-1990s, when Dr. White applied for permission to reopen excavations at Abri Castanet, he now had two things going for him: “an enormous credibility from all the research I had done,” he said, and his relationship with René Castanet, who owned the land the rock shelter sat on and whose permission was necessary to dig there.
Getting his own site to dig sealed Dr. White’s reputation in French archaeology and gave him the foothold he needed to indulge his interests in the history of the French antiquities trade as well as to challenge conventional accounts of the Hauser affair.
The five years he spent researching his book “was the work of a monk,” says Alain Roussot, who was curator of the Museum of the Aquitaine in Bordeaux from 1962 to 2000 and has known Dr. White since he first starting working in France. Dr. Roussot, who helped correct Dr. White’s French text, adds that his investigation was “very meticulous.”
Yet not everyone in the Périgord is ready to accept all of Dr. White’s conclusions about Peyrony and the fish. “Things were more complicated back then,” said Dr. Turq of the Les Eyzies museum. “Hauser made no permanent contributions to French archaeology, while Peyrony invested his money in excavations and built the museum in Les Eyzies. It was a different time.”
Challenge to Emissions Rule Is Set to Start
By DANNY HAKIM, The New York Times, April 10, 2007
The fight over cars and carbon dioxide moves today from the Supreme Court to a federal courtroom in Burlington, Vt., in a case that automakers say could reshape vehicles sold on the East and West Coasts.
The industry is suing to block a 2004 California regulation on global warming from taking effect. The rule would require a 30 percent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases from cars and trucks sold in Vermont and New York, which follow California’s air quality rules, to be fully phased in by the 2016 model year.
In court filings, automakers have argued that regulating the emissions will increase pollution, cause more traffic deaths and lead domestic automakers to stop selling most of their passenger models in states that adopt such regulations.
The companies have disputed that global warming is a problem, even though they have acknowledged it in different forums as a serious problem. And they tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to close much of this case to the public.
“This is a huge issue to consumers, because it may well determine what vehicles are available for them to purchase,” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes General Motors, Toyota and most other large automakers. “If it’s a big issue for consumers, it’s a big issue to us.”
Environmental groups and the offices of the attorneys general in Vermont and New York, which is a party to the case, say the automakers are overstating the complexity and hardship of such a regulation.
“It’s that sky-is-falling approach, but the sky didn’t fall with catalytic converters,” Attorney General William H. Sorrell of Vermont said, referring to the antipollution technology forced on the industry in the 1970s.
Last week, in a 5-to-4 decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobiles. The Bush administration has long opposed that.
Instead, more than 12 states, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, have already or are in the process of moving to regulate such emissions.
California has the authority to set air-quality rules, and Northeastern states have long chosen to follow those rules instead of Washington’s. The Supreme Court victory was important for the states, because the approval of the environmental agency is needed before California can regulate emissions involving global warming.
Automakers have sued to block the California regulation in federal courts in California, Rhode Island and Vermont, though just the Vermont case has gone forward. That case is scheduled to enter the trial phase today.
The battle has exposed fault lines among automakers. Two trade groups representing the major manufacturers are involved in the suit, one dominated by domestic producers and one by foreign.
They have clashed in their legal strategies, and just G.M. and DaimlerChrysler, two of the more outspoken companies opposing the new regulation, are directly listed as plaintiffs. The trade groups had initially sued separately but are now plaintiffs in a consolidated suit.
The main legal argument uniting the industry is their contention that states cannot regulate carbon dioxide emissions because that would be little different from regulating fuel economy, and Washington has the sole authority to set mileage standards. The recent Supreme Court ruling, however, appeared to undermine that argument.
The industry estimates that the new regulation would impose a 50 percent increase in fuel economy for passenger cars and small sport-utility vehicles but a more modest increase for large trucks, effectively making it harder for a company like G.M. to bring smaller vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu into compliance than its Hummers.
An expert hired by automakers said, according to court filings, that DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor and G.M. “will need largely to exit” from the passenger car and small truck markets.
Environmental groups say the industry is ignoring the potential effects of its move to bolster alternative fuels like ethanol, as well as the advent of hybrid electric technology and other technologies.
