Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2025 i ARCHAEOLOGY

What do a sword, a key, and an avocado have in common? In this issue, you will see how each of these items became a powerful cultural emblem and read about how everything from the color of a woman’s teeth to the building of a region-wide system of fortresses can reflect the symbolic lives of people of the past. Some events are symbolic, such as the modern annual procession of men dressed in samurai armor who wend their way through Japan’s Ichijo Valley, recalling the golden age of the Asakura clan and their lost city of Ichijodani. During the celebration, the men carry that most iconic of samurai symbols, the long, curved, razor-sharp sword known as a katana. Over the course of six decades of excavations in medieval Ichijodani, archaeologists…

THE CAT AND THE FAT During the 19th Dynasty (ca. 1295–1186 b.c.), the village of Deir el-Medina, on the Nile’s west bank in Upper, or southern, Egypt, was home to a community of civil servants and artisans who built and decorated the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. Scholars are on unusually familiar terms with these people. “As expert scribes and draftsmen, they left quite a lot of writing,” says Egyptologist Rob Demarée of Leiden University. At the site, archaeologists have excavated tens of thousands of texts written on papyrus and ostracons—discarded pieces of pottery or stone used like scrap paper. In 1997, Demarée began compiling these texts into an online database that now contains more than 5,000 records. Although some texts are accounts of mundane work,…

Arock shelter 40 miles south of Paris contains what researchers believe is a representation of the surrounding landscape created by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers around 13,000 years ago. Research led by geologist Médard Thiry of Mines Paris–PSL suggests that these long-ago people carved channels into the shelter’s sandstone floor that, combined with its natural undulations, produced a model of water flowing from the area’s highlands into streams and rivers that, in turn, fed lakes and swamps. “When you are looking carefully at the sandstone’s features, you can clearly distinguish what is natural and what has been modified,” Thiry says. “In this case, the floor of the shelter is marked with a lot of grooves that don’t appear to be natural.” Water would have flowed through the network after rainfall; it could also…

The diet of British birds of prey in the distant past was very different from that of their descendants. A team led by archaeologist Juliette Waterman of the University of Reading discovered surprising disparities between bones of raptors such as red kites found at Roman and medieval archaeological sites and those of the same birds that lived during what scholars call the modern period, which began in the seventeenth century. Chemical analysis of the bones showed sisted on a diverse diet of wild mammals, small birds, and earthworms. Rabbits also provided an abundant food resource for that in the Roman period, the birds’ diet included meat from domesticated mammals such as sheep, cows, and pigs, which modern birds of prey. The animals were introduced to Britain they took from scraps…

Seventy-five miles northeast of Disney World, a tangled forest of palms, pines, and mossy oaks nearly reclaims the charred remnants of Bulow Plantation and the hulking ruins of its massive steam-powered sugar mill. The largest sugar plantation in eastern Florida when it operated from 1821 to 1835, Bulow is now an important site for scholars researching the archaeology of enslavement. During excavations from 2014 to 2018, and through recent archival discoveries, they have revealed a much more complicated and more horrific place than they had previously imagined. In 1823, two years after the United States acquired Florida from Spain, John Bulow inherited 4,700 acres in what’s now known as Bulow Plantation Ruins Historic State Park. Bulow surrounded his home at what he called Bulowville with a semicircle of 46 cabins…

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF FUKUI, a city of a quarter of a million people in central Japan, a handful of shops and restaurants, a smattering of homes, and a few rice fields line the Ichijo River as it snakes its way through a narrow valley protected on three sides by mountain ranges. Locals as well as tourists enjoy the valley’s scenic beauty, but on the surface there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the spot. However, a deep history lurks beneath the serene landscape. Few places in Japan are less populated today than they were five centuries ago—but the Ichijo Valley is one of them. It may be diffcult to imagine that this was once the location of the lively city of Ichijodani, where events that helped alter the course of Japan’s…

I recently returned from Athens, where I revisited the Acropolis and its wondrous 2,500-year-old architecture: the imposing entrance known as the Propylaea, the massive Parthenon, the Erechtheum’s graceful porch, and the perfect proportions of the temple dedicated to Athena perched on the edge of the nearly 500-foot-high hill. As I climbed to the top on a breezy Thursday morning, I was surrounded by rowdy schoolchildren making their pilgrimage to the marble structures that highlight the city’s classical past. Walking among them and hundreds of tourists reminded me of so many earlier processions to buildings that commemorate local cults, battle victories, and the city’s artistic prowess. It also brought to mind how rulers from elsewhere built monuments at home to recall the place that had so moved them. The Attalids, the…

The Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long linen cloth crafted in the eleventh century, depicts scenes from William the Conqueror’s invasion of England and his defeat of Harold Godwinson, England’s last Anglo-Saxon king, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. (See “Unfolding the Bayeux Tapestry,” January/February 2021.) There are detailed images of boats, horses, battles, fish, and even of Harold himself. Only four actual places in England are shown on the tapestry—one being Harold’s residence—but their locations have been hard to identify. “Despite the tapestry’s relative notoriety,” says Newcastle University archaeologist Duncan Wright, “it’s unusual that little concerted efort has been made by archaeologists to locate Harold’s complex on the ground.” A team led by Wright has now confirmed the location of the king’s home. The archaeologists investigated a site known as…

Native American oral history and archaeological data alike suggest that farmers in parts of North America began abandoning major settlements such as Mesa Verde in Colorado and Cahokia in Illinois sometime after 1150. Now, a team led by archaeologist Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming has studied this period using a previously assembled database of some 100,000 radiocarbon dates from across the United States. (See “Save the Dates,” July/August 2022.) They used the dates to track population movements and demographic decline during this turbulent era, which was marked by drought, warfare, and disease. “We knew in a piecemeal fashion that these conditions drove demographic changes in different regions,” says Kelly. “But the radiocarbon data gives us a powerful new tool to understand population decline across the continent.” After dividing…

FLORIDA: A new discovery has been made in St. Augustine: part of a fort built by the British during their brief occupation. Although the city was founded by the Spanish in 1565, it was held by the British from 1763 to 1784. During that time, to protect the city’s western edge, they constructed 7 small earthen forts, or redoubts, one of which was recently unearthed in a vacant lot downtown. When the Spanish retook control, these defenses were abandoned and largely forgotten. ISLE OF MAN: Iron Age inhabitants of the Isle of Man didn’t have crystal balls, but they did have their own special tools to predict the future: divination spoons. One such utensil, which dates to between 400 and 100 b.c., was recently found on the island. The bowl…

SOME OF THE EARLIEST TEXTS from Mesopotamia describe a paradise called Dilmun. These accounts, written in the late fourth millennium b.c., tell of a place far off in the middle of the sea where fresh water flows from the ground, where people live free of sickness and threats from wild animals, and never grow old. The mythical hero Gilgamesh was said to have traveled to Dilmun as part of his quest for eternal life and to have met a survivor of the great flood who had been granted immortality by the gods. From early on, Dilmun was also associated with sources of copper, a material coveted by the Mesopotamians to make bronze for their tools and artworks. By the mid-third millennium b.c., it’s clear from Mesopotamian texts that this version…

Drumanagh, Ireland While the Romans never ruled over Ireland, their conquest of Britain in the first century A.D. brought expanded trade opportunities to the Emerald Isle. From the first to third century A.D., the site of Drumanagh, on a windswept coastal promontory just north of Dublin, was a trading post where a range of novel foodstuffs made landfall. During excavations that began in 2018, a team led by archaeologist Christine Baker of the Fingal County discovered copious amounts of burned spelt, a cereal that was a staple in Roman Britain but was relatively rare in Ireland. They have also unearthed fragments of 10 amphoras used to transport olive oil to Drumanagh. Recently, the team made its most exciting gustatory find so far: a burned fig that has remained intact for…

Vlasac, Serbia Nearly 9,000 years ago, Mesolithic foragers living along the Danube gathered Cornelian cherries on the edges of a dense oak forest surrounding their settlement. They used cherry wood as kindling and might also have extracted oil from the pits for fuel. A team led by archaeologist Dušan Borić, now at the Sapienza University of Rome, excavated several burials at the settlement. Beneath one, they unearthed a small earlier grave dating to the mid-seventh millennium b.c. containing cremated human bones. Sprinkled throughout this grave were about 30 charred cherry pits, 13 of them whole. Borić thinks the bones were burned to purify the ground before interring a newly deceased member of the community. “We began to speculate whether the cherries were attached to branches used to make a funeral…

