Researchers report early evidence of flour production by ancient humans. Recent interest in ancient diets has led to the collection of extensive data about the variety of plants eaten by early humans and ancient food processing capabilities. Marta Mariotti Lippi of the University of Florence and colleagues analyzed the residues from an ancient grinding tool to gain further insight into food processing practices of the Early Gravettian culture of ancient Europe. The tool was found in Grotta Paglicci in Southern Italy in 1989 and dates to more than 32,000 years ago. Residue samples from the tool contained a variety of starch grains, and the distribution of the starch grains on the tool surface supported the use of the tool for grinding grain into flour. The presence of swollen, gelatinized starch grains in the residues suggests that the plants were thermally treated before grinding. Such a treatment might have been necessary to accelerate plant drying during the Middle-Upper Paleolithic, when the climate was colder than at present. The most common starch grains in the residues appeared to come from oats, representing the oldest evidence to date of the processing of oats for human consumption. The findings suggest that the inhabitants of Grotta Paglicci may have been the earliest people to use a multi-step process in preparing plants for consumption.
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Interior of Grotta Paglicci, Italy, with wall paintings. Image courtesy of Stefano Ricci.
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Grinding stone from Grotta Paglicci, Italy. Image courtesy of Stefano Ricci.
“Multistep food plant processing at Grotta Paglicci (Southern Italy) around 32,600 cal B.P.,” by Marta Mariotti Lippi, Bruno Foggi, Biancamaria Aranguren, Annamaria Ronchitelli, and Anna Revedin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 September 2015.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
They looked something like Neanderthals. But they weren’t classic Neanderthals. Not exactly.
For one thing, they lived 430,000 years ago in what is today northern Spain. Neanderthals have not been traditionally known, at least by the fossil evidence, to have walked the earth at that time. The oldest recovered classic Neanderthal fossil dates to about 200,000 years ago, though many scientists have suggested that Neanderthals lived more anciently, as their distinctive stone tools, known as the Mousterian industry, have been dated to far earlier times.
Were these humans ancestral to Neanderthals? Possibly so. But the people most familiar with their bones, scientists like Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Centro Mixto Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain, are saying that they might have been something else.
The Bone Studies
Their bones were excavated by Arsuaga and his team beginning in 1997 within a subterranean chamber created by nature at the terminus of a natural vertical 13-meter subterranean karstic shaft. Spelunkers and scientists call it the “chimney”, and for good reason—it’s a bit like negotiating down the interior of a house chimney. Entering the shaft can only be done by traversing through yet another, much larger cave—Cueva Mayor—part of a larger karstic mountain complex in northern Spain called Atapuerca. Atapuerca is important because here in the caves of these mountains scientists have found fossils and stone tools of some of the earliest known humans in Western Europe, and this small cave at the end of the vertical shaft is arguably the star of the show. Here, over a period of more than two decades, teams of archaeologists and other specialists have excavated over 6,700 human fossils of at least 28 individuals, individuals who lived more than 400,000 years ago. Aptly named Sima de los Huesos (“Sima”), or “Pit of Bones”, it is to date the largest single assembly of early human fossil remains ever found at any single site in the world. The new questions precipitated by the findings at the site have stirred the scholarly world of human evolution. Dating to 430,000 years ago, “this unique collection has to be compared with the much more fragmentary and generally isolated remains yielded by other Middle Pleistocene sites in Europe and out of Europe,” said Arsuaga. It offered Arsuaga and his team a unique opportunity to study a scene on the stage of the evolution of Middle Pleistocene humans, an unprecedented collection of fossils representing a single population of a hominin (early human) species.
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The team at work inside the cave: The Sima de los Huesos site. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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The location within the Sima de los Huesos site where the bones were unearthed. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the 20 June, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Juan-Luis Arsuaga at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues was titled, ‘Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.’ Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Professor Juan Luis Arsuaga holds one of the many fossil specimens found at the site. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the 20 June, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Juan-Luis Arsuaga at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues was titled, ‘Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.’ Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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After excavation, extensive analysis first centered on 17 skulls. Although some of them had been studied before, seven have been presented anew, and six are now more complete than ever before, after many hours of painstaking reconstruction in the lab. With these mostly intact samples for study, the researchers were beginning to more clearly define the common features of this population. Most striking, the examiners found that the fossils exhibited a mosaic of physical characteristics that could not be wholly attributed to any single, recognized human species to date. The skull samples showed clear Neanderthal features in the face and teeth. The researchers suggested the ‘Neanderthal-derived’ features were functionally related to mastication, or chewing. “It seems these modifications had to do with an intensive use of the frontal teeth,” Arsuaga said. “The incisors show a great wear as if they had been used as a ‘third hand,” typical of Neanderthals.” But elsewhere, the skulls showed characteristics that diverged from the Neanderthal model. The braincase itself, for example, still showed features associated with more primitive hominins. The crania or skulls were indicating that these were not really Neanderthals*
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Reconstructed skull 17 from the Sima de los Huesos site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the 20 June, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Juan-Luis Arsuaga at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues was titled, ‘Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.’ Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Reconstructed Skull 9. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the 20 June, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Juan-Luis Arsuaga at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues was titled, ‘Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.’ Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Reconstructed Skull 15. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the 20 June, 2014, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Juan-Luis Arsuaga at Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues was titled, ‘Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.’ Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Above: A video inside look of the team at work inside the cave. Courtesy Madrid Scientific Films
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Next, the team examined the bones of the postcranial skeletons—all bones other than the skulls. They closely examined and measured 1,523 fossil elements from the collection, representing a minimum number of 19 individuals, using raw values for key skeletal parts as proxies to estimate stature, body breadth, and weight. They also compared the results for the same values from data derived from other early human fossils, including hominins dated to much earlier times. From these results, they were able to characterize the body design of postcranial skeletons, finding that these individuals were relatively tall (by early human standards), with wide, muscular bodies. Although similarly built to Neanderthals, they had generally less brain mass than the classic Neanderthals. They were shorter, wider and more robust than the much later Homo sapiens, or modern humans (MH), with less brain to body mass. Like the results of the skull study, the researchers observed that these humans shared many anatomical features with Neanderthals, although some other key Neanderthal features were not present.**
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This image shows the upper and lower limb bones of those adults found in Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. Image from Carretero et al.
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This is a complete Sima skeleton assembled from samples excavated at Sima de los Huesos. Image courtesy Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
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So what did these findings mean?
“Morphologically, the Sima de los Huesos skulls [and postcranial skeleton] exhibit some (generally incipient) Neanderthal traits,” said Arsuaga. “These traits have been scrutinized to understand how the Neanderthal specializations developed……..and it is now clear that the full suite of Neanderthal characteristics did not evolve at the same pace.” However, according to Arsuaga,”we think based on the morphology that the Sima people were part of the Neanderthal clade, although not necessarily direct ancestors to the classic Neanderthals.”
“Not necessarily direct ancestors” was an operative statement, because another study, conducted by Matthias Meyer and a team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, indicated a genetic connection of the Sima group to Denisovans, a newly discovered extinct human species that heretofore had been known to exist primarily in Asia at least 40,000 years ago. Those researchers found that the Sima group shared a common ancestor with the Denisovans about 700,000 years ago. “The fact that the mtDNA of the Sima de los Huesos hominin shares a common ancestor with Denisovan rather than Neanderthal mtDNAs is unexpected since its [the Sima hominin] skeletal remains carry Neanderthal-derived features”, said Meyer. According to Meyer and colleagues, the age and Neanderthal-like features of the Sima hominins pointed to the possibility that they may have been related to a population ancestral to both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Another possibility, according to Meyers, is that gene flow from a different group of hominins introduced Denisova-like mtDNA into the Sima hominins or their ancestors.***
More recent sequencing[1] of the nuclear DNA taken from a tooth and leg bone has produced some startling new results, however. As reported by Meyer, the results of that sequencing has suggested that the Sima group was likely more closely related to Neanderthals than they had previously suspected, possibly even as a direct ancestor to Neanderthals. Moreover, the results of the study suggested that the origins of the Neanderthals may need to be pushed significantly back further into time.
Thus, the Sima collection represented an ancestral or sister ancestral group to later Neanderthals, with the findings indicating that the features that distinguished the Neanderthals did not evolve as a single package, but separately in different groups, in a mosaic pattern that eventually came together in the species we know today as classic Neanderthal. The uptake: Human evolution, at least in what is today western Europe, was likely far more complex than the traditional single line paradigm suggested.
The Million Year Stasis
But there was another important observation.
By comparing the postcranial fossils to those of other ancient humans, particularly the earlier hominin species that made up the Homo genus (the genus to which Neanderthals and modern humans belong), the researchers also noted that the generally wide Sima skeleton body plan provided additional evidence that early humans, before Homo sapiens, changed relatively little in this respect over the one million years preceding the rise of modern humans.
“This is really interesting,” said Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam, a study participant, “since it suggests that the evolutionary process in our genus is largely characterized by stasis (i.e., little to no evolutionary change) in body form for most of our evolutionary history.”
It wasn’t until modern humans, in other words, that humans became taller, narrower, and lighter—along with a greater brain mass to body mass ratio (more encephalized)—a result, some scientists suggest, that reflected evolutionary engineering for greater efficiency, survival and adaptability.
The Pit of Bones—A Funerary Site?
So what were the bones of 28 individuals doing in this nearly inaccessible little chamber at the bottom of a difficult-to-negotiate shaft?
It wasn’t an ancient living space. Its size and location, along with the distinct lack of tell-tale evidence of human habitation, precludes this possibility. One thing for sure, however, the skeletal remains represented whole individuals. Although the bones were accompanied by bones of an extinct species of bear, the pattern didn’t indicate that the bone elements were randomly washed down into the cavity from the outside by nature over time or carried into the location by bears or other predators.
Another possible clue came from a recent fascinating finding by another international team of scientists. Led by Nohemi Sala from Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, Spain, this team of researchers examined one particularly peculiar Sima skull (‘Cranium 17’) using modern forensic techniques, including stereoscopic light and digital microscopes, an industrial CT scanner, 3D imaging technology, and contour and trajectory analysis. They focused on two unusual holes or lesions on the frontal bone above the left eye. They were unlike many of the bone fractures on the other bones recovered from the site, which by examination were shown to have been caused by geological process disturbances or as a result of having fallen down a vertical shaft into the cave, perhaps by accident. The results of the study indicated that both fractures were likely produced by two separate impacts by the same object with slightly different trajectories at the same time. According to the researchers, the nature of the lesions indicated that they were likely lethal, and unlikely the result of an accidental fall down the vertical shaft.Rather, the type of fracture, their location, and the appearance of having been produced by two blows with the same object, led the researchers to interpret them as the result of an act of lethal interpersonal aggression. In other words, Sala and his team uncovered what is likely the oldest known case of murder, or violent lethal interpersonal interaction, in human history. Moreover, and most relevant to the interpretation of the site, the study results indicated that the individual was already dead before arrival at the cave site, suggesting that the person was carried to the top of the vertical shaft of the cave and deposited by other humans.
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Frontal view of Cranium 17 showing the position of the traumatic events T1 (inferior) and T2 (superior). Courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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Shown above: The Cranium (Skull) 17 bone traumatic fractures. (A) Frontal view of Cranium 17 showing the position of the traumatic events T1 (inferior) and T2 (superior); (B) Detailed ectocranial view of the traumatic fractures showing the two similar notches (black arrows) present along the superior border of the fracture outlines. Note that the orientation of the two traumatic events is different; (C) Detail of the notch in T1 under 2X magnification with a light microscope. (D) Endocranial view of T1 and T2 showing the large cortical delamination of the inner table (black arrows). From Sala N, Arsuaga JL, Pantoja-Pérez A, Pablos A, Martínez I, Quam RM, et al. (2015) Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene. PLoS ONE 10(5): e0126589. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0126589
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Thus, combined with what scientists already knew about the site and its contents, the finding also led the researchers to another significant conclusion: Given the nature, position, abundance and condition of human bones found within the cave, “the interpretation of the SH site as a place where hominins deposited deceased members of their social groups seems to be the most likely scenario to explain the presence of human bodies at the site,” wrote the study authors in the report. “This interpretation implies this was a social practice among this group of Middle Pleistocene hominins and may represent the earliest funerary behavior in the human fossil record.”****
So the Pit of Bones was the prehistoric equivalent of a mass grave or cemetery?
Perhaps, but study of the site and its contents is ongoing. If anything, experience has shown that there may be more surprises to come.
Artist’s depiction of the Sima de los Huesos humans. Group picture – no matter what we did, we couldn’t get them to smile. Life was hard 430,000 years ago. Courtesy Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
*J.L. Arsuaga et al., Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos, Science, 20 June 2014, Vol. 344 no. 6190
**Juan-Luis Arsuaga et al., Postcranial morphology of the middle Pleistocene humans from Sima de los Huesos,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1514828112
***Matthias Meyer et al., A mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos, Nature, 4 December 2013 (DOI: 10.1038/nature12788)
[1]Ann Gibbons, DNA from Neandertal relative may shake up human family tree, Science, 11 September 2015.
****Sala N, Arsuaga JL, et al., Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene. PLoS ONE 2015 10(5): e0126589. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0126589
For more than 30 years, archaeologists have unearthed a wealth of finds bearing on the ancient Philistines, a people perhaps best known from the Bible as the arch enemies of the Biblical Israelites. Monumental evidence of their presence has already been revealed through the exposed remains of sites such as Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron. Thriving between 1200 and 600 BCE on the coastal plain of what is today called Israel, they built cities, built a powerful local military force, and, indeed, even spread their influence beyond their original cultural boundaries into the land of their Judahite neighbors.
Of all the Philistine cities, however, only one can be directly associated with one of the best-known and popular stories of the Bible—that of David and Goliath. Goliath, according to the Biblical story, hailed from Philistine Gath.
But for most of the last 2500 years, Gath has been lost. Not to memory – but to sight. For years, its actual location has been grist for scholarly debate, not unlike the story of other biblical sites once lost and found. Today, however, it can be confidently stated that most scholars would place the long-lost Gath at the archaeological site of Tell es-Safi, a location where Bar-Ilan University’s Prof. Aren Maeir has been excavating along with generously staffed teams of archaeologists, students and volunteers for over two decades. Situated about halfway between Jerusalem to the east and the ancient coastal Philistine city of Askelon in the west, Gath, along with its similarly located ancient Philistine sister city of Ekron not far to its north (Tell Miqne), has thus far yielded evidence of human occupation reaching as far back as Chalcolithic times, or about the 5th millennium BC. Excavations have also revealed impressive monumental remains of an underlying Canaanite city dating from the Early Bronze Age.
