Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2023 i ARCHAEOLOGY

You may be surprised at the extent to which the world of the past was bound together by what economists now refer to as a globalized economy, in which goods, services, labor, technology, and ideas travel across great distances to satisfy people’s needs and desires. In this issue, you will read several articles that tell the story of ancient and early modern globalization. For example, you’ll discover how a five-foot-tall bronze vessel made its way from Italy to France in the mid-fifth century B.C., how a collection of golden ear pendants shows the influence of multiple empires, and how a busy Red Sea port enabled ancient Ethiopians to dominate the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia in the first millennium A.D. One of the richest graves in all of Iron…

In fall 2007, Glenna Wallace, chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, visited the Octagon Earthworks in the central Ohio city of Newark while attending a lecture series at the Ohio State University in nearby Columbus. Wallace is a seasoned world traveler, but she was nevertheless astounded by the Native American mounds, which were built 2,000 years ago by her people’s ancestors. The eight walls of the Octagon Earthworks’ namesake structure each measure five to six feet high and about 570 feet long. The Octagon Earthworks are part of the Newark Earthworks, the largest known set of earthworks that include circular, square, and octagonal enclosures. The mounds’ positions correspond to lunar movements, and the structures align with points at which the moon rises and sets over the course of…

A piece of fabric found in a Highland peat bog in the early 1980s has now been determined to be the oldest example of true tartan ever located in Scotland. Tartan, which for centuries has been an important element in Scottish cultural identity, is distinguished from simpler check designs by its greater complexity of patterning and inclusion of more than two colors. To learn more about the woolen textile, which measures roughly 22 by 17 inches, the Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) commissioned several types of analysis. High-resolution microscopy detected a ground pattern of red and yellow with green overstripes. There is also a dark brown color, though this may be a product of the fleece’s natural color. Chemical analysis, meanwhile, found no evidence of artificial dyes, which were first available…

At the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu in present-day Tello, in southern Iraq, stands a mound known as Tablet Hill. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French archaeologists excavated tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets there. Looters made off with thousands more. These tablets were known to have been the administrative archives of a palace that had never been located. Given the extent of the looting that had taken place at the site, many believed there were no significant archaeological remnants left. Based on his experience excavating a nearby temple to the warrior god Ningirsu, however, British Museum archaeologist Sebastien Rey had a hunch that the earlier archaeologists’ spoil heaps might have protected portions of the site. “We tend to say that the big sites…

A hoard of silver and gold items buried in the Netherlands 800 years ago—possibly for safekeeping during a time of war—was recovered by a licensed metal detectorist. The hoard, which was found in the small city of Hoogwoud in the West Friesland region, contained four crescent-shaped gold ear pendants, two strips of gold leaf, and 39 hammered silver coins. According to Annemarieke Willemsen, curator of medieval collections at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, the pendants can be dated to the first half of the eleventh century based on their style, technique, and similarity to finds from Mainz, Germany. The fingernail-size coins, however, were all minted in the first half of the thirteenth century, the most recent in 1248. Willemsen says the items were probably all buried together shortly after…

GREENLAND: When Norse settlers arrived in Greenland in the 10th century A.D., they needed wood for fuel, to make tools, and to build ships and houses. While the island has small native trees and a supply of driftwood, these sources didn’t always meet the demands of high-status colonists. Analysis of wood fragments found at the farmstead of Igaliku suggests that from the 11th to 15th century, wealthier Norse Greenlanders journeyed to North America to procure robust hemlock and jack pine logs for construction projects—further evidence that Vikings visited the continent centuries before Columbus. FLORIDA: Divers located a 19th-century quarantine hospital and a cemetery on a submerged island in Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles west of Key West. The building was used between 1890 and 1900 to house patients suffering from…

MORE THAN TWO MILLENNIA ago, a richly outfitted Celtic woman was buried beneath a massive stone tumulus along the River Seine at a site known as Vix, in the Burgundy region of central France. Laid on a wagon whose wheels had been removed and propped up against the tomb’s eastern wall, the woman’s body was adorned with luxurious bronze jewelry and ornaments made of jet, amber, and coral. An intricately crafted gold torc with globe-shaped terminals at both ends, each decorated with a lion’s foot and the winged horse Pegasus, was placed around her neck. Also in her grave were objects imported from across the Mediterranean and Baltic regions, including a five-foot-tall Greek bronze krater used for mixing wine and water. The vessel’s surface was decorated with warriors in horse-drawn…

Acarved stone marker was recently found near an entrance to the Casa Colorada building complex in the ancient city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The carving depicts two men playing the Maya ball game, and contains the first complete inscription found at the site in 20 years. The circular marker, which was discovered by archaeologist Lizbeth Beatriz Mendicuti Pérez of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, is nearly 13 inches in diameter and weighs more than 85 pounds. The inscription includes the date 12 Eb 10 Cumku in the Maya ritual calendar, which corresponds to a particular day in A.D. 894. Mendicuti Pérez believes that the marker commemorates a game played on that date at the Casa Colorada complex. The ball game was played for many reasons,…

