Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i ARCHAEOLOGY

We know we aren’t supposed to pick favorites, whether among children, pets, or articles in the magazine, but we have to admit that it would be hard for a team of editors not to love “Formatting Bronze Age Tablets,” which appears in this issue’s Digs & Discoveries section. The image of ancient Greek scribes toiling away at their tablets more than 3,000 years ago and devising ways to make their work clear and comprehensible definitely struck a chord with us. Thankfully, we don’t have to edit lists of bushels of grain or flocks of sheep like those scribes did, and instead can bring you our annual Top 10 Discoveries. There were so many wonderful finds from which to choose, including nearly five dozen mummies in their painted sarcophagi from the…

OUR STORY The Editor’s Letter about the telling of stories throughout our lives in the September/October 2020 issue made me realize that is why I enjoy your magazine so much. ArchAeology does tell a story—it tells many stories—and I read it front page to last page just to get those stories. My mind pictures everything I read that the pictures don’t always show. Connie L. Jansen Seattle, WA AN AMAZING BEING I enjoy every issue of the magazine that comes, cover to cover. ArchAeology entertains and enlightens. I read with fascination “Weaving for Their Ancestors” (November/December 2020) by Roger Atwood, in which he describes the Oculate Being as having a snake-like tongue and cat’s whiskers. It also has a monkey’s head, which makes it one of the more interesting zoomorphic…

Although they were only meant to be kept for a year or so, administrative documents recording the people and goods controlled by the palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1400–1200 b.c.) show signs of having been carefully edited to present information in a clear, orderly fashion. The documents, which were written on clay tablets using a script known as Linear B, have only survived because they were accidentally fired and hardened when the buildings in which they were stored burned. In the case of a tablet (below), listing offerings to various deities at the palace of Pylos, says Anna P. Judson, a research fellow at the British School at Athens, these edits affected how the entire document was organized. On the tablet’s front side, the scribe worked out a…

The date of the earliest known bone point has been pushed back by 700,000 years, says paleoanthropologist Michael Pante of Colorado State University. While reexamining a collection of bones that had been recovered from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge by renowned fossil hunter Mary Leakey, Pante noticed that some show signs of having been shaped by human hands. One of the artifacts appeared to be an unfinished bone point with barbs carved into its side. An international team that included Pante analyzed the tool and concluded that the bone had been flaked using a hammer stone or another object. It had also been scraped and polished. The bone point has been dated to 800,000 years ago, at which time Homo erectus lived at Olduvai. This species is known to have made bone…

The mining city of Ouro Preto, in southeastern Brazil, is one of the best-preserved colonial settlements in the New World. Tens of thousands of Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous people flooded the mountainous region surrounding the city after major gold deposits were discovered there in the 1690s. In the late seventeenth century, the area was home to hundreds of Indigenous groups, mostly speakers of the Jê language group. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the area’s gold deposits began to diminish and profits dwindled, Ouro Preto was one of the wealthiest and most populous urban centers in South America. The city is noted for its baroque architecture and public artwork, much of which is attributed to the architect and sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa, more commonly known as Aleijadinho. It…

Mummification is among the best-known religious practices of the ancient Egyptians, yet apart from a few textual descriptions and tomb paintings, very little is known about the facilities where this process took place. That changed when archaeologists discovered a unique series of rooms dating to the Saite-Persian period of the mid-first millennium b.c. “The whole complex could be looked upon as a funeral home of sorts that provided the service of mummification along with burial compartments and equipment,” says Ramadan Hussein of the University of Tübingen. The facility includes a subterranean chamber at the bottom of a 40-foot-deep shaft that was used by embalmers. There, they laid bodies out on a rockcut bed, drained them of fluids, and prepared them for burial. Hussein’s team also found ceramic vessels labeled with…

Although Pompeii has been almost constantly excavated since the mideighteenth century, around one-third of the city still remains buried beneath 20 feet of volcanic debris from the a.d. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Archaeologists do not often get a chance to work in the unexcavated areas. However, when a large section of volcanic debris in a neighborhood known as Regio V began to collapse, authorities had no choice but to remove more than a quarter acre of material, revealing long-hidden parts of the Roman city. Streets, houses, and workshops were exposed for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Vibrantly colored frescoes, still bright and radiant, look as if they have just been painted. Archaeologists also retrieved a number of bodies of people who were not fortunate enough to escape…

Created in the eleventh century, the Bayeux Tapestry is one of the world’s most famous textiles, both an extraordinary piece of medieval art and an impressive historical document. The 230-foot-long linen cloth is embroidered with images of more than 600 people, 200 horses, and an array of buildings, ships, and animals—and even captions—that convey the story of William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. William’s victory over Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings and seizure of the English throne was one of most consequential events in European history. Yet many aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry remain obscure, including where it was originally intended to be viewed. Was it displayed in a church? In a nobleman’s great hall? Or taken from village to village like a traveling picture show?…