Automakers argued in a court filing in January that “defendants make unsubstantiated predictions that global climate change is having a number of alarming adverse effects.”
Michael J. Stanton, the president of the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a plaintiff group, said in an interview the position did not represent the views of the mostly Asian automakers who are his constituents, some of whom are trying to create “eco-friendly” reputations.
“We believe that there is enough information out there to address climate change and we know that cars — passenger cars and light trucks — contribute, and we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Stanton said.
The regulation California adopted in 2004 was to begin taking effect with 2009 models and to be phased in over eight years. President Bush and Congress more recently discussed fuel economy rules that could potentially accomplish similar reductions for gases tied to global warming, though no firm plan is in place.
Among other points, the industry says more fuel efficient cars could be dangerous, because they will be cheaper to drive and lead people to drive more and potentially have more accidents.
“Everybody’s getting a good laugh out of the safety claim,” said David Bookbinder, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, which is a party to the case. “Detroit is saying it’s a bad idea for everybody to drive more.”
Roadblock for Spreading of Human Ashes in Wilderness
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, March 30, 2007
MISSOULA, Mont. — Last wishes notwithstanding, federal officials are opposed to a Montana woman’s plan for a business that would spread the cremated remains of her clients over western Montana’s publicly owned wild mountain peaks and flower-studded meadows.
To Fran Coover, her new business, Ladies in White, seemed a perfect way to blend her interest in the environment and alternatives to the American way of dying. “It’s much less expensive,” Ms. Coover said. “And it is far more environmentally benign.”
For $390 Ms. Coover, a former administrator at a project studying end-of-life care here, along with two other ladies, offered to scatter the ashes of clients and provide a ceremony, a photograph, journal notes and Global Positioning System coordinates of the final resting place. Ten percent of the cost would be donated to groups who work to protect wild lands.
But after Ms. Coover scattered the cremated remains of her first client, she applied to the federal Forest Service, one of Montana’s largest owners of wild land, for a special-use permit to continue her business.
Though some officials told her it was fine to scatter the ashes on public land, she says, officials from Region I of the Forest Service, which covers Montana and Idaho, said it was against national policy and denied a permit.
She took her request to the Bureau of Land Management, the largest of the country’s federal land management agencies. At first the bureau seemed fine with it, she says, until it sent out an e-mail message to stakeholders, or groups with an interest in public lands, and ran into opposition from Indian tribes.
Exasperated at the barriers, Ms. Coover said, she is preparing appeals. “Three women in white dresses and hiking boots want to carry a pack on their back into a wilderness area,” she said. “How harmful can that be? Does it make sense for people to have land they love logged or torn up by mines, but not available to have ashes scattered?”
But the Forest Service has long had a firm policy against commercial scattering, said Gordon Schofield, the group leader for land use here in Region I. If ashes are scattered “the land takes on a sacredness, and people want to put up a marker or a plaque,” Mr. Schofield said, then they oppose activities they do not see as compatible with the site as a resting place.
The Forest Service has a version of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for private individuals who want to scatter the ashes of a loved one.
“We don’t prohibit it, but we don’t authorize it,” Mr. Schofield said. “People should do what they think is right.” But an allowed commercial enterprises require a permit, he said.
Wilderness Watch, a conservation group, opposes dissemination of human remains in wilderness areas.
“I understand wilderness is sacred ground and many people feel closer to the Creator there than they do in church,” said George Nickas, the group’s executive director. “But it’s also a place where commercial enterprise is not allowed. I think the prohibition on Ladies in White is the right thing.”
Mr. Nickas said he would allow the women to scatter ashes on public land that is not wilderness because “we allow all kinds of commercial activity” on such land.
As people turn to nontraditional ways of disposing of their loved ones’ remains, ash-scattering businesses have blossomed. Families can choose to have ashes scattered in a variety of ways, including from a helium balloon or an airplane flying over an ocean or a volcano.
In Britain, a company called Heavens Above Fireworks, sends remains into the sky in “a spectacular fireworks display.”
While she appeals the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management decisions, Ms. Coover said, she is negotiating with a private landowner, a rancher, to scatter ashes on his mountain property.
