Danielle Walczak
Staff Writer
A University of Maine graduate and faculty associate of archaeology’s interdisciplinary research on the late Ice Age early human civilizations in the Peruvian Andes won an international prize.
Kurt Rademaker, associate faculty member of the Climate Change Institute, won the Tübingen Research Prize for Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology. The German University awards the top doctoral student internationally from a mix of subject areas including ecology and archeology.
By studying high-elevation sites in Peru, Rademaker’s work focuses on the development of human adaptations and interactions with their environments, looking at the reciprocal changes between humans and their environments.
His major finding, after about 10 years of research, is there was Peruvian life at 14,700 feet elevation around 12,000 years ago. Living in theses conditions is challenging business but not impossible. For Rademaker, his work is multi-faceted.
“It’s good to know how we got where we are now; we’re interested in our own history,” Rademaker said. “The other part of it that has relevance for today is that humans have impacted environments all over the world in ways that are profound. The history of these impacts goes back very far into the past. When we want to understand an environment and how to manage it well we have to understand the history of the environment. That includes how humans have impacted it through time.”
Despite a “distorted” perception of what life was like in the Andes, Rademaker and others collaborated to help clarify their understanding of this land before he began his research. The human civilizations were located on high plateau lands above a deep valley surrounded by ice cap-covered volcanoes. The temperatures were about 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than they are today, but not unbearable.
Life in the Andes was more bountiful than Rademaker first believed. The plateau lands were grassy, filled with wetlands and bogs, as well as camelids, wild descendants of llamas and alpacas.
“It’s like the Serengeti up there,” Rademaker said.
There were all the essentials for life: food, shelter in the form of rock caves, volcanic glass for tools and plenty of plants, perfect for fire-burning.
“Finding sites [in the Andes] in hindsight is not all that unexpected, considering what’s there. But it’s been there for such a long time it was assumed that at such a high altitude and being so cold at the end of the last Ice Age, it would be impossible to live there. What we found is that’s just not true,” Rademaker said, calling the residents of the area “some of the toughest people” he’s ever met.
Rademaker’s work is multidisciplinary, gathering researchers from as far as Canada and Germany and UMaine graduates and students. Each member brings a different piece to the puzzle. This interdisciplinary approach is something Rademaker said he learned from his work with the Climate Change Institute, which gave him the research “problem of a lifetime to work on” in the one place he’s always wanted to study. This initial project brought him to Peru, which jump-started his award-winning doctoral research.
“I think that I think that way because of coming through the Climate Change Institute, where you’re trained to be multidisciplinary and to think about different dimensions of a system and I think that training is one of the most valuable things we have at the University of Maine. A lot of our departments at Maine are interdisciplinary and we do that really well,” Rademaker said.
Tübingen University has a prestigious archaeology program working on subjects ranging from Paleolithic sites in Europe to sequencing the Neanderthal genome. Rademaker never thought he’d even win the Tübingen prize.
“They’re doing serious cutting-edge work and a nod from them in my direction for my work is so rewarding. These people are doing such amazing work,” Rademaker said. “It’s just so encouraging to have the work I did recognized by a program like that.”
With an extra push of reinforcement, Rademaker’s research has opened many new questions, which draw him back to Peru and at-large South America.
“There’s a whole continent full of questions that need answering,” he said.
During different archaeological digs, Rademaker and his team found tools made not of the volcanic glass typical of that location but of stone cobbles which are only found at lower elevations.
Rademaker said this led him to think that these civilizations may have lived in more than one place, moving to high or low elevation throughout their lives based on season or starting in the lowlands and bringing their tools with them to the plateaus as they moved.
The “nature of this connection” will, according to Rademaker, tell the story of how South America was first settled.
From this data Rademaker can glean information about the duration of human settlements in this area. Have there always been humans and water? Have there been dry spells forcing humans to live elsewhere?
The answers to these questions will help current residents in the high Andes deal with issues like melting ice caps and climate change, happening right before their eyes, questioning their way of life. For Rademaker this is a true boon to archeology.
“That makes archeology really fun — studying the old stuff — for sure. It’s like puzzles that you’re working out and people and that’s great,” Rademaker said. “But when that knowledge can also be directly useful to living people, not just information that’s interesting but can actually help them in their lives, that’s a bonus.”