Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2016 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Wartime Weaponry The gun shown on page 48 (“A Splendid Failure,” September/October 2016) is actually a model 1836 flintlock conversion pistol. This weapon was manufactured by Robert Johnson in Middletown, Connecticut, and was later modified, probably after the Mexican War, for percussion ignition. It is rare! Thanks for an interesting and well-written article about the ironclad. Carl Adamczyk Philadelphia, PA The Responsible Parties In reference to “A Splendid Failure,” I would like to make the following comment: The article states, “Moreover, it is a captured ‘enemy’ vessel, so the ship and its contents, including unexploded ordnance, belong to the U.S. Navy.” While it is true that the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) now has custody of the wreck, it is not the de facto custodian of Confederate naval…

 In the mid-1500s, a family of the Mixtec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, recorded their historic deeds in a book now known as the Selden Codex. But books were scarce at the time, so they took an old text, covered it with white gesso, and then painted their new narrative on top. Now researchers in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have been able to use a technique called hyperspectral imaging to see parts of the older text without damaging the newer one. The images are not sharp enough to read or date the glyphs, but several identifiable figures have emerged, including a line of spear-carrying men possibly marching off to war.…

 In 1967, archaeologists discovered a spectacular burial of two men accompanied by six male servants inside a mound in the city of Cahokia, which flourished near present-day St. Louis from around a.d. 1000 to 1250. The two bodies were found atop 22,000 shell beads that formed the shape of a bird, which in some Native American cultures is associated with military prowess. At the time it was thought that the burial was a kind of monument to male power, and it was assumed the men were warrior chiefs— part of a male-dominated hierarchy that controlled Cahokia. When bioarchaeologists led by the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s Thomas Emerson reexamined the remains, they were astonished to find that the skeletons in the bead burial actually belonged to a man and a woman,…

 A new study has concluded that the wardrobe of the 5,300-year-old ice mummy known as Ötzi was assembled from five different animal species. Until recently, identifying the provenance of Ötzi’s surviving garments was difficult due to the degraded nature of the material. However, thanks to advances in genetic sequencing technology, a research team enriched and increased the existing DNA information so that the exact species of furs and leathers could be identified for six items: his coat, loincloth, leggings, shoe bindings, hat, and quiver. The analysis indicates that the coat (sheep and goat), loincloth (sheep), leggings (goat), and shoe bindings (cow) were made from domesticated animals, which were readily available through husbandry or trade. The fur hat (brown bear) and quiver (roe deer) were fabricated from the skins of…

BELIZE: The occupant of one of the largest Maya tombs discovered in the country—in one of the few known Maya funerary pyramids—wasn’t the most surprising find in a recent exploration of a massive temple at the site of Xunantunich. Also found there were two hieroglyphic panels believed to have come from a dismantled ceremonial stairway at the city of Caracol. Almost all the panels—which tell the story of a victory of Caracol over the city of Naranjo—had previously been found, except for these two, from the tale’s beginning and end. MONTSERRAT: Hikers in the dense forest of this British Overseas Territory—an island that has been devastated by volcanic eruptions over the last 20 years—found its first known petroglyphs, a series of designs both geometric and apparently figurative, carved into a…

 IT IS THE NIGHT OF October 31, and hundreds of people have gathered at the Hill of Ward, once known as Tlachtga, in County Meath, Ireland. Some wear robes and masks and carry torches and banners emblazoned with spiritual symbols. It is all part of a revival of the ancient Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced “SAH-win”) that includes processions, chanting, and storytelling. “Let’s raise our voices together and call back Tlachtga from the mist of time,” proclaims Deborah Snowwolf Conlon, one of the festival’s organizers. It is a contemporary celebration repeated annually, of a piece with countless other seasonal celebrations across the world that have roots both modern and ancient. In this case, neither the choice of site nor date is incidental: The Hill of Ward was one of the…