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority have unearthed parts of a Roman and Byzantine settlement just outside the modern city of Kiryat Gat. The researchers believe the settlement was founded in the first century b.c. and flourished for more than 600 years, thanks to its location along an important road connecting the Judean Mountains with the coastal plain. The settlement seems to have been especially prosperous during the fifth and sixth centuries a.d., based on evidence of an extensive building campaign as well as distinctive types of pottery, coins, and decorative marbles found at the site. Also dating to this period are remnants of successful winemaking and ceramic industries, which produced goods for use by local communities as well as for export throughout the Mediterranean. This Byzantine expansion of the…

AS EARLY AS THE SECOND century b.c., residents of the city of Stratonicea in western Anatolia honored their patron goddess Hecate, a deity of magic and transitions, with the annual Festival of the Key. This celebration, which was unique to Stratonicea, began with a sixmile-long procession in which a key was carried to the city from a temple dedicated to Hecate in the neighboring town of Lagina. This is the only known temple devoted solely to the goddess. The procession then returned to Lagina through pine forests and past spring-fed reservoirs. Afterward, onlookers from Stratonicea and nearby villages streamed through a monumental arched gateway into the sanctuary for a day of music, prayers, and sacrifices of cattle or sheep on a marble altar in front of the temple. Spectators sat…

American Southeast More than 600,000 tons of peaches are grown in the United States each year, and the fruit is a fixture of American diets. Yet scholars have had only a dim understanding of the iconic fruit’s early history in North America. Historians assumed that Spaniards introduced peaches to Florida by the mid-sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, large stands of wild peaches were reported as far from Florida as Pennsylvania and Arkansas. Because peach trees are hardy and can bear fruit less than two years after germination, many scholars believed peaches were a particularly successful invasive species and quickly spread across the continent. In this scenario, Native Americans were largely bystanders in the fruit’s story. A team led by archaeologist Jacob Holland-Lulewicz of Pennsylvania State University has studied all…

Africa Long before watermelon became a refreshing summer treat, reliefs adorning the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs suggest the fruit was a coveted delicacy. However, exactly when the species of watermelon commonly consumed today, Citrullus lanatus, became the beloved emerald-skinned fruit with white stripes and a sweet red interior is unclear. In fact, its 6,000-year-old predecessor’s pulp wasn’t very tasty and was potentially hazardous. “It actually could have killed you,” says botanist Oscar Alejandro Pérez Escobar of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. To plot the fruit’s evolutionary trajectory, Pérez Escobar’s team sequenced genomes from watermelon seeds dating to between 6,000 and 3,400 years ago excavated from graves in Libya and Sudan. They traced watermelon’s origins to a species closely related to the modern West African Citrullus mucosospermus, which has bitter, greenish-white…

IF A CATASTROPHIC ERUPTION suddenly buries most of a region under volcanic ash, does the culture of those still living there end abruptly? Does the identity of people who have endured for hundreds of years transform completely when a rival conquers a centuries-old capital, or when climate change makes farming the land impossible? The archaeological record shows that even under pressure, whether extreme or gradual, people carry on despite altered circumstances, preserving at least some of their culture in the form of artistic techniques and styles. “Cultures can be flexible and resilient,” says archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter of Harvard University, “even in the face of great change.” Quilter and a team including archaeologist Carlos Rengifo of the National University of Trujillo and art historian Amy Oakland of California State University, East…

On a squat peninsula along southern Albania’s Ionian coast, Porto Palermo Castle, a threesided fortress of neatly dressed masonry fringed with notches for cannons, commands the sea from nearly 100 feet above azure waves. A picture-postcard spot, the castle evokes its builder, Ali Pasha of Tepelena, the infamous conqueror of huge swaths of today’s Albania and Greece. It’s a popular stop for thousands of tourists who descend upon the Albanian Riviera in search of an inexpensive seaside lounge chair and an Instagram-worthy cocktail amid the aura of long-ago pirates and princesses. But on a mid-February afternoon, only a few curious travelers are poking around the castle with its seasoned caretaker, Aleksandër. Ali Pasha ruled the Pashalic of Janina—now Ioannina in northwestern Greece—as governor from 1788 to 1822. He became a…