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Unearthing the City of King Midas

Posted on December 13, 2014 by James Wright -

James Wright is a Senior Archaeologist at the Museum of London Archaeology. He has researched the palace at Kings Clipstone for over twelve years and has recently published a book entitled A Palace For Our Kings on the subject via Triskele Publishing – www.triskelepublishing.com.

When Alexander the Great entered the city of Gordion in 333 BCE, the city was already ancient, only a vestige of its former glory. By this time it was governed within a satrapy of King Darius III’s Persian Empire, a hegemony that Alexander was determined to dismantle the best way he knew how—by military force. Gordion was a staging point and a place to rest his troops. From here he would muster his forces to march into Cilicia to battle the Persians, but not before he accomplished one important thing — untying the legendary knot that fastened the pole to the legendary oxcart that still stood within the old palace of the ancient Phrygian kings. According to prophecy, anyone who could untie the knot would go on to rule all of Asia.

Ancient writers have told the story in different ways, but arguably the most popular version has it that Alexander, frustrated with his failed attempts to untie the knot with his hands, took his sword and simply cut the knot. The event proved to be a metaphor for Alexander’s way of creating a new Hellenistic empire, and he went on to defeat the armies of Darius at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE, leading to the collapse of the Persian Empire.

Gordion, the ancient capital of the Phrygians, is popularly known by another story. It was in Phrygia that the legendary King Midas lived, known in ancient Greek mythology as the king whose touch turned everything to gold, an ability that was granted to him through a wish to the satyr Silenus. What was initially thought to be a great gift turned out to be a curse, however, as he soon found that even the food he needed for sustenance turned to gold at his touch.

Other than recorded myth and literature, there is little direct, indisputable evidence of the existence of the King Midas of Greek mythology. But historical sources tell of three different kings of Phrygia by the name of Midas, with one who ruled Phrygia in the late 8th century BCE well known from Greek and Assyrian sources. Of the reality of the Phrygian kingdom itself, there is plentiful physical and archaeological evidence, and much of it can be found at the ancient archaeological site of Gordion, otherwise known as Gordium. Located in present-day west central Turkey near modern Yassıhüyük about 70 – 80 km southwest of Ankara, its ruins stand as a testament to Phrygian monumental architecture, an urban presence spanning across two kilometers, dominated by massive buildings and fortifications and over 100 burial mounds, lying strategically as it were where an ancient well-traveled road crossed the Sakarya river between Lydia and Assyria/Babylonia. It was the capital and largest city of an Anatolian kingdom, whose power peaked during the late 8th century BCE under the historical king Midas, when it dominated western and central Anatolia and rivaled Assyria and Urartu to its east for the eastern regions of Anatolia. More anciently, during the Bronze Age, it allied itself with the Trojans, according to Homer’s The Iliad, to battle the Achaeans.

King Midas with his daughter, turned to gold with death at his touch, from A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Painting by Walter Crane (1845-1915).

Today, Gordion’s population is history. It’s inhabitants now consist mostly of a seasonal influx of archaeologists, conservators, excavators, and a mix of other experts and specialists whose tasks revolve around systematically uncovering what remains of the city, restoring and preserving what can be pieced back together again, and showcasing its finds in an onsite museum.

But this work goes back decades. Historically, it has been the focus of on-and-off excavations since it was discovered in 1893 by Alfred Körte, who initiated exploratory excavations at the site in 1900. The best known excavations were conducted under the directorship of Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) beginning in the 1950’s. His excavations over 17 seasons uncovered major sections of the Phrygian period Citadel Mound, including overlying Hellenistic towns, and a mudbrick fortress and defensive walls of a Lower Town near the Citadel. Young also uncovered no less than 30 burial tumuli, which included the sensational royal ‘Tumulus MM‘ (the “Midas Mound”) and a nearby tomb of a wealthy Phrygian child (‘Tumulus P’).

Now, under the directorship of Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania, teams have, since 2007, uncovered additional finds. In the last two seasons, beginning in 2013 with renewed excavations at the south side of the Citadel Mound, solid new evidence has emerged for additional defensive works, including massive defensive walls, part of a road, and industrial work spaces dated back to some of the earliest periods of the site, all adding to the historical and chronological sequence of the site.

“Gordion’s historical significance derives from its very long and complex sequence of occupation, with seven successive settlements spanning a period of nearly 4500 years,” says Rose. “What we discovered was a large glacis or stepped terrace wall over 2.5 m in height, dating to the Early Phrygian period, that supported a substantial fortification wall nearly 3 m. wide. This has proven that the western side of the mound was fortified, and that those fortifications had already been established in the Early Phrygian period (9th c. B.C.), neither of which had been known previously.”*

Other massive fortifications, particularly on the eastern side of the Citadel Mound, had already been uncovered through previous expeditions. But the new features now expanded the emerging picture of the Gordion defensive fabric. Rose’s excavations revealed fortifications spanning the entire time period of Phrygian rule in the region. “We were fortunate this year in uncovering new fortifications dating to three different periods: Early Phrygian (9th c. BC), Middle Phrygian (8th c. BC) and Late Phrygian (6th c. BC)…….it is already clear that the scale of the citadel fortifications throughout the entire Phrygian period was much more ambitious than formerly suspected,” wrote Rose in a recent report of the latest, 2014 season.*

Aerial view of the newly excavated Early, Middle, and Late Phrygian fortifications on the southern side of the Citadel Mound. Photo by Lucas Stephens. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-Area 1 Aerial 5)

View of the Early and Middle Phrygian fortifications on the southern side of the Citadel Mound, looking east. Tumulus MM (Midas Mound) is visible at upper right. Photo by Brian Rose. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-7483)

View of collapsed colored stones newly discovered behind the Middle Phrygian fortification wall on the southern side of the Citadel Mound, looking north. Photo by Gebhard Bieg. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-1579)

Additionally, Rose’s team excavated a sondage trench through what has been designated the Terrace Building, a structure discovered during previous excavations and thought to be a building where industrial activities occurred. They uncovered a large industrial kiln surrounded by ceramic remains that helped to date the feature to the Early Iron Age, or the 11th century BCE. Above and east of the kiln they excavated an Early Iron Age house structure, which contained objects related to textile manufacture, such as spindle whorls and loom weights, and a bell-shaped pit that contained fragments of Early Iron Age handmade wares and animal bones. “The evidence yielded by the sondage demonstrates that there was considerable industrial activity in this area before the Terrace Building was constructed, beginning in the 11th c. B.C.,” wrote Rose in a recent newsletter report.*

Excavators Olivia Hayden and Jane Gordion digging beneath the rubble fill in the Terrace Building sondage. Photo by Brian Rose. Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-4142)

Excavators Kate Morgan, Olivia Hayden, and Jane Gordion uncovering the Early Iron Age house below the rubble fill under the Terrace Building, looking east. The upper part of a kiln is visible at the bottom. Photo by Gebhard Bieg. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-6666)

Aerial view of the Citadel Mound of Gordion in 2014. Photo by Lucas Stephens. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-CM Aerial 1)

The Outer Town

The Citadel Mound tells only part of the story of urban Gordion. Beyond and below the imposing defensive bastion thrived a city of people who left vestiges of other monumental public buildings and domestic structures, a Gordion far more robust and expansive than a single citadel. During Young’s excavations decades before at a small mound (called ‘Küçük Höyük’) near the Citadel, archaeologists revealed a mudbrick fortress set atop a mudbrick bastion, interpreted as a probable ancient Lydian construction dated to the late 7^th or early 6^th century BCE. They found that its associated walls, including connected ditch-work, actually enclosed a settlement area they designated as the Lower Town, an area consisting of evidence of residential, or domestic, structures. Remote sensing has since successfully defined the fortification walls, streets and buildings of this settlement area.

Most recently, a team under the direction of Stefan Giese and Christian Huebner of GGH in Freiburg, Germany, conducted a geophysical survey that yielded traces of yet another associated settlement area, an ‘Outer Town’, using magnetometry and electric resistivity techniques. The Outer Town is a second residential area with detected remains just west of the Lower Town. What they found was no less revelatory than the new Citadel Mound discoveries. They detected signs that this Outer Town was “bordered by a ditch with a defensive wall on its interior”*, which the team believes surrounded the entire Outer Town. And this was not all—the findings included other features that suggested a monumental fort. “At the western end of the Outer Town,” write Rose, et al., “nearly 1 km to the west of the citadel mound, we discovered the presence of what we interpret as a monumental fort, approximately the same size as the fort of Küçük Höyük (the “minor mound”) in the Lower Town.” The new findings seemed to match the pattern found previously with the Lower Town, though they appeared to have been planned as separate residential areas demarcated by a fortification wall between them.

Did these findings suggest or imply something about ancient Godion’s social structure? The investigators have no answers, yet. But further surveys and excavation may shed some light.

The fortifications of Gordion detected through remote sensing. The new results in the Outer Town appear at left. Plan by GGH. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, GGH 2014 Map 4)

The Conservation Task

The combined forces of time, weather, exposure and other elements take their inevitable toll on archaeological sites. Gordion has been no exception. Perhaps most dramatic were the effects caused by a major earthquake in 1999, which left a significant bulge in the masonry of the Early Phrygian Gate. Because of its monumentality and importance as the best-preserved citadel gate of Iron Age Asia Minor, it has arguably become one of the most urgent tasks for conservators at the site. “We realized that strategic intervention was necessary if a collapse was to be averted, now and in the future,” wrote Rose, et al.* With the help of a number of organizations, individuals, and consulting firms, solid steps have been taken to shore up the structure, which included erection of a new scaffolding system, removing displaced stones, repairing deteriorated or damaged stones, and inserting steel support straps, among other measures.

Erection of the new scaffolding at the Early Phrygian Citadel Gate prior to the beginning of conservation. Photo by Brian Rose. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-4535)

Other damage was caused by more ancient events, such as an 800 BCE conflagration that damaged the masonry foundations of the Early Phrygian Terrace Building, which anciently was an 8-room industrial complex. Since 2009, conservators and other expert workers have been busy repairing and rebuilding the foundations and walls of the various rooms within the structure.

Like that of other major archaeological sites, the artwork of Gordion has drawn special attention from conservators. In 1956, Young excavated a remarkable late 9^th century BCE pebble mosaic near the Terrace Building, a piece that, according to archaeologists, featured “a series of polychromatic geometric designs that most likely echo the kinds of textiles that would have been produced in the adjacent Terrace Building.”* This effort has involved application of the latest restoration techniques by experts specially trained in the art of repair and restoration.

