PROVIDENCE – A discovery made by an associate professor of art history at Providence College earned one of the spots on Archaeology Magazine’s Top 10 Discoveries of 2010.
Thomas F. Strasser’s 2008 and 2009 discovery of stone tools at two sites on the Greek island of Crete that date between 130,000 and 700,000 years old were hailed as the earliest indirect evidence of boating by early human ancestors (from the mainland to the island 40 miles out to sea).
“If hominins could move around the Mediterranean before 130,000 years ago, they could cross other bodies of water as well,” said team member Curtis Runnels of Boston University to Archaeology Magazine, the flagship publication of the Archaeological Institute of America.
“When similar finds on other islands are confirmed, the door will be opened to the re-evaluation of every assumption we have made about early hominin migrations,” he added.
Prior to this discovery, the earliest uncontested marine crossing in the Mediterranean was circa 12,000 B.C., Providence College said in a news release.
Strasser’s team collected more than 2,100 stone artifacts made of quartz and chert (a form of microcrystallite quartz), from the southwestern coast of Crete, some of which were found 92 meters above present sea level.
Other discoveries cited on the magazine’s list were a royal tomb in Guatemala, early pyramids in Peru, a sunken British merchant ship in Canada and the remains of a Protestant church built in 1608 in Jamestown, Va.
“Decades from now people may remember 2010 for the BP oil spill, the Tea Party, and the iPad. But for our money, it’s a lock people will still be excited about the year’s most remarkable archaeological discoveries,” the magazine said. The Top 10 of 2010 list appears in the January/February issue.
