ANTHROPO S:The Anthropology Newsletter
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
The State System of Higher Education

Columbus Ship Discovered Near
Panama
Divers searching in shallow
Caribbean waters have discovered the wreck of a Spanish galleon which archaeologists believe
is part of the fleet used by Christopher Columbus on his final
voyage to the Americas.
The discovery, made at the
end of October, occurred in six
meters of water off the coast of
Panama's Colon Province. It is
believed to the La Vizcaina, one
of four ships that sailed on Columbus' fourth voyage in 1502.
Artifacts recovered from the find
include five cannons and pottery
fragments. Researchers were
alerted to the presence of the
wreck when fishermen hauled up
several stone cannonballs earlier
in the month.
The twin-masted Vizcaina, a

vessel with a displacement of 100
tons, was part of a failed expedition to settle the mouth of the
Belen River in 1503. According
to accounts of the period, the
small fleet had just weighed anchor and set sail for Spain when
La Vizcaina began leaking. On
Columbus' orders, the vessel was
deliberately sunk a short way
from the coast.
It was a common practice of
the times to not salvage cannons
from wrecks. When the coralencrusted cannons were lifted
from the sea, researchers were
able to identify them as the kind
known to have been on Columbus' ships. The pottery fragments were also consistent with
the early 16th century.

discovery in 1492, Columbus
also sailed to the New World in
1493, 1498, and 1502. After his
first voyage, Columbus was
named Viceroy of the new possessions, but Columbus' dream
of the area yielding great wealth
did not come to pass. The voyage of 1502 was one last attempt
to reclaim the glory of 1492.
That effort failed, and Columbus
died in 1506 in Spain.

Special points of interest:
• BU Anthropology News - p. 3
• Anthropology Students Win
Grants-p. 3
• A Minor in Anthropo/ogy-p. 6

Inside this issue:

In addition to his voyage of

written specifically for children.
Jonathan and Emily's article describes the creation of the site
and participation of the Camp
Horizon campers in the excavation. The magazine's editor especially appreciated the various
interpretations of their findings

Nov-Dec. 2001

• Circulation news- p . 6

Anthropology Students Have Article
Accepted for Publication
Jonathan Rhodes and Emily
Rupert have had an article about
the 2001 Camp Victory Children's Project accepted for publication by Dig! Magazine. This
magazine is nationally distributed
by the Cricket Group and features articles about archaeology

Volume 26, Issue 3

by the children and the photographs of the site.
The article will be published
in the January/February 2002
issue. Jonathan and Emily also
wrote up a description of their
work for the September 2001
ANTHROPOS.

Japanese Martial Arts

2

Oldest Stone Tools From Outside ofAfrica

2

Urban Legends Research

3

Student Presentations in
46.385

4

Dr. Wymer to Organize Pienary Session

4

Upper Paleolithic Stone Tools
in Africa

5

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ANTHROPOS: The Anthropology Newsletter

Program on Japanese Martial Arts by Lauren ·Madak
What immediately comes to mind when you hear the word ninja? This is precisely the question Keith Lutz asked the audience
at the beginning of his fascinating Anthropology Club lecture about Japanese martial history on October 24. Answers from the audience fit into the stereotype of the ninja that American culture has cultivated: the black outfit and mask, the sword, the Chinese
stars, and, of course, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Keith, an anthropology student and a first-degree black belt in Togakure
Ryu Ninjutsu, has been studying martial arts for nearly fifteen years and now owns his own dojo in Danville called Divine Wind
Budo. After hearing the audience's responses, Keith immediately set out to present Japanese martial history from an anthropological perspective and to clear up popular myths about the ninja..
In the first part of his presentation, Keith provided a brief historical overview of the martial arts and over two thousand years of
Japanese social and political history. He explained that the roots of martial arts were in China. Over time the martial arts emigrated to Korea and Japan, and Koreans and Japanese developed their own distinctive traditions. Whereas Tai Chi and Kung Fu
come from China, the traditions of Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, and Hwa Rang Do derive from Korea. Karate has most of its immediate origins in Japan, as does Ninjutsu.
After explaining the history of the martial arts, Keith began his discussion on the ninja. He pointed out that in order to understand the origins of the ninja, one must first understand the history of the samurai. Samurai were members of a unique warrior
class in ancient and medieval Japanese society who fo11owed a special code of conduct, the bushido or "way of the warrior class."
Basica11y, this code demanded honor and service to one's lord and the Japanese emperor. Unfortunately, a period of civil war during the fifteenth century upset Japanese society and eventually created turmoil within the samurai class. In reaction to the rigid
expectations of the code samurai were expected to follow, one samurai, Daisuke Togakure, disagreed with this complete lack of
flexibHity; , _R ather than Jake his own life for no longer following bushido, Daisuke Togakure fled to the mountains and created his
own lineage, or ryu. Eventually, his new class of warriors became known as the nirga ("one who perceives.")
Finally, Keith talked about some of his own training in Togakure Ryu Ninjutsu and enlightened his audience with a few of the
intriguing and mysterious stories surrounding modern day ninja. Again, he reminded the audience that modem American ideas of
the ninja, most of them conveyed by Hollywood, are highly inaccurate. For example, modem day ninja wear regular clothing, not
black pajamas!
Although Keith gave an excellent lecture, he stressed that his presentation was only a brief overview of Japanese martial history.
It is impossible to provide a complete picture of such a chaotic time in Japanese history that occurred almost seven hundred years
ago. Also, he emphasized the difficulties in presenting Japanese history and culture because of the significant cultural differences
between the United States and Japan.

