Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i ARCHAEOLOGY

THE BEAUTY OF BUGS Different people value different things. The same goes for cultures at large. The things people value and how they choose to display their wealth depends on a great number of factors: geography, history, personal preference, religious beliefs, and mythology, to name just a few. And while the term “wealth” may evoke images of shining gold and silver, glittering gems, and piles of currency, something that may not have any value to people of one culture may be precious to another. It is often at times of momentous change that notions of value can provide the greatest insight into a culture’s belief system. Recently, archaeologist Michael Terlep, who works in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest, and colleagues from Northern Arizona University (NAU) have explored how members of the…

Burned vegetable remains from Franchthi Cave in Greece and Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq are revealing that Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers cooked plants many thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. A team including archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu of the University of Liverpool found that people in the two caves used food preparation techniques that were remarkably similar, despite the 60,000 years separating them; Shanidar Cave was occupied by Neanderthals between 75,000 and 70,000 years ago, while Franchthi Cave was used from 11,700 to 11,400 years ago. The researchers employed reflected light and scanning electron microscopes to identify the species of carbonized plants. They found that the remains in both caves included oat and barley seeds as well as peas, pistachios, almonds, and wild mustard. Several of these plants…

An excavation team led by archaeologist Katerina Janakakis of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania has uncovered ruins of an odeon, or roofed theatrical building, in the ancient city of Lissos on the southwest coast of Crete. Thus far, the team has unearthed 14 rows of seats, two vaulted side chambers, and part of the stage, all constructed from local limestone. The odeon was built in the first century A.D., when Lissos was a prosperous Roman city. The settlement was heavily damaged, likely during a devastating earthquake in A.D. 365 that leveled other cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Although odeons typically hosted musical performances and poetry competitions, Janakakis believes this particular building might also have served as a gathering place for government authorities. “Lissos was a small, provincial city,” she…

WASHINGTON: Researchers determined that a mastodon living in the Pacific Northwest 13,900 years ago was wounded when it was struck by a spear. The elephant-like animal’s remains were first discovered 45 years ago at the Manis Mastodon site on the Olympic Peninsula. Recent CT scanning and 3-D software analysis revealed that tiny bone fragments embedded in its rib were pieces of a projectile fashioned from the leg bone of another mastodon. This represents the oldest known bone spearpoint in the Americas and the earliest evidence of mastodon hunting. PENNSYLVANIA: A U.S. Army ordnance disposal team was summoned to Gettysburg when a 160-year-old live artillery shell was uncovered during archaeological work. The 7-inch-long unexploded round was found 2 feet below the surface near a rocky outcrop known as Little Round Top. During the…

THE MOCHE RIVER VALLEY in northern Peru was an unlikely place to build a city. Though barely 1,000 feet from the Pacific Ocean, the valley received less than a tenth of an inch of rain per year. Nevertheless, in about A.D. 1000, a people known as the Chimú selected a location in the valley some four miles north of the river and set about making it habitable. Called Chimor in colonial accounts, and now commonly known as Chan Chan, it became the largest urban center in the Americas. What enabled the Chimú to build a city in this unpopulated coastal desert was their tremendous engineering skill, which they used to create an extensive network of irrigation canals that channeled snowmelt from the Andes Mountains into the Moche River. What drove…

While digging beneath the transept of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, archaeologists from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) recovered two lead sarcophagi. The first was sealed within a masonry tomb in a privileged position at the threshold of the cathedral’s choir. An epitaph identifies the deceased as Antoine de la Porte, a cleric who paid for renovations to the choir and died in 1710 at the age of 83. Three bronze medals depicting de la Porte were found atop the coffin. De la Porte’s polished teeth and slender bones indicate a life of leisure befitting someone of his position. Furthermore, explains biological paleoanthropologist Eric Crubézy of the University of Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier, he has lesions on a big toe that appear to be characteristic of gout. “Because…

POMPEII GETS ALL THE scientific and public attention, and it’s not hard to understand why. The city buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 provides an endless source of artistic marvels and archaeological insight, and the cone-shaped stratovolcano still looms over Naples with familiar menace. But just on the other side of Naples’ modern sprawl is a kind of shadow Pompeii called Baiae, another ancient town lost to volcanic activity—but not due to a sudden cataclysm. Once a legendary playground for Rome’s elite, Baiae slowly sank to a watery end. Thousands of years before Baiae was known as a resort destination, it would have been the worst place in the world to be. Around 39,000 years ago, the Gulf of Pozzuoli, where Baiae was eventually founded, exploded…

About 25 miles from Chan Chan in the foothills of the Andes on the easternmost edge of the Kingdom of Chimor sits ancient Collambay, a small village where excavations have unearthed some of the best evidence of how the Chimú interacted with the people they came to control. Collambay is in a small climatic zone called the chaupiyunga, an especially sunny area between the coastal valleys and the highlands that is the only place on the western slopes of the Andes suitable for growing coca, one of Andean peoples’ most precious crops. “Everyone needed access to coca for ritual, political, and social purposes,” says archaeologist Alicia Boswell of the University of California, Santa Barbara. During excavations at Collambay, Boswell unearthed pottery assemblages that include a mix of styles—Chimú, highland, and…

