Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2016 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Although today it stands in ruins, Glastonbury Abbey, in Somerset, England, is still a powerfully evocative place, shrouded in history, religion, and mythology. One story claims that Joseph of Arimathea, legendary keeper of the Holy Grail, founded the first Christian church in Britain at Glastonbury shortly after the death of Christ. Another holds that in 1191, monks from the abbey unearthed a hollowed-out log containing two bodies and an inscribed cross that read: “Here lies buried King Arthur and his wife Guinevere.” The traditions and myths surrounding Glastonbury Abbey are perhaps key among the reasons it developed into one of the most important—and wealthiest—monasteries in Europe. But skeptics have long decried these stories as inventions by medieval monks to fill the abbey’s coffers, especially after a massive fire destroyed the…

Dutch archaeologists have examined archaeological, historical, and geochemical data to pinpoint the site of a catastrophic battle between Julius Caesar and two Germanic tribes, the Tencteri and Usipetes. According to the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Caesar’s firsthand account of the campaign, the two tribes crossed the Rhine River in 55 B.C. and petitioned Caesar to allow them to settle in Gaul. After negotiations collapsed and the Germans attacked his cavalry, Caesar directed his entire army of eight legions against the German camp, killing 150,000 to 200,000 men, women, and children. The recent study analyzed a deposit of metal artifacts and human skeletal remains that was retrieved during dredging of the Meuse River near the village of Kessel in the Netherlands. The mass of first-century B.C. weaponry, including swords, spearheads, and…

THE SCENE MIGHT HAVE been lifted from the pages of a Scandinavian crime novel: Under a steely sky, a half-dozen skeletons emerge from the cold, wet earth. A strip of yellow and blue tape, fluttering in the wind blowing in from the Baltic Sea, holds back curious onlookers. Portable fences, the kind that go up around construction sites, form a protective ring-within-a-ring around the scene. Yellow plastic stakes mark the spots where bodies, some with clear evidence of brutal blows to the head with an ax or other edged weapon, have already been found. Slowly, trowelful by trowelful, a 12-person team of investigators is excavating the scene of a gruesome mass murder on Öland, an island several miles off the coast of Sweden. In the last five years, they’ve found…

SOMETIME IN THE EIGHTH century, a monk at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was preparing to transcribe a book of the Bible in Arabic and needed fresh parchment. New parchment was an expensive commodity at the time and was difficult to obtain, especially for a humble monk copyist living in a remote desert monastery. Luckily for him, the venerable religious community had a massive library that included books that were no longer in use. These manuscripts, some written in extinct languages, or thought to be unimportant, were valued only for their potential as sources of recycled parchment. No one in the monastery would have thought twice, for instance, when, while searching for writing material, the monk plucked out of the collection an ancient Greek text that had gone…

As with many archaeological sites, the Côa Valley in northeastern Portugal came to the attention of authorities because of a dam. An energy company commissioned an archaeological survey prior to beginning construction, which led to the discovery of one of Europe’s largest open-air “museums” of Paleolithic rock art. “Petroglyphs can’t swim,” stated a campaign to protect the works. These efforts helped stop the building of the dam and ensured the survival of the Côa Valley’s heritage. UNESCO describes it as “an outstanding example of the sudden flowering of creative genius at the dawn of human cultural development.” The Côa Valley petroglyphs are comparable to the famous cave art found in other parts of Europe, says archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona. The quantity of art in the valley…

From the iron bands that signified citizenship to those bearing a state seal and worn by the emperor, rings were the most common piece of jewelry for both men and women in the ancient Roman world. A metal detectorist in Tangley, Hampshire, in southern England, has uncovered a late Roman example dating to the fourth century A.D., fashioned of gold and an unusual type of onyx called nicolo. The ring depicts the god Cupid, his left arm resting on a column and his right arm holding a torch, which he will use to test Psyche (in the guise of a butterfly), in an allegory of love overcoming death. In the absence of the context that comes with a complete archaeological site, it is unknown who might have worn the relatively…

A team of archaeologists and geologists excavating two ancient quarries in the Presili Hills of west Wales has confirmed that these sites are the sources of the 43 “bluestones” erected at Stonehenge. Weighing on average between one and two tons, these igneous and volcanic rocks were transported to Stonehenge sometime around 3000 B.C. But radiocarbon dating of charcoal discovered at quarry-related camps shows that Neolithic workers were active at the two sites some 300 to 500 years before the earliest installation of bluestones at Stonehenge. This suggests that the megaliths may have been quarried and erected in the immediate area long before they were transported to Stonehenge. “We suspect that there is a dismantled stone circle monument somewhere in the area between the quarries,” says University College London archaeologist Mike…

A large portion of an eighteenth-century ship that measured around 80 feet long was recently discovered on the site of a planned hotel near the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. The vessel appears to have been scuttled between 1775 and 1798 in what were then mud flats, where it served “as sort of a prebuilt framework to hold soil that was being deposited to make new land,” says Boyd Sipe, manager of Thunderbird Archeology, the firm that conducted the survey. Based on its size and evidence that its hull timbers had contact with salt water, Sipe says the ship was most likely a two-masted oceangoing heavy cargo or military craft. The timbers were particularly well preserved because, once buried, they were sealed off from oxygen and were not disturbed despite…

