John J. Shea

Personal Webpage

With “Chippy”on the back porch of my house.	In the Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia.	Demonstrating stone tool production

CONTACT INFORMATION

Anthropology Department

Stony Brook University

NY 11794-4364 USA

Tel. (631) 632-7665, FAX: (631) 632-9165, email: John.Shea@stonybrook.edu

ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH INTERESTS

The evolution of hominin behavior, particularly insofar as it is revealed by the analysis of stone tools (lithics). I have been replicating stone tools and other aspects of primitive technology since I was a teenager. My current research focus on behavioral and strategic ecological sources of variation among Paleolithic stone tools in Southwest Asia and East Africa. I am especially interested in the hominin dispersals and adaptive radiations.

ACTIVE RESEARCH PROJECTS

The Later Prehistory of West Turkana, Kenya.

This field project will investigate the Early Holocene prehistory of western Lake Turkana, Kenya. This project is carried out in collaboration with Elisabeth Hildebrand, Veronica Waweru, and the Turkana Basin Institute. My work will focus on the Ceramic Later Stone Age (Sutton’s “Aqualithic”), ca. 10,000-6000 BP, a period during which East African populations intensified their exploitation of lacustrine and riverine ecozones. In 2007, preliminary reconnaissance south of the Turkwell River between Lodwar and Kalakol identified numerous Ceramic Later Stone Age and Pastoral Neolithic sites, some of which will be the excavated starting in 2008 (pending funding).

Child’s Play: Detecting Novice Flintknappers in the Archaeological Record.

This lab project investigates differences between novice and experienced flintknappers with the goal of developing criteria for recognizing stone tools knapped by children in Stone Age times. A pilot study of experimental débitage is in progress, and I am writing a grant proposal to fund this research.

John J. Shea (2006) Child's Play: Reflections on the Invisibility of Children in the Paleolithic Record. Evolutionary Anthropology 15 (6): 212-216.

Stone Tools of the Paleolithic and Neolithic Periods in the Near East: A Guidebook.

This writing project aims to create a guidebook to the major stone tool types and lithic technology of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods in the East Mediterranean Levant. The book proposal for this project is currently under review by prospective publishers.

RECENTLY-COMPLETED RESEARCH PROJECTS

(Projects for which the research has been completed and about which I am writing and publishing.)

Middle Paleolithic Spear Points/The Origin of Projectile Points.

Projectile weaponry is a universal (and apparently uniquely-derived) feature of human behavior, but its antiquity is unknown. Early in my doctoral research (see below), I noticed large fractures on the tips of Levallois points from Kebara Cave. Finding similar such wear traces on points and triangular flakes from other sites, I proposed that Neandertals and early Homo sapiens were using such artifacts as hafted stone spear points. At the time I proposed this, the late 1980s, many paleoanthropologists were questioning Neandertals’ abilities as hunters. Consequently, my “Middle Paleolithic Spear Points” hypothesis was greeted with considerable skepticism. I subsequently investigated this issue by examining ecogeographic variation in point frequency and by a series of experiments testing replicas of Levallois points with a calibrated crossbow and goat carcasses.

Levallois points from Levantine Middle Paleolithic contexts.

In 1999, the discovery of a Levallois point fragment embedded in an equid vertebra at Umm el Tlel (Syria) seemed to have settled the debate in favor of the Middle Paleolithic Spear Points hypothesis. Nevertheless, this experience left me dissatisfied with the criteria archaeologists were using to evaluate hypotheses about the possible uses of stone tools as projectile armatures. Many of these criteria were subjective (e.g., microwear) while others were of dubious relevance to ballistic performance.

To make these assessments more systematic and objective, I adapted a method using tip cross-sectional area to identify projectile points among in New World ethnographic contexts and applied it to stone tools form Old World Paleolithic contexts. This study examined variation among thousands of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stone points from Africa, Southwest Asia, and Europe. (My own data for this project were augmented by those provided by many other researchers.) I concluded that stone-tipped projectile technology probably originated in equatorial Africa between 100,000-50,000 years ago and that it spread to Eurasia along with dispersing Homo sapiens populations. I think projectile weaponry probably originated in Subsaharan Africa initially as a “niche-broadening” technology, but that it was later co-opted into the social realm as an aid to coalition enforcement. This functional duality was probably a major factor in the persistence of projectile technology in Homo sapiens adaptations.

