Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2015 i ARCHAEOLOGY

The monumental mid-first-century A.D. Domus Aurea, residence of the Roman emperor Nero, once encompassed not just sumptuously decorated palatial structures, but also vineyards, farmlands, and forests. For nearly 1,500 years, the massive property lay abandoned, eventually absorbed and covered over by the Eternal City. In “Golden House of an Emperor” (page 37), journalist Federico Gurgone tells us of the dramatic steps archaeologists, landscape architects, and conservators are taking to document and preserve this extraordinary testament to power and artistry constructed during “Reclaiming Lost Identities” (page 48), by journalist Traci Watson, offers a view of history on a far more human scale—the discovery of a paupers’ graveyard in the city of Kilkenny, containing the burials of nearly a thousand victims of Ireland’s Great Famine. Under pressure to complete their work before…

Gold has long played an important role in human societies. Its color, malleability, and resistance to corrosion have given it unequaled desirability for personal ornamentation and currency. In mainland Europe, the earliest evidence of goldworking dates back to more than 6,500 years ago in Bulgaria. For Ireland and Britain, it dates to about 2500 B.C., when early Bronze Age Irish craftsmen made great strides in metallurgy and demonstrated extraordinary skill in the production of gold artifacts. By hammering gold into thin sheets and then forming it into objects such as sun disks, beads, oval plaques, and lunulas, or crescent-shaped neck ornaments decorated with geometric motifs, they created what were to become the most iconic gold artifacts of the early Irish Bronze Age (2200–1800 B.C.). Some 100 lunulas have been discovered…

In the prehistoric American Southwest, trade with distant Mesoamerica was a source of power and prestige that could make or break a ruler. Within the massive multistory buildings at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, for instance, archaeologists have discovered exotic goods from Mexico, such as cacao and the remains of 33 scarlet macaws, whose natural habitat is 1,000 miles away on the Gulf of Mexico. Scholars had assumed that long-distance trade became important only during the period when Chaco’s power was greatest, from A.D. 1040 to 1110. But now a team has dated the macaw bones and found that some were imported as early as A.D. 900. “I was very much surprised,” says American Museum of Natural History archaeologist Adam Watson, who helped organize the dating. “I, along with everyone else,…

Some 5,300 years ago, a man now known as Ötzi died high in the Tyrolean Alps from an arrow wound to his chest. Now German and Italian researchers have recovered two intact red blood cells from the arrow wound and another corpuscle from a wound on his hand. The blood cells appear normal—even after five millennia under a glacier. They are the oldest known intact cells ever recovered from a mummy. The discovery opens the way to analyze Ötzi’s blood for diseases and to understand his general state of health. The researchers have now moved on to the contents of Ötzi’s stomach.…

In northern Spain about 430,000 years ago, the bodies of at least 28 early humans—evolutionary precursors of Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis—found their way to the bottom of a 43-foot-deep shaft in the bedrock that archaeologists call Sima de los Huesos, or “Pit of the Bones.” How the bodies got there is a mystery that Nohemi Sala, a paleoanthropologist at the Joint Center for Evolution and Human Behavior at the Institute of Health Carlos III in Madrid, has been trying to solve since 2007. Several explanations have been proposed: Carnivores might have dragged them there, or perhaps 28 separate hapless hominins accidentally fell down the shaft. In one particular case, the pit appears to have been used to dispose of the earliest known murder victim. Sala discovered the evidence of murder while…

The remains of an injured medieval knight who may have had a serious appetite for jousting have been identified among some 2,500 skeletons unearthed at England’s Hereford Cathedral. The knight immediately stood out because of unusual fractures on the right side of the body. “We were aware of this individual even before he was removed from the ground,” says Headland Archaeology’s Andy Boucher, who supervised the project’s post-excavation analysis. Osteological examination shows that the injuries, including many broken ribs and a shattered shoulder, were the result of blunt force trauma. “In a jousting tourney the knights used blunt weapons,” says Boucher. “If these had been battle wounds, some sharp trauma would be expected.” The identity of the knight remains a mystery, though isotopic analysis of his teeth shows that he…

TO FIND THE SITE OF the paupers’ graveyard in Kilkenny, Ireland, you need to start at the mall: Step into the spacious shopping center just outside the city center. Pass the locals sipping coffee and the stores selling fancy watches and the latest mobile phones. Walk outside the building into an unpaved yard. On this spot a century and a half ago, nearly a thousand victims of Ireland’s Great Famine were consigned to unmarked graves and covered with a thick layer of earth. Eventually, the burial ground’s existence drifted from memory. Now a new examination of the Kilkenny burial ground and the bodies interred there has begun to paint a picture of these forgotten dead, who were among the million-plus people who died of starvation and disease during the famine…

On a broad hilltop in the heart of Tallahassee, Florida, is Mission San Luis, a site with a deep history involving the Apalachee Native Americans and Spanish missionaries. In the mid-1500s, Hernando de Soto visited Anhaica, the capital of the Apalachee, an Indian nation so prominent that mapmakers bestowed its name on distant mountains: the Appalachians. In 1656, the Apalachee chief agreed to move his people a few miles away to Mission San Luis, the capital of Spain’s settlements in western Florida. There, Spanish friars baptized thousands of the Native Americans. Amid conflict between the Apalachee, other Native American groups, the Spanish, and the English, the mission was destroyed in 1704. According to Grant Stauffer, a graduate student at Texas State University, archaeologists consider Mission San Luis unique because, unlike…

