Hello and welcome to Ask an
Archaeologist! I'm Sarah Kansa, the host of
this afternoon's show. Ask an
Archaeologist is a series of live-streamed
interviews co-hosted by the
Archeological Research Facility and the
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology for Cal Week 2020. Each day at 11 and 2
this week, we have interviews with UC
Berkeley archaeologists and are taking
audience questions. So, this is the last
of our series this week and thank you
for tuning in. 
Before we start today's interview I want
to remind you how you can ask questions:If you open a browser, go to sli.do,
which is SLI dot DO. 
Type in "askarf" click on join and you
can type in your question. I will
also remind you about this part way
through the interview. So, in the last episode this week,
we're speaking with
Sara Ann Knutson. Sarah Ann is a
fourth-year PhD candidate in
anthropology at UC Berkeley. She has a
master's degree in archaeology from the
University of Cambridge and a BA in
history from the University of Michigan.
She's lived in three foreign countries
to conduct archaeological research and
as a visiting scholar at the University
of Cologne Germany she recently
completed research on medieval economic
networks and the circulation of ivory
between medieval Africa the Middle East
Europe and the North Atlantic. She is
currently working on a dissertation that examines global socio-economic networks
across Eurasia from the perspective of
medieval Arab coins. We're very
excited to hear about this work today. 
Thank you for joining us, Sara Ann and
I would like to invite you to tell
us about your work.
Great. So I'm going to start by sharing the slides. and
I'll start by kind of sharing you an
overview of some of the places that my
archaeological research has taken me. The top two photos that you see here on the
slide are from the eastern Scottish
Isles--
Shetland and Orkney. This is something I
did for my master's thesis at the
University of Cambridge, 
but archaeology has taken me definitely
all over the world. I used to live in
Sweden, where I conducted research on
these monuments called rune stones, which are from the Viking Age but I've also
done work in the Arctic and as well as
the Middle East. Archaeology is
great and that it can take you literally
all over the world. What I would
do today is start by talking about two
projects that I've been working on
throughout my PhD. The first is the one
that you mentioned, Sarah, about the
medieval ivory trade and this will kind
of get you to it'll give you a flavor of
the sort of questions I'm asking about
the archaeological record. So I'm going
to start by just giving you a brief
overview of the medieval period. This map
is just to show you the kinds of
interconnections that are happening
between Europe the Middle East and
Africa, and this was something that I
started thinking about in terms of the
ivory trade. Medieval Europeans really
liked carving in ivory, particularly from
the ivory of the African savannah elephants.
And I'll show you an example of an object that was created from African ivory.
This is an object that is
on display at the Met in New York and
you can see the African ivory has a very
light very milky color. It's also
something very soft to carve which
European carvers really liked.
But I started noticing that there's all these
different objects that are not carved in
African ivory and I will show you some
examples here. All the images that I've
shown you here are carved out of
medieval walrus ivory. Now, walrus comes
from very few places in the world. During this time, walrus ivory was
sourced from the Bering Sea region as
well as the North Atlantic -- so we're
talking Iceland and Greenland. And I started thinking about
how these different trajectories of how
these materials end up in Europe are
connected to wider connections of trade
and exchange. Particularly I was
wondering if there's a connection
between when African ivory appears in
Europe as opposed to when walrus ivory
appears in Europe. And so I kind of had
that question in my mind and I thought "well
let's map the network of walrus ivory
and see what happens." And this is another
example of some walrus ivory objects.
These are the famous Lewis Chessmen. If
you've ever been if you've ever been to
the British Museum or the National
Museum of Scotland, these objects
are on display. They're also carved in
walrus ivory. This is the network
that I came up with. I collected data
from museum collections in over 14
countries. And I collected data on the
movement of walrus ivory materials.
And I was interested in where they were coming
from, particularly in the North Atlantic,
as well as where they were ending up
across Europe. And so that's kind of
giving you a sense of what it looks like. But what happened when I did the time
slices of this network is it really
brought into play how the African ivory
trade is influenced in this particular
network. So this is the network-- what
it looks like when the African ivory
trade is happening. So, again, Europeans
prefer African ivory, so we see a little
bit of walrus ivory objects on the
continent. They're coming mainly from
Iceland but really there's not too many
objects happening yet. Now when we enter
the 11th century for some reason the
African ivory trade collapses. We don't
know exactly why. Scholars sort of posit
that there's some sort of internal
conflict going on in the Fatimid
Caliphate but for whatever reason the
trade between Africa and Europe gets cut
off in terms of ivory. So this is what
happens when that trait gets cut off.