Various stone points from African Middle Stone Age contexts.

Tip cross-sectional area measurements (TCSA) for hafted North American ethnographic arrowheads, spearthrower dart tips, and experimental thrusting spear points compared to TCSA values for various samples of African Middle Stone Age points (from Shea 2006).

John J. Shea (in press) The Impact Of Projectile Weaponry On Late Pleistocene Hominin Evolution. In The Evolution of Hominid Diets, Edited by Jean-Jacques Hublin and Michael Richards. Leipzig, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

John J. Shea (2006) The Origins of Lithic Projectile Point Technology: Evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe, Journal of Archaeological Science 33(6): 823-846.

John J. Shea, Kyle Brown, and Zachary Davis (2002) Controlled Experiments with Middle Paleolithic Spear Points: Levallois Points. In Mathieu, James R. (ed.) 2002 Experimental Archaeology: Replicating Past Objects, Behaviors, and Processes, pp. 55-72. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1035 (Oxford)

John J. Shea, Zachary Davis, and Kyle Brown (2001) Experimental Tests of Middle Paleolithic Spear Points Using a Calibrated Crossbow. Journal of Archaeological Science 28 (8): 807-816.

John J. Shea (1998). Neandertal and early modern human behavioral variability: A regional-scale approach to the lithic evidence for hunting in the Levantine Mousterian. Current Anthropology 39: S45-S78.

John J. Shea (1997) Middle Paleolithic Spear Point Technology. in Heidi Knecht (ed.), Projectile Technologies: Archaeological and Ethnoarcheological Perspectives. Pp. 79-106. New York: Plenum Press.

John J. Shea (1995) Behavioral Factors Affecting the Production of Levallois Points in the Levantine Mousterian. In Harold L. Dibble and Ofer Bar-Yosef (eds.) The Definition and Interpretation of Levallois Technology. Pp. 279-292. Madison, WI: Prehistory Press.

John J. Shea (1993) Lithic Use-Wear Evidence for Hunting by Neandertals and Early Modern Humans from the Levantine Mousterian. In Gail Larsen-Peterkin, Harvey Bricker and Paul Mellars (eds.) Hunting Techniques and Animal Exploitation in the Later Pleistocene of Western Eurasia. PP. 189-198. Washington, D.C.: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 4.

John J. Shea (1988) Spear Points from the Middle Paleolithic of the Levant. Journal of Field Archaeology 15 (4): 441-456.

Neandertals and Homo sapiens in the East Mediterranean Levant.

During the course of my doctoral research on Levantine Mousterian stone tools, I became interested in the evolutionary relationship between Neandertals and early Homo sapiens in the East Mediterranean Levant. My reading of the evidence from Levantine and African sites suggested these hominins were rival species who competed with one another briefly and intensely for the same ecological niche. I argue that the so-called “transition” between Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods in the Levant was actually a “turnover” event in which African early Homo sapiens populations dispersed into the Levant, replacing indigenous Neandertal populations that had been decimated by abrupt climate change (namely, the H5 and H5a Heinrich events).

John J. Shea (2007) Behavioral Differences between Middle and Upper Paleolithic Homo Sapiens in the East Mediterranean Levant: The Roles of Intra-Specific Competition and Dispersal from Africa. Journal of Anthropological Research, accepted May 1, 2007.

John J. Shea (2007) The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Evolutionary Discontinuity in the Late Pleistocene Levant. In Rethinking the Human Revolution. Editors P. Mellars, C. Stringer, O. Bar-Yosef and K. Boyle. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monographs. Pp. 219-232.

John J. Shea and Ofer Bar-Yosef (2005) Who Were the Skhul/Qafzeh People? An Archaeological Perspective on Eurasia’s Earliest Modern Humans. Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society 35: 449-466.

