Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2015 i ARCHAEOLOGY

According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Augustus boasted that he had found Rome a city of mudbrick and left it a city of marble: “Marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam accepisset,” in his words. It has become one of the first emperor’s better known quotes, and has seemingly been corroborated by historical and archaeological evidence. The Forum of Augustus, the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, the Theater of Marcellus, the Baths of Agrippa, and the Ara Pacis are just some of the religious buildings, monuments, and infrastructure that were completed under his reign. But just how accurate was his declaration that he transformed Rome into a city of marble? A recent project led by Diane Favro, of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),…

Tom Lucking, a first-year university student and amateur metal detector-ist in Norfolk, England, recently discovered one of the highest quality examples of Anglo-Saxon jewelry ever unearthed. “I’d been attempting to discover more about the area,” says Lucking, “but after I found a copper-alloy bowl, I called in professionals to excavate properly” Lucking, it turns out, had located the mid-seventh-century A.D. grave of a high-status Anglo-Saxon woman. Her body was surrounded by grave goods, including gold and silver jewelry the most notable piece of which is a three-inch-wide pendant inlaid with more than 400 red garnets, some cut to create an interwoven animal motif.…

Archaeologists working outside Trieste, Italy, have discovered what may be the oldest surviving Roman fortification system. An interdisciplinary study used ground-penetrating radar, lidar, and archaeological survey to reveal three Roman forts—one large central camp and two minor outposts—that are the only Roman camps ever identified on Italian soil. The largest of the three, San Rocco, was strategically located across 32 acres of land, with outer and inner networks of ramparts. Dating to the beginning of the second century B.C., the camp predates the previous earliest known examples of Roman encampments, in Iberia. The fort was likely built to support Rome’s conquest of the Istrian Peninsula in 178–177 B.C., and would have been an essential resource in helping Rome secure its unstable borders against the native Celtic population. “These forts are…

More than 100 years ago, eight eagle talons were excavated from a famous Neanderthal site called Krapina, and subsequently left in a drawer at the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb. Davorka Radovčic recently took over as curator, and she discovered the talons while reexamining the museum’s collections. She noticed several deep cut marks and evidence that the talons had been strung together as a necklace. The talons have been dated to about 130,000 years ago, predating the arrival of Homo sapiens in the area by about 50,000 years. The talon necklace is now thought to be the earliest known symbolic Neanderthal artifact.…

The role of climate change in human and cultural evolution is now, more than ever before, becoming clear. Refined techniques for analysis of ice cores, lake sediments, deep-sea cores, and plant remains are allowing archaeologists to document climate change, to date specific climate events with precision, and to correlate them with cultural changes. Human physical and cultural evolution through the last two million years, during the Pleistocene Epoch and into the Holocene, took place in the context of at least 20 cycles of advancing and retreating glaciers. Humans learned to adapt to climate change, and fluctuations in climate likely influenced human evolution. Successive episodes of warming and cooling are seen as setting the conditions for the peopling of Eurasia and Australasia from Africa. Lower sea levels during the Last Glacial…

Almost all of the Roman town of Carnuntum, 25 miles east of Vienna, Austria, is preserved under fields and vineyards. The town’s history began in A.D. 40, when Roman soldiers of the Legio XV Appollinaris established a fortress on a steep cliff above the Danube. The fort controlled the eastern border of the empire and had access to the Amber Road, an ancient trade route connecting the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Within a few decades, Carnuntum had become the capital of the Roman province of Upper Pannonia, with a population of 50,000, including soldiers’ families, veterans, and merchants, as well as wealthy Roman citizens who founded another town west of military territory. Amid constant political threats, economic stress, and the impact of a major earthquake, the fort was abandoned in A.D. 433.…

A new dating technique is making it easier for paleoanthropologists to study the human evolutionary record by making it possible to date a wider range of stones and sediments. A team of scientists, including Darryl Granger of Purdue University, has looked to aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, isotopes that are created when rocks are out in the open, exposed to cosmic rays. Once the rocks are buried, the isotopes no longer form, and then begin to decay at known rates. Ultrasensitive instruments that can measure the tiny amounts of these isotopes can tell scientists how long a rock has been underground. Granger used this technique on quartz crystals from South Africa’s Sterkfontein Cave that surrounded the skeletal remains of an early hominin dubbed “Little Foot,” formally known as Australopithecus prometheus. Granger dated…

