Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2019 i ARCHAEOLOGY

When we started planning our special feature “Mapping the Past,” we knew we wanted to bring you a wide range of maps from diverse cultures and time periods. We also wanted to broaden the concept of what constitutes a map by taking into account whatever people might wish to locate, including the stars, their stories, or a path through the afterlife. As we researched our choices, we wondered: How many maps have survived from antiquity? Were the materials used to create them too perishable to last? Would universal themes appear? Or would people from different cultures, places, and time periods map their worlds in unique ways? When we started to make our selections, we found that maps made of all sorts of materials—bronze, clay, papyrus, silk, marble, cotton, paper, and…

More than a decade ago, archaeologists Andrew Chamberlain of the University of Manchester and Mike Parker Pearson of University College London began taking measurements at Stonehenge as part of their research at the site. They determined that the Neolithic monument’s earthwork elements—including a ditch, a bank, and a ring of chalk pits—which form concentric circles around the iconic standing stones, all feature diameters evenly divisible by a single standard measurement, that is to say, with no fractions remaining. They termed this measurement the “long foot,” because it is equal to 1.056 modern feet. Chamberlain and Parker Pearson found that the distances between some of Stonehenge’s megaliths could also be expressed as whole numbers of long feet. This led them to question how Stonehenge’s builders had made the calculations necessary to…

Four foxes buried alongside women at prehistoric sites in northeastern Spain offer insight into the value Bronze Age Iberians placed on their animal companions. The animals were unearthed in three graves dating to the end of the third to the beginning of the second millennium B.C. at the Catalan sites of Can Roqueta and Minferri. More than 30 dogs were also found. Isotope analysis of the foxes’ bone collagen suggests that they were regularly fed by villagers, most likely women, whose diet sometimes differed from that of men. For example, at Can Roqueta, men ate more meat than women. “Foxes are associated with women, not only in the grave but also in what they ate,” says Aurora Grandal-d’Anglade of the University of A Coruña. “The foxes show isotopic signatures consistent…

In the late 1960s, the Soviets commissioned a trio of bases designed to store nuclear warheads in remote, forested areas of western Poland. The warheads, which ranged from 0.5 to 500 kilotons each, were intended to be fired at areas of West Germany and Denmark. Although the bases were secret, and attempts were made to camouflage them, the CIA had definitively identified their purpose by 1972. Now, using declassified satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning, and on-the-ground exploration, Grzegorz Kiarszys of the University of Szczecin has carried out the first archaeological investigation of the bases. Little remains at the sites apart from the bunkers used to store the actual warheads. When they were operational, however, Kiarszys knows from archival photographs and the contents of trash pits, the bases included facilities to…

While gathering material from a stone quarry in Cumbria’s Gelt Woods for renovations to nearby Hadrian’s Wall, Roman soldiers carved personal inscriptions, funny cartoons, and “good luck” phallic symbols into the rock face. This 1,800-year-old graffti is now being documented by archaeologists from Historic England and Newcastle University. One soldier seems to have etched a humorous caricature of his perhaps overly demanding boss, Agricola. “This was hard and potentially dangerous work that they were doing and this is a really human reaction to that environment,” says Historic England’s Mike Collins. Equipped with laser-scanning technology, archaeologists were suspended 30 feet down the quarry face to document the graffti, which was first discovered in the eighteenth century. In the process, they identified several previously unknown examples. Because the inscriptions record names, ranks,…

When a local resident noticed a partially fossilized tree protruding from a peat tidal pool on the island of Benbecula in Scotland’s Western Isles, she alerted archaeological authorities. This led to the identification of a 7,000-year-old submerged forest. Although Benbecula today is mostly treeless, researchers now know that thousands of years ago it was covered by dense pockets of willow, birch, and Scots pine. “By looking at the wood, pollen, and other microfossils we can learn an enormous amount about what the islands were like before humans arrived and can study the impact of people on the natural vegetation,” says University of St. Andrews archaeologist Joanna Hambly. As Hambly and her team mapped the location of around 300 trees, they discovered traces of human activity dating to around 1700 B.C.,…

In northern China’s Shaanxi Province, the Tuwei River winds its way through the undulating terrain of the Loess Plateau. This Yellow River tributary bisects a stark landscape. To the west are rows of rolling sand dunes that gradually taper off into the Mu Us Desert; to the east are rippling hills and mountain ridges cut by steep gullies and ravines. Even today, this is considered a remote region of China. Scholars have long believed that thousands of years ago, it was not only remote, but also existed at the distant outskirts of the civilized world, far from the Central Plains, where many believe Chinese civilization originated 4,000 years ago. The region is perhaps best known for a section of the Great Wall that weaves through its landscape. Parts of that…