John J. Shea (2006) The Middle Paleolithic of the Levant: Recursion and Convergence. In Erella Hovers and Steven Kuhn (eds) Transitions before the Transition: Evolution and Stability in the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age. New York: Kluwer Academics/Plenum. Pp. 189-212.

John J. Shea (2003) The Middle Paleolithic of the East Mediterranean Levant. Journal of World Prehistory 17(4):313-394.

John J. Shea. (2003) Neandertals, Competition, and the Origin of Modern Human Behavior in the Levant. Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (4): 173-187.

John J. Shea (2001) The Middle Paleolithic: Early Modern Humans and Neandertals in the Levant. Near Eastern Archaeology 64(1-2): 38-64.

Daniel E. Lieberman and John J. Shea (1994) Behavioral Differences between Archaic and Modern Humans in the Levantine Mousterian. American Anthropologist 96(2): 300-332.

Levantine Middle Paleolithic Stone tools from Tabun Cave, Israel.

Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Kibish Formation, Lower Omo Valley Ethiopia.

In 2000, I joined a project investigating geological, paleontological, and archaeological contexts associated with putatively early Homo sapiens fossils in the Kibish Formation, Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia. The Omo Kibish fossils had been discovered in 1967 by a team led by Richard Leakey and provisionally dated to the early Upper Pleistocene (40,000-130,000 BP), but their age and stratigraphic associations remained unresolved. Our project renewed excavations at KHS (the findspot of Omo 1), recovering human fossils that conjoined to those recovered three decades earlier by Leakey’s team. We also recovered rich lithic and faunal assemblages from this and two other sites, BNS and AHS. Single-crystal argon dates obtained from pumices in tuffs in the Kibish Formation date Omo 1/KHS (and the newly-discovered AHS hominins) to 195,000 BP, making these the oldest-dated fossils of Homo sapiens thus far known. The Omo Kibish archaeological assemblages are similar to ones known from elsewhere from around the same time period in East Africa (e.g., Gademotta/Kukuletti, Aduma in the Middle Awash, and near Ileret in East Turkana), suggesting they may be part of a regional adaptive complex within which Homo sapiens originated.

John J. Shea, John G. Fleagle, and Zelalem Assefa (in press) Context and Chronology of early Homo sapiens fossils from the Omo Kibish Formation, Ethiopia. In Rethinking the Human Revolution. Editors P. Mellars, C. Stringer, O. Bar-Yosef and K. Boyle. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monographs. Pp. 153-162.

John J. Shea (in press) The Middle Stone Age Archaeology of the Lower Omo Valley Kibish Formation: Excavations, Lithic Assemblages, and Inferred Patterns of Early Homo sapiens Behavior. In John Fleagle, Editor, Journal of Human Evolution Special Issue: Paleoanthropology of the Lower Omo Valley Kibish Formation.

Matthew L. Sisk and John J. Shea (in press) Intrasite Spatial Variation of the Omo Kibish MSA Assemblages: Artifact Refitting and Distribution Patterns. In John Fleagle, Editor, Journal of Human Evolution Special Issue: Paleoanthropology of the Lower Omo Valley Kibish Formation.

John Shea & Adam Jagich examining stratigraphy at AHS.

Stone points from the Kibish Formation.

Excavations at ‘Ubeidiya, an Early Pleistocene Site in the Jordan Valley, Israel.

During the 1990s, I was co-director of excavations at Ubeidiya, a 1.5 Million year-old archaeological-paleontological site in the Jordan Valley. My co-directors included Eitan Tchernov, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Claude Guerin (1992-1994) and Gerhard Bosinski (1997-1999). Other affiliated researchers included Martine Faure, Evelyne Debard, Sabine Gaudzinski, Miriam Belmaker, and Craig Feibel. Our excavations recovered a rich mammalian fauna in fine clay-silt deposits from the Lower Fluvial Member of the Ubeidiya formation. The Early Acheulian stone tool assemblages from these deposits are remarkably well preserved. Careful examination of these artifacts suggests to me that Homo erectus populations effortlessly shifted their stone tool technology between the production of large cutting tools (picks, handaxes, cleavers, etc.) and pebble-core reduction, largely in response to local situational variables (the geological substrate) and regional ecological factors (resource predictability). Since the untimely death of our colleague, Eitan Tchernov, I have been working with Bar-Yosef to complete the publication of our findings.

