Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2024 i ARCHAEOLOGY

There are countless places that people have transformed into sacred spaces where they can express their devotion to a god or gods, to their family and ancestors, or to the Earth. In this issue, you will discover a fascinating array of locations where people of the past came together in groups or individually to practice their faith. You will read about two very different kinds of island temples where offerings were made to deities who are remembered today. The first is a long-sought temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis on the Greek island of Euboea that stood at the center of one of the most renowned sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world. The other temple, dating to the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., belonged to an early Jewish settlement on…

A TAÍNO IDOL’S ORIGIN STORY Archaeologist Joanna Ostapkowicz of the University of Oxford has spent countless hours combing through documents stored in the two miles of shelves at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) of the Smithsonian Institution. “It’s an incredible resource,” she says. “The archive is a repository of documents pertaining to archaeology and anthropology by some of the field’s most influential researchers, many of whom were Smithsonian Institution staff.” The records include those related to the Bureau of American Ethnology’s nineteenthcentury surveys of mounds in the eastern United States, as well as others covering extensive excavations undertaken by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Ostapkowicz studies pre-Columbian Caribbean wooden sculptures (see “Entombed in Asphalt,” March/April 2018) and was recently at the NAA searching through the files of archaeologist…

Archaeologists excavating a small ridge in Villedieu-sur-Indre in central France (part of ancient Gaul) unearthed a dozen pits containing more than 30 horse skeletons that have been radiocarbon dated to the Late Iron Age or early Roman period, between 100 b.c. and a.d. 100. The horses may be linked to one of Rome’s most famous personages. The largest pit held the remains of 10 complete equines that had been carefully laid to rest in two rows, on their right sides, with their heads facing south. The horses, which were symbols of Iron Age aristocracy, were relatively small, measuring just four feet high at the withers. “We realized the importance of the discovery immediately, due to the arrangement of the horses and the great care taken in their interment,” says archaeologist…

While digging in the center of the Belgian city of Antwerp, archaeologists from the urban archaeology department made an unexpected discovery. Hidden within the earthen rampart of a nineteenth-century fortress was a very, very large dark red metal box. “We saw this metal thing sticking out that was like nothing we had ever seen,” says archaeologist Femke Martens. “Even as we were staring at it, it began to fall apart, so we had to document it as fast as we could.” The team, which included archaeologist Daan Celis, rushed to brush dirt from the letters painted on the side and were able to make out a few snippets of text, including: “NITURE REMOVAL TO HOUSE,” “ENQUIRE AT ANY STATION,” “BK769,” and “LNER.” “We thought maybe it was some sort of…

Marathon runners today may be able to thank ancient hunters for their ftness routine. According to anthropologists Eugène Morin of Trent University and Bruce Winterhalder of the University of California, Davis, humans evolved to maximize stamina and smarts, which allowed them to perfect a hunting strategy that Morin describes as “spook and run.” “Prey will sprint and then seek refuge or rest, and a hunter following at a regular pace will catch up,” says Winterhalder. “The cycle repeats several times, debilitating the animal and compromising its ability to flee.” This strategy is akin to that employed by the proverbial tortoise in its seemingly plodding race against the hare. The researchers reviewed more than 400 sources from across cultures, time periods, and locations that describe similar hunting practices—from accounts of Coahuiltecan…

IN THE CENTRAL TABLELANDS of southeastern Australia’s Wiradjuri Country, the tough exterior bark of a yellow box tree, a type of eucalyptus, has been chiseled away to create a smooth canvas into which geometric patterns have been etched. Undulating parallel lines emanate outward from a diamond shape that wraps around a portion of the tree. Marked or carved trees such as this one are called marara by the area’s Wiradjuri people. Marara are part of a broader tradition of modifying trees for practical and symbolic purposes practiced by Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This particular carving, or dendroglyph, was likely engraved at some point after the early 1800s by members of the Wiradjuri, the largest Aboriginal language group in the state of New South Wales and the second largest in Australia. Nearly…