The Blackland Prairie is a crescent-shaped swath of land extending from central Alabama into northeast Mississippi. Its fertile landscape is dotted with farms, cattle ranches, and the occasional commercial or industrial complex. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the region was one of the United States’ major cotton producers. However, centuries before, it was a vast grassland and home to the Chickasaw Nation, whose heartland was centered around the modern-day city of Tupelo, Mississippi. Today, a scattering of archaeological sites in the region, including ancient villages, burials, and battlefields, attest to the Chickasaw presence in the Blackland Prairie, but there are no longer any Chickasaw there. The tribe was forcibly removed from its homeland in 1837 and resettled 500 miles away in what is now Oklahoma. Recently, the Chickasaw have…

A bored student passes notes. An exasperated teacher sighs. This scene would be familiar in any classroom around the world and across the ages. And while school scenes are uncommon in Greek vase painting, archaeologist Ollie Croker of the Museum of London believes that the painter of this drinking cup, an artist named Onesimos, clearly had an ancient version of these scholastic foes in mind. Croker says the scene of a disapproving teacher and a pupil surreptitiously examining a scroll is just one of several examples of humor in the cup’s imagery. The scroll on the cup, which was found in Egypt, contains a phrase—“Muses who lead the chorus-leading hymn”—that cleverly slips in the name of the sixth-century B.C. poet Stesichorus. The text is written in a style called boustrophedon,…

People living in southern Germany around 3,500 years ago appear to have grown so concerned about dwindling water supplies that they deposited valuables in a well in an attempt to end the drought. Archaeologists working in advance of construction in the town of Germering found dozens of items at the bottom of the well, including 26 robe pins, needles, a bangle bracelet, two metal spirals, four amber beads, and a wooden ladle. There were also more than 70 finely crafted and decorated clay vessels of a type usually only found in Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1200 B.C.) graves, a single button that was likely already hundreds of years old when it was put in the well, and an animal tooth wrapped in bronze wire, possibly as a ritual practice. “We…

The chance discovery of a cow horn container in a rock shelter in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province has provided scholars with the recipe for a pharmaceutical compound formulated around 500 years ago. The cow horn, which has been radiocarbon dated to between 1461 and 1630, was found covered with a leather lid and wrapped in leaves and grass. A team led by University of Johannesburg archaeologist Justin Bradfield analyzed residues from the container. They concluded that the residues contained high concentrations of the chemical compounds mono-methyl inositol and lupeol, both of which are used to control blood sugar and cholesterol levels, lower fevers and soothe inflammation, and treat infection. The team determined that three local plants could have been the source of the chemicals. Bradfield says the container is…

A team of archaeologists from Kiel University and the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences unearthed an unusual mass grave at the Neolithic site of Vráble in Slovakia. Vráble was inhabited from about 5250 to 4950 B.C. by people belonging to what scholars call the Linear Pottery culture. At its peak, the site consisted of three neighboring settlements of around 80 houses in all, making it especially large for the time. The team discovered 37 skeletons missing their skulls in a ditch surrounding one of the villages. Mass graves have been found in ditches at other Linear Pottery sites, but none excavated thus far have contained decapitated bodies. Evidence of large-scale massacres at other mass graves suggests the Linear Pottery people entered a period of crisis around…

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was the most accomplished scientist in sixteenth-century Europe. Using only astronomical equipment that relied on the naked eye—the telescope hadn’t been invented yet—he established that the stars were not part of an unchanging firmament, but belonged to a constantly evolving universe. In 1576, the Danish king Frederick II granted Tycho title to the windswept island of Ven, where the scholar constructed Uraniborg, or Castle of the Heavens, a state-of-the-art, three-story brick observatory and scientific institute. There, not content with observing a single heavenly body once and then moving on to the next, Tycho and his assistants made thousands of observations of individual stars with instruments such as quadrants, sextants, and a device of Tycho’s own invention known as an equatorial armillary. “He observed the heavens…

Thousands of years after it was founded around 3000 B.C. in what is now Mosul, Iraq, the city of Nineveh underwent a sweeping campaign of urban renewal. This redevelopment project was led by the newly crowned Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 704–681 B.C.), who sought to transform the ancient city into a suitable imperial capital. Sennacherib built a huge royal residence and expanded the city’s footprint, surrounding it with high walls punctuated by 19 imposing gates. Inscriptions commemorating the walls’ construction describe one of the gates as “that of ‘Ea who causes my springs to flow,’” says University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Michael Danti. “Ea was a water deity and was also associated with wisdom, rituals, and incantation.” This particular gate provided direct access to the Tigris River and is known as…

THE KHOE AND SAN PEOPLES have created rock art in southern Africa for millennia. On the walls of rock shelters throughout the region, artists painted finely rendered depictions of dancers and hunters, as well as animals such as the eland, the world’s largest antelope. For well over a century, scholars have studied what these rock canvases reveal about ancient Khoe-San beliefs and traditions. But in the rugged mountains of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province there are other, more recent works that offer a glimpse of the violent world the Khoe-San endured after Europeans began to settle the region in the late eighteenth century. The Khoe-San living in the Winterberg Mountains reacted to attempts by colonizers to seize their land and enslave their people by raiding European settlements, to devastating effect.…