Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Human history doesn’t travel in a straight line but moves through cycle after cycle—of birth and death, boom and bust, rise and fall. In this issue, you will encounter stories about the different ways people of the past experienced these inevitable cycles. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in Mesopotamia during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. At the empire’s zenith, Neo-Assyrian kings also controlled territory in Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, and Arabia. In addition to a reputation for exceptionally vicious behavior toward their enemies, these rulers were known for building successive capitals from which to govern their vast empire. The most magnificent of these was Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq. In 612 B.C., the Babylonians sacked and laid waste to the great city. It was all…

BRONZE AGE BEADS GO ABROAD The smallest artifacts can sometimes reveal surprisingly distant connections. In 2015, archaeologists began excavating one of England’s most intriguing sites, the British Bronze Age (2500–800 B.C.) settlement known as Must Farm. This village of perhaps 60 inhabitants in eastern England was built sometime around 850 B.C. After just a year, it burned down and was preserved nearly intact by the oxygen-free conditions of the muddy river into which it sank. Archaeologists raced to explore the site because the brick company that owned the land planned to reopen a clay quarry there. The researchers quickly unearthed five complete circular houses and a number of wooden walkways once perched six feet above a river that no longer exists, all surrounded by a six-foot-high fence of sharpened posts.…

While digging at the crossroads of the two main streets in the ancient city of Philippi in northern Greece, archaeologists discovered a finely carved head W depicting Apollo, god of the sun, music, and poetry. While the sculpture was carved in the second or third century A.D., the team believes it was reused to decorate a fountain that dates to the medieval period. A sculpture of Hercules dating to the same time as the Apollo head was found in 2022 and was likely also part of the fountain. (See “A Young Hercules,” January/February 2023.) “It’s very early to determine the connotations of both figures in a medieval urban context,” says archaeologist Anastasios Tantsis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. “But it’s safe to assume that they were seen primarily as…

Analysis of teeth from an unusual horse burial ground in London offers a glimpse into the international trade in elite horses in the late 1400s and early 1500s. The robustness of the horses’ remains, along with the pattern of dental wear from bits they wore in their mouths, suggests these animals belonged to high-status residents of the city, who may have ridden in jousting competitions at nearby Westminster Palace, says archaeologist Oliver Creighton of the University of Exeter. As teeth and bones develop in a young animal, they record traces of their environment by absorbing isotopes, versions of the same element that differ in atomic mass, from the food and water they consume. Archaeologist Alex Pryor of the University of Exeter looked for variations in strontium and oxygen isotopes in…

Located in a desert gorge in southern Peru, Toro Muerto is one of the richest rock art sites in South America. It includes at least 2,600 boulders bearing petroglyphs, many featuring figures known as danzantes who appear to be dancing. On at least 300 boulders, danzantes are depicted alongside geometric motifs that are mostly varieties of zigzag lines. The same designs have been found on artifacts from the site that have been radiocarbon dated to around 2,000 years ago. Researchers led by archaeologist Janusz Wołoszyn of the University of Warsaw believe the petroglyphs were produced around this time by members of the local Sihuas culture. Little is known of the Sihuas, so archaeologist Andrzej Rozwadowski of Adam Mickiewicz University turned to twentieth-century ethnographic accounts to try to determine the petroglyphs’…

VIRGINIA: Did George Washington chop down the cherry tree to make a popular 18th-century beverage? While working on a project to revitalize Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, archaeologists found a pair of sealed glass bottles in the cellar with their contents preserved. The bottles date to when Washington lived in the mansion and were buried beneath a brick floor installed in the 1770s. The contents included cherries, pits, and stems. They may be remnants of cherry bounce, a fruit-infused brandy the Washington family often enjoyed. NEW MEXICO: Between the 9th and 12th centuries A.D., when Chaco Canyon was the center of Ancestral Puebloan culture, someone was always listening—especially for the sound of a conch-shell trumpet. Chaco was home to more than a dozen communities, and as many as 200 smaller settlements existed…