CANADA: Domesticated dogs have played an integral role in Indigenous life for thousands of years, used for transportation, hunting, and protection. First Nations archaeological sites throughout the Pacific Northwest in particular contain plentiful remains of a special type of woolly dog. These small canines were prized for their coats, which were sheared like sheep pelts. The wool was then used to create blankets, garments, and belts. The dogs are believed to have gone extinct after European-made textiles became widely available. GUATEMALA: Some 2,000 years ago, the Maya inhabitants of Tikal struggled to consistently access clean drinking water. To solve this problem, they created an ingenious water purification system using the minerals quartz and zeolite. It is the oldest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. The minerals were obtained from…

A decade ago, archaeologists were summoned to investigate a scattering of human and camelid bones outside the modern city of Trujillo. They would soon learn that the 500-year-old remains belonged to the victims of a mass ritual sacrifice, the largest of its kind known in the Americas. In total, the skeletons of 200 llamas and 140 boys and girls were recovered from the Chimu site of Huanchaquito–Las Llamas. Cut marks on the children’s ribs and sternums suggest their hearts were removed during the ritual before each victim was carefully prepared for burial. “Despite the bloody ceremonies, I was shocked by the careful postmortem treatment of the bodies,” says University of Florida archaeologist Gabriel Prieto. “They didn’t simply discard them.” At first, Prieto thought that the sacrificial event was a singular…

After Richard III—England’s most vilified monarch—was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, he was hastily buried in Leicester’s Greyfriars church. When the church was demolished 50 years later by Henry VIII, the grave of the last Plantagenet king was lost. Almost 500 years later, it was identified a few feet beneath a parking lot. “The odds were heavily stacked against us,” says Richard Buckley of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services. “What were the chances of the grave surviving for so many years in the middle of a great industrial city?” Yet, radiocarbon dating and osteological analysis confirmed the bones as Richard’s. The skeleton displayed serious wounds, including blows to the head, consistent with reports of Richard’s battlefield injuries. His severely curved spine, caused by adolescent scoliosis, may…

SOON AFTER CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH arrived at Jamestown in 1607, or so the story goes, he was captured by Opechancanough, the brother of the powerful Native chief Powhatan. English explorers wrote that Powhatan controlled a domain spanning much of what is now Virginia, from the state’s Piedmont region to the coast. Several tribes reportedly paid him tribute and lived within his Powhatan Confederacy. After Smith narrowly escaped execution through, he later claimed, the intervention of Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas, he set off from Jamestown to explore and chart the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Opechancanough had already taken Smith to a number of Native settlements during his captivity, including at least one on the Rappahannock River. Smith recorded that the Rappahannock peoples, who inhabited both sides of the eponymous waterway, were…

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the hajj—the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all able Muslims are to undertake at least once in their lives—was an act of both great faith and great hardship: a 40-day march through the desert region known as al-Hijaz, or the Hejaz. Traveling south from Damascus along the western side of the Arabian Peninsula, pilgrims might move in groups of 5,000 or more, in columns two miles long. They went by night, fearing Bedouin raids, past Ma’an in what is now southern Jordan, to the Ras en-Naqb escarpment. There they descended 500 feet through a narrow pass called Batn al-Ghoul, the Belly of the Beast, where a shape-shifting djinn was said to lure people to their death in the desert. From there, it was still 750 miles…

In the middle of a potato field not far from the small village of Pömmelte in central Germany, University of Halle archaeologist Franziska Knoll unrolls a five-foot-long piece of paper and tapes it to the graffiti-streaked side of a shipping container full of recently excavated artifacts. A set of concentric circles fills one corner of the paper. Under that, dozens of rectangles, all oriented in the same direction, march along the length of the page. The blueprint is the fruit of three years of excavation that has involved everything from earthmoving equipment to tweezers. The dig’s scale is hard to fathom. In 2020 alone, a 15-person team from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt excavated more than six acres, in trenches as long as several football fields…

Five hundred years ago, someone stood in a rocking boat or on a swaying raft, grasped the ropes threaded through holes on the sides of a stone box, and lowered the box to the bottom of Lake Titicaca. It came to rest on the K’akaya Reef, where it remained undisturbed for centuries. When Université libre de Bruxelles archaeologist Christophe Delaere first saw the box during a dive on the reef, he was both excited and surprised. Similar boxes had been found on the Khoa Reef some distance away, but this was the first to be found at K’akaya—and, unlike the great majority of other such boxes found in the lake, it was still tightly sealed. Inside he found a gold cylinder and a tiny camelid carved from shell, symbols of…

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The Tashtyk culture, which existed between the first and seventh centuries a.d. in southern Siberia, is known for its elaborate burial customs, including applying layers of gypsum onto the deceased’s face to create lifelike death masks. A stunning example of this practice—the mummified remains of a man buried some 1,700 years ago wearing a painted red death mask—was discovered in the late 1960s in the Khakassia region. More than half a century later, researchers from Russia’s Hermitage Museum have finally managed to glimpse the man’s face. Since removing the mask would damage the mummy, the researchers instead conducted a CT scan to peer beneath the facial covering. The scan revealed that the man had a nasty gash across the left side of his face, running from his eye to his…

