Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2017 i ARCHAEOLOGY

In 1946 or 1947, a Bedouin goatherd found a number of ancient texts in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea and the ruins of the town of Qumran in the West Bank. Searches over the next decade yielded around 900 mostly fragmentary ancient Jewish texts in 11 different caves. These texts, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, are among the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Written primarily on parchment and papyrus, they date from between the third century b.c. and the first century a.d. and include almost all of the Hebrew Bible, texts related to it known as Apocrypha, and the writings of a Hebrew sect thought to have been based at Qumran, most likely the Essenes. The texts offer valuable insights into debates about Jewish law and…

Archaeologists from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit have uncovered an Augustinian friary that occupied what is now Cambridge University property from the 1280s to 1538. In addition to buildings and artifacts, they have discovered nearly 40 burials. These will be analyzed as part of an ongoing project that compares human remains from throughout the city, including around 400 skeletons found at Cambridge’s Hospital of St. John in 2010. It will be interesting, site director Craig Cessford says, “to know if the friars had different diets or origins, were healthier, or lived longer than the rest of the Cambridge population.”…

MEXICO: Maya communities living in the interior of the Yucatán Peninsula were evidently aware of the great marine predators swimming at the outskirts of their jungle world. A new study has examined the strong influence sharks had on Maya art, iconography, and daily life. Shark teeth have been found at many inland Maya sites, including fossilized examples from extinct megalodons. The teeth, which were acquired through trade, were used in ritual ceremonies, as votive offerings, or as personal adornments. CHILE: The Atacama Desert, which stretches 600 miles along South America’s west coast, is one of the driest locations on Earth. It had previously been thought that the desert’s uninhabitable conditions created a barrier to the movements of the earliest human settlers. However, recent research has detected evidence of freshwater plants…

By late August, most of the brash ice is gone from Greenland’s Nuuk Fjord, but occasionally the distant boom of an ice chunk calving off an iceberg echoes through the fog. A small boat owned by the Greenland National Museum, the Inua, cruises carefully toward the faint outline of an inlet. There are no trees on the shore, only bare rock, sea wrack, and patches of wild grass. The boat’s stern is angled toward a rocky point, and Henning Matthiesen, a soil chemist from the National Museum of Denmark jumps over the bow and holds the nose of the Inua while colleagues scramble to pass boxes and backpacks over his head and onto shore. Matthiesen and five other scientists wait there while the boat returns to Nuuk, Greenland’s small capital…

In the 1950s, the U.S. government funded the Dalles Dam Project to build hydroelectric capacity for the Northwest and beyond. The project was completed in 1957, but the rising waters behind the dam forever changed a stretch of the river valley separating Washington and Oregon. The area had long been a gathering place for people from the Warm Springs, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes. Their modern descendants opposed the dam construction and feared that ancient rock art there would be submerged. Although they were not able to stop the project, the tribes were able to save approximately 40 artworks by having them jackhammered out of the cliffs. In the early 2000s, the artworks were taken out of storage and placed in a permanent outdoor display called Tamani Pesh-Wa, or…

Founded in 1594, the garrison town of Tara was one of the first Russian settlements in Siberia. Archaeologists led by Tomsk State University’s Maria Chernaya are now discovering what life was like there for the earliest Russian pioneers. In addition to wooden fortifications, the team has unearthed the remains of burned log houses that held toys, chess pieces, leather shoes, and knitted stockings that show that life on the Siberian frontier wasn’t as austere as some might imagine. Chernaya says the most unexpected discovery was a clay pot containing a charred turnip. “It was likely part of the winter stocks, so the house probably burned in the winter or spring.” She thinks the fire must have started just as someone was preparing to cook the root vegetable for a meal.…

In 1943, the German navy constructed a secret base on the island of Alexandra Land in the Arctic Ocean. Codenamed “Treasure Hunter,” the station was staffed by meteorologists who provided weather forecasts to German cruisers and submarines in the Arctic. After the war, Soviet officials ordered the base destroyed. “We had only a very vague understanding of where the station was and how much had been preserved,” says Russian Arctic National Park archaeologist Evgeni Ermolov, who led a team that recently rediscovered the site. They found evidence of residences, warehouses, and a network of defensive structures, along with artifacts such as cartridges, batteries, and even pieces of raincoats. “We were surprised to find some artifacts still bearing German military insignia,” says Ermolov. After the station’s destruction, rumors circulated that it…

