Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2018 i ARCHAEOLOGY

A pathogen possibly responsible for one of several catastrophic sixteenth-century epidemics in Mexico has been identified in DNA taken from the teeth of several of its victims. The 1545 huey cocoliztli, or “great pestilence,” as it was called at the time in the Nahuatl language, raged through Mesoamerica 25 years after the Spanish arrived, killing tens of millions. Working with genetic material from 29 individuals buried in the only known cemetery from the 1545 outbreak, a team from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has discovered the presence of Salmonella enterica serovar Paratyphi C, a bacterium that causes paratyphoid fever. It’s rare today but has a high mortality rate if untreated. Max Planck’s Christina Warinner says, “People have been wondering about the cause of this epidemic…

An 800-year-old gaming piece unearthed in Tønsberg, Norway’s oldest city, has been identified as a knight used to play an early form of chess. Lars Haugesten of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, the excavation’s project manager, explains that the object’s shape is similar to that of chess pieces found in Arabia. It was likely made locally, however, as it was carved from reindeer antler and is decorated with a number of dotted circles, which are typical of Scandinavian designs. The piece’s protruding nose identifies it as a knight. Haugesten says it may originally have had a piece of lead embedded in it to prevent it from tipping over on a playing surface.…

IN SOUTHERN ISRAEL’S Negev Desert, about eight miles from the ancient trade route linking Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea, Shivta sits “in the last place in which one would expect to find a town,” wrote C. Leonard Woolley and T.E. Lawrence in 1914 in The Wilderness of Zin. This British archaeological survey was a cover for collecting military information about the terrain of southern Palestine as England prepared to battle Germany for control of the area, which was then ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Woolley and Lawrence thought that Shivta had first been settled sometime between the third and fifth centuries A.D. by Christian monks, a conclusion they based on its remote location, the remains of three churches, and a number of pottery sherds they collected during a surface survey.…

NEAR THE BANKS of the Guadiana River in southwestern Spain, some 2,500 years ago, a great ritual banquet was held within the confines of a rural sanctuary. Hundreds of ceramic bowls and cups, bronze braziers, decorated jugs, and charred animal bones have been found scattered around the building’s upper floor. Ash and coal still cling to the top of the altar there, where the last dedications to the gods were placed. At the foot of a monumental staircase, one story below, a much more sanguineous offering was prepared. Nearly 30 animals, most of them horses, were methodically slaughtered so that they would remain entombed in the building forever. After these ceremonies were completed and the feast was concluded, the complex was deliberately set ablaze and the ruins carefully buried. The…

THE DECORATED TOMBS of Beni Hassan, a cemetery site on the east bank of the Nile in central Egypt, not only bear the stamp of the artisans who decorated them, but also reflect the lives lived by the deceased. The tombs date to the 11th and 12th Dynasties of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (2050–1650 B.C.) and offer some of the best-preserved examples of how artists and tomb owners conceived of the natural world. Originally surveyed between 1893 and 1900 by Egyptologist Percy E. Newberry, they are now being reexamined by a team of researchers from Australia’s Macquarie University. According to project director Naguib Kanawati, the tombs at Beni Hassan are among the most complete and important of Middle Kingdom Egypt. The works depict a great range of fauna and flora, including…

In the mid-first century B.C., a man named Marcus Novius Tubula, son of Marcus, was elected to one of Rome’s most ancient offices, that of tribune of the plebs. For Marcus, the event was significant enough to celebrate by commissioning a sundial to be displayed in a prominent spot in his hometown. He had his name inscribed on the base of the sundial, and paid for the whole thing “De Sua PECUNIA,” or with his own money. The plebeian tribune, established in 494 B.C., was the first office to be open to the common people and was intended to check patrician abuse of power. During most of the Republican period (509–27 B.C.), it was one of the most powerful offices in Rome—although by the time Marcus became tribune the position…

Archaeology at southern Oregon’s Fort Rock Cave is central to debates on when the Great Basin region was first colonized by Paleoindian peoples. In 1938, archaeologist Luther Cressman discovered dozens of sagebrush bark sandals beneath a layer of ash that were eventually radiocarbon dated to between 9,000 and 11,000 years old. The cave also produced projectile points from the Western Stemmed Tradition, a Paleoindian culture thought to have emerged around 11,000 b.c. In the 1970s, Cressman’s student Stephen Bedwell reported finding tools in Fort Rock Cave going back even further, to 15,000 years ago, a date dismissed as farfetched by most researchers. However, recent evidence of a nearly 15,000-year-old occupation at nearby Paisley Caves prompted a team from the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History to reexamine…