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The visible mound of Tell es-Safi on the landscape. Still screenshot from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
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New Discoveries
Arguably one of Maeir’s finest eureka moments came, however, when he and his team began to realize that they had encountered the beginning traces of monumental structures that could potentially reveal a motherlode of new information about the city that existed at the time of Philistia’s biblically famous warrior.
“We found the very large and impressive fortifications of the city, and very likely the city gate as well, dating to the Iron Age,” said Maeir.*
Although this area of the excavation was still very much in the early stages at the time of this writing in 2015, archaeologists were already seeing the unmistakable outlines and dimensions of the fortification complex. Said Eric Welch, a key participating archaeologist from the University of Kansas: “We have a city wall that appears to be about 2 meters thick, and we’ve traced this for over 30 meters. On the outside of this fortification system are larger towers or outbuildings, and right through the middle of this we have a large opening – a depression – that looks like its going to be the entrance to the city itself.”**
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Above: A view of the excavated remains of the Iron Age city wall of Philistine Gath. Prof. Aren Maeir, Director, Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University Expedition to Gath
View of excavated Iron Age fortifications of the lower city of Philistine Gath. Prof. Aren Maeir, Director, Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University Expedition to Gath
Aerial view of excavations. Screenshot still from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
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Above and below: Excavators at work on site. Screenshot still from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
The findings have important implications. A city gate is recorded in the Bible (in 1 Samuel 21) in reference to David’s flight from King Saul to seek refuge with Gath’s King Achish. Moreover, explains Maeir, “Up until now we knew the size of the Iron Age period site but we couldn’t show that it was actually fortified. Now we see that it was not only the largest city in the land for its time but also it had perhaps the most impressive monumental fortifications. It tells us something about the character of the city and its importance compared to other cities and other states in the land at the time.”
“For example,” Maeir continued, “if you think about the relationship between Gath and the Judahite kingdom at the time, very often we think of the kingdom of David and Solomon as a kingdom that was more or less the size of the empire of Constantine [according to the Biblical account]. But the question is, [archaeologically speaking] how big was the kingdom of David and Solomon? If this city [Gath] was large, fortified, very dominant, then it most probably meant that the Judean kingdom could not expand westward, so that means that we’re limiting at least in that direction how large the kingdom was.”*
The findings also mean something in terms of further illuminating the nature and life-ways of the Iron Age city.
“In ancient cities we always know that the gate was a focal point, it was one of the civic centers,” explained Maeir. “That’s where a lot of commerce went on, that’s where judicial issues were addressed, that’s where cult activities were conducted, and we know from many archaeological sites that a lot of interesting finds are often found at the city gate. It could very well be that, in finding the gate, we will have a very nice view of what the city of Gath was like in ancient times. And what makes this so fascinating is that this entire area of the gate, including the fortifications all around it, is completely devoid of later remains. That means that we can basically scratch the surface and [immediately] get to the remains from the time of the Iron Age……For the next few seasons, we’re gong to have a lot of cool finds.”* Remains of a temple and a stone altar have already been revealed in the area, and during 2015 the team uncovered evidence of metallurgical and textile production activity.
The Philistine Remake
The Philistines have traditionally been thought to be descendants of what many scholars have called “Sea Peoples”, groups of Late Bronze Age colonizers from Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, the Balkans, and other Aegean locations, who brought their respective cultures with them and built new lives in a new land already firmly occupied by the Canaanites. What happened after they arrived, Maeir explains, has been illustrated by the archaeology he and his other colleagues have conducted over at least the last 20 years.
Contrary to the traditional view, Maeir states “when they came to Canaan they didn’t destroy the Canaanite cities. We don’t have evidence of major destructions. Rather, they settled in the Canaanite cities with the Canaanites and together with them formed a very unique culture—what we call an entangled culture, a mixture. This culture continued to exist for about 600 years, from about 1200 to about 600 BCE.”*
Moreover, based on the archaeological evidence, the Philistines and their neighbors the Israelites experienced a relationship seemingly far more complex than that of mutual enmity. “We see a picture of both enmity on the one hand and on the other hand a lot of interconnections – Philistines influencing Israelites and Israelites influencing Philistines,” said Maeir. “So for example, recently, not far from Jerusalem they excavated a Judahite temple from about the 10-9th centuries BCE but within the temple they found figurines which are very similar to Philistine figurines. On the other hand, at Gath, we excavated a Philistine temple from the 9th century and in that Philistine temple we found a stone altar very similar to the stone altars that we know existed in Israelite temples, and a fascinating find right next to the altar—[there was] a jar with an inscription, a Judahite name, a jar made in the region of Jerusalem. That means someone from Jerusalem, a Judahite, took a jar and offered it to the Philistine temple. So the whole concept of a clear-cut [cultural and geographic] border between Judah and Philistia may not have really existed.”*
In other words, the distinction between Judahites and Philistines is likely more blurred and complex than the traditional image reflected in the Biblical text. Maeir and colleagues hope that the continuing excavations at Tell es-Safi will shed additional light on this emerging complex relationship.
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Above: Example of typical Philistine pottery style. Screenshot still from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
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Stone altar found within the remains of a Philistine temple at Tell es-Safi. Screenshot still from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
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Much more than the recent Iron Age fortifications, Tell es-Safi/Gath has already amassed an impressive list of significant finds that tell a story of a city with a commanding presence in the history of the region. Among the findings to date:
Philistine temples dating to the 11th through 9th centuries BCE; evidence of the first Philistine settlement in Canaan; the earliest decipherable Philistine inscription ever discovered, featuring two names similar to that of Goliath; remains of the earliest siege system yet discovered in the world, interpreted to have been constructed by King Hazael of Aram Damascus in about 830 BCE, including evidence of Hazael’s capture and destruction of the city; prolific remains of the earlier Canaanite city; signs of a major earthquake in the 8th century BCE; and the remains of the Crusader castle known historically as “Blanche Garde”, where King Richard the Lion-Hearted is recorded to have been. More than that, and perhaps most importantly, the excavations have shed additional light on the everyday lives of a people long vanished. Said Welch of the 2015 season: “Up in Area F where the KU team was working we have a large city wall that dates to 2500 BC or what we call the Early Bronze Age and then behind that we have progressive layers of rooms that were built up against the city wall, using it as an outer wall. These are domestic structures, basically living spaces where we are finding cooking pots, small votive vessels…….just the things you would associate with a typical domestic context.”** And excavated plant remains at the site, along with similar remains uncovered and analyzed from other known Philistine sites in Israel, have recently shown how the Philistines introduced new plant varieties and agricultural practices into the ancient land, significantly influencing the floral biodiversity.
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Above: Aerial view of some of the Bronze Age remains unearthed at Tell es-Safi. Screenshot still from video, KU professor and students help uncover ancient Biblical city of Gath, YouTube 11 August 2015.
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Archaeologists say that excavations and research at the site will likely continue for many years to come. The efforts have been joined by a coalition of participating institutions, including the University of Melbourne, the University of Manitoba, Brigham Young University, Yeshiva University, University of Kansas, Grand Valley State University of Michigan, and several Korean institutions, to name some. Vastly interdisciplinary in nature, the work at Gath will reflect a range of research and academic interests focusing on a time and place that, for many, and for different reasons, represents an important place in an important part of the world.
But on behalf of the hundreds of professionals, students and volunteers who have worked at the site, Maeir has expressed it best of all. Ultimately, he says, there is one best reason to do archaeology—plain and simple, “it’s because it’s fun.”*
More about the excavations project at Tell es-Safi can be found at the project weblog.
Peering up at it from below, I could see that this wouldn’t be a leisurely stroll. This flight of seemingly countless steps, ascending with rails almost like scaffolding to a destination high above, invited a small sense of adventure. But I could envision that, long before this modern, convenient construction, human visitors surely had a more challenging task. I was told that casual visitors once had to ascend with the aid of a rope assemblage, and long before that, Native Americans had to reach it using whatever devices or efforts at their disposal. Carved by nature in a bluff overlooking a tributary of the Ohio River known as Cross Creek, the ancient rockshelter above had remained tucked away for millennia within a lush green, hilly landscape of what is today called the Allegheny Plateau of western Pennsylvania. Thousands of years of weathering and erosion made this place a cave-like shelter for prehistoric human sojourners—affording them protection from the elements without and a space to rest, sleep and eat within.
Once I reached the top of the steps, I could move freely over a spacious, human-made platform, designed to hold small capacity crowds. I could now see the interior of the rockshelter clearly laid out before me, left as it was after the latest archaeological excavations closed out (although the site continues to be investigated). But long before archaeologists and others came to investigate and work at the site, nature’s hand had already morphed its appearance many times over through thousands of years of weathering and erosion. I could see the visible reminders of this in the face of the sandstone cliffs surrounding it. Slowly sculpted by water, wind and ice, it was an almost surrealistic picture of what time and the elements could do to otherwise seemingly impermeable and impenetrable stone. Today, the rockshelter is enveloped in an impressive, protective overhanging wooden construction, an architectural wonder by itself.
Archaeologists, historians and the public call this place Meadowcroft. For those who know something about the site, the Meadowcroft rockshelter is now widely thought to have yielded evidence of the earliest known presence of humans in North America, along with the longest sequence of continuous human occupation. It was first systematically excavated by Dr. James M. Adovasio, currently the Dean of the Zurn School of Natural Sciences and Director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst University. His efforts included a team of colleagues and field school students in the early 1970’s. All together, they uncovered evidence of a human presence they suggested dated thousands of years before the time of the advent of the first broadly recognized human culture in the Americas—the Clovis—and its implied first peopling of the North American continent. Their dating at this site pushed the clock back on human occupation of North America to as much as 16,000 years ago.
But this stature and acceptance didn’t come quickly and easily for Meadowcroft and its chief archaeologist. It challenged the prevailing paradigm, radically pushing back the dates on human occupation of the continent. From the very beginning, the validity of his findings related to the earliest human modified stone objects and other features of human habitation found at the site were marked with controversy. Decades later, however, the story of the Meadowcroft controversy has evolved to one of broad acceptance. Partly due to the mounting evidence from other sites with Pre-Clovis artifacts across the Americas, and in no small measure to the meticulous and scientifically rigorous methods used in the Meadowcroft research, the site has arguably become a kingpin in a new mainstream of scientific inquiry that has increasingly legitimized the ‘Pre-Clovis’ way of thinking. Today, Meadowcroft is designated as a National Historic Landmark, drawing thousands of visitors yearly. — Ed.
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Popular Archaeology took the opportunity to interview Dr. Adovasio (pictured right) about the site and its significance within the context of the ongoing search and debate on the first peopling of the Americas. What follows are the details of that interview:
Q1: Would you describe your personal route/experience, attributes and interests that drove you to your current occupation or career?
As I indicated in my book, “The First Americans,” I was essentially programmed to be an archaeologist by my mother, Lena M. Adovasio. She was a four-field major in college, one of which was history and another of which was chemistry. She taught me to read well before kindergarten with geology, paleontology, and archaeology books. As a consequence I never really wanted to do anything else except pursue an archaeology career. I knew where I wanted to go to undergraduate school in the 6th grade and, in fact, attended that institution (The University of Arizona). The attributes which I brought to the “archaeology table” were and remain, extreme attention to detail, a high degree of organization leavened with intense self-discipline, and, I suppose, the ability to absorb and synthesize oftentimes very diverse data sets. It probably helped that, like my mother, I was endowed with a near perfect memory.
Q2: What is the story of how Meadowcroft first came to your attention?
When I assumed a faculty position at The University of Pittsburgh in 1972, I was told that one of the parameters of that position was the establishment of an archaeological and geoaracheological field training program in western Pennsylvania. What I had hoped to locate was an area with little or no previous archaeological or geoarchaeological research coupled with relatively easy striking distance of Pittsburgh for obvious logistical reasons. I also sought an area which contained at least one cave or rockshelter site because these were the sites I was most familiar with from my graduate career at The University of Utah. Because I had previous research commitments on the Island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, I did not have the time to locate a suitable study area myself. So I circulated word amongst my colleagues in the profession, and as a result, a now deceased historian/amateur archaeologist from what was then California State College, California, Pennsylvania, informed me about Meadowcroft Rcokshelter in the early spring of 1973. His name was Phil Jack, a longtime friend of the landowner, Albert Miller, who discovered the site. I arranged with both of them to visit the site in the later spring of 1973 and upon viewing it decided to solicit permission from the landowners to begin excavations there in June of 1973. The rest is, literally, history.
Q3: While excavating at Meadowcroft in the 1970’s, what was it that made you realize that there was something special or unusual about this site?
We initially believed that the deposits at Meadowcroft would be something less than a meter in thickness and that the oldest occupation would be Late Archaic or Early Woodland, at best. These estimates were based on excavations at other rockshelters in southwestern Pennsylvania and adjacent portions of Ohio and West Virginia. However, early in the 1973 season it became clear that the deposits at the site were well in excess of a meter in thickness and the recovery of Middle and Early Archaic materials signaled an older occupation than we had imagined. Of course, when the first radiocarbon dates were run after the 1973 season was over, it was evident that the site was initially occupied earlier than we suspected.
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General view of Meadowcroft Rockshelter facing west before excavation in 1973; vegetation marks the limits of the vegetation current overhang; large block in lower left represents a roof detachment ca. 12,500 years ago. Image courtesy James M. Adovasio
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Q4:What finds convinced you that you had uncovered evidence of human occupation at this site going back possibly 16,000 years or more?
The answer to this question is more complicated than it seems. The deposits at Meadowcroft are characterized by a series of roof spalling and block collapse events which dramatically altered both the configuration of the rockshelter, as well as the availability of “livable” floor space through time. One such spalling event marks, in effect, the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary as well as, for all intents and purposes, the end of the Clovis interval in southwestern Pennsylvania. Beneath this spalling event, we expected to encounter no additional, older cultural material, but rather the parent bedrock of the rockshelter in the form of the Birmingham Shale. Instead of the Birmingham Shale, we found a series of apparent occupational surfaces replete with shallow fire pits and associated artifacts of indisputable anthropogenic origin. Radiocarbon dates derived from charcoal within these pits clearly preceded the established age of Clovis in eastern North America, thereby, and surprisingly to us, indicating an earlier than Clovis occupation. Additionally, none of the recovered artifacts, most notably the unfluted lanceolate so-called Miller projectile point [named after the site’s discoverer] and small blade flakes, were consistent with a Clovis ascription.
