Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2022 i ARCHAEOLOGY

For archaeologists, the remnants of buildings can be as rich with meaning as any ancient text. In this issue, you will read about an extraordinary variety of buildings and what they tell us about the motivations and lives of the pharaohs, politicos, merchants, and citizens who commissioned and constructed them. In the cover story, “Journeys of the Pyramid Builders,” you will encounter the workers who built the 481-foot-high Great Pyramid at Giza for the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu more than 4,500 years ago. For centuries, scholars—and anyone who has ever seen it—have puzzled over how the massive edifice was built. I think you will be surprised to learn not just the fascinating details of its construction, but that Egyptologists now even know the names of some of the workers who transported…

The first archaeological radiocarbon date in North America was obtained in 1949 from a piece of charcoal unearthed in central Nebraska that was found to be 5,000 years old. Since then, tens of thousands of dates have been obtained from sites across the United States and Canada. All the roughly 9,000 radiocarbon dates from Canadian archaeological sites are logged in the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD) maintained by the University of British Columbia, but until recently there had been no ongoing, systematic attempt to track radiocarbon dates from the United States. Researchers led by University of Wyoming archaeologist Robert Kelly have sought to remedy this by conducting an exhaustive survey of documented radiocarbon dates in the lower 48 states, which they have added to CARD. Having a centralized repository for…

While investigating aboveground mausoleums known as chullpas in the Chincha Valley, on the southern coast of Peru, archaeologists have discovered 192 instances of a previously unknown approach among the area’s Indigenous people to honoring the dead: human vertebrae threaded onto reed posts. From around a.D. 1000 to 1400, the region was controlled by the Chincha Kingdom, which formed an alliance with the Inca Empire and was incorporated into it in the fifteenth century. When Spanish colonists arrived in the sixteenth century, they looted the valley’s chullpas, searching for silver and gold. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers have determined that the individuals whose vertebrae were threaded onto posts likely died between 1520 and 1550, and that the reeds the posts were made of were harvested over the subsequent four decades. According…

ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON around 4,600 years ago, near the end of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, a boat crewed by some 40 workers headed downstream on the Nile toward the Giza Plateau. The vessel, whose prow was emblazoned with a uraeus, the stylized image of an upright cobra worn by pharaohs as a head ornament, was laden with large limestone blocks being transported from the Tura quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. Under the direction of their overseer, known as Inspector Merer, the team steered the boat west toward the plateau, passing through a gateway between a pair of raised mounds called the Ro-She Khufu, the Entrance to the Lake of Khufu. This lake was part of a network of artificial waterways and canals that had…

THE GARGANTUAN WORLD’S FAIRS of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries weren’t the only events of the type at the time. In many British cities, smaller exhibitions were held to highlight the latest inventions and sell the most fashionable goods. One such fair was held in Lister Park in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The Great Bradford Exhibition opened on May 4, 1904, and over the next six months attracted 2,417,928 visitors to its 23-acre grounds. Attendees came to ride a water slide brought from Canada and to see the 9.5-foot-tall “Gigantic Glittering Thimble,” a monument to Bradford’s fading preeminence as a world textile center. They could enjoy Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which had also been among the biggest attractions at the Chicago World’s Fair. One of the most astonishing exhibits was…

The ancient Maya have much to teach us. Recent analysis of DNA from archaeological sites in Belize offers potential insights into the introduction of agriculture in the region through migration. (See “The Great Maize Migration,” page 13.) An Archaeology Abridged talk this spring by Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) member Heather McKillop of Louisiana State University also focused on Belize, in this case her team’s excavation of ancient coastal saltworks, far from the urban centers of the Maya rulers. Their research sheds new light on the production of salt, which is notably scarce in tropical rain forests, and their discoveries have implications for our understanding of Maya economy, technology, and environmental exploitation. A third example is the fascinating project in Guatemala conducted by AIA member Heather Hurst of Skidmore College…

Sometimes referred to as “red gold,” saffron is the world’s most expensive spice. For thousands of years, it has been highly prized by many cultures across the Mediterranean world and the Near East for its use as a colorant, perfume, and food additive, and for its medicinal properties. Saffron is obtained from the stigmas of Crocus sativus, or saffron crocus, which only reproduces with human intervention. It can take as many as 8,000 flowers, which must be harvested by hand, to produce a single pound of saffron. The earliest evidence of people using wild crocus comes from saffron-derived pigments found in 50,000-year-old cave paintings in Iraq, but experts have debated when and where the plant was first domesticated. New research drawing on both ancient art and genetic sequencing points to…