Researchers Discover Oldest Stone Tools Found Outside of Africa

'

In early November, researchers from Oregon State University and the Geophysical Institute oflsrael announced the discovery
of stone tools at a site called Erk-el-Ahmar in Israel. Using magnetostratigraphy as a dating technique, the researchers announced
that the tools were between 1. 7 and 2 million years old, making them the oldest stone tools ever found outside the continent of Africa. The tools were Oldowan tools, both choppers and flint fragments; these are the tools associated with Homo habilis, the oldest
known member of the genus Homo. Homo habilis is known from 2.5 million year old deposits in East Africa; this find suggests
that Homo habilis migrated out of Africa quite early. In addition, researchers reported finding a few skull fragments and teeth.
Erk-el-Ahmar is located about three kilometers south of the Sea of Galilee.
Magnetostratigraphy is an archaeological dating technique which measures changes in the earth's magnetic field over time. The
researchers were Shaul Levi of OSU and Hagai Ron, an Israeli geophysicist. Their discovery was announced in the journal, GeolQgy.

Page3

Volume 26, Issue 3

Anthropology Students Win Grants
1bree anthropology students are recipients
of the 2001 Kozloff Undergraduate Research
Award. They are Becky Digan, Lauren
Madak, and Luis Ocasio. Dr. Faith Warner
will advise Lauren and Luis on their projects,
and she will co-advise Becky, along with Dr.
Dave Minderhout.
The Kozloff Awards were created by a gift
of Ors. Jessica and Steven Kozloff to fund
undergraduate research projects.

The Anthropology Club will hold a meeting on November 26 at 6 PM in the Anthropology Lab, CEH 154. This is a mandatory
meeting for all students attending the American Anthropological Association meetings in
Washington, D.C. in December.
The club will also present the movie,
"Monty Python & the Holy Grail" directly
after the meeting.

BU Anthropology News
On November 6, the Anthropology Club
sponsored a workshop on graduate school
hosted by Dr. Warner. Students were told
about the application process for graduate
school as well as how graduate education differs from undergraduate education.

The Society for American Archaeology
meetings will be March 20-24, 2002 in Denver. Students interested in attending and/or
working at the meetings should begin making
their plans now.
The Anthropology Club has designed at-

shirt for 2001-2002. The shirt features the
Top Ten Reasons for Being an Anthropology
Student as well as a Haida (Native American)
design. A regular t-shirt is $10, a long sleeved
tee is $12, and a sweatshirt is $15; all are
available in either gray or white. Order forms
are available in the Anthropology Lab, 146
CEH.
Karin Rebnegger, a 1997 graduate of BU,
successfully defended her Master's thesis in
anthropology at the University of Oklahoma in
October. Her thesis was an analysis of the

Urban Legends
Shari Sanger, a Mass Communications major in the university's Honors Program, is conducting an honors thesis project with Dr. Wymer. Shari's project, "Sources of Belief: Exploring College Students' Familiarity of Selected Urban Legends," entails surveying various populations of Bloomsburg University
students to assess how familiar they are with
five commonly encountered stories often believed as true in American society, but which
are, in fact, "urban myths."