Walk into any archaeologist’s laboratory and you’re likely to see bags of broken pottery. Walk into Bárbara Arroyo’s laboratory in a warehouse on the edge of the ruins of Kaminaljuyú in Guatemala City and you’ll find bags containing millions of pottery sherds, stacked almost to the ceiling. Millions more sit in the vaults of the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology a few miles away. Outside Arroyo’s laboratory, she and her team have dumped thousands upon thousands more ancient ceramic scraps into a large hole. “They can’t take any more at the museum,” she says with a shrug, gesturing out a window at the overflowing pit. Long before archaeologists came to this area, visitors who had seen ancient Kaminaljuyú’s pyramids and platforms wondered what it had once been. In 1893,…

The first alphabetic writing system was created in the Levant and Sinai Peninsula sometime in the second millennium B.C., probably between 1850 and 1700 B.C., by adapting Egyptian hieroglyphs—a writing system expressing both concept and sound—to represent only sound. This Proto-Sinaitic alphabet is the ancestor of many of the writing systems that developed across the world. Until now, the earliest known alphabet tables, called abecedaries, have been found on cuneiform tablets from Ugarit, in what is now Syria, dating to the thirteenth century B.C. But while studying an undeciphered ostracon found in a tomb at Luxor, Egyptologist Ben Haring of the University of Leiden discovered an abecedary that predates those tablets by two centuries, making it the oldest example ever found. The order of the symbols is not the “ABC”…

Frenzied development in San Francisco is introducing the city’s real estate and tech booms to its industrial and mercantile history. The $1.6 billion Central Subway project, which will connect Chinatown and the booming South of Market district by light rail, unearthed the latest finds: 10 late nineteenth-century industrial sewing machines, and pieces of several more, from what is thought to have been a basement room in Chinatown. The building, at 1018 Stockton Street, was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, along with the rest of the city’s original Chinatown, and archaeological remains of the neighborhood are vanishingly rare, according to Adrian Praetzellis, an archaeologist at Sonoma State University. It is hoped that archives can help connect these ornate machines with the names of the men who might have used them.…

Archaeologists excavating an Inca storehouse at the site of Inkawasi on Peru’s south coast have unearthed 34 khipus, the knotted-string devices once used by the Andean people for keeping records. Some khipus encode purely numerical data, while others contain deeper forms of information, such as records of historical events—but these remain undeciphered. Many of the Inkawasi khipus were found with or covered by the remains of produce, such as peanuts, black beans, and chili peppers, and it’s likely they were used to keep track of those crops when they were brought to storage. Analysis of the khipus shows that some subtract a fixed value from tallies at regular intervals, and could possibly represent a state tax. Harvard archaeologist Gary Urton, who has studied the Inkawaski khipus, is hopeful that understanding…

ALASKA: Ships’ captains have always relied on experience and intuition to keep cargo, passengers, and crew safe. But sometimes the sea is inscrutable, such as in 1871, when the captains of 33 whaling ships counted on a wind shift to drive ice out to sea. The wind refused, and the fleet was destroyed by pack ice in just weeks, stranding more than 1,200 people—all of whom were rescued. Maritime archaeologists have now found the remains of two of those ships, in part because climate change means less ice and more access to Arctic wreck sites. NEW MEXICO: The “great houses” built by Puebloans in Chaco Canyon may appear, at first glance, to be made of stone alone, but wood was just as important a building material. Using a technique called…

SITUATED HIGH IN THE northern reaches of the Peruvian Andes, Pacopampa was a major ceremonial center established around 1200 b.c. The temple complex there consisted of a series of ascending terraces, with the uppermost section believed to have been the most sacred and exclusive. It was at this level that a team of archaeologists from Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology and Peru’s San Marcos University recently uncovered a tomb containing the remains of two people who lived around 600 b.c. The goods buried with them show that they were important members of their society, says the team’s leader, Yuji Seki of Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology. Indeed, they may have been regarded as being powerful both in the earthly realm and beyond. One of the individuals was buried with a…

DUNLUCE CASTLE NEVER FAILS to impress as it comes into view for drivers along the northern Antrim Coast Road. The ruined medieval building perches in dramatic isolation on a basalt outcrop that extends into the chilly North Atlantic, and 100-foot cliffs drop steeply all the way around the castle. It is reachable only via a footbridge over a 20-foot-wide chasm and is one of the most iconic—and supremely defensible—locations in Northern Ireland. It is easy to see why its builders were drawn to the site in the fourteenth century, a period rife with intrigue, violence, and rebellion. Any potential attackers would have had a difficult time indeed reaching the castle. While the castle today appears remote and secluded in the coastal countryside, new discoveries are indicating this wasn’t always the…