Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Often in these pages you will read about scholars wrestling with how to interpret patchy or incomplete written accounts left by the people whose lives they are trying to reconstruct. Sometimes, as in the case of Colonial Williamsburg, those records can be robust but still leave significant gaps. For instance, documents pertaining to the lives of enslaved people and their descendants in the colonial capital are sparse, but archaeological evidence coupled with oral history can help researchers tell the stories of people who traditional histories have overlooked. The Norse descendants of the Vikings wove together history and mythology in works known as sagas, mostly in the thirteenth century. These epics purport to be biographies of their illustrious ancestors. Yet the historical accuracy of these accounts is questionable, and they do…

The Schmalkaldic War, which began in 1546 and lasted less than a year, pitted the forces of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–1556) against the Schmalkaldic League, a Protestant alliance formed by German principalities and cities within the empire. The conflict was fought largely by a new breed of warrior—mercenaries trained to fight in large infantry formations. “While these troops were the backbone of all military operations, we know next to nothing about the individuals within these armies,” says archaeologist Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection. Evidence of the grim fate that awaited many such soldiers has now emerged from excavations in the town of Lauingen. Archaeologists have discovered the shallow graves of four young men buried with coins whose dates suggest that…

Researchers excavating at a site in northern Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge have unearthed bone implements made by human ancestors 1.5 million years ago. This is around a million years earlier than scholars had believed hominins regularly fashioned tools from bone. The team, which includes paleoanthropologist Jackson Njau of Indiana University Bloomington, discovered 27 bones, mostly parts of elephant and hippopotamus limb bones, that showed clear signs of having been worked and used as tools for chopping carcasses. All were found in the same geological layer and were likely crafted by toolmakers who belonged to the species Homo erectus. “These finds mark a pivotal moment in human history,” says Njau. He emphasizes that the tools date to a period when hominins were transitioning from the relatively simple Oldowan tradition, which arose roughly…

FLORIDA: Cats curl up on couches in 1/3 of all American households. However, domesticated felines are not native to the New World, but were introduced by Europeans. The earliest known cats in the present-day United States, an adult and a juvenile, have been identified in the wreck of a Spanish ship that sank at the site of Emanuel Point II in Pensacola Bay in 1559. Although the cats were likely brought aboard to feast on rodents, analysis of their diet indicated, surprisingly, that they dined much like the sailors. TEXAS: An Indigenous hunter sat by the fire in a cave 6,500 years ago and evaluated the state of his weapons, making repairs to some and discarding others. Over the past several years, archaeologists have collected the wood and stone equipment the hunter…

For the past four years, a team led by archaeologist Anacleto D’Agostino of the University of Pisa has conducted ongoing excavations at Uşaklı Höyük, a mound located in the heart of the Central Anatolian Plateau. There they have found large public buildings—possibly temples and a palace—leading them to believe that the mound may be the site of Zippalanda, a sacred city that, like Nerik some 100 miles away, was dedicated to the Weather God. In 2021, the team unearthed a circular structure that contained large quantities of animal bones and potsherds that was likely a place for rituals and perhaps where offerings were made to a deity. They have also found fragments of clay tablets that contain mythological, ritual, and incantatory texts. The most recently discovered inscription, unearthed in 2024,…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE a birder to recognize a duck call. The courtship whistles, odd cackles, and persistent quacking of ducks are some of the natural world’s most familiar sounds. In 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that the North American population of wild ducks stands at around 34 million. Mallards, the most common duck species, are reckoned to number 6.6 million. Federal wildlife specialists arrive at these figures through annual surveys of duck breeding grounds, conducted from May to June, that allow them to forecast the fall flight, or the number of ducks that will migrate that autumn. Some scholars have suggested that an average fall flight before Europeans arrived in North America could have seen as many as 400 million ducks heading south. The cackling…