Suddenly we see this influx of walrus ivory objects
coming in from the North Atlantic at a
scale that's never been seen previously.
So you can see how there's a lot more
movement coming in from the North
Atlantic into Scandinavia and then it's
really being distributed across Europe.
And now let's look at what happens 
in the 13th and 14th centuries when the
African ivory trade resumes. Ironically, 
the Crusades of all things opened up
more contact between the Middle East,
Africa, and Europe.
So this is what happens when the African
ivory comes back in. We see the collapse
of the walrus ivory network. There's
still some connections happening, we
still see some movement of objects in 
the continent but definitely not at the
same scale that we saw previously. So
it's a really interesting case study of
how developments that are happening in
the Middle East and Africa
can affect activity that's going on in
Greenland and Iceland.
If I could just ask a question: Now, is this raw materials that are coming in or is it worked materials or both?
Well I'm including both.
And that's a really good question
because previously
archaeological studies have focused on
raw material. And the worked 
material that you see often in museum
collections-- that's usually been
relegated to the study of art historians.
And there really hasn't been any one
that has sat down and said "Wait a minute
these things are part of the same
assemblage, really." So that was what kind
of helped me create that dataset and
really helped me to sort of see this at
a more macro level. Yeah, absolutely. Great
question. So that kind of brings me to my
dissertation research now which is not on
ivory
but the same principle sort of apply
especially with what I'm doing with
network analysis. So for my dissertation
project I'm looking at
coins from the Arab world as
they move across Eurasia, particularly in
Eastern Europe. This is a really
interesting phenomenon because there are
so many coins that...Well, first of all
they're being sourced in modern-day
Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and then
they're being minted in the Arab world
and then somehow they end up across
Eurasia. And this is the scale that we're
talking about this is the distribution
of medieval Arab coins. You can see that
they're literally being found all over. There's a particular
concentration in Eastern Europe, 
particularly eastern Germany, Poland
especially in Russia, most definitely in
Sweden-- but you find them in England,
France, etc. So it's a really interesting
phenomenon of how these coins are being
traded and why . This is definitely an
open question that I'm trying to tease out.
This is to give you an example of
what a hoard would look like. So these
are where we're typically finding these
Arab coins. This is the Spillings Hoard,
which is the most famous one it was
found on the island of Gotland in Sweden.
But you can see that really these
Northern Europeans and Europeans more
broadly are really interested in Arab
silver and they're collecting it in vast quantities.
So that's sort of what I'm
doing for my project. It's going
to be a non-invasive survey. I'm not
going to excavate anything. Instead I'm
going to be looking at pre-existing, 
preassembled collections at museums and
archives and looking at what this data
from all these points can tell me and how
can we reconstruct these social economic
networks. This is an example of what the
museum collection might look like. This
is again from the Spillings Hoard on Gotland.
You can see how the coins are
being lined up according to the date that
they're minted or found. You will notice
in this image that there are some coins that
have been literally chopped in half. This
is a really interesting phenomenon in
the medieval period because the value of
the currency was based on its weight not
necessarily on an established value. So you can see where this is going...
So if you wanted something that was
worth half of a coin you just literally
chopped it in half. And this is
called hacksilber is that sort of
phenomenon of chopping coins in half. So
I'm going to stop the share now so
hopefully we're back. I'm going to show
you what a replica of these look like so
I don't know if you can see it... I
know it's really tiny you see. So what we
do with Arab coins is-- they're written in
Arabic, obviously-- so you have to read
them from right to left. So what I do is
I usually start in the middle of the
coin. Again, I can show it more closely
see it so this inscription reads "la
ilaha allah." So, "there's no god but God"
and then it goes on to say that on the
other side that Muhammad is the
Messenger of God. So these are verses
taken from the Quran and again what you
do once you read the middle of the
inscription is you go through the edges
again you read count clockwise. And this
description will tell you things about
where the coin was minted. For example we
have a lot of coins that are minted in 
Damascus or Baghdad. It'll tell you the
date that was minted and usually the
ruler of the Caliph that sponsored the
minting of these coins. So there's a lot
of really valuable information there.
Can you see trends-- or as are
there any patterns in the where the coin
was minted and where the coins end up
around Eastern Europe? Like do you see
concentrations of certain types of mints
in certain areas or is it all over the place?
Yeah, that's gonna be a good question. 
