Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i ARCHAEOLOGY

A storm blew over a 215-year-old beech tree in Sligo, Ireland, revealing a skeleton tangled in its root system. Archaeologist Marion Dowd was called in to investigate what she calls “an unusual situation,” and found that the remains belonged to a 17- to 20-year-old man who died of what appear to be knife wounds sometime between A.D. 1030 and 1200. Records indicate that there was a medieval graveyard in the area, and although no visible trace of it survives, Dowd suspects there could be more burials nearby.…

Figureheads, carved decorations on the prows of sailing ships, went out of fashion in the nineteenth century, but judging by the one recently pulled from the Baltic, perhaps it is time for a revival. Maritime archaeologists in Sweden recently raised a figurehead depicting a monster from the fifteenth-century wreck of Gribshunden (“Grip Dog”) off the southern coast. The warship, belonging to Danish King Hans, sank at anchor following a fire in 1495, and is today one of the best preserved ships from the period, because the cold Baltic kept shipworms at bay. Researchers hope to raise more from the ship soon.…

Ituna began its life as a luxury steam yacht in Scotland in 1886. It went down as a fishing trawler off the California coast in 1920. In between, Ituna lived several other lives. Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently discovered the historic wreck 200 feet down, 24 miles from San Francisco, where it sank in a storm. As a luxury craft, with a hull designed by famed yacht designer George Lennox Watson, Ituna saw several owners before it was purchased by Allison V. Armour, a wealthy patron of the sciences. She sent the ship on a three-month research expedition to Mexico in 1894, which resulted in Archaeological Studies among the Ancient Cities of Mexico, an early and influential text on Mesoamerican archaeology. Twenty-two years later the ship…

ALASKA: It was long thought that Ice Age humans in the Americas were primarily big-game hunters. But sharp-eyed archaeologists have found evidence that they ate fish as well. In an 11,500-year-old hearth, researchers found salmon bones, the earliest known evidence for the use of the fish as food in North America. Because the bones were found more than 800 miles from the ocean, it is clear that long-distance salmon migrations likely date back at least to the last Ice Age. LIBYA: A hundred and fifty thousand years or so ago—ages before escargot became a delicacy—humans ate land snails on a regular basis. Evidence for this comes from tens of thousands of snail shells documented in Haua Fteah Cave. Some of the shells have holes indicative of drilling, which broke the…

AROUND 2,500 YEARS AGO, a people known today as the Dorset flourished in eastern Canada and Greenland. Despite not having boats or bows and arrows, they survived in the harsh Arctic environment by using spears to hunt seals along the edge of the sea ice. The Dorset shared the stark landscape with polar bears, the world’s largest terrestrial predator, who are also deadly seal hunters. Ursus maritimus (“sea bear”) can weigh up to 1,700 pounds, and must have loomed large in the imagination of the Dorset, who fashioned great numbers of bone and ivory figurines depicting polar bears. Matthew Betts, a zooarchaeologist at the Canadian Museum of History, which has a significant collection of the carvings, became interested in what they could reveal about the Dorset people’s relationship to these…

THE THREE-STORY House of the Golden Bracelet on the Vicolo del Farmacista was one of the most opulent in Pompeii, its walls covered with vibrant frescoes depicting theatrical scenes and imitating expensive marble paneling, its floors paved with intricate black-and-white geometric mosaics. At the rear of the house lay a verdant garden with a splashing fountain and quiet pools, its natural beauty echoed by wall paintings depicting oleander, viburnum, arbutus, bay, palm trees, irises, roses, daisies, and poppies, home to doves and house sparrows, a swallow, a golden oriole, and a jay. From the terrace was a view of the sea, whose breezes cooled the house during hot Mediterranean summers. THE MORNING OF August 24, A.D. 79, was relatively quiet in Pompeii, perhaps disturbed only slightly by a series of…

