Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2021 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Two universal experiences appear in several of this issue’s stories: one that we look forward to every day, usually several times a day; the other we mostly meet with dread each April (or October). The first is eating. The other is paying taxes. While it’s true that food features in some way in every issue—remnants of food often survive in the archaeological record—in this issue the profound transformation in the way people acquired food starting about 11,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Revolution, takes center stage at one of the ancient world’s most extraordinary sites. Unearthed on the slopes of an otherwise-anonymous hillside in southeastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe is known for its circular buildings and T-shaped pillars decorated with carved animals and symbols. At the same time that people were…

It turns out that what you eat may have as much to do with how you cook as with what’s available at the farmers market. In Bronze Age China, established cooking styles had a profound impact on the speed with which new domesticated crops were adopted into regional cuisines, says archaeologist Xinyi Liu of Washington University in St. Louis. “There is a deep-seated divide between eastern and western cooking preferences in China: boiling and steaming in the east, and grinding and baking in the west,” Liu explains. “When grains like wheat and barley, which are rooted in the grinding and baking tradition, enter a cuisine that favors boiling and steaming and eating whole grains, what’s going to happen?” Will people accustomed to beginning their day with a steaming bowl of…

A multinational team led by the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is revealing a previously unknown story about elephant ecology in West Africa by analyzing ivory from a 500-year-old shipwreck discovered on Namibia’s coastline. The Portuguese vessel Bom Jesus sank in 1533 while en route to India loaded with valuable cargo that included copper from Central Europe, German faience, and more than 100 West African forest elephant tusks, the largest ivory cargo ever found in a shipwreck. Genetic analysis of the tusks showed that the elephants were from 17 distinct herds in West Africa, some from areas not traditionally associated with the ivory trade. To the team’s astonishment, four of these herds still exist today, made up of descendants of those who were hunted to fill Bom Jesus’ hull.…

MORE THAN 20 LIGHT-COLORED limestone structures climb the hill of Göbekli Tepe, a 45-foot-high rise on a rolling plateau in southeastern Turkey. Some of these structures are round or oval spaces enclosed by sturdy walls. Many of them have large T-shaped pillars standing just off-center in the middle and around the edges, incorporated into the walls or into raised stone benches. On a clear, sunny day, the stones are a uniform, dusty brown. At night, when not artificially lit, they disappear into the landscape. The smallest of the buildings is 20 feet across, with pillars rising to about 10 feet high, while the largest circle, which archaeologists call simply Building D, measures no less than 65 feet across. Building D is punctuated by two 18-foot-tall freestanding limestone central pillars, each…

ONE OF THE MOST VIVID GLIMPSES into the mind of an ancient ruler was unearthed in 1928, at the royal cemetery of Ur, in modern-day Iraq. The so-called Standard of Ur, dating to around 2500 B.C., is a foot-and-a-half-long trapezoidal wooden box decorated with mosaics made of lapis lazuli, shell, and red limestone that depict a flourishing Mesopotamian city-state. On one side of the box, average citizens dutifully line up to offer produce, sheep, and other livestock as taxes to the king, who is shown with his retinue feasting on the revenues. On the opposite side, the king’s army, funded by tax levies, is seen smiting Ur’s enemies. Both scenes illustrate a king’s-eye view of a highly idealized government functioning with great efficiency thanks to what has become a universal…

A long the northern coast of Australia’s Arnhem Land, the Alligator Rivers wind among towering sandstone outcrops, forming a maze of estuaries that eventually empty into the Timor Sea. Kangaroos hop alongside fish-filled rivers, through tropical savannas, and into thick forests of eucalyptus where dingoes, lizards, wallabies, pythons, and more than 100 species of birds make their home. Entwined with the natural landscape, evocative images of both animals and people painted on rocky crags and inside shallow caves appear as evidence of the region’s human past. West Arnhem Land is home to one of the world’s largest collections of rock art, a testament to the relationship between humans and nature that has thrived here since the Paleolithic era, more than 30,000 years ago. The region remains one of the most…