Ancient necropolises often provide clues about the lives of the dead, with grave goods helping determine what was valued by people in the past. Traditionally, however, archaeologists could only speculate about relationships among the deceased. Were they friends, family, or maybe even enemies? A recent genetic study of 32 individuals interred in a kurgan, or burial mound, south of the Ural Mountains has provided a snapshot of family dynamics in a small pastoral community on the Eurasian steppe 3,800 years ago. Researchers learned that the group, which belonged to the Srubnaya-Alakul cultural tradition, consisted of three generations of a single Bronze Age (ca. 2400–800 b.c.) family that were all buried close together over just three to 10 years, based on radiocarbon dating of material from the graves. At the burial’s…

From a sandy spit of land rising more than 20 feet high in the boreal forest of the Lower Ob River region, the vast expanse of the West Siberian Plain stretches to the horizon. The taiga landscape, thick with stands of Siberian pine, spruce, and larch, is traced with wide, slow rivers, still the principal routes of transport for the area’s Indigenous Khanty people—by boat in summer, and in winter, along the ice. The closest of these waterways, the Amnya River, flows about a third of a mile to the south. A team of Russian and German archaeologists have discovered that, around 6000 B.C., Neolithic hunter-gatherers constructed one of the world’s oldest known fortified settlements on this promontory—centuries before similar sites were built in Europe. Called the Amnya complex, it…

Fall brings archaeologists in from the field and back into the classroom brimming with tales of unexpected discoveries, new insights, and local collaboration. Some of these stories may find their way into Archaeology magazine, one of the ways the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) fulfills its mission to engage with the public. The AIA also provides opportunities for people to interact directly with archaeologists and explore heritage sites through online lectures and in-person events held by our more than 100 local societies. In celebration of International Archaeology Day in October 2023, the Niagara Peninsula Society, of which I am a member, visited the Queenston Heights National Historic Site in Ontario, Canada, to learn about the battle fought there during the War of 1812. We craned our necks to marvel at…

Researchers have highlighted a unique way that some Vikings permanently marked their bodies, perhaps as a way of secretly identifying themselves with a specific group. Archaeologists examined the skulls of 130 men who were buried across the Viking world between the tenth and twelfth centuries and who had strange horizontal striations on their teeth. The majority of the men were found in the Kopparsvik cemetery on the Swedish island of Got land, which was an important trading center. (See “Hoards of the Vikings,” January/February 2017.) Originally, the researchers thought the grooves might have been formed during textile production, when the men used their teeth as cutting tools. However, they now believe the unusual markings were intentional. “Most of the tooth filings were carried out with great skill by one person,…

Archaeologists have dated the lakefront Neolithic (7000–3200 B.C.) settlement of Dispilio in northern Greece using a method that involves detecting evidence of bursts of cosmic radiation in ancient wood samples. In 2012, physicist Fusa Miyake first identified sudden spikes in the level of radioactive carbon-14 in tree rings that could be attributed to bombardment by cosmic rays at precisely known points in the past. A handful of these spikes, called Miyake Events, which allow wood samples to be dated to a single year, can be identified in tree rings dating back as far as 12,350 B.C. A team including University of Bern archaeologists Albert Hafner and Andrej Maczkowski and University of Arizona dendrochronologist Charlotte Pearson took 787 samples from preserved juniper and oak piles that Dispilio’s inhabitants used to build…

Humans have been passing through the Barrancas River Valley in what is now western Argentina since at least the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. But excavations starting in 2012 turned up only scant traces of early hunter-gatherers, mostly stone projectile points. Then, in 2018, archaeologists discovered that the valley was more than just a way station: They found a grave, and then another in 2023. One burial had been partially preserved—including soft tissue—by the Andean Plateau’s extreme aridity. Dated to 9,700 years ago, that burial is one of the oldest known examples of naturally mummified remains in the world. Fragments of two slippers made of vicuña leather had also survived in the grave. “We’re thinking of this landscape as a transit area, but a constantly…

