Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2016 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Early this year, news spread quickly that a recently deciphered 2,000-year-old tablet contains calculations laying out the movements of the planet Jupiter. The artifact was embraced as evidence that Babylonian astronomers and scientists were far more sophisticated than had been previously known. Archaeology’s editors, equally taken with the tablet’s cuneiform script, immediately set to work on “The World’s Oldest Writing” (page 26). There, they offer an introduction to this robust, long-lived system of notation, and present some of the ancient world’s most impressive examples of cuneiform texts tied to the lives of kings, the rule of law, the practice of medicine, and more. “An Overlooked Inca Wonder” (page 34), by online editor Eric A. Powell, surveys the work of researchers in Peru’s Pisco Valley who are contending with a puzzling…

Over the two-plus years Alice Stevenson has been curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, she has looked at the delicate cream-colored garment hundreds of times, wondering at both the fineness of its workmanship and its extraordinary age. Thought to date from nearly 5,000 years ago, the “Tarkhan Dress” was once part of a large pile of dirty linen cloth excavated by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1913 at the site he named Tarkhan after a nearby village 30 miles from Cairo. In 1977, researchers from the Victoria and Albert Museum, while sorting through the pile of textiles as they prepared to clean them, discovered the dress, remarkably well preserved. They conserved the fabric, sewed it onto a type of extrafine, transparent silk called Crepeline to stabilize it,…

Archaeologists have identified what they believe is the earliest archaeological evidence of the consumption of tea: plant remains in two tombs excavated in Tibet and Chang’an, today called Xi’an, a city that marks the beginning of the Silk Road in northern China. The finds contain traces of caffeine and theanine—substances particularly characteristic of tea. The tombs are more than 2,000 years old, indicating the beverage was consumed during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–a.d. 220). A Chinese document from 59 B.C. that mentions a drink that might be tea was previously the earliest known record of the beverage. Tea does not grow near the tombs, so the discovery indicates that the Silk Road was a “much more complicated and complex long-distance trade network than was known from written sources,” says researcher…

In the eighth century a.d., the Umayyad Islamic caliphate conquered the Visigothic Kingdom, which occupied the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France. The Muslim presence in Spain and Portugal during this period is well documented, but evidence from north of the Pyrenees has been scant. Now archaeologists believe they have found three Muslim burials in Nimes, France, that date to this period. “The presence of Muslim burials suggests the existence of a Muslim community,” says Yves Gleize of the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research. In accordance with Muslim burial practices, all three bodies were buried on their right sides, facing southeast toward Mecca, and in one case the arrangement of bones suggests that the body was wrapped in a shroud upon burial. Genetic analysis shows that all three individuals…

The massacre took place roughly 10,000 years ago, but the victims’ bones weren’t buried; they lay on the ground at the site of Nataruk near the shore of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Millennia later, they were discovered entirely by accident. Marta Mirazon-Lahr of the University of Cambridge had planned to explore a sediment layer dating to the time when the first Homo sapiens lived in the area, but her team first found 12 skeletons emerging from the ground due to erosion. Ten of the skeletons show signs of violent deaths: heads had been smashed with clubs, an obsidian arrow tip was embedded in the top of one skull, and another person’s face has a deep cut that may have come from a club inset with obsidian blades. Mirazon-Lahr believes the attack…

MEMBERS of the public regularly get in touch with Charles Stanish, an expert on Andean cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two years ago, Stanish received a call from a man in Pittsburgh who had just seen a program claiming that aliens played a large role in the lives of ancient people. He was interested in getting Stanish’s take on a particular Peruvian site purported to be the handiwork of extraterrestrials. “I always try to be nice to people like that,” says Stanish. “For whatever reason, they are interested in the ancient past, and I share with them what archaeologists know about the subject.” In this case, the man asked Stanish what he thought about the idea of aliens constructing a strange alignment of pits, known popularly as…

EXCAVATE, EDUCATE, ADVO www.archaeological.org The AIA’s 2016 Award for Best Practices in Site Preservation was presented to the Vernon Township Historical Society in acknowledgment of the excellent work the organization has done—and continues to do—as steward of the Black Creek Indian Site in Vernon, New Jersey. For over a decade, members of the Vernon Township Historical Society have worked with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Indians of New Jersey to preserve, protect, and promote the Black Creek Site. Home to some of the area’s earliest residents, the site includes more than 6,000 artifacts representing 10,000 years of occupation. The Society’s interpretive plan and cultural resource program involve close collaboration with local residents and state and national officials. The program includes regular monitoring and maintenance, the installation of explanatory signage, and the creation…

As of this writing, a humanitarian and cultural heritage disaster continues to unfold across the Middle East. Conflicts in Iraq and Syria are causing massive loss of life, the displacement of people, and the destruction of ancient sites. The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with many other organizations, has frequently spoken out in order to raise awareness of the impacts these conflicts are having on the people and heritage of the region. Archaeological, historical, and cultural sites in Syria and Iraq are the patrimony of their citizens and also represent the shared heritage of us all, documenting key stages in the development of human civilization. To address this crisis, the AIA and the American Schools of Oriental Research, with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the…

