Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2016 i ARCHAEOLOGY

In 1498, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama created shock waves in Europe when he reached and returned from the Indian coast—and its valuable spices—by sailing all the way around Africa, a 24,000-mile journey. Da Gama found both success and hostility in the Indian Ocean, so when Portuguese king Manuel I dispatched him to the Indies again, in 1502, he went equipped with an armada of 20 ships and instructions not only to acquire spices, but also to harass and destroy the Muslim shipping industry that had monopolized the spice trade. One of these ships, Esmeralda, was captained by da Gama’s uncle, Vicente Sodré. Though the infamously brutal Sodré was directed by da Gama to patrol the Indian coast and protect Portuguese interests, he opted to sail toward the Arabian Peninsula…

Some scholars have accused British military officer T.E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, of exaggerating his experience fighting with Bedouin guerillas during the 1916–1918 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Now archaeologists working in the Arabian Desert in Jordan can place him at the scene of one of the most dramatic moments described in his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In the account, Lawrence records that he led an ambush on a Turkish military train. While surveying the site of that attack, the team found a spent bullet that was fired from a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, a weapon that would have been extremely rare in the Middle East at the time—and that Lawrence is known to have carried. “You can never be 100 percent sure,” says University…

Archaeologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research working in a large building at the site of Mudhmar East near the city of Adam in Oman have made an “exceptional find.” Inside the structure, which is thought to have had a religious function, the team uncovered a collection of bronze weapons dating to between 900 and 600 B.C. The metal artifacts—two very rare quivers (ordinarily made of leather) with arrows, five battleaxes, five daggers, 50 arrowheads, and five bows, are too small to have been used in combat and were, explains project director Guillaume Gernez, perhaps intended as offerings to a war god. This region of the Arabian Peninsula, which sits at an important crossroads of ancient trade routes on the border between Oman’s desert and oases, is almost…

The remains of the “Woman in Blue,” discovered in 1938 in eastern Iceland, have been subjected to a battery of tests that have revealed new details about her origins and life history. Chief among these is that the woman, named after a blue-dyed apron she was buried in, appears to have come to Iceland during its early settlement period. Radiocarbon dating of one of her teeth suggests that she was born around A.D. 900, while settlement is thought to have begun around A.D. 871. Isotopic analyses of the same tooth indicate that, at around age five, her diet shifted from one composed primarily of land animals to one including a mix of seafood and land animals. “This implies that she moved to Iceland some time after the age of five,”…

On the windswept northeastern coast of England, Bamburgh Castle rises high above a massive outcrop of black dolerite. Its brooding sandstone fortifications command sweeping views of the surrounding county of Northumberland, which was once the heart of the medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Visit the castle today, and what you see is an ornate Norman fortress that was extensively rebuilt by its owners in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, though traces of medieval masonry are still visible in many of the buildings. But view the site through the eyes of archaeologist Graeme Young, and a different vision of the castle emerges. On his morning tea break, Young takes a few moments from supervising his crew to explain that he has spent 20 years excavating inside and around Bamburgh in an…

The installation of a new heating system in the 1970s revealed a rich, millennia-old archaeological site under the famous Saint Pierre Cathedral in the Old Town of Geneva, Switzerland. After 30 years of excavation by the Cantonal Department of Archaeology, the site was opened to the public, revealing what Michel Etter, president of Thematis, which created the visitor experience, says is one of the most remarkable places in Europe. It was a place of worship well before the birth of Christianity, and Geneva was so central to the development of the religion—John Calvin preached from Saint Pierre in the sixteenth century—that it is often called the “Protestant Rome.” The site Completely covered and protected by the cathedral, the site encompasses more than 30,000 square feet. Modern tunnels and galleries extend…

An inscribed stone slab unearthed at an Etruscan site in Tuscany is proving to contain one of the most difficult texts to decipher. It was believed that the sixthcentury b.c. stela would shed light on the still-mysterious Etruscan language, but so far it remains a puzzle. “To be honest, I’m not yet sure what type of text was incised on the stela,” says Rex Wallace, professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts. Inscribed with vertical dots and at least 70 legible letters, the four-foot-tall and two-foot-wide slab had been buried for more than 2,500 years in the foundations of a monumental temple at Poggio Colla, some 22 miles northeast of Florence in the Mugello Valley. Archaeologists speculate that the text, written right to left, may refer to a goddess…

In a fourth-century B.C. cemetery near Athens, a team led by archaeologist Maria Petritaki recently discovered a cache of five lead tablets pierced with iron nails in a grave holding a woman’s cremated remains. Four of the tablets were inscribed with text that Yale classicist Jessica Lamont recently translated. She found they contain nearly identical ritual curses that beseech the gods Hecate, Artemis, and Hermes to punish several sets of husband-and-wife business owners, probably tavern keepers. According to Lamont, it is difficult to know exactly why the person who commissioned the tablets targeted the couples, but they were likely involved in some kind of commercial rivalry. “It is possible that this cache was commissioned in connection with a court case,” she says. Lamont also notes that the style of the…