ARCHAEOLOGISTS DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when they began searching for a 2,700-year-old Assyrian sculpture that had last been seen decades before. First documented in the nineteenth century and excavated in the early 1990s, the massive statue was subsequently reburied to protect it from turmoil in northern Iraq that threatened the site. By 2023, the political situation in the region had stabilized, allowing archaeologists to return. As an Iraqi-French team removed 30 feet of debris, the figure’s fine details gradually reemerged. There were rows of delicately overlapping feathers, the hanging curls of a man’s beard, and the cloven hooves of a bull, all skillfully carved from shining white alabaster. The sculpture, which stood 12.5 feet tall and weighed nearly 20 tons, represented a lamassu, an Assyrian deity with a human…

Rubber was an essential material for many people of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, who used it to make objects such as sandals and rubber bands. However, it is perhaps best known as the material used to create the balls that were the centerpieces of well-known Mesoamerican games. A team of researchers has now employed a range of imaging techniques and methods of chemical analysis to better understand how the earliest known rubber balls from Mesoamerica were fashioned. The researchers studied 14 balls found at the Olmec site of El Manatí in Veracruz, Mexico, that are up to 3,600 years old. “At El Manatí, rubber balls were found as oferings in ritual contexts in considerable quantities,” say archaeologists María del Carmen Rodríguez and Ponciano Ortiz, leaders of the El Manatí Project. “We think…

Archaeologists uncovered two coffins during excavations of a nineteenth-century cemetery in Quebec City that provide evidence of the illicit practice of diverting corpses for the study of human anatomy. One of the coffins contained two large logs on a bed of straw, while the second, which was child-sized, was empty. Both were nailed shut. The cemetery, which was used between 1835 and 1871, was associated with Marine Hospital, which treated sailors and newly arrived immigrants. It was also the city’s first teaching hospital. Starting in 1847, medical students were required to have practical experience studying human anatomy, but legal options to procure cadavers were limited, and, thus, bodies were often stolen. The logs, which together weigh around 90 pounds, would have ensured that the adult-size coffin didn’t arouse suspicion, says…

On the periphery of Zamárdi, an ancient lakeshore settlement in west-central Hungary, archaeologists uncovered a nearly five-foot-deep beehive-shaped pit with the skeletons of four adult dogs buried in successive shallow layers. Stretched out at the bottom of the pit was an unusual find—the skeleton of a male Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), a notoriously shy creature. The feline’s bones were radiocarbon dated to the mid-fifth to mid-sixth century A.D.—the Migration Period, during which various tribes invaded Roman provinces, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. “Finding a complete lynx skeleton is special because not many have been discovered in archaeological contexts,” says zooarchaeologist László Bartosiewicz of Stockholm University. “Humans definitely buried this lynx, but we have little idea why or how they came into contact with the animal.”…

AROUND A.D. 600, migrants from across the southern Andes were drawn to a city just south of Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest large lake, at 13,000 feet above sea level. Founded in A.D. 150, Tiwanaku—a name possibly based on the local Aymara people’s term meaning “stone in the center”—was one of the earliest cities in the Andes. It eventually stretched across 1.5 square miles of harsh altiplano, or high plain landscape, between the Cordillera Occidental and Oriental ranges of the Andes Mountains. Amid monumental mudbrick and stone buildings were adobe homes where, between 10,000 and 20,000 people once lived, and around which they buried their dead in underground tombs. These new arrivals were likely drawn to this seemingly inhospitable landscape by extravagant sacred festivals held in and around Tiwanaku’s…

For the nearly two centuries since this Etruscan oil lamp was found near the city of Cortona, Italy, it has confounded scholars. It was unearthed in a ditch, so its original context is unknown. And its combination of imagery is unique in the ancient Mediterranean world, leaving nothing to compare it with that might hint at how it was used. On the bottom of the lamp, at the center, is an image of a fearsome Gorgon surrounded by snakes. This Gorgon is encircled by a frieze of animals, including dolphins, in combat. In the next ring, crouching male demigods known as Sileni playing musical instruments alternate with winged female Sirens. Finally, there are images of faces flanking the nozzles into which oil was poured, which scholars have traditionally interpreted as…