I don't know yet.
So it's gonna depend on what I'm
finding in the museum collections.
I suspect there's going to be some sort of
temporal element where certain
caliphates are being represented in
certain regions, but it'll be it'll be
interesting to see how those
patterns play out definitely.
Great. I'm just gonna pause for one second to remind the listeners about how they can ask a question.
If you have a question to ask
Sara Ann, you can go to sli.do
and type in "askarf" and then put
your question there and it'll
reach here here. I actually have a couple of
questions from listeners already, if I may.
Someone asked: In your research, are you are you accounting
for the fact that there might be a
bias to what we find in museums versus
what actually existed in terms of the
total like volume of coins?
Absolutely, this is very important to keep in mind, kind of difficult to put into practice,
but it's definitely important to realize
that the things that end up in museum
collections have an inherent bias. 
So silver coins are traditionally
something that would be concerned
valuable or even exotic so they're gonna
end up in museum collections more than
other kinds of materials. That's that.
We also need to account for the fact that--
I'm almost certain that at least some
amount of silver was later melted down for it's material, so what we
find in these so-called hoards across
Eurasia is definitely not you know all
of the phenomena. So even still, even
though we're dealing with pretty big
data here, we're still dealing with a
fraction of what actually was happening in the medieval period.
And when you to
get your datasets, when you do actually
go to museums look at the coins or is
there some research you've done
virtually? Are there online databases you
can access? how do you go about that?
Yeah, so it's a combination of everything. 
So, some collections are digitized others
are not. So it's a very long process of
figuring out which collections actually
have these kinds of materials. But I'm also using, you know,
whatever previous scholarship has been
done on these. Sometimes they will
reproduce their data so I can take a
look at that. And some museums are really
good about publishing their data online
so I'm able to virtually go through this
data and develop my database that way. 
Ok, there's one more question from
before we move on: Our listener has asked
are there geochemical studies of the
metal coins that show different minting
regions? Yeah, so this is something I'm a
little less familiar with because I'm no
chemist. Definitely this has been done
before. I will say though that is
generally done on a regional scale.
There hasn't been research that has
really applied this on the macro scale
of Eurasia because that would be a very,
very large project. But definitely I will
be using some of those studies to help
me think about where these materials are
coming from. Absolutely.  And someone else has asked:
What would they use to cut the coin? It seems like it would be hard to do. It's a good question!
I haven't really thought about it. I'm assuming just an axe or whatever they have. I mean, silver is
fairly soft so I'm assuming it wouldn't
take that much to sort of hack it in half.
Yeah. Well I have some more
questions-- unless you had more? Did you
have more slides you wanted to get back to? Ok well so why are medieval
Arabic coins so available today? They're for sale on places like eBay.
Are these fakes? Can you comment on looting and that kind of thing?
Absolutely, yea. So this is a very tricky issue. The first thing I guess I should mention is that
obviously we have a lot of coins. These
things, when we find them across Eurasia,
they number in the millions. We're
talking such big data here. So in Sweden
we have about 70,000 hoards that
represent a hundred and forty million coins
and that's just Sweden. So we're talking huge
amounts of coins first of all. But to get
back to the question about how these
things are appearing on eBay
definitely touches on this issue of
looting and the illegal antiquities trade. 
So it's important to point out that
there's a lot of problems that impact
archaeological sites today. We have urban
development and construction, natural
disasters, but looting is still concerned
the most devastating to archaeological
sites. So looting is the major source
for artefacts that appear on the antiquities
market. So this kind of touches on the
issue of where items go after excavation. As archaeologists, we are trained to
handle objects and we're trained to
ensure a paper trail once the object
leaves the archaeological site. And so
when items are looted from archaeological
sites, it makes it very difficult if not
impossible to say anything about the
archaeological context surrounding that
coin. Like we truly lose world cultural
heritage every time this happens. It's
almost impossible even if you recover
the object, you're not going to recover
the archaeological context once that
information is lost. We do have something
called the International Council of
Museums (ICOM). They do have a online Red
List database that compiles information
about the kinds of cultural materials that
are particularly susceptible to looting
and the illegal, um, yeah, international smuggling and all
these kinds of things. So this database
is kind of how is used to help us sort
of think about the artifacts are being
stolen and to try to help return these
objects to their owners in the event
that these objects are being sold illegally.
But so I'll go into this issue
a little bit if we have time.