Peruvian archaeologists have found the 4,600-year-old remains of a woman decked out in finery, including a shell necklace, bone brooches, and blankets made of cotton and woven reeds. The bones were discovered at Áspero, a major site of the north-coast Caral civilization, the oldest known urban society in the Americas, which dates to four millennia before the Inca. “We can interpret that, some 4,600 years before the present, women had already reached significant positions in society,” says archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís. The brooches in particular, carved into bird and monkey designs, point to “a woman of prestige.” The necklace’s shells must have been brought from Peru’s far north coast and the Amazon lowlands, both hundreds of miles away, further proof of her high status. Despite the fancy accessories, the woman,…

CANADA: Using a modern reproduction of a Springfield Model 1795 .69-caliber smoothbore flintlock musket, and a tray of pork belly, shoulder, and chops (together comprising “proxy buttocks”), archaeologists conducted an experiment to determine what injuries from buckshot should look like in the archaeological record. Based on their results, they determined that bone damage on remains from the War of 1812’s Battle of Stoney Creek were caused by these smaller lead pellets—the first archaeological identification of buckshot injuries. FLORIDA: The period between 1645 and 1715—corresponding roughly to the Golden Age of Piracy—was light on Caribbean hurricanes, according to a new study that brought together shipwrecks, trees, and sunspots. An inventory of shipwrecks was combined with tree rings, which reflect the annual growth of trees (slower in years with hurricanes), to suggest…

ABOARD THE CANADIAN Coast Guard ship Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a team of marine and terrestrial archaeologists, hydrographers, the ship’s captain, and a helicopter pilot gathered to finalize the day’s plan. It was September 1, 2014, and they were in the waters of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, searching the west coast of King William Island and the eastern part of Queen Maud Gulf—some 540 square miles of sea. The team, led by Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada, had been looking since 2008 for signs of perhaps the two most famous ships lost in the search for the Northwest Passage: the reinforced British bomb vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, led by Sir John Franklin and missing since the late 1840s. Scott Youngblut, a Canadian government hydrographer,…

The World Heritage site of Chauvet Cave in southern France is famous—and a source of both wonder and controversy—for having the world’s oldest cave paintings. When the cave was discovered in 1994, many scholars initially assumed that they must have been made around the same time as those at Lascaux, around 21,000 years ago. But the first radiocarbon dates showed that Chauvet Cave had been occupied twice starting about 35,000 years ago. The Aurignacian people, among the first Homo sapiens to live in Europe, brought to the cave a fully formed artistic tradition that used a variety of techniques involving charcoal and a type of red pigment. Now, a new batch of 88 radiocarbon dates has further refined the cave’s chronology. Humans used the cave from 37,000 to 33,500 years…

Archaeologists from Historic England and the Salisbury Museum were called to investigate a well-preserved Roman mosaic discovered near Tisbury in Wiltshire, England. The red, white, and blue ancient floor was found just 18 inches belowground when a local resident was installing an electrical cable in his garden. After a week of geophysical survey and excavation, experts concluded that the mosaic was part of a large Roman villa complex that was built between A.D. 175 and 220. Due to its size and state of preservation, the villa’s discovery is being characterized as “unprecedented in recent years.” The walls of the ground floor, which contained as many as 25 rooms, were preserved to a height of five feet. The double-courtyard villa is believed to have stood three stories high, and may have…

RUSSIAN ARCHAEOLOGIST ANDREY BELINSKI wasn’t sure what to expect when he found himself facing a small mound in a farmer’s field at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. To the untrained eye, the 12-foot feature looked like little more than a hillock. To Belinski, who was charged with excavating the area to make way for new power lines, it looked like a type of ancient burial mound called a kurgan. He considered the job of excavating and analyzing the kurgan, which might be damaged by the construction work, fairly routine. “Basically, we planned to dig so we could understand how it was built,” Belinski says. As he and his team began to slice into the mound, located 30 miles east of Stavropol, it became apparent that they weren’t the first…

About 10 miles outside of Hanoi’s city center, where the urban environment gives way to rice paddies and vegetable stalls, a steep hill rises abruptly out of the landscape and runs adjacent to the road for half a mile before turning away. Closer examination reveals that it is man-made—substantial, certainly, and old. The rise is, in fact, the outer edge of the remains of Co Loa, Vietnam’s earliest urbanized center, an earthen rampart that, more than 2,000 years after it was built, still defines the land it occupies. The structure, says Nam C. Kim, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, represents a turning point in Vietnam’s history, the moment when a powerful, centralized state evolved out of the region’s protohistoric Iron Age culture. Co Loa is a city that…