“Cremation is growing by the year,” she said, “and people are looking for a place to scatter. The public land is public legacy, and it’s where ashes belong.”
Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
Correction: March 12, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the first solar observatory in the Americas misstated the title of Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who helped investigate the site, in Peru. Mr. Ghezzi is the archaeological director — not the overall director — of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru. (Cecilia Bákula Budge is the director.)
By MICHAEL BALTER, The New York Times, April 10, 2007
LES EYZIES-DE-TAYAC, France — A few miles upstream from this red-roofed village in the Périgord region of southern France, the meandering Vézère River flows past the entrance to the Gorge of Hell. A trail runs along the base of a limestone cliff to a locked steel door. Behind the door, which can be opened to a visitor only by appointment, is the oldest depiction of a fish ever discovered.
About 25,000 years ago, a prehistoric artist carved the yardlong, bas-relief sculpture into the yellowish ceiling of a shallow rock shelter known today as the Abri du Poisson. The image is so vivid and detailed that experts have been able to make out its species, Salmo salar, the Atlantic salmon.
The fish is framed by a rectangular pattern of deep, closely spaced holes, which, according to Périgord lore and guidebooks on sale at the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies, are the remnants of an abortive attempt by a Swiss archaeologist to remove this precious artwork and sell it to Berlin’s prehistory museum.
Conventional accounts of the episode, which dates to 1912, maintain that this treachery was stopped just in time by the valiant efforts of French prehistorians led by Denis Peyrony, a local schoolteacher who founded the Les Eyzies museum and conducted some of the Périgord’s most important archaeological digs.
On a crisp evening in March, however, the archaeologist Randall White of New York University stood at the lectern of the museum’s 126-seat auditorium and told the capacity crowd a very different story. The Swiss archaeologist, Otto Hauser, was innocent, Dr. White argued, the victim of an ugly press campaign that included vicious anti-Semitic and anti-German slurs, even though Hauser was neither Jewish nor German.
As Dr. White maintains in his new book in French on the scandal, “L’Affaire de L’Abri du Poisson,” the attempted abduction of the fish was carried out entirely by local French citizens, including the owner of the surrounding land.
As for Peyrony, Dr. White concluded that he was not such a steadfast champion of France’s cultural heritage after all. In the midst of the Hauser affair, Peyrony, who died in 1954, sold 1,200 prehistoric artifacts from his Périgord excavations to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for a sum equal to about twice his annual schoolteacher’s salary.
Dr. White’s book on the affair, which is based on five years of research in French, German and American archives, is the culmination of more than three decades of archaeological work in France, during which he has become one of the world’s leading experts on the cave paintings, sculptures, carved figurines, and necklaces and other personal ornaments that prehistoric humans produced here by the thousands.
“He has done a huge amount to clarify the unique and unprecedented nature of Cro-Magnon behavioral expression,” says Ian Tattersall, anthropology curator for the Museum of Natural History. “His research has allowed us to understand what a break with the past it truly represented.”
Currently, Dr. White is director of an international team excavating at the 35,000-year-old site of Abri Castanet in the Vézère Valley, which was first investigated by Peyrony and has provided some of the earliest evidence for the dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa to Western Europe.
Peyrony found hundreds of personal ornaments and dozens of paintings and engravings at Abri Castanet. Dr. White’s new excavations, financed by the National Science Foundation, are intended to address several unanswered questions about these first migrations of modern humans, including how and why they replaced the Neanderthals who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years.
Meanwhile, Dr. White himself has become an ardent defender of France’s cultural heritage and a fierce opponent of the antiquities trade. In early 2006, for example, he publicly protested the $200 million donation from the antiquities collector Shelby White (no relation) to N.Y.U. that is to be used to create a new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, on the ground that some objects in Ms. White’s collection are alleged to have come from illicit excavations.
His work on personal ornaments has taken him to museums all over the world, but particularly in the United States and Canada, where he has studied and published analyses of artifacts from France that had languished for decades in dusty drawers. Over the years, he has made France his second home, putting down deep roots in the country and its culture. He spends several months each year in the Périgord. Recently, he bought a stone farmhouse and several other buildings on 113 acres of land just outside Les Eyzies, which he shares with his longtime French companion, Hélène Talenton, who owns a beauty salon in a nearby community.