During the Iron Age, people in what is now Leicestershire, in the Midlands region of England, generally lived in village-like settlements devoted to farming. But the discovery of 11 complete or nearly complete cauldrons—along with a scattering of other artifacts—buried at the site of Glenfield Park and thought to date to the third or fourth century B.c. suggests that people from the surrounding area were drawn there to partake in large feasts. “These gatherings may have taken place at significant times of the year—festival times or rites of passage,” says excavation director John Thomas of University of Leicester Archaeological Services. “Feasting is thought to have played an important social role within Iron Age society, and it may have helped bring the wider community together and increased opportunities for social interaction.”…

Twenty-one feet beneath the waves near Florida’s Manasota Key, divers have found a 7,200-year-old burial ground. The site appears to have been a freshwater pond when it was in use, but rising sea levels over the millennia have submerged it. So far, the bones of at least six individuals have been identified, as well as pieces of cordage, fabric, and some carved wooden posts that were used to hold the bodies of the deceased in place at the bottom of the pond. This was a common burial practice in that part of Florida at the time. Wave action and the force of hurricanes were thought to make the underwater environment too harsh to preserve archaeological sites, says Ryan Duggins, underwater archaeology supervisor of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, but the…

Recent excavations have unearthed a site resembling a Buddhist monastery in India’s Odisha state. The sculptural and architectural findings at the village of Jharhiamba in the Angul district suggest that a Buddhist monastery flourished during the reign of the Shunga-Kushan Dynasty, which governed the region between 150 B.c. and the first century a.D. Though a Buddhist presence is well known in the state, the discovery, archaeologists say, is important because this is the only monastery in Odisha where they have found evidence of monks and nuns cohabiting. A copper plate that was recovered by British archaeologists in the nineteenth century, around six miles from the spot, bore an inscription about the monastery being present in the area and monks and nuns living together. “We believe that around 200 people lived…

Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht were brothers. Or so say the inscriptions on their coffins, which claim that they had the same mother. The roughly 4,000-year-old mummies were found in 1907 by Egyptologists Sir William Flinders Petrie and Ernest Mackay in an undisturbed tomb in Middle Egypt’s Deir Rifeh cemetery. But ever since they were taken back to England and unwrapped a year later, their true familial relationship has been debated. Now, using a next-generation DNA sequencing technique on samples extracted from the mummies’ teeth, the men’s true bond has been revealed. This first-ever successful typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies has proved that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht were, in fact, half brothers who had different fathers. “I had actually suspected that one or the other of the…

ARCHAEOLOGIST JOHNY ISLA is head of the Ministry of Culture in southern Peru’s Nazca and Palpa Provinces and one of the world’s foremost experts on the geoglyphs of the area’s high desert. These include the Nazca Lines, a set of designs dating to more than 1,000 years ago whose meaning has long puzzled archaeologists. During a trip to Berlin in 2014 to visit colleagues at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Isla was intrigued when he came across an aerial photograph of a geoglyph from Peru described as portraying a human figure and a bird. The image had appeared in the catalog of a 1974 photo exhibition held in Zurich, Switzerland. “I was surprised to see the picture of a figure I had not seen before,” says Isla. He immediately understood…

High in the Philippine Cordilleras, the terrain is a work of engineering and art so stunning it has been called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Steep, furrowed mountains are sculpted into terraces, stacked one atop the other, following the craggy contours of the land. In lush green paddies, people cultivate rice just as their ancestors did, passing the land down from one generation to the next. Since 1995, UNESCO has included the rice terraces of Ifugao Province on its World Heritage list, describing them as expressions of “harmony between humankind and the environment.” Ecology, geography, and agronomy mingle with the culture, religion, economy, and politics of indigenous Ifugao life. “The rice terraces are emblematic of Philippine heritage; they exemplify human ingenuity and humanity’s ability to modify even the most…

