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April Nowell

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Canadian archaeologist (born 1969)
April Nowell
Born1969 Edit this on Wikidata
Alma mater
OccupationUniversity teacher, anthropologist, archaeologist, scientist Edit this on Wikidata
Employer

April Nowell (born 1969) is a Paleolithic archaeologist, Professor of Anthropology and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research team works on international projects in areas including Jordan, Australia, France, and South Africa.

Nowell's areas of study include Neanderthal lifeways; the archaeology of childhood; the origins of art, symbol use, and language; the development of human cognition and behavior; and the historical development of archaeological theories. Her book Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021) won the 2023 European Archaeological Association Book Prize.

Early life and education

Nowell grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She received a BA from McGill University and did her first field work in Old Montreal. She later worked on sites in Belize, the Canadian Arctic, Ontario, France and Spain.

Nowell earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation examined The archaeology of mind: Standardization and symmetry in lithics and their implications for the study of the evolution of the human mind. (2000).

Career

Nowell is a Professor of Anthropology and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. Nowell leads an international research team and collaborates on multiple projects worldwide. Her areas of study include Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan, cave art in Australia and France, and ostrich eggshell beads in South Africa.

Nowell has challenged accepted beliefs about hominin artworks, suggesting that not only Homo sapiens but also Neanderthals and Denisovans may have created cave art much earlier than previously believed. In a 2011 study, Nowell and Genevieve von Petzinger unraveled the chain of attributions through which experts on cave art had dated artworks to specific ages. They found that very few artworks had been independently dated based on physical evidence using techniques like radiocarbon dating. More often, estimates of dates of one artwork were based on others, resulting in circular chains of attribution.

Negative hand, Caves of Gargas, France

Nowell and von Petzinger have also created a database of symbols from more than 200 cave walls in France and Spain, such as Rouffignac, Chauvet and Lascaux. The symbols tended to be ignored next to the caves' vibrant paintings of animals. Documenting their location, time, and relationship to other markings led to the identification of twenty-six specific repeated signs. These included basic shapes like triangles, squares, full circles, semicircles, open angles, crosses and grouped dots, and more complex drawings of negative hands, finger flutings, branch-like penniforms, and hut-like tectiforms. Dating suggests that some signs originally appeared as truncated images of animals, and eventually became symbolic representations of concepts. Surprisingly, symbols often appeared in specific clusters, which were repeated in different caves, such as the combination of a negative hand with finger fluting. Nowell has cautioned: "This is not writing as we know it or language as we understand it. However, in these caves we are looking at the patterning of symbols" substantially predating the first occurrence of writing by 25,000 years.

In Jordan, Nowell's team has worked at the Azraq Basin, an area 100 kilometres (62 mi) east of Amman that was once a wetland oasis, but is now a desert. They have recovered 10,000 well-preserved Middle Pleistocene stone tools, some of which they have examined for traces of protein residue using crossed immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP). In 2016, they identified 17 of the stone tools as having identifiable traces of blood: the earliest that have been found. They showed that at least 250,000 years ago, early humans caught and ate animals ranging from duck to rhinoceros. Time Magazine listed the blood residue work among its top 100 discoveries.

Examples of ostrich eggshell beads found in archaeological contexts in Africa.

In South Africa, Nowell has worked with Benjamin Collins and others on the study of both finished ostrich eggshell beads and OES fragments. Studying fragments has enabled researchers to examine patterns of manufacture and trading of beads among social groups through time. At Grassridge Rockshelter in the Eastern Cape, they have identified both ostrich eggshell beads at all stages of manufacture, and marine shell beads. Since Grassridge is at least 200 kilometres (120 mi) from the coast, this supports the idea that extensive social networks existed during the southern Africa Holocene.

In her examinations of archaeological evidence and visual material culture, Nowell emphasizes the importance of social interaction within communities. She has documented the lives of children, who were present alongside adults during many activities, as shown by evidence from Palaeolithic caves in Europe. Examinations of the archaeological record have typically studied adults rather than children. Nowell's work has challenged the invisibility of children in the Paleolithic archaeological record and filled a significant gap in physical and behavioral anthropology.

Nowell's book Growing Up in the Ice Age has been described as both "illuminating and engaging" and "carefully written and impeccably researched". Nowell's examination of Plio-Pleistocene childhood was awarded the 2023 European Archaeological Association Book Prize. The Association stated: "A socially inclusive emphasis on dynamic and diverse childhoods, in which children are seen to have been active social and economic agents, is successfully combined with a wider evolutionary perspective, showing how childcare and socialisation affected the longer trajectory of the human species."

Nowell appears in the NOVA series Ancient Earth (episode 5) and the CBC documentary Little Sapiens.