AS THE NILE FLOWS NORTH out of Sudan into Upper, or southern, Egypt, it passes a small island that was a crossroads of exchange between Africa and the Middle East for thousands of years. Such great quantities of ivory were traded on the island that the ancient Egyptians called it Yeb, which means elephant. This legacy is the source of the name the Greeks gave it in the late fourth century B.C.—Elephantine. The island, which measures just a mile long and 1,300 feet across at its widest point, served a key role in Egypt’s defense throughout its history and was home to border fortresses that monitored traffc on the river. By the late nineteenth century, when the British occupied Egypt, Elephantine had begun to attract European tourists and British offcials…

Archaeologists know a great deal about the Roman Empire. They know its dates: Octavian assumed the title of emperor and the name Augustus in 27 b.c. The last Western Roman emperor was forced to abdicate in a.d. 476, while the last Eastern Roman emperor died in 1453. They know the empire’s extent: At its largest, in the second century a.d., it covered nearly two million square miles. They know about masterful artworks, massive aqueducts, and countless surviving laws, poems, and plays. Yet they don’t know very much about the genetics of Rome’s residents. To begin to understand the origins of the people who lived in and around what would become the empire’s capital, an international team including archaeologist Hannah Moots of the Centre for Palaeogenetics sampled DNA from 127 people…

Coffea arabica, the flowering evergreen plant whose vibrant red berries, when dried and roasted, are used to make millions of cups of coffee each morning, originated in the forests of Paleolithic East Africa. For millions of years, two other species of coffee, C. canephora and C. eugenioides, are thought to have grown in sub-Saharan Africa until they interbred in the Great Rift Valley. “About 600,000 years ago, there was a hybrid event when pollen from C. canephora came into contact with C. euge-nioides, and a new, viable plant was born,” says plant genomics researcher Jarkko Salojärvi of Nanyang Technological University. “This is how C. arabica came to be.” From then on, coffee’s story is one of survival against great odds. Salojärvi and his team have reconstructed coffee’s complex evolution by…

Archaeologists digging near the village of Offord Cluny recently unearthed the isolated burial of a man who, according to radiocarbon dating of his remains, lived between a.d. 126 and 228, during the Roman period. The man, designated Offord Cluny 203645, was between 18 and 25 when hedied and was buried close to a rural homestead less than a mile from a major Roman road. No grave goods were discovered with him that could help tell his story. A team led by archaeogeneticist Marina Soares Da Silva of the Francis Crick Institute, however, sequenced his DNA as part of a project to investigate ancient Britain’s genetic heritage. Silva recognized at once that Offord Cluny 203645 was no ordinary rural Briton—his genome was similar to those of ancient people who lived in…

In British folklore, the cuckoo’s song is the symphony that accompanies spring, but when the summer solstice arrives, the bird falls silent. As the days descend into winter, the cuckoo returns to the underworld, dragging the Earth’s warmth along with it. Enclosing fledgling cuckoos in a pen could, the story goes, prolong spring and prevent the creeping cold of winter. After University of Aberdeen archaeologist David Nance encountered this legend while investigating a Bronze Age (2500–700 b.c.) granite standing stone in Scotland known as the Gouk Stone (“gouk” comes from the Old Norse for cuckoo), he made an unexpected connection to another Bronze Age site in Britain. Discovered in 1999 on the Norfolk coast of England, Holme I, or Seahenge, is a 4,000-year-old seaside circle of oak posts surrounding an…

Did a medieval hermit named Guthlac make a plundered prehistoric monument in the Fens of eastern England his home? For generations, scholars inspired by an early eighth-century a.d. account known as the Life of Guthlac have searched for the repurposed barrow where the ascetic—or his sister Pega—is purported to have dug out a cell and private chapel. They have focused in particular on Anchor Church Field in the town of Crowland, which is the site of a medieval abbey. Recently, archaeologists Duncan Wright of Newcastle University and Hugh Willmott of the University of Sheffeld undertook the first concerted excavation of the site. “Beginning in the early seventh century a.d., there was a real interest in monuments, especially barrows, being reused,” says Wright. “They were seen as ancestral and as points…