In the fourth century A.D. Christianity became the official religion across the Roman Empire, which, at the time, extended from Britain to North Africa, and from Spain to Mesopotamia. In some locations, the new faith brought with it a desire to eradicate the symbols of the past. By its very nature, iconoclasm can be difficult to find in the archaeological record. At the small city of Antiochia ad Cragum in Rough Cilicia, an image of the snake-haired gorgon Medusa survived the fourth- or fifth-century destruction of the earlier Roman building it once adorned. “It was fortunate that we found the Medusa head,” says Michael Hoff of the University of Nebraska, who, with Birol Can of Uşak University, excavated the sculpture. “The folks living in Antiochia ad Cragum in the late…

Late-Breaking News And Notes From The World Of Archaeology When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, he assumed he was in Japan. This was partly due to his fifteenth-century naïveté regarding world geography, but also because he had departed Spain armed with misinformation. It is believed that one of the sources that Columbus consulted before his journey was a map produced by German cartographer Henricus Martellus in 1491. The map locates Japan a thousand miles from the Asian mainland, where Columbus expected to find it on his way to the East Indies. The Martellus map reflected the sum total of European geographical knowledge at that time, and is considered by experts today to be one of the seminal maps of the Age of Discovery. “It seems to have…

When King Henry III’s (A.D. 1216–1272) workers began the monumental foundations for a Gothicstyle Westminster Abbey, they encountered burials dating to early periods in the abbey’s history. They stockpiled the remains and reburied them in charnel deposits in an area that was likely a monastic burial ground. Now excavations in preparation for the building of a new Gothic-style tower have rediscovered these bones, as well as 19 other burials in both cist graves and coffins, under a Victorian-era drainpipe. The burials likely date to between A.D. 1000 and 1250, and will provide important evidence of early medieval life at the abbey.…

Renovations in the rotunda at the University of Virginia have led to the discovery of a nineteenthcentury chemistry laboratory hidden in the building’s walls. The iconic Thomas Jefferson–designed rotunda was constructed in the 1820s as the centerpiece of the university he founded. Recently, while exploring a mysterious void within the walls on the bottom floor, workers found a chemical hearth, which apparently was used by Professor John Emmet during the university’s early years. According to Jefferson’s letters, he and Emmet discussed the location of the chemistry classroom. “For the Professor of Chemistry, such experiments as require the use of furnaces, cannot be exhibited in his ordinary lecturing room,” he wrote. “We therefore prepare the rooms under the oval rooms of the ground floor of the Rotunda for furnaces, stoves, etc.”…

This year’s Top 10 Discoveries reach us from vastly different cultures and across eons. Some raise new questions about what it means to be human and what separates us from our species’ relatives. Others bring us face to face with individual people, their travels, their faith, their hold on power. Several, covering matters as diverse as slavery and the origins of art, come to us via newly applied scientific methods. Taken together, this year’s discoveries present an array of insights into endeavors, large and small, spanning millions of years. A New Human Relative Johannesburg, South Africa Scientists have long searched for the transitional species between apelike australopithecines, such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), and early humans, such as Homo habilis. And now, deep in the Rising Star cave system in South…

IF EVERY HOME TELLS a story, then Knole House is a tome. By any measure one of the five largest houses in England, this country estate in Sevenoaks in west Kent has seen six centuries of British history, and the reigns of some 30 monarchs. Knole House has been the backdrop for all the ups and downs of the English aristocracy and for the lives of the countless tradesmen, butlers, maids, cooks, and footmen who kept dwellings like it running. Located just 30 miles outside London, the house occupies four acres, surrounded by 26 acres of gardens and fields, and another thousand that make up a medieval deer park. If the house sprawls, it is with good reason. From Sir James Fiennes to the Archbishop of Canterbury to King Henry…

The Frontier Day Rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in August 1908, brought together some of the best riding and roping champions from across the Americas, from Alaska to the Argentine Pampas. Among them were three unusually dark-skinned cowboys who, according to a newspaper report, were initially mocked by other competitors. But after two days of steer roping, Ikua Purdy, Archie Ka‘au‘a, and Jack Low finished first, third, and sixth—with Purdy cementing a claim as the champion steer roper of the world. What the other competitors didn’t understand about these cowboys was that they had earned their spurs roping irritable feral cattle on the unpredictable terrain of a dormant volcano: Mauna Kea. The rodeo proved to the mainland what Hawaiians, who greeted the returning heroes with a parade, already knew: that Hawaiian…