Several mass graves—one of which includes the remains of at least 150 bodies—have been discovered beneath a Paris supermarket located just a mile from Notre Dame Cathedral. The French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) unearthed the graves in advance of an expansion of the supermarket’s basement. Based on the largest grave’s placement among other underground features, archaeologists believe it dates to between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The people in the grave, men and women of all ages as well as children, appear to have been the victims of a fierce epidemic, most likely plague. The bodies were buried snugly, with children nestled into spaces between adults, says Mark Guillon, a physical anthropologist with INRAP Paris and the French National Center for Scientific Research in Bordeaux. A hospital…

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A Happy Childhood I so enjoyed “The Minoans of Crete” (May/June 2105) and the discussion of the recent excavations at Gournia. The article was a wonderful blend of history and current discoveries, and fooded me with memories of my childhood. In 1970, my father, an attorney in Cleveland, created a self-imposed sabbatical and we sailed to Greece. We spent a year living in nearby Agios Nikolaos, complete with donkey, Eleni. We used to scamper over the ruins of Gournia and hike the goat trails to the site of Vrokastro—I swear we were the only ones in 1970 who knew Vrokastro was there. My experiences led me to major in classics at Oberlin and return to Greece after school to become an archaeological illustrator. I worked with C.K. Williams in Corinth…

Powerful empires throughout history have exploited precious resources, but this extraction can take a toll on the environment. Researchers have recently discovered two examples of imperial mining efforts—separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles—that left behind pollution that can still be measured today. When the Mongols conquered China and founded the Yuan Dynasty (A.D. 1271–1368), they established an ambitious silver mining operation near Lake Erhai in Yunnan Province. Production grew rapidly, and by 1328 almost half of the national tax revenue came from silver mined and processed there. Once ore containing silver was mined, it was heated to release impurities such as lead. A recent analysis of sediment cores from Lake Erhai found that lead pollution spiked during the Yuan Dynasty, peaking at three to four times the…

In southern Alberta, University of Lethbridge archaeologist Shawn Bubel and her team were excavating a bison kill site dating to 500 B.C. when they encountered something bizarre. Beneath the remains of at least 68 butchered bison, prehistoric hunters had pressed collections of bison bones deep into the earth. “I had my students dig below the bone bed, not expecting to find anything,” says Bubel. “Then we started to see bones shoved down into clay.” Eventually the team unearthed eight of these enigmatic bone structures, which dated to the same time as the bone bed above them. Bubel says that while prehistoric Native Americans were known to use upright bison bones as anvils or to tie down tepees, none of these bones bore the telltale marks of those activities. “It’s a…

During the height of the transatlantic slave trade, from 1500 to 1850, some 12 million people were enslaved, most from West and West Central Africa. Diverse cultures, languages, traditions, and religions were found in these regions, but the ethnic and geographic origins of most of these individuals are lost to history. This is no longer the case for three slaves who were buried on the Caribbean island of St. Martin in the seventeenth century. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the Stanford University School of Medicine have employed a new technique for studying fragmented DNA to learn more about where these individuals came from. DNA does not last long in the tropics, but the researchers found small bits of it in tooth roots, which they then subjected to a…

After being closed for the past two years, all 70 rooms of Pompeii’s most famous house, the Villa of the Mysteries, have reopened, revealing to the public for the first time the astonishing results of an extensive restoration and conservation project (“Saving the Villa of the Mysteries,” March/April 2014). Much of the most recent work, begun in 2013, focused on removing the layer of wax that had been used to protect the frescoes in the 1930s. However, it was discovered that the wax had damaged and faded the paintings’ oncevibrant colors. With the wax eradicated and the frescoes cleaned using chemical solutions and lasers, it is now possible to see, for the first time since they were buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, just how…

www.archaeological.org AIA Announces Winners of 2015 Cotsen Excavation Grants MICHAEL HARROWER, assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Tristan Carter, associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, are the winners of the 2015 Cotsen Excavation Grants. Each will receive an award of $25,000 to support their excavations and research. Harrower was awarded the Cotsen Grant for mid-career project directors to support his ongoing work at the ancient Ethiopian town of Baita Semati. Discovered in 2009, Baita Semati, with its deep stratigraphy, monumental architecture, and impressive range of ceramic, metal, and glass artifacts, and plant and animal remains, is one of the more important archaeological sites recently discovered in Africa. T rough his research there, Harrower is attempting to unravel…