Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2017 i ARCHAEOLOGY

CANADA: Excavations on Triquet Island off the British Columbian coast may affirm the generations-old oral histories of the Heiltsuk Nation. Their tradition holds that tribal ancestors once sought refuge on an unfrozen strip of land along the coast to survive the last Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found in a hearth indicates that human settlement on the island dates back, surprisingly, some 14,000 years, when most of Canada was covered in glaciers. The site also holds evidence of stone tool manufacture and sea mammal hunting. PORTUGAL: A 400,000-year-old partial skull buried in the Gruta da Aroeira cave in central Portugal is the oldest human fossil ever found in Portugal and the westernmost in Europe dating to the Middle Pleistocene. The deposit in which the cranium was embedded also contains…

British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, writing in the 1940s, memorably re-imagined a Roman attack on the Iron Age hillfort of Maiden Castle in southwestern Britain. Having found signs of violent trauma on the bodies of the native dead lying in the cemetery there, he dramatically interpreted the events of the assault: “First the regiment of artillery…was ordered into action and put down a barrage of iron-shod ballista arrows.… Following this barrage, the infantry advanced up the slope, cutting its way from rampart to rampart, tower to tower.… But resistance had been obstinate and the fury of the attackers was roused...confusion and massacre dominated the scene…men and women, young and old, were savagely cut down before the legionaries were called to heel.…” Wheeler’s excavations at Maiden Castle exposed the lives of a…

The Amazon jungle wasn’t supposed to have been the site of something this big. The mound, known locally as Montegrande, spans more than two acres at its base and stands as tall as a five-story building. It sits today amid rice paddies and cow pastures outside the Peruvian city of Jaén. Although it was overgrown with bushes and taken for a natural hill by people living nearby, the few archaeologists who had ventured to this remote corner of the western Amazon basin could not ignore the fact that it bore the features of an ancient burial mound: It had steep sides and a round shape, and there are no other hills around it. When archaeologist Quirino Olivera began excavating Montegrande (“big hill”) in 2010, he discovered that it was not…

KA-CHING! In 2012, a pair of veteran metal detectorists on Jersey in the British Channel Islands discovered a gargantuan coin hoard in a field they had been searching off and on for three decades. The hoard was the largest ever to have been found in Britain and appeared to have the potential to transform interpretations of Jersey’s history. But first it had to be moved. Just getting it out of the ground was fraught with tension. “With earth still attached, it weighed over a ton,” says Neil Mahrer, a museum conservator with Jersey Heritage. “We had no idea how strong it was, in that it was only held together by the corrosion between the coins.” Once the hoard was safely in the laboratory in the Jersey Museum in mid-2014, Mahrer…

For three centuries, Egyptians ruled the land of Canaan. Armies of chariots and 10,000 foot soldiers under the pharaoh Thutmose III thundered through Gaza and defeated a coalition of Canaanite chiefdoms at Megiddo, in what is now northern Israel, in 1458 b.c. The Egyptians then built fortresses, mansions, and agricultural estates from Gaza to Galilee, taking Canaan’s finest products—copper from Dead Sea mines, cedar from Lebanon, olive oil and wine from the Mediterranean coast, along with untold numbers of slaves and concubines—and sending them overland and across the Mediterranean and Red Seas to Egypt to please its elites. As with many colonial ventures before and since, military conquest led to a new cultural order in the occupied lands. Across Israel, archaeologists have found evidence that Canaanites took to Egyptian customs.…

Around 8,000 years ago, in the woodlands of what is now the eastern United States, hunter-gatherers began to make stone objects with holes drilled in them that have no parallel in any other prehistoric society. Today, archaeologists call these highly polished and sometimes elaborate objects “bannerstones.” The name was coined by early twentieth-century scholars who thought they must have been mounted on shafts and used as emblems or ceremonial weapons. But just why they were made only during the so-called Archaic period, which ended around 3,000 years ago, has been debated by archaeologists for more than a hundred years. Some have taken the position that they were not strictly ceremonial and were used as weights that imparted force and accuracy to spear-throwers, or atlatls. They were made from a wide…

Legend, historical accounts, and archaeology are in agreement that Gamla Uppsala, in southeastern Sweden, was the home and burial place of the kings of the fifth- and sixth-century Ynglinga Dynasty. These monarchs reigned during the time depicted in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Until the arrival of Christianity, Gamla Uppsala was long regarded throughout Northern Europe as an important and sacred location and was ultimately graced by palaces, a great pagan temple, and a royal burial ground. John Ljungkvist of Gamla Uppsala University says, “These rulers transformed the entire landscape to showcase what they thought was their divine lineage.” He adds, “These monuments made Uppsala a central assembly place for nearly 1,000 years. It’s Beowulf, for real.” Today, of some 300 remaining funerary barrows, three mounds in particular, measuring…

While visitors to the homes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are escorted through fine mansions, tourists coming to the Albemarle County, Virginia, home of President James Monroe see a cottage. The modest clapboard house, located on the bucolic estate Monroe called Highland, was billed for more than a century as his family’s main residence for much of his presidency. To some visitors, the cottage may well have seemed commonplace, and a bit small for the home of a prominent family, headed by a man who stood roughly six feet tall. But for decades, few questions arose. Perhaps that was because Monroe— a Founding Father who fought in the Revolutionary War, a statesman who helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, and an enormously popular two-term president—is often perceived as a man…

If you see a yamuti, then hide in a tree,” Adnyamathanha children are told, “for the Yamuti can’t lift its head to the sky.” For some Australians, learning about the Yamuti—a terrifying mythical creature that eats people and carries children away—is a rite of passage. The Adnyamathanha, one of Australia’s many aboriginal communities, have inhabited the Flinders Ranges in northern South Australia and passed down stories of the Yamuti for as long as they can remember. Some believe the myth has its origin in a long-extinct, hippo-sized mammal called the diprotodon—the largest marsupial known to have lived. Archaeological excavation inside a recently discovered rock shelter suggests that Australia’s earliest human occupants did, in fact, interact with these giant beasts more than 40,000 years ago. But the finds in the shelter,…