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Lithic shown under rockfall is the type specimen of the Miller Lanceolate projectile point form. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Miller Lanceolate projectile point type specimen, obverse surface; the specimen is significantly re-sharpened and reduced in overall dimensions from the hypothesized prototype; it is unfluted, but basically ground. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Assorted Miller Complex artifacts from Stratum IIa (containing the oldest cultural remains radiocarbon dated to about 16,000 years B.P.) at Meadowcroft Rockshelter; from left to right: Miller Lanceolate type specimen made of local Cross Creek chert, prismatic blade flake made from Onandaga chert, prismatic blade flake made from Flint Ridge chert, biface fragments made from Flint Ridge or Kanawha chert (black specimens are Kanawha). Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Q5: What is the significance of these findings within the context of the Clovis First debate?
Meadowcroft was the first site in nearly 40 years to seriously challenge the long held Clovis-First paradigm. Between 1933 and 1973, more than 500 archaeological sites in North and South America were claimed to be older than the Clovis horizon of ca. 10,900 to 11,300 uncorrected radiocarbon years ago. Prior to Meadowcroft, all of these Pre-Clovis claimants exhibited a similar history. First, you would read about them in a local newspaper or popular scientific journal, then more extensive treatments would appear in the technical scientific literature. Inevitably, the sites would then be exposed for some real or imagined flaw – the artifacts were not definitively of human origin; the stratigraphy was non-existent or imperfectly defined; the context and association of even genuine recovered artifactual material was problematic, etc. As I pointed out in “The First Americans,” each of these sites enjoyed a Warholesque 15 minutes of fame, then disappeared into oblivion. Each time one of these claimant sites failed, it reinforced the Clovis-First model. Therefore, by the time the initial reports on Meadowcroft appeared, there was a long established record of failure which served to render the Meadowcroft discoveries suspect ab initio.
Q6: Do you think the Clovis First paradigm is now discredited, or on its way out, given the findings from other sites across the Americas that show evidence of human occupation before Clovis times? (In other words, do you think there is sufficient evidence now to support a pre-Clovis presence or culture in the Americas, and why?)
To answer this question, it is perhaps useful to cite an observation by Dr. Jonathan C. Lothrop in his review of a Pre-Clovis site in the Americas, a volume published by the Smithsonian Institution. He says,
“In 2015, if one polled New World archaeologists familiar with the literature, I suspect most would agree that there is a growing body of evidence of human occupation in the Americas that pre-dates ca. 13,200 Cal. B.P.” (Lothrop 2015: p. 256)
I certainly concur with Lothrop’s assessment, but it is also worth stressing that a handful of very vocal, Clovis-Firsters still remain and, like Hrdlicka in an earlier time, will probably go to their graves with their minds unchanged. The death of established paradigms often takes a very long time—as witnessed, for example, by the many decades which elapsed between the promulgation of continental drift and its widespread acceptance in the geological community. I completely underestimated how long it would take for Clovis-First to expire and I also misjudged the degree to which its “spear carriers” would hold on to their beliefs. This is all particularly interesting given the fact that, almost from its inception, most European scholars and virtually all South American scholars questioned the underpinnings of the Clovis-First model. The American response, of course, was that the Europeans were simply ignorant of the facts and that the South Americans didn’t even publish in English. The number and distribution of what might be called broadly acceptable Pre-Clovis archaeological sites now clearly points to an earlier than Clovis presence. I stress, however, that even if there were only one, then one would be sufficient. Monte Verde effectively terminated the argument even if its still vocal critics don’t accept the fact.
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Blade flakes from Stratum IIa at Meadowcroft Rockshelter; cross sections range from prismatic on the first three specimens to triangular on the forth; the edge is intentionally dulled for hafting. Courtesy Jame M. Adovasio
Close up of blade flakes from Meadowcroft Rockshelter; one edge of each blade flake is intentionally dulled for hafting, while the opposite edge is the working edge. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Polyhedral blade cores of the type from which Meadowcroft blade flakes were struck; these are very different from Clovis blade cores. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Q7: What were the specific challenges of excavating and investigating the site?
All cave and rockshelter sites around the world are part of what some archaeologists call the “marked landscape”. Places so designated were well known to aboriginal populations both in time and through time and as such, were frequently visited and utilized. While some of these sites probably witnessed yearly visits, many were only episodically visited. Because of repetitive visits, often over very long periods of time, such sites provide the opportunity for studying environmental change and concomitant human adjustments to those changes in very unique ways. Unfortunately, depending on the nature, intensity, and duration of these visits, these types of sites may evidence considerable anthropogenic disturbance with attendant difficulties in establishing the stratigraphic/occupational sequence. Additionally, because of the nature of the depositional process in many of these sites, even without human disturbance, the stratification may be remarkably complex. The combination of naturally complicated stratigraphy and repetitive human visits with attendant disturbance render the proper excavation of these kinds of sites very difficult.
Q8: What specific techniques, processes, methodologies and applications made the investigation of this site stand out from other excavations or investigations?
A necessary preamble to this answer is to state that a field archaeologist in virtually any setting – prehistoric, historic, or forensic – has three basic responsibilities. The first, and most fundamental of these, is the reconstruction of stratigraphy from visible stratification. While in English, we tend to use the terms “stratigraphy’ and “stratification” interchangeably, they do not, in fact, mean the same thing. Stratification is an objective phenomenon. It has both subjective and objective physical properties which can be detected, assessed, and measured. Stratification is a product. Stratigraphy is both the process by which stratification is created and the study of that process. The establishment of stratigraphy from observable stratification is fundamental and critical to the other two responsibilities of a field archaeologist. Without it, the other two cannot be done. The second responsibility is the delineation of context. Context literally means place in time and space and unless the context of all recovered material is explicitly defined in a stratigraphic perspective, there is no context. Finally, perhaps the most difficult field responsibility is the demonstration of association. Association means that two or more items have entered the archaeological record penecontemporaneously as a consequence of the same process. Association refers, in forensic terms, to primary or probative evidence as opposed to secondary or circumstantial evidence.
Suffice to note, for reasons already articulated, it is particularly and peculiarly difficult to execute the three responsibilities of a field archaeologist in a cave or rockshelter situation. To execute these responsibilities in any excavation situation requires knowledge of and the ability to operationalize all of the so-called laws of stratigraphy. While most people are familiar with the first of these laws – superposition – many are, to varying degrees, unfamiliar with the remainder. These include original horizontality, lateral continuity, and intersecting relationships. The key to operationalizing all of these principles – frequently referred to as Steno’s Laws – requires the ability to recognize and delineate the contacts or interfaces between discrete strata. Without digressing into an arcane lecture on methodology, it should be noted that during the Meadowcroft excavations much of our attention was directed precisely at facilitating and defining interfaces and contacts. Students were exhaustively trained to recognize strata differences on the basis of perceived textural differences. In practice, this meant that they could use their trowels to detect differences in compactness versus friability, density versus porosity, and related properties by feel and even sound. Once sufficiently skilled, our students could recognize stratigraphic differences quite literally with their eyes shut in much the same way that anyone could detect by feel and sound alone the difference between layers of cake and icing between those layers. Despite the reliance on texture in the excavation training process, a wide array of other things were done to maximize the ability to “see” stratigraphic transformations in profile. Meadowcroft, virtually from the outset, was fully electrified and thanks to University of Pittsburgh engineers in conjunction with assistance from Westinghouse, we were able to install an experimental lighting system that allowed the excavators to combine different light sources to illuminate stratigraphic profiles in a variety of ways. The difference between different light source combinations was and is striking and, at that time, had not been employed extensively as a supplement to excavation.
In order to systematically plot the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates of artifacts and ecofacts, a series of vertical and horizontal datum points were combined, initially manually, and later, via total stations, to ensure the establishment of the appropriate provenience or context of excavated materials. Since the rockshelter had an active phone line, we could then communicate directly via telephone modem to the mainframe at the University of Pittsburgh to encode excavation data. To my knowledge, this is also the first time that was ever done – at least in a cave or rockshelter setting.
In order to provide objective verification of what were subjectively defined strata, samples of sediment from each stratum or microstratum were processed with a Coulter blood cell counter converted to measure sediment size differences. Once again, this was the first time such technology had been employed in the field.
I could continue in this vein, but the point here is simply this – given the experience and imagination of the investigators, coupled with sufficient funding, we were able to implement a variety of data recovery and documentation as well as analytical protocols which had never been extensively employed before. While some of these did not work as expected, many did. The collective effect was a level of precision in the excavations which virtually no critic of the site has ever questioned.
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Precision and care: Excavation of a thin anthropogenic surface at the site via single-edged razorblade. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Above and below: On-site documentation procedures at Meadowcroft Rockshelter; colored pencils which represented different combinations of silt, sand, and clay-sized materials were employed to produce microstratigraphic profile maps of all parts of the excavation. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Q9: What arguments or issues did you have to address regarding the validity of the finds and their dating?
Virtually from the publication of the first radiocarbon chronology from Meadowcroft in 1974, the possible age of the earliest occupation of the site engendered great controversy. Significantly, especially as compared to other putative Pre-Clovis claimant localities, none of this controversy surrounded either the excavation methodology employed at the site nor the possible anthropogenic origin of any of the earliest artifacts. As already noted, the excavations at Meadowcroft were, and still are, widely hailed as “meticulous” and the “early” artifacts bear the unmistakable stigmata of humanly modified materials. Instead, the criticisms of the possible antiquity of the site pivoted around three basic issues: 1) the possible particulate or non-particulate contamination of only the eleven oldest radiocarbon samples from the site; 2) the absence of Pleistocene faunal remains; and 3) the apparently anomalous character of the recovered floral materials.
Dozens of pages of published material have been devoted to refuting the objections to the apparent age of the lower and middle Stratum IIa materials from Meadowcroft and these arguments will not be repeated here. It should be sufficient to note that there is absolutely no probative evidence for the particulate contamination of any of the eleven oldest C-14 samples from Meadowcroft. As to non-particulate contamination, the introduction of dissolved older carbon into just the eleven deepest radiocarbon samples from Meadowcroft requires a vehicle for contamination in the form of groundwater movement. An intensive micromorphological study conclusively demonstrated that such movement did not occur and, therefore, the non-particulate contamination issue is moot.
As to the faunal and floral critiques, modern research indicates that the paleoenvironment south of the glacial ice front in North America was remarkably variable and diverse. Further, the floral species represented at Meadowcroft were not inconsistent with such diversity. Finally, the faunal remains from Meadowcroft’s oldest deposits are diminutive both in numbers and weight, though all of the species represented have been reported in Late Pleistocene contexts elsewhere in eastern North America.
Put most simply, all of the currently available data suggests that Meadowcroft was sequentially and sporadically visited before the advent and spread of Clovis technology by populations who may or may not have been the ancestors to the makers of fluted points.
Of course, a larger issue, at least for some scholars, was the absence for a period of time of “other Meadowcrofts.” Now, of course, there are other sites of demonstrable Pre-Clovis age. Despite the best efforts of diehard Clovis-Firsters to discredit these other localities, often with incredibly convoluted and far-fetched scenarios, the existence of Pre-Clovis populations in the new world is now widely accepted.
Meadowcroft set the evidentiary bar! Monte Verde broke it! Other sites are appearing to join them. For Clovis-First it is the end of the game.
Q10: If you were to create a scenario or story describing the nature and lifestyle of the early, Pre-Clovis inhabitants of the site, what would it be?
As described in various publications, the earliest visitors to Meadowcroft appear to have been broad spectrum foragers rather than megafauna-focused big game hunters. These populations visited the site, as would their successors, principally in the fall of the year, utilizing a durable technology that included the production of unfluted lanceolate projectile points and the manufacture of diminutive blade flakes from polyhedral cores. They also employed a perishable technology that included basketry and presumably a variety of other less well documented related technologies. Their visits to Meadowcroft were apparently brief and perhaps separated by a number of years. They exploited a wide array of lithic raw material sources which I personally do not believe reflect their range. I would suspect these materials were acquired by trade and exchange. These sources include Kanawha chert from West Virginia, Onandaga chert from New York, and Flint Ridge chert from Ohio to name but a few. Evidence of these earliest visitors to Meadowcroft, named by us the Miller Complex after Albert Miller who discovered the site, are also evidenced at several other localities in the Cross Creek Drainage and a very similar durable technology is also evident at more remote locations like Cactus Hill in Virginia. While there are no obvious technological connections between Miller durable technology and Clovis, there is the possibility that some sort of relationship may be discovered in the future.
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Reenactment of Paleoindian family unit showing both genders, different ages, durable and non-durable technology. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
Q11: What is in store for the future investigation and research of this site?
About one third of Meadowcroft remains unexcavated. This area is available for future study when there are even more resolute excavation, documentation, and analysis protocols available. The main task at present is to complete the long overdue final report as well as a series of smaller contributions about one or another aspect of the long Meadowcroft sequence.
Q12: Are there any other comments you would like to make?
The Meadowcroft/Cross Creek operation was originally designed as an undergraduate and graduate training project aimed at both anthropology/archaeology students and those in related fields. Obviously, there was also a research component but this was, at least on paper, secondary to the student training goal. Because of the experience of the multidisciplinary research staff as well as access to extraordinary funding, it was possible to not only offer students state-of-the-art protocols in site excavation, documentation, and analysis, but also to constantly refine those protocols from both a methodological and substantive perspective. Because of the foregoing, the excavations at Meadowcroft were considered by others to be at the very cutting edge of the field. That they are still considered by many to be so is a testimony to the success of the methodological aspect of the project. We have always been more proud and pleased with the methodological “end” of the Meadowcroft project than any, or even all, of the results it produced. Expanding the envelope of the field in any perspective is rewarding, but in terms of actual enhancement of field data collecting procedures, it is and has been particularly gratifying. From a more substantive perspective, while the earliest materials from Meadocroft have garnered the most attention, the incredible length of the occupational sequence is to us far more striking. Because of the lengthy and hyper-detailed Paleo-environmental record from Meadowcroft, we can examine macro and micro climatic changes and their attendant consequences very precisely. We can also articulate in unique ways human responses and adjustments to those changes. That was in essence the “cake” we were trying to bake. That the site proved to be quite old was the unintended “icing.”
I must admit that I lived a full three years less than a two-hour drive away from the Meadowcroft Rockshelter site before actually seeing this site in person. Likely many thousands more are not even aware that this, clearly one of the most important archaeological sites related to Early Americans, sits so closely to their doorsteps. Accessing the impressively well maintained site and its associated visitation area is, however, not a simple and straightforward endeavor. It isn’t located conveniently off the well-traveled freeway circuits. But the driving directions provided at the website can be extremely helpful to any first-time visitor. Any visitor should be aware in advance that, to physically access the rockshelter itself, one must ascend a relatively lengthy flight of stairs. But this effort, though comparatively modest as hiking and climbing goes, is richly awarded with an up-close-and-personal view of the site and its scenic surrounding context.
—Ed.