Beneath the ruins of the medieval village of Old Dongola, on the Nile in northern Sudan, a team from the University of Warsaw was surprised to find stone blocks that may date to the time of the pharaoh Taharqo (reigned ca. 690–664 B.C.). “Despite nearly sixty years of archaeological research in Old Dongola, no traces from such an early period had been encountered,” says Egyptologist Dawid Wieczorek. Out of hundreds of ancient blocks found at the site, only eight bear carved inscriptions. Most of these are too fragmentary to read, but one set of hieroglyphs mentions the Egyptian sun god Amun-Ra and refers to a town called Kawa, which was located 75 miles north of Old Dongola. During Taharqo’s reign, the Egyptian kingdom extended over large stretches of North Africa…

Archaeologists rarely unearth the remains of large predators such as leopards, lions, and bears. But University of Haifa archaeologist Ron Shimelmitz and his colleagues wondered if, by looking at a large number of sites over thousands of years, they could identify evidence showing that ancient people hunted these fearsome creatures. The team reviewed reports of animal remains discovered at sites in the southern Levant dating from 25,000 to 2,500 years ago. They found that the frequency at which leopard, lion, and bear skeletal remains were found changed over time. Leopard bones were relatively numerous at sites dating to the Neolithic period (9700–4700 B.C.), but were virtually nonexistent in later Copper and Bronze Age (4700–1200 B.C.) settlements, where there were more bear bones and many lion bones. “If these bones were…

As visitors to Persepolis, capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, entered the city, they would approach a stone terrace on which a palatial precinct rose 40 feet above the fertile flatlands at the foot of Kuh-i-Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy. Bearing gifts from their homelands—perhaps a metal chalice or a braying donkey—they would ascend 63 limestone steps, pivot on a landing, then climb another 48 steps to an imposing threshold known since antiquity as the Gate of All Nations. Flanking the four-story-tall gate were statues of lamassu, winged bulls with human heads and curly beards. The great city was founded by the Persian king Darius I around 518 B.C. in present-day Iran and construction continued for nearly 200 years. For the duration of its existence, the ever-expanding metropolis was a…

The southern tip of South America is a region of extreme landscapes, where towering granite peaks and glacial ice caps give way to grasslands that fade into the ocean. Small huemul deer weave through stands of beech that are permanently bent sideways by the same powerful winds that lift Andean condors toward the clouds. Giant rheas, large flightless birds similar to ostriches, dart across the open steppe, past herds of grazing guanaco, a wild llama, which nervously keep their noses to the wind, on the alert for prowling pumas. This vast region is known as Patagonia, and it encompasses the bottom quarter of South America, covering more than 400,000 square miles of Chile and Argentina. It extends 1,300 miles from the thirty-seventh parallel south to the tip of Cape Horn,…

The warriors of the Viking Great Army who campaigned in Britain from A.D. 865 to 878 worshipped gods often associated with animal companions, such as Odin and his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. It seems that some of the army’s leaders may have made the voyage across the North Sea from Scandinavia with their own cherished animals as comrades. A team led by University of Durham archaeologist Tessi Loeffelmann discovered evidence of these travel arrangements while analyzing isotopes of the element strontium in cremated animal bones recovered from Norse burial mounds near the site of the army’s A.D. 873–874 winter camp in Repton. Strontium is incorporated into bones and teeth from bedrock via food and water, leaving a distinctive trace of people’s and animals’ geographic origins. In the case of bones of…

In southern Turkey’s Amuq Valley, a curious one-inch-tall lead figurine unearthed at a rural Bronze Age site is giving archaeologists a glimpse of how villagers living around 2000 B.C. responded to a period marked by increasing drought. A team led by Mustafa Kemal University archaeologist Murat Akar discovered the figurine while excavating a grain silo at the site, which is known as Toprakhisar Höyük. The archaeologists were instantly struck by the object’s odd appearance. Taking the form of a bull, it resembles lead trinkets that were circulated by traders in Anatolia at that time. But it also bears a likeness to larger artifacts from Mesopotamia called foundation pegs, conical or nail-shaped objects inscribed with dedications to the gods and placed under the walls of important buildings. Akar thinks the hybrid…

One of Mexico’s most important archaeological sites is hidden in plain view in the Tlalpan borough of southern Mexico City. Few people make the 12-mile drive from downtown to Cuicuilco, but the site’s surprising and enigmatic history makes it well worth the trip. “Cuicuilco is central Mexico’s first true city,” says Boston University archaeologist David Carballo. Cuicuilco was settled around 800 B.C. by early farmers who were already living in sedentary village communities. Over the next millennium, it grew until it was home to a population of 20,000 who thrived in this relatively lush area by channeling water to irrigate their land and for use in domestic and religious spaces. “Cuicuilco may be the best example in the center of Mesoamerica of a complex early society with a well-organized hydraulic…

HUNDREDS OF ANCIENT obelisks and stelas are strewn across fields on the outskirts of Aksum, a city in the highlands of northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The largest of these monuments, which lies toppled and broken into sections, was carved with doors and windows to mimic a 13-story building, and once stood around 100 feet high. Weighing more than 570 tons, the Great Stela, as it is known, was hewn from a single block of granite-like rock cut from a quarry two and half miles away. At more than three times the height of the biggest of Easter Island’s moai statues and nearly 20 times heavier than the mightiest of Stonehenge’s sarsens, it is among the largest monolithic sculptures ever created and transported. These monuments, which date to the third and…