Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2017 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The Rosetta Stone, known worldwide because its inscription holds the key that allowed scholars to finally read hieroglyphics, also tells of the ruthless victory of Egypt’s pharaoh Ptolemy V over insurgents. “In the Time of the Rosetta Stone” (page 50), by contributing editor Jason Urbanus, covers the excavations of the ancient city of Thmuis in the Nile Delta. Archaeologists have recently uncovered the first evidence that a bloody siege did indeed take place there, giving credence to the stone’s account of incidents from the Great Egyptian Revolt. Located in a rock shelter close by the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande is an elaborate mural measuring nearly 26 feet long. This extraordinary painting is the subject of “Reading the White Shaman Mural” (page 32), by deputy editor…

At a medieval necropolis in the Russian High Arctic, researchers have excavated the naturally mummified remains of a woman who lived some 800 years ago. Dozens of burials have already been discovered at the site, known as Zeleny Yar, but this is the first woman to have been identified. “Before this, we thought that perhaps only men were buried here,” says Arctic Research Center archaeologist Alexander Gusev, who leads the excavation. “This transforms our understanding of the burial ground.” The woman’s hair and even eyelashes are perfectly preserved thanks in part to a copper plate that covered her face. Gusev notes that after oxidizing, the plate set off a chemical reaction that helped slow decomposition. The plate was fashioned from a copper cauldron that was made in Persia, almost 4,000…

While the streets, houses, and shops of ancient Herculaneum were preserved to a remarkable degree by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a.d. 79, its vibrant frescoes have suffered a tremendous toll in the years since they were first exposed. By using a new portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device called Elio, chemist Eleonora Del Federico of the Pratt Institute has been able to see behind the damage to the surface of a painting excavated in the House of the Mosaic Atrium 70 years ago. “Using this device we can see a complex and sophisticated painting technique with details not visible to the naked eye today,” says Del Federico. But it was the “iron map”—XRF shows researchers the elemental composition of artifacts and how the elements are distributed within the object—that…

Taposiris Magna is an active archaeological site located west of Alexandria. In the last eleven years, Dr. Zahi Hawass and Dr. Kathleen Martinez have been excavating the temple, searching for the tombs of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. The site is closed to all tourists. For many years this temple was considered insignificant, even unfinished, but at that time the researchers did not realize the importance of this site. Dr. Kathleen Martinez reopened excavations in Taposiris Magna and the results have surprised the archaeological world. New discoveries not only show that Taposiris Magna was one of the most important temples of the goddess Isis during the reign of Cleopatra, but it also renewed hope for finally finding the lost tomb of the last queen of Egypt. In the beginning of 2017…

In northern Italy 2,500 years ago, Etruscans developed a unique system of beekeeping to manufacture honey, beeswax, and other products. Archaeologists working at the site of Forcello recently gained rare insight into ancient beekeeping when they uncovered the charred and melted remains of honey, honeycombs, and honeybees in a workshop that had burned down between 510 and 495 b.c. Researchers conducted chemical and palynological (pollen) analyses of the material to determine not only the composition of Etruscan honey, but also what types of plants bees were collecting pollen from two and half millennia ago. While bees in northern Italy today feed abundantly on nonnative plants that have been introduced to the region, during the Etruscan period, bees were foraging from aquatic sources such as water lilies and the flowers of…

THE ROSETTA STONE IS, inarguably, one of the most famous archaeological artifacts in the world. Shortly after it was uncovered by French Napoleonic troops in Egypt in 1799, it was seized by the British and transferred to the British Museum, where it has remained prominently on display for the past 200 years. The carved gray granodiorite stela is strikingly elegant, but the stone’s significance lies more in its tripartite inscription than in its aesthetics. The juxtaposition of the three passages, identical but for each having been written in a different script—Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic, and Ancient Greek—would prove to be key to solving the puzzle of deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. While many people may be familiar with the basics of the Rosetta Stone, few perhaps know what the text says…

For many ancient Mediterranean cultures, there are particular types of artifacts with which they are most closely associated—for the Mycenaeans, it is tablets written in Linear B, for the Greeks it might be marble sculptures, and for the Romans, it may be the amphoras that transported Roman olive oil, wine, and fish sauce across the empire. For the Phoenicians, who inhabited the eastern Mediterranean in the second and first millennia b.c., perhaps the most characteristic artifacts are clay masks. Although these masks have been found from Phoenicia all the way to Spain, this is the first time a mold used to make such a mask has been discovered. “The artifact is exceptional because there are no other known clay molds of anthropomorphic masks, it was found in a sealed context,…

The holiday season is a time to gather with family and friends, exchange gifts, and remember those less fortunate than ourselves. It is also a time when we count our blessings. Therefore, I wish, in this letter, to thank our supporters, and particularly the generous benefactors who have endowed our programs, enabling the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) to carry out our mission to excavate, educate, and advocate. Our programs include public lectures hosted by our Local Societies, the preservation and conservation of archaeological sites around the world, the publication and dissemination of fieldwork reports, undergraduate participation on excavations, and research by graduate students and recent PhDs. In a previous letter, I addressed the proposed cuts to federal agencies, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities that provide crucial…

After defeating Hannibal and Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 b.c.), Rome found itself the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. While it may seem obvious that Rome’s prospects would rise, having vanquished its chief military, economic, and political rival, a new study led by Katrin Westner of Goethe University suggests that it was the massive influx of Iberianmined silver into the Roman economy that fueled its unprecedented expansion. Researchers analyzed the elemental composition and lead isotope signature of 70 Roman coins issued between 310 and 101 b.c. in order to determine the source of the silver ore. The results show that in the decades before the Second Punic War, Roman silver originated mostly from Aegean sources and Greek colonies in Magna Graecia. However, coins issued after the war…