While restoring a viewing area overlooking the Nazca Lines in the desert of southern Peru, archaeologists noticed the previously undocumented traces of a cat geoglyph crouching on a steep hillside. The 121-footlong outline of a feline was badly eroded but has since been cleaned and conserved. Based on its resemblance to depictions of Andean cats frequently found on textiles, ceramics, and petroglyphs produced by the Paracas culture, researchers have dated the figure to around 200 b.c. This means it predates the creation of many Nazca geoglyphs by some 400 years. “This feline seems to have been part of Paracas religious cosmology of the time,” says archaeologist Johny Isla of Peru’s Ministry of Culture. “The cat was considered a deity that represented dominion over the earth, together with the killer whale…

As early as the eleventh century a.d., Persians added chromium to iron to produce a strong type of steel that could be made into tools, armor, and weapons. Guided by medieval texts that describe areas where steel was manufactured, Rahil Alipour, an archaeologist at University College London, located a site named Chahak in southern Iran. There, she found broken ceramic molds called crucibles in which steel had been made, as well as slag, the waste product of metal production. Embedded in the slag were droplets of steel that were found to contain between 1 and 2 percent chromium by weight. “That might not sound like much,” says Alipour, “but it really does make a difference in the mechanical properties of steel.” Among the evidence that chromium was intentionally added is…

To the Maya people living in the city of Xultun in Guatemala’s Petén rain forest, a sweat bath was a sacred place symbolizing the circular nature of time and the cycle of birth and death. In excavations of Xultun’s sweat bath over the past decade, archaeologist Mary Clarke of Boston University has found that the building is painted with images of a goddess who has the features of toads and iguanas. A person entering and leaving the sweat bath, Clarke says, would have metaphorically passed through the body of the goddess in an act of death and rebirth. Radiocarbon dates establish that the Xultun sweat bath was first used from a.d. 562 to 651. It was then ceremonially buried. A combination of radiocarbon and ceramic typology dating revealed that the…

Captain John Franklin set sail from England in May 1845 with 133 men and two ships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—in search of the Northwest Passage. The crews of two whaling ships that sighted the expedition that August were the last Europeans to see Franklin and his crew alive, sparking a nearly 170-year maritime mystery. Search parties sent to northern Canada occasionally happened upon ominous clues: items left behind by the expedition, grim testimonies from Inuit witnesses, and even a note left by a crewman on King William Island in 1847 stating that the two ships had become trapped in the ice. In 2014, Canadian authorities announced that researchers had finally located Erebus at the bottom of Wilmot and Crampton Bay. Two years later, Terror was found around 45 miles away.…

The countryside surrounding the Khmer Empire’s capital of Angkor is blanketed with thick jungle, which has hindered archaeological investigation for more than a century. However, laser scanning technology was finally able to do what researchers couldn’t and peer through the dense vegetation, revealing unknown urban settlements and hundreds of hidden archaeological features. “Had you been there a thousand years ago, the forest wouldn’t have existed,” says Damian Evans of the French School of Asian Studies. “You would have seen a vast, bustling metropolis of wooden dwellings and fields stretching off in every direction.” The 3-D images captured in 2015 were the result of the most extensive archaeological scanning project ever undertaken. Evans’ team surveyed 737 square miles of terrain at the heart of the Khmer Empire, which flourished between the…

One of the greatest archaeological discoveries in Greece over the past 50 years was made at Pylos by University of Cincinnati archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker. The grave of the “Griffin Warrior” held the remains of a powerful man who died around 1450 b.c. and was buried alongside 1,500 precious objects, including silver cups, bronze weapons, ivory combs, and gold rings. “The more we study the assemblage, the more amazed we are by how rare and exotic this unique group of artifacts is,” say Davis and Stocker. The most exquisite artifact is one of the smallest: a 1.4-inch-long carved almond-shaped agate sealstone depicting three warriors. Davis and Stocker believe the gem was made on Crete. “Our understanding of the closeness of the relationship between Pylos and the Minoans of…

FOR SOME 3,500 YEARS, the sand dunes of Turkmenistan’s Murghab Delta plains, a stretch of Central Asia’s Karakum Desert, concealed the ruins of a sprawling 70-acre city belonging to a long-forgotten civilization, its name lost to history. First rediscovered by Soviet archaeologists in the 1970s, the city was dubbed Gonur Depe, or “Gray Hill,” which is what the local Turkmen called the site. The sandy mound concealed high mudbrick walls, carefully gridded streets that divided residential districts from those where merchants may have plied their trades, and areas where religious ceremonies likely took place. Soon after the city’s discovery, excavations revealed that the people of Gonur Depe were immensely wealthy. Artisans crafted beads from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, carved ivory from India into mosaics depicting dragon-like creatures, and fashioned…