Yep, definitely. So, this is where the issue
becomes more
complicated though. So these efforts are
really turning cultural heritage into
cultural property and I mention this
because once you start conceptualizing
artifacts as property, national property
laws come into play. So I'll give you two
examples. One is the country of
Mexico, which licenses people who find
artifacts to possess them but they do
not own them. So it means that they
cannot sell the artifact and they cannot
give it away, but you can possess them.
The US and the contrast is the only
country of the world that has this
extreme notion of entirely owning
cultural property. So this means that you
can do anything with it. If you own a
culture a piece of cultural property, you
can do anything with it, including
destroy it. So it's really important to
kind of think about the national
property laws that are coming into play here.
The other issue is that we don't
have an international body that polices
or governs the import and export of
stolen cultural property. We do have the
UNESCO Convention of 1970 but this
only applies to countries who are
signatories, so there's always going to
be these kind of loopholes. Right now the
US is a signatory of the 1970 UNESCO
convention and they had to create a law
thereafter that sort of brings
these things into the legal realm. So we
do have a law in the US now that
prohibits the import of cultural
property from countries that are also
signatories of UNESCO. Again, it always
applies to who are the signatories the
loophole here is that this law only
protects antiquities that are worth at
least $5,000. Yeah, so these coins I'm
looking at-- an individual coin is not
going to be worth $5,000, I wouldn't think,
so that's going to be another loophole
to get through. And this law only applies
to antiquities that were brought into
the US and any other signatories from
UNESCO after 1970, so if you have some
that belongs to another country prior to
1970 you are not necessarily required to
give it back, which creates all these
issues of patriation and so on and so forth. So I'll wrap up I guess by saying to
get back to the original question-- they may
or may not be fakes they might not be
they might be real. But we need-- if
people are going to collect them, and you
can collect them, but collectors are
really powerful stakeholders in this
antiquities trade and they really need
to be engaged in the ways in which-- the
ways that they collect these things. They
need to ensure that there's a proper
paper trail if you are going to collect
them because there's so many people who
are just unaware that these items are on
a black market and that's really kind of
what the issue boils down to.
Yeah, and I think, in terms of coins specifically a
particular point is they're so small and
there's so many of them, I feel like
that's something that... at least when I
was in Jordan, I remember little kids
trying to sell you coins you know that
they just dug up somewhere
at a site that you're nearby and it's it
seems like they're so accessible and
they're so easy to just put in your pocket.  There's there's a lot of education that has to happen around that.
Definitely. Very interesting. To pivot a
little bit to another other question: 
Can you talk a little bit about the
oldest form of currency based on what we
know archaeologically?
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is that ever since human history we've had some sort of
system of economic exchange whether it's
a bartering system or other kinds of
movable wealth. But coins specifically
kind of appear in three places in the
world around the same time. So they
appear in northern China, they appear in
the Ganges River Valley in northeast
India, and they also appear in the Aegean
Sea / Mediterranean area. In each of these
areas, coins appear roughly around 600 BC.
So if you're not an archaeologist, 
to put that date and look into context
this is before the Roman Empire roughly
around the time of Alexander the Great.
That's when we see the first evidence of
coinage. This comes a lot from the
economic anthropologist David Graeber, 
who famously wrote his book on debt
which is really interesting. And he has used
coinage to talk about what he sees as
oscillations and periods in Eurasian
history in which sometimes coinage is
use and other times when a system of
credit is being used. So based on
Eurasian history, he argued that one
motivation for creating coinage was for
the compensation of soldiers. Right, 
because it's a
movable wealth that you can just
put in your pocket. And so empires
particularly seem to be drawn to coinage
as a monetary system and at least David
Graeber would argue that systems of
credit come into play where there's
relatively, like yeah, there's 
periods of relative social stability and
peace and you need to really have
networks of trust in order to pull it off.
So it's interesting to see how these
things kind of come and flow in
different ways. Ok, so again if
you have a question to ask please go to
sli.do and type in "askarf"and
send us a question. I would like to go
back to the ivory objects- they were so
pretty [laughter]. I'm assuming that the stuff
coming out of Africa is elephant ivory, is that true? Can you talk a little bit
more about- I mean are there other- 
there's hippo ivory as well as far as I
understand. But I'm assuming a lot of
these objects are made out of elephant
ivory. And you showed that there are
workshops around Europe?  Yeah so the
main workshops around this time tend to
be in Cologne, Paris, Trondheim.
Trondheim is where we believe that the Lewis chessmen were carved
but it's usually going to be in these
same centers where trade seems to happen.