Dr. White is “well accepted by the French archaeological community,” said Alain Turq, curator of the Les Eyzies museum. “He lives here and he speaks our language very well, which is very important.”
Today, the Périgord region is probably best known to tourists for its truffles, foie gras and wine. But during the Upper Paleolithic period, about 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, the caves and rock shelters carved out by the Vézère and its tributaries some two million years earlier were buzzing with artistic activity.
A dozen miles upstream from Les Eyzies, prehistoric artists were painting the magnificent images of bulls, horses, reindeer and rhinoceroses at Lascaux Cave. Just north of the town, 19th-century archaeologists found a rich trove of art and bone tools, including the head of a mammoth carved on a piece of ivory, in a rock shelter called La Madeleine, which gave its name to the so-called Magdalenian culture that marks the epitome of the Upper Paleolithic in France.
Between these two sites, at Le Moustier, Hauser in 1908 found the skull of a Neanderthal adolescent, along with characteristic Neanderthal stone tools from what is now referred to as the Mousterian culture.
Dr. White, 54, who was born and grew up in Canada’s Alberta Province and has maintained his Canadian nationality, came to the Périgord in 1974 while an undergraduate anthropology student at the University of Alberta.
“I fell in love with southern France, its archaeology, and its ambience,” he said. “I discovered that I was a francophile.”
For his doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto, Dr. White conducted the first topographical survey of all the 180 known Upper Paleolithic sites in the region. “I still get calls from people asking where is this or that site,” he said.
Dr. White was hired by N.Y.U. in 1981, and the next year published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology that made his reputation. In that and subsequent publications, he has argued that modern humans were able to replace Neanderthals in Europe not necessarily because they had superior cognition, but because they developed long-range social networks that allowed them to better adapt to local conditions.
The dramatic explosion of art in Upper Paleolithic Europe, and especially the creation of uniformly designed personal ornaments that early humans seemed to use to identify themselves as part of the same group — behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in only minimally, at best — allowed the Homo sapien newcomers to out-compete their rivals, Dr. White maintained.
His ideas have been challenged by archaeologists who think that Neanderthal symbolic expression has been underestimated, as well as by researchers who think that the supposed “explosion” is really a continuation of nascent symbolic behavior in Africa going back at least 75,000 years. Nevertheless, Dr. Tattersall of the Museum of Natural History says, Dr. White’s work has demonstrated that “the Upper Paleolithic is a remarkable period, as much for the density and vividness of its creative manifestations as for the contrasts it provides with the cultures that preceded it.”
Despite Dr. White’s early success, he found it difficult to begin a dig of his own in the Périgord. Dr. White says that the French prehistorian responsible for issuing permits to excavate in the area preferred that he work as part of his team rather than independently.
“I was shut out of working in France the way I wanted to do it,” Dr. White said. Rather than agree to work as part of the team, he began to look at collections of artifacts stored in museums in Canada and the United States, where he found thousands of objects from digs by Peyrony and other archaeologists, including artifacts from the Abri Castanet, sometimes stored in terrible conditions.
“I saw Upper Paleolithic engravings with drawers on top of them,” Dr. White said, adding that these experiences fueled his early anger about the antiquities trade.
In the late 1970s, Dr. White had met René Castanet, a local landowner and the son of one of the region’s most celebrated amateur archaeologists, Marcel Castanet, after whom the Abri Castanet was named. The two men soon developed a close friendship. In the mid-1990s, when Dr. White applied for permission to reopen excavations at Abri Castanet, he now had two things going for him: “an enormous credibility from all the research I had done,” he said, and his relationship with René Castanet, who owned the land the rock shelter sat on and whose permission was necessary to dig there.
Getting his own site to dig sealed Dr. White’s reputation in French archaeology and gave him the foothold he needed to indulge his interests in the history of the French antiquities trade as well as to challenge conventional accounts of the Hauser affair.
