Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2025 från ARCHAEOLOGY

Each year, the editors of Archaeology choose 10 special finds to share with you. Discussing, writing, and editing our “Top 10 Discoveries” feature is always the perfect way to start the new year—2025 will be our 77th year of continuous publication—and to think back on the recent discoveries that have inspired archaeologists to consider the human past in new ways. In 2024, we published features about people’s resilience in the face of natural disasters, climate change, and threats to their liberty; about stunning discoveries that are revolutionizing how scholars understand the Neolithic period and how hunter-gatherers transformed their entire way of life more than 10,000 years ago; about priestesses of Copper Age Spain who wielded a level of political clout that scholars had not previously understood; and about the might…

BAD MOON RISING The British Museum houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia written in cuneiform script between 3200 B.C. and the first century A.D. Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets—which include Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite—the over-whelming majority remain untranslated. Four newly deciphered tablets written in Old Babylonian, a form of Akkadian, have been found to contain the earliest known mention of omens related to lunar eclipses. These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C. Unusual celestial events were especially worrisome for the Babylonians because they believed the gods placed messages in the heavens to express their displeasure. Eclipses were considered…

THE MAKING OF A MOCHE QUEEN Pañamarca, Peru At the site of Pañamarca, a monumental center belonging to the Moche people, who controlled northern Peru’s coastal valleys between around A.D. 350 and 850, archaeologists have discovered the first evidence of a throne room designed for a Moche queen. While working in a large pillared hall, a team led by archaeologists Jessica Ortiz Zevallos of the Archaeological Landscapes of Pañamarca program, Lisa Trever of Columbia University, and Michele Koons of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science unearthed extremely well-preserved murals executed in vivid blue, red, and yellow depicting four scenes that highlight a powerful woman. One panel shows the woman receiving a procession of visitors, and in another, she is seated on a throne. Even more stunning than the paintings…

Mortars were the blenders of the Middle Ages. It was a common belief among the upper classes that food ground into a paste was easier for the body to absorb and thus more healthful. Most wealthy households used mortars for this purpose, but these early appliances also had nonculinary functions. For example, they could be employed to crush herbs for medicinal use or pigments for painting. Much larger examples were carved to mix the mortar used to bond masonry—building mortar takes its name from the vessel in which it was once mixed. Around 30 mortars have been discovered in association with the shipwreck off Dorset, England, known as the Mortar Wreck. They come in a range of shapes and sizes and are made from Purbeck marble and other local stone.…

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A majestic row of five circular pyramids known as yácatas dominates a promontory overlooking Lake Pátzcuaro in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Embodying the former might of the Purépecha Empire, which flourished from around 1350 to 1530, the pyramids rise in the center of the imperial capital of Tzintzuntzan, or “place of the hummingbirds” in Purépecha, a language still spoken by more than 100,000 people in Michoacán. Known as the Tarascan Empire to the Spanish, the state was a fierce rival of the Aztecs to the east and brought a diverse group of Mesoamerican peoples under the rule of a single monarch. Tzintzuntzan covered more than 1,500 acres and was home to some 30,000 people when the Spanish arrived in 1522. Unlike the Aztecs, the Purépecha submitted to Spanish…

SOMETIME IN THE LATE FIRST century B.C., a man by the name of Marcus Novius Tubula left the Italian countryside and moved to Rome. Tubula was from a town called Interamna Lirenas, located 75 miles southeast of the capital, and was chasing his dreams of something bigger. Tubula found political success and was elected as a tribune of the plebs, once one of the most important offices in Rome. To publicize his achievement to those back home, he had a limestone sundial erected in Interamna’s forum. The timepiece, which was inscribed with Tubula’s name and elected office, functioned as an ancient billboard, announcing that he was now someone with clout. A small-town boy had made it in the big city. Rome has been called a civilization of cities, and it…

SINCE THE LATE NINETEENTH century, archaeologists have recovered troves of administrative documents and personal archives in the ancient city of Philadelphia, on the northeastern edge of Egypt’s Fayum region. Yet only around 30 papyri featuring excerpts of literature have been found there. When archaeologist Basem Gehad of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities began excavating the city’s necropolis in 2017, he had no idea that he would discover one of the most significant pieces of lost ancient literature to have been found in at least 60 years. In 2022, Gehad unearthed a third-century A.D. pit grave in the Roman section of the necropolis. The grave contained the mummified body of a woman, and, on a ledge above her remains, a mummified child. In a corner of the pit, the…