There are a great many urban myths in
American society. Some of the most famous
are the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" and the "Man
with a Hook," a murderer who preys on romantic teens "parking." Shari became interested in this topic while taking Dr. Wymer's
Honors Pseudoscience Seminar during Fall
2000. Shari will use the survey and accompanying research to explore how urban legends
are transmitted through different communication mediums, like the Internet.

lithic assemblage at the site of Paquime in the
state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

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ANTHROPOS: The Anthropology Newsletter

News & Notes:
BU Anthropology Students Provide Summaries to Nationwide Data Base
Eight anthropology majors, under the direction of Dr. Dauria, will publish summaries of articles that have appeared in past issues
of American Anthropologist for the Public Anthropology Archive Project. The American Anthropologist Public Anthropology Archive project aims to publish summaries and obituaries from the AA from 1888 through 2000 on the Public Anthropology website,
www.publicanthropology.org. The summaries wil1 be published by the end of the Fall 2001 semester. The project involves over 40
colleges and universities. The students, who are in Dr. Dauria's Anthropology Research & Writing course (46.385), are Elizabeth
Hazzard, Krista Ingram, Nadine Lyman, Shawn Lipsky, Lauren Maciak, Tom Pepe, Betsy Stephens, and Melissa Wormser.

Dr. Wymer to Organize Session at Midwestern Archaeological Conference
Dr. Dee Anne Wymer has been asked to organize and chair one of the plenary sessions at next year's Midwestern Archaeological
Conference in Columbus, Ohio. The conference will be held in October 2002. The theme of the conference will be the latest research on the Hopewell archaeological culture, the ''moundbuilders" of2000 years ago in the Midwest. The conference organizers
have decided to have three plenary sessions to highlight various aspects of the newest information available. Thursday's session will
be at the Ohio State Museum and will center on research conducted with the museum's collections. The second session, on Friday,
will focus on trade and burial ritual. The third and largest session, on Saturday, will bring together the most active researchers in the
field and will highlight Hopewell settlement patterns and subsistence; this is the session Dr. Wymer has been asked to organize. Saturday's session will be followed by a banquet that will feature the famous British archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, schedule permitting.

Student Presentations
In Dr. Dauria's Anthropology Research & Writing course, students are required to research a topic and put together a Power
Point presentation of their material as if they were trying to persuade an agency to adopt a new idea or program. All of the presentations will be at 11 AM in CEH 164. The schedule of presentations for this semester are:
Tina Adams: "Improving Health in the Dorms at BlI'' (November 28)
Tom Pepe: "A Proposal for a Mandatory National Service in the United States" (Nov. 28)
Elizabeth Hazzard: "An Argument for Using Both Qualitative & Quantitative Data Col1ection in Anthropology (Nov. 30)
Betsy Stephens: "Implementing 'Life Skills" Classes at Bloomsburg" (Nov. 30)
Sean O'Shea: "The Bloomsburg University Systems of Control and How Students Can Identify How They Work" (Nov. 30)
Krista Ingram: "Initiating an After School Program at Bloomsburg University." (Dec. 3)
Shawn Lipsky: "Gaining Knowledge About Gun Control." (Dec. 3)
Melissa Wormser: "Teaching Sign Language to Elementary Children." (Dec. 3)
Nadine Lyman: "Adding the Physical and Linguistic Component to the Anthropology Program at Bloomsburg University." (Dec. 5)
Lauren Madak: "A New Course Proposal: International Anthropology." (Dec. 5)

Volume 26, Issue 3

Page 5

Out of Africa: New Information
In the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, archaeologist Christopher S. Henshilwood of SUNY-Stony Brook
and four other authors announce the discovery of 70,000 year old bone tools from a cave in South Africa. This discovery is significant on at least two accounts. First, they are at twice as old as any other similar tools previously discovered. Second, while all previous collections of tools of this sort of manufacture have been found in Europe, these are from Africa. This adds another piece to the
puzzle of humans evolving in and migrating out of Africa; this find shows that early modem humans did not invent the characteristic
Upper Paleolithic tool assemblage in Europe, as was previously thought to be the case, but rather brought the assemblage with them
from Africa.
Down through the years, what is known about the origins of the human species has become increasingly complex. Prior to 1959,
most scientists thought humans had evolved in Asia because of the discovery of early human remains in Java and China. In 1959,
Louis Leakey turned the scientific world on its ear with his discovery of an early hominid, which he called Zinjanthropus, in the
Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. This confirmed what anatomist Raymond Dart had said in the l 920's with his discoveries-that humans
evolved in Africa. By the 1960's, anthropologists were convinced that humans emerged out of the australopithecine line in Africa
and that they then spread out across the Old World over a million years ago. There they underwent subsequent changes: Homo erectus to archaic modern humans to fully modern humans. This process was thought to be pretty uniform throughout the Old World.
Then in the 1980's, geneticists working with mitochrondrial DNA announced that a survey ofliving humans suggested a common
ancestor for them all in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This common ancestor was a woman, since mitochondrial DNA is transmitted only through the egg; journalists quickly dubbed this common ancestor, ''Eve." Subsequent research in genetics has fine-tuned
those original findings, leading many to believe that there were two waves of human migration out of Africa. One early migration
led to Homo erectus and early archaic forms of modern humans, such as Neanderthals, and a second, more recent wave of modern
humans who replaced the arch;iic forms in Europe and Asia. In recer.t years, a number of archaeological discoveries in South Africa
seemed to confirm the idea that anatomically modern humans emerged first in Africa_. (Note: not all anthropologists accept this idea;
the archaeologist Milton Wolpoffvigorously denies the Eve hypothesis on the basis of the existing fossil evidence; many others are
waiting for more data from Africa.)