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General view of Meadowcroft, facing northeast after sunset. Courtesy James M. Adovasio
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This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
Heval Bozbay, a graduate of İstanbul University, currently works in the Archaeology Department of Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir. He has been a member of the Aşıklı Höyük research team since 2009.
If you travel south along the road near the small, southern Turkish village of Kizilkaya, you will encounter a two-story red building, the old office for the headman of the village. A dark shop under the building belongs to an old carpenter. You can hear him as he works – the sounds of saw and hammer – as you follow the stone-paved road lined with trees on both sides. After a few hundred meters, you will see a mound about fourteen to fifteen meters high, covered by grass.
The villagers call it Aşıklı Höyük. It is not a natural mound. It actually began its formation about ten millennia ago, when people settled and built dwellings, staying for a thousand years and then vanished, leaving remains, like a layer cake of towns atop other towns, only vestiges of which ultimately survived the ravage of time.
Today, however, it is a quiet place – no one lives there anymore – but nearby you will sometimes see and hear children and teenagers playing in and around the water of the adjacent Melendiz River. They remove their clothes down to their underwear and catch the scaly fish known as gray mullet with sack-like nets they hold in their hands. If it is the weekend, you may see and smell the mix of smoke and meat. Those who arrive from Aksaray and the surrounding villages and districts parcel out the shade for picnics. In the fields on both sides of the river, the villagers are deeply occupied with hoeing, irrigation or harvesting, according to the season. And if you had a time machine and you were able to arrive here a century or even a few millennia ago, you would encounter almost the same scene: children fishing and playing in the river; barley and wheat fields scattered here and there; and villagers working in these fields… It would be as if nothing had changed for centuries, even millennia.
But go back more than nine thousand years at the place where this mound now stands and you would likely encounter a very different scene. You would see about a dozen houses in two groups. They are flat-roofed, single-story houses constructed of adobe – a construction material the local people today would not prefer much when building their own houses. The walls of these ancient houses are either shared between separate units, or the spaces between the houses are so narrow that not a single person could negotiate between them. These spaces are filled with bones, stones, and other materials, much like a dump. Areas that people use for various purposes, such as meeting houses, streets for travel, gardens, courtyards or squares are almost nonexistent among the houses.
And there is another curious feature, or lack thereof: These houses have no doors for entry. To enter a house, you must ascend an exterior ladder and go inside through an opening in the roof, then descend an interior ladder. The only source of light is the opening in the roof you used to enter, and one or two holes in a wall, a hole far too small to be called a window by modern standards. Once your eyes adjust to the dim environment, you can move about. You can see that it is not a very large space. The ancients who lived here built their houses with one or two rooms and only rarely with three rooms. Generally, there is a main room, which measures ten to twelve square meters, and a smaller adjoining back room. Some houses contain an earthen bench (a raised place) raised from the ground for five to ten centimeters, used for sitting or lying in one corner of the room. This would be covered with an animal skin or a mat woven with reeds and various weeds. In another corner is a rectangular hearth about a meter in length and forty to forty-five centimeters in length, used for both cooking and heating. These hearths are standard to almost every house. They were built by placing palm-sized flat stones side by side upon the ground and then enclosing them with upright stones in order to prevent ashes, embers and other materials from spreading about.
You will notice bunches of various herbs and flowers hanging down the walls of the room and the central wooden post supporting the roof. They are herbs with names such as havacıva otu (alkanet/Alkanna), pisipisi otu (wild barley/Hordeum), sabun otu (soapwort/Saponaria), kedi otu (valerian/Valerianella coronata), kuzu kulağı (sheep’s sorrel/Rumex), sığır kuyruğu (mullein/Verbascum), gıcıgıcı (silene/Silene), and çoban yastığı (prickly thrift/Thymelaea), used as food or for medicinal treatment. Some of them are still used today by villagers. Based on excavations and research, archaeologists have determined that the ancient people of Aşıklı Höyük subsisted substantially on such wild plants and harvested plants as barley, wheat, and lentil. Almonds, hackberry, chickpeas and legumes were abundantly consumed. Moreover, given the very large amount of bones recovered during excavations, it is clear they were very good hunters, with meat playing an important role in their diet, including wild cattle, wild sheep and goats, warthogs, deer and roe deer. At the beginning of their settlement, sheep and goat had not yet been domesticated, although their wild species were controlled in herds consisting of small numbers, kept within the settlement, and in time domesticated during the thousand-year occupation of the site. Apart from these animals, various bird species, fish and small animals like rabbits would likely have been found on the table of an ordinary family living in Aşıklı.
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The architectural remains of the 8th millennium BC settlement of Aşıklı Höyük. From the Aşıklı Höyük archive.
Modern experimental reconstruction of the ancient houses, built next to the mound.From the Aşıklı Höyük archive.
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A view inside of one of the modern experimentally reconstructed houses.From the Aşıklı Höyük archive.
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Above and below: Reconstructions show interior appearance of the ancient houses. Note the reconstructed hearth in each photo.From the Aşıklı Höyük archive
If your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness rather well and you look at the floor of the house carefully, you may also encounter a pile of black glassy stones at one corner. These stones are a type of volcanic stone called obsidian or natural glass, the local name of which is “deve cıncığı”. Today we primarily use minerals to make such tools as knives, spoons, and weapons. Likewise, the inhabitants of Aşıklı, some ten millennia ago, also used this obsidian to make the arrowheads and spearheads they used in hunting; knives they used to slaughter, skin, and process animals or to cut their own beards; and sickles with which they cut grass. The Cappadocia Region, which includes Aşıklı, is rich in obsidian. Because its properties allowed it to be easily processed into sharp edges and points, the ancients could shape it into useful tools and weapons. Its comparative rarity on the earth’s surface, its usefulness, and its attractive, polished appearance made it a valuable commodity for export to very distant regions such as Syria, the region called Israel-Palestine, and the island of Cyprus, even during the heyday of Aşıklı, a time when no means of transport beyond the human foot was yet available: The wheel had not yet been invented, and horses, donkeys and mules had not been domesticated.
Did the people of Aşıklı export and trade in obsidian?
That question remains unanswered, but archaeologists have uncovered seashells from the Mediterranean Sea among the remains at Aşıklı.
In addition to obsidian, there was basalt, granite and tuff – again, types of volcanic stones – which were are also among the stones frequently used by the people of Aşıklı to make various tools, such as grinding stones (mortars and pestles) used to grind plants and handstones and hammers used to separate nuts like almonds and pistachios from their shells. Animal bones and horns were also used for such tools as needles, awls, spoons and shovels, and even for adornment in the form of beads.
Household Burials
If you have the eye of an archaeologist, you may also spy what may have been a pit once dug into the floor, which was then covered with soil and pressed firmly. The people of Aşıklı commonly dug pits into their floors to bury their dead. Once refilled after burial, they would go on living above their deceased. This practice, which in many cultures today would be considered unthinkable, was a generally accepted tradition almost everywhere during the Neolithic Period. Skeletons of about eighty individuals buried in this way were unearthed in the excavations. Of course, not every individual who died in Aşıklı was buried beneath the floor of the house in this way. Where were the others buried? This question remains unanswered. In either case, all were buried at what in today’s terms would be considered a young age – examination of skeletal remains revealed that the average life-span of the people of Aşıklı was generally 30 to 35 years!
Visitors to the site of Aşıklı today would see modern replicas or reconstructions of these ancient structures, built based on the information gleaned from the excavations and research conducted by archaeologists and others who have painstakingly studied the remains, and constructed with the gracious help of the villagers of nearby Kizilkaya. During the summer months, archaeologists and their teams from all over the world are busy working at the site – arrive in the late morning and you may even be offered a glass of their tea.
A Temple?
The comparatively few visible remains at the site strike a vivid contrast to the monumental remains often seen at other ancient sites, particularly those of later time periods. The foundations of houses and some of the walls have hardly escaped the anger of time. Despite this, if you turn to Mount Hasan and walk downwards after you have reached the highest point of the mound, you will approach a section with special buildings. The settlement of Aşıklı consisted of two sections in antiquity. Separated by a four-meter-wide pebbly road, one section was the residential area, comprised of the houses just described. But the special section contained buildings with characteristics of a very different sort. One of these buildings, square in shape, measured twenty-five square meters. The floor, plastered with lime, along with its walls and benches, were painted entirely with red ochre. At four corners were large stones upon which were placed wooden posts. A small channel, opening to the outside, was built into one of the walls. Archaeologists investigating the structure suggest that it was probably used as a ceremonial place, with evidence suggesting that a kind of fluid was poured at these ceremonies. Associated with the building were other spaces, also likely used jointly by the residents of the settlement. Scholars have conjectured that it may have been a temple or sacred complex or public place, an assembly area where everyone gathered to make joint decisions or perhaps used for activities on special days or for social ceremonies. In any case, all the signs seemed to point to this place as something special, something other than a common dwelling place.
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The special or communal building. The floor and walls of the building were painted red in antiquity, as can be seen evidenced in the remains. Different layers of the building can be seen on the bottom left corner of the photo. From the Aşıklı Höyük archive.
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The evidence thus far suggests that the residents of Aşıklı Höyük abandoned this place, where they had lived for more or less a thousand years about nine millennia ago, then migrated somewhere else. Where and why they went are only two of a long list of questions. Some nine millennia have elapsed since, the building remains becoming the mound we see today. But, in a very real sense, this ancient settlement is coming alive again through the ongoing search for answers by a team under the leadership of Mihriban Özbaşaran of İstanbul University. The story of this early Neolithic town continues to unfold.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Recent findings shedding new light on the whereabouts of the remains of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great; how an archaeologist-sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life; archaeologists uncovering town life at the dawn of civilization; an exclusive interview with internationally acclaimed archaeologist James M. Adovasio about what makes the Meadowcroft Rockshelter prominent in the ongoing search for the first Americans; what archaeologists are finding at the site of the ancient city of Gath, the home town of the biblical Philistine giant, Goliath; and how scientists are redrawing the picture of human evolution in Europe. Find it on Amazon.com.
As Founder and Editor of Popular Archaeology Magazine, Dan is a freelance writer and journalist specializing in archaeology. He studied anthropology and archaeology in undergraduate and graduate school and has been an active participant on archaeological excavations in the U.S. and abroad. He is the creator and administrator of Archaeological Digs, a popular weblog about archaeological excavation and field school opportunities.
On any given day, you might see Oscar Nilsson busily engaged on a project in his new workspace in Tumba, just south of Stockholm, Sweden.A green and pleasant suburban extension of Stockholm, Tumba is a community consisting of families and workers connected to the town’s papermill and milk processing industries, though many commute into the city for their livelihoods, much like any other suburban community.
But Nilsson is unlike most other Tumba residents. He is a sculptor, though not of the usual variety. He works in a well-lighted 80-square-meter newly converted art gallery space. Now a studio, its bookshelves are filled with literature on facial reconstruction, anatomy, anthropology, history, art……….and 30 plastic replicas of human skulls. One can see a vacuum machine for castings, a lightboard, airbrush tools, brushes, and other tools of his trade, including a smaller room for castings and mold-making. He spends much of his time at two ergonomic worktables. Oscar Nilsson has a passion for reconstructing the past, or, more specifically, human faces of the past. He can do this because he is not only an artist, but also an archaeologist by education, armed with a knowledge of human anatomy, a familiarity with osteology (the scientific study of bones], and a finely honed set of skills for handling specialized materials to create lifelike, hyper-realistic facial reconstructions of individuals who came and went long before us, before the advent of photography.
For Nilsson the archaeologist, the artifacts and monumental remains that the archaeologist unearths in the field and interprets and reports about in the scholarly journals are important. They illuminate our understanding of our collective past.
“But history is made of actual people,” he is quick to add.
And this is where he lights up. “Making a facial reconstruction is like opening a window to the past, an opportunity to see what the people from history really looked like,” he told Popular Archaeology. “So the face tells a direct story to the beholder, establishing an emotional and personal connection that text or written records can never accomplish.”
Looking at his creations, one can see precisely what he means. A medieval face stares defiantly back at you and you can hear the face’s owner say in your mind’s ear, “I have been ill-treated.” Or a 13th century Swedish ruler, whose face shows not only his past-prime age but the contemplative facial expression of a man weighed by the momentary task of making an important decision, says “give me pause to think.” So life-like are the reconstructions, one could almost ask of these long-dead people: “Have we met before?” Archaeology, history, osteological analysis, state-of-the-art technology, and the skill of a seasoned artist and other artisans—all have combined to inform the creation.
His finished subjects have ranged from a 5500-year-old Stone Age man whose remains were unearthed near Stonehenge in the U.K., to a young Greek girl who died in Athens around 430 B.C., to six drowned victims of a salvaged 17th century warship. With 50 subjects completed thus far, his works grace the exhibit halls of museums around the world. “My ambition is to get the museum visitor as close to the people of the past as possible,” he says. And like any artist, he has some personal favorites:
In the Museums
Located on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden, the Vasa Museum houses the only nearly completely intact 17th century ship that has ever been salvaged, the warship Vasa, which sank on her maiden voyage in 1628. It draws visitors from around the world, making this Scandinavia’s most visited museum attraction—and for good reason. Remarkably preserved in striking detail, it appears almost as if it were built only decades ago. Equally remarkable, however, is the adjacent exhibit of six hyper-realistic facial reconstructions derived from the excavated skeletal remains of drowned seamen who vanquished with the ship. They represent the results of one of Nilsson’s favorite projects. “To reconstruct six faces of the drowned victims from the Vasa ship was a very special project,” Nilsson told Popular Archaeology. He mentioned several other projects in the same vain, the reconstructions of which are found in other museums, such as 9 faces of seamen connected to the Mary Rose—the flagship of renaissance England’s King Henry VIII—a Stone Age man from Stonehenge, and the “Bocksten Man”.
The Bocksten Man reconstruction strikes a particularly strong chord with Nilsson for a number of reasons. The remains of this individual, discovered and excavated from a bog about 15 miles east of Varburg on the west coast of Sweden, is among Sweden’s most famous medieval ‘cold cases’, evidencing a violent death. His clothing and other accoutrements were found in remarkably well-preserved condition. As Nilsson describes:
“Before the reconstruction was made his skeleton, including hair and skin tissues, were on display in the museum in Varberg. This has made a lasting memory for generations of school children who visited the museum. He became ”the phantom”, a frightening image of a violent death. But once my reconstruction was completed and displayed, something happened; he became a human instead of a freak. He regained some of his dignity here.
But the story itself is incredibly intriguing. This man, who died around 1370, may have been impaled. This has been interpreted as an attempt by the medieval community of the time to prevent the man from rising from the scene of his death as a ghost and haunting his killers and the neighborhood.
Who was he? His clothes tell the story of a man of elevated status in society. But the times and the region he lived in were violent. Was he a sheriff, plundering the region, thereby making enemies? This is a common theory.”
