Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2022 i ARCHAEOLOGY

When thinking about the best way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, as we have been for several years, we knew that we wanted readers to learn something new and surprising about the young pharaoh. But finding a fresh story to tell about Egypt’s most famous ruler was challenging—the 5,000 splendid artifacts in his tomb seemed to have given up their secrets long ago, and how could there be any unresolved questions about King Tut after a century of study? But once we started delving deeper into Tutankhamun’s world, it became clear that the questions had not all been answered. You’ll find an especially captivating mystery in “The Case of Tut’s Missing Collar”—and there is plenty more to say about Tutankhamun’s own life, too. As…

THE CASE OF TUT’S MISSING COLLAR Below the whole group and at the lowest level before reaching the skin, was a bib-like Collarette composed of fine green faience & gold bead matting having a zigzag pattern.… This bib covers the whole of the upper part of the chest as far as the clavicles.—Howard Carter, November 15, 1925 Three years, almost to the day, after archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun (r. ca. 1336–1327 b.c.) in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, he removed the pharaoh’s mummy from its coffn and unwrapped a layer of linen bandages. Underneath, he saw a splendid collar on the chest of the young king where it had been placed more than 3,000 years before. Photographs taken by excavation photographer Harry Burton nearly a year…

For generations, Aboriginal artists of Australia’s West Arnhem Land region have used naturally occurring red, yellow, and white pigments to create their distinctive rock art. The area has no natural source of blue pigment. Scholars had believed that it wasn’t until the late 1920s that artists there first began using laundry blue, a dye introduced by Europeans, to create rock art featuring vibrant blue hues. In powder form, laundry blue was used to brighten white textiles. Now Griffth University archaeologist Emily Miller and her team have determined that Aboriginal artists were using laundry blue in West Arnhem Land at least a generation earlier than previously thought. The team found that fiber baskets and bark belts with blue accents were collected at a mission that existed for just a few years…

Agenetic study comparing DNAfrom California’s Muwekma Ohlone people and DNAfrom remains of their ancestors supports the community’s oral history, which contends that the tribe has lived in the area for millennia. Muwekma Ohlone tribal members worked alongside archaeologists at two sites near the town of Sunol in the San Francisco Bay Area, within the group’s traditional territory. The team recovered the remains of 29 individuals at one site, which was inhabited from around 490 b.c. through 1775, and the remains of 76 people at another site, which was occupied between roughly 1345 and 1850. They sequenced the genomes of 12 of these individuals, including one who lived some 2,000 years ago. “We identified a genetic signature connecting the two sites and then compared that signature to present-day Muwekma Ohlone community…

From the village of Ozette on the westernmost point of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, members of the Makah tribe hunted whales and fished for halibut. They smoked their catch on racks and in smokehouses and traded with neighboring groups from around the Puget Sound and nearby Vancouver Island. Ozette was one of five main villages inhabited by the Makah, an Indigenous people who have been based in the region for millennia and who now mostly live about 15 miles north in Neah Bay on the peninsula’s tip. Tribal oral history and archaeological evidence suggest that, sometime between 1500 and 1700, at least a century before Makah people first came into sustained contact with Europeans, a mudslide destroyed part of the village, covering several longhouses and sealing in their contents. Thousands of…

The 17-year reign of the pharaoh crowned as Amenhotep IV was one of the most revolutionary periods in Egyptian history. After the prosperous 39-year reign of his father, Amenhotep III, the pharaoh inherited a peaceful kingdom, which, says Egyptologist Relief of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Arlette David of the Hebrew and their daughters University of Jerusalem, was a perfect setting for the blossoming of philosophical ideas—conditions the new pharaoh took full advantage of. Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten five years into his reign to reflect his rejection of the main gods of the established pantheon and his promotion in their place of Aten, the god of light, as Egypt’s principal god. He also moved the royal capital 250 miles north from Thebes and built a city there that he called…

For three years after his 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter did not think much about an undecorated wooden box that turned out to contain two small resin-covered coffns, each of which held a smaller gold-foil-covered coffn. Inside these coffns were two tiny mummies. Preoccupied, Carter numbered the box 317 and did little to study it or its contents, only unwrapping the smaller of the two mummies, which he called 317a. The larger mummy he called 317b. The mummies were not carefully examined until 1932, when they were autopsied and photographed, at which time they were identified as stillborn female fetuses. But the most recent work on these two tiny girls, undertaken by radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University, tells more of their story. A decade ago,…

WELL BEFORE THE ISLANDS of the Lucayan Archipelago—which includes Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas—became famous as cruise ship ports of call, intrepid travelers journeyed there by canoe, likely in search of natural resources such as salt, conch, and sea turtles. The Lucayans, the people for whom the chain is named, are believed to have arrived around a.d. 800 from islands in the Greater Antilles, including Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Their journey, researchers believe, represents the final push in a millennia-long expansion from northern South America up through the Antillean chain. Starting around 800 b.c., people who made ceramics began to migrate north from what is now Venezuela. Later, they were joined by other groups from various parts of South and, possibly, Central America, establishing trade networks across the…