In 563, an Irish monk named Columba came to the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, along with a group of followers—12, according to legend—and founded a monastery that grew into one of the most important religious sites in the British Isles. King Oswald of Northumbria, among others, was educated there, and when he established the monastery on Lindisfarne in 635 he envisioned it as an “Iona of the East.” Unlike Lindisfarne, which has, until now, been very little excavated, Iona has been explored by archaeologists periodically for more than five decades. During these excavations, teams have unearthed evidence of wooden structures dating to the monastery’s earliest years. Perhaps the most intriguing of these discoveries is a hut that, according to a biography written a century after…

Shortly after a 1793 epidemic of yellow fever ravaged Philadelphia, the nation’s capital at the time, the architect and engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe described the city thus: “The backyards of most of the houses are also depositories of filth to a degree which is surprising.…The houses being much crowded, and the situation flat, without subterraneous sewers to carry off the filth, every house has its privy and its drains which lodge their supplies in one boghole sunk into the ground at different depths.” Latrobe hypothesized that deeply dug cesspits had contaminated the underground aquifers that supplied most of the drinking water, causing the disastrous outbreak. As a native of Philadelphia whose family had a plumbing supply business, I am particularly interested in the story of sanitation. As an archaeologist, I…

Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory, a roughly three-hour drive southeast from the territory’s capital, Darwin, is one of the greatest rock-art landscapes in the world. Recent archaeological excavations have pushed back the earliest dates of human presence in the region to around 65,000 years ago. More than 5,000 sites with petroglyphs have been recorded within the park’s 8,000 square miles. Pinning down the precise date of some of Kakadu’s rock art is challenging, as many of the mineral pigments used in the area are not datable using radiocarbon methods. Therefore, says Samantha McLean of Kakadu’s research and permits office, archaeologists and art historians have constructed timelines for the art using a combination of thermoluminescence dating, which can determine when mineral elements of paint or ceramics were first heated…

A belt buckle featuring a whimsical depiction of a tiger and its cub has been unearthed in the city of Cheongju in South Korea. The third-century A.D. bronze artifact depicts a crouching tigress with her mouth wide open, as if roaring, and a tiny cub in the same pose seated on her tail. Although tiger-shaped belt buckles have been found in the past, this is the first excavated example of a mother and baby tiger. It is also the first tiger-shaped buckle to have been discovered at Cheongju, a site belonging to the Mahan Confederacy, which existed between the first century B.C. and third century A.D. on the southern Korean peninsula, and about which little is known.…

On the evening of October 26, 1942, the Yorktown-class aircraft carrier USS Hornet sank to the bottom of the South Pacific during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, ending a brief but storied career that included a pivotal role in the Battle of Midway. Now, with the aid of U.S. and Japanese naval records, the crew of Research Vessel Petrel has located the wreckage of Hornet near the Solomon Islands, almost 17,500 feet underwater. “There’s no current at that depth, so the level of preservation is in many ways pristine,” says underwater archaeologist Robert Neyland of the Naval History and Heritage Command, who accompanied Petrel’s crew on the expedition. The first evidence of damage to Hornet that Petrel’s crew documented—the result of Japanese bomb and torpedo attacks, as well…

Each spring as new plants sprouted from the ground, the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica, including the Aztecs, understood the event as the earth growing a new skin. This idea was embodied by the god Xipe Totec, who was often depicted wearing a flayed human skin. The deity was thought to cause crops and other plants to grow. Archaeologists led by Noemí Castillo Tejero of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History recently uncovered the earliest known temple of the “Flayed Lord” at the Ndachjian-Tehuacan archaeological zone in the Mexican state of Puebla. The temple complex was built by the Popoloca people around A.D. 900. There, the archaeologists have found a large pyramid with two circular altars where, they believe, prisoners of war were given as sacrifices to honor Xipe Totec…

CANADA: Several unassuming rock walls along the shore of Quadra Island are actually the ruins of ancient clam gardens constructed by First Nations peoples thousands of years ago. The walls were erected within intertidal zones to create sandy terraces, ideal habitats for shellfish such as littleneck and butter clams. Radiocarbon dating of organic material sampled from one wall indicates it was built nearly 3,500 years ago, making it the oldest known aquaculture system of its kind. SOUTH CAROLINA: A piece of Charleston’s history was revealed when construction workers encountered a section of the city’s colonial defensive network. Charleston was one of the most heavily fortified English colonial cities in America. Its defenses offered protection against potential Spanish and French attacks. Construction began on a red brick wall along the city’s…

In ancient egypt, the passage to the afterlife was an arduous one. Even at the end of the journey, the deceased could be turned away from the paradise of the Field of Reeds if their heart tipped the scales when weighed against a feather. Often elements of the transit were painted on tomb walls, a process that, judging from the accomplished and detailed murals that have survived, would have consumed a great deal of time. Although the walls of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb are decorated with familiar scenes of this path to paradise, new research is now telling a fresh story about the real-world turmoil caused by the sudden death of the young king. The pharaoh, who was first known as Tutankhaten (r. ca. 1336–1327 B.C.), was crowned at the…

