Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2018 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The most exciting thing about making a magazine is that moment when everything begins to come together, when what started out as ideas on a whiteboard takes shape as an issue of ARCHAEOLOGY. Each issue is, in some ways, a blank slate to fill—but one with 70 years of history behind it. As we begin our eighth decade of publication, I would like to introduce myself to you and express my profound thanks for being entrusted with the position of editor in chief. From the time I was seven years old, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I could not have imagined when I first subscribed to ARCHAEOLOGY as a teenager that I would eventually have the chance to join the staff of the one magazine that expresses so very…

It was common in antiquity for deceased individuals to be sent on their journey to the afterlife with a collection of their cherished objects. Nevertheless, archaeologists in Germany were surprised by the burial assemblage of a wealthy Roman woman who was entombed with her jewelry, her makeup kit, and other finely crafted beauty items. “Cosmetic utensils and jewelry as gifts in women’s graves are not uncommon, but the variety and quality of the offerings is particularly interesting,” says Susanne Willer of the LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn. The discovery was made during the installation of sewer and drainage systems near Zülpich. The 25-to-30-year-old woman died around the fourth century B.C. and was interred in a massive stone sarcophagus. When researchers finally lifted and opened the 4.5-ton casket, they discovered a wealth of…

The fungus Ustilago maydis may damage the plant it grows on (and certainly looks disgusting), but it was an important part of the diet of the people who lived at Turkey Pen Ruin in Utah from 400 B.C. to A.D. 400. The fungus, better known as corn smut, infects maize plants, turning the kernels gray and misshapen. About 80 percent of the diet eaten by the Ancestral Puebloan people living at Turkey Pen Ruin was maize, which lacks certain amino acids. As a result, those who rely heavily on maize can fall prey to a potentially fatal nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Jenna Battillo, an archaeologist with Southern Methodist University, wanted to understand why these Ancestral Puebloan people didn’t suffer from this kind of malnutrition. She analyzed samples of feces from…

National Park Service archaeologist Jeffrey Shanks recently led a team excavating a storm cellar at the house of Robert E. Howard, the author who created the pulp hero Conan the Barbarian, among others, at a desk in his bedroom. Howard’s house in Cross Plains, Texas, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the storm cellar offered the tantalizing possibility of learning something new about Howard’s life. If the cellar had appeared in one of Howard’s stories, it might have been the tomb of an undead king ready to do battle to protect his treasure—but it mostly held jars of pickled green beans. Intriguingly, the team also found a tiny battle-ax-shaped object, but Shanks thinks it may be part of a hatpin, or maybe a bone from a toad’s…

Every summer when I travel to the Middle East, I marvel at the ingenuity of the diverse populations who inhabited the region in antiquity. This past summer I brought my entire dig team from Israel’s Galilee to visit Petra in Jordan. Although people today are familiar with the iconic facade of “The Treasury” from the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, many might not realize this monument has nothing to do with the Holy Grail. Instead, it is one of hundreds of tombs carved into the red sandstone cliffs of Petra. Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans—originally a nomadic, pre-Islamic people who spoke an early form of the Arabic language and controlled the lucrative caravan routes connecting the Arabian Peninsula with the Mediterranean Sea. By the time of…

Thingvellir National Park, just under 30 miles northeast of Reykjavik, may accurately be described as the birthplace of the Icelandic nation. Situated on a boundary of tectonic plates, the 35-square-mile park is a patchwork of highlands, fertile fields, and rifts filled with crystal-clear water. Thingvellir translates to “plains of assembly.” The site was home to the Althing, Iceland’s parliament, which was founded as an open-air assembly in a.d. 930 and met there annually until 1798. The governing body was founded by some of the island’s first Viking settlers and turned into the pop-up capital of Iceland for two weeks every year. In addition to hosting legislative debate, the assembly featured markets, sporting competitions, and feasts. Local chieftains are believed to have sent an emissary to Norway to record laws with…

A large number of livestock bones found in a mound of settlement debris on Egypt’s Giza Plateau are offering possible insights into the diet of workers who toiled there some 4,500 years ago. Amid the debris, archaeologists from Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) have unearthed sealings dating to the reign of the 4th Dynasty pharaoh Khafre (r. ca. 2520–2494 B.C.), along with chunks of painted plaster suggesting the material is from wealthy settlements. They also found a concentration of long, meat-bearing sheep and goat bones, many of whose ends had been snapped off. Two Egyptian archaeologists taking part in a field school at the site immediately recognized that the snapped-off ends were likely used to make gelatin soup, a cheap source of protein enjoyed to this day in Egypt. AERA…