As the morning sun catches the tops of the turquoise domes of the city of Bukhara, and before the fierce heat of a cloudless Central Asian summer day takes hold, New York University archaeologist Sören Stark and his team are already at work. When someone shouts from deep in an excavation trench, Stark hops down steep steps cut into the earth, descending past fine, lightcolored soil to the dark, damp dirt below. At the bottom of the trench, excavator Husniddin Rakhmonov whisks a brush along the outline of a round, reddish object. After a few minutes of digging, he scoops the artifact up with a trowel. Some 2,000 years after it was lost or abandoned by its owner, the head of a terracotta figurine falls neatly into his hand. This…

EDUCATE The Elizabeth Bartman Museum Internship award helps undergraduate or graduate students in archaeology or a related field meet the expenses associated with an internship. In fall 2024, scholarship winner Courtney McCrae Crawford gained invaluable experience handling archival collections during her internship at the American University in Cairo’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL). She later organized an exhibition at the RBSCL’s museum using some of the materials she curated. The collection Crawford worked with is particularly significant, as it is the only publicly accessible collection in Egypt that contains documentation from Egyptian Egyptologists. In 2022, the RBSCL was awarded the UNESCO/Jikji Memory of the World Prize for preserving access to Egypt’s documentary heritage and the heritage of humanity. Crawford’s work has expanded the public’s ability to access this…

SOUTH CAROLINA: Like many hunter-gatherer cultures across the world, early Native American communities were nomadic. Around 5,000 years ago, to take advantage of abundant marine resources, groups in the coastal southeastern United States began to settle down and build villages atop mounds consisting of millions of discarded mollusk shells. Recent chemical analysis of such shell mounds determined that clams and oysters were harvested year-round, suggesting that these sites were the first permanent settlements in the region. GERMANY: Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of artifacts have been found at the Paleolithic site of Gönnersdorf, including 406 engraved schist plaques. These 15,800-year-old plaques are often just a few inches wide, and the faint images on them are difficult to discern with the naked eye. Advanced imaging technology has now revealed that…

FOR THE PAST 750 years, a 25-foot-square mosaic in front of the High Altar of Westminster Abbey has been the stage for the coronation of British royalty. Known as the Cosmati Pavement, after a Roman family specializing in this type of decorative stonework, it was laid in 1268 on the order of King Henry III. Under the gentle light of suspended brass chandeliers, the colorful tapestry created from more than 30,000 pieces of marble, glass, metal, and gemstones glows and dances. Every monarch from King Edward I in 1274 to King Charles III in 2023 has been crowned on this flooring. And while the mosaic’s gleaming pieces of black onyx, purple porphyry, and green serpentine immediately draw the eye, the stone into which the vibrant circles, squares, stars, and spirals…

WHEN LUCAS ASICONA, a farmer and local historian living in the small city of Chajul in Guatemala’s western highlands, decided to renovate his three-room adobe house in 2003, he could hardly have expected to make a major artistic discovery. In one of the rooms, which contained a kitchen and several beds, fragments of plaster had been falling off the walls, revealing patches of paintings underneath. As Asicona removed more plaster using a machete, he was stunned to find a tableau covering three walls. The artwork featured a range of people dressed in outfits that mixed elements associated with both the Spaniards, who colonized the territory in the early sixteenth century, and the area’s Indigenous Ixil Maya. Researchers have come to recognize that the murals uncovered in Asicona’s house, as well…

Creating large metal sculptures is risky. Producing and controlling copious amounts of molten metal can involve exposure to dangerous chemicals and heat resulting from the casting process. Furthermore, copper alloys are heavy; for example, the six-foot-tall original cast of The Thinker, by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, weighs some 2,000 pounds. They can also be difficult to source. The copper used in the massive bronze equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned A.D. 161–180) in Rome likely came from Cyprus, more than 1,000 miles away. But above all, explains conservator Jean-François de Lapérouse of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is the finicky nature of metal solidification that makes creating such sculptures so challenging and, in antiquity, required artists to push the envelope of what was technically possible. A…