,

It was widely believed, however, that while modern humans developed anatomically in Africa, their cultures, represented by
tools, evolved once humans left Africa. The current report suggests that this is not true. Why are Upper Paleolithic tools thought to
be so remarkable? Upper Paleolithic tools represent major cognitive advances over earlier stone tool technologies. Upper Paleolithic tools require more foresight to manufacture, require more steps in the manufacturing process, but make much more efficient
use of core materials. There is also an explosion of variety in the kinds of tools made and in the materials used for tools, especially
bone and ivory tools. Bone and ivory spear points, fish hooks, needles and other such tools are diagnostic of the Upper Paleolithic
tool assemblage. Bone and ivory are difficult to work with stone tools, but they are more supple and resilient than stone. Imagine
making a eyed needle out of a piece of stone or a barbed fish hook or harpoon! Archaeologists have always seen Upper Paleolithic
tools as a major step in the evolution of modern human intelligence.
The latest announcement shows that Africans were making polished bone spear points long before this tradition appears in
Europe. The researchers are confident that more evidence will be forthcoming. To quote Henshilwood, "Right now we are only
scraping the surface of information about prehistoric Africa. Europe, has been extensively excavated over the last 70 or 80 years,
and Europeans have an enormous amount of background information to draw on. Africa is geographically enormous when compared to western Europe, but it has been excavated properly only for a very short period, and very few sites in Africa have really
been well-dug." As larger samples are discovered, the picture of the evolution of modem humans may look very different from what
it was 20 years ago.
The co-authors with Henshilwood are Francesco d'Errico of the Institut de Prehistoire et de Geologie du Quaternaire, Curtis
Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, Richard G. Milo from Chicago State University, and Royden
Yates from the South African Museum.

Bloomsburg University of
Pennsylvania
The State System of Higher Education

II
ANTHROPOS: the Anthropology Newsletter, is published six times during the academic year and is
mailed to interested students, faculty, administrators,
and alumni. It is also distributed in anthropology
classes on campus and made available on the department's home page. Ifyou would like to be on the
newsletter mailing list, please contact Dr. Dave
Minderhout at the address and numbers on the left.

Department of Anthropology
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
400 E. 2nd Street
Bloomsburg, PA 17815
Dr. David Minderhout, Editor
Phone: 570-389-4859
FAX: 570-389-5015
E-mail: dminderh@bloomu.edu

The Department ofAnthropology offers a 36 credit
B.A. degree and a 18 credit minor in anthropology. If
you would like details, please see any of the anthropology faculty.

Anthropology is the study of humans.

We 're on the Web!:
www.bloomu.edu/
departments/
anthro

Minoring in Anthropology
The Department of Anthropology offers an 18 credit minor in
anthropology. The following three
courses are required for the minor:

46.200 Principles of Cultural
Anthropology
46.210 Prehistoric Archaeology
46.220 Human Origins.

The remaining 9 credits are electives to be chosen among the many

courses offered by the department
in consultation with a faculty advisor in anthropology.
To sign up for a minor in anthropology, students should obtain
a Declaration of Minor form either
from the department office of the
Office of Academic Advisement.
The form requires the signature of
Dr. Wymer, the department chairperson. The completed form is to
be filed with the Office of Academic Advisement.
It is important to remember to

have another form filled out, verifying the completion of the minor,
when the 18 credits have been fulfilled. This form is to be filed with
the Registrar's Office. If this form
is not filed, students will not receive official credit for the minor
on their transcripts when they
graduate.