Sema Küreckçi and Meredith Keller cleaning the pebble mosaic from Megaron 2 (an Early Phrygian period structure). Photo by Gebhard Bieg. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014-4408)

For Rose and colleagues, there is much more work to do. Countless features and artifacts are left to be uncovered, work that will occupy researchers for many years ahead. But in the short time span of Rose’s research at the site thus far, much has already been accomplished. Popular Archaeology asked Rose what he thought were some of the most important discoveries made since renewed excavations began in 2007.

“We discovered four inscriptions in Tumulus MM, the tomb that probably held the body of Midas’ father [Gordias, the founder of Gordion],” Rose replied. “These may be the signatures of the officials who oversaw the burial. We’ve also been able to determine that the Phrygians used a special pigment to color their clothing, which gave them a golden sheen. This may tie in to the legend of Midas’s Golden Touch.” More recent investigations in the area of the ancient site have uncovered another major tumulus. About 17 meters in height, and like Tumulus MM, this one also features a wooden burial chamber within. Initially found as a result of illegal looting excavations by treasure hunters, Rose now hopes to conduct controlled archaeological salvage excavations at the mound to determine more about its nature and the possible remains of its human occupant. Although detailed information about it is still forthcoming, Rose suggests, based on data thus far acquired, that the new tumulus dates to the 8th century B.C. and may contain the remains of a Phrygian king.

But perhaps the most far-reaching discovery revolves around the newly found immensity of the ancient city itself. “We have been able to determine that the city was twice as large as we previously thought, because we’ve identified the outer fortifications of the city through remote sensing.” With this in mind, one of Rose’s more immediate goals relates to developing a city plan of Gordion based on the available and emerging data. “We have not yet determined the city plan of the settlement,” says Rose, “but by combining excavation with remote sensing (radar, magnetic prospection), we should be able to do it.”

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More information about Gordion and the Gordion Archaeological Project can be found at the project website. For individuals interested in making a donation to the project, see the Friends of Gordion page. Friends of Gordion receive an annual newsletter about the most recent results of research and excavation and may also receive special guided tours of the site.

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* Rose, C. Brian and Gürsan-Salzman, Ayse, Friends of Gordion Newsletter, September 2014

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A R T I C L E S U P P L E M E N T

The Funeral of Tumulus MM

One of the most spectacular discoveries at the Gordion archaeological site came when Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania opened an imposing tumulus mound in 1957 known as Tumulus MM, today interpreted to have been the probable tomb of Gordias, founder of the city of Gordion and father of the legendary King Midas. Within a wooden chamber of the tumulus tomb, Young and his colleagues found the remains of a man determined to have died when he was between 60 and 65 years old. His remains had been placed on a pile of dyed textiles inside a wooden coffin. The coffin was accompanied by 14 remarkably well-preserved items of wood furniture, thought to have been dining and serving tables used at a funerary banquet before the interment. Also found were 3 large cauldrons on iron tripod stands, 19 large two-handled bowls, 100 bronze drinking bowls, round-bottomed buckets, 19 juglets, 2 jugs, a ram-headed situla, and a lion-headed situla. Further analysis indicated that vessels had contained a beverage made from a mixture of honey mead, grape wine, and barley beer. Eighteen ceramic jars showed evidence of a spicy funerary feast of lentils and barbecued sheep or goat stew. It was, according to the archaeologists, evidence of an elaborate banquet fit for a king.

Section of Tumulus MM from the north, showing the open trench and tunnel cut during the excavation of 1957. Drawing by Richard Liebhart, after Young 1981: fig. 51. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion Archive 102811, and Richard Liebhart)

Tumulus MM: Center cross-section construction of the tomb chamber complex (looking north). Drawing by Richard Liebhart. (Picture credit: Gordion Archaeological Project, Richard Liebhart)

Above and below: Tumulus MM, 1957: Inlaid table as found, with bronze vessels. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive)

Above: Inlaid table, Tumulus MM, reconstruction drawing by Elizabeth Simpson, 1985. Copyright E. Simpson.

Above: Inlaid table from Tumulus MM reconstructed for display, 1989. Courtesy Gordion Furniture Project.

Above: Tumulus MM, 1957: Remains of a plain table, with bronze bowls, as found. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2376)

Tumulus MM, 1957: Southern end of the tomb chamber, with bronze cauldrons against the wall, the remains of plain Tables in front, and bowls and jugs scattered across the floor. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2385)

Tumulus MM, 1957: Bronze-studded leather belts with decorative bronze disc attachments, and bronze trefoil- mouthed jugs, on the floor where they had fallen in antiquity. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2404)

Tumulus MM, 1957: Wooden serving stands in place: stand A at right and stand B at left. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2343)

Tumulus MM, 1957: Bronze ram’s-head situla, after cleaning by the British Museum. Middle Phrygian period, c. 740 B.C.E. (Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-3008)

Decades later, in 2007, Richard Liebhart, Rose and colleagues discovered four Phrygian inscriptions incised on several timbers while investigating the northwest corner of the outer tomb chamber. “The names [NANA, MYKSOS, SI↑IDOS, and KYRYNIS] had clearly been scratched into the beams before they were set in place around 740 BCE,” wrote the researchers about the find. “The hand of the inscriber was steady and sure, and all the words appear to have been inscribed by the same man, at approximately the same size, with SI↑IDOS written slightly larger than the other words. The SI↑IDOS beam was also probably the first one to have been placed on the tomb after the funeral ended.” Rose and colleagues suggest that SI↑IDOS was likely a prominent man in the community of Gordion.

“One can think of this as an early prototype of the Memorial Name Books that are still used in funerals today,” wrote Rose and colleagues.**

Above and below: The names inscribed on the roof beam in Tumulus MM. Photos by Richard Liebhart (Picture credit: Gordion Archaeological Project, Richard Liebhart)

The Royal Funeral Ceremony Banquet. Reconstruction of the funeral ceremony held before the Tumulus MM burial. Painting by Greg Harlin based on drawings by Elizabeth Simpson, 2001. Copyright G. Harlin and E. Simpson.

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** http://sites.museum.upenn.edu/gordion/articles/history-archaeology/69-the-funeral-in-tumulus-mm

Image, top: Tumulus MM, 1957: Note the long excavation trench running into the mound, and the horse and wagon in front for scale. (Picture credit: Penn Museum Gordion)

The Real Indy

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Dan McLerran -

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.

And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones……….1 Kings 10:1,2

Western Yemen, 1951—Approaching the village in their big Dodge Power Wagon, it didn’t take long before Wendell Phillips and his small party of explorers became surrounded by a mob of rifle-armed tribesmen and soldiers. Dressed in blue robes and faces painted in indigo, the mob stood transfixed, staring at them in silence. Clearly outnumbered, Phillips knew that one knee-jerk move among his crew could spark gunfire. These locals had never seen Europeans or motor vehicles. Phillips and his group were traveling in what for Westerners was unexplored land—the forbidden regions of Yemen.

But Phillips had the blessings of Imam Ahmed, the King of Yemen, and it wasn’t long before Arabian friends with some clout and familiarity showed up to save them from what could have been a disastrous end to this expedition. Phillips, a paleontologist and geologist by education and an explorer by chosen occupation, was leading this expeditionary group to an ancient site he had long dreamed of excavating—a site that, until now, had been off limits for decades to anyone from the West. It was the location of Marib, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Sheba, thought to be the seat of the famous tenth century B.C. biblical queen of Sheba and a center made rich in the centuries BC by the lucrative revenues and trade of the Incense Road. Soon a much larger team of specialists would follow with a convoy of trucks bearing equipment, supplies, and an eclectic crew of archaeologists, photographers, epigraphers, physicians, and others. William F. Albright, by this time already world-famous for his archaeological discoveries and scholarship related to the lands and cities of the Bible, would be his chief archaeologist for the dig.

Arguably considered today as a real-life model for the famous fictional character of Indiana Jones, Phillips had already cut his teeth in a significant way in the late 1940’s as leader of a major U.C. Berkeley expedition in Africa, taking him from Cairo to Capetown with an entourage of experts in a variety of scientific fields. “In the course of the expedition, more than fifty scholars, scientists, and technicians, utilizing 25 trucks, an airplane, and a motor-boat, had covered the entire continent, working on research problems in tropical medicine, paleontology, geology, anthropology, archaeology, and other fields,” wrote Phillips of his African expedition in his 1955 book, Sheba’s Buried City.* It was also in Africa where he received his inspiration to explore southern Arabia.

“Many things conspired to bring South Arabia into my mind during the African expedition,” he wrote. Significant among his inspirers was the Aga Khan, who “suggested South Arabia as one of the most essential remaining areas for archaeological work.”*

Phillips wasted no time moving forward to Arabia. Following his African expedition, he embarked on a two-week aerial reconnaissance survey expedition of southern Arabia in 1949.

It hooked him.

“I saw beneath the shifting sand dunes, the parched wadis, and tumbled rocks, a long highway stretching 700 miles across the broad base of the country, then turning northwards and winding for more than 1,000 miles to the shores of the Mediterranean and the homes of our civilization’s ancestors. I looked back over my shoulder 3,000 years and saw long trains of camels burdened with frankincense and myrrh and sometimes with gold, pearls, ivory, cinnamon, silks, tortoiseshell, and lapis lazuli.”*

Phillips was writing of course about the great Arabian Incense Road of antiquity, the road that presumably, at least in part, made rulers like the Queen of Sheba, and ostensibly by extension her royal friend and ally King Solomon to the north, wealthy beyond imagination. The Road was the maker of a number of southern Arabian kingdoms, most notably the five kingdoms of Qataban, Ma’in, Saba (Sheba), Himyar, and Hadhramaut. Of these kingdoms, Saba, as it was the kingdom of the queen of Sheba, fed Phillips’ ambitions the most. But in the 1940’s, the ancient capital of Saba, whose remains were located at the site of Marib in southwestern Yemen, was in the forbidden zone. It could not be safely accessed by Westerners because of tribal hostilities.

Marib would have to wait. Phillips turned to the other possibilities, consulting with familiar sources for advice. “In Cairo I had lunch with St. John Philby [the British Arabist, explorer, writer, and colonial office intelligence officer ], who………encouraged me and agreed that I should consider the Wadi Beihan, site of the capital of the old Qatabian kingdom.”* Charles Inge, friend and then Director of Antiquities for Britain’s Crown Colony of Aden, recommended it “as the most promising site in all southern Arabia, with the exception of the Queen of Sheba’s ancient capital, Marib and the ruins of Sirwah located in forbidden Yemen.”*

It was thus on to the site of Timna, the ancient capital of Qataban in the Wadi Beihan, for what Phillips called his First Arabian Expedition under the auspices of his newly founded American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM), the organizational framework he knew he would need as the umbrella instrument of his efforts. Getting things off the ground was no easy task, but painstaking preparations saw him at the head of a convoy of trucks, equipment and a hand-picked mix of specialists and experts that reflected shades of his previous African expedition.