My summer fieldwork in Sicily is dedicated to surveying and recording ancient, historic, and contemporary wrecks along the coast of the island and conducting ongoing research on excavation finds. Recently, while studying the ceramics we had uncovered on a Byzantine shipwreck at Marzamemi that carried 100 tons of marble destined for the construction of a church, our team made an amazing discovery. Examining a fragment of a bowl decorated with a tiny cross, we realized that this cross completed the staff held by a priest depicted on a bowl found by archaeologist Gerhard Kapitän, who worked at Marzamemi some 50 years ago. Together with the ship’s architectural cargo, this bowl’s symbolism reflects age-old connections among international trade, religion, the state, and the daily lives of the people charged with sustaining…

During excavations of a Byzantine monastery in 2017 just north of Jerusalem’s Old City, a team led by Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists Zubair ’Adawi and Kfir Arbiv discovered an unusual burial in a crypt beneath the altar of the complex’s church. The rock-cut tomb contained the remains of a person whose limbs had been bound with iron rings. Some dozen rings were wrapped around each of the individual’s arms, 10 on each leg, and four around the neck. Attached to the rings were iron plates that lay on the deceased’s stomach. This form of punishment was self-inflicted and was a common practice among Christian ascetic monks, who believed bodily affliction could allow them to attain a higher degree of spirituality. “From Byzantine written sources, we know that this phenomenon started…

Archaeologists have questioned who made five raised rings in the southeastern Australian state of Victoria. Some have proposed that the 65-foot-wide rings, located in what is now the Melbourne suburb of Sunbury, resulted from postcolonial military or agricultural activity. Scholars now believe the rings were constructed by Ancestors of Woi-wurrung-speaking people, who are the Traditional Custodians of a large swath of the south-central region of Victoria. Such raised rings have a deep history, but only around 100 are thought to remain in eastern Australia today. In 1979, archaeologists excavating one of the Sunbury rings unearthed 166 stone artifacts, but the objects weren’t analyzed in detail. A team of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elders working with researchers led by archaeologist Caroline Spry of La Trobe University has now reopened the excavation trench and…

People of the Chancay culture, who lived along Peru’s central coast from around A.D. 900 to 1533, tattooed their skin with intricate geometric designs and images of animals. Some of this artwork is preserved on the skin of mummified Chancay individuals, but the ink has bled and faded as the bodies have decayed over the centuries. This has obscured the designs’ original clarity. A team of researchers led by paleobiologists Michael Pittman of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Thomas G. Kaye of the Foundation for Scientific Advancement has devised a novel way to examine ancient tattoos on mummified human remains and has used it on examples uncovered in 1981 at a necropolis in Peru’s Huaura Valley. The method, called laser stimulated fluorescence, causes preserved skin to glow bright…

AN ENORMOUS BUG-EYED dragon fends off an attack by a pair of lions. The toothy maw of a killer whale erupts from the earth across the way from an immense lumbering tortoise that carries a female figure, perhaps the goddess Fame, on its back. A huge siren with two tails sits opposite an equally large winged harpy with a serpent’s tail and a lion’s claws. These fantastical sculptures are among dozens of such creations lining the paths that wind through a forested ravine below Bomarzo, a medieval town in the Lazio region of Italy. Known as the Sacro Bosco, or the Sacred Wood, this is among the most unusual designed landscapes of the Italian Renaissance. “Upon first visiting the Sacro Bosco, I was completely overwhelmed by the scale of the…

And so it proved, for within that time the ship and the pyre, the girl, and the corpse had all become ashes and then dust. On the spot where the ship stood after having been hauled ashore, they built something like a round mound. In the middle of it they raised a large post of birch-wood on which they wrote the names of the dead man and of the king of the Rus, and then the crowd dispersed. The Risala, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan FIRST-HAND ACCOUNTS OF ancient funerary rituals are exceedingly rare, leaving researchers to piece details together from archaeological evidence and ethnographic studies. One exception is found in The Risala, a report written by an emissary from the caliph of Baghdad named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan that includes an eyewitness…