The Dead Sea includes the lowest point on Earth, at more than 1,400 feet below sea level, and lies in a long and narrow desert valley that runs through Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. The sea itself is nearly 1,000 feet deep and covers more than 200 square miles, but its water is too salty to support any life beyond microscopic bacteria. Called a “sea” in multiple languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, this body of water is actually an inland lake, fed mainly by the Jordan River at its northern end. Green oases of palm trees and freshwater springs dot the land around the Dead Sea, but the terrain is overwhelmingly barren and rocky, with mountains rising along both the eastern and western shores. Despite the harsh landscape, people…

ARTISTIC VISION As an artist who also works with horses, I was captivated by the carved horse image on the stone tablet from Rocher de l’Imperatrice (“Art at the End of the Ice Age,” March/April 2019). The carving appears to be a careful study done from a dead animal. The artist has realistically rendered the challenging angles of the hoof, fetlock, and pastern, but the horse’s feet are not in contact with the ground. The limbs are not posed to support the animal’s weight—even the limp nature of the tail suggests the horse is placed on its side. The loss of volume shown beneath the chin suggests a fairly recent death, before the onset of rigor mortis or bloating. Jessica Madole St. Paul, MN SECRET SOCK SOCIETY As an anthropology…

The skeleton of an eleventh-century man who appears to have been executed has been unearthed in central Sicily. When archaeologists led by Roberto Miccichè of the University of Palermo found the remains in a shallow grave, they immediately realized they had an unusual case on their hands. The man had been buried facedown, in a manner that did not follow any of the religious practices common in Sicily at the time. This suggests that he was an outlaw. As Miccichè studied the bones using CT scans and a 3-D reconstruction, he recognized that the victim had been stabbed in the back at least six times, most likely while kneeling with his feet bound together. This is evidence of “someone very familiar with human anatomy carrying out a kind of ‘surgical…

Arichly furnished grave excavated in 1878 near the Viking town of Birka in eastern Sweden had long been assumed to hold a powerful male warrior. The grave was equipped with an arsenal of weapons, as well as a set of gaming pieces and a gaming board, which were seen as indications that the deceased was a military commander. A pair of horses was also found in the grave, one bridled as if prepared to ride off into battle once again in the afterlife. More than a century later, several osteologists concluded—and genetic analysis confirmed—that this Viking warrior was actually female. When these results were reported in 2017, skeptics wondered whether there had been a testing mistake, or, perhaps, whether the person in the grave had not been a warrior after…

THE NEBRA SKY DISC DATE: ca. 1800 B.C. MATERIAL: Bronze and gold DIMENSIONS: 1 foot diameter, weight 4.6 pounds FOUND: Saxony-Anhalt, Germany When the Nebra Sky Disc was buried, it had already been in use for 200 years. While its raw materials were imported from as far away as Cornwall, the knowledge required to create the object was entirely local, drawn from observing the heavens from atop Mittelberg, a mountain near the modern village of Nebra. The bronze disc—the world’s oldest representation of a specific astronomical phenomenon—had five phases over its history. In the first phase, the disc showed the night sky with 32 gold stars, including the Pleiades, a gold orb representing the sun or a full moon, and a crescent moon. It served as a reminder of when…

Standing by a trench at the south end of the tidal island of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England, archaeologist David Petts gestures dismissively at the seemingly expansive ruins of a priory dating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that loom in the background. “Don’t be deceived by the little tiny priory we’ve got here. That’s quite compact. It’s like a pocket monastery,” he says. “The early monastery probably underlies the whole village. It was a big, big site, and there would have been buildings, including multiple churches, all over the place.” The early monastery to which Petts refers dates to the seventh century, a time when Great Britain was occupied by competing Anglo-Saxon and Celtic kingdoms that regularly clashed in bloody battles and fought to hold on to…

For thousands of years and across much of the world, tattoos have been markers of identity used, for example, to make statements about gender, ethnicity, and status, but evidence for tattooing among the indigenous cultures of the American Southwest is rare. There are no identifiable tattoos on excavated human remains from the region, and while some scholars believe that images on rock art, clay figurines, and kiva murals represent tattoos, others suggest they may depict body painting. “These all provide potential indirect evidence for ancient tattooing,” says archaeologist Andrew Gillreath-Brown of Washington State University. Furthermore, he explains, it is thought that, however murky its history, tattooing in the Southwest was abandoned after European contact. “Colonial institutions looked down on tattooing and other forms of non-Christian, indigenous cultural expression,” Gillreath-Brown says.…