Since her remains were discovered in 1921 near the town of Egtved, Denmark, almost 3,300 years after she died at around 17, the young woman was thought to have been a local, and became known as the “Egtved Girl.” But new research has undermined this assumption. Based on the strontium isotope signature of one of the girl’s first molars, which was fully formed by age four, a team led by Karin Frei of the National Museum of Denmark has determined that she could not have grown up on the Jutland Peninsula, where Egtved is located. Instead, she was most likely raised in the Black Forest region of southern Germany, some 500 miles away. There were well established ties between the two areas at the time, and the researchers believe the…

A team of archaeologists scoured El Mirón Cave in northern Spain starting in 1996 and found abundant remains of prehistoric people, primarily the Magdalenians, hunter-gatherers who lived across Western Europe at the end of the last Ice Age. But it wasn’t until 2010, when they investigated a narrow space behind a large limestone block, that the cave began to reveal its greatest secret: a significant portion of the skeleton of a Magdalenian woman who had died around 18,700 years earlier at the age of 35 to 40. The team, led by Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico and Manuel González Morales of the University of Cantabria, found that the woman’s bones were coated with ochre, a red, iron-based pigment, earning her the moniker the “Red Lady of El…

“In no other matter did he act more wasteful than in building a house that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill, which he originally named “Transitoria” [House of Passages], but when soon afterwards it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt he called it “Aurea” [Golden House]. A house whose size and elegance these details should be sufficient to relate: Its courtyard was so large that a 120-foot colossal statue of the emperor himself stood there; it was so spacious that it had a mile-long triple portico; also there was a pool of water like a sea, that was surrounded by buildings which gave it the appearance of cities; and besides that, various rural tracts of land with vineyards, cornifields, pastures, and forests, teeming with every kind of animal…

www.archaeological.org Site Preservation Grants Awarded to Projects in Greece and Chile THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL Institute of America awarded its most recent Site Preservation Grants to the Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage, and Exploration Synergasia (TAPHOS) in Greece and to the Project for the Preservation of the Pukara and Chullpas of Nama in Chile. Te archaeological site of Aidonia, located in southern Corinthia, Greece, includes several Late Bronze Age cemeteries dating from the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C. One of these cemeteries, discovered in the late 1970s, includes at least 20 high-quality tombs comparable in design and construction to elite tombs uncovered at Mycenae. Te Aidonia tombs contained a large quantity of burial goods and furnishings, including the famous “Aidonia Treasure.” Unfortunately, a majority of the tombs were looted in the 1970s.…

A Reminder of Home On “Juneteenth” (June 19), I opened my July/August 2015 issue of the magazine to a lengthy article about my hometown, Hampton, Virginia (“Letter from Virginia: Free Before Emancipation”). Hampton calls itself the oldest continuously English-speaking city in the United States and celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2007. Juneteenth is a loosely observed holiday, honoring the Emancipation Proclamation and the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865—the last state to do so following the end of the Civil War. Hamptonians have history in abundance, and the Butler fugitive slave law is part of that. It is reported that the frst reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to the “contraband” Hamptonians was outside Fort Monroe underneath an oak tree. That tree is still alive,…

The remarkably well preserved, fully dressed body of a seventeenth-century noblewoman has been found in a lead coffin in the French city of Rennes. A team led by Rosenn Colleter of the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) made the discovery while excavating the remains of a fourteenth-century convent at the site of a future conference center. Along with some 800 graves, the archaeologists unearthed five lead coffins, one of which was still hermetically sealed and held the nearly intact body. “I knew at once that it was a beautiful discovery,” says Colleter, “and that we would need to work quickly so as not to lose any information to decomposition.” The woman was buried with a heart-shaped relic inscribed with her husband’s name and containing his heart. This…

What seemed at first to be a simple ancient Roman burial has become an interesting case of how quickly archaeological interpretations can change. In February 2015, archaeologists from Cotswold Archaeology, working on the site of a new parking lot under construction in Cirencester in western England, found a tombstone. Because the site was known to have been a cemetery, the discovery was not especially surprising. But once they had completely excavated it, they found the artifact to be quite unusual. Unlike the other small tombstone fragments found at the site, it was intact, and when they turned it over, they saw that it contained an inscription. Fewer than 300 inscribed tombstones from the period have been found in England. The inscription reads, “In memory of Bodicacia, devoted wife, lived 27…

There’s more to the Salisbury Plain than Stonehenge. Throughout the twentieth century it was utilized as a military training ground, including during World War II, when U.S. forces used the plain as a staging ground for European operations. Over the last few years, archaeologists from Wessex Archaeology have found and excavated the remains of American camps and barracks, and have recently announced some of the finds, including cans of sliced bacon from Chicago (empty, fortunately) and a cache of 16 small cans of New Jersey–made “U.S. Cream Sunburn Preventive” (still creamy).…

A great empire needs a great capital. In A.D. 1256, the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, instructed his Chinese adviser Liu Bingzhong to design what became his capital city—Xanadu. The legendary site, which covers 12 acres, contains remains of numerous structures, including temples, palaces, city walls, canals, and tombs. The earliest structure known is a type of large, freestanding ceremonial entranceway called a Que-tower. As part of the excavations of Xanadu, Mongolian archaeologists uncovered the tower’s foundations, pieces of brick and stone from the building, and some of its colorful decoration, including this head of a dragon. The brightly colored beast once covered the end of a supporting beam. Along with two other similar dragons, colored tiles, figurines of an immortal being, a bird, a fish,…