The five years he spent researching his book “was the work of a monk,” says Alain Roussot, who was curator of the Museum of the Aquitaine in Bordeaux from 1962 to 2000 and has known Dr. White since he first starting working in France. Dr. Roussot, who helped correct Dr. White’s French text, adds that his investigation was “very meticulous.”
Yet not everyone in the Périgord is ready to accept all of Dr. White’s conclusions about Peyrony and the fish. “Things were more complicated back then,” said Dr. Turq of the Les Eyzies museum. “Hauser made no permanent contributions to French archaeology, while Peyrony invested his money in excavations and built the museum in Les Eyzies. It was a different time.”
Challenge to Emissions Rule Is Set to Start
By DANNY HAKIM, The New York Times, April 10, 2007
The fight over cars and carbon dioxide moves today from the Supreme Court to a federal courtroom in Burlington, Vt., in a case that automakers say could reshape vehicles sold on the East and West Coasts.
The industry is suing to block a 2004 California regulation on global warming from taking effect. The rule would require a 30 percent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases from cars and trucks sold in Vermont and New York, which follow California’s air quality rules, to be fully phased in by the 2016 model year.
In court filings, automakers have argued that regulating the emissions will increase pollution, cause more traffic deaths and lead domestic automakers to stop selling most of their passenger models in states that adopt such regulations.
The companies have disputed that global warming is a problem, even though they have acknowledged it in different forums as a serious problem. And they tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to close much of this case to the public.
“This is a huge issue to consumers, because it may well determine what vehicles are available for them to purchase,” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes General Motors, Toyota and most other large automakers. “If it’s a big issue for consumers, it’s a big issue to us.”
Environmental groups and the offices of the attorneys general in Vermont and New York, which is a party to the case, say the automakers are overstating the complexity and hardship of such a regulation.
“It’s that sky-is-falling approach, but the sky didn’t fall with catalytic converters,” Attorney General William H. Sorrell of Vermont said, referring to the antipollution technology forced on the industry in the 1970s.
Last week, in a 5-to-4 decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobiles. The Bush administration has long opposed that.
Instead, more than 12 states, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, have already or are in the process of moving to regulate such emissions.
California has the authority to set air-quality rules, and Northeastern states have long chosen to follow those rules instead of Washington’s. The Supreme Court victory was important for the states, because the approval of the environmental agency is needed before California can regulate emissions involving global warming.
Automakers have sued to block the California regulation in federal courts in California, Rhode Island and Vermont, though just the Vermont case has gone forward. That case is scheduled to enter the trial phase today.
The battle has exposed fault lines among automakers. Two trade groups representing the major manufacturers are involved in the suit, one dominated by domestic producers and one by foreign.
They have clashed in their legal strategies, and just G.M. and DaimlerChrysler, two of the more outspoken companies opposing the new regulation, are directly listed as plaintiffs. The trade groups had initially sued separately but are now plaintiffs in a consolidated suit.
The main legal argument uniting the industry is their contention that states cannot regulate carbon dioxide emissions because that would be little different from regulating fuel economy, and Washington has the sole authority to set mileage standards. The recent Supreme Court ruling, however, appeared to undermine that argument.
The industry estimates that the new regulation would impose a 50 percent increase in fuel economy for passenger cars and small sport-utility vehicles but a more modest increase for large trucks, effectively making it harder for a company like G.M. to bring smaller vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu into compliance than its Hummers.
An expert hired by automakers said, according to court filings, that DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor and G.M. “will need largely to exit” from the passenger car and small truck markets.
Environmental groups say the industry is ignoring the potential effects of its move to bolster alternative fuels like ethanol, as well as the advent of hybrid electric technology and other technologies.
Automakers argued in a court filing in January that “defendants make unsubstantiated predictions that global climate change is having a number of alarming adverse effects.”
Michael J. Stanton, the president of the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a plaintiff group, said in an interview the position did not represent the views of the mostly Asian automakers who are his constituents, some of whom are trying to create “eco-friendly” reputations.
“We believe that there is enough information out there to address climate change and we know that cars — passenger cars and light trucks — contribute, and we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Stanton said.