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The expedition convoy makes its way through the desert landscape of Yemen. Courtesy American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM)

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The Wonders of Timna

At the end of a long, L-shaped gallery in the Smithsonian Institution’s Sackler Gallery of Art once stood a large glass-enclosed case. It contained what Phillips and his colleagues considered one of the First Arabian Expedition’s greatest finds—the twin bronze Lions of Timna. Initially discovered by a Yemeni dig team member and dated to 75 BCE – 50 CE, the large bronze statues of lions with riders were found within the context of the ‘House Yafash’, an ancient residence of a wealthy Qataban located near the South Gate of the city. Incredible finds by their workmanship and aesthetic value alone, they also proved to play an essential role in establishing the chronology of the Qataban civilization. They were two among more than 70 artifacts on display in the Sackler Gallery exhibit, Unearthing Arabia: The Archeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips, an exhibit that, courtesy of the AFSM, also showcased field notebooks, tools of his excavation, photos and videos of Phillips’ expedition to the Wadi Beihan, where he and his team uncovered key finds at Timna and nearby Hajar bin Humeid (see slideshow below). It was at these sites where Phillips recovered a motherlode that made him famous as a pioneer in southern Arabian archaeology.

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The “Lions of Timna”. Courtesy AFSM

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Detailed view of one of the twin “Lions of Timna”. Courtesy Sackler Gallery and AFSM

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Hajar bin Humeid

To be sure, the southern Arabian expedition was much about adventure, but, like the great African expedition that preceded, it was first and foremost about systematic, scientific inquiry and investigation. Under the leadership of Professor and Chief Archaeologist William F. Albright, one of the expedition’s first tasks was to establish a base relative chronology from which to work for placing the hoped-for upcoming finds into context. That opportunity came with Hajar bin Humeid, where a large oval-shaped mound featured an eroded cross-section on its western side, affording the team an ideal starting point for determining stratigraphy and recovering pottery and layers of human occupation. “A rectangular cut about 60 feet square was made from the top downward,” recounts Phillips.* Excavations at Hajar continued for two seasons, from 1950 through 1951, exposing a stratigraphy that gave them a dating sequence based on eighteen strata, going back to the end of the 11th century BCE. “Hajar bin Humreid was full of surprises for Professor Albright and Dr. Albert Jamme, our Belgian epigrapher from Louvain, who expected to find broken pottery but instead encountered at the outset extensive stone walls of houses and a possible temple,” wrote Phillips*. But an abundance of pottery sherds and other artifacts, key to determining the dating sequence, invariably followed, and in great numbers. The artifacts, combined with the site’s ancient location, suggested that Hajar bin Humeid was located along one of the caravan routes that stretched all the way to the Mediterranean. It represented the remains of a modest-sized city that likely thrived primarily on customs collected from the caravans that traveled through the Wadi Beihan area.

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View of cross-section excavation of the mound at Hajar bin Humeid. Pottery finds helped to date the stratigraphy of the site back to at least 1,000 BCE. Courtesy AFSM

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Panoramic view of the ancient site of Timna. Courtesy AFSM

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The South Gate

Chief among Phiilips’ goals was to uncover the remains of what was identified as Timna’s buried South Gate, entrance to the city itself. It was here that the monumental character of Timna really began to take shape. As at Hajar bin Humeid, a large team of workmen was employed to remove what seemed to be tons of sand, and after three weeks of excavation its features finally took shape:

The gateway itself was flanked by two massive towers constructed of rough blocks, some as large as 8 by 2 ft. The masonry work was good but not smoothly finished, indicating that the gate was built before the flowering of Qatabian civilization, when more polished work was done. Certainly it was made not later than the fifth century BC. Many inscriptions were found on the big blocks of the towers, and there was also evidence of two vertical grooves for gateposts and another for a heavy crossbeam. Charred wood still remained in parts of these grooves [evidence of a fiery conflagration].

Now we had our first glimpse, infinitesimal but still a glimpse, of ancient Timna. It was not too difficult to approach the massive South Gate and imagine ourselves part of a camel caravan loaded with frankincense, on our way from the lands of the East to the Mediterranean.*

— p. 85, Sheba’s Buried City

In addition to the structure itself, the team recovered artifacts interpreted as objects for religious ceremony and inscriptions with references to Qataban rulers. Their findings at the South Gate, like the findings at the Hajar bin Humeid cut, were instrumental in developing a chronology of Timna and its people, a chronology they found went back at least as far as the 8th century BCE.

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Excavations at the South Gate. Courtesy AFSM

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Dr. Jamme, the expedition epigrapher, creating latex squeezes of inscriptions found on the walls of the South Gate. Courtesy AFSM

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The Epigrapher’s Dream: The House Yafash and the Graffito Valley

As the excavators continued to progress beyond the gate into the city, they eventually came upon evidence of a structure. Designating it Building B, it featured inscriptions that identified it as the “House Yafash”. It was in the context of this ancient house that the expedition uncovered the twin bronze lions, arguably their most important find. Under the direction of Albright, the team found that three of the rooms within the structure were still intact. They also uncovered a number of utilitarian objects, including a burned comb, several containers, and a stone die, shedding light on ancient Qataban domestic life. But it was the subject, style, make, and inscriptions deciphered on the bronze statues that paved the way to understanding the timeline and culture of this southern Arabian kingdom. The lions and their riders were critical not only in establishing the chronology, but also in determining its greatest florescence in the first century CE.

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One of the “Lions of Timna” still ‘in situ’, as found in place immediately after excavation. Note the inscription at its base. Courtesy AFSM

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Like literally hiking back through time, however, it was the result of a foray by a team colleague into a narrow canyon known as the Wadi al-Fara about three miles north of the Hajar bin Humeid that captured Phillip’s imagination in equal measure. Clued in and led by a local Beihani tribesman, team member Dr. Richard Bowen discovered what was surely to become one of the great discoveries of his life:

The Beihani tribesman led Bowen up a steep slope and then directed him to what turned out to be an ancient Qataban inscription carved into the rock face. But there was much more. Phillips recounts in his book:

Dick knew that the inscription might be interesting, but he was far more excited about other things he saw on the walls of the canyon—great numbers of graffiti, or shallow carvings in the rock surface. These graffiti contained short inscriptions with personal names: the equivalent of our ‘Kilroy was here’ scrawls on walls or carvings on trees. This is the plain, simple stuff of which real archaeological treasure often consists.*

With the able decipherment and interpretation from Jamme and Albright, what they had discovered was to this point the “earliest phase of Arabian inscription…..dating back probably to the 9th or 10th century BC,” containing three names found in the Bible—the father of Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, Eli, the name of a high priest mentioned in First Samuel, and Yagur, a place name in ancient Judah. “While our excavation work had slowly carried us backwards in time—to the destruction of Timna, and on to the first, second, third, and even fourth centuries BC,” wrote Phillips, “Graffito Valley whirled us past five or six more centuries and brought us close to the ancient days of the Bible, close to the time of the Queen of Sheba, who lived in Marib, just 40 miles away.”*

The House Yafash and Graffito Valley experiences were certainly not the only cases where inscription finds opened up a window on the world of the Qataban people to the team. Throughout the entire duration of the excavations, they encountered them. The inscription finds could arguably be considered the greatest takeaway from Phillips’ Arabian Expedition.

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Dr. Jamme making a squeeze of one of the many inscription finds. Courtesy AFSM

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The Cemetery

It showed up first as a small white ring emerging from the sand and soil as a workman dug. It was part of a waxen human ear. Realizing the potential significance of this find, he called for Dr. Alexander Honeyman, an archaeologist and epigrapher and Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of St. Andrews. He was directing the excavations of the Timna Cemetery, an important part of the overall excavations at Timna. Few of the finds from the Cemetery excavations, however, caught Honeyman’s interest more than this one. After Honeyman’s careful excavation to reveal more of the find, it turned out to be a beautifully sculpted alabaster head of a woman with large eyes inlaid with a blue material, swept-back hair made of plaster, pierced ears that likely once held earings, and holes in the sides of the neck that likely were meant to secure a necklace. It could be held in one’s hands. Nicknamed “Miriam” by the Arab workmen, it was dated to the 1st century BCE and the first half of the 1st century CE. Although there were no inscriptions to help identify the woman’s actual identity, Honeyman and his colleagues concluded that, given the workmanship, material and other features, this was probably a woman of means and importance.

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Dr. Honeyman holding “Miriam”, his prize find. Courtesy AFSM

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Detailed view of the head of a woman, or “Miriam”. Courtesy Sackler Gallery and AFSM

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This was clearly a sign of more things to come, for it was only a day later that they recovered an exquisitely crafted gold necklace, pendant and chain combination, with a legend in Qataban letters identifying the owner of the piece, a woman named Far’iat. Excavations at the Timna Cemetery proved to be one of the great achievements of the expedition, resulting in the discovery of mortuary buildings, steles and funerary portraits, along with a variety of miniature objects intended for the afterlife, in addition to Honeyman’s finding that a series of partitioned rectangular chambers within the mausoleum complex were actually ossuaries where bones of the deceased were re-interred. Today it is considered among the largest and most elaborate ancient necropolises in southern Arabia, a testament to the importance that the ancient Qatabans accorded their deceased.

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The gold necklace, pendant and chain combination discovered in the Cemetery excavations. Courtesy Sackler Gallery and AFSM

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Above and below: Excavations in the Cemetery yielded numerous small funerary finds. Courtesy AFSM

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The Temple Complex

In terms of sheer magnitude, nothing more monumental was unearthed at the Timna site than the imposing structure of what Phillips’ team identified as a temple complex:

We had not worked long at the temple site that second season before confirming our view that here lay the largest building of ancient Timna. It was certainly the first really monumental building to be excavated in all South Arabia, for we dug in an area 160 ft. long by 135 ft wide without yet reaching the end of what was a complex of buildings and courts making up the Temple of Athtar, the Arabian equivalent of our Venus…….The Temple must have been a beautiful and imposing structure [in its day], for we found a central nave and foundations for four or five rows of gigantic pillars, with five pillars to a row. What an awe-inspiring spectacle this great Temple of Venus must have been to the weary traveler from Shabwa or farther east as he gazed upward through its forty to fifty columns!*

Built of massive blocks of stone, the complex consisted of the temple structure, an open court, rooms on its western side, and what they identified as a water tank. Excavations revealed that it had undergone four phases or periods of construction ranging from the 8th or 7th century BCE to the 1st century CE. It apparently stood until the final destruction of Timna, for the excavators encountered large blocks of stone that had been fused together—something that could happen only in a state of intense heat. Here was evidence of a fiery conflagration that likely caused the demise of a city that had existed for centuries.

