Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2019 i ARCHAEOLOGY

For the most part today, we consider magic incompatible with our scientific understanding of the world around us. For many past cultures, though, their relationship with the supernatural was deeply entwined with their understanding of the natural world. In the seventeenth century, in Salem, Massachusetts, and across Europe, civic and church officials undertook witch hunts to track down and eradicate what they perceived as the dangerous practice of witchcraft. In 1612 in rural Lancashire, one family, the Devices, including a young woman named Alizon, her grandmother, and eight other members of their community, were the target of one of these hunts. In “Searching for the Witches’ Tower,” you will read about how the alleged witches of Lancashire may actually have been practitioners not of conjuring but of folk traditions that involved…

Rathcroghan, in western Ireland, covers more than three square miles and contains at least 240 archaeological sites spanning the time period from the Neolithic to the late medieval era. Its inhabitants began to raise animals and farm around 3,500 years ago, and went on to build stone structures and earthworks, remnants of which can still be seen. Rathcroghan is known not only from these monuments, but also from its pride of place in Ireland’s rich literary canon. The site is recorded in medieval accounts to have been a primary location for the ancient óenach, a ceremonial assembly featuring gatherings of legal scholars, boisterous feasts, and competitions of strength. It is also described as a burial place for Gaelic nobles and as the royal seat of the Connachta, who ruled western…

Long before pressed pennies and postcards, a resident of Londinium (Roman London) received a witty souvenir from the empire’s capital. An iron stylus—a writing implement used to press letters into wax or clay tablets—dating to about A.D. 70, unearthed from a trash dump along a lost tributary of the Thames, bears a personal message in Latin etched along its sides: In the decades following the conquest of Britain, Londinium experienced an influx of Roman soldiers and merchants, who brought with them goods from all across the Roman world. “This stylus is a clear demonstration of a personal connection between someone in Londinium, which lay close to the edge of the empire, and someone who had been to Rome, which lay at its heart,” says Museum of London Archaeology senior finds…

An 8,000-year-old wooden platform has been discovered on the seabed off the Isle of Wight. The platform, which has been excavated by researchers from the Maritime Archaeology Trust (MAT) and taken to a laboratory for study, lay under more than 30 feet of water. At the time it was built, however, sea levels were much lower, and the area was heavily wooded and abutted a waterway. The newly identified structure, which measures about seven feet by three feet and may have originally been substantially larger, consists of layers of split wood resting on a perpendicular log foundation. It was identified by divers after it eroded out of the seabed. Building the platform would have required woodworking skills that were not thought to have been developed in this region until several…

CANADA: Remnants of a forgotten early 20th-century Japanese village were uncovered deep in the forest outside Vancouver. They include 14 houses, a possible shrine, and a bathhouse, along with an assortment of Japanese ceramics. The small settlement likely began as a logging camp, but community members may have chosen to remain even after logging ceased in order to avoid widespread anti-Japanese sentiment. The village’s sudden abandonment was, perhaps, the result of Canada’s establishment of Japanese internment camps in early 1942. MEXICO: A millennium ago in Chichen Itza, the Maya practiced ritual human sacrifice. Scholars have long debated whether locals or outsiders were subjected to this grim fate. Using the results of isotope analysis of tooth enamel from sacrificial victims thrown into the site’s Sacred Cenote, researchers have concluded that some…

ON A SPRING AFTERNOON in 2017, archaeologist Jan Simek led a group of graduate students into the dark, wet mouth of a Tennessee cave. They slipped past cave crickets and ducked under a colony of bats clinging to the ceiling. When they came to the end of the passage, the group belly-crawled through a crack in a wall and emerged in a small chamber. Simek angled his headlamp over the chamber’s walls to reveal hundreds of strange images carved into the stone: a serpent with antlers, a mud wasp with delicate wings, an entire flock of birds that seemed to soar across the wall. The images had been engraved by Native Americans 1,200 years earlier, during what archaeologists call the Woodland period (1000 B.C.–A.D. 1100), when hunter-gatherers were beginning to…

For the most part today, we consider magic incompatible with our scientific understanding of the world around us. For many past cultures, though, their relationship with the supernatural was deeply entwined with their understanding of the natural world. In the seventeenth century, in Salem, Massachusetts, and across Europe, civic and church officials undertook witch hunts to track down and eradicate what they perceived as the dangerous practice of witchcraft. In 1612 in rural Lancashire, one family, the Devices, including a young woman named Alizon, her grandmother, and eight other members of their community, were the target of one of these hunts. In “Searching for the Witches’ Tower,” you will read about how the alleged witches of Lancashire may actually have been practitioners not of conjuring but of folk traditions that…