More than 1,000 unexploded rockets have been recovered from an abandoned well in the state of Karnataka in southern India. The excavators believe the corroded shells date to the eighteenth century when the Muslim warrior King Tipu Sultan ruled the region. The cache was uncovered when the well, located at Nagara Fort in the Shivamogga District, was being repaired. “The rockets, which are of several sizes, are metallic cylinders filled with some powder, possibly saltpeter or some form of explosive propellant,” says R. Shejeshwara Nayaka, assistant director of the Karnataka Department of Archaeology, Museums, and Heritage (DAMH), who led the excavation in 2018. “They have circular end caps on one side, while on the other side there is an opening which lights like a fuse. We have also found some…

Athlit Castle, which was built by the Knights Templar in the early thirteenth century, now sits inside the perimeter of an Israeli Defense Force training camp on the coast between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Its cemetery, the largest known Crusader resting place in the Middle East, lies just outside the camp’s fence. Here, over a period of about eight decades, the remains of thousands of people were buried in an orderly rectangular space a football field long, and almost as wide. There are many unusual features of the Athlit cemetery that seem to contradict conventional thinking about European burial practices of the time. In the thirteenth century, the castle stood above a thriving town to the east and the fertile countryside beyond, but, unusually, the cemetery was located some distance…

Even in the darkest moments of their lives—and perhaps even more so at those times—human beings have a remarkable ability to create something beautiful. This decorated canteen is evidence of that capacity. A touching example of “trench art”—an object fashioned by soldiers, civilians, or prisoners in the midst of warfare or conflict—the canteen began as a standard, functional item used to carry water or alcohol. But when its owner, a Russian soldier, was interned in the Czersk POW camp in northern Poland, he created a lasting memento of his experiences. The soldier who owned the canteen carved his initials, O and R, on its back on April 15, 1915, the very day he was taken captive by German troops, according to Dawid Kobiałka of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology…

A CHOICE WEAPON I would suggest that the Neolithic balls (“Spheres of Influence,” September/October 2018) may be bola balls. The weapons are ancient ones, and the grooves would have made it easy to tie the cord around them while allowing the stone to stick out to effect the blow. Bob Dopp Marietta, GA National Museums Scotland curator Hugo Anderson-Whymark replies: There are a few uses for the balls that seem plausible. Their use as weapons is a strong possibility, either bound in cord and thrown like South American bolas, as suggested by Sir John Evans in 1872, or bound to a haft as a macehead, as suggested by John Smith in 1876. However, for at least some of these artifacts, it is likely that they were deployed as symbolic or…

Archaeologists believe that a bronze hand from the Roman fort of Vindolanda was associated with the cult worship of Jupiter Dolichenus at the site. The palm of the four-inch hand may have once held a small effigy of the god, who was often depicted riding a bull and grasping an ax and a lightning bolt, says Vindolanda director of excavations, archaeologist Andrew Birley. The hand was originally attached to a staff that was likely used to bless worshippers. Although much is still unknown about the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, it is believed that its origins lie in the Near East. “What little we do know is that the cult was open to both men and women, and to different social strata in Roman society, which would make it appealing to…

Some 5,000 years ago, nomadic herders in East Africa constructed a monumental cemetery. The site, called Lothagam North, is close to Lake Turkana in northwest Kenya and has been excavated by a team led by Elisabeth Hildebrand of Stony Brook University and Katherine Grillo of the University of Florida. It features a platform around 100 feet in diameter marked by megalithic pillars. In a large cavity at the platform’s center, the team found the remains of at least 580 people, almost all buried with ornaments, with no distinction based on gender or age. This counters assumptions that such monumental building projects were only embarked upon by settled, socially stratified farmers. Burials at the site continued for hundreds of years, coinciding with a period when rainfall in the area decreased dramatically…

FOR MUCH OF THE first millennium B.C., China consisted of a patchwork of powerful states competing for supremacy. Among these were the Qin, who would go on to found the first unified Chinese empire, and the Han and the Chu, who would battle over the right to succeed them. During this long period of struggle, smaller kingdoms tended to be swallowed up by larger ones. It might seem unlikely that any of the smaller kingdoms survived under these circumstances, much less thrived. But the Ba kingdom of eastern Sichuan did both, despite its vulnerable location within striking distance of all three of these much more powerful states. The grave of a member of the Ba’s ruling class speaks volumes about how the Ba negotiated their way through this tumultuous era.…

archaeological.org AIA TURNS 140 IN 2019 In 1879, Harvard University professor Charles Eliot Norton and his colleagues and friends founded the Archaeological Institute of America in Boston to promote and conduct archaeological and artistic investigation and research. One hundred eight people attended the first AIA meeting. Since then, it has grown to become the largest archaeological organization in North America, with more than 220,000 members. Today, in keeping with Norton’s vision, the AIA continues to support archaeological excavation, research, and publication, and works for the protection and preservation of archaeological sites around the world. In addition, its annual meeting is attended by around 2,500 scholars. The AIA publishes ARCHAEOLOGY magazine and the American Journal of Archaeology and hosts websites that are visited by millions of people each year. Through its…