Archaeology fans around the world got a treat early this year with the release of the Netflix movie The Dig. Focused on the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk, England, on the eve of World War II, it tells the story of Mrs. Edith Pretty, a wealthy landowner who hired the polymath and self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown to excavate the mounds on her property. Once Brown realized he had found the remains of a ship, he and Pretty brought in a “dream team” of professionals, Peggy and Stuart Piggott among them, to methodically excavate Mound 1. The magnificent Anglo-Saxon royal ship burial and its opulent treasures that the team unearthed rewrote history. The finds’ glittering artistry, sophisticated design, and evidence of far-flung trade showed that the early…

It has long been thought that when Roman rule of Britain ended in the early fifth century A.D., the population retreated to the countryside to eke out a living through subsistence farming. But new dating of a mosaic at Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire suggests that at least some continued to appreciate the finer things. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone found in a trench dug to build one of the walls of the room where the mosaic was laid down shows that the fancy flooring was crafted in the mid-fifth century A.D. “It’s really exciting to imagine that these people carried on a Romanized way of life and that crafts like mosaic making survived,” says National Trust archaeologist Martin Papworth.…

A small ceramic jar containing four gold coins dating to the tenth century A.D. has been discovered during excavations in Jerusalem’s Western Wall Plaza. In contrast to Europe, the medieval Middle East was a highly monetized society, explains numismatist Robert Kool of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Gold coins called dinars and silver coins called dirhams were exchanged whole or in fractional pieces by members of all walks of life. These four coins, all dinars, date to between the 940s and 970s A.D. Two were minted in Ramla, in what is now Israel, by Abu Qasim al-Ikhshid, a governor who administered the region in the name of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate based in Baghdad. The others were minted in Cairo under the Fatimid Caliphate, North African Shiites who conquered Egypt in…

Murals unearthed in a tomb in northwestern China’s Shaanxi Province portray two hardworking professionals struggling to control animals. Dating to the early Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618–907), the murals depict the men with features and clothes typical of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, many of whom lived in China. (See “A Silk Road Renaissance,” July/August 2020.) In one mural, a Sogdian merchant confronts a camel laden with goods as it throws its head back. In another scene, a Sogdian groom attempts to tame a wild horse as two greyhounds, a breed still popular in the area today, look on. “These murals show vivid facial expressions and gestures of both people and animals,” says archaeologist Ming Li of the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology in Xi’an. Li’s team found the…

The arc of standing stones in western Wales known as Waun Mawn is fairly run-down, which is to be expected of a monument that is more than 5,000 years old. Weather and time, however, are not entirely to blame, according to Mike Parker Pearson of University College London. He believes that the builders of Stonehenge helped themselves to Waun Mawn’s bluestones as building materials for their own monument on England’s Salisbury Plain, some 180 miles to the southeast. Excavations by Parker Pearson’s team have demonstrated that Waun Mawn was once a complete circle of stones. The excavators found a pit at the site that still bore the imprint of a missing stone’s pentagonal base. Its dimensions matched those of one of Stonehenge’s bluestones. Parker Pearson suggests that two of Waun…

Saint Helena, a tiny volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly midway between southern Africa and Brazil, is a time capsule of the bygone Age of Sail. This British way station, which served as an entrepôt offering fuel, food, and mischief to mariners rounding the Cape of Good Hope, now relies on tourism to sustain its economy. Until an airport opened in 2016, most visitors traveled to the island from Cape Town by boat, a voyage that takes six days. Those who still come to Saint Helena by sea arrive in Jamestown Harbor, where they are greeted by the town’s original eighteenth-century architectural facades and the last surviving East India Company wharf in the world. First discovered by Portuguese navigators in 1502, Saint Helena became a possession of the…

UNUSUAL AMONG EARTH’S large landmasses, Iceland has a textual tradition establishing the year it was first settled—though the texts don’t agree on precisely what year that was. According to Íslendingabók, or the Book of Icelanders, written by an Icelandic priest named Ari Thorgilsson the Learned around A.D. 1125, the Norwegian Ingólfur Árnason was the island’s first settler, making a new home in Reykjavík in A.D. 870. Many of his compatriots soon followed. According to Ari, Iceland was “fully settled” by A.D. 930, when the Althing, or parliament, was established. Landnámabók, or the Book of Settlements, which dates to the thirteenth century A.D., asserts that Ingólfur actually settled the new land four years later than Ari claimed, in A.D. 874. It also describes the experiences of four adventurers who preceded him,…