John J. Shea (2007) What Stone Tools Can (and Can't) Tell Us About Early Hominin Diets. In Peter Ungar (Ed.) Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pp. 213-229.

John J. Shea, (1999) Artifact abrasion, fluvial processes, and “Living Floors” at the Early Paleolithic site of ‘Ubeidiya (Jordan Valley, Israel). Geoarchaeology 14 (2): 191-207.

John J. Shea and Ofer Bar-Yosef (1998) Lithic Assemblages from the New (1988-1994) Excavations at ‘Ubeidiya: A Preliminary Report. Mitekufat HaEven: Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society. 28: 5-20.

Bar-Yosef, O., M. Chech, E. Debard, M. Faure, C. Guerin, John J. Shea, and E. Tchernov (1996) Oubéidiyeh, Nouvelles Données des Fouilles 1988-1994. Comptes Rendus de L'Académie des Sciences 332(II a): 709-712.

John Shea, Ofer Bar-Yosef, & Eitan Tchernov at Ubeidiya, 1994.

Boulders, fossils and stone tools comprising the “Living Floor” of Unit III-22a. (Note: the levels of this site are tilted off the horizontal plane by geological forces.)

INACTIVE/FINISHED RESEARCH PROJECTS

(Projects on which I am no longer working or writing.)

Stone Age Sites on the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea.

In 2005 Amanuel Beyin and I began a project surveying Stone Age sites on the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea. Previous researchers had noted the presence of stone tools in coral deposits near Abdur on the Buri Peninsula. Our work focused on terrestrial sites in the Gulf of Zula and elsewhere on the Buri Peninsula. Initial survey identified about a dozen localities, of which Beyin test-excavated three, Asfet, Gehelalo NW, and Misse East, for his doctoral dissertation research. We have published preliminary results of our surveys, but the definitive publication will be Beyin’s dissertation.

Amanuel Beyin and John Shea (2007) Evidence for Middle and Late Stone Age cultures on the Buri Peninsula and Gulf of Zula, Red Sea Coast of Eritrea. In Peter R. Schmidt, Matthew C. Curtis, and Zelalem Teka, eds., The Archaeology of Eritrea: Recent Advances. Asmara: Red Sea Press.

Amanuel Beyin and John J. Shea. (2007) Paleolithic sites on the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea: Preliminary results of a recent reconnaissance. Journal of Field Archaeology 32 (1): 1-16.

Middle Paleolithic of Northwest Jordan.

In 1997-1999, Patricia Crawford and I surveyed cave, rockshelter, and open-air sites in the Wadi Yabis and Wadi Kufrinja (Ajlun District), northwestern Jordan. We had hoped to find stratified Middle Paleolithic deposits like those known from the opposite side of the Jordan Rift Valley in the Galilee, but our search was not successful. Most of the cave/rockshelter sites had been disturbed by recent pastoralist activity. The most promising locality, an open-air site called “Ar Rasfa” (Hill of the Paving Stones) turned out to have undergone recent disturbance. Finds of ceramics in some of the deepest levels of the site suggested further excavations were not warranted.

John J. Shea and Patricia L. Crawford (2003) Middle Paleolithic Northwestern Jordan, 1999 Season: Investigations in Wadi Yabis and Wadi Kufrinja. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 47: 431-441.

John J. Shea (1999) Ar Rasfa, A Levantine Mousterian Site from Northwest Jordan: A Preliminary Report. Paléorient 24 (2): 71-78.

John J. Shea (1998) Ar Rasfa, A Stratified Middle Paleolithic Open-Air Site in Northwest Jordan: A Preliminary Report on the 1997 Excavations. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 42: 41-52.

Microwear Analysis of Levantine Mousterian Stone Tools.