WHEN THE EMPEROR Hadrian visited the province of Britannia in a.d. 122, he was in full command of the entire Roman Empire, which stretched some 2,500 miles east from northern Great Britain to modern-day Iraq, and 1,500 miles south to the Sahara Desert. He had become emperor five years earlier, after a controversial postmortem adoption by his predecessor and guardian Trajan, and he ruled until his death in 138, at the age of 62, likely of a heart attack. In just over 20 years, he became, according to an anonymous ancient source, the “most versatile” of the Roman emperors. He was a battle-tested solider who fought with Trajan in Dacia, a skilled politician who masterminded the consolidation of the empire’s territory, a faithful patron and lover of the arts, and…

New excavations at Abri Blanchard in southwestern France have uncovered a limestone block engraved with a series of dots and the image of an aurochs, a wild ancestor of modern cattle. Pieces of bone found with the artifact were radiocarbon dated to 33,000 years ago, the period when the Aurignacian people, Europe’s first anatomically modern humans, made the first representational artwork. In addition to the aurochs tablet, the research team reanalyzed 38 engraved limestone blocks that had been found at Abri Blanchard between 1910 and 1912. One of those tablets was decorated with a feline figure that was drawn using the same distinctive technique that an artist used for a painting of a feline at Chauvet Cave, about 200 miles away. While some techniques are shared between such early artistic…

Recent analysis of the only intact Viking boat burial ever discovered on the British mainland has revealed new information about the identity, culture, and origins of the interred individual. The tenth-century grave, which belonged to a high-status warrior, was first discovered in 2011 in western Scotland. Isotope analysis of two teeth indicates that the occupant of the grave was likely born in Scandinavia. The grave assemblage included several weapons, typical of Viking warrior burials, and other items related more to daily life such as food preparation and farming. The artifacts came from a wide range of sources, including Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia, underscoring the broad geographical connections of the well-traveled warrior. Says University of Leicester archaeologist Oliver Harris, “This burial helps us learn about how Viking people were interacting and…

When a hydropower construction project lowered the water level of the Hongmen Reservoir in the southeastern Chinese city of Fuzhou, an unexpected visitor appeared—the head and shoulders of a 12-foot-tall Buddha statue carved into what had been a riverside cliff before the area was flooded by a dam in the 1950s. Underwater archaeologists found evidence of a temple below. According to locals, tricky currents made river navigation perilous, so the temple may have been where people prayed for safe passage. Researchers are documenting the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) finds before they are submerged once again by spring rains.…

The hallmundarhraun lava field—basalt dark, with great swells and a froth of white moss—looks like a stormy sea whipped into a frenzy and frozen in place. It begins under the Langjökull glacier in mountains to the east and winds some 30 miles to Hraunfoss—literally, “Lava Falls”—where a crystalline river of meltwater pours directly from its wide, stony face. It’s very Icelandic: fire and ice, water and stone. When the lava flowed at the end of the ninth century, shortly after the Vikings arrived on the island, it was probably the first volcanic activity of its kind that northern Europeans had ever witnessed. Those early residents of western Iceland may have heard eruptions, seen a fiery glow on the horizon, and tracked its spread across the landscape, a spread that ultimately…

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1650, between Doon Hill and the London Road in Dunbar, Scotland, the English Parliamentary army led by Oliver Cromwell battled the Scottish Covenanting army. By this time, the series of conflicts known as the English Civil Wars had raged, off and on, for eight years. At the outset, Cromwell and the Scots had been on the same side, opposed to the royalists who backed King Charles I. The king had been beheaded the previous year, and now the Scots were supporting the royal claim of his son, Charles II. The Scots are thought to have had as much as a two-toone advantage in men, and held a superior position on the hill. However, many of the Scots were novices who had been recruited over the summer to…