The history of Los Angeles’ water supply is long and complicated—remember Chinatown?—and continues through today’s drought crisis. In the early 1900s, William Mulholland, then superintendent of Los Angeles’ Water Department, oversaw the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct to bring water to the city from Owens Valley, more than 200 miles away. About a decade later, he built the St. Francis Dam, in San Francisquito Canyon, to guard the city against drought and to generate hydroelectric power. St. Francis, a curved gravity dam like the later Hoover Dam, was completed in 1926. On March 12, 1928, two years to the day after the reservoir began to fill, the St. Francis Dam failed catastrophically, sending a wall of water through the towns of Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula that killed at…

In the fifth century B.C., the Samnites, an Oscan-speaking people from the Appenine Mountains of central Italy, occupied the Campania region, including the town of Pompeii. Being mountaineers and shepherds, the Samnites were eager to control the lowlands, toward the Tyrrhenian Sea, to ensure access to commercial routes across the ancient Mediterranean. They turned Pompeii into a thriving city with a two-mile city wall, ritual sanctuaries, and homes. Yet relatively little is known about their presence in the city, including where they buried their dead. Now archaeologist Laetitia Cavassa from the French National Center for Scientific Research has uncovered an inhumation burial dating to the middle of the fourth century B.C., when Pompeii was still a Samnite stronghold, before it was taken over by the Romans. The tomb, which is…

Archaeological digs have been rare in Haiti because of its political and civil instability. But last summer, a team led by J. Cameron Monroe of the University of California, Santa Cruz, began excavation at the Sans-Souci Palace in the town of Milot. The palace was built in the early nineteenth century by Henri Christophe, who took control of the northern part of the country in a civil war that broke out after independence from France. The team located a major structure below the palace complex that they believe is an early phase of construction. Under it, they found a midden filled with domestic objects from the mid- to late eighteenth century, including ceramics imported from France and England, locally made tobacco pipes, and Afro-Caribbean potsherds. Monroe believes the midden was…

A salvage excavation at the site of a new housing development near Aarhus, Denmark, has revealed the remains of sacrificial victims, including a headless woman and eight dogs, who were dropped into a bog more than 2,000 years ago. Per Mandrup of Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum led the excavation. While the bodies of humans preserved in bogs have received a lot of scholarly attention, less is known about dogs. “It’s always surprising to find so many dogs and also find a human,” says Mandrup. “It was the jackpot.” The dogs appear to have been a breed similar to border collies that was probably used for sheep herding. Leashes were found with some of the dogs, but how they were killed is not known. Other sacrifices have been found in another nearby…

CHINA’S SONG DYNASTY (A.D. 960–1279) was a prosperous time. The population was growing, and business and commerce boomed, conferring financial success that even reached the lower classes. With that prosperity came a taste for status symbols—even in death. A large, dual-chamber tomb recently uncovered in southern China shows one way that common people in the period tried to show off their newly acquired social mobility. The massive modern city of Chongqing has long been known as a fertile ground for Song Dynasty discoveries. More than 40 Song tombs have been found within its environs, so the discovery last August of a new one at a construction site in the Jiangjin district wasn’t a great surprise. The Jiangjin tomb, like many now being uncovered, had been looted long ago, but its…

EXCAVATE, EDUCATE, ADVOCATE www.archaeological.org International Archaeology Day Celebration Largest to Date International Archaeology Day (IAD) continues its rapid growth as a global celebration of archaeology. October 17, 2015, the fifth anniversary of the program, featured more than 500 events organized by more than 400 Collaborating Organizations in 27 countries. Preliminary estimates indicate that more than 100,000 people participated in these events—almost seven times as many people as participated in the first celebration in 2011. The number of Collaborating Organizations increased from 14 to more than 400 between 2011 and 2015, and the number of participating countries from three to 27 during that same period. The popularity and phenomenal growth of IAD is a testament to the worldwide interest in archaeology and archaeological discovery. From an Archaeology Fair in Belmopan, Belize,…