Not exclusively, but they
definitely tend to appear in definitely
urban centers. But it is true like it there's- I don't
know if any work has been done on hippo
ivory, but yeah the African savannah
elephant is like the main source of
ivory during this time.
And so looking at those chessmen and then looking at that amazing silver hard that you showed,
who decides where the artifacts go
after an excavation-- for safekeeping and
preservation? Where do those things
end up and why? Yeah, so this is a very complicated question [laughter].
So this kind of goes back to our question of what items tend to be preserved right that's kind of
like the first question is what are the
biases in museum collections from the start?
Traditionally, only items that are concerned
rare and exotic or somehow valuable tend
to find their way into museum collections
but after archaeologists
identify which artifacts deserve to be
preserved in the first place the
question of where to house them, if not
back at the site, is then kind of 
what they need to figure out.
This depends on a lot of factors- not least
where you found the artifact, who found it,
what is its deemed value-- again, different countries will have different laws
about these kinds of things, 
particularly when a member of the
general public finds a historical item
like this. The US has a number of
different laws regarding these things. 
The US antiquities Act from 1906
forbids unauthorized excavations on a
federally owned lands, for example.
It's also illegal today in the US to
disturb any human remains. But it is
legal today to collect artifacts on
private property if you have the written
consent of the owner. So there's that
kind of issue. As for museums,
it depends on the institution on how
they choose to handle artifact
acquisition. Sometimes they'll acquire
artifacts through donations sometimes
they will purchase the item. I think in
also some cases national museums will
acquire artifacts from smaller scale
museums. So there's a variety of
different ways in which artifacts kind
of circulate and end up in a museum.
Interesting. Yea. We have a couple of
questions now coming in from the
listeners. So, one is about
hoards and when you find a hoard is it
collected in an object or is it like
dispersed throughout a site. Like is it a
"treasure chest" or a package,
I guess, just defining what does a "hoard" mean?
Yeah this came up in my
qualifying exam actually and I'm still thinking about it.
What does the term "hoard" actually
mean because in every other part of the
world it seems to be, it's called a cache
or a deposit. So why do we call them
hoards is a really interesting
question that I can't answer... yet. Yeah so
as far as I can tell, they
don't generally end up in like a
treasure chest but they are not necessarily dispersed around the site either,
so they tend to be buried
together in a small area within the
ground. So for example the Spillings
Hoard which comes from Gotland, Sweden,
was found in the ground
underneath a pre-existing structure.
So whether it was someone's house or
whatever we think that structure was
used for, it seems to be that the hoard
is a way of-- it's kind of like the modern bank,
it's a way of storing the silver
for safekeeping. Yeah, that actually leads
really nicely to the next question which
was how long did it take for the first
banks to appear after coins started
becoming more widespread?
Yeah, I need to do more research on the development of banks. I think it kind of depends on how
you define a bank, right? Whether we can
consider these hoards as actual banks or
whether
something else going on is, I think,
a question that we need to tease out a
little bit. But, yeah, it's a good question.
I need to think more about it. Yeah
that's a good one. Well okay and then we
have one more question here from the
listeners: Did Viking control of the
northern ivory sources mean that coins
were moving in that direction? Are these related?
So I never saw-- I don't have
evidence that these phenomena are
related. The trade of ivory as far as I
can tell doesn't necessarily equate with
the exchange of coinage or silver. For
example, we know-- they are right to point
out that the Viking Age Scandinavians
controlled the North Atlantic, they
colonize Greenland during this time, and
we have records that the Norwegian
Kingdom at this time wanted the local
Scandinavians on Greenland to pay their
taxes in ivory. Though there's an
interesting way that ivory is being
circulated as a form of movable wealth
and of itself. So I don't think it's
necessarily that you pay money and you
get ivory back. It's more about the ways
in which ivory itself is a considerable
form of wealth. Okay, yeah great well
thank you! This was a lot of questions to
field and we appreciate hearing from you
and hearing about your awesome research. 
We look forward to seeing how it
develops and reading your publications
as they come out about these topics.
So thank you so much for joining us today
and I'd like to thank all of our listeners
and the people who asked questions and
thank you to those who have joined in
this week and during our Cal Week Ask an
Archaeologist series. You can see any of
these videos now-- they're posted on the
ARF YouTube channel, which you can get to
by going to bit.ly/askarf or just
navigate the ARF website and you can find
the link to our YouTube channel there. So thank you very much and
everyone have a great weekend!
