There has, of late, been a veritable tsunami of results from recent research that are literally transforming prehistory before our very eyes. One of these that has attracted a lot of interest beyond specialists in early Southeast Asia comes from Óc Eo, a 2,000-year old port on the Mekong Delta. It was first excavated by the French archaeologist Louis Malleret during the Second World War, and in his voluminous publication, he described a rectangular, moated city divided into wards by canals that radiated out across the flat delta landscape, linking Óc Eo with Angkor Borei, the probable capital of an early kingdom known to us from early Chinese visitors as Funan. This city was a vital node in a trading network, known as the Maritime Silk Road, that brought Chinese mirrors and ceramics, Indian-inspired religions, temples, and script, even Iranian and Roman coins. Now we have a new trade item straight from an Indian cookery book. An examination of stone mortars has identified starch grains, the list comprehensively covering the components of South Asian cuisine. Turmeric probably came from India and cloves from the Molucca Islands. Cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka. Other spices include ginger and galangal. Mix them up and you have curry powder. This finding needs to be taken in conjunction with the DNA from a young man from an Iron Age cemetery at Angkor Borei, dated to the 1st to 2nd century AD, that revealed 42-45% South Asian ancestry.
The subject of ancient DNA brings me to another paper published recently that, behind its direct and factual text, has seismic implications for prehistory. Just three years after Crick and Watson walked the few yards from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the Eagle pub to announce the structure of the double helix, I found myself passing through a tiny French village, Gurgy-les-Noisats, on my moped en route to a summer spent digging at Arcy-sur-Cure. Renowned for its hazelnuts, this village should now be better known for its Middle Neolithic cemetery, dated between 4850 BC and 4500 BC. Excavations there have progressively uncovered a cemetery of 128 inhumation burials in which barely one has disturbed another, a sure sign that the people knew where their ancestors were buried. On purely archaeological grounds, there is no pathway to finding out how long the site was in use, unless one radiocarbon dates an awful lot of bones, because there is no vertical stratigraphy. Very few graves overlie another. Only a decade or so ago, this site would barely have registered any interest beyond the Department of Yonne, for grave goods were sparse and there was nothing very much to report.
Secrets from the grave
However, 110 individuals were sampled for surviving DNA, of which 94 returned positive results. Strontium 87Sr/86Sr ratios were also obtained for 57 individuals, in order to distinguish between those raised locally and others who joined the community from a different environment. The increasing incisiveness of DNA analyses in identifying relationships has sorted the cemetery population at Gurgy into two pedigrees or descent groups. The larger, Group A, comprises 44 males and 20 females, while Group B contains seven females and five males. The former group has resolved into seven generations, in which descent followed the male line. Here is evidence for a patrilineal and patrilocal social order, while, at a stroke, the duration of the site has been identified. The founding father was found as a handful of bones, reinterred from elsewhere it seems, in the grave containing a complete female skeleton who, unfortunately, did not yield any DNA. Thereafter the graves of the succeeding six generations extended out from the founding father in a south-westerly direction. The graves of Group B, meanwhile, concentrated in the northern sector of the burial ground.
Q&A with site supervisor Jacqui Wood