A torrential spring downpour had left a sea of mud at a construction site in the old Virginia capital of Williamsburg, but archaeologist Jack Gary seemed oblivious to the muck as he held out a small silver disk. That morning in 2024, his team had discovered the worn Spanish half real in the cellar of a demolished colonial-era manor house. The coin had been minted, Gary explained, in Lima, Peru, 3,500 miles to the south. The team had also unearthed a fragment of a delicate Chinese teacup, an African cowrie shell, and pieces of an English-made leaded glass window. “We now have finds from four continents,” says Gary. “This shows how connected the residents were with the wider world.” After analyzing bricks from the house’s cellar, Gary, director of archaeology at…

PIG TALES Your March/April 2025 “Letter from the Levant: On the Origin of the Pork Taboo” doesn’t mention pigs or hogs eating the dead, which happened in some protracted American Civil War battles. If you knew your pigs or hogs had not partaken, they would be fine. Pork is a wonderful meat. But if you couldn’t be sure, or if you had seen it happen, you may have supported a taboo. Imagine ancient boar hunting to eliminate a monster instead of for a great meal. The theory of Judeans losing their pastoral identity by raising pigs is an excellent point along with the raw pork health issues. Your magazine is a wonderful source of inspiration and information—please keep up the fantastic work. David Turner Jacksonville, FL Thank you for the…

An overwhelming body of archaeological evidence suggests that people first began farming around 9500 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean. But scholars are still uncertain how agriculture spread across the rest of Asia. The ancient village of Mehrgarh in Pakistan, which is one of the few extensive early Neolithic sites east of the Fertile Crescent to have been excavated, has loomed large in this debate. Archaeologists who dug at the site in the 1970s believed the settlement dated to 8000 B.C. This is far earlier than any other Neolithic site lying between it and the Fertile Crescent, suggesting that people in what is now Pakistan may have developed agriculture independently. “Mehrgarh always stood out as a unique site,” says archaeologist Benjamin Mutin…

Archaeologists working in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have unearthed evidence of the harsh treatment endured by some Ptolemaic-era miners. Egypt’s gold mines were a coveted source of wealth for its rulers for more than 2,000 years. Mining was particularly intensive at the beginning of the Ptolemaic period (304–30 B.C.), when the first Ptolemaic pharaohs required gold to fund military campaigns and building projects. As many as 40 mines were opened at this time, including one at the site of Ghozza that dates to the second half of the third century B.C. Recent excavations there have uncovered parts of an extensive mining town, including streets, residential areas, administrative buildings, and even baths. Several ostracons––fragments of pottery that contain writing––found at Ghozza indicate that some workers were paid wages, but a discovery made…

DESCENDING DOZENS of slick steps worn smooth by millennia of use, guided only by stone walls, one can almost hear echoes of prayers to long-lost gods hovering in the cool, damp air of a narrow underground tunnel. At the bottom of the 50-step staircase lies a water-filled pool where, thousands of years ago, Hittite kings came to pray for prosperity. For these mighty rulers of ancient Anatolia, this sanctuary dedicated to their all-powerful Weather God was the most revered place in their vast empire. In about 1650 B.C., the Hittites began to expand their dominion, which eventually spanned Anatolia from the Black Sea coast in the north to northern Syria in the south, and nearly from the Aegean in the west to beyond the Euphrates River in the east. Each…

AT THE BASE OF A pyramid-shaped peak in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos lies the tomb of an unknown pharaoh. After decades of excavations at the site, and considering the Egyptians’ usually meticulous recordkeeping, it might seem implausible that any of these ancient rulers and their hidden burials remain to be unearthed. But, a team led by Egyptologist Josef Wegner of the Penn Museum has made just such a discovery in the royal necropolis at Anubis Mountain, which the Egyptians named after the jackal-headed god of mummification. Wegner believes the newly discovered pharaoh belonged to the short-lived Abydos Dynasty (ca. 1650–1600 B.C.), which held sway over parts of Upper, or southern, Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1640–1540 B.C.), a tumultuous time in the country’s history. Unlike the…