Another major discovery came in 1951, when Albright observed ancient masons’ marks on marble paving stones in the Temple courtyard while guiding a visitor through the site. He could see that the stones had been tagged or marked using the sequence of letters or symbols of the South Arabian alphabet. For the expedition team, it was like looking at the Rosetta Stone for understanding the order of the ancient South Arabian alphabet. “This was a discovery of the first importance,” wrote Phillips. “The ancient Qatabians who had paved this court inscribed their alphabet around it. We had never known before the proper order of the ancient South Semitic alphabet, but now it had been discovered.”* This finding proved to be among the expedition’s greatest discoveries.

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Above and below: Excavation at the Temple in Timna. Courtesy AFSM

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The City of Sheba

No other ancient site in Yemen excited Phillips more than the prospect of excavating at Marib, the capital of the ancient Sabaeans and thought by many biblical scholars as the likely residence of the famed 10th century Queen of Sheba. It was among his plans from the beginning to explore the possibility of obtaining permission to excavate at the site, but the area was regarded as forbidden to Westerners because of tribal unrest. Approval and support from Imam Ahmed, the King of Yemen, however, could make all the difference, and this is exactly what Phillips attempted to obtain. An audience with the King was finally realized, resulting in approval for Phillips and his team to push forward to Marib for this, the first excavation by a Western expedition to Marib in over 60 years.

Getting to Marib required an uneasy journey northward across the dunes through what for Westerners was largely unexplored land. But once there, Phillips was overwhelmed by the site:

We were standing where no American or Englishman had ever stood and where no non-Moslem has been, to our knowledge, since 1889. We looked at the buried ruins of what had once been the largest and richest of the ancient cities of South Arabia, the centre of a great culture almost 3,000 years ago………Columns, walls and pillars extended everywhere as far as our eyes could see, in an endless crescent.*

Phillips knew that local Yemenis had already dug about 70 feet down at one point at the site to recover stone blocks for a fortress and houses, encountering cultural layers as they went. Compared to the 51-foot escarpment Phillips and his team created at Hajar bin Humeid, this suggested that “Marib was considerably older than the Qatabian cities in Beihan.”* This, Phillips hoped, would be the prize dig of the expedition. But he knew that excavating the entire city would be far too much to tackle at this point, so the team focused their efforts on what was clearly the most prominently visible feature of the city—the Mahram Bilqis, or Temple of Awam, otherwise known by the ancients as the Temple of Almaqah, dedicated to the moon god who was the principal deity of Marib.

Only the tops of eight massive pillars and the upper part of an oval-shaped wall could be seen jutting above the windblown sand at first, but as they dug, painstakingly removing tons of sand and soil with a workforce of scores of workmen, they eventually uncovered a large hall with monumental pillars, and stairways, inscriptions, and bronze and alabaster sculptures. In some places the wall of the temple itself, 13.5 feet thick and constructed of fitted ashlar masonry, still stood to a height of more than 27 feet above the temple’s excavated entrance hall. Adjacent to the temple they uncovered evidence of a mausoleum and tombs similar to what they had unearthed at Timna.

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Excavations beginning at the Awam Temple in Marib in 1951. Courtesy AFSM

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Above: Unearthed by Yemeni locals (long before the excavations) as they dug for building stones, these ancient alabaster sculptures (600 in all) were stored inside the old fortress at Marib. They were shown to the expedition team on a guided tour before excavations began. Courtesy AFSM

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These discoveries were already magnificent by any measure, and there was potentially much more to unearth. But developing tribal tensions spelled danger for the team long before they could achieve their objectives, and they were forced to leave the site, never to return as an expedition under Phillips’ direction again. Their sudden, hasty exit meant leaving their equipment and archaeological discoveries behind, though their written records were later published in scholarly reports. Phillips died in 1975, never having realized his hopes of returning to Marib to finish the work.

Return to Marib

It wasn’t until 1998, more than two decades later, when renewed excavations began at Marib. Invited by the government of Yemen to resume excavations where her brother left off in 1952, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, by then President of the AFSM, took the ball and ran with it. With more than fifty workmen and an international team that included archaeologists, epigraphists, architects, and other specialists involved in what turned out to be a multi-year expedition lasting nine seasons, their discoveries were no less sensational than those made decades earlier. Focusing on the Awam Temple, hundreds of new inscriptions were recovered, and for the first time, the interior of the oval precinct walls of the complex was uncovered to a depth of sixteen feet. Features of its main Peristyle Hall and Annex areas were uncovered and defined, and more insight to the construction and occupational chronology or sequence for the Temple was acquired.

“The earliest material cultural remains excavated in the Awam complex date to the eighth century BC,” wrote archaeologists Zaydoon Zaid and Mohammed Maraqten in a report of their findings from the Temple complex. “Inscriptions mark the beginning of the history of occupation of the site.” Added to this, “a recently discovered but as yet unpublished inscribed block that served as the base of a statue mentions a dedication by the Shab of Saba and is dated according to the Himyaritic era (i.e. 115 or 110 BC) to the late fourth century AD. It confirms the continuity of the main function of the temple as a sacred place……..The architectural sequence for the Awam temple would therefore seem to span a period from the first millennium BC to the late fourth century AD.”**

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Above: View of the impressive excavated staircase in ‘Area A’ of the Awam Temple. Excavations have revealed that the Temple Complex includes several major architectural components: The Oval Wall, enclosing most of an open-air Oval Precinct; The Peristyle Hall with thirty-two pillars surrounding a large courtyard; The Annex Area along the north-east side of the Peristyle Hall and parallel to the eight monumental pillars; A large courtyard area, Area A, building 1, paved passage and staircases; A mausoleum adjacent to the south-east exterior of the Oval Wall; and a cemetery to the south-west of the Oval Wall. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM

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View of the excavated Peristyle Hall and Annex area. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM

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The Temple pillars as seen from inside the Oval Wall. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM

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The monumental wall that surrounds the Oval Precinct of the temple complex. Note the inscriptions on the upper rows of blocks. Courtesy Zaydoon Zaid and the AFSM

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The results of the renewed excavations further confirmed what Phillips had, decades before, concluded about the significance of the site. In terms of the construction date chronology, continuity of use, opulence and monumental scale, the Awam Temple was, according to Zaid, clearly “one of the most important monuments of the Sabaean period, which doubtless composed the religious center of the city of Marib and of ancient South Arabia as a whole”.** It bespoke a civilization that, in its time, rivaled the great civilizations to its north, west and east, for it was in Marib that the Sabaean kings made their capital, building massive irrigation works such as the Ma’rib dams, (the ruins of which are still visible) and other monumental buildings, made possible by the wealth brought in through the incense trade routes and extensive maritime connections as a seafaring people. It was a flourishing culture for more than a thousand years.

Was it here, at the Awam Temple, that the biblical Queen of Sheba worshipped? As far as scholars know, the temple construction chronology post-dates the time period in which many biblical scholars suggest she lived, the 10th century BCE. Was there an earlier temple on this spot? Further excavation may shed additional light on the question. “One of our main objectives is to continue excavating inside the Oval areal, where we think we will find a lot of answers that will help to establish and complete the occupational history of the site,” says Zaid.

Zaid hopes to one day return to finish where the last set of seasons left off nine years ago, but the political situation and unrest mitigates the possibilities.

He tempers some sadness with wishful anticipation. “Yemen is a unique land, something like an open museum,” he says. “When you travel in Yemen, talk to the kind Yemeni people, visit the old cities and the amazing bazaars—you would think that time has stopped. Things are still much the same as they were hundreds of years ago. We hope that the situation in Yemen will develop in a positive way, so that the people of Yemen will have their peace and go back to normal life and, of course, allow us to go back to continue our work at the temple.”

Phillips, no doubt, if he were alive, would be in the front of the pack.

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Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, current President of the American Foundation for the Study of Man and sister of Wendell Phillips. Courtesy the AFSM

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* Phillips, Wendell, Sheba’s Buried City, 1958 Pan Books Ltd.

** Zaid, Zaydoon and Maraqten, Mohammed, The Peristyle Hall: remarks on the history of construction based on recent archaeological and epigraphic evidence of the AFSM expedition to the Awam temple in Marib, Yemen, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 38, 2008

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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.

Winter 2015 Issue of Popular Archaeology Released

Posted on December 13, 2014 by No Author -

Popular Archaeology Magazine is pleased to announce the release of its latest issue, the Winter 2015 Issue, to begin the upcoming new year. Here is a listing of the new major feature articles, some of which are designated as premium articles for paying subscribers, for a worldwide readership. Two of the premium articles have been published FREE to the public. This latest issue includes the following titles:

1. The Real Indy (FREE Premium Article)

A book and a special exhibit tell the story of a forgotten explorer and his intrepid journey to discover great ancient Arabian cities of the Incense Road.

2. Unearthing the City of King Midas (Premium Article)

Archaeologists are making new discoveries at Gordion, the legendary capital of the ancient Phrygian kingdom.

3. Digging Vampires (Premium Article)

Have archaeologists uncovered ‘vampires’ among the dead?

4. Uncovering the Secrets of Cosma (FREE Premium Article)

Part 1 of a series: In a remote valley in north-central Peru, archaeologists are beginning to peel back the layers of monumental structures that may tell a forgotten story of an ancient people.

5. A Field Report: Preclassic Xnoha (for regular (free) subscribers)

Excavations in 2014 by the Maya Research Program at the ancient Maya site of Xno’ha uncovered Late Preclassic period finds.

6. Digging a Battlefield of American History (for regular (free) subscribers)

The reflections of a volunteer on an archaeological dig.

7. Syrian Heritage in Crisis (for regular (free) subscribers)

The Syrian Heritage Initiative, the US State Department, and UNESCO work together to save world heritage sites under attack by the Islamic State.

8. Countering the Illicit Antiquities Trade (for regular (free) subscribers)

Fighting the illicit trade of antiquities can mean fighting terrorism, and much more.

Premium subscribers may access all premium articles online in back issues extending back to the beginning of 2011.