A thriving Bronze Age settlement at the site of Zincirli in southeastern Turkey was suddenly and catastrophically destroyed more than 3,500 years ago, archaeologists have discovered. A joint team from the Universities of Chicago and Tubingen uncovered two buildings that burned down, forcing their inhabitants to flee and leave behind their personal belongings. However, the layer of charred debris that covered the site preserved the buildings’ contents, including an array of bowls, drinking cups, cooking pots, storage jars, and other domestic objects. “It’s not that unusual for ancient settlements to have been burned and abandoned,” says project codirector Virginia Herrmann of the University of Tubingen, “but we were definitely surprised to find such good preservation.” The project leaders believe that they know who was responsible for the swath of destruction:…

Roadwork at Veyre-Monton in central France has revealed the first known megalithic site in the region. There, archaeologists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) have uncovered evidence of cult activity spanning thousands of years, from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age. They identified 30 menhirs, or monoliths, arranged from largest to smallest in a 500-foot-long line oriented precisely north to south. Most of the menhirs are made of local basalt and undecorated, but a single limestone example was sculpted to resemble a person, with two small breasts and an engraved chevron that might depict forearms. At some point all the menhirs were intentionally buried, as was an adjacent four-sided stone cairn, measuring 46 feet long and 21 feet wide, that surrounded the tomb of a tall…

Before the rise of Alexandria in the fourth century B.C., the ancient port city of Thonis-Heracleion at the mouth of the Nile was the gateway to Egypt for foreign traders. The city and a suburb, Canopus, also served as a center of Egyptian religious life before a series of natural disasters submerged them by the eighth century A.D. Recent excavations in a channel south of Thonis-Heracleion’s main temple to the god Amun-Gereb have uncovered debris from its destruction around 140 B.C. Wedged among the building’s blocks and columns were hundreds of mostly intact ritual artifacts, ceramics, and bronze coins from the reign of Ptolemy II (r. 285–246 B.C.). Across from the temple’s entrance, archaeologists discovered Doric columns belonging to a circular Greek temple. Thonis-Heracleion’s surfeit of sanctuaries, including temples dedicated…

Ancient Greece is renowned for its extraordinary stone temples. Structures such as the Parthenon were only made possible by the invention of the crane, which is considered to be one the Greeks’ greatest technological innovations. The device allowed heavy blocks to be lifted and set into place using relatively few men. “Lifting methods previously employed by the Greeks, as well as by other ancient cultures, required large ramps and scaffolds of earth or mudbrick,” says University of Notre Dame architectural historian Alessandro Pierattini. “Building and dismantling such massive earthworks required a large workforce.” It has long been thought that the crane was developed toward the end of the sixth century B.C. However, Pierattini suggests that the Greeks experimented with crane technology at least a century earlier. By reexamining ashlar blocks…

WHEN POPOCATEPETL, a volcano overlooking the southern Valley of Mexico, erupted in the first century A.D., it blanketed nearby cities and farmlands with thick layers of ash. The cataclysm forced people to abandon their homes in search of arable land. Many of those fleeing the consequences of the eruption eventually made their way to the Teotihuacan Valley, 70 miles north of the volcano, where there were only a few scattered farming villages. Here, over roughly a century following the eruption, these refugees and their descendants laid out an urban grid, dug an extensive irrigation network, and built the center of what would become, for a time, the largest city in Mesoamerica, known today as Teotihuacan. The most politically and economically powerful center in the ancient Americas until the Aztecs forged…

THE SOUTHERN ITALIAN region of Puglia rolls across seemingly endless hills of golden grain that stretch in every direction. Bordered by the azure waters of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, this area at the heel of Italy is home to the bustling ports of Bari and Monopoli. Yet away from the coast and past the fortified medieval cities of Ostuni and Alberobello, the sunbaked landscape begins to feel uninhabited. Moving deeper into Puglia’s interior, the towns give way to single farmhouses, which, in turn, disappear, leaving only the gently waving rows of wheat that guard an agricultural legacy going back more than 2,000 years. At the end of a two-track road that winds around ravines and through cultivated fields of wheat and chickpeas, a line of square trenches cuts deep…