 SPRAWLING OVER more than 50 acres, the palace complex of Wolseong in southeastern South Korea served as one of the royal residences of the Silla Dynasty (57 b.c.–a.d. 935) for more than 700 years. Named “Half Moon Castle” for its crescentshaped fortress walls, Wolseong likely contained hundreds of buildings, including a throne hall, royal bedchambers, and government offices. According to Samguk Sagi, a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea written in the twelfth century, and Samguk Yusa, a thirteenth-century compilation of Korean legends, biographies, and folktales compiled by a monk named Iryeon, the palace once had many gates, a tower with a large drum inside, and a storage facility for bamboo flutes. But other than these scant mentions, there are few detailed descriptions of the castle and no…

 You see before you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the coldest of cases, an archaeological fraud perpetrated more than 100 years ago, concerning the evolution of humankind, the scientific process, and personal ambition. It centers on Piltdown Man, paleoanthropology’s greatest whodunit. In February 1912, amateur fossil collector Charles Dawson wrote to Arthur Smith Woodward, distinguished Keeper of Geology at the British Museum of Natural History (now just the Natural History Museum), to tell him of a new find, “a thick portion of a human(?) skull.” The previous decades had seen the identification of Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, and scientists and antiquarians were on the hunt for more—specifically human ancestors with apelike features and bigger, humanlike brains. Two years of excavation at the site of Dawson’s find, Piltdown, Sussex,…

 Archaeologists at Akaki, about 20 miles from the Cypriot capital of Nicosia, have uncovered a rare mosaic depicting a horseracing venue known as a hippodrome. The work, one of fewer than 10 extant ancient mosaics on the subject in the world, was likely part of a lavish villa from the fourth century a.d., when the Romans controlled Cyprus. The villa site so far measures more than 36 feet long and 13 feet wide, though it may well be much larger. Although horse races were some of the most important spectacles staged by the emperor, they are an especially unusual artistic subject in the eastern Mediterranean. Notably, above each four-wheeled chariot are inscribed two names, which Cyprus Department of Antiquities archaeologist Fryni Hadjichristofi believes belong to the charioteer and…

 At least 17 petroglyphs, created more than 400 years ago by the aboriginal inhabitants of the Waianae Coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, were only briefly revealed in July 2016. The petroglyphs had been carved into a flat slab of stone on the shore, and are usually covered by sand. A shift in the sand exposed them for a few days, but archaeologists from the State Historic Preservation Division and the U.S. Army are thinking about how to protect them the next time they appear.…

 In 1935, Dmitri Baramki, a young archaeologist working for the British administration in his native Palestine, began excavating three dirt mounds outside the ancient city of Jericho 25 miles east of Jerusalem. Baramki was concerned that important evidence of a Byzantine church or monastery inside the mounds was being destroyed by the locals’ habit of pilfering and reusing the ancient stones for building material. However, he soon realized that what he had found was not a Christian religious building at all, but instead, the remains of an eighthcentury Islamic palace. Though much of the palace complex was in shambles, likely destroyed by an earthquake in a.D. 747, Baramki’s team nevertheless unearthed detailed mosaics and stuccowork of the highest quality that once had decorated the palace’s walls and floors. Baramki…

 NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD August Seelmeyer arrived in northern France on April 10, 1917. He had been deployed with the rest of his German artillery unit along World War I’s internecine western front. A mere six days later, he was killed. Records from his home village of Polle, in lower Saxony, indicate that he was lost somewhere in the intense fighting northwest of Reims, becoming one of the anonymous dead lying beneath the green fields of France. The chances of finding out what transpired in his final moments or where he had been buried would become less and less likely as the decades passed. Over the course of the conflict, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, 10 million soldiers lost their lives in Western Europe, and an estimated 700,000 of them remain unaccounted…

 In the late 1840s, a young woman, improbably named Cinderella, was enslaved on a tobacco plantation called Belvoir, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Her story, discovered by Chris Haley, research director for the Maryland State Archives’ Legacy of Slavery program and nephew of Roots author Alex Haley, tells of her marriage to Abraham Brogden, a freedman who worked at another plantation nearby. In late December 1848, Abraham learned that Cinderella was to be sold out of the area to pay off a debt. He was unable to purchase his wife himself, so the couple fled to Baltimore. They were caught, however, before the runaway-slave ad even hit the newspaper. Abraham was incarcerated for “enticing a slave to run away,” while Cinderella was returned to her plantation. After serving three…