Currently, he works on reconstructing the face of an 18-year-old Greek girl called “Aygis”, who died about 8,000 years ago during the Mesolithic age. The antiquity of her skeletal remains were significant, but it wasn’t simply age that brought her case to Nilsson. “I made a reconstruction of ”Myrtis”, a young girl from Greek antiquity (430 B.C.) years ago for the same client, himself being an orthodontist,” said Nilsson. “Both these ancient skulls have very significant dental closures, and that is why they were chosen. Their unique dental closures produced two quite special faces—perhaps not pretty—but full of individuality.”
In the case of Myrtis, it was established that she had probably died of Typhoid during the 430 B.C. Plague of Athens, an epidemic that even saw the deaths of King Pericles and his family. The case of Aygis was not so clear-cut, however. Aygis’ bones exhibited no trace of disease. And except in rare cases or when the osteological analysis has revealed traumatic injuries as the cause of death, for most of Nilsson’s subjects the cause of death is unknown. But the question remains: Why would a young, healthy 18-year-old girl simply die? “It can be tempting to draw the conclusion that the remains from a young person that show no traces of illness, disease or trauma had good stamina, as the bones look so healthy,” says Nilsson. “But it is much more likely that it is the other way around. A simple cold can be the cause of death in such cases. This contradiction is called the osteological paradox.”
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The Myrtis reconstruction. Courtesy Oscar Nilsson
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Above: The Bocksten Man: The remains of a medieval man’s body were found in a bog in Varburg Municipality, Sweden. The bog is located about 24 kilometres (15 mi) east of Varberg on the west coast of Sweden, close to the Via Regia, which is known to have been an important medieval road in the area. The remains were found as farmer Albert Johansson was gathering peat with a harrow from a drained bog on 22 June 1936. On closer examination, Johansson identified parts of a skeleton and the following day contacted the local police and a physician. It was first suspected as possible evidence of a recent murder, but upon further investigation it was determined to be too old to be of criminal interest.
A local museum curator, Albert Sandklef, was contacted. Sandklef invited a team of other experts — among them the well-known geologist Lennart von Post, to examine and excavate the site.
Generally (though with uncertainty) dated to between the 13th and 15th centuries, the remains indicate that the man was about 170–180 centimetres (67–71 in) tall and slenderly built. He suffered a traumatic injury on the right side of his cranium. Of the inner organs, parts of the lungs, liver and brain as well as cartilage were preserved. The tunic is among the best-preserved medieval tunics in Europe, made of woollen fabric. He was wearing a gugel hood with a liripipe (“tail”). On his upper body he wore a shirt and a cloak, his legs covered with hosiery. In addition to the clothing, excavators recovered a fabric bag, foot coverings, leather shoes, a belt, a leather sheath and two knives.
Scientists suggest that the man was likely violently knocked into the what was at the time a lake (later becoming a bog).
Who was this man and what is the story behind the find? One hypothesis has it that he was Simon Gudmundi, the dean of the Diocese of Linköping, who died on May 12, 1491. In his book, Who was the Bocksten Man?, Owe Wennerholm argues that Gudmundi’s name may be the interpretation of initials that were found on what is thought to possibly be a micro shield among the finds. Historically, he argues that it is also likely that Gudmundi visited the area. Wennerhol suggests that he may have been killed by order of Hemming Gadh so that Gadh could assume the post of dean of the Diocese of Linköping. This, however, is only one of a number of possibilities and we may never know who the Bocksten Man really was in life. Photos, above and below, courtesy of Charlotta Sandelin, Hallands Kulturhistoriska Museum.
Above and below, reconstruction of an archer from the Mary Rose. Courtesy May Rose Museum
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Above: During preparations for the new Stonehenge visitors center, Nilsson puts the finishing touches to the head reconstructed from a male Neolithic skeleton unearthed near the Stonehenge site. Explains Nilsson about the subject: “The grave was discovered in the late 19th century but the bones were recently the subject of extensive analysis and surveys. Some of the results from those analyses are amazing: He was born around 5,500 years ago well to the west or north west of the Stonehenge area, probably in what is today Wales, Devon or Brittany. At 2 years old he moved to the area near Stonehenge, and aged 9 he moved back to the west again. As he grew older his frequency of travel back and forth between those two places increased. How do we know all this? By analyzing the successive layers of the enamel in his teeth, isotopic values of strontium and oxygen reflected the sources of his drinking water.
He lived some time before the famous stone circle was built, but decades after his death, the mound of his grave was massively enlarged, one of the grandest known from Neolithic Britain. We also know from the analysis that he had a much higher percentage of meat and dairy products in his diet than would probably have been normal at the time. And he was taller than the average Neolithic man—172 cm compared to the average height, 165 cm. So, this was clearly a person of high status in his society.”Photo by Clare Kendall/English Heritage
The combined science, techniques and tools of Nilsson’s trade define a specialty that arguably only a comparatively small number of professionals across the globe can claim. As seemingly narrowly specialized as this area is, however, it does not begin in the studio. It actually begins in the field……..
From the site to the lab
Human skeletal and funerary remains have long defined some of the “sexiest” stuff of archaeology. The headline-making news of discoveries such as the remains of King Richard III, the possible bones of King Philip II of Macedon, and some nearly complete fossil skeletons of early human ancestors testify to this. But these sensational discoveries are only a few. Skeletal finds unearthed at most other archaeological sites, for which most of us hear little about, are legion by comparison. Like their more famous representatives, they are carefully, meticulously, and methodically removed from their original earthen matrixes by specially trained excavators and archaeologists, and undergo a preliminary analysis in the field as they are excavated. The real analysis of these specimens, however, occurs after they are brought into the osteological and forensic labs offsite. Here, the scientists examine the remains with physical tools and often high-tech, radiological equipment such as CT and laser scanning devices to probe their secrets and create three-dimensional models for further study. Forensic scientists and osteologists can sometimes tease a wealth of information from the bones, such as age, sex, height, weight, health condition, cause of death, and even occupation. Parts of some of these subjects, such as skulls or crania, are reproduced into replica copies using 3D “printer” technology. These replicas, or osteological reproductions, often make their way to museums or other labs for show or study by other experts. Or, in a few cases, to experts who can use them to produce realistic reproductions of the individuals the copy represents—bringing them to life, so to speak.
This is where Nilsson enters the picture.
In the studio
Nilsson would be the first to say that reconstructing the face of a long-deceased individual is not as simple as taking a guess and, with full artistic license, applying clay and paint over a plastic skull. He must gather as much information as possible about the individual he is re-creating. This means information about the time and place in which the person lived, the context and circumstances of the original skeletal finds, and detailed findings from the examining osteologists and forensic experts about the skull of the individual excavated or exhumed. This often goes beyond the basics, such as age, sex, height and weight estimates. It may involve any number of signs teased from the bones that may reflect the person’s health, condition or lifestyle. “Any trace of disease, ailment or trauma is of big importance,” says Nilsson. “As my goal is to find the individuality in the face, a broken nosebone or a characteristic scar can get us a more precise image of the deceased´s face.”
Next, his task is to determine the unique form of the soft tissue of the face. He does this by attaching small, meticulously measured wooden pegs at anatomical points across the skull, defining the characteristic depth of the tissue at any point of the face and the cranium. To do this with accuracy, he must apply years of anatomical knowledge, with reference to special statistical tables of measurements subdivided by age, weight, sex and ethnicity. “On these points, measurements have been taken on humans for more than 100 years now,” notes Nilsson.
Once this framework is in place, he inserts prosthetic eyes and the actual sculpting begins, involving the shaping and placement of non-drying plasticine clay to recreate the muscles and tissues using traditional sculpting tools. As he works and the face takes shape, he graduates to smaller and smaller tools, finally recreating the details and any wrinkles of the overlying skin with variously sized needles. From this finely created three-dimensional model, he is then able to produce Acrystal molds into which he pours flesh-colored silicone to produce the model over which he paints the finishing touches for features, including application of the hair.
How truthful are Nilsson’s reconstructions to the people who actually lived?
We know the scientific evidence, technology, and anatomical knowledge likely facilitates an accurate recreation of the basic facial size and form. But the cosmetic aspect—such things as skin color, hair color, and eye color—says Nilsson, is a bit trickier. Sometimes this may take an educated guess. “I try to bear in mind that people in the past lived their lives more outdoors than we do. This means more pigmented skin, more birthmarks, blisters etc., and the skin ages more quickly from the UV-radiation. Most speculative are the ears and the color of the eyes and hair. In recent years the use of DNA analysis on the originally excavated material can predict, with high probability, the eye and hair color. As this can be sensitive to speculate about, this development in my opinion is a blessing. But as it is time consuming and a bit expensive, it has only been used on one of my projects, a murder victim from the Bronze Age. I’m hoping to use it more frequently in my future projects.”
Looking Ahead
One day soon, museums will not be the only place a visitor can see Nilsson’s lifelike reconstructions. He plans to open his new studio space with exhibitions of his own.
Popular Archaeology asked Nilsson about his upcoming projects. “One of the reconstructions planned is a 14-year-old Stone Age girl that was found buried together with a very small child,” he responds. Her remains were discovered at a site known as Tybrind Vig in Denmark in the 1970’s. Dated to about 5500 – 5000 BC, Tybrind Vig is a Late Mesolithic Ertebølle Culture site, yielding graves and remarkably well-preserved organic materials like dugout boats and paddles. To recover the girl’s remains and those of the child, archaeologists had to work underwater, as the bones were submerged 300 meters offshore to a depth of 3 – 4.5 meters. In her time, her place of rest would have been dry, hugging the shore, when there was a greater abundance of inland ice in Scandinavia and the sea level was lower.” The Stone Age girl reconstruction will join other objects of the Tybrind Vig discoveries at Denmark’s Moesgård Museum.
Another upcoming project involves reconstruction of the face of a Stone Age man unearthed near Ulricehamn, Sweden in 1994. “Judging from his bones he was extremely robust with very broad shoulders,” said Nilsson.“And the skull of this 45-60-year-old man exhibits a significant elevated ridge running from his forehead to the back of his head, making it peak-shaped from a frontal view. These well-preserved bones surprised everyone when the result of the C14 dating came back: he was 10,000 years old and, with that, Sweden’s oldest skeleton. He’s named ‘Bredgården Man’, after the name of the farmhouse near the site of the discovery.”
Finally, Nilsson added, “I also have a ‘wish list’ of projects for the future. One is to reconstruct the face from an Egyptian mummy. The period has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. And, of course, a gladiator! A significant number of remains from Roman gladiators were found in York some years ago. This would be a fantastic project, as a gladiators´ life was so dramatic and cruel. The bones would tell the story.”
Popular Archaeology Magazine is pleased to announce the release of its Fall 2015 issue. This richly illustrated issuance contains the following fascinating stories:
1. Before Kings and Palaces
Archaeologists have uncovered a 9,000-year-old Neolithic town in Turkey, offering a glimpse of life at the dawn of civilization. (A premium article)
2. Royal Bones: Where Lies the Warrior King of Macedon?
Scientists believe they have identified the remains of Philip II of Macedon, the famous Greek warrior king and father of Alexander the Great. But there are skeptics, and the debate rages on. (A premium article)
3. Faces from the Past
How an archaeologist sculptor is bringing bones of the dead back to life, giving us a look at startlingly realistic reconstructions of the faces of people who lived long before us. (A premium article)
4. Digging the City of Goliath
Archaeologists have made big discoveries at Philistine Gath, the hometown of the Biblical King David’s first vanquished foe. (A free article with a regular subscription)
5. Meadowcroft
Popular Archaeology details an exclusive interview with the renowned archaeologist who uncovered North America’s oldest and longest inhabited early Native American site. (A premium article)
6. Not Quite Neanderthal
Unprecedented discoveries in a Spanish cave are helping scientists redraw the picture of human evolution in Western Europe. (A premium article)
7. Discoveries at Magdala
Archaeologists have unearthed rare finds at a site that witnessed the tumultuous times of Jesus and the First Jewish Revolt. (A free article with a regular subscription)
Plus, two more stories, The Mysterious Chacmool and the Redbox Femur, will soon be added as bonus content. (Both free articles with a regular subscription)
We hope you will enjoy these new feature articles, and look forward to any comments or suggestions you may have regarding the current or future content of the magazine.
An international team of researchers has sequenced the first complete genome of an Iberian farmer, which is also the first sequenced ancient genome from the entire Mediterranean area. This new genome sequencing opens a window on understanding the distinctive genetic changes that map Neolithic migration in Southern Europe, which possibly led to the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer way of life. The study is led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), in collaboration with the Centre for GeoGenetics in Denmark. The results are published in the Molecular Biology and Evolution journal.
A prevailing theory suggests that the first farmers entering Europe about 8,000 years ago coming from the Near East spread through the continent following two different routes: one to Central Europe via the Danube, and the other toward the Iberian peninsula following the Mediterranean coast. These latter farmers developed their own cultural tradition: the Cardium Pottery, so-called due to a characteristic incised decoration made with the edges of bivalves shells belonging to the genus Cerastoderma (formerly Cardium).
So far, only genomic data of various individuals belonging to the inland route found in Hungary and Germany have been available, but complete genomes from individuals of the Mediterranean route have been missing. This is partly due to the climatic conditions in Southern Europe, which hinder the conservation of genetic material.
The research team, led by Carles Lalueza-Fox from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, has sequenced the complete genome of a Neolithic woman from a tooth dated to 7400 years ago, recovered from the cardial levels of the Cova Bonica cave in Vallirana, near Barcelona.This site is being excavated by a team from the University of Barcelona, led by Joan Daura, Montserrat Sanz, Mireia Pedro, Xavier Oms and Pablo Martinez. In addition, they have recovered partial genomic data from three other sites: Cova de l’Or (Alicante) and Cova de la Sarsa (Valencia) in Spain, and Almonda (Portugal).
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The cave named Cova Bonica, in Vallirana (Barcelona, Spain), where the remains were found. Courtesy Joan Daura/ Montserrat Sanz
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Thanks to this newly sequenced genome, researchers have been able to determine that farmers from both the Mediterranean and inland routes are very homogeneous and clearly derive from a common ancestral population that, most likely, were the first farmers who entered Europe through Anatolia.
According to Iñigo Olalde, first author of the paper, “the sequencing of this genome has been possible thanks to new advances in both techniques of ancient DNA extraction, building of and construction techniques of genomic libraries, and massive sequencing; from an experimental point of view, it has been quite challenging”.