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*Cover photo courtesy American Foundation for the Study of Man and the Arthur M. Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, from the feature article, The Real Indy.

Affluence Explains Rise of Moralizing Religions, Suggests Study

Posted on December 11, 2014 by No Author -

The ascetic and moralizing movements that spawned the world’s major religious traditions–Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity—all arose around the same time in three different regions, and researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 11 have now devised a statistical model based on history and human psychology that helps to explain why. The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia.

“One implication is that world religions and secular spiritualities probably share more than we think,” says Nicolas Baumard of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. “Beyond very different doctrines, they probably all tap into the same reward systems [in the human brain].”

It seems almost self-evident today that religion is on the side of spiritual and moral concerns, but that was not always so, Baumard explains. In hunter-gatherer societies and early chiefdoms, for instance, religious tradition focused on rituals, sacrificial offerings, and taboos designed to ward off misfortune and evil.

That changed between 500 BCE and 300 BCE—a time known as the “Axial Age”–when new doctrines appeared in three places in Eurasia. “These doctrines all emphasized the value of ‘personal transcendence,'” the researchers write, “the notion that human existence has a purpose, distinct from material success, that lies in a moral existence and the control of one’s own material desires, through moderation (in food, sex, ambition, etc.), asceticism (fasting, abstinence, detachment), and compassion (helping, suffering with others).”

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People at worship services. Wikimedia Commons

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While many scholars have argued that large-scale societies are possible and function better because of moralizing religion, Baumard and his colleagues weren’t so sure. After all, he says, some of “the most successful ancient empires all had strikingly non-moral high gods.” Think of Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Mayans.

In the new study, the researchers tested various theories to explain the history in a new way by combining statistical modeling on very long-term quantitative series with psychological theories based on experimental approaches. They found that affluence–which they refer to as “energy capture”–best explains what is known of the religious history, not political complexity or population size. Their Energy Capture model shows a sharp transition toward moralizing religions when individuals were provided with 20,000 kcal/day, a level of affluence suggesting that people were generally safe, with roofs over their heads and plenty of food to eat, both in the present time and into the foreseeable future.

“This seems very basic to us today, but this peace of mind was totally new at the time,” Baumard says. “Humans living in tribal societies or even archaic empires often experience famine and diseases, and they live in very rudimentary houses. By contrast, the high increase in population and urbanization rate in the Axial Age suggests that, for certain people, things started to get much better.”

The researchers say that this transition is consistent with a shift from “fast” life strategies, focused on the immediate problems of the day, to those focused on long-term investments. They say that it will now be interesting to test whether other familiar characteristics of modern human society, such as high parental investment and long-term monogamy, might stem from the same historical change.

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Source: Cell Press News Release

Study: Current Biology, Baumard et al.: “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions”

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Popular Archaeology’s annual Discovery Edition eBook is a selection of the best stories published in Popular Archaeology Magazine in past issues, with an emphasis on some of the most significant, groundbreaking, or fascinating discoveries in the fields of archaeology and paleoanthropology and related fields. At least some of the articles have been updated or revised specifically for the Discovery edition. We can confidently say that there is no other single issue of an archaeology-related magazine, paper print or online, that contains as much major feature article content as this one. The latest issue, volume 2, has just been released. Go to the Discovery edition page for more information.

Archaeologists Excavate Ancient Wari Temple in Peru

Posted on December 10, 2014 by No Author -

An international team of archaeologists under the joint directorship of Dr. Maria Lozada of the University of Chicago, Dr. Hans Barnard of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology of UCLA, and Lic. Augusto Cardona Rosas of the Centro de Investigaciones Arqueológicas Arequipa, Peru, have uncovered what they identified as an ancient Wari temple with a configuration in the shape of a ‘D’ in the Lower Vitor Valley of southern Peru.

“We have identified extensive Wari influence and possible presence at Vitor, including a D-shaped temple and significant quantities of Wari-influenced ceramics,” write Lozada and colleagues about the site discoveries. They have also uncovered a “strong and substantial presence of local populations”, indicating a mix of local and Wari-influenced culture at the site.*

Digging at a location approximately 40 kilometers west of the modern city of Arequipa, Peru, the team has unearthed a variety of ceramic and textile remains at the site, including skeletal remains found within a local Ramada culture cemetery. Focusing on evidence uncovered for the Early Intermediate (ca. 200 BCE – 800 CE) and Middle Horizon (ca. 500 – 1000 CE) occupation periods of the valley, the scientists hope to be able to answer questions related to the degree to which the local Ramada culture was incorporated into the Wari Empire as well as the role and influence of Wari culture in this area of the Andes.

Above and below: Skeletal and textile remains unearthed at the cemetery site.

Above: Specialists examining the remains in the lab.

The Wari, or Huari, was a civilization that flourished in the south-central Andes and coastal areas of what is modern-day Peru from about AD 500 to 1000 (Middle Horizon period). It expanded to cover much of the highlands and coast of Peru, establishing administrative centers, developing a terraced agricultural technology and a vast network of roads, at least some of which provided a foundation for the same for the later Inca civilization.

In 2015, the team plans to continue excavations at the D-shaped temple under the direction of Lic. Augusto Cardona, as well as continue with surveys under the direction of Dr. Hans Barnard. In addition, they plan to conduct analyses of the materials excavated from the temple and materials they previously excavated from the Ramada cemetery during 2012 and 2014. The analyses will include an examination of skeletal remains, ceramics, and textiles uncovered during the field seasons.

The research is being conducted through the support and auspices of the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration, Dumbarton Oaks, the community of Vitor, and the Ministerio de Cultura del Perú.

The Institute for Field Research is coordinating field work at the Vitor site. More information about the excavations and how one can participate can be found at the Vitor Archaeological Project website. See the video below.

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* http://ifrglobal.org/programs/south-america/peru-vitor?utm_source=IFR+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5aee8dbfad-Peru_Vitor_Video_Announcement11_26_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5da3ddc8ef-5aee8dbfad-326738257

All images are Vitor Archaeological Project YouTube video stillshots.

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Penn Museum Exhibits Spectacular Finds from Ancient Panama

Posted on December 9, 2014 by No Author -

PHILADELPHIA, PA—For more than a thousand years, a cemetery on the banks of the Rio Grande Coclé in Panama lay undisturbed, escaping the attention of gold seekers and looters. The river flooded in 1927, scattering beads of gold along its banks. In 1940, a Penn Museum team led by archaeologist J. Alden Mason excavated at the cemetery, unearthing spectacular finds—large golden plaques and pendants with animal-human motifs, precious and semi-precious stone, ivory, and animal bone ornaments, and literally tons of detail-rich painted ceramics. It was extraordinary evidence of a sophisticated Precolumbian people, the Coclé, who lived, died, and painstakingly buried their dead long ago.

Beneath the Surface: Life, Death, and Gold in Ancient Panama, a new exhibition opening February 7, 2015 at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, invites visitors to dig deeper, exploring the history, archaeological evidence, and new research perspectives, in search of a greater understanding of the Coclé people who lived from about 700 to 900 CE. Video footage from the original Sitio Conte excavation, video kiosks with opportunities to “meet” and hear from a range of experts, a centerpiece “burial” with interactive touchscreens—and more than 200 objects from the famous excavation—provide an immersive experience. The exhibition runs through November 1, 2015.

One massive burial, named “Burial 11” by the excavators, yielded the most extraordinary materials from the excavation. Believed to be that of a Paramount Chief, it contained 23 individuals in three distinct layers, accompanied by a vast array of grave objects. A to-scale installation of the burial serves as the exhibition’s centerpiece, drawing visitors beneath the surface of the site. The re-creation features many artifacts displayed in the actual positions they were found, as well as digital interactive stations for further exploration.

About the Site

The site of Sitio Conte is situated about 100 miles southwest of Panama City. When golden grave goods were exposed on the banks of the Rio Grande de Coclé, the Conte family, owners of the land, invited scientific excavation. The Peabody Museum of Harvard University carried out the first investigations in the 1930s. In the spring of 1940, J. Alden Mason, then curator in Penn Museum’s American Section, led a Penn Museum team to carry out three months of excavations.

Diary entries, drawings, photographs, and color film from the excavations set the story of the research in time and place. New excavations in Panama, most recently at nearby El Caño, conservation work and laboratory analyses, and ongoing research on Coclé and neighboring Precolumbian cultures, adds to a growing body of knowledge, told through short interviews with Penn Museum and outside experts.

Coclé Culture and Society

Long overshadowed by research on other indigenous Central and South American peoples, the Coclé remain mysterious, but archaeologists, physical anthropologists, art historians, and other specialists are drawing on the materials they have excavated to tell more. The rich iconography, sophisticated gold working technologies and craftsmanship, exacting placement of bodies and materials in the burials: all offer clues about the world view, artistic style, and social hierarchy of the Coclé.

The art and artifacts uncovered from Burial 11 and throughout the Sitio Conte cemetery were rich in cultural meaning and utilitarian value, and Beneath the Surface uses them to begin to create a portrait of the Coclé people. Central to Exhibition Curator Clark Erickson’s vision of “peopling the past” is a contemporary rendering of the central burial’s Paramount Chief; he stands replete with some of the golden pendants, arm cuffs, and plaques, exquisitely crafted and worthy of a great warrior, which he wore to his grave.

Though not identified as direct descendants of the Coclé, many indigenous groups continue to live in Panama and in the region of Sitio Conte today. A small section of the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to see contemporary Kuna clothing that echoes some of the design forms and styles of ancient Coclé pottery, pendants, and gold.

Throughout, visitors can explore the evidence and encounter new perspectives on who these people were and how they lived.

Archival Photograph, Excavations at Sitio Conte, Panama, led by J. Alden Mason of Penn Museum, March 1940. Photograph by R. Merrill.

Archival Photograph, Ceramics in Situ, Excavations at Sitio Conte, Panama, led by J. Alden Mason of the Penn Museum, March 1940. Photograph by R. Merrill.

Ceramic Polychrome Plate (Turtle), Sitio Conte, Panama, ca. 700-900 CE. Photo: Penn Museum.

Ceramic Shaman Figure, Sitio Conte, Panama, ca 700-900 CE. Photo: Penn Museum.

