Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2022 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The last time I saw Martha—at some point, I’m not sure when, she stopped being Professor Joukowsky and was just Martha—she ran across the room calling my name and beckoning me with her huge smile and arms open wide. I had written some time before to tell her that I had been asked to be editor in chief of ARCHAEOLOGY, and that day she said, “I am so proud of you.” As she had every time I saw her since I was an 18-year-old student in her Introduction to Archaeology class, she made me feel like the most important person in the room. Martha stirred me with her love for the ancient world and encouraged me to follow my passion for the past, and it is her inspiration that led…

After the Romans conquered the Phoenicians of northern Africa in 146 B.C., they allowed them to maintain their cultural traditions, but imposed a new economic system. The drastic cost of this was evident at Zita, a city in present-day Tunisia that was once famous for its olive groves. A team of American researchers and archaeologists from Tunisia’s National Heritage Institute compared the quantity of iron slag and carbonized olive pits in soil from the city’s iron smelting workshops. When the Romans took over, they increased iron production, but the problems didn’t begin until about A.D. 200. “We can see clearly in the archaeological record that they lost the balance between producing fuel and producing olive oil,” says archaeologist Brett Kaufman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He believes that…

At least a portion of the life stories of eight men who served on Mary Rose, an English warship that sank in 1545 during a battle with the French navy, can now be told. They number among 179 sailors whose remains, along with thousands of artifacts, have been recovered from the wreck in the Solent, the strait between the Isle of Wight and the southern coast of England. A team led by archaeologists Jessica Scorrer and Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University conducted strontium and oxygen-isotope analysis of samples of the seafarers’ teeth. This allowed them to determine where the crew members grew up and what they ate as children. Three of the individuals may have hailed from areas with climates warmer than Britain’s, possibly the Iberian Peninsula or North Africa.…

When archaeologists discovered the skeleton of a 25-year-old man partway down a looter’s shaft in a large tomb in the Ningxia region of northern China, they initially believed he had been one of the robbers. However, a new analysis led by Qian Wang, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University’s College of Dentistry, has revealed an even more sinister scenario. The man was found around six feet belowground, but the looter’s shaft extends another 15 feet to the burial chamber floor. Given that the shaft appears to have filled in naturally, the team determined that the man was, in fact, the victim of a vicious assault that occurred long after the tomb was looted. Radiocarbon dating showed that the man died during the seventh century A.D., whereas the tomb’s inhabitants—a man,…

THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE in antiquity was usually the result of complex, interconnected factors that lay beyond the scope of any one person’s control. Nonetheless, traumatized contemporaries and later historians alike have often laid the fault at the feet of a single individual. “It’s the last ruler who is usually blamed for an empire’s downfall,” says University of Toronto Assyriologist Paul-Alain Beaulieu. The enigmatic Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus seemed destined for just such a fate after the Persian armies of Cyrus the Great marched through Babylon’s gates in October 539 B.C. By deposing Nabonidus, whose reign was marked by eccentric political and religious choices, the Persians ensured that he would be the last ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 B.C.) and the last native-born Mesopotamian king. For some 2,500 years,…

WHEN THE BRITISH DEPORTED thousands of Acadians from Nova Scotia and the surrounding region starting in 1755, they attempted to divide the exiles into small groups to prevent them from banding together and resisting or returning. Marginalized in their new communities, many Acadians ended up regrouping and settling in Louisiana. By 1800, more than 4,000 transplants were living in Nouvelle Acadie, or New Acadia, where they became known as Cajuns, a moniker derived from the pronunciation of ’Cadiens. However, little archaeological work has been dedicated to finding evidence of Louisiana’s early Acadian settlers. Among the most storied of these early arrivals was a group led by the brothers Joseph and Alexandre Broussard. The pair had waged a legendary, if ultimately doomed, guerrilla campaign against the British in Nova Scotia after…

One of the great pleasures of the AIA’s annual conference is the discovery of new voices, new topics, and new approaches in archaeology. This January we continued our new tradition of Society Sunday, the public program inaugurated last year to celebrate the AIA’s 100-plus Local Societies. This event featured the presentation of awards thanking our lay enthusiasts and a fascinating public lecture by Debby Sneed of California State University, Long Beach, “Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece.” Sneed dispelled the myth of widespread exposure of disabled infants by the Greeks, focusing on both literary and material evidence to show the efforts ancient families took to encourage their survival, including the production and use of special feeding bottles like the one shown here. During the conference proper—successfully flipped to virtual thanks…

While on a recreational dive last summer in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologist Tamara Thomsen discovered an ancient dugout canoe carved from a single white oak. Resting on the lake bottom 27 feet underwater, the canoe contained seven notched stones of a type known as net sinkers that were used to hold down fishing nets. Photos of the canoe showed it to be in such pristine condition that Wisconsin state archaeologist James Skibo suspected it had been made recently. But radiocarbon dating showed it was in use around A.D. 800, likely by ancestors of today’s Ho-Chunk Nation. Indigenous people in the region traditionally submerged their canoes in shallow water in the fall to protect them during the winter months and then recovered them in the spring. Skibo notes…

