Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2020 från ARCHAEOLOGY

Popular interest in the past is often focused on the political or spiritual centers of ancient cultures—capitals such as Rome or Teotihuacan, for example, or the religious complexes at Saqqara in Egypt or on the Acropolis in Athens. But outside those centers lived people whose beliefs at times reflected, and at other times challenged, those held by the inhabitants of such power centers. Several of the stories in this issue investigate the customs of people who thrived on the far reaches of some of the ancient world’s great empires. “The Founder’s Tomb” shares the discovery of a vibrantly frescoed burial chamber in what is now Jordan. The tomb’s paintings—some of them humorous—tell the story of the founding of the city of Capitolias, which, during the late first and second centuries…

Scholars have longed believed that a Bronze Age Aegean painting of a troop of monkeys depicts stylized exotic primates cavorting about a rocky landscape. The fresco adorns a room in a two-story complex at the second-millennium B.C. settlement of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera. No monkeys are native to the region, and the depictions were thought to have been made by painters following Egyptian stylistic conventions, which often rendered animal species as abstract types. Now, a team led by University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Marie Nicole Pareja that includes primatologists and a taxonomic illustrator has concluded that the Akrotiri monkeys are, in fact, accurate depictions of langur monkeys, whose natural range is the Indus River Valley, some 4,000 miles away. The researchers observed that the Akrotiri monkeys have S-…

Elaborate ship burials are among the most famous and most mysterious remains of the Viking Age. During the burial ritual, an individual was laid to rest on the deck of a full-size ship, which was then interred beneath a mound of earth. Over the past century and a half, dozens of such ship burials have been discovered from Scandinavia to the British Isles. In recent months, five more have been identified in Norway and Sweden. Specialists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research detected one ship on the Norwegian island of Edoya using high-resolution georadar. The vessel, which lies just belowground, is between 40 and 50 feet long and awaits further archaeological investigation. Around 25 miles east of Edoya, on Norway’s mainland, archaeologists were perplexed by the discovery of…

For thousands of years, in a field next to the site of the Palace of Nestor in Pylos in mainland Greece, tens of thousands of watermelon-sized stones protected two Bronze Age tombs dating to between 1600 and 1500 B.C., the very beginning of the Mycenaean era. After more than a year and a half of removing the stones—which were the remains of the tombs’ collapsed roofs—a team from the University of Cincinnati led by archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis unearthed the two beehive-shaped, or tholos, tombs, which contained gold jewelry and multiple skeletons. A gold ring, which was found in the smaller of the two tombs, depicts a unique scene of bovines and barley. A gold pendant depicting the Egyptian goddess Hathor was found in the larger tomb. “Such…

The remains of infants buried wearing the craniums of older children as helmets have been excavated at the site of a ritual and funerary complex belonging to the pre-Columbian Guangala culture of coastal Ecuador. The burials are believed to date to around the first century B.C. According to University of North Carolina at Charlotte archaeologist Sara Juengst, natural disasters in the ancient Andean world often prompted dramatic reactions, including the sacrifice of children. In this case, the infants may have been sacrificed in an attempt to end environmental degradation and drought resulting from a possible volcanic event attested to by ash discovered at the site. However, archaeologists also found lesions on the infants’ skeletons, suggesting they were in chronic poor health. “They may have died of illness,” Juengst says, “but…

FROM THE TWELFTH TO the seventeenth century, the MacDermots ruled the kingdom of Maigh Luirg in the Irish province of Connacht from a small island in Loch Cé (now Lough Key) known as the Rock. They were the right-hand men—and sometime rivals—of the O’Conors, the kings of Connacht, whose power center lay at the modern village of Tulsk, some 20 miles away. It was Diarmait, king of Maigh Luirg from 1124 until his death on the Rock in 1159, who gave the MacDermot clan its name. In the sixteenth century, the king Brian MacDermot commissioned the Annals of Loch Cé, which remain among the most important written records of medieval Irish history. They are the primary source for the history of the kingdom of Maigh Luirg (Anglicized as Moylurg), which…

THE GOD SETH IS ONE of the most enigmatic deities in the Egyptian pantheon. He was regarded as a god of confusion and disorder, and was often depicted in the form of one of many animals, including a hippopotamus, a falcon, and, most frequently, the “Seth animal,” a long-snouted creature with a forked tail and pert ears. The deity embodied both positive and negative aspects, but even his violent and destructive tendencies could be used for the good of the cosmos. Seth’s dual nature appears in the earliest texts containing myths about the Egyptian gods, the Pyramid Texts, which covered the walls of funeral chambers built for Old Kingdom pharaohs and queens at the necropolis of Saqqara in the late third millennium B.C. In a later collection of spells called…