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Gold Plaque, Sitio Conte, Panama, ca. 700-900 CE. Photo: Penn Museum

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Dr. Clark Erickson, Curator-in-Charge, American Section, is the exhibition’s Lead Curator, working with Co-curator Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator and Sabloff Keeper, American Section; William Wierzbowski, American Section Keeper; and a team of undergraduate Student Assistant Curators, Monica Fenton, Sarah Parkinson, and Ashley Terry of the University of Pennsylvania, and Samantha Seyler of New College, Florida, who provided additional collections and research support. Kate Quinn, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, leads the exhibition interpretation and design, working with Christine Locket and Associates (interpretive planning), Alusive Design (exhibition design), and Bludecadet (multimedia design). The exhibition fabrication is provided by Art Guild, Berry and Homer Printing, and the Penn Muiseum Preparation Department, led by Ben Neiditz, Chief Preparator.

Beneath the Surface: Life, Death, and Gold in Ancient Panama is made possible with generous support from the Selz Foundation, Lead Underwriter, the Manning Family Exhibitions Fund, the Susan Drossman Sokoloff and Adam D. Sokoloff Exhibitions Fund, and A. Bruce and Margaret Mainwaring. Global Arena is Language Services Partner.

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About the Penn Museum

The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.

The Penn Museum is located at 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (on Penn’s campus, across from Franklin Field). Public transportation to the Museum is available via SEPTA’s Regional Rail Line at University City Station; the Market-Frankford Subway Line at 34th Street Station; trolley routes 11, 13, 34, and 36; and bus routes 21, 30, 40, and 42. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and first Wednesdays of each month until 8:00 pm. Open select holiday Mondays. Museum admission donation is $15 for adults; $13 for senior citizens (65 and above); free for U.S. Military; $10 for children and full-time students with ID; free to Penn Museum Members, PennCard holders, and children 5 and younger.

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Source: News Release of the Penn Museum

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Looting, Antiquities Trafficking Supporting ISIS, Say Officials

Posted on December 7, 2014 by No Author -

Antiquities looting, trafficking and destruction of cultural property is no longer a concern only for archaeologists, preservationists, and other concerned citizens, according to UN officials and other experts. It is a matter of worldwide security.

So stated Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, when he addressed an international conference on threats to cultural heritage and diversity, organized by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris on December 3. “The protection of cultural heritage is a security imperative,” he remarked at the UNESCO Paris headquarters.

Given recent developments in Syria and Iraq, his remarks would not be an understatement. “Armed gangs of looters have exploited the vacuum of government control, threatened residents, and hired hundreds of people to carry out illegal excavations,” said Zoe Leung, Program Fellow at the U.S. National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS), an advisory body to UNESCO on the preservation of heritage sites. “By selling newly found artifacts to middlemen and smugglers on the spot, looters profit instantly. Looting operations constitute a significant source of income for ISIS; and trade in illicit antiquities is driving conflict as lootings fund weapons that are fueling violence.”

U.S. officials at the highest levels of government have become increasingly concerned about the problem, a situation that appears to be growing worse as the chaos and violence in Syria and ISIS actions in Iraq drag on. “Ancient treasures in Iraq and in Syria have now become the casualties of continuing warfare and looting,” stated U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in a recent speech at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “And no one group has done more to put our shared cultural heritage in the gun sights than ISIS….it is tearing at the fabric of whole civilizations….it has no respect for culture, which for millions is actually the foundation of life.” Kerry also alludes here to the economic significance cultural resources have in countries where tourism and its related industries are the bread-and-butter of many people’s lives.

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Damage to the Great Mosque in Aleppo due to conflict has been an iconic symbol of the ongoing destruction and looting. Wikimedia Commons

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The developing crisis has precipitated a number of high-level calls for action. Said Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General, “there can be no purely military solution to this crisis. To fight fanaticism, we also need to reinforce education, a defense against hatred, and protect heritage, which helps forge collective identity.” The remarks were supported by Staffan de Mistura, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria, and Nikolay Mladenov, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Iraq. Both stressed the imperative to include education and culture in the developing emergency measures to protect vulnerable civilians in the conflict zones and to safeguard human rights.

To add substance to the call, Bokova and her colleagues are promoting wide-sweeping measures to stem the tide of loss and destruction. One of them focuses on establishing “protected cultural zones” around important cultural sites, requiring a cooperative/collaborativ:-)e effort by all local parties involved in the conflicts, as well as international elements, including governments, to regard such sites as ‘off limits’ in the arena of armed activities. She suggested a start could be made in places like the city of Aleppo, where the great Omayad Mosqfue has already sustained significant damage.

Other proposed measures have included an international ban on the illicit trafficking or sale of antiquities from Syria, now a major problem and source of financial support for groups like ISIS, and the creaion of a global registry of antiquities that are being placed on the market. “Creating an exhaustive registry of all antiquities of Iraqi and Syrian origins currently held in collections will enable the government to target artifacts that do not have clear legitimate titles and excavation history,” says Leung. “The registry will force buyers to prove legitimacy, sending a strong message that artifacts with questionable origins will be subject to severe scrutiny and ethical conduct investigation. The registry will bring down the market value of these artifacts and makes them less attractive to loot.”

Leung admits that creating and sustaining such a registry would not be an easy task, but would be well worth the effort, if successful. “Striving for a foolproof registry presents both challenges and opportunities,” she stated. “The endeavor is likely to strain administrative resources, yet the registry will be able to shift the burden of proof of origin and legitimacy from sellers to art dealers and antiquities buyers. Holding art dealers and private collectors accountable is vital to deter buyers from obtaining artifacts with questionable origins and from justifying such artifacts as “chance finds.”

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More about the crisis in cultural property damage and loss in Syria and Iraq will be covered in two feature articles to be published soon in Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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Archaeologists Discover First Evidence of Frankincense in British Roman Burials

Posted on December 4, 2014 by No Author -

The first scientific evidence of frankincense being used in Roman burial rites in Britain has been uncovered by a team of archaeological scientists led by the University of Bradford. The findings – published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science – prove that, even while the Roman Empire was in decline, these precious substances were being transported to its furthest northern outpost.

The discovery was made by carrying out molecular analysis of materials previously thought to be of little interest – debris inside burial containers and residues on skeletal remains and plaster body casings. Until now, evidence for the use of resins in ancient funerary rites has rarely come to light outside of Egypt.

The samples came from burial sites across Britain, in Dorset, Wiltshire, London and York, dating from the third to the fourth century AD. Of the forty-nine burials analysed, four showed traces of frankincense – originating from southern Arabia or eastern Africa – and ten others contained evidence of resins imported from the Mediterranean region and northern Europe.

Classical texts mention these aromatic, antimicrobial substances as being used as a practical measure to mask the smell of decay or slow decomposition during the often lengthy funeral rites of the Roman elite. But it was their ritual importance which justified their transportation from one end of the empire to the other. Seen both as gifts from the gods and to the gods, these resins were thought to purify the dead and help them negotiate the final rite of passage to the afterlife.

Rhea Brettell from the University of Bradford, whose research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, was the first to realise that these grave deposits were an untapped reservoir of information which could provide the missing evidence:

“Archaeologists have relied on finding visible resin fragments to substantiate the descriptions of burial rites in classical texts, but these rarely survive,” she says. “Our alternative approach of analysing grave deposits to find the molecular signatures of the resins – which fortunately are very distinctive – has enabled us to carry out the first systematic study across a whole province.”

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An example of Frankincense bought on the market in Somalia. This is not an example of evidence actually found in Roman Britain burials.

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These resins were only recovered from burials of higher status individuals, identified from the type of container used, the clothing they were wearing and items buried with them. This is consistent with the known value of frankincense in antiquity and the fact it had to be brought to Britain via what, at the time, was a vast and complex trade route.

University of Bradford Professor of Archaeological Sciences, Carl Heron, who led the research, adds: “It is remarkable that the first evidence for the use of frankincense in Britain should come from such seemingly unpromising samples yet our analysis demonstrates that traces of these exotic resins can survive for over 1700 years in what others would reject as dirt.”

The project was a collaboration between the University of Bradford and specialists at the Anglo-Saxon Laboratory in York, the Museum of London and the Universities of Bamburg and Bordeaux.

Dr Rebecca Redfern, research osteologist in the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology at the Museum of London, said: “This eye opening study has provided us with new and amazing insights into the funerary rituals of late Roman Britain. The University of Bradford’s significant research has also rewarded us with further understanding of a rich young Roman lady, used in the study, whose 4th century skeleton and sarcophagus was discovered near Spitalfields Market in the City of London in 1999, making her burial even more unique in Britain.”

The materials from which the samples were collected are held by Dorset County Museum, Museum of London, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Wessex Archaeology, Winchester Museums and York Museums Trust.

The resins found in the study were from three different plant families:

Pistacia spp. (mastic/terebinth) from the Mediterranean or the Levant
Pinaceae (probably Pinus spp.) from Northern Europe
Boswellia spp. (frankincense/olibanum) from southern Arabia and eastern Africa

This study published in Journal of Archaeological Science covers inhumation burials. The University of Bradford researchers have subsequently also identified resins in a cremation burial from the Mersea Island barrow, where the resins were added to the ashes in the urn prior to burial. These findings are due to be published in the New Year.

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Source: University of Bradford press release.

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King Richard III Case Closed After 529 Years

Posted on December 2, 2014 by No Author -

The international research team led by Dr Turi King from the University of Leicester Department of Genetics has now provided overwhelming evidence that the skeleton discovered under a car park in Leicester indeed represents the remains of King Richard III, thereby closing what is probably the oldest forensic case solved to date.

The team of researchers, including Professor of English Local History, Kevin Schürer, who is also Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Leicester and led the genealogical research for the project, has published the findings online today (Tuesday 2 December) in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.

The researchers collected DNA and analysed several genetic markers, including the complete mitochondrial genomes, inherited through the maternal line, and Y-chromosomal markers, inherited through the paternal line, from both the skeletal remains and living relatives. The study is also the first to carry out a statistical analysis of all the evidence together, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Skeleton 1 from the Greyfriars site in Leicester is indeed the remains of King Richard III.

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The excavated remains of Richard III, discovered at Greyfriars. Courtesy University of Leicester

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Their results: While the Y-chromosomal markers differ, the mitochondrial genome shows a genetic match between the skeleton and the maternal line relatives. The former result is not unsurprising as the chances for a false-paternity event is fairly high after so many generations. They have also shown beyond reasonable doubt that Skeleton 1 from the Greyfriars site in Leicester is indeed the remains of King Richard III. Genetic markers related to the King’s hair and eye colour indicated that he probably had blond hair and blue eyes, appearing most similar to his depiction in one of the earliest portraits of him that survived, the one curated by the Society of Antiquaries in London.

“The combination of evidence confirms the remains as those of Richard III,” said Shürer. “Especially important is the triangulation of the maternal line descendants.”

