Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Almost one hundred years before the Roman Empire conquered Britain, Julius Caesar invaded the island in 55 B.C. and again the following year. The exact locations of his landings have been debated, but recent evidence suggests that one occurred at Ebbsfleet, at the Isle of Thanet in eastern Kent. During construction of a modern road, workers discovered a large ancient ditch measuring around 15 feet wide and six feet deep. Objects found nearby, including Roman weapons, indicated that it was constructed around the middle of the first century B.C., and its size and shape are consistent with Roman defensive networks of that era. Archaeologists believe that Caesar’s army built a temporary fort at the site to protect his fleet of 800 ships. “The wider significance of the discoveries at Ebbsfleet…

Natural disasters were a constant threat for people living in the ancient city of Liangzhu in China’s Yangtze Delta. The annual monsoons posed a severe risk of flooding, so the city’s residents constructed an extensive network of dams and reservoirs along with an enormous levee in and around the 740-acre settlement. “The sheer scale is really phenomenal—the scale of landscape transformation, the scale of labor mobilization, and the scale of rice farming as well,” says Yijie Zhuang, one of the project’s archaeologists, based at University College London. He believes that these constructions were used to irrigate rice paddies and transport stone and timber from the nearby mountains. The hydraulic complex consists of 51 canals in and around the city and 11 dams forming two reservoirs. All of this was accomplished…

On the bank of a river in Siberia’s Tuva region, archaeologists have unearthed an Iron Age cemetery that held the remains of nobles of the Xiongnu Empire, a confederation of nomads that dominated much of Central Asia in the second century B.C. Tuva would have been on the northernmost fringe of the empire, but living on the frontier evidently didn’t keep Xiongnu noblewomen from being fashionable. A team led by St. Petersburg archaeologist Marina Kulinovskaya discovered that many of the women in the cemetery were buried with extravagant jewelry and other accessories. Some graves contained buckles made from bronze or stone that depicted fantastical creatures, as well as bulls, camels, horses, and sheep. Others were studded with turquoise, jade, and other semiprecious stones. Perhaps the most fashion-forward woman was buried…

THE TURN-OFF FROM the Pan-American Highway into Peru’s Casma Valley, a five-hour, 200-mile drive up the coast from Lima, reveals a forbidding landscape. The foothills of the Andes loom over a bone-dry desert interspersed with sand dunes. “Except for maybe the occasional cactus, it’s all just sand and rocks,” says Melissa Vogel, an archaeologist at Clemson University who has been traveling there to excavate since 2004. She studies Peru’s little-known Casma state, which had its capital city in this valley between A.D. 700 and 1400—a period during which the environment was even more hostile. Devastating droughts punctuated by unpredictable storms had already brought one dominant culture, the Moche, to its knees. So when Vogel first visited this area she expected to find, at best, evidence of a small city eking…

The South Agora of Aphrodisias, located in southwestern Turkey, was one of two public squares within the ancient city. It was built during the first century A.D., and had been previously interpreted as a commercial complex. However, recent archaeological work has shown that the space functioned in quite the opposite capacity, and was instead an urban park, equipped with a monumental pool, fountains, promenades, trees, and other greenery. “It had the grandeur of public city architecture and design, but was intended for relaxation, strolling, and some retail,” says University of Oxford archaeologist R.R.R. Smith. The enormous pool at the complex’s center measures 575 feet long and 82 feet wide and was bordered by marble benches, some even inscribed with gaming boards. Excavations and archaeobotanical analysis of plant remains revealed that…

Evidence continues to reveal much about the quality of life of the residents of ancient Pompeii. The city created an intricate and robust system for the local production of food and wine. Researchers have long been aware of frescoes, found in many surviving houses and villas, depicting plants and the pleasure of eating and drinking. Remains of triclinia, or dining rooms, and of food stalls, bakeries, and shops selling the fish sauce garum are abundant. Garden archaeology as a discipline was pioneered in Pompeii in the 1950s when archaeologist Wilhelmina Jashemski began to excavate areas between the remaining structures. She discovered that homeowners planted flowers, dietary staples, and even small vineyards. “From the oldest type of domestic vegetable garden, the hortus, to ornate temple gardens,” explains Betty Jo Mayeske, director…