A rare circular burial found at the site of Tlalpan in southern Mexico City holds the remains of 10 males and females ranging in age from infancy to adulthood. The burial dates to approximately 2,400 years ago, a period when state-level societies were beginning to take shape in the Valley of Mexico. Some of the skeletons in the 6.5-foot-diameter grave show signs of intentional skull deformation and tooth filing, which were common practices in later Mesoamerican civilizations. The arrangement of the skeletons suggests to archaeologists that the burial could symbolize the stages of life, progressing from young to old.…

It is extremely rare to find paper in a shipwreck, but a number of small scraps were retrieved from the wreckage of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship, which ran aground off the North Carolina coast in 1718. Now, based on words printed on the fragments, researchers have determined that they came from a 1712 narrative of a round-the-world voyage. It’s unclear whether Blackbeard or his men actually read Captain Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711 between bouts of plundering merchant ships on the way from Africa to the Caribbean. After all, the paper was found amid sludge removed from the chamber of a breech-loading cannon. But Queen Anne’s Revenge project conservator Kimberly Kenyon…

Dice generally get mentioned only in passing in excavation reports, but researchers Jelmer W. Eerkens and Alex de Voogt say that changes in dice design can reflect shifting mentalities. According to Eerkens, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, “It takes assembling large numbers of dice to see the broader patterns,” which is why the team visited dozens of museums to construct a historical dice database. After comparing dice from ancient Roman, medieval, and Renaissance sites in the Netherlands, Eerkens found that they became standardized over time, shifting from “lopsided and uneven” Roman dice to more cubic designs as of 1250. By 1450, dice were highly standardized in shape with the numbers on opposite sides adding up to seven, inspired by the demand for fair dice with equal probabilities.…

In the third millennium B.C., a sanctuary on the island of Keros in the Aegean Sea was an important ritual center and destination for Bronze Age pilgrims. Today it is renowned for the discovery of Cycladic figurines, abstract marble figures whose dramatic shapes influenced artists in the early twentieth century. Now, new excavations on a promontory that was once connected to the island by a narrow causeway, before the sea level rose, have uncovered the remains of an unusually sophisticated settlement that flourished at the same time as the sanctuary. A team led by University of Cambridge archaeologists Michael Boyd and Colin Renfrew has shown that the island’s inhabitants built a series of terrace walls that enhanced the promontory’s natural pyramid-like shape. An estimated 1,000 tons of white stone covered…

SCOTLAND: Mystery surrounds the discovery of a World War I–era Austrian belt buckle near Stirling Castle. The buckle depicts the imperial double-headed eagle and Austrian coat of arms and was found during excavations of a footpath known as the Black Walk. It isn’t known how the object arrived at Stirling Castle, but officials believe it may have been a war trophy brought back by a Scottish soldier or may have even belonged to an Austrian prisoner who was held at the castle. SAN FRANCISCO: Two Irish Republican Army jacket buttons have been retrieved from a late 19th-century privy. Originally, the IRA was the military wing of the Fenian Brotherhood, which was founded in New York in 1858 and dedicated to Irish independence. City records indicate that two Irish families (the…

SOMETIMES, SHIPWRECKS APPEAR out of what seems to be merely sand. For more than 350 years, a ship lay unseen just off the Dutch island of Texel in the southeastern part of the North Sea, known as the Wadden Sea. This unique tidal and wetland environment, created by the interaction of salt water and fresh water with the mainland and islands, is one of the most dynamic ecosystems in the world, hosting an extraordinarily diverse biomass. It is home to more than 2,000 species of plants and animals, and is a crucial stopover on the major migratory flyways—between 10 and 12 million birds pass through each year. “This is an area which changes continuously,” says Maarten van Bommel, professor of conservation science and chair of the Restoration and Conservation of…

WHEN PEOPLE IN THE Near East’s Fertile Crescent first learned how to domesticate animals and cultivate crops some 11,000 years ago, they dramatically altered the course of human history. Known as the Neolithic Revolution, this radical event transformed mobile hunter-gatherers to sedentary food producers, fundamentally changing humans’ relationship to the environment around them. “Adopting agriculture is only possible after hunter-gatherers abandon their egalitarian ethos and invest in the idea of owning land,” says Princeton University archaeologist Peter Bogucki. “It involves a fundamental shift in belief systems.” Certainly farming was a successful way of life, and it spread rapidly beyond the Fertile Crescent. The first Neolithic people arrived in Greece around 6800 B.C., and farming then moved across the European continent by an average of about five miles a year, according…