CONSIDER WHAT IT TOOK to make the event happen: nearly 250 ships, tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, both military and scientific, dozens of scientists, 21 observers from 10 countries—plus press—42,000 soldiers and other personnel, eight B-17s on autopilot and dozens of other planes, 750 cameras, and more film than Hollywood shot that year. And two of the most sophisticated weapons ever made. Operation Crossroads was the first public demonstration of nuclear arms, the first nuclear detonations after Nagasaki, and the first peacetime test that could be measured and quantified. Planning began just six months after World War II ended. The Army and Navy chose the site, Bikini Atoll in the Central Pacific’s Marshall Islands, because it was isolated and had a wide lagoon and predictable weather. The 167…

The Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting, which takes place the first weekend in January, offers an amazing smorgasbord for the archaeology lover. Every year, the meeting illustrates the AIA’s mission to excavate, educate, and advocate. Of the many papers that focused on aspects of excavation this past January, I single out here the panel on the shipwreck at Marzamemi off the southern coast of Sicily that you first had the opportunity to read about in “Shipping Stone” in the September/October 2018 issue of ARCHAEOLOGY. One of several ancient wrecks of ships with cargoes of monumental stone architectural elements that had been identified by the early 1960s, this vessel carried prefabricated pieces of carved marble church architecture dating to the early Byzantine era. In addition to providing a fascinating look…

Some 1,000 years ago, stonemasons cut into a basalt escarpment in a river valley outside the modern Balinese village of Tampaksiring. They carved out a nearly 100-foot-wide courtyard backed by a 40-foot-tall vertical wall. Into this wall they carved five shrines, called candis, each almost 30 feet tall and intended to resemble temple facades. Across the small river bisecting the valley, the masons carved another courtyard and four more, slightly smaller, candis. A tenth candi is set apart from the others. The two courtyards and the candis, as well as a number of small artificial caves that may once have been used as prayer or living spaces for monks, make up the site of Gunung Kawi. This is one of many temple complexes built on Java and Bali starting around…

A fragmentary but poignant insight into the spare moments of nineteenth-century Wisconsin homesteaders has been discovered at Fort McCoy, a United States Army installation about 90 miles northwest of Madison. Archaeologists unearthed four pieces of a German-made harmonica among more than 2,000 artifacts from what appears to have been a communal dumping ground in the area. One of the harmonica’s exterior plates reads “Friedr. Hotz,” indicating that it was made by the Friedrich Hotz Company. Based in Knittlingen, Germany, the company began producing harmonicas in the 1820s and was eventually bought out by Matthias Hohner, who introduced the instrument to America in 1862. “The leisure-related items from the site represent a small portion of the assemblage,” says Colorado State University archaeologist Tyler Olsen. “This probably reflects the proportion of any…

Egyptologists have long been puzzled by a type of figure in ancient Egyptian art depicted wearing an unusual kind of conical hat. These figures often appear in scenes depicting banquets, funerary rituals, or interactions with the gods. Scholars assumed that these strange headpieces were symbolic artistic devices, since no archaeological evidence of them had ever been uncovered. But new excavations of two burials dating to between 1347 and 1332 B.C. in Amarna have yielded proof that these headpieces did, in fact, exist. One hat was found atop the head of a female in her twenties, while the other belonged to a 15-to-20-year-old individual of undetermined sex. Analysis of the cones indicates that they were made of beeswax, perhaps molded around a textile lining. Experts are still unsure why some Egyptians…

The modern poet W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) was one in a line of centuries of Irish bards who, like the personal poets of the MacDermot kings, wrote about the Rock of Loch Cé. Yeats called the Rock the “Castle of Heroes” and envisioned it becoming a utopian community that would function as a kind of living shrine to the Irish past and a place to practice what he termed “a ritual system of evocation and meditation to reunite the perception of the spirit of the divine, with natural beauty.” In his description of this ritual system, Yeats combined his worship of the mystical might of Ireland’s past and his belief in the occult with his political agenda—in particular, Irish nationalism and an ardent desire to drive the English from the country.…

IN HIS NATURAL HISTORY, a first-century A.D. book that purports to contain everything then known about the world, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder briefly describes the Decapolis, a region at the Roman Empire’s eastern edge. He notes that, as its Greek name suggests, the Decapolis consists of 10 cities—among them Damascus, Syria; Philadelphia, now Amman, Jordan; and Hippos, Israel—though he adds that “all writers are not agreed” precisely which cities should make the list. A later account, from the second-century A.D. Greek geographer Ptolemy, who lived in the Roman province of Egypt, jettisons one of Pliny’s Decapolis cities, Raphana, but adds nine more, for a total of 18. One of the additions was a newly founded city with the Latin name of Capitolias. Many cities of the Decapolis were…

After scanning the target area of Operation Crossroads, the University of Delaware and SEARCH team cruised three hours across Bikini Atoll to a spot where it looks like a mile-wide shark took a chunk out of one of its islands, the site of the massive, gaping Castle Bravo crater. Conducted in 1954, Castle Bravo was the first nuclear test after Baker at Bikini—21 more would follow. It was a 15-megaton thermonuclear explosion equivalent to more than 700 Bakers, making it America’s largest nuclear test and the second largest artificial explosion in history, dwarfed only by the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, which measured 50 megatons. The research team scanned the crater and revealed why it appears oblong, rather than circular as one might expect. They realized that, in fact, there is…