Recently, my hairdresser described the excitement of the six-year-old son of a friend who received a toy set of dinosaur bones embedded in dirt and equipped with small digging tools. This story encapsulates the universal attraction of archaeology: Everyone enjoys the thrill of discovery. The tangible bond with the past, created by recovering an artifact made centuries ago, is as close as we can come to time travel. Many people do not realize, though, that digging is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Excavation provides the raw data that archaeologists study to learn about the past. My own project at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee illustrates this. Our excavations are bringing to light a fifth-century synagogue paved with mosaics depicting an extraordinary series of biblical scenes…

El Pilar, an ancient Maya city that straddles the border between modern-day Belize and Guatemala, boasts more than 25 plazas and numerous houses, temples, and grand monumental structures. Archaeologist Anabel Ford, who first recorded the site in 1983, works with local Maya people, in cooperation with both governments, to run El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna. Much as it may have been some 2,300 years ago when first settled, the city remains nestled in the forest, one with the natural environment. This distinguishes El Pilar from other, perhaps better-known, Maya sites throughout Mexico and Central America, where trees are often removed and lawns manicured to accommodate tourists. El Pilar, a major urban center at its height between A.D. 500 and 1000, featured large forest gardens, relying on…

While excavating three Byzantine churches in Galilee, archaeologists from Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee uncovered seven intact mosaic inscriptions that are beginning to fill in the story of small-village life in the fifth century A.D. The inscriptions are in Greek, and by virtue of mistakes in the language, Mordechai Aviam, who directs the project with historian Jacob Ashkenazi, who read the inscriptions, believes that the town and surrounding area was populated during the Roman period by a local Semitic people who were pagans. By the mid-fifth century, they had converted to Christianity. One inscription, one of the longest found to date in western Galilee, gives the names of donors and the names and positions of church officials, including Irenaeus, the bishop of Tyre in 445. “The first importance…

A piece of American cinematic history has been uncovered in California’s Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Researchers have removed the head of a 13-foot-tall plaster sphinx built for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments, one of 21 sphinxes designed by French artist Paul Iribe for a massive Egyptian Exodus set. Since the 1990s, efforts have been under way to find remains of the set, which DeMille deliberately buried to prevent other filmmakers from using it. According to Doug Jenzen, director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, rapidly shifting sands will soon leave the remaining material vulnerable to disintegration, allowing little time to save evidence of a pivotal moment in U.S. popular culture. “These silent films were successful enough that the production companies were willing to experiment at great expense,” he says.…

Although the treasure of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s grave, one of the most famous archaeological discoveries of all time, was found nearly 100 years ago, researchers are still learning new things about ancient Egyptian society by studying the grave assemblage. In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered the lavish 3,300-year-old tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Now, a German-Egyptian project has analyzed hundreds of embossed decorative gold items from the grave for the first time. The fragmented gold pieces were boxed up shortly after they had been discovered and remained in museum storage until recently. Experts have painstakingly reassembled the ornamental applications, which would have been attached to objects in the pharaoh’s tomb, such as quivers, bow cases, and bridles. They were surprised to detect decorative motifs foreign to…

People have created gardens across the world and throughout time, and these spaces have been an essential part of the human experience. Gardens such as Eden, and also Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed and his disciples slept the night before his crucifixion, are, to this day, regarded as sacred. Gardens are also a key element in some of the best-known myths. One of the Labors of Hercules required the hero to steal, from a place on the far edge of the world called the Garden of the Hesperides, the golden apples that the goddess Hera had given to her husband Zeus as a wedding present. The palaces of the ancient Near East are known to have had spectacular gardens, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of…

Monasteries and convents in medieval Europe were bastions of literacy and of expertise with medicinal herbs unknown by the general population. At the site of the Naantali Cloister in southwest Finland, scholars have employed a combination of archaeological, historical, and botanical research to learn what types of plants the Bridgettine monks and nuns who lived there grew. Archaeo-botanist Teija Alanko and her colleague Kari Uotila sorted and radiocarbon dated 4,561 plant macrofossils uncovered during excavations around the Naantali church, the only surviving building of the cloister, which was occupied between 1443 and 1554. In addition to dietary staples such as rye, barley, and other cereals, the team discovered several species with healing properties, including henbane, greater celandine, St. John’s wort, nettle, and juniper. They can’t, at this time, be sure…