The regulation California adopted in 2004 was to begin taking effect with 2009 models and to be phased in over eight years. President Bush and Congress more recently discussed fuel economy rules that could potentially accomplish similar reductions for gases tied to global warming, though no firm plan is in place.
Among other points, the industry says more fuel efficient cars could be dangerous, because they will be cheaper to drive and lead people to drive more and potentially have more accidents.
“Everybody’s getting a good laugh out of the safety claim,” said David Bookbinder, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, which is a party to the case. “Detroit is saying it’s a bad idea for everybody to drive more.”
Roadblock for Spreading of Human Ashes in Wilderness
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, March 30, 2007
MISSOULA, Mont. — Last wishes notwithstanding, federal officials are opposed to a Montana woman’s plan for a business that would spread the cremated remains of her clients over western Montana’s publicly owned wild mountain peaks and flower-studded meadows.
To Fran Coover, her new business, Ladies in White, seemed a perfect way to blend her interest in the environment and alternatives to the American way of dying. “It’s much less expensive,” Ms. Coover said. “And it is far more environmentally benign.”
For $390 Ms. Coover, a former administrator at a project studying end-of-life care here, along with two other ladies, offered to scatter the ashes of clients and provide a ceremony, a photograph, journal notes and Global Positioning System coordinates of the final resting place. Ten percent of the cost would be donated to groups who work to protect wild lands.
But after Ms. Coover scattered the cremated remains of her first client, she applied to the federal Forest Service, one of Montana’s largest owners of wild land, for a special-use permit to continue her business.
Though some officials told her it was fine to scatter the ashes on public land, she says, officials from Region I of the Forest Service, which covers Montana and Idaho, said it was against national policy and denied a permit.
She took her request to the Bureau of Land Management, the largest of the country’s federal land management agencies. At first the bureau seemed fine with it, she says, until it sent out an e-mail message to stakeholders, or groups with an interest in public lands, and ran into opposition from Indian tribes.
Exasperated at the barriers, Ms. Coover said, she is preparing appeals. “Three women in white dresses and hiking boots want to carry a pack on their back into a wilderness area,” she said. “How harmful can that be? Does it make sense for people to have land they love logged or torn up by mines, but not available to have ashes scattered?”
But the Forest Service has long had a firm policy against commercial scattering, said Gordon Schofield, the group leader for land use here in Region I. If ashes are scattered “the land takes on a sacredness, and people want to put up a marker or a plaque,” Mr. Schofield said, then they oppose activities they do not see as compatible with the site as a resting place.
The Forest Service has a version of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for private individuals who want to scatter the ashes of a loved one.
“We don’t prohibit it, but we don’t authorize it,” Mr. Schofield said. “People should do what they think is right.” But an allowed commercial enterprises require a permit, he said.
Wilderness Watch, a conservation group, opposes dissemination of human remains in wilderness areas.
“I understand wilderness is sacred ground and many people feel closer to the Creator there than they do in church,” said George Nickas, the group’s executive director. “But it’s also a place where commercial enterprise is not allowed. I think the prohibition on Ladies in White is the right thing.”
Mr. Nickas said he would allow the women to scatter ashes on public land that is not wilderness because “we allow all kinds of commercial activity” on such land.
As people turn to nontraditional ways of disposing of their loved ones’ remains, ash-scattering businesses have blossomed. Families can choose to have ashes scattered in a variety of ways, including from a helium balloon or an airplane flying over an ocean or a volcano.
In Britain, a company called Heavens Above Fireworks, sends remains into the sky in “a spectacular fireworks display.”
While she appeals the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management decisions, Ms. Coover said, she is negotiating with a private landowner, a rancher, to scatter ashes on his mountain property.
“Cremation is growing by the year,” she said, “and people are looking for a place to scatter. The public land is public legacy, and it’s where ashes belong.”
Scientists say that this ancient toothed horizon served as part solar observatory at a ceremonial complex, right.
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 6, 2007
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
Correction: March 12, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the first solar observatory in the Americas misstated the title of Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who helped investigate the site, in Peru. Mr. Ghezzi is the archaeological director — not the overall director — of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru. (Cecilia Bákula Budge is the director.)