Says King of the report: “Our paper covers all the genetic and genealogical analysis involved in the identification of the remains of Skeleton 1 from the Greyfriars site in Leicester and is the first to draw together all the strands of evidence to come to a conclusion about the identity of those remains. Even with our highly conservative analysis, the evidence is overwhelming that these are indeed the remains of King Richard III, thereby closing an over 500 year old missing person’s case.”

Simon Chaplin, Director of Culture & Society at the Wellcome Trust, added: “It is exciting to have access to genetic data from any known historical individual, let alone a king of England lost for more than 500 years, so we are thrilled to be able to support this fascinating project through our Research Resources grant scheme. Adding this information to a wealth of existing material about Richard III further highlights the ways in which studying human remains can inform our understanding of the past, and we look forward to learning more about Richard for many years to come.”

The research team now plans to sequence the complete genome of RIII to learn more about the last English king to die in battle.

See the videos detailing the research and findings below.

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The University of Leicester was the principal funder of the research. Dr King’s post is part-funded by The Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.

Source: Adapted and edited from a University of Leicester press release.

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Mastodons Disappeared From Ancient Beringia Before Humans Arrived

Posted on December 1, 2014 by No Author -

It seems the mastodons had already left the scene by the time early Americans arrived on the ancient Beringia landmass about 13,000 – 14,000 years ago. A re-dating of mastodon bones reveals that the extinct mammals, related to the modern day elephant, disappeared from the area during a glacial period more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps—a chronology that is at odds with what scientists know about the massive animals’ preferred habitat: forests and wetlands abundant with leafy food. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers is revising fossil age estimates based on new radiocarbon dates and suggesting that the Arctic and Subarctic were only temporary homes to mastodons when the climate was warm. The new findings also indicate that mastodons suffered local extinction several tens of millennia before either human colonization–the earliest estimate of which is between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago–or the onset of climate changes at the end of the ice age about 10,000 years ago, when they were among 70 species of mammals to disappear in North America.

“Scientists have been trying to piece together information on these extinctions for decades,” said Ross MacPhee, a curator in the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the paper. “Was it the result of over-hunting by early people in North America? Was it the rapid global warming at the end of the ice age? Did all of these big mammals go out in one dramatic die-off, or were they paced over time and due to a complex set of factors?”

Over the course of the late Pleistocene, between about 10,000 and 125,000 years ago, the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) became widespread and occupied many parts of continental North America as well as peripheral locations like the tropics of Honduras and the Arctic coast of Alaska. Mastodons were browsing specialists that relied on woody plants and lived in coniferous or mixed woodlands with lowland swamps.

“Mastodon teeth were effective at stripping and crushing twigs, leaves, and stems from shrubs and trees. So it would seem unlikely that they were able to survive in the ice-covered regions of Alaska and Yukon during the last full-glacial period, as previous fossil dating has suggested,” said Grant Zazula, a paleontologist in the Yukon Palaeontology Program and lead author of the new work.

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An American mastodon. Bottom: An American mastodon (left) and a woolly mammoth for comparison (right). Image courtesy George Teichmann.

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Megafaunal mammals including the American mastodon (rear center), Jefferson’s ground sloth (front center and right), the flat-headed peccary (front left), and the western camel (rear left) extended their habitat into northern latitudes during the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago. Image courtesy of George Teichmann.

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The research team used two different types of precise radiocarbon dating on a collection of 36 fossil teeth and bones of American mastodons from Alaska and Yukon, the region known as eastern Beringia. The dating methods, performed at Oxford University and the University of California, Irvine, are designed to only target material from bone collagen, avoiding the accompanying “slop,” including preparation varnish and glues that were used many years ago to strengthen the specimens.

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Grant Zazula, a paleontologist in the Yukon Palaeontology Program and lead author of the new work, cuts samples of American mastodon bones for radiocarbon dating. Credit: © G. Zazula

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A mastodon molar. Courtesy G. Zazula

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All of the fossils were found to be older than previously thought, with most surpassing 50,000 years, the effective limit of radiocarbon dating. When taking mastodon habitat preferences and other ecological and geological information into account, the results indicate that mastodons probably only lived in the Arctic and Subarctic for a limited time around 125,000 years ago, when forests and wetlands were established and the temperatures were as warm as they are today.

The residency of mastodons in the north did not last long,” Zazula said. “The return to cold, dry glacial conditions along with the advance of continental glaciers around 75,000 years ago effectively wiped out their habitats. Mastodons disappeared from Beringia, and their populations became displaced to areas much farther to the south, where they ultimately suffered complete extinction about 10,000 years ago.”

The work has several implications. Researchers know that giant ground sloths, American camels, and giant beavers made the migration as well, but they are still investigating what other groups of animals might have followed this course. The new report also suggests that humans could not have been involved in the local extinction of mastodons in the north 75,000 years ago as they had not yet crossed the Bering Isthmus from Asia.

“We’re not saying that humans were uninvolved in the megafauna’s last stand 10,000 years ago. But by that time, whatever the mastodon population was down to, their range had shrunken mostly to the Great Lakes region,” MacPhee said. “That’s a very different scenario from saying the human depredations caused universal loss of mastodons across their entire range within the space of a few hundred years, which is the conventional view.”

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Source: Edited and adapted from an American Museum of Natural History press release and a press release of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other authors of the paper include Jessica Metcalfe, University of British Columbia; Alberto Reyes, University of Alberta; Fiona Brock and Shweta Nalawade-Chavan, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit; Patrick Drukenmiller, University of Alaska Museum and University of Alaska Fairbanks; Pamela Groves, Daniel Mann, and Michael Kunz, University of Alaska Fairbanks; C. Richard Harington, Canadian Museum of Nature; Gregory Hodgins, University of Arizona, Tucson; Fred Longstaffe, University of Western Ontario, London; H. Gregory McDonald, U.S. National Parks Service; and John Southon, University of California, Irvine.

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Researchers Investigate ‘Vampire’ Remains in Polish Cemetery

Posted on November 26, 2014 by No Author -

Potential ‘vampires’ buried in Poland with sickles and rocks placed across their corpses were likely local people known by their community before death, say researchers in a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lesley Gregoricka from University of South Alabama and colleagues.

Archaeologists and other scientists who have exhumed the medieval and post-medieval skeletal remains of individuals in cemeteries across Europe in the course of their research have long known about burials of individuals who were thought to be potential ‘vampires’, or the ‘undead’. They know this by the peculiar features associated with the skeletal remains within the graves, objects such as sickles placed across the bodies, large stones placed over the neck or under the chins, iron bars or ‘stakes’ inserted through the chest area, or bricks or stones inserted within the cavity between the madible and the cranium (the mouth). They are considered indicators of apotropaic burial practices, or bodily treatments to the deceased within their coffins or graves designed to prevent them from returning to life and rising out of their graves to haunt, kill or eat the living. Only a minority of burials across Europe have exhibited these characteristics, but the practice is a reflection of a variety of cultural or religious beliefs that have inspired or spawned the more modern, popular conceptions in literature and the media about Dracula and vampires within the horror genre—a fascination and source of entertainment for generations.

Beginning in 2008, excavations carried out by an international team at the ‘Drawsko 1’ post-medieval cemetery site in northwestern Poland revealed six unusual graves, with skeletal remains dated to the 17th – 18th century showing sickles across the bodies or large rocks under the chins of select individuals. Though unusual, these burials were among hundreds of other normal burials. The researchers at the site have interpreted them to be apotropaic burials.

“In Polish folklore……the soul and the body are distinct entities that separate upon a person’s death,” write Lesley A. Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama and colleagues in the report. “Souls, the majority of which are harmless, leave the body and continue to inhabit the earth for 40 days after death. However, a small minority of these souls were seen as a direct threat to the living and at risk of becoming a vampire, particularly those who were marginalized in life for having an unusual physical appearance, practicing witchcraft, perishing first during an epidemic, committing suicide, being unbaptized or born out of wedlock, or being an outsider to the community.”*

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Individual 49/2012 (30-39 year old female) is shown with a sickle placed across the neck. Courtesy Amy Scott

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Individual 60/2010 (60+ year old female) is shown with a stone placed directly on top of the throat. Courtesy Gregoricka et al.

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In the study, Gregoricka and her colleagues analyzed the remains of 60 of the total of 285 buried skeletal remains unearthed in the excavations, including those of five of the six “special” or deviant, apotropaic, burials, by using radiometric strontium isotope analysis of dental enamel samples. The study was designed to determine whether the bodies selected for apotropaic burial rites were local or immigrants, one factor that can be scientifically tested. The research methodology used is important because strontium isotopes are absorbed by the flora and fauna of local ecosystems, which include humans, by the weathering or breakdown of bedrock into the soils and groundwater. “Because strontium is structurally similar to calcium, as humans consume these plants and animals, small amounts of strontium absorbed by the intestines substitute for calcium in the formation of enamel and bone hydroxyapatite,” wrote Gregoricka, et al. in the report. “Strontium uptake into the human skeleton is primarily determined by these consumed foods, and because the 87Sr/86Sr ratios within these products are a direct reflection of the distinct isotopic composition of a particular region’s underlying geology, biogeochemical signatures in human dental enamel (which form only during childhood) offer a useful means of evaluating childhood geographic residence and mobility in the past.”*

The team’s conclusion: The ‘vampires’ were local. They did not immigrate into the community from the outside, often cited historically by residents of communities during the 17th and 18th centuries as a reason for the introduction of evil elements into the social structure. The data thus indicated that they had to be perceived with suspicion in some other way. The study authors suggest one alternate explanation could be related to the cholera epidemics in Eastern Europe during the 17th century. “People of the post-medieval period did not understand how disease was spread, and rather than a scientific explanation for these epidemics, cholera and the deaths that resulted from it were explained by the supernatural – in this case, vampires,” said Dr. Gregoricka. “However,” cautioned Gregoricka in the report,”because cholera kills quickly and does not leave behind visible markers on the skeleton, it is unclear if this is the case at Drawsko.”*

The research study was published November 26, 2014 in the open access journal, PLOS ONE.

A more extensive feature article about the archaeology of ‘vampires’ will be published in the Winter 2015 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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*Gregoricka LA, Betsinger TK, Scott AB, Polcyn M (2014) Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLoS ONE 9(11): e113564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0113564

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Prehistoric Farming on the Tibetan Plateau

Posted on November 20, 2014 by No Author -

Animal teeth, bones and plant remains have helped researchers from Cambridge, China and America to pinpoint a date for what could be the earliest sustained human habitation at high altitude.