My doctoral research (1985-1991) examined variation in the functions of Levantine Mousterian (Middle Paleolithic) stone tools from the sites of Kebara, Qafzeh, Tabun, and Hayonim (Israel), and Tor Faraj (Jordan). This study employed the “low-magnification” approach to microwear analysis pioneered by George Odell. Though, in theory, this method provided less detail about polishes and thus inferred worked materials than “higher magnification” approach developed by Lawrence Keeley. The countervailing advantage of this approach is that it allowed large numbers of stone tools to be scanned and analyzed relatively swiftly. (To this day, this remains one of the few microwear studies to create large, probabilistic samples of the kind that can legitimately be used to infer population parameters from sample statistics.) This research project found that Neandertals and early Homo sapiens used Levantine Mousterian stone tools for similar purposes, mostly woodworking, butchery, and (occasionally) as weapon armatures. This finding contradicted the popular hypothesis that Neandertals and Homo sapiens differed in the ways in which they used stone tools.

John J. Shea (in press) Microwear Analysis of the Lithic Assemblages associated with Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Qafzeh Cave Levels XV-XXIV. Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society.

John J. Shea (in press) Microwear Analysis of Mousterian Assemblages from Kebara Cave. In Ofer Bar-Yosef and L. Meignen (eds.) The Archaeology of Kebara Cave. Cambridge, MA: American School of Prehistoric Research.

John J. Shea (1995) Lithic Microwear Analysis of Tor Faraj Rockshelter. In Don Henry (ed.) Prehistoric Cultural Ecology and Evolution: Insights from Southern Jordan. Pp. 85-105. New York: Plenum Press.

John J. Shea (1992) Lithic microwear analysis in archaeology. Evolutionary Anthropology 1(4): 143-150.

John J. Shea 1991 Ph.D. Harvard University, Anthropology Department. Dissertation Title: The Behavioral Significance of Levantine Mousterian Industrial Variability. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.

John J. Shea (1989) Tool Use in the Levantine Mousterian of Kebara Cave, Mount Carmel. Mitekufat HaEven (Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society) 22: 15-30.

John J. Shea (1989) A Functional Study of the Lithic Industries Associated with Hominid Fossils in the Kebara and Qafzeh Caves, Israel. In Paul Mellars and Christopher Stringer (eds.) The Human Revolution: Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans, Vol. 1, pp. 611-625. Edinburgh University Press.

PUBLIC OUTREACH

I take an active role in educating the public about the importance of evolution. Videos of me making various Stone Age tools are currently in use in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I have also appeared in the following television documentaries:

2005 Neanderthal for BBC Horizon.

2001 Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang for PBS/WGBH (Boston).

2000 Secrets of the Stone Age for Granada Television.

1997 Bones of Contention for The Discovery Channel.

1997 The Last Neandertal for The Discovery Channel.

1996 Neandertals for the National Geographic Society/Channel.

1996 Searching for Man’s Origins for Sci-Trek/Discovery Channel.

1994 Walter Cronkite’s Ape-Man Arts and Entertainment Network/Granada Television.

PERSONAL STUFF

I was born and raised in Hamilton, Massachusetts. My interest in archaeology was ignited by early reading about ancient mythology (principally the Daulaires’ Book of Greek Myths (1962) and by F. Clark Howell’s book Early Man (1968). In 1978 I attended Boston University, majoring in archaeology and anthropology, under the supervision of the African prehistorian, Creighton Gabel. Following graduation (1982), I worked in Belize as a lithics analyst for Richard S. (“Scotty”) MacNeish. There, I learned microwear and other aspects of lithic analysis from George Odell. I attended Harvard University between 1984-1991, studying Paleolithic archaeology first with Glynn Isaac and later with Ofer Bar-Yosef. Since earning my doctoral degree, I have held a professorship in the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook University.

My wife, Patricia Crawford, is a paleoethnobotanist who has worked in Egypt and Jordan, and with me at Ubeidiya. She and I are the proud “parents” of Boudicca and Bianca (aka the “Devilbunnies”) who constantly find new things to gnaw around the house. When time allows, Pat and I enjoy hiking, cycling, skiing, camping and wildlife observation.

Camping on the San Juan River, Utah.

Boudicca and Bianca taste-testing our Jordanian Pillowcases

WEBPAGE DESIGN

I designed and maintain this website myself. The information here is current as of October 27, 2007. Please request permission before using images shown here for any commercial or scientific purpose.