Recently discovered graffiti carved into a stable door at a farm in Lincolnshire during the first decades of the twentieth century mixes bucolic childhood concerns with matters of far greater import. Looming above images of plows, horses, and a bicycle is a stark record of the day Great Britain entered World War I: “WAR AUG 4 1914.” Below this date sits a question mark. “I wonder if this is someone asking, ‘When’s it going to end?’” says Ian Marshman, historic environment officer at the Lincolnshire County Council. The graffiti artists also signed their work with two sets of initials—WB and JL—and an abbreviated name, J. Leusley. Marshman and his colleagues used census information to determine that WB was William Bristow, part of the family that owned the farm, and JL…

Members of northern China’s Peiligang culture practiced aquaculture well before the domestication of fish in medieval Europe. By measuring teeth from common carp remains excavated at the Neolithic site of Jiahu, an international team of researchers estimated the body sizes of the fish. Comparing them with carp populations reared in modern Japanese fisheries, they found that the ancient specimens represent both immature and mature fish. This suggests that, by about 8,000 years ago, Jiahu residents had begun to raise carp in controlled channels, where the fish spawned naturally and were harvested in the autumn. A dramatic increase in burials identified at Jiahu around this time indicates that the settlement had grown, explains archaeologist Junzo Uchiyama of the Sainsbury Institute. “It’s possible to assume that carp aquaculture was developed in response…

An extraordinary collection of bronze tools and weapons was recovered at a construction site near the Thames in East London. Dubbed the Havering Hoard, the assemblage comprises 453 artifacts dated to between 900 and 800 B.C., making it the largest Bronze Age hoard discovered in London. The artifacts, including axes, spearheads, swords, and woodworking tools, were found buried close together in four separate pits within an ancient enclosure. Most were partially broken or damaged in antiquity. Some of the axes are of a style that originated on the European continent, suggesting that the tools were either traded across the English Channel or brought by immigrants to Britain. Researchers are stumped as to why these artifacts were so carefully buried. One theory is that they may represent the stockpile of a…

ARCTIC: When the ancestors of today’s Inuit population crossed into North America from Siberia 2,000 years ago, they had a secret weapon that would help them conquer the notoriously harsh Arctic climate: their dogs. Although dogs were already present in North America, according to a recent study of hundreds of dog and wolf remains, the first Inuit migrants brought their own specialized breed of sled dog with them. These dogs were genetically distinct from and larger and stronger than North American canine populations of the time. MEXICO: Huge pits dug in Tultepec, north of Mexico City, are providing greater understanding of the techniques humans used to hunt woolly mammoths 15,000 years ago. The two pits, each around 80 feet in diameter and 6 feet deep, contained 824 mammoth bones from…

It was not enough for medieval Irish lords to own cows, they also had to steal them. “Stealing cows was important in this society,” says archaeologist Daniel Curley of the National University of Ireland Galway. “It was a ready source of wealth, a slight to opponents’ honor and power, and a pseudo-martial sport.” In fact, pilfering the animals is the central theme of Ireland’s national epic, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, which was composed in the seventh and eighth centuries. It tells the tale of a conflict between the kings of Connacht and the kings of Ulster over the Brown Bull of Cooley, which was owned by Daire, an Ulster chieftain. Medb, the warrior queen of Connacht, and her husband, the king Ailill, were very competitive about their assets, explains…

EXPLORING THE BELIEFS of complex cultures that flourished before the advent of writing challenges archaeologists to imagine how the buildings and artifacts those people left behind express long-vanished belief systems. On the Moche River, six miles inland from the arid northern coast of Peru, loom structures that were central to a people who left behind abundant evidence of their worldview. These buildings, the 15-story adobe-brick Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, are among the largest built by the Moche, who thrived in northern Peru from about A.D. 200 to 800. Moche artisans produced a rich array of murals, pottery, and other artifacts depicting humans engaged in ceremonies and interacting with mythic creatures. Thanks to these vivid depictions and the lavish burials of priests and nobles, archaeologists can reconstruct how…

The Plains of San Agustin stretch some 50 miles across west-central New Mexico and are surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges. In the late summer monsoon season, vibrant wildflowers make the brownish-green scrubland pop with color. Archaeologist Lisbeth Louderback of the University of Utah and botanist Bruce Pavlik of the Natural History Museum of Utah head west on U.S. Route 60 from the small town of Magdalena, then turn into a picnic area on the side of the highway. “The Mirabilis is out, that’s good,” Pavlik says, scanning the vegetation and pointing to a short plant with purple flowers often found growing alongside or near potato plants. “Let’s see if we can find the potatoes.” Louderback and Pavlik are looking for a tiny species of potato called Solanum jamesii,…