In colonial America, Philadelphia was home base for a community of ardent plant enthusiasts who came together on the banks of the Schuylkill River. There they competed to cultivate exotic specimens, fostering an Enlightenment-era spirit of inquiry that eventually led to the discipline of botany. At the Woodlands, a private estate built between the 1760s and 1780s, wealthy collector William Hamilton amassed what was possibly the largest collection of flora in the country and constructed a state-of-the-art greenhouse known to have been visited by Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton, with the help of his friend and neighbor, seed dealer William Bartram, created a garden dedicated to aesthetics and to building a scientific collection of plants from around the world. According to archaeologist Sarah Chesney, who identified and excavated the Woodlands’ greenhouse, the…

Archaeologists working in the ancient city of Doliche, now Dülük in modern-day Turkey, have uncovered a large collection of 1,800-year-old clay seals called bullae, which date to the period when the city was part of the Roman province of Syria. Many of the bullae appear to have been used for official government business and show various deities, including depictions of Roman emperors shaking hands with Jupiter Dolichenus, a thunder and war god indigenous to the area, whose cult spread across the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries A.D. “It is one of the great enigmas in the history of Roman religion that the main local god from a second-tier city of the north Syrian hinterland developed into one of the best attended cults of the empire,” says Michael…

ARIZONA: A new theory is challenging the long-held idea that Native American groups living in the Grand Canyon region 1,000 years ago relied predominantly on corn for subsistence. Instead, research suggests that prehistoric communities set controlled fires to burn off the grasses and weeds along the canyon’s forested rim. This stimulated the growth of edible plants such as amaranth and chenopodium, wild relatives of quinoa. These plants likely dominated local diets at that time, as pollen analysis of ceramic storage vessels has indicated. ENGLAND: Perhaps medieval Englanders should have shunned fur. Genetic testing on the skull of a woman who died in Suffolk between 885 and 1015 revealed that she suffered from a strain of leprosy carried by red squirrels. Cases of leprosy were particularly prevalent in East Anglia during…

Beginning in the second century B.C., Rome’s most prominent families began to build luxurious country estates for which exquisitely designed gardens were essential. The Bay of Naples, with its sweeping vistas and cool breezes, became one of the most popular destinations. Today, the coastline is littered with the ruins of large villas and their opulent gardens, buried and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. According to Cornell University’s Kathryn Gleason, it is only recently that archaeologists have truly begun to understand the complexity and various functions of a villa garden. “A design might have been initiated as a display of wealth, but also might provide simple pleasures, such as shade, produce, a place for children to play, for weary politicians to find retreat, or for young people…

IN A MARSHY CLEARING on the island of Trinidad, Pitch Lake could be mistaken for a derelict parking lot. But this vaguely industrial landscape is nowhere you’d want to leave your car. Stand in the wrong spot for too long and the ground will begin to sink beneath your feet. The wrinkled surface conceals 10 million tons of slowly churning natural asphalt, 250 feet deep, spreading across 115 acres. One of the world’s biggest natural tar pits, Pitch Lake has always loomed large in the lives of Trinidadians. To the Arawak people who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish, it was the site of a mythical punishment. They believed that after hunters from another tribe upset the Good Spirit by killing hummingbirds, considered to be the incarnations of…

A red sandstone block props open the door to Gyula Kereszturi’s wine cellar in a small village in southern Hungary. Kereszturi, who ekes out a living selling homemade wine and plum brandy in one of this country’s poorest regions, found the block more than two decades ago when he expanded the cellar. Over the years, it has made a good doorstop, or sometimes a makeshift table. But it used to be much more than that. This block was once part of the revered mausoleum complex of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire’s most prolific builder and accomplished military leader. Although Kereszturi and other locals had long referred to the occasional red bricks they found buried in their yards as “Turkish ruins,” they had no idea that anything significant had ever…