A sprawling 2,000-year-old fortress in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan appears to have included a sanctuary dedicated to the ancient Persian water goddess Anahita. The fortress of Rabana-Merquly stretched across some two miles of rugged terrain on the southeastern frontier of the vassal kingdom of Adiabene, within the domain of the Parthian Empire (247 B.C.–A.D. 224). According to Michael Brown, an archaeologist at Heidelberg University, the settlement was intended to project authority into the highlands, which were home to rebellious pastoralist groups. Evidence of what Brown believes to be an Anahita sanctuary includes a seasonal waterfall surrounded by a large terrace with monumental walls, a rock-covered escarpment, and staircases climbing the slope. The largest of the staircases leads from the waterfall’s base to a building where archaeologists have found…

At Boncuklu Tarla, or Beaded Field, a Neolithic site in southeast Turkey, an astounding 100,000 personal ornaments made of stone and shell have been unearthed since 2012. These include necklaces, pendants, and bracelets, as well as a range of small items that look like they could have been used as piercings—though until recently this was a matter of speculation. Now, archaeologists studying burials at the site dating to as long as 11,000 years ago have excavated around 100 of the ornaments near people’s ears or mouths, indicating that they were indeed used to pierce flesh. In at least one case, a stone ornament was found near the mouth of an individual whose tooth enamel was abraded in a fashion suggesting it was scratched by the ornament. “The degree of surface…

ON AN EXTINCT VOLCANO in western Java, five artificial terraces are cut into a promontory known as Gunung Padang, or Mountain of Enlightenment. The terraces are buttressed with stone retaining walls and can be reached from the valley below via a staircase made up of 370 stone steps. Each terrace is covered with rectangular megalithic structures composed of hundreds of prismatic andesite blocks that geologists call columnar joints. These are igneous stones that owe their shape to repeated heating and cooling when the volcano was active millions of years in the past. Scholars believe that, centuries ago, the ancestors of today’s local Sundanese people conducted sacred rituals on these terraces. The lowest and largest terrace, Terrace 1, features a five-foot-long andesite block that makes a loud, deep sound when struck.…

REIGN DATES Trajan (A.D. 98–117) Hadrian (A.D. 117–138) Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138–161)  Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161–180) Commodus (A.D. 177–192) Pertinax (A.D. 193) Septimius Severus (A.D. 193–211)  Caracalla (A.D. 198–217) Macrinus (A.D. 217–218) IN THE EARLY SECOND century A.D., with the Roman emperor Trajan’s conquests of Dacia, in what is now Romania, and Parthia, in modern Iran, the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent. Trajan was born in Spain, the first emperor to have been born out-side Italy. His adopted successor, Hadrian, shored up border defenses in northern Britain by constructing a 73-mile-long wall. For much of his reign, Hadrian traveled throughout the vast empire. One of the important provincial centers he visited, twice, was the city of Viminacium, in what is now eastern Serbia. Situated where the Mlava River flows…

When visitors arrive at Benin Airport in southern Nigeria’s Edo State, one of the first things they see is a large poster welcoming them to the state’s capital city. It features an aerial photograph of a huge traffic circle—one of the world’s largest, authorities boast—known as Ovonramwen Square, named for the powerful oba, or king, who reigned over the Benin Kingdom from 1888 to 1897. Towering over the giant roundabout are striking bronze sculptures featuring larger-than-life-size royal figures and their attendants and, in one case, a soon-to-die warrior battling British soldiers. The statues are masterpieces of modern smithing. In a corner of the poster, in front of which travelers pose for family photos, is an image of a sixteenth-century ivory pendant mask depicting Idia, the mother of Oba Esigie (reigned…