In the winter of 2013, amateur geologist and expert crystal hunter Heinz Infanger was backcountry skiing in the mountains of central Switzerland’s canton of Uri when he came upon a rich vein of rock crystal exposed by a retreating glacier. Infanger soon discovered antler tools, wood fragments, and rock crystal artifacts, which suggested the outcropping had been visited by crystal hunters in the distant past. He reported his discovery to local heritage authorities, and a team led by archaeologist Marcel Cornelissen of the Institute of the Cultures of the Alps visited the site and conducted a thorough excavation. The team determined that huntergatherers living during the Alpine Mesolithic period (ca. 9000–5500 b.c.) visited the site as recently as 5900 b.c. and extracted rock crystal from the vein, after which it…

A ztec rulers were fascinated by a particular variety of starfish whose orange-and-brown coloration resembled one of their most venerated symbols of power—the jaguar. The remains of 164 of these starfish have recently been found in a ritual offering dating to about 1500 in the Templo Mayor complex at the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. When they began excavating the deposit, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a female jaguar lying in a bed of thousands of seashells and pieces of coral. Further digging revealed fragments of starfish. Most were largely decomposed, but one starfish remained intact because it had been flattened into the soil, like a pressed flower. The starfish, Nidorellia armata, also known as the chocolate chip star due to its dark brown spots, is found in the Pacific Ocean. “The…

Beginning in Late Antiquity, around the sixth century a.d., a powerful group of nomads known as the Avars ruled much of Europe—and nearly conquered Constantinople. The Avars were based in the Carpathian Basin at the height of their grip on the region—from the sixth through ninth centuries a.d.—but where they came from has been a mystery. They left no written records, and scholars believe they were probably not literate. Some contemporaneous Byzantine sources portray the Avars as a menace who suddenly appeared in Europe from somewhere to the east. Archaeological discoveries, including weapons and harnesses, at Avar sites in modern-day Hungary are similar to those found on the steppes of eastern Eurasia. Analysis of DNA extracted from the remains of 66 Avars found in Hungary has provided evidence that they…

OREGON: New clues to the whereabouts of a legendary Spanish shipwreck were gathered from the Oregon coast near Manzanita. Lab analysis confirmed that a dozen timbers recovered from a sea cave likely belonged to the Spanish galleon Santo Cristo de Burgos, which vanished in 1693 on a journey from Manila to Mexico. Local lore, including Indigenous accounts, reports that, for centuries, parts of the ship’s valuable cargo, including porcelain, silk, and beeswax, have occasionally washed up on shore—but the location of the wreck remained unknown. MEXICO: The most impressive and best-preserved collection of wooden Aztec artifacts ever found was unearthed near Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor. More than 2,500 objects that had been left as gifts for the gods between 1325 and 1521 were discovered in ritual deposits at the base of the Aztec…

When the pharaoh Akhenaten died, he left no obvious successor. Three of his and his wife Nefertiti’s six daughters had died, and his son, Tutankhaten (later Tutankhamun) was too young to be king. Who would rule Egypt and bring peace back to a land rent by the religious revolution led by Akhenaten? For present-day scholars, too, the answer is far less than evident. The chronology of deaths and inheritors to the throne, which is usually relatively clear in Egyptian history, is extremely murky during this period. Some have suggested that Akhenaten’s successor was Nefertiti herself. But a particularly interesting alternate theory has recently been advanced by Egyptologist Marc Gabolde of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University. “We are sure that a queen-pharaoh ruled between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun,” he says. “The clues I…

THE SMALL ISLAND OF MOTYA, off the western coast of Sicily, lies at the heart of an ancient sea route across the Mediterranean. Owing to Motya’s central position between trading outposts in Cyprus, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Sardinia, in the early eighth century b.c., the Phoenicians, a merchant seafaring people from the Levant, settled on the island. Within a century of their arrival, they had transformed their settlement into an important multicultural port and hub for trans-Mediterranean trade. They brought with them a religious culture inextricably entwined with their everyday lives that would change and flourish as a result of their far-flung trading connections and their interactions with the Elymians, the native population of western Sicily. Among the first structures the Phoenicians built on Motya were temples to…

In the popular understanding, the Underground Railroad consisted largely of people making their way north over land. In fact, says Michael Dyer, curator of maritime history at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, many, if not most, enslaved people who escaped to freedom did so by boat. “The coastal commerce of the East Coast of the United States before the Civil War was like standing on an interstate overpass and watching the tractor-trailers go by,” Dyer says. “It was constant, with sloops and schooners going up and back all the time. So the potential for enslaved individuals to make their way north on shipboard was high.” Moreover, many enslaved people worked on the waterfront, providing skills and connections that aided in their escape. Some people seeking freedom stowed away with full…