CROWNING GLORY Thank you very much for Marley Brown’s excellent article about the Egyptian mummy shroud (“To Die like an Egyptian,” September/October 2017). Margaret Maitland is correct that the gold laurel wreath resonated with Egyptian sensibilities as a symbol of triumph over death. One can note an Egyptian precedent: the “crown (or wreath) of justification.” This is conferred by the gods on the blessed dead; it is mentioned from the New Kingdom on and is the subject of Chapter 19 of the Book of the Dead. Edmund S. Meltzer Carpinteria, CA PAINFUL PAST Samir S. Patel’s article on Spanish Civil War archaeology (“Landscape of Secrets,” September/October 2017) is superb—perhaps the best I’ve ever read in your magazine. He handled the many layers of the research, including the painful politics of…

Archaeologists have unearthed a fragment of an ivory icon at the Byzantine frontier fortress of Rusokastro in southeastern Bulgaria. Depicting the archangel Gabriel and Saint Basil, the 3.2-inch-tall icon dates to the tenth century and was likely made in Constantinople on the orders of an emperor, says archaeologist Milen Nikolov of the Burgas Regional Historical Museum. “This was an expensive—very expensive—item,” says Nikolov, who is surprised that such an elaborate artifact made its way to the imperial frontier. He and his team discovered the object, which was once a wing of a triptych, beneath a large thirteenth-century building that was probably the residence of the local governor.…

In recent years, scientists have determined that early humans interbred with other hominin species, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, by comparing the genomes of present-day humans with DNA taken from hominin fossils. Now, however, evidence of interbreeding has been found based on analysis of human genomes drawn from people currently living around the world. Specifically, researchers have focused on a gene called MUC7, which codes for a protein found in saliva. A team led by Omer Gokcumen and Stefan Ruhl of the State University of New York at Buffalo studied how MUC7 varied in 2,500 present-day human genomes. To their surprise, it took a dramatically different form in around 5 percent of people from sub-Saharan Africa. The most likely explanation, the researchers concluded, was that some 150,000 to 200,000 years…

One of the greatest discoveries made by Egypt's legendary archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass has to be The Valley of the Golden Mummies, yet it is a site that is still closed to the world. When the discovery was made near the oasis of Bahariya, it quickly became apparent that it was an even more important discovery than that of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. The cemetery of the Golden Mummies, which is thought to cover an area of approximately 2.3 square miles, has been estimated to contain more than 10,000 mummies, many of them completely covered with gold. Already during the first season of excavations a total of 108 mummies were found. "When the first tomb was opened, the brilliance of gold shone in the sunlight among the piles of…

Of all the estates and houses available to King Henry VIII, Greenwich Palace in southeast London was known to be his favorite. The king spent more than 4,000 nights there (that’s almost 11 years in total), and he added a number of structures to it, including an armory staffed by metalsmiths from abroad. The palace was largely razed by the end of the seventeenth century, and little sign of it remains aboveground. Recently, however, two of its rooms were unearthed during construction of a visitor center at the Old Royal Naval College, which sits on the palace’s former grounds. “We knew it was quite likely we might find the odd bit of historical Greenwich,” says William Palin, director of conservation at the Old Royal Naval College, “but nothing quite prepared…

Vividly colored red and blue fragments of wool discovered at a copper mining site in southern Israel’s Timna Valley are offering new insights into the social standing of metalworkers who lived in the remote area. The fragments, which have been radiocarbon dated to 3,000 years ago, are the earliest known examples of textiles treated with plant-based dyes in the Levant. But the plants used to make the dyes—the madder plant for red and most likely the woad plant for blue—could not have been grown in the arid Timna Valley. Nor was there enough water available locally to raise the livestock necessary to provide wool or to dye the fabric. The textiles must, therefore, have been produced elsewhere. According to Naama Sukinek of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the discovery suggests that…

IN LATE JULY 2016, a small group of people assembled on a narrow terrace near the shore of southeastern Alaska’s Kruzof Island. Among them were archaeologists from the United States, Russia, and Canada, as well as representatives of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and the Russian Orthodox Church. They were gathered to remember those who had perished more than 200 years earlier when a Russian ship called Neva sank in stormy waters off the island’s west coast. The archaeologists had uncovered evidence—including what they believed to be the grave of one of the wreck’s victims, a Russian nobleman who had been on his way to assume an important managerial position in nearby Sitka—that the wreck’s survivors had made a camp on the terrace after washing ashore. Chuck Miller of the…

archaeological.org AIA-SCS ANNUAL MEETING IS FAST APPROACHING We invite you to join us in Boston for the 119th AIA-SCS Joint Annual Meeting from January 4 to 7 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. The meeting begins on Thursday, January 4, with the public lecture and opening night reception. Academic sessions start on Friday the 5th and conclude on Sunday the 7th. The conference also includes the Annual Meeting of the AIA Council. Discounted hotel rooms are available from Monday, January 1, through Monday, January 8. Additional rooms are available at the Westin Copley Place. Please register and make your hotel reservations as soon as possible, as rooms will fill up quickly. For full details, visit the Annual Meeting section of the AIA website at archaeological.org/ annualmeeting. HERITAGE EDUCATORS CONFERENCE AT…