In 1954, two ranchers digging a small pond in Sioux County, Nebraska, stumbled across a bonebed containing the 10,000-year-old remains of up to 600 bison. The ranchers, Bill Hudson and Albert Meng, tried for years to convince professional archaeologists to take a look. Finally, Larry Agenbroad of Chadron State College saw the potential of the site and excavated there for six years in the 1970s. Further excavations have taken place at the Hudson-Meng Bison Kill, as it is known, ever since. The site represents the largest known related to the Alberta Paleoindian culture, and has left an enduring mystery—how all those bones came to rest there—that archaeologists have been trying to solve for more than 40 years. “Hudson-Meng is a unique place where visitors can come and learn about early…

No one disputes that European colonization of the New World devastated native populations. But the timing and scale of that demographic crash are sources of debate among archaeologists and historians. Some believe that Old World diseases, for which Native Americans had no resistance, spread even faster than explorers and colonists, in some regions wiping out peoples before they had any direct contact with Europeans. A team led by Harvard University archaeologist Matthew Liebmann has now tested that hypothesis in northern New Mexico, which the Spanish first reached in 1539. Using lidar images of 18 ruined villages once occupied by the Jemez people, the team estimated the population of these Puebloans through time. They found that it was stable throughout the sixteenth century—well after the first Spaniards arrived in New Mexico.…

An 11,000-year-old shale pendant engraved with an enigmatic network of lines has been discovered at Star Carr in North Yorkshire, England. The Mesolithic site was among the first in the British Isles to have been permanently settled after the end of the last Ice Age, during which Britain was likely depopulated. The engravings are similar to those found on amber pendants from the same period in Denmark, which was then accessible by land from Britain. Researchers believe the engravings may depict a tree, a map, a leaf, or tally marks. “Personally, I’m happiest with the idea that they’re counting something,” says Nicky Milner of the University of York, “but it’s impossible to say.”…

Hiding the Goods Many thanks for a wonderful March/April issue. I especially enjoyed “Legends of Glastonbury Abbey,” which was particularly interesting to me because my wife and I had spent two weeks in Glastonbury in September. I also hope future articles will help to dispel the mysteries of the Öland massacre (“Öland, Sweden, Spring, A.D. 480”). There is one minor point I disagree with the archaeologists about. I wonder whether householders, in preparation for the impending attack, hurriedly buried their valuables. I’d conjecture that the valuables were already stored in these small underground compartments beside the door, since there would probably not have been time when the attackers were approaching to dig a hole and bury coins and jewelry. Christopher B. Sanford Durham, NC An Alternate Interpretation I read with…

Excavations at the site of Kavuşan Höyük in southeastern Turkey uncovered the unique burial of a woman and a child—the pair were interred with as many as 21 turtles, tortoises, and terrapins. The grave dates to around the sixth century B.C., and was discovered by a team led by Gülriz Kozbe of Batman University. Archaeologists were stunned to find the grave so littered with chelonian remains, most of which belonged to the Euphrates soft-shelled turtle. Turtles were not normally part of the local diet, but the evidence indicates that these were butchered and consumed as part of a funeral ritual before their shells were deposited in the grave. Researchers believe that shelled reptiles had symbolic roles as psychopomps, or guiding spirits, in the afterlife. “Very few examples of burials containing…

The woeful state of Viking bathrooms could be a factor behind smokers’ coughs in Scandinavia. Sometimes in human evolution, populations adapt in ways that aren’t always beneficial in the long run. For example, the sickle-cell trait evolved in humans because it provides some protection against malaria, but people who inherit the trait from both parents develop sickle-cell disease, a serious blood disorder. In this new case, molecular biologists have connected intestinal parasites in the Viking Age to modern lung disease. Last year, Danish scientists studying the remains of a Viking privy found that the ancient Norse and their domestic animals were infested with a variety of intestinal parasites. These parasites release enzymes called proteases that cause disease. The immune system also creates proteases that can cause inflammation and damage, but…

In early 2016, hundreds of media outlets around the world reported that a set of recently deciphered ancient clay tablets revealed that Babylonian astronomers were more sophisticated than previously believed. The wedge-shaped writing on the tablets, known as cuneiform, demonstrated that these ancient stargazers used geometric calculations to predict the motion of Jupiter. Scholars had assumed it wasn’t until almost A.D. 1400 that these techniques were first employed—by English and French mathematicians. But here was proof that nearly 2,000 years earlier, ancient people were every bit as advanced as Renaissanceera scholars. Judging by the story’s enthusiastic reception on social media, this discovery captured the public imagination. It implicitly challenged the perception that cuneiform tablets were used merely for basic accounting, such as tallying grain, rather than for complex astronomical calculations.…

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One of the most common mythical figures of the European Middle Ages among both rich and poor was the lustful woodland deity known as the Wild Man. As far back as the fifth century B.C., in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, and later the Roman historian Pliny, distant, little-known peoples were considered to be uncivilized—in contrast to the civilized world in which the historians lived—and this was embodied by beastly, amoral gods, such as the debauched, hairy, club-carrying, half-goat, half-man creatures called satyrs. With the coming of Christianity and in the writings of its great scholars, including Saints Jerome and Isidore of Seville, these pagan deities often became devils, demons, and monsters, says historian Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol. One of these monsters was the Wild…