Analysis of the genome from Cova Bonica has made it possible to determine the appearance of these pioneer farmers, who had light skin and dark eyes and hair. This contrasts with previous Mesolithic hunters who, as the man from La Braña in León (Spain)—recovered in 2014 by the same research team—has demonstrated, had blue eyes and a darker skin than current Europeans. Both individuals are only separated by 600 years and 800 kilometers; however, they are very different from a genetic and physical standpoint. Modern Iberians mostly derive from these farmers, with Sardinians and Basques preserving the farming genetic component to the largest extent.
For Carles Lalueza-Fox, “this study is only the first step of a major project done in collaboration with David Reich at the Broad Institute that aims to create an Iberian paleogenomic transect, from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages. So far, we have genomic data from fifty individuals and we want to reach more than one hundred. Being at the westernmost edge of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula is crucial to understanding the final impact of population movements such as the Neolithic or the later steppe migrations that entered Europe from the East.”
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
After examining the body size and shape of fossils from the Sima de los Huesos(SH) site in Spain, researchers report evidence that Neanderthal features did not arise in tandem as a package but instead followed a mosaic pattern of evolution, wherein evolutionary changes in some body parts preceded others. SH is a Middle Pleistocene site with the largest collection of postcranial skeletons—parts of the skeleton apart from the skull—ever found. The skeletal remains, including the cranial (skull) specimens, represent individuals of a single population of early humans who lived about 430,000 years ago in what is presently northern Spain.
Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Centro Mixto Universidad Complutense de Madrid and colleagues closely examined and measured 1,523 fossil elements, representing a minimum number of 19 individuals, from the collection using raw values for key skeletal parts as proxies to estimate stature, body breadth, and weight. They also compared the results for the same values from data derived from other early human fossils, including hominins dated to much earlier times. From these results, they were able to characterize the body design of SH postcranial skeletons, finding that the SH individuals were relatively tall, with wide, muscular bodies. Although similarly built to Neanderthals, they had generally less brain mass than the classic Neanderthals. They were shorter, wider and more robust than the much later Homo sapiens, or modern humans (MH), with less brain to body mass. The researchers concluded that the SH humans shared many anatomical features with Neanderthals, although some other key Neanderthal features were not present in the SH group of fossils, suggesting in their analysis that the SH humans were a sister group to later Neanderthals, and that the characteristics that eventually defined later Neanderthals did not all evolve together, but separately, in a mosaic pattern through time. They also concluded that the generally wide SH body plan provided additional evidence that early humans, before Homo sapiens, changed relatively little in this respect over the million years preceding the rise of modern humans. Modern humans, compared to their more ancient SH, Neanderthal, and other ancestral species and cousin lineages, are generally taller, narrower, and with the largest brain mass to body mass relationship (more encephalized).
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This image shows the upper and lower limb bones of those adults found in Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. Image: Carretero et al.
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This is a complete SH skeleton assembled from samples excavated at Sima de los Huesos. Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
A team at work inside the cave: The Sima de los Huesos site. Image courtesy Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films
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“In sum,” concluded the researchers, “SH offers the best proxy for the general postcranial size and shape of Homo for at least the past 1 million years until the appearance of MH. Despite large periods of morphological stasis in the general body plan, the anatomical details of the postcranial skeleton, as revealed in the SH sample, offer the best evidence for a pattern of mosaic evolution in the postcranium within the Neandertal lineage.”*
*Juan-Luis Arsuaga et al., Postcranial morphology of the middle Pleistocene humans from Sima de los Huesos, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1514828112
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Bar-Ilan University—One of the most pressing issues in modern biological conservation is “invasion biology”. Due to unprecedented contacts between peoples and culture in today’s “global village” certain animal and plant species are spreading widely throughout the world, often causing enormous damage to local species.
Recent studies have shown that alien species have had a substantial impact not only in recent times but also in antiquity. This is exemplified in a study published in the August 25th issue of Scientific Reports by a team led by archaeologists from Bar-Ilan University’s Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology (Suembikya (Sue) Frumin, Prof. Ehud Weiss and Prof. Aren Maeir) and the Hebrew University (Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz), describing the bio-archaeological remains of the Philistine culture during the Iron Age (12th century to 7th century BCE). The team compiled a database of plant remains extracted from Bronze and Iron Ages sites in the southern Levant, both Philistine and non-Philistine. By analyzing this database, the researchers concluded that the Philistines brought to Israel not just themselves but also their plants.
The species they brought are all cultivars that had not been seen in Israel previously. This includes edible parts of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) which originates in western Europe; the sycamore tree (Ficus sycomorus), whose fruits are known to be cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, and whose presence in Israel as a locally grown tree is first attested to in the Iron Age by the presence of its fruit; and finally, cumin (Cuminum cyminum), a spice originating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sue Frumin, a PhD student at Prof. Ehud Weiss’s archaeobotanical lab, Bar-Ilan University, explains that “the edible parts of these species – opium poppy, sycamore, and cumin – were not identified in the archaeobotanical record of Israel prior to the Iron Age, when the Philistine culture first appeared in the region. None of these plants grows wild in Israel today, but instead grows only as cultivated plants.”
In addition to the translocation of exotic plants from other regions, the Philistines were the first community to exploit over 70 species of synanthropic plants (species which benefit from living in the vicinity of man) that were locally available in Israel, such as Purslane, Wild Radish, Saltwort, Henbane and Vigna. These plant species were not found in archaeological sites pre-dating the Iron Age, or in Iron Age archaeological sites recognized as belonging to non-Philistine cultures – Canaanite, Israelite, Judahite, and Phoenician. The “agricultural revolution” that accompanied the Philistine culture reflects a different agrarian regime and dietary preferences to that of their contemporaries.
The fact that the three exotic plants introduced by the Philistines originate from different regions accords well with the diverse geographic origin of these people. The Philistines – one of the so called Sea Peoples, and mentioned in the Bible and other ancient sources – were a multi-ethnic community with origins in the Aegean, Turkey, Cyprus and other regions in the Eastern Mediterranean who settled on the southern coastal plain of Israel in the early Iron Age (12th century BCE), and integrated with Canaanite and other local populations, finally to disappear at the end of the Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE).
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Species turnover between the Bronze and Iron Age at Iron Age sites. Each site is marked by two columns. The green column marks the number of Bronze Age species found in the Iron Age floral list. The red column marks the number of new species in Iron Age sites. Numbers beneath the site name give the absolute numbers of Bronze Age /Iron Age species. Map produced by M. Frumin using ArcGIS for Desktop (ArcMap 10.1), ESRI.
This is the structure of Iron Age Floral List at each site. Circle size reflects the total number of new plant species recognized in Iron Age sites. Red indicates new species that appeared only in Philistine Iron Age sites. Green indicates species that appeared only in non-Philistine Iron Age contexts. Blue denotes species shared by Philistine and non-Philistine sites. The three numbers represent the quantity of Philistine species/non-Philistine species/shared species, at a site. Map produced by M. Frumin using ArcGIS for Desktop (ArcMap 10.1), ESRI.
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The results of this research indicate that the ca. 600 year presence of the Philistine culture in Israel had a major and long-term impact on local floral biodiversity. The Philistines left as a biological heritage a variety of plants still cultivated in Israel, including, among others, sycamore, cumin, coriander, bay tree and opium poppy.
The Philistines also left their mark on the local fauna. In a previous study also published in Scientific Reports in which two of the present authors (Maeir and Kolska Horwitz) participated, DNA extracted from ancient pig bones from Philistine and non-Philistine sites in Israel demonstrated that European pigs were introduced by the Philistines into Israel and slowly swamped the local pig populations through inter-breeding. As a consequence, modern wild boar in Israel today bears a European haplotype rather than a local, Near Eastern one.
As illustrated by these studies, the examination of the ancient bio-archaeological record has the potential to help us understand the long-term mechanisms and vectors that have contributed to current floral and faunal biodiversity, information that may also assist contemporary ecologists in dealing with the pressing issue of invasive species.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
In a newly published paper*, Smithsonian anthropologist Richard Potts and anthropologist J. Tyler Faith of the University of Queensland, Australia, relate in detail the results of years of study defining a predictive model of climate and environmental variability correlated with key changes or stages in human evolution in East Africa and China. The study, in concert with previous studies, challenges some long-held theories about what has driven the mechanisms of human evolution.
The model, say the authors, predicts eight long periods of environmental instability in East Africa correlated with times of hominin evolutionary innovations as a result of natural selection resulting from the variability. The research also included data derived from palynological study in the Nihewan Basin of China, where evidence suggests that early humans survived and successfully adapted to a new, radically changed environment.
“Unstable climate conditions favored the evolution of the roots of human flexibility in our ancestors,” says Potts. “The narrative of human evolution that arises from our analyses stresses the importance of adaptability to changing environments, rather than adaptation to any one environment, in the early success of the genus Homo.”**
The paper is at least in part a reflection of the core of Pott’s years of research in East Africa and China, at sites such as the Olorgesailie Basin, the Turkana and Olduvai Basins, the Tugen Hills and the Hadar Basin, all in East Africa; and the the Nihewan Basin in China. Much of his research has focused on testing what he has penned the variability selection hypothesis, which proposes that it was adaptability to change, not the long-held notion of specialization, that was a key to human evolution. It challenges the long-held “savanna hypothesis”, which has suggested that our genus, Homo, emerged and evolved at least in part due to adaptations (such as walking upright, dietary change, a larger brain and body, and making tools) as a result of a major, gradual climate change from a warmer, wetter forest environment on the African continent to a cooler, drier one that resulted in the spread of a savanna grassland. This latest study report follows a recent study published in the journal Science, wherein he and co-author colleagues Susan Antón, professor of anthropology at New York University, and Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, reported results from comprehensive research on shifting paleoclimates, ancient stone tools, isotopes found in teeth, and cut marks found on animal bones in East Africa. The findings have supported an emerging new consensus that suggests a rethinking of some of the long-held assumptions about human origins and evolution.
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Richard Potts and colleagues in the field in East Africa. Screen shot from video, see below.
*Richard Potts, J. Tyler Faith, Alternating high and low climate variability: The context of natural selection and speciation in Plio-Pleistocene hominin evolution, Journal of Human Evolution, 25 August 2015 doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.06.014
**From a press release of the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian scientist and collaborators revise timeline of human origins, 3 July 2014
Cover image, top left: Scientist surveying in the field in East Africa. Screenshot from video, see above.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
In 2011, Popular Archaeology Magazine published an article by Mirjana Roksandic, a prominent paleoanthropologist with the University of Winnipeg, touching on the discovery of a partial hominin mandible in the Mala Balanica cave in the Sicevo Gorge in Serbia.
With the new release of that article entitled The Road through Sicevo as a free access article, the findings related to the mandible are now updated based on the publication of Roksandic’s later paper, The Role of the Balkans in the Peopling of Europe: New Evidence from Serbia. That paper explained that Electron Spin Resonance and Thermoluminescence dating have suggested a date range between 395 and 525 Kya for the age of the subject fossil. The testing and study was conducted by an international team of researchers that included William Jack Rink of McMaster University, Canada, Dušan Mihailović, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Mirjana Roksandic, University of Winnipeg, Canada.* Mihailović and Roksandic were both involved in the initial discovery of the ancient mandible (scientifically labeled “BH-1”) in 2008.
The dating now supports the observable primitive morphology of the mandible with that of an early Middle Pleistocene archaic human, although different from hominin fossils found for the same time period in the western regions of Europe. Significant to the research on Middle Pleistocene human evolution in Europe and Southwest Asia, the mandible bears characteristics not attributable to any species with Neanderthal features, or Neanderthal derived features. This includes Homo heidelbergensis, an early human species long generally accepted to be a possible ancestor to Neanderthals in Europe. Overall, these new findings have implied a possible evolutionary and human dispersal picture that is more complex than previously thought, with the Balkans representing “the only refugium that never experienced isolation,” and therefore playing a role “in maintaining gene flow and allowing primitive traits to remain present in the population for a longer period of time.”**
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Excavations underway in the Mala Balanica cave. Courtesy Mirjana Roksandic
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Partiable mandible BH-1, discovered in the Mala Balanica Cave in 2008. From Rink WJ, Mercier N, Mihailovic´ D, Morley MW, Thompson JW, et al. (2013) New Radiometric Ages for the BH-1 Hominin from Balanica (Serbia): Implications for Understanding the Role of the Balkans in Middle Pleistocene Human Evolution.PLoS ONE 8(2): e54608. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054608 Courtesy Mirjana Roksandic
See the premium article about this subject, now released as a free article.
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*Rink WJ, Mercier N, Mihailovic´ D, Morley MW, Thompson JW, et al. (2013) New Radiometric Ages for the BH-1 Hominin from Balanica (Serbia): Implications for Understanding the Role of the Balkans in Middle Pleistocene Human Evolution.PLoS ONE 8(2): e54608. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054608
**Mirjana Roksandic, The Role of the Balkans in the Peopling of Europe: New Evidence from Serbia, Recent Discoveries and Perspectives in Human Evolution, Manchester 2013
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
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Roksandic concludes: “While isolation [due to glaciation] represented the major mechanism of evolutionary change in the west of the continent, causing a bottleneck and fixation of derived traits, the [warmer refuge of the] Balkan Peninsula did not experience the effects of isolation.”*
The findings also support the model of the Balkans as a critical connecting region with Southwest Asia in the dispersal of humans, possibly consisting of multiple major migrations.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Palatial ancient homes with basements with vaulted ceilings, countless pottery fragments, other artifacts left in place since deposited as much as 2,000 or more years ago—these are the kinds of things that a team of archaeologists, students and volunteers with the Mount Zion excavations project have been digging up just below the historic walls of Jerusalem, the city sacred to three of the world’s great religions.
Led by Shimon Gibson, a British-born Israeli archaeologist, who is also adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) and Senior Associate Fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, along with James Tabor, a well-known scholar of early Christianity and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, also at UNC Charlotte, the team has recently completed its 2015 season of excavations, building on the large collection of finds and records they have already amassed from previous seasons—findings that are helping them to gradually piece together what life was like for the people who lived here centuries before in the shadow of Jerusalem’s ancient walls.
“We’re uncovering ancient Jerusalem in all of its periods,” says Tabor in a recently made news documentary about the dig. “This is actually the center of the city” he says about the location of the dig. That’s because the historic 15th-16th century Old City wall that overlooks the site did not exist for most of the time periods represented by the finds his team are uncovering. “So you have to imagine markets and houses and streets, and those are not visible now. It’s like a city arising out of the soil.”*
Says Gibson: “The early remains that we thought were badly preserved turned out to be extremely well preserved, with houses, palatial houses dating back 2,000 years, with the ceilings of the lower basement levels intact, vaulted ceilings, and doorways leading into different chambers.”*
Some of the finds made in previous seasons include a plastered cistern, a stepped and plastered ritual bathing pool (‘mikveh’) with a well preserved barrel-vaulted ceiling, a chamber containing three bread ovens (‘tabuns’), Early Roman pottery, lamps, stone vessels, murex shells, coins, Roman Tenth Legion stamped roof tiles, and what appeared to be a relatively rare and well-preserved, plastered bathtub. Gibson and Tabor suggest that what they are finding could be a wealthy neighborhood and, given the site’s proximity to the location of the Herodian-built Second Temple known from the time of Jesus, possibly a community that included priests who served at the Temple.
