Ancient Impressions

In the 19th century, a British colonial administrator in India, Sir William Herschel, stumbled onto the technique of fingerprinting, which has since become an indispensable aid to police in hunting down criminals. Now a young Swedish professor at the University of Goeteborg contends that fingerprinting offers a promising tool for his own particular pursuit: archaeology.

Something of a crime buff himself, Archaeologist Paul Astroem made his unusual proposal at a recent colloquium in Athens. The assembled scholars were heatedly debating one of their favorite questions: When did the Indo-European people who became the classical Greeks invade the area and subdue the aboriginal populations? One school argues that it was as early as 5000 B.C.; another sets the date as late as 1200 B.C.

In the absence of any written evidence dating back so far in time, Astroem suggested, the archaeologists should begin collecting fingerprints from ancient pottery fragments and clay tablets. Astroem's theory is based on the possibility--under increasing study by modern fingerprint experts--that individual races, nations, tribes display a distinctive overall pattern in the distribution of arches, loops and whorls. If an archaeologist came upon a sudden break in the fingerprint patterns of an ancient population, Astroem argued, he could logically assume that it had been displaced or absorbed by invaders.

"Clear fingerprints impressed in the clay of ancient pots are rare," he conceded. Ancient potters, like modern, were at pains to smooth away any trace of their own hands. But in concealed places, on the underside of handles or inside spouts, where the potter gave the clay a last shaping touch, telltale prints can sometimes be found.

To support his case for archaeological fingerprinting, Astroem and a friend, Sven Eriksson, chief of the Swedish police's fingerprint department, collected some 200 impressions from ancient pottery found in Greece and Cyprus. The Mycenaean fingerprints had a distribution of 20% arches, 65% loops, 15% whorls, while those from Minoan Crete, a civilization some 1,000 years older, show a contrasting distribution of 4%, 42%, 54%. Their sampling was admittedly too small to suggest any major answer to perennial disputes. "My purpose," Astroem explained, "is to maintain that fingerprints can be used in defining a population or a race. If we can establish sets of fingerprints from prehistoric times down to classical Greece, we shall also be able to detect when new peoples appear and, perhaps, when the Indo-Europeans first arrived in Greece."

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