Archaeological discoveries from the ‘roof of the world’ on the Tibetan Plateau indicate that from 3,600 years ago, crop growing and the raising of livestock was taking place year-round at hitherto unprecedented altitudes.

The findings, published today in Science, demonstrate that across 53 archaeological sites spanning 800 miles, there is evidence of sustained farming and human habitation between 2,500 metres above sea level (8,200ft) and 3,400 metres (11,154ft).

Evidence of an intermittent human presence on the Tibetan Plateau has been dated to at least 20,000 years ago, with the first semi-permanent villages established only 5,200 years ago. The presence of crops and livestock at the altitudes discovered by researchers indicates a more sustained human presence than is needed to merely hunt game at such heights.

Professor Martin Jones, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, and one of the lead researchers on the project, said: “Until now, when and how humans started to live and farm at such extraordinary heights has remained an open question. Our understanding of sustained habitation above 2-3,000m on the Tibetan Plateau has to date been hampered by the scarcity of archaeological data available.

“But our findings show that not only did these farmer-herders conquer unheard of heights in terms of raising livestock and growing crops like barley and millet, but that human expansion into the higher, colder altitudes took place as the continental temperatures were becoming colder.

“Year-round survival at these altitudes must have led to some very challenging conditions indeed – and this poses further, interesting questions for researchers about the adaptation of humans, livestock and crops to life at such dizzying heights.”

Professor Jones hopes more work will now be undertaken to look at genetic resistance in humans to altitude sickness, and genetic response in crop plants in relation to attributes such as grain vernalisation, flowering time response and ultraviolet radiation tolerance – as well as research into the genetic and ethnic identity of the human communities themselves.

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Modern-day barley harvest in Qinghai, farmed at a height of 3,000 meters above sea level. Credit Professor Martin Jones, University of Cambridge

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Research on the Tibetan Plateau has also raised interesting questions about the timing and introduction of Western crops such as barley and wheat – staples of the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’. From 4,000-3,600 years ago, this meeting of east and west led to the joining or displacement of traditional North Chinese crops of broomcorn and foxtail millet. The importation of Western cereals enabled human communities to adapt to the harsher conditions of higher altitudes in the Plateau.

In order to ascertain during what period and at what altitude sustained food produced first enabled an enduring human presence, the research group collected artefacts, animal bones and plant remains from 53 sites across the late Yangshao, Majiayao, Qiija, Xindian, Kayue and Nuomuhong cultures.

Cereal grains (foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, barley and wheat) were identified at all 53 sites and animal bones and teeth (from sheep, cattle and pig) were discovered at ten sites. Of the 53 sites, an earlier group (dating from 5,200-3,600 years ago) reached a maximum elevation of 2,527m while a later group of 29 sites (dating from 3,600-2,300 years ago) approached 3,400m in altitude.

Professor Jones believes the Tibetan Plateau research could have wider and further-reaching implications for today’s world in terms of global food security and the possibilities of rebalancing the ‘global diet’; at present heavily, and perhaps unsustainably, swayed in favour of the big three crops of rice, wheat and maize.

He said: “Our current knowledge of agricultural foods emphasises a relatively small number of crops growing in the intensively managed lowlands. The more we learn about the rich ecology of past and present societies, and the wider range of crops they raised in the world’s more challenging environments, the more options we will have for thinking through food security issues in the future.”

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Source: University of Cambridge press release

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Archaeologists Excavate Imperial Roman Structure

Posted on November 19, 2014 by No Author -

Ostia Antica, the famous Roman port that served the city of Rome from the days of the Republic through Imperial times, is noted for its remarkably preserved ancient buildings, frescoes and mosaics. Located near Rome, its ruins lie near the modern suburb of Ostia, a popular destination for tourists and teams of excavating archaeologists for years. During its heyday it skirted the banks of the Tiber river, but silting over centuries of time has placed the site 3 kilometres (2 miles) from the sea. Many of its ancient structures, however, remain extraordinarily intact, almost as if to imply that nothing has changed.

In 2015, a team of archaeologists and students will once again return to the site under the direction of Dr. Darius Arya and Dr. Michele Raddi of the American Institute of Roman Culture. They will be focusing their efforts on two areas in the Parco dei Ravennati, a public park area near the main archaeological site of Ostia and the famous Medieval borgo Renaissance castle built by Pope Julius II. The first area, designated ‘Area A’, contains an Imperial Roman structure built using the opus mixtum construction technique and redecorated in Late Antiquity with frescoes and an opus sectile floor in one room, which was later divided into a series of smaller rooms during the Medieval period. Next to this is a 15th century vaulted structure that was partially investigated in the late 1960s, thought to be associated with the construction of the borgo castle. The second area, designated ‘Area B’, features part of a Roman road next to a circular Late Republican period mausoleum, excavated in previous years. Arya, et al., believe this part of the road was “likely the last major phase of the Via Ostiensis dating to the early Middle Ages”.*

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Ostia Antica, for obvious reasons as depicted above, is among the most visited archaeological sites in Italy, with visual reminders of places like Pompeii. Wikimedia Commons

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The upcoming excavations come on the heals of some remarkable finds by the team in recent years. “We’ve had amazing finds over the past two years at Parco dei Ravennati,” Arya told ANSA, the Italian news wire service, in an interview last July. “This year, we’ve uncovered more than a dozen early Christian-era tombs arranged close to a central tomb. Our working hypothesis is that the set up of the surrounding tombs suggests the person buried here was of great importance, such as Saint Monica or Saint Aurea, whose church is nearby.” Excavators also uncovered a number of fragmentary funerary inscriptions and a possible tabella defixionum, a lead tablet inscribed with a curse to protect the dead from tomb raiders. In 2013, the team uncovered an opus sectile (an inlaid, colored marble pavement). The 2014 excavations continued the work on the pavement, revealing a detailed geometric motif.

Darya and colleagues are currently calling for individuals who would be interested in participating in the excavations during the 2015 summer season. For more information about the Ostia Antica excavations and how to participate, see the website for details.

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*http://romanculture.org/programs/current-field-school-excavation/

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Climate Change Not a Cause of Bronze Age Collapse

Posted on November 17, 2014 by No Author -

Scientists will have to find alternative explanations for a huge population collapse in Europe at the end of the Bronze Age as researchers prove definitively that climate change – commonly assumed to be responsible – could not have been the culprit.

Archaeologists and environmental scientists from the University of Bradford, University of Leeds, University College Cork, Ireland (UCC), and Queen’s University Belfast have shown that the changes in climate that scientists believed to coincide with the fall in population in fact occurred at least two generations later.

Their results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that human activity starts to decline after 900BC, and falls rapidly after 800BC, indicating a population collapse. But the climate records show that colder, wetter conditions didn’t occur until around two generations later.

Fluctuations in levels of human activity through time are reflected by the numbers of radiocarbon dates for a given period. The team used new statistical techniques to analyse more than 2000 radiocarbon dates, taken from hundreds of archaeological sites in Ireland, to pinpoint the precise dates that Europe’s Bronze Age population collapse occurred.

The team then analysed past climate records from peat bogs in Ireland and compared the archaeological data to these climate records to see if the dates tallied. That information was then compared with evidence of climate change across NW Europe between 1200 and 500 BC.

“Our evidence shows definitively that the population decline in this period cannot have been caused by climate change,” says Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, and lead author of the study.

Graeme Swindles, Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds, added, “We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods.”

According to Professor Armit, social and economic stress is more likely to be the cause of the sudden and widespread fall in numbers. Communities producing bronze needed to trade over very large distances to obtain copper and tin. Control of these networks enabled the growth of complex, hierarchical societies dominated by a warrior elite. As iron production took over, these networks collapsed, leading to widespread conflict and social collapse. It may be these unstable social conditions, rather than climate change, that led to the population collapse at the end of the Bronze Age.

According to Katharina Becker, Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at UCC, the Late Bronze Age is usually seen as a time of plenty, in contrast to an impoverished Early Iron Age. “Our results show that the rich Bronze Age artefact record does not provide the full picture and that crisis began earlier than previously thought,” she says.

“Although climate change was not directly responsible for the collapse it is likely that the poor climatic conditions would have affected farming,” adds Professor Armit. “This would have been particularly difficult for vulnerable communities, preventing population recovery for several centuries.”

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Painting depicting the fall of Troy, a symbolism here of the Late Bronze Age civilization collapse. Wikimedia Commons

The findings have significance for modern day climate change debates which, argues Professor Armit, are often too quick to link historical climate events with changes in population.

“The impact of climate change on humans is a huge concern today as we monitor rising temperatures globally,” says Professor Armit.

“Often, in examining the past, we are inclined to link evidence of climate change with evidence of population change. Actually, if you have high quality data and apply modern analytical techniques, you get a much clearer picture and start to see the real complexity of human/environment relationships in the past.”

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Source: University of Bradford press release.

The detailed research paper: “Rapid climate change did not cause population collapse at the end of the European Bronze Age”, by Ian Armit, Graeme Swindles, Katharina Becker, Gill Plunkett and Maarten Blaauw, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the week beginning 17 November 2014.

Archaeology in Ireland

Ireland offers particularly rich opportunities to study archaeological records, partly because of the quality of palaeoenvironmental samples from the countries peat bogs, and partly because of a huge upsurge in archaeological excavations in Ireland during the economic boom between 1995 and 2008.

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Popular Archaeology Now Top-Ranked

Posted on November 17, 2014 by No Author -

Yes, it is true. Popular Archaeology Magazine is now among the world’s top 20 most popular digital magazines for those interested in archaeology. In fact, it ranks no. 2, close on the heals of Archaeology Magazine, the publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, which has been around for decades with a strong traditional following. Comparatively speaking, Popular Archaeology is the new kid on the block, having been up and running for less than 5 years. But it has been the quality of its content that so quickly propelled Popular Archaeology to the top rung of the heap.

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See the quality for yourself by examining the articles first hand at https://popular-archaeology.com. And access to all of our best, premium quality articles, in past issues and in the present, can be obtained for only $9.00 annually (significantly less costly than the equivalent digital version of Archaeology Magazine).

But here is the best news: For a limited time, from now until January 1, 2015, those who subscribe for the first time for the premium content level can have access to all premium articles for only $4.50, a 50% discount, as our “Black Friday”/Holiday discount offer. Just go to “Subscribe Here” in the upper right-hand corner of the web page and enter the coupon code, holiday12014, during the sign-up process.

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Archaeologists Excavate Ancient Bronze Age Remains in