Gibson hopes that, beyond the scientific and scholarly gain that will be generated by the excavations and research, the work here will set the stage for an archaeological park open to the public. “With time,” he adds, “when we have completed the excavation work, we will be getting down to preserving the archaeological remains and then opening it up as a park so that one day these people that are now passing by in bewilderment looking at our tents and seeing all this fuss being made in these excavation trenches will be able to come down and pass through and see all of these amazing remains in a way which together combine into a kind of theatre of history.”*
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Above: The Mount Zion dig site. Courtesy Shimon Gibson and the Mount Zion Excavations Project.
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Looking down into the area of the basement of a Herodian period house. Courtesy Shimon Gibson and the Mount Zion Excavation Project.
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Tabor envisions a close and developing connection between the project, Jerusalem and UNC Charlotte and the Charlotte community, building a bridge between two locations thousands of miles apart, physically separated by geography and different cultures, but joined by their common humanity.
“We want the University to have an impact on the community,” said Tabor, “and this is one of the ways—a UNC Charlotte connection, but also for the city of Charlotte. This is our Charlotte pride here. What other city has a dig in Jerusalem?”*
UNC Charlotte is the only non-Israeli school with a license to dig in Jerusalem.
A detailed feature article about the Mount Zion dig was published in the December, 2013 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine and can be accessed here.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Many decades of scientific research and archaeological excavations have produced a wealth of data, in the form of fossils, artifacts, and the resulting information and insights they have afforded, about a human genus that, for the better part of over two million years, scavenged, hunted, foraged and fished for a living. Museum dioramas depict small groups of hardy, spear- and bow-and-arrow equipped hunting parties bringing down Ice Age megafauna like the woolly mammoth or other giant Ice Age mammals in North America or Eurasia. Artists illustrate early human groups with stone hand axes slicing up scavenged or hunted lion prey on the African savannah a million years ago in what is today Kenya or Tanzania. Past studies have suggested that many vulnerable species that thrived in land areas occupied by humans over the past 40,000 years have gone extinct, at least in part due to exploitation by cooperative human hunter-gatherers who, because of their cultural and technological evolution, were able to successfully prey upon larger animals and a more diverse faunal set.
But legions of past human hunters notwithstanding, none of them can compare to the human “super predator” of today.
Such might be the conclusion of anyone reading a recent study published in the journal Science by Chris Darimont and colleagues of the University of Victoria. In that study, Darimont and his team conducted a survey of 399 animal species for a total of 2,125 estimates combining both terrestrial and marine environments across the globe. What they found was a predominant human pattern of preying on adults of other species at rates up to 14 times higher than other predators, with especially focused exploitation of terrestrial carnivores and fishes.
“We reveal striking differences in exploitation rates between nonhuman predators and contemporary humans, particularly fishers and carnivore hunters,” report Darimont, et al. “Clearly, nonhuman predators influence prey availability to humans. But overwhelmingly these consumers target juveniles, the reproductive “interest” of populations. In contrast, humans—released from limits other predators encounter—exploit the “capital” (adults) at exceptionally higher rates,” the authors continued.* Our dominance is most pronounced in the marine environment—the oceans—they maintain.
“Our wickedly efficient killing technology, global economic systems and resource management that prioritize short-term benefits to humanity have given rise to the human super predator,” says Darimont, also science director for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.
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Horned animals with human hunters in late bronze age petroglyph at Tangaly, Kazakhstan. Ken and Nyetta, Wikimedia Commons
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Above: Wildlife under pressure. Darimont et al. show that the rates at which humans exploit land mammals and marine fish vastly exceeds the impacts of other predators. Marine fish experience “fishing through marine food webs,” with diiferent trophic groups similarly affected. In contrast, on land top predators are exploited at much higher rates than are herbivores. Courtesy P. Huey/ Science
But the biggest story may be the potential consequences. The authors point to the impact it is having and will continue to have on the current and future global ecosystems and environment, a subset of which could be the eventual extinction of the prey humans target.
“Our impacts are as extreme as our behaviour and the planet bears the burden of our predatory dominance,” says Darimont.
Write the authors in the report: “The implications that can result are now increasingly costly to humanity, and add new urgency to reconsidering the concept of sustainable exploitation.”*
Will we be the victims of our own evolutionary success in this sense, or could we as a species successfully adapt our behavior and conserve the current ecosystem? Boris Worm, in a related article published in the same issue of Science, makes some concluding statements about the insights we have gained from this study and other similar studies that have preceded it. One of them stands out in relation to Darimont, et al.’s conclusions. Compared to all other predators, “we have the unusual ability to analyze and consciously adjust our behavior to minimize deleterious consequences.”**
*”The unique ecology of human predators,” by C.T. Darimont; C.H. Fox; H.M. Bryan; T.E. Reimchen at University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada; C.T. Darimont; C.H. Fox; H.M. Bryan at Raincoast Conservation Foundation in Sidney, BC, Canada; C.T. Darimont; H.M. Bryan at Hakai Institute in Heriot Bay, BC, Canada. 21 August 2015, Vol. 349, Issue 6250.
**”A most unusual (super) predator,” by Boris Worm, Science, 21 August 2015, Vol. 349, Issue 6250.
Additional content adapted and edited from the related University of Victoria news release.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
The fact that the greatest diversity of large mammals is found in Africa reflects past human activities – and not climatic or other environmental constraints. This is determined in a new study, which presents what the world map of mammals would look like if modern humans (Homo sapiens) had never existed.
In a world without humans, most of northern Europe would probably now be home to not only wolves, Eurasian elk (moose) and bears, but also animals such as elephants and rhinoceroses.
This is demonstrated in a new study conducted by researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark. In a previous analysis, they have shown that the mass extinction of large mammals during the Last Ice Age and in subsequent millennia (the late-Quaternary megafauna extinction) is largely explainable by the expansion of modern human (Homo sapiens) populations across the world. In this follow-up study, they investigate what the natural worldwide diversity patterns of mammals would be like in the absence of past and present human impacts, based on estimates of the natural distribution of each species according to its ecology, biogeography and the current natural environmental template. They provide the first estimate of how the mammal diversity world map would have appeared without the impact of modern man.
“Northern Europe is far from the only place in which humans have reduced the diversity of mammals – it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And, in most places, there’s a very large deficit in mammal diversity relative to what it would naturally have been”, says Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, who is one of the researchers behind the study.
Africa is the last refuge
The current world map of mammal diversity shows that Africa is virtually the only place with a high diversity of large mammals. However, the world map constructed by the researchers of the natural diversity of large mammals shows far greater distribution of high large-mammal diversity across most of the world, with particularly high levels in North and South America, areas that are currently relatively poor in large mammals.
“Most safaris today take place in Africa, but under natural circumstances, as many or even more large animals would no doubt have existed in other places, e.g., notably parts of the New World such as Texas and neighboring areas and the region around northern Argentina-Southern Brazil. The reason that many safaris target Africa is not because the continent is naturally abnormally rich in species of mammals. Instead it reflects that it’s one of the only places where human activities have not yet wiped out most of the large animals,” says Postdoctoral Fellow Soren Faurby, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, who is the lead author on the study.
The existence of Africa’s many species of mammals is thus not due to an optimal climate and environment, but rather because it is the only place where they have not yet been eradicated by humans. The underlying reason includes evolutionary adaptation of large mammals to humans as well as greater pest pressure on human populations in long-inhabited Africa in the past.
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Above: The natural diversity of large mammals is shown as it would appear without the impact of modern man (Homo sapiens). The figure shows the variation in the number of large mammals (45 kg or larger) that would have occurred per 100 x 100 kilometer grid cell. The numbers on the scale indicate the number of species. Illustration courtesy Soren Faurby
Above: The current diversity of large mammals is shown. It can clearly be seen that large numbers of species virtually only occurs in Africa, and that there are generally far fewer species throughout the world than there could have been. Illustration courtesy Soren Faurby.
The study’s openly accessible data set of natural range maps for all late-Quatenary mammals provides researchers with the first opportunity to analyze the natural patterns in the species diversity and composition of mammals worldwide. Hereby, it can be used to provide a better understanding of the natural factors that determine the biodiversity in a specific area.
Today, there is a particularly large number of mammal species in mountainous areas. This is often interpreted as a consequence of environmental variation, where different species have evolved in deep valleys and high mountains. According to the new study, however, this trend is much weaker when the natural patterns are considered.
“The current high level of biodiversity in mountainous areas is partly due to the fact that the mountains have acted as a refuge for species in relation to hunting and habitat destruction, rather than being a purely natural pattern. An example in Europe is the brown bear, which now virtually only live in mountainous regions because it has been exterminated from the more accessible and most often more densely populated lowland areas,” explains Soren Faurby.
Hereby, this new study can provide an important base-line for nature restoration and conservation.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Teams of scientists have uncovered mass graves indicating mass murder at sites representing the same culture in time and space in Central Europe. But these instances have nothing to do with the Nazi-orchestrated holocaust of World War II. They have everything to do with a Neolithic people who lived about 7,000 years ago in what is today Germany and Austria.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anthropologist Christian Meyer of the University of Mainz and colleagues have reported study results that suggest an entire Neolithic community of people, some time between 5207 and 4849 BC, may have been massacred and dumped, without ritual or care, into mass graves at the site today known as Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Germany. One excavated mass grave provides the certain evidence that 26 people, half of them adults and half of them children, were bludgeoned in the head by “typical weapon-tools of the time”.* Furthermore, before or after their deaths, many of them were mutilated or tortured by the smashing of their lower leg bones. Arrowheads were also found among the remains, suggesting the use of arrows in an act of warfare by the perpetrators.
Meyer and colleagues came to their overall conclusions after conducting an intense osteological analysis of the bones, initially excavated at the site in 2006.
With the exception of the bone leg mutilation, similar mass grave finds were made at two other sites dated to the same time period and affiliated with the same culture—one in Talheim, Germany, and the other in Asparn/Schletz in Austria. All three sites are identified with what is called the Linearbandkeramic culture, or LBK, a major archaeological horizon of the European Neolithic, which flourished from about 5500 to 4500 BC. Combined, the finds at the three sites present implications for the later phases of the culture.
“The new evidence presented here for unequivocal lethal violence on a large scale is put into perspective for the Early Neolithic of Central Europe and, in conjunction with previous results, indicates that massacres of entire communities were not isolated occurrences but rather were frequent features of the last phases of the LBK,” wrote Meyer, et al., in their report.*
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Cranial fracture in a 3-5y old child from the Neolithic mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten, Germany. Image courtesy of Christian Meyer.
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Pictured above: Typical LBK Pottery. Collection University of Jena. Roman Grabolle, Wikimedia Commons
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Moreover, report Meyer and colleagues, “the significant absence of younger women in the Kilianstädten mass grave may indicate that these were taken captive by the attackers, as also has been suggested for the Asparn/Schletz site in Austria…we suggest that the repeated occurrence of almost indiscriminate massacres, the possible abduction of selected members, and the patterns of torture, mutilation, and careless disposal all fit into the concept of prehistoric warfare as currently understood within anthropology.”*
The finds beg the obvious questions: What was really happening? What was precipitating this mass violent behavior?
The authors suggest several possible causes, but point to a complex scenario: “Although the underlying supraregional causes for the recognized increase in mass violence in the late LBK undoubtedly were complex and multifactorial, a significant increase in population followed by adverse climatic conditions (drought), possibly coupled with the inability of long-settled farmers to practice the avoidance behavior by which hunter-gatherers typically evade conflict, seem to have been important components of the overall picture.”*
*“The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe,” by Christian Meyer, Christian Lohr, Detlef Gronenborn, and Kurt W. Alt., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 August 2015.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
In a study recently published in press in the Journal of Human Evolution, an international team of scientists report evidence that fossilized faunal (animal) remains recovered from Pliocene hominin-bearing deposits show butchery marks—cut marks that were likely made with stone tools. The subject fossil remains and their characteristic marks, they suggest, are dated to the time period of the earliest stone tools, or about 3 million years ago.
Jessica Thompson of Emory University, along with colleagues from other American universities and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, examined a large assemblage of fossils collected from the Hadar Formation at Dikika, Ethiopia, an area known to have yielded significant hominin finds bearing on the early stages of human evolution. Scrutinizing them through microscopic technigues, they were able to determine that two fossil specimens, taken from a site locality designated ‘DIK-55’, collectively showed “twelve marks interpreted to be characteristic of stone tool butchery damage.”*
The 12 marks on the two specimens – a long bone from a creature the size of a medium antelope and a rib bone from an animal closer in size to a buffalo – most closely resemble a combination of purposeful cutting and percussion marks, Thompson says. “When these bones were hit, they were hit with enormous force and multiple times.”
The paper supports the original interpretation that the damage to the two bones is characteristic of stone tool butchery, published in Nature in 2010. That finding was sensational, since it potentially pushed back evidence for the use of stone tools, as well as the butchering of large animals, by about 800,000 years.
The Nature paper was followed in 2011 by a rebuttal in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggesting that the bones were marked by incidental trampling in abrasive sediments. That sparked a series of debates about the significance of the discovery and whether the bones had been trampled.
For the current paper, Thompson and her co-authors examined the surfaces of a sample of more than 4000 other bones from the same deposits. They then used statistical methods to compare more than 450 marks found on those bones to experimental trampling marks and to the marks on the two controversial specimens.
“We would really like to understand what caused these marks,” Thompson says. “One of the most important questions in human evolution is when did we start eating meat, since meat is considered a likely explanation for how we fed the evolution of our big brains.”
Evidence shows that our genus, Homo, emerged around 2.8 million years ago. Until recently, the earliest known stone tools were 2.6 million years old. Changes had already been occurring in the organization of the brains of the human lineage, but after this time there was also an increase in overall brain size. This increased size has largely been attributed to a higher quality diet.
While some other apes are known to occasionally hunt and eat animals smaller than themselves, they do not hunt or eat larger animals that store abundant deposits of fat in the marrow of their long bones. A leading hypothesis in paleoanthropology is that a diet rich in animal protein combined with marrow fat provided the energy needed to fuel the larger human brain.
The animal bones in the Dikika site, however, have been reliably dated to long before Homo emerged. They are from the same sediments and only slightly older than the 3.3-million-year-old fossils unearthed from Dikika belonging to the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis.