Kublai Khan’s horse-mounted warriors may have been the terror of the Asian steppe, but they were much less fearsome when they had to brave the waters of the Pacific to do battle. In 2017, locals on the Indonesian island of Serutu discovered a sandstone boulder carved with Chinese characters. In 2021, scholars published a translation of the inscription, revealing that it records the attempted invasion of the Singhasari Kingdom on Java by the khan’s forces in 1293. Prior to the invasion, the fleet spent about a month on Serutu preparing for battle. Hsiao-chun Hung, a specialist in Asian archaeology at Australian National University, who worked on the translation, notes that the inscription mentions 500 ships. Previously, scholars had been unclear how many vessels the khan had in his fleet. The…

The eighth-century B.C. settlement of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples was the earliest Greek colony in the western Mediterranean, far from cities such as Athens or Sparta on the mainland. Archaeologists excavating the remote colony’s necropolis in the 1950s were surprised to unearth a cup bearing the earliest known reference to Homer’s epic poem the Iliad. The clay drinking vessel is inscribed with a short poem that makes a bawdy reference to the aphrodisiacal properties of the legendary cup of the king of Pylos, Nestor. For his part, Homer describes Nestor’s cup as “a beautiful cup…studded with golden nails,” a striking contrast to the modest vessel from Pithekoussai. In the years after its discovery, researchers believed the cup had been buried with the cremated…

For the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantine the Greatest, pious blessed Augustus, because by inspiration of divinity, in greatness of his mind, from a tyrant on one side and from every faction of all on the other side at once, with his army he avenged the republic with just arms, the Senate and Roman People (SPQR) dedicated this arch as a sign for his triumphs.—Dedicatory inscription, Arch of Constantine, Rome THE PINNACLE OF AN ancient Roman general’s or emperor’s military career was to be awarded the right to parade through the streets of Rome to celebrate his victories on the battlefield and flaunt the spoils of war in an extravagant display known as a triumph. During these grand spectacles, Romans watched as senators clad in brilliant white togas trimmed in purple…

On a September night in 1931, the British fishing vessel Colinda was sailing 25 miles off the Norfolk coast of England near the North Sea’s Leman and Ower Banks. Trawlers like Colinda operated by dragging nets across the sea floor, scooping up everything in their path––fish, shells, seaweed, or otherwise. As the crew hauled up their net from a depth of 120 feet, the boat’s skipper, Pilgrim Lockwood, noticed a large block of peat among the catch. As he smacked it with his shovel to break it up and toss it overboard, he hit something hard, which he later recalled sounded like striking metal. Upon examination, Lockwood noticed an unusual object embedded in the clump. It was 8.5 inches long, with a barbed edge, and appeared to resemble some sort…

Researchers have determined that an obsidian mirror believed to have been owned by the sixteenth-century English polymath John Dee originated in the Aztec world. Dee served as a scientific adviser and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603). Like many Renaissance scholars, he was deeply immersed in occult practices and regularly attempted to communicate with spirits. One of the tools Dee is believed to have used in his magical pursuits is a circular obsidian mirror now in the British Museum. Notes attached to the mirror in the eighteenth century identify it as “The Devil’s Looking-glass” and “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits.” The Aztecs used obsidian mirrors of this sort to divine the future, and a number of these objects were brought to Europe…

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The National Archives holds a famous letter dated April 14, 1865, in which Abraham Lincoln pardons Private Patrick Murphy on a charge of desertion. The document is noteworthy because Lincoln was assassinated later that very day, suggesting that one of his last official deeds was saving a condemned man from death. New examination of the letter has confirmed that the number 4 in the year was erased and replaced with a 5. The letter was actually written in 1864, a year before Lincoln’s death. ARGENTINA: Archaeologists are able to extract DNA from human bones and teeth, but the process is destructive. A new, less-invasive method involves recovering genetic material from the scalps of people who suffered from head lice. DNA sequencing was carried out on 2,000-year-old mummies entombed…

STARTING IN THE EARLY seventeenth century, the French began settling the colony of Acadia—which stretched across what is now Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and south into Maine—where they established a number of prosperous agricultural communities. A key to their success was a system of dikes they created, particularly in Nova Scotia, that allowed water to drain out of the marshes but prevented seawater from flowing back in. Once rain washed the salt away from this reclaimed land, it became extremely fertile thanks to the rich organic material that had been deposited by the tides over thousands of years. The great quantity of peas, wheat, and other grains, as well as livestock, which the Acadians consumed and exported, helped fuel population growth that is among the fastest ever…

THE FIRST MAJOR FIRE AT Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral burned through an August night more than 800 years ago. At the time, cathedral fires were not uncommon—the structures were tinderboxes of dry wood, textiles, hanging lamps, and burning candles. The twelfth-century chronicler Guillaume le Breton records that the inferno started when a thief broke into the cathedral’s attic and, using ropes and hooks in an attempt to steal the candlesticks, set the silk hangings alight. Over the following centuries, there were almost certainly many more fires, but none as catastrophic as the one that began in the attic and engulfed the building on April 15, 2019. The cause of that conflagration remains uncertain; an electrical short circuit or damaged electrical cable in use during restoration efforts taking place at the…