On a warm, windy day in the spring of 2022, archaeologist Michael Malliaris unlocks the gate in the construction fence that surrounds the most recently uncovered evidence of Berlin’s past. Inside is a broad expanse of light brown soil the size of a football field, dotted with deep pits revealing stone and brick walls and floors dating back nearly 800 years. Across the street is an imposing modern gray stone city administration building. On the other side of the excavation area, several lanes of traffc crawl past. A few redand-white shipping containers inside the fence serve as Malliaris’ offce and headquarters. Malliaris, at the time an archaeologist working for Berlin’s Monument Authority, is a 25-year veteran of rescue excavations. Trained as a classical archaeologist, he found himself caught up…

When Europeans shifted from being mobile hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, their average height declined by just over an inch, according to a new study of 167 skeletons ranging from 38,000 to 2,400 years old. The analysis, which controlled for genetic factors and examined indicators of health in the bones, supports the idea that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle had serious consequences. Height is a good proxy for the way nutrition and disease impact a person’s overall health, explains anthropologist Stephanie Marciniak of Penn State University. “Height really represents a snapshot of a very dynamic and very nuanced process,” she says. The researchers found that the average person still had not regained the lost inch as of about 2,400 years ago. A second study by a research group based in…

Because they lived in isolated mountain settlements rather than cities, the pre-Roman Samnite people have been hard to detect in Italy’s archaeological record. A new survey of the vast territory that scholars believe they once inhabited, however, has located an extensive system of Samnite hillforts. University College London archaeologist Giacomo Fontana scoured lidar images covering an area of 5,900 square miles in south-central Italy for traces of ancient ramparts and walls. He then visited nearly 150 sites to document these features on the ground. Thus far, Fontana has identified 95 previously unknown hillforts and other types of archaeological sites stretching from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic Sea, some of which may date to as early as the sixth century b.c. While hillforts along the Adriatic coast appear to have…

A rare carved Pictish stone was unearthed near the village of Aberlemno in eastern Scotland. The 5.5-foot-tall monument, which dates to the fifth or sixth century a.d., is covered with geometric symbols such as disks, ovals, and crescents. “The Picts appear to have created a communication system that is unique and as yet undecipherable,” says University of Aberdeen archaeologist Gordon Noble. “Our best bet is that this was a form of identity marking, perhaps communicating a person’s name or status.” The stone was reused as a paving slab in an eleventh- or twelfth-century structure that was built directly atop an ancient Pictish settlement. The region of Angus, where the discovery was made, was an important landscape for the Picts in the early Middle Ages, and several other carved monoliths have…

After being installed as king of Judea by the Romans, Herod the Great launched an expansive building campaign that involved constructing fortresses, palaces, and even entire cities. Herod (r. 37–4 b.c.) also installed massive bathtubs in at least two of his residences—the Kypros Fortress and the Herodium—to foster a Roman-style culture of bathing. Both tubs were made of translucent calcite alabaster and were assumed to have been imported from Egypt as no quarries producing the fine stone were known to have existed in the Levant. In recent years, however, a calcite alabaster quarry has been discovered in Te’omim Cave, on the western slopes of the Jerusalem hills, near the present-day city of Beth Shemesh. Ayala Amir, while a researcher at Bar-Ilan University, led a team that demonstrated unequivocally that the…

THE BANKS OF THE NILE RIVER in modernday Luxor are strewn with so many ruins of Egypt’s illustrious past that the area is sometimes called the world’s largest open-air museum. Luxor was once ancient Thebes, the erstwhile capital of Egypt, and for more than 1,000 years, the pharaohs erected temples, monuments, and sculptures there as testaments to their power, wealth, and piety. The New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 b.c.), which many scholars believe was the cultural and artistic zenith of Egyptian civilization, was an especially prolific period. Among the archaeological sites on the Nile’s east bank are two of the largest and most important temples in all of Egypt, the Karnak Temple, called the “most selected of places” by ancient Egyptians, and the Luxor Temple, known to them as the “southern…

THE FIRST FEW WEEKS OF May 1836 were pleasant ones for the whaling brig Industry. Based in Westport, Massachusetts, the two-masted, 64-footlong ship had been built in 1815 and launched the next year. Now, two decades into her career, Industry and her crew of 15 men had been out for just over a year hunting sperm whales as far east as the Azores and as far south as the Caribbean. They had built up a store of several hundred barrels of sperm whale oil and were making their way back home when they detoured into the Gulf of Mexico in hopes of topping up their prized cargo. Before the widespread availability of petroleum, sperm whale oil was a valuable commodity. It burned clearly and brightly without smoking, making it ideal…

IN NORTHWEST SAUDI ARABIA, a well-worn pathway covered with red rocks wends its way from the floor of the al Wadi Oasis up to volcanic plateaus that surround the green valley. Anyone leaving the oasis by this route will soon pass a series of low stone walls radiating from circular mounds that line the path. The walls form triangles extending away from the stone cairns, enclosing areas reminiscent of courtyards. When viewed from the air, it becomes clear that the largest of these monuments are shaped like keyholes. These are one of several types of tomb that archaeologists call pendant tombs, and recent dating has shown that they were originally built in the third millennium b.c. when the region was inhabited by seminomadic Bronze Age herders. Similar structures are found…