According to a new study, more than half of the modern Maya genome is derived from ancient populations who migrated to theYucatán Peninsula from southern Central America and South America at least 5,600 years ago. A team led by archaeologist Keith Prufer of the University of New Mexico, geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, and archaeologist Douglas Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzed DNA from human remains recovered from two rock shelters in southern Belize. They discovered that a group of the individuals whose remains were radiocarbon dated to between 5,600 and 4,000 years ago are ancestors of present-day Chibchan-speaking populations that live between Costa Rica and northern Colombia. “These people moved into the area in fairly small numbers over a period of perhaps five hundred to…

An Iraqi-German team recently excavated the remnants of an ancient boat that was exposed by erosion in 2018 near the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Iraq. The boat, which measures 23 feet long and up to 4.5 feet wide, was found on the city’s outskirts in an area once covered by fields, canals, and small settlements. The vessel sank around 4,000 years ago near the bank of a river that has long since silted up. Although the organic material used to construct the boat—likely wood, reeds, or palm leaves—has completely decayed, the material left clear impressions in a surviving layer of bitumen that was applied to the boat as waterproofing. Researchers carefully documented the excavation of the fragile find before moving the vessel’s remnants to the Iraq Museum in…

There is finally a computer that’s designed for simplicity and ease of use. It’s the WOW Computer, and it was designed with you in mind. This computer is easy-to-use, worry-free and literally puts the world at your fingertips. From the moment you open the box, you’ll realize how different the WOW Computer is. The components are all connected; all you do is plug it into an outlet and your high-speed Internet connection. This is a completely new touch screen system, without the cluttered look of the normal computer screen. The “buttons” on the screen are easy to see and easy to understand. All you do is touch one of them, from the Web, Email, Calendar to Games, and a new screen opens up. Until now, the very people who could…

In addition to ProvidinG unique insight into the experience of workers who helped build Khufu’s (r. ca. 2633–2605 B.C.) Great Pyramid, the papyri discovered at Wadi el-Jarf offer revealing clues to the layout of the Giza Plateau and its maritime infrastructure during the period of the pyramid’s construction. In the papyri, when Inspector Merer and his men are described approaching the plateau with a boatful of limestone blocks, they pass through the Ro-She Khufu (Mouth of the Lake of Khufu) into either the She Khufu (Lake of Khufu) or the She Akhet Khufu (Lake of the Horizon of Khufu). According to Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, who has led excavations at the Giza Plateau for three decades, this supports scholars’ theory that the ancient Egyptians built…

THE 1893 WORLD’S COLUMBIAN Exposition, more commonly known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was one of the signature events of the nineteenth century. Planned as a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World—although it opened a year late—it was the last of the century’s grand international expositions. The first was London’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, or Crystal Palace Exhibition, an event that attracted some six million visitors. The next major fair took place in 1876 in Philadelphia. Called the Centennial Exposition, it attracted 10 million guests, many of whom paid extra to see the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Then came the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, for which the Eiffel Tower was built.…

IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY, a glint off the Mediterranean is just visible from the top of a mound known as Tell es-Safi that rises some 300 feet above Israel’s coastal plain. For generations, scholars believed that the stretch of Mediterranean coast west of Tell es-Safi was once the landing point of multiple invasions by the Israelites’ dreaded nemeses, the Philistines. First emerging in the southern Levant around 3,200 years ago, the Philistines were long thought to have been descendants of invading groups that scholars refer to as the “Sea Peoples.” In the twilight of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200 B.C.), these groups raided Egypt and conquered the cities of the Semitic Canaanite people who lived on the coast of what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories.…

DEMON DANCE During the course of reading your fascinating article “The World of Egyptian Demons” (May/June 2022), I looked closer at the image of the demon brandishing knives with both feet. I wondered why its right-foot weapon was not sharply carved like a knife, but rounded like a club instead. I took note that it was not a club, nor a knife, but the tip of its tail protruding from behind its foot. Thank you for the lovely article. Chelsey Andrew  Roswell, NM POTS ON POINT I appreciated the article by Kate Ravilious on the latest research on Neolithic pottery, “Pottery’s Origin Stories” (May/June 2022). It was a very informative and thought-provoking article. I must, however, disagree with the researchers’ reasoning for the earliest pottery having conical bases. It was…