PROOF POSITIVE Nothing lives forever—except maybe yeast, which can go dormant and hibernate, perhaps indefinitely. An archaeologist, a biologist, and a baking enthusiast have recently embarked on a collaborative project to revive and reuse millennia-old yeast. They believe they have succeeded in identifying, isolating, and even baking bread with strains of yeast that may have been used by Middle Kingdom Egyptians to make bread—and brew beer—more than 4,000 years ago. Archaeologist Serena Love of the University of Queensland is interested in brewing beer using Egyptian recipes, which scholars have attempted to piece together by studying tomb paintings and analyzing the microstructure of starch preserved in the archaeological record. Love, along with tech inventor and dedicated baker Seamus Blackley, set out to acquire ancient yeast strains that have secure archaeological provenance.…

Humans and animals have traversed the icy landscape of Norway’s Jotunheimen Mountains for thousands of years. Now, melting ice patches at a site in northern Oppland County are exposing evidence of these often-treacherous crossings. A team of archaeologists led by Espen Finstad of the Secrets of the Ice Project has recovered hundreds of well-preserved artifacts scattered across the high mountain pass, including a Viking-period arrowhead, a horse’s snowshoe, and a wooden tinderbox with leather straps containing a stick and fragments of resin-filled wood. “We believe we are seeing a long series of losses and discards,” says project codirector Lars Pilø, who remarks that none of the finds seem to be associated with any of the others, despite the fact that most appear to date to the Viking Age and medieval…

Excavations near an eleventh-century church in Lyminge, Kent, have exposed the foundations of an ancient predecessor. The Anglo-Saxon building dates to the mids-eventh century, just a few decades after Christianity, which had largely disappeared from Britain following the departure of the Romans in the early fifth century, was reintroduced by St. Augustine of Canterbury. One of the oldest stone churches in England, the seventh-century building was partially unearthed and then reburied in the nineteenth century, but a new project led by Gabor Thomas of the University of Reading is reinvestigating and documenting the site using modern archaeological methods. “Only a handful of stone churches dating from the earliest phase of English Christianity survive to the present day,” says Thomas. “Very few opportunities have arisen to explore these sites archaeologically.” The…

Queen Victoria is known for wearing only black clothing during a mourning period for her beloved Albert that endured for no less than 40 years. She even went so far as to favor black jewelry made from jet, a gemstone that is composed of fossilized wood from a type of Jurassic-period British coniferous tree. But the queen was not the first Briton to wear jet jewelry. Archaeologists recently unearthed a jet necklace dating to sometime between 2200 and 1900 B.C. in a tomb under an earthen mound near the village of Kirk Michael on the Isle of Man. The crescent-shaped necklace consists of 122 decorated beads between 0.4 and 2 inches long. These jet gemstones came from Yorkshire, in northern England, suggesting that communities on the Isle of Man were…

Aztecs ventured to Teotihuacan in the fourteenth century and gathered ancient stone masks from the site to reuse as offerings in their own temples. Archaeologists have since unearthed dozens of such stone faces, most of which measure six to nine inches wide, from neighborhoods throughout the city. Many scholars assumed the masks, which have holes on their sides, were used during religious rites and then buried with the dead. Recently, anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh and mineralogist Timothy Rose, both researchers at the Smithsonian Institution, made a close study of more than 100 of the objects. They determined that the masks were fashioned from limestone and three other types of stone found outside Teotihuacan’s immediate territory. They also concluded that the objects were likely not masks at all. “They don’t have…

THE RESIDENTS OF BABYLON in the first millennium B.C. saw themselves as facing their past and walking backward into the future. In the Akkadian language of ancient Mesopotamia, the word panu, or “face,” relates to the past, whereas “behind” is a word associated with the future. Reverence for the past was at the heart of the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II’s (r. ca. 604–562 B.C.) plan to rebuild Babylon. By his time, the city was already more than 1,500 years old and had been shattered by a recent war with the Assyrian Empire. The king and his advisers, called ummanu, who were considered to be descended from divine sages and were experts in religion, architecture, and magic, wanted to create a capital both earthly and divine for their newly established empire,…

For more than two millennia, travelers, merchants, and scholars have been awed as they walked through a gorge in the desert of western Jordan to find themselves in a city carved almost entirely from red sandstone. Named Petra, meaning “rock,” by the Roman emperor Trajan in the second century A.D., the earliest city at the site dates to the second century B.C. At that time, the Nabataeans, a Semitic people whose origins are unclear, began building their grand capital, which, according to an inscription found there, they called Raqmu. The Nabataeans controlled the regional trade in gold, spices, and other luxury goods, which were transported between Gaza, with its access to the Mediterranean—and thus to the rich markets of Greece and Rome—and places as distant as India and China. Raqmu’s…