The two-million-year-old skull of a male hominin unearthed in the Drimolen Main Quarry north of Johannesburg has changed how scholars imagine one of our distant human cousins. The skull, dubbed DNH 155, belongs to the earliest known and best-preserved member of the species Paranthropus robustus, a small-brained hominin that lived around the same time as Homo erectus, our direct human ancestor. P. robustus had large, powerful teeth that had evolved to eat tough food such as tubers and bark. The species was thought to have been highly sexually dimorphic, meaning that males and females were drastically different in size and build. Paleoanthropologists had drawn that conclusion because the exclusively female skulls discovered at Drimolen Main Quarry were much smaller than those of male skulls discovered at nearby Swartkrans Cave, which…

New research into one of Scotland’s most peculiar graves has finally unveiled the identity of its occupants. In 1997, during excavations of a medieval church in the small fishing village of Portmahomack in Easter Ross, archaeologists unearthed a coffin that they originally thought contained the complete skeleton of a man and the disembodied heads of five other individuals. The man was quickly dubbed the “six-headed chief.” Soon after, it became clear that the grave actually contained two complete male skeletons and four additional skulls, but researchers still didn’t know why they had been buried in such a curious way. DNA testing of some of the bones has now revealed that five of the six people whose skeletal remains were found in the coffin belonged to one extended family, buried between…

From 1881 to 1890, in locations including modern Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, a number of very similar bronze bird figurines dating to the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages (ca. 1300–500 B.C.) were unearthed. For more than a century, it remained unclear how these artifacts were used, but their similarity was seen as evidence of shared cultural practices and beliefs across a large swath of Europe at this time. Now, a team studying a recently discovered bronze waterbird, perhaps a swan, from the site of Liptovský Hrádok in northern Slovakia, has determined that the artifact, and likely the other similar examples as well, was originally attached to a small chariot, filled with animal fat or vegetable oil and used as a lamp during burial rituals and ceremonial…

While investigating the remains of Greek-era buildings beneath the Roman theater in the ancient city of Myra in the region of Lycia, on Turkey’s southwestern coast, archaeologists unearthed 40 intact terracotta statuettes, along with fragments of perhaps 50 more. The sculptures, which date to the second and first centuries B.C., depict Greek deities, animals, and men, women, and children performing daily activities such as riding horses and carrying water. Among the discoveries are rare statuettes of Leto and her divine children: Artemis, patron goddess of Myra, and Apollo, who was Lycia’s patron deity. Many of the sculptures still have traces of pink, blue, and red paint. “It was the biggest surprise to find such a rich and diverse collection of figurines,” says archaeologist Nevzat Çevik of Akdeniz University. He notes…

ALASKA: The largest archaeological geophysical survey ever undertaken in Alaska confirmed the location of a storied Tlingit fort in Sitka that was attacked by Russian forces in 1804. The Tlingit people initially withstood the onslaught, but were forced to abandon the wooden stronghold when their gunpowder supply ran low. Only after they took the fort were the Russians able to establish a colony there, which they maintained until 1867, when they sold their Alaskan possessions to the United States. ITALY: It is no surprise that the Roman emperor Hadrian dined in style, especially at his sprawling 200-acre villa outside Rome, which he built in the 2nd century A.D. A luxurious dining room was recently uncovered within the 30-building complex. The excavators believe that the emperor and his wife ate breakfast…

THE INDEPENDENT CITY-STATES of ancient Greece, including longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, first began to develop in the eighth century B.C. Athens eventually came to directly control the sprawling region of Attica, while Sparta became the leading state in Laconia on the southern Peloponnese. As the power of these two city-states grew, they developed their own political institutions, artistic styles, and unique cultures. Yet, despite their differences, they united against a common enemy, the Persians, who attempted to conquer Greece in the early fifth century B.C. The period after the defeat of the Persians in 479 B.C. was a time of uneasy alliances among Greek city-states. While the Spartans were embroiled in territorial conflicts and revolts close to home on the Peloponnese, the Athenians tightened their control over the rest…