On the western side of the ancient necropolis of Abusir, a team of archaeologists led by Miroslav Bárta of Charles University has unearthed the largest cache of embalming equipment ever found in Egypt. More than 370 vessels were buried in clusters during the second half of the sixth century B.C. in a 46-foot-deep shaft, which seems to be associated with an adjacent, as-yet-unexcavated tomb. In the top layer of the cache, the researchers discovered four canopic jars, which were typically used to store the embalmed viscera and organs that were removed during mummification. “These jars should have been buried with the deceased in his tomb, but they were discovered clean and empty in the cache,” says Egyptologist Jiří Janák of Charles University. “We are still trying to determine whether they…

Artists have sought to depict sound in their work since at least the European Upper Paleolithic, some 36,000 years ago. A row of red dots emerging from the mouth of a lion in France’s Chauvet Cave, for instance, is one of the earliest known examples of an artist rendering an animal making a sound. Recently, Texas State University archaeologist Carolyn Boyd surveyed rock art made by hunter-gatherers living from around 2500 B.C. to a.D. 500 in the canyonlands of southwest Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila to explore how these people may have depicted human and animal speech. She found that the artists, who worked in a tradition known as Pecos River Style rock art, used dots and lines made almost exclusively with red pigment to create what she…

Northwest England is known for its rugged mountains, clear lakes, fields of daffodils, and four lads from Liverpool who changed the history of music. It’s less known for well-preserved archaeological sites, though not because they are absent. Unlike in the south, where large construction projects in recent decades have necessitated extensive archaeological investigations and where the chalky soil preserves materials well, much that remains of the past buried in the northwest’s acidic soil is hidden or lost. But recent excavations at the town of Poulton along the banks of the River Dee in Cheshire have begun to change scholars’ perceptions of this part of Britain, especially in the Iron Age. “Northwest England is thought of as an Iron Age backwater,” says archaeologist Kevin Cootes of Liverpool John Moores University. “But…

MASSACHUSETTS: Timbers from a ship known as Sparrow-Hawk may belong to the oldest known shipwreck in English colonial America. In 1626, the Plimoth Colony governor William Bradford recorded that an unnamed ship carrying 2 English tobacco merchants and their Irish servants ran aground off Cape Cod. The wreck’s survivors were rescued by Native Americans and brought to the fledgling colony. Recent dating revealed that sections of Sparrow-Hawk’s hull were made from trees felled in England between 1556 and 1646, further evidence that this was the ship that made the ill-fated voyage. ALABAMA: The 19th Unnamed Cave contains the greatest concentration of Native American cave art in the Southeast. Hundreds of human and animal glyphs were traced into mud covering the walls more than 1,000 years ago. Recent high-resolution 3-D modeling…

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY before the Spanish conquest, the Aztec Empire had been annexing its neighbors, pressuring them into subservience, or turning them into tribute-paying vassal states. But there was one neighbor they could never subjugate: an isolated city-state known as Tlaxcallan located 60 miles east of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which today lies under the streets of Mexico City. Separated from the capital by a ridge of volcanoes, Tlaxcallan became an island of resistance to Aztec domination. Its population swelled with refugees from kingdoms that had fallen under Aztec rule, and it turned those refugees into warriors who fought off the Aztecs for decades. The people of Tlaxcallan were still doing battle with the armies of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II (r. 1502–1520) in 1519 when Spanish conquistadores…

In the fall of 2008, Kevin Thomas, a deputy sheriff in northern Georgia’s Jackson County, was on a routine patrol in the new River Glen subdivision. Then consisting of just a few houses under construction near the banks of the upper Oconee River, the development was still largely pristine, its gently rolling hills covered with oak and hickory trees. As he was driving along the neighborhood’s River Glen Drive, a flash of white in the woods to the east of the road caught his eye. He pulled his patrol car over and walked toward what turned out to be a mound of stones piled a foot high. “I thought, ‘Good lord, these have been here a long time,’” says Thomas. “I’ve seen piles of stones farmers make after clearing a…