Sitting on a Beach: Archaeologist Albert Ammerman

WHEN YOUR OPTIONS ARE a seat on the ground or, well, a seat on the ground, then a natural chair formed from petrified sand dunes suddenly sounds pretty comfortable.

At least it did 12,000 years ago.

When Albert Ammerman — a seasoned archaeologist and professor of humanities at Colgate University — traveled to Cyprus in 2003 to search for evidence of early seafaring peoples, his peers thought that he was making a bad career move. Prior excavations hadn't turned up much of anything.

"A lot of people thought I was crazy. It was kind of risky to go out and do something that nobody else could do," said the professor. "However, we had the good fortune to look in the right place."

The right place turned out to be Cyprus' aeolionite beaches — desolate stretches of unforgiving petrified sand dunes.

"Nobody ever before had taken the slightest interest in looking at this formation along the coast. It looks like a moonscape," Ammerman said. "But as we worked on it, we found it quite easy to see the sites."

What Ammerman and his team discovered were primitive stone tools — the remnants of campsites used by the Mediterranean's earliest sea-going peoples. They found that up to 12,000 years ago primitive coastal peoples were traveling to Cyprus by boat for seasonal stays of a few weeks at a time to search for food.

Ammerman will discuss these findings at the Smithsonian on April 16 in a lecture titled "The First Argonauts: Sailing the Mediterranean at the End of the Last Ice Age."

The archeologist's great intuition in locating the sites was to look for the places that early people wanted to sit down.

"This land surface has what we call 'stone-age furniture,'" Ammerman said. "The people at the time were coastal foragers. They knew how to take advantage of the rock. It was like an early version of the Motel 6."

However, a stone-age trip to Cyprus was hardly an idyllic getaway.

"This was 11- to 12-thousand years ago," said Ammerman. "People think about 'The Odyssey' and Homer, but that was the Bronze Age, only 5,000 years ago. Instead we're going to this time called the Younger Dryas — a cold snap at the end of the last ice age. Times were tough. The colder temperatures made hunter-gatherers more mobile. They started going to sea to solve their problems."

Ammerman also realized that his crew was seeing only half of the picture.

"The other thing was that if we go back 12,000 years ago, the sea level was a lot lower," he said. "What we were finding was only the tip of the iceberg. It was likely that a lot of the site is way out there in the water because the sea level was 50 meters lower. Last summer, in July, I decided that we should take the plunge."

He assembled a team of divers to excavate the seabed, which yielded even more stone tools. A filmmaker went along with the crew and shot a 15-minute underwater documentary that Ammerman will screen at the lecture.

Surprisingly, even though they were at the bottom of the ocean for 12,000 years, the tools weren't that hard to find once the archaeologists new where to look.

"They're just sort of sitting there," Ammerman said. "You kind of have to fan your hand over it and then you can see them — the pieces become visible."

» S. Dillon Ripley Center, Education Center, 1100 Jefferson Dr. SW; Wed., 6:45-9 p.m., $40. 202-357-3030. (Smithsonian)

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko
Photos courtesy Smithsonian Resident Associates & Albert Ammerman