 Human societies have developed through climatic cycles—some long, some short. The 100,000-year oscillations of the Pleistocene, for example, resulted in more than 20 ice ages, and there have been much shorter cycles of 1,500 years, of centuries, and even of decades. Sometimes climate shifts suddenly. A change in ocean circulation, for example, caused the 1,000-year cold snap called the Younger Dryas around 13,000 years ago, while the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia may have caused the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816. People have adapted to these climate changes in many cases, but they can also be highly disruptive to human activity. It is thought that sudden climate shifts impacted humans at a critical moment— when farming began in the Middle East about 13,000 years ago. I’ve excavated sites…

 Dogs often turn up in ancient Peruvian graves, buried to accompany their masters into the afterlife. But the recent discovery of 138 canine skeletons points to mass sacrifice on a scale never seen before in Peru. The dogs—big and small, and of various breeds—were found between 2012 and 2014 in two mounds at Parque de las Leyendas, a zoo and park complex in Lima. Some had been wrapped in textiles and woven reeds. The mounds also held the remains of 134 people, most between the ages of 20 and 40, many showing skull trauma, fractures, and other signs of violence. What does all this carnage mean? The people and the dogs were all buried around a.d. 1000, a time of cultural flux, says the park’s archaeology director, Lucenida Carrión.…

 The extensive damage to the structures of Khirbet al-Mafjar led one of the original excavators, Robert W. Hamilton of the British Mandate for Palestine’s Department of Antiquities, to conclude in the 1940s that the complex had been largely destroyed by an earthquake known to have hit the region in a.D. 747. Dmitri Baramki, an archaeologist who worked there during the same time, suggested in his writing that he thought it persisted longer. The team working there currently, led by Donald Whitcomb of the University of Chicago and Hamdan Taha, the recently retired director of the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, has uncovered new evidence to support Baramki’s theory. They have discovered buildings from the ninth and tenth centuries, when the caliphate was ruled by the Abbasids, who overthrew…

 FIFTY MILES SOUTH of Sicily, the dry, rocky islands of the Maltese archipelago were first colonized by Neolithic people in the sixth millennium b.c. They lived relatively simple farming lives that closely resembled those of their Sicilian neighbors for almost 2,000 years. But around 3600 b.c., something changed. For reasons that are still unclear, people on Malta and the nearby island of Gozo began to construct massive limestone temple complexes and went on to create large underground burial chambers. Other Neolithic people in Europe would eventually also create large megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge in England, but the prehistoric architects on Malta and Gozo were the only ones to build structures on such a large scale. In trying to comprehend these sites, some archaeologists emphasize their astronomical alignments, while…

 World War I will forever be known for its unprecedented loss of life, and so it is particularly poignant that, against that backdrop, spontaneous episodes of camaraderie between the opposing armies occurred occasionally along the front, especially in the war’s early years. The most famous instance of this occurred during the days leading up to Christmas 1914, when battle-weary French, British, and German soldiers are known to have put down their rifles and, under the aegis of an unofficial truce, assembled in the area between the trenches known as no-man’s-land. There, they exchanged small gifts, sang Christmas carols, and permitted one another to retrieve fallen comrades who had remained uncollected on the battlefield. Alarmed, commanders on both sides quickly moved to forbid the behavior. As the war went on, these…

 St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge has been, over its more than 500-year history, the educational home of prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, pioneers of science, artists, actors, and poets. It is fair to say that probably none of them knew that hidden behind a wall of the Combination Room, where they often met to chat and have tea, was a very old shoe with what Cambridge Archaeological Unit archaeologist Richard Newman calls a “long and eventful life.” Found during recent renovation work, behind the wainscoting between a window and a fireplace, the well-worn shoe was put there almost three centuries ago as an apotropaic item intended to ward off evil and bad luck. Popular magic of this kind was a relatively widespread phenomenon in England between the…