ERETRIA, ONE OF ANCIENT GREECE’S most prominent and infuential city-states during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., lay just off the mainland on the island of Euboea. Meaning “town of rowers,” Eretria was among the first Greek cities to establish colonies around the Mediterranean, including, as early as the eighth century B.C., those at Cumae and Pithecusae on the Bay of Naples. The Eretrians’ most sacred place—and one of the most renowned religious sites in the ancient Greek world—was the Sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia. Every spring, the Eretrians paraded out of their city to the sanctuary en masse to celebrate the goddess’ festival. The first century b.c. geographer Strabo records that the processions featured 3,000 armed soldiers, 600 cavalry, and 60 war chariots. This parade would have been followed by…

Each cell in a plant, animal, or person contains millions, or even billions, of DNA base pairs—molecules connected by hydrogen bonds that are the building blocks of DNA. These base pairs collectively make up an organism’s genome, the complete set of its genetic material. The existence of DNA was first discovered more than 150 years ago, and scientists identified its structure in the 1950s. The study of ancient DNA, however, is still in its infancy. Ancient DNA is often fragmented and heavily degraded, making it diffcult for researchers to extract and to determine the exact sequence of base pairs in a DNA molecule, a process referred to as sequencing. In 2010, geneticists successfully mapped an entire Neanderthal genome for the first time. They made the groundbreaking discovery that, even though…

For the Indigenous Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, woolly dogs played an extremely significant cultural and spiritual role. The Coast Salish prized the dogs for their distinctive fur, which has soft guard hairs making up the outer coat and an unusually long, crimpy undercoat. High-ranking women spun the hair into yarn, which they wove into blankets, clothing, and ceremonial items. They also carefullytended to the dogs, feeding them a special diet and keeping them in pens near human housing or on small islands so they wouldn’t interbreed with other canines. The dogs provided much more than a useful weaving material, says Michael Pavel, an Elder from the Skokomish (Twana) Coast Salish community on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. “The woolly dogs’ most important contributions, in addition to…

For thousands of years beginning at least 10,000 years ago, a population of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers sharing the same genetic lineage lived in what is now Denmark. Then, around 5,900 years ago, they were replaced wholesale by Neolithic farmers with roots in Anatolia (modern Turkey). Just a millennium later, these farmers were, in turn, completely supplanted by herders known as the Yamnaya, whose origins can be traced back to the southern Russian steppe. A study that involved sequencing the genomes of 100 people who lived inDenmark between 10,500 and 3,200 years ago revealed these dramatic population changes. The general pattern of hunter-gathers giving way to farmers who then gave way to herders is known to have unfolded throughout Europe. In this case, however, researchers were able to obtain an unusually…

The Blackfoot Confederacy is today made up of four bands. The traditional lands of three of them, the Blood (Kainai), Piikani, and Siksika First Nations, are on the plains of southern Alberta, Canada, while the Blackfeet Tribe’s homeland is in northern Montana. Many scholars have concluded that the confederacy is a relative newcomer to the High Plains. Linguists classify the Blackfoot language as part of the Algonquin family, which includes many languages spoken by peoples living around the Great Lakes and on the Eastern Seaboard. Since the nineteenth century, Euro-American anthropologists have argued that the ancestors of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy must have originally lived near the Great Lakes. At some point in the last millennium, they are thought to have migrated to the High Plains. But the…

EXCAVATE The AIA’s Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin (AFOB) helps thousands of students and volunteers search the world for fieldwork experiences. In addition to in-depth project descriptions, the AFOB contains information about funding sources, travel grants, age requirements, academic credit availability, accommodations, bibliographies, and more for hundreds of archaeological projects worldwide. Fun fact: Archaeology magazine’s editor in chief, Jarrett A. Lobell, got her start at a dig in Pompeii that she found in the AFOB and credits this invaluable resource for her archaeological career. Find the AFOB at archaeological.org/afob. ADVOCATE From June 4 to 6, 2024, the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee convened to review requests from Ecuador, Jordan, and Ukraine to renew or establish bilateral agreements that limit the import of archaeological and ethnological materials into the United States. The…