Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The range of scientific tools archaeologists have at their disposal is remarkable, and advances have provided today’s researchers with insights into people of the past that previous generations of scholars could never have imagined. One of the most fascinating new methods of analysis you will read about in this issue is explored in “Paleolithic Pathfinders.” This exciting new way to date archaeological layers is called fuliginochronology, a technique in which researchers examine soot rings from campfires that burned tens of thousands of years ago to determine dates in much the same way they use tree rings. Scientists working in southern France have recently used fuliginochronology to help ascertain that modern humans were present in a cave known as Grotte Mandrin some 54,000 years ago and to narrow down the time…

Nearly 25 years ago, a team working in Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany’s Swabia region unearthed a small piece of carved ivory they believed represented a horse’s head. Even as three more small ivory pieces that were part of the same figurine were found subsequently, their judgment didn’t change. A fifth piece of the Ice Age sculpture has recently been discovered, and researchers now believe it depicts an entirely different animal. “As soon as the pieces were fit together, it was clear from the shape of the shoulder and body that they couldn’t belong to a horse,” says archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen. The figurine was created about 40,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans coexisted with many large mammals, including cave lions and…

Off the coast of present-day Croatia in the Adriatic’s Bay of Zambratija, a team of archaeologists recently retrieved the remnants of the oldest hand-sewn boat discovered in the Mediterranean, dating to between the twelfth and tenth centuries b.c. First spotted in 2008, the vessel was partially excavated in 2011 and fully excavated, documented, and reburied in 2013. In summer 2023, the team brought to the surface eight planks, the largest of which measures 23 feet long, as well as several additional pieces of the boat. The delicate removal process required creating and placing supports matching the measurements of the planks before lifting them out of the water to be stabilized. The vessel was constructed of planks and frames of locally sourced elm, alder, and wild pear that were sewn together,…

On the tiny island of Bryher, off the southwest coast of England, a farmer happened upon a grave in 1999 that proved particularly intriguing. The grave dated to late in the Iron Age (ca. 750 b.c.–a.d. 43). It contained an iron sword sheathed in a copper alloy scabbard and a shield made of wood or animal hide, weapons typically associated with male burials in the area. It also held a bronze mirror, an object more commonly associated with female burials. The skeletal remains added up to just 5.3 ounces of bone and teeth and were so degraded that it was impossible to determine the deceased’s sex. “This is the richest grave in southwest England from the Iron Age,” says Sarah Stark, a human skeletal biologist with Historic England. “That told…

Over the past 50 years, excavations of settlements and graves around Hrubieszów, a small Polish town near the Ukrainian border, have shown that Gothic cultural practices had spread south by around a.d. 150 into a region inhabited by people of the Masłomęcz culture. One such practice was the use of Roman coinage. During these excavations, archaeologists uncovered coins in Masłomęcz graves or scattered in village sites, suggesting that people in the area adopted Roman money as a medium of exchange by around a.d. 180. In 2020, a hoard of 1,753 third-century a.d. silver denarii—weighing more than 12 pounds—was uncovered by a local farmer. Archaeologist Andrzej Kokowski of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University says large numbers of counterfeit coins found in Masłomęcz are evidence Gothic tribes minted their own money, suggesting a high…

To love archaeology is to love puzzles, to embrace weaving together multiple small fragments of past lives into complete pictures. A concrete form of this puzzle-piecing comes from the work of reassembling objects. Imagine opening the cardboard box containing your puzzle with a plan to sort edges and corners, common colors, and specific elements of design. Yet your box holds not one but hundreds of jumbled puzzles, their pieces all shades of brown with eroded edges and imperfect joins. Such is the task of Şükran Köroğlu, whose work at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology’s Bodrum Research Center in Turkey includes the painstaking restoration of some 250 amphoras and other ceramic containers from a sixth-century b.c. shipwreck at the site of Pabuç Burnu off the coast of Turkey. Reconstructing ceramics involves…