Thompson specializes in the study of what happens to bones after an animal dies. “Fossil bones can tell you stories, if you know how to interpret them,” she says.
A whole ecosystem of animals, insects, fungus and tree roots modify bones. Did they get buried quickly? Or were they exposed to the sun for a while? Were they gnawed by a rodent or chomped by a crocodile? Were they trampled on sandy soil or rocky ground? Or were they purposely cut, pounded or scraped with a tool of some kind?
One way that experimental archeologists learn to interpret marks on fossil bones is by modifying modern-day bones. They hit bones with hammer stones, feed them to carnivores and trample them on various substrates, then study the results.
Based on knowledge from such experiments, Thompson was one of three specialists who diagnosed the marks on the two bones from Dikika as butchery in a blind test, before being told the age of the fossils or their origin.
The PNAS rebuttal paper, however, also used experimental methods and came to the conclusion that the marks were characteristic of trampling.
Thompson realized that data from a larger sample of fossils were needed to chip away at the mystery.
The current paper investigated with microscopic scrutiny all non-hominin fossils collected from the Hadar Formation at Dikika. The researchers collected a random sample of fossils from the same deposits as the controversial specimens, as well as nearby deposits. They measured shapes and sizes of marks on the fossil bones. Then they compared the characteristics of the fossil marks statistically to the experimental marks reported in the PNASrebuttal paper as being typical of trampling damage. They also investigated the angularity of sand grains at the site and found that they were rounded – not the angular type that might produce striations on a trampled bone.
“The random population sample of the fossils provides context,” Thompson says. “The marks on the two bones in question don’t look like other marks common on the landscape. The marks are bigger, and they have different characteristics.”
Trample marks tend to be shallow, sinuous or curvy. Purposeful cuts from a tool tend to be straight and create a narrow V-shaped groove, while a tooth tends to make a U-shaped groove. The study measured and quantified such damage to modern-day bones for comparison to the fossilized ones.
“Our analysis shows with statistical certainty that the marks on the two bones in question were not caused by trampling,” Thompson says. “While there is abundant evidence that other bones at the site were damaged by trampling, these two bones are outliers. The marks on them still more closely resemble marks made by butchering.”
One hypothesis is that butchering large animals with tools occurred during that time period, but that it was an exceedingly rare behavior. Another possibility is that more evidence is out there, but no one has been looking for it because they have not expected to find it at a time period this early.
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This is the location in Ethiopia where two stone tool modified bones were discovered in the Andedo drainage of the Dikika Research Project. One bone (DIK-55-2) was found part way up the slope to the left. The other bone was found just to the left of the limits of this photo. Courtesy Dikika Research Project
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These two bones from Dikika, which have been dated to roughly 3.4 million years ago, provide the oldest known evidence of stone tool use among human ancestors. Both of the cut-marked bones came from mammals—one is a rib fragment from a cow-sized mammal, and the other is a femur shaft fragment from a goat-sized mammal. Both bones are marred by cut, scrape, and percussion marks. Courtesy Dikika Research Project, California Academy of Sciences
This is a detail of the marks on a fossilized rib bone, one of the two controversial bones. “The best match we have for the marks, using currently available data, would still be butchery with stone tools,” says Emory University anthropologist Jessica Thompson. Photo courtesy Zeresenay Alemseged.
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The Dikika specimens represent a turning point in paleoanthropology, Thompson says. “If we want to understand when and how our ancestors started eating meat and moving into that ecological niche, we need to refine our search images for the field and apply these new recovery and analytical methods. We hope other researchers will use our work as a recipe to go out and systematically collect samples from other sites for comparison.”
In addition to Dikika, other recent finds are shaking up long held views of hominin evolution and when typical human behaviors emerged. This year, a team led by archeologist Sonia Harmand in Kenya reported unearthing stone tools that have been reliably dated to 3.3 million years ago, or 700,000 years older than the previous record.
“We know that simple stone tools are not unique to humans,” Thompson says. “The making of more complex tools, designed for more complex uses, may be uniquely human.”
The findings are significant in light of recent discoveries in East Africa that may be effectively pushing back the clock or even blurring the human evolutionary line between the earliest species of the Homo genus (early human ancestors) and an earlier or more ‘primitive’ genus known as the Australopithecines (a proto-human ancestor).
But who were the possible hominins responsible for the Dikika cut marks? Fossil remains of Australopithecus afarensis are (as of this writing) the only hominin fossils found in the area of Dikika dated to the same time period, though many more finds and much more work remains to be done before the toolmaker can be identified, if ever.
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Emory University anthropologist Jessica Thompson is shown here at work in the field in Africa. She specializes in the study of what happens to bones after an animal dies. Photo courtesy Jessica Thompson.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Mark Hallum is a staff writer for Popular Archaeology Magazine.
In 1944, the city of Vilna in Lithuania was under the grip of Nazi occupation. Like so many other Jewish communities throughout Europe at the time, citizens of Vilna became part of the Nazi “final solution” — the holocaust — including the destruction of their holy sites. Among the kosher meat stands, miqva’ot (ritual baths), and the famous Strashun rabbinical library, the most magnificent of these sites was the Great Synagogue and the Shulhof of Vilna. The synagogue was built in the 17th century in the Renaissance-Baroque style, and was burned to the ground in 1944 with the rest of the monuments to Jewish heritage in Vilna. In 1964, the Soviets demolished what was left and built a school over part of the foundation.
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The Great Synagogue of Vilna as it stood in 1934.
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Recently, however, archaeological efforts to locate the remains of the synagogue have led teams to use ground penetrating radar to identify its long-buried features. The results revealed surviving sections of the synagogue and possible remains of associated mikva’ot. They plan to initiate excavations next year. The research is a joint effort between the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Cultural Heritage Conservation Authority of Lithuania (CHCAL), with Jon Seligman (IAA), Zenonas Baubonis (CHCAL), and Richard Freund from the University of Hartford leading the project. The researchers hope to coordinate efforts of an international community of Jewish, Israeli and Lithuanian volunteers to expose the remains for study and public display, which will stand as a monument to the destruction of the entire Jewish community of Vilna.
The Israeli Antiquities Authority is encouraging sponsorship and participation in the project. Individuals interested in participating or supporting the efforts may do so by contacting the AIA.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
University of Cambridge—An international team of researchers has discovered unique ‘graffiti’ on the walls of a cave in central China, which describes the effects drought had on the local population over the past 500 years.
The information contained in the inscriptions, combined with detailed chemical analysis of stalagmites in the cave, together paint an intriguing picture of how societies are affected by droughts over time: the first time that it has been possible to conduct an in situ comparison of historical and geological records from the same cave. The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, also point to potentially greatly reduced rainfall in the region in the near future, underlying the importance of implementing strategies to deal with a world where droughts are more common.
The inscriptions were found on the walls of Dayu Cave in the Qinling Mountains of central China, and describe the impacts of seven drought events between 1520 and 1920. The climate in the area around the cave is dominated by the summer monsoon, in which about 70% of the year’s rain falls during a few months, so when the monsoon is late or early, too short or too long, it has a major impact on the region’s ecosystem.
“In addition to the obvious impact of droughts, they have also been linked to the downfall of cultures – when people don’t have enough water, hardship is inevitable and conflict arises,” said Dr Sebastian Breitenbach of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, one of the paper’s co-authors. “In the past decade, records found in caves and lakes have shown a possible link between climate change and the demise of several Chinese dynasties during the last 1800 years, such as the Tang, Yuan and Ming Dynasties.”
According to the inscriptions in Dayu Cave, residents would come to the cave both to get water and to pray for rain in times of drought. An inscription from 1891 reads, “On May 24th, 17th year of the Emperor Guangxu period, Qing Dynasty, the local mayor, Huaizong Zhu led more than 200 people into the cave to get water. A fortune-teller named Zhenrong Ran prayed for rain during the ceremony.”
Another inscription from 1528 reads, “Drought occurred in the 7th year of the Emperor Jiajing period, Ming Dynasty. Gui Jiang and Sishan Jiang came to Da’an town to acknowledge the Dragon Lake inside in Dayu Cave.”
While the inscriptions are business-like in tone, the droughts of the 1890s led to severe starvation and triggered local social instability, which eventually resulted in a fierce conflict between government and civilians in 1900. The drought in 1528 also led to widespread starvation, and there were even reports of cannibalism.
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Inscription from 1891 found in Dayu Cave. It reads: On May 24th, 17th year of the Emperor Guangxu period (June 30th, 1891 CE), Qing Dynasty, the local mayor, Huaizong Zhu led more than 200 people into the cave to get water. A fortuneteller named Zhenrong Ran prayed for rain during a ceremony. Photo credit L. Tan
Inscription from 1894 found in Dayu Cave. It reads: Draught lasted more than one month. On June 12th, 2oth year of the Emperor Guangxu period (July 14th ,1894 CE), Qing Dynasty, scholar Peilang Zheng, mayor Huaizong Zhu, heads of the clan Wenxin Zheng and Bangyun Zhen, and Zhenrong Ran. Hengyu Zhu, led more than 120 persons to the cave to get water. Photo Credit L. Tan
“There are examples of things like human remains, tools and pottery being found in caves, but it’s exceptional to find something like these dated inscriptions,” said Dr Liangcheng Tan of the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi’an, and the paper’s lead author. “Combined with the evidence found in the physical formations in the cave, the inscriptions were a crucial way for us to confirm the link between climate and the geochemical record in the cave, and the effect that drought has on a landscape.”
The researchers removed sections of cave formations, or speleothems, and analysed the stable isotopes and trace elements contained within. They found that concentrations of certain elements were strongly correlated to periods of drought, which could then be verified by cross-referencing the chemical profile of the cave with the writing on the walls.
When cut open, speleothems such as stalagmites frequently reveal a series of layers that record their annual growth, just like tree rings. Using mass spectrometry, the researchers analysed and dated the ratios of the stable isotopes of oxygen, carbon, as well as concentrations of uranium and other elements. Changes in climate, moisture levels and surrounding vegetation all affect these elements, since the water seeping into the cave is related to the water on the surface. The researchers found that higher oxygen and carbon isotope ratios, in particular, corresponded with lower rainfall levels, and vice versa.
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Speleothems within the cave were analyzed to acquire clues to climate change. Photo credit: L. Tan
The researchers then used their results to construct a model of future precipitation in the region, starting in 1982. Their model correlated with a drought that occurred in the 1990s and suggests another drought in the late 2030s. The observed droughts also correspond with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. Due to the likelihood that climate change caused by humans will make ENSO events more severe, the region may be in for more serious droughts in the future.
“Since the Qinling Mountains are the main recharge area of two larger water transfer projects, and the habitat for many endangered species, including the iconic giant panda, it is imperative to explore how the region can adapt to declining rain levels or drought,” said Breitenbach. “Things in the world are different from when these cave inscriptions are written, but we’re still vulnerable to these events – especially in the developing world.”
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
Archaeologists and a team of student and volunteer excavators continue to unearth clues to Roman life at the ancient Roman frontier fort and settlement of Maryport in the U.K.
The Roman fort and nearby civilian settlement at Maryport, under excavation since 2011 by the Roman Temples Project team, were a significant element of the coastal defenses forming the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire for more than 300 years. They are part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site which also includes Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall in Scotland and the German frontier.
This year’s dig has yielded more information about the layout of the temples area near the remains of the Roman fort and civilian settlement in fields next to the Senhouse Roman Museum. The team has also found a rare piece of Roman jewelry.
Professor Ian Haynes, project director said: “This year we have been able to demonstrate that the temples formed part of a large monument complex, unlike anything discovered on Britain’s Roman frontier to date. The complex was a major undertaking and was dominated by a substantial precinct where many of Maryport’s famous altars may once have stood.
“Our aim has always been to find out more about how the famous collection of Maryport Roman altars, unearthed in 1870 and now in the Senhouse Roman Museum, were originally displayed in Roman times.
“In 2011 we found the altars had been used in the foundations for later timber buildings just over the ridge, not ritually buried as previously thought. We think that when they were originally dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter by commanders of the fort each year – which we know from the inscriptions – a number of them would have been displayed together on the cobbled precinct.
“We’ve also found more evidence from ditches below the precinct for a temporary camp, which appears to date from before Hadrian’s Wall was constructed, evidence for the movement of Rome’s campaigning armies. Site director Tony Wilmott first suggested that there might be indications of an early camp back in 2013, but the proof of his hypothesis came this year.”
And team member Daisy-Alys Vaughan, a BA Ancient History and Archaeology student from Newcastle University, found a rare piece of rock crystal Roman jewelry from the second or third century, probably the centre piece from an expensive ring. The head of a bearded man, possibly a philosopher, is carved into the back. The carving is filled with white material, possibly enamel, and there was a small piece of bronze with the stone which was the backing to the white head. When originally worn the polished bronze back would have looked like gold through the stone.
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The excavated cut stone and pound coin for scale. Courtesy Senhouse Museum Trust
Jane Laskey, manager of the Senhouse Roman Museum said: “It has been a very exciting season and there are just a few days left to visit the excavation site before it closes. Tours led by the museum’s volunteer guides start from the museum at 2pm and 3.30pm every day, the excavation team’s last day is Friday 14 August.
This is the last week of the final excavation by the Maryport Roman Temples Project team. Since 2011, teams have spent around eight weeks on site each summer.
“We’d like to thank all the volunteers and archaeology students involved in the project over the years for their fantastic support.
“Once work on the excavation site is complete the team will continue analysing the results of this year’s dig and considering the new insights the whole project has brought to our understanding of the Roman empire in Britain.”
The museum cares for and displays the Netherhall Collection and other collections of Romano-British objects from West Cumbria. The museum displays the largest group of Roman military altar stones and inscriptions from any site in Britain and unique examples of Romano-British religious sculpture.
It is run by the Senhouse Museum Trust.
This article was adapted and edited from a press release of the Senhouse Museum Trust.
This richly illustrated ebook version of a recent Popular Archaeology issue includes the following stories: The discovery of the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh that is shedding light on a lost ancient Egyptian dynasty; how genetics is revolutionizing what we know about human evolution and our prehistoric past; one scholar’s controversial ‘New Chronology’ and how it supports the historicity of the biblical Exodus; how archaeologists are unearthing new history in Williamsburg, Virginia, a seat of British colonial power in 18th century America; the discovery of the remains of a major Roman legionary base in Israel; the unearthing of an ancient Judean fortified settlement in the borderlands between the biblical kingdoms of ancient Judah and the Philistines; and how archaeologists are uncovering evidence of what may have been an important administrative center of Judah during the 8th century BCE. Now available from Amazon.com!
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