Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2019 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The offices of ARCHAEOLOGY magazine are in New York City, a place defined by the rivers that surround it. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company founded the settlement of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, where the East and Hudson Rivers meet. This location offered unfettered access to riverine waterways, to some of the world’s finest deepwater harbors, and to the Atlantic Ocean. By 1626, when the company belatedly purchased Manhattan from the Lenape Indians, New Amsterdam was already a center of commerce. It was fascinating as we worked on this issue to see how, across broad historical spans and great stretches of the globe, rivers have played a vital role in human history—and also helped to preserve the remains of the past. In…

THE CASE FOR CLOTILDA A shipwreck designated archaeological site 1Ba704 should, say archaeologists, also be called Clotilda, one of the most notorious vessels in U.S. history. The path to identifying the wreck as the last ship to carry enslaved Africans to the United States has been challenging. And it began with the wrong wreck. In 1855, William Foster, a shipbuilder and businessman born in Nova Scotia and trained in the shipyards of the northeast, traveled south to Mobile, Alabama, where he built the schooner Clotilda. On the first of her 40 commercial voyages, she sailed to Havana from Mobile with unknown cargo. On her last, in 1860, she traveled to Mobile from Ouidah in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey, carrying 110 Africans destined for the slave markets of New…

THE AGE OF HOMER WAS an age of heroes—Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and Nestor, the king of Pylos, among others—whose deeds are chronicled in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Many archaeologists believe that Homer’s tales, despite being composed 500 or more years after the Late Bronze Age events they describe, had roots in a real past. “There’s always a kernel of truth to stories handed down from generation to generation,” says archaeologist Jack Davis. Whether these men were real people is unknown. But the culture they belonged to, which dominated Bronze Age Greece from around 1600 until 1200 B.C.—known as Mycenaean since it was given that name by nineteenth-century scholars—was certainly the model for the poems’ dimly remembered heroes from the deep past. Over…

On a bluff above the southern shore of the picturesque Lake George stands a small granite memorial. A bronze plaque commemorates the burial of four soldiers who died nearby during the 1755 Battle of Lake George, an early skirmish in the French and Indian War, which pitted British forces against the French and their Native American allies. The men’s remains had been unexpectedly disturbed during road construction in the 1930s, and were eventually reinterred in their present location beneath the monument. They are believed to be the oldest unknown American soldiers in the United States. This grim discovery is not altogeth er unusual for this region. There are many forgotten graves here, vestiges of a time when tens of thousands of soldiers roamed, fought, and died in these woods. “Given…

Some say that the world is divided into dog people and cat people. Having grown up with cats, I belong to the latter category. I recently learned that cats were domesticated relatively late in human history, probably in the ancient Near East. They were likely attracted to the food remains left by the area’s early farmers and to the mice that inhabited grain storage areas. Dogs, by contrast, were the first animals to be domesticated, and were bred to perform specific tasks, such as herding and hunting. This goes a long way toward explaining why dogs can be easily trained, whereas cats are generally so independent. My interest in the history of cats was sparked by a beautiful tabby kitten that my husband Jim named Zoe, after the mosaic of…

Along the rocky shoreline of Hopedale, in Labrador’s autonomous Inuit region of Nunatsiavut, a community is working to document and preserve more than 500 years of its past. Hopedale, which is home to a population of roughly 600, is celebrated for its postcardworthy complex of wooden buildings constructed by Moravian missionaries who arrived in the 1780s. It was once the site of a major Inuit settlement called Agvituk—“place to find whales”—a large whaling center and nexus for Inuit-European coastal trade from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. “Moravian missionaries considered Agvituk to be the Inuit equivalent of Paris or London,” says archaeologist Laura Kelvin of Memorial University of Newfoundland, who is documenting artifacts uncovered at the site and conducting interviews with longtime Hopedale residents. The Avertok Archaeology Project is led by…

IN LATE 1815 IN LONDON, Thomas Smith, then about 16 years old, signed up as an apprentice on Norfolk, a 650-ton former warship that had passed into private hands. Smith had heard that the vessel was bound for Africa in search of gold and ivory, an impression reinforced by eager talk among the more experienced sailors of hunting down huge elephants. As the ship sailed south, the youngster learned that Norfolk’s actual destination was South Georgia, a bleak, windswept island in the South Atlantic Ocean some 1,200 miles east of the southern tip of South America. There, he would indeed be hunting elephants—sea elephants, or elephant seals, as they are now known. Smith hung back warily during the first attack on a herd of elephant seals, enormous beasts that weigh…

VIRGINIA: Divers exploring the York River identified burned wooden timbers and cannons that may belong to a British ship that sank during the Siege of Yorktown. In this, the Revolutionary War’s decisive battle, George Washington’s army attacked the British by land, while the French navy assaulted them from the sea. More than 40 British ships went down during the onslaught, either from enemy fire or because they were deliberately scuttled by Lord Cornwallis in an attempt to stop a French landing. NORTH CAROLINA: A tavern in Brunswick Town that burned down in the 1760s may have been a popular watering hole for rebellious colonials. A small cufflink found among the tavern’s remains was inscribed with the words “Wilkes Liberty 45,” a cryptic rallying cry used by those opposing King George…

FOLLOW THE WINDING ROAD from Durham Cathedral, a 900-year-old architectural masterpiece that dominates the skyline of this historic city in northeast England, and you’ll eventually reach a narrow, cobbled twelfth-century stone bridge. Known as Elvet Bridge, it stands 20 feet above the River Wear. When it was the main thoroughfare in and out of the city, the bridge was also the prime spot for merchants to sell their wares. If you happened to have crossed it in 1650 or so, you might have stopped at one of many wooden market stalls to choose some new coat buttons, seek out a remedy for an ailment, or perhaps treat yourself to a hair comb. The bridge was only 16 feet across then—just wide enough for a horse and carriage—and, as a result,…

RECORDS OF VOYAGES TO South Georgia, and other islands in the South Seas, make clear that millions of fur-seal pelts were exported from these remote locations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What became of these pelts once they were sold in London, New York, and southern China is less well understood. To try to find out how the pelts were used in England, Robert Burton, who served as the South Georgia Heritage Trust’s project manager for a recent archaeological expedition to the island, searched British newspaper archives. Burton found that when sealskins first arrived in London in the late eighteenth century, there was little demand for them and they were used to produce thin leather for gloves and shoes. In 1795, a trunk maker named Thomas Chapman developed an…