Awards and honors

  • 2023, Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow, University of Victoria, "given to an established researcher in recognition of outstanding, internationally recognized contributions to scholarship in their area of expertise".
  • 2023, European Archaeological Association Book Prize, for Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021)

Selected publications

Books

Papers

This section may contain excessive or irrelevant examples. Please help improve the article by adding descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. (December 2023)

References

  1. Archaeology of the Night by Nancy Gonlin, April Nowell - Ebook. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  2. ^ "Smithsonian Journeys Experts: April Nowell". Smithsonian Journeys. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  3. ^ Vernimmen, Tim (28 November 2023). "Neanderthals: More knowable now than ever". Knowable Magazine. doi:10.1146/knowable-112823-4. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  4. "April Nowell". University of Victoria, Canada. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  5. ^ "Book Prize 2023 Winner". European Association of Archaeologists. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  6. ^ Wright, Michelle (2016). "Stone Age Kitchenware" (PDF). UVic Torch. pp. 22–25.
  7. ^ Wilkins, Jayne (10 July 2020). "Learner-driven innovation in the stone tool technology of early Homo sapiens". Evolutionary Human Sciences. 2: e40. doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.40. ISSN 2513-843X. PMC 10427492. PMID 37588390.
  8. Marshall, Michael (15 July 2022). "When did humans start making art and were Neanderthals artists too?". New Scientist.
  9. ^ McKie, Robin (11 March 2012). "Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?". The Observer.
  10. Ravilious, Kate (17 February 2010). "The writing on the cave wall". New Scientist. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  11. Sharpe, Tara (August 30, 2016). "Paleolithic stones snag 21st-century attention". University of Victoria. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  12. Dolski, Megan (August 8, 2016). "Animal residue on ancient stone tools shines light on early humans". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2023-12-20.
  13. Kluger, Jeffrey (August 8, 2016). "Humans First Used Tools to Eat Meat 250,000 Years Ago. Here's What the Discovery Means". Time. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  14. "Archaeologists make world-first discovery about Stone Age tools in Jordan". Jordan Times. 9 August 2016.
  15. Hatton, Amy; Collins, Benjamin; Schoville, Benjamin J.; Wilkins, Jayne (1 June 2022). "Ostrich eggshell beads from Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter, southern Kalahari, and the implications for understanding social networks during Marine Isotope Stage 2". PLOS ONE. 17 (6): e0268943. Bibcode:2022PLoSO..1768943H. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0268943. hdl:10072/415809. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 9159631. PMID 35648787.
  16. "Guest Blog: Benjamin Collins". Wenner-Gren Foundation. 24 September 2018. Retrieved 20 December 2023.
  17. ^ Tague, Gregory F. (4 May 2022). "Book review of Growing Up in the Ice Age". PaleoAnthropology. 2022 (1): 168–170. doi:10.48738/2022.iss1.92. ISSN 1545-0031. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  18. Davidson, Iain (1 September 2020). "Marks, Pictures and Art: Their Contribution to Revolutions in Communication". Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 27 (3): 745–770. doi:10.1007/s10816-020-09472-9. ISSN 1573-7764. S2CID 254596313.
  19. Nowell, April (15 October 2015). "Learning to See and Seeing to Learn: Children, Communities of Practice and Pleistocene Visual Cultures". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 25 (4): 889–899. doi:10.1017/S0959774315000360. S2CID 164590203.
  20. Nowell, April (13 February 2023). "What was it like to grow up in the last Ice Age? | Aeon Essays". Aeon.
  21. ^ Kamp, Kathryn (October 2022). "Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children. April Nowell. 2021. Oxbow Books, Oxford. vii + 384 pp. $55.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-178925-294-1". American Antiquity. 87 (4): 851–852. doi:10.1017/aaq.2022.20. ISSN 0002-7316. S2CID 248276001.
  22. "Dr. Nowell - Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow award - University of Victoria". University of Victoria. April 3, 2023. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  23. "Social Sciences Lansdowne Awards: Amy Verdun and Natalie Ban". University of Victoria. February 9, 2018.
  24. Eren, Metin I. (2011). "Nowell, A. and I. Davidson (eds.) -- Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition". PaleoAnthropology. 2011: 72–73. ISSN 1545-0031.
  25. Beaune, Sophie A. de (February 2011). "Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition, edited by April Nowell & Iain Davidson, 2010. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado. ISBN 978-1-6073-2030-2 hardback £58.50 & US$65.00; 320 pp; 4 b/w photos, 29 figs., 6 tables". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 21 (1): 143–145. doi:10.1017/S0959774311000126. ISSN 1474-0540. S2CID 163115045.
  26. Hutson, Scott R.; Gonlin, Nancy; Nowell, April (2018). "Review of Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World, Gonlin, Nancy; Nowell, April". American Antiquity. 83 (4): 757–758. doi:10.1017/aaq.2018.42. ISSN 0002-7316. JSTOR 26583241. S2CID 165891048.
  27. Emerson, Thomas E. (1 April 2020). "Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World". American Journal of Archaeology. doi:10.3764/ajaonline1242.Emerson.
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