While digging in a large Roman house in the Spanish city of Mérida, archaeologists uncovered a vibrant mosaic featuring geometric and plant motifs, depictions of fish and animals, and, at its center, the head of Medusa. The mosaic covered the floor of a room measuring about 20 by 30 feet that had colorful painted walls. “Because of its location, we believe that this space was the tablinum, one of the main rooms of the house, where the owner received his guests,” says Félix Palma García, director of the Consortium of the Monumental City of Mérida. Images of theatrical masks, a panther, and four peacocks frame Medusa. These symbols are associated with the god Dionysus, according to art historian Irene Mañas of the National University of Distance Education. Such mythological…

The ancient city of Paestum in southern Italy is well known for its three massive stone temples, which were built in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. by Greek colonists who founded the settlement in 600 b.c. and named it Poseidonia. Archaeologists recently unearthed the remnants of another, smaller stone temple dating to the early fifth century b.c. along the city’s western wall. Measuring just 51 by 25 feet, the temple had four Doric columns along its facade and seven on each side, enclosing the building’s single room. The team also found terracotta decorations that once adorned the roof, including lion-shaped waterspouts and figures of Gorgons and the goddess Aphrodite. Around an altar not far from the entrance, researchers uncovered hundreds of votive offerings, including miniature temples, bulls’ heads, figurines…

Little is known of the Hirota people, who lived on the southern Japanese island of Tanegashima from the third to the seventh century a.d.—except that they seem to have engaged in long-distance shellfish trade and to have had unusually shaped skulls. Examination of skeletons excavated from a Hirota burial ground on the island has established that the rear part of the skulls, including the occipital and parietal bones, tends to be unusually flat and asymmetrical in a manner not seen in other groups who lived in Japan at the time. “We believe this flattened head shape would have been noticeable at a glance when they were alive,” says James Loftus, an archaeologist at Kyushu University. Until recently, it was unclear whether the Hirota had intentionally modified the shape of their…

Dozens of enigmatic ivory rings have been found in the graves of Anglo-Saxon women buried in England in the fifth and sixth centuries a.d. Their function has been an open question, as has the source of the ivory. Archaeologists were unsure whether the rings had been carved from walrus, mammoth, or elephant tusks. Researchers performed mass spectrometry, radiocarbon dating, and strontium isotope analysis on one such ring that was recently recovered from a grave in the Lincolnshire village of Scremby. They determined that the ivory came from an East African elephant who lived around 1,500 years ago. The object was likely carved in the Ethiopian city of Aksum and then transported more than 4,000 miles via Mediterranean and European trade networks to the British Isles. (See “Africa’s Merchant Kings,” July/August…

First & Second Altars “Sacred to [---] of the island [---], protectress, mighty in [---], Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso augur, granddaughter of Gnaeus Piso, offered (this) as a gift.” Third Altar “BBDOMHBIMV, to the triumphant, Lady of the earth and the sea, protectress, who has power over wisdom and remedies, goddess who judges well, Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso augur, granddaughter of Gnaeus Piso, offered (this) as a gift.” Fourth Altar “To Isis the one with innumerable names, winner, Lady of the earth and the sea, to Serapis, Osiris, (and) to Anubis, inventor and guardian of the sacred rites, Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, granddaughter of Gnaeus Piso, offered (this) as a gift.”…

The parents of an Assyrian woman named Zizizi were furious. Like many of their neighbors’ children, their daughter had dutifully wed an Assyrian merchant. Sometime around the year 1860 b.c., she had traveled with him to the faraway Anatolian city of Kanesh in modern-day Turkey, where he traded textiles. But her husband passed away and, instead of returning to her family, Zizizi chose to marry a local. “Before god, you do not treat me, your father, like a gentleman! You have left the family!” wrote her father, Imdi-ilum, using a reed stylus to press neat wedge-shaped, or cuneiform, characters into a small clay tablet. Zizizi’s mother, Ishtar-bashti, also signed the missive. Her parents did not explicitly state disapproval over Zizizi’s choice of husband—in fact, as they reminded her, they had…

ADVOCATE One of the important ethical and professional responsibilities archaeologists are charged with is to document and report the state of cultural heritage in areas where they conduct fieldwork. We are living through a particularly perilous time when sites, landscapes, and monuments are under threat of destruction from looting, urbanization, fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure development, and natural disasters. In more recent decades, a new threat has entered our radar: climate change and the broader environmental crisis. As we increasingly see the effects of climate change where we work and across the planet, we become more aware of its impact on cultural heritage. The site of Eski Hisar in Turkey sits on the ruins of ancient Stratonikeia and offers an example of human impact on the archaeological landscape. Eski Hisar is…

Archaeologists excavating the tombs of pharaohs, queens, and nobles of ancient Egypt have found rooms filled with objects made of gold—solid gold masks, golden furniture, and thousands upon thousands of pieces of gold jewelry. Perhaps surprisingly, they have found very little silver, especially dating from the Old Kingdom (ca. 2649–2150 b.c.). A rare exception are the bracelets of Hetepheres I, wife of the founder of the 4th Dynasty, Snefru (reigned ca. 2575–2551 b.c.), and mother of Khufu (reigned ca. 2551–2528 b.c.), builder of the Great Pyramid. The queen’s wooden jewelry box containing her bracelets was discovered in her tomb in Giza in 1925, but the bangles had not been studied for decades. A team has now reexamined the bracelets, employing the latest scientific techniques, and has found answers to some…

A team of researchers recovered two marble fragments of a Roman document known as the Fasti Ostienses while digging in the ancient harbor town of Ostia outside Rome. The Romans were meticulous record keepers and engraved important events in chronological lists on marble slabs called fasti. The Fasti Ostienses listed the deeds and actions of Roman emperors, political leaders, and magistrates between the years 49 b.c. and a.d. 175. Their execution was the responsibility of the pontifex Volcani, the highest ranking local religious official. The discovery was made during excavations of the Forum of Porta Marina, a large rectangular complex surrounded by a colonnaded portico on three sides. Two prior excavations in the area during the twentieth century uncovered several pieces of the calendar, but the recently discovered fragments are…

A dozen miles southeast of Little Rock, two large mounds rise from the flat Arkansas River floodplain. These structures—one almost 50 feet high and the other standing 39 feet—once marked the main religious and political center of an Indigenous group archaeologists call the Plum Bayou culture. From about a.d. 650 to 1050, these people came to the mounds from surrounding villages and hamlets to celebrate rituals at important times of the year. The site has been known as Toltec Mounds ever since its nineteenth-century landowners assumed it was constructed by the Toltec people of central Mexico. The state of Arkansas, which now maintains a park at the site, recently renamed it Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park after consultation with the Quapaw and Osage Nations, who are active stewards of the…

FOR MOST OF THE seventeenth century, China was in an almost constant state of political upheaval. After nearly 300 years of rule, the Ming Dynasty was collapsing under the weight of widespread corruption, domestic rebellion, and foreign invasions. This turmoil was exacerbated by a series of droughts and famines that swept through the land. A semi-nomadic people from northeastern Asia known as the Manchus first invaded China in 1618 and eventually established the Qing Dynasty, which would go on to rule China until 1912. But before the Qing leaders solidified their control over the country in the 1680s, China was riven not just by conflicts between the Qing forces and the Ming armies, but by peasant rebellions led by self-proclaimed kings. These events are described in the Qing-era work The…

DURING THE LATER centuries of the Roman Empire, writers described barbarian incursions from the east that slashed across their lands, including a fierce battle near the shores of the Black Sea in a.d. 251 that ended in the death of a Roman emperor and his son. Many of these attacks, they wrote, were perpetrated by people they called the Goths, who, by the end of the fifth century a.d., would control much of what remained of the western half of the Roman Empire, their reach extending from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. In the space of a just a few hundred years, they went from barbarian menace to kings of Europe. Little is known about the Goths’ origins, and contemporaneous Roman authors struggled to explain their foe’s…

Pedro Escalante is one of the few people who can truthfully say that they have found a lost city in the jungles of Central America. Now a well-known Salvadoran writer, Escalante was a 25-year-old law student in 1970 when local farmers told him about a group of odd square mounds in the hills of central El Salvador. Escalante and a few other Salvadorans had been searching for the country’s first capital, which was built by Spanish colonists in 1528, abandoned after less than 20 years, and then all but forgotten. In 1545, the Spaniards moved the capital of what was then the province of San Salvador to a new location about two days’ journey on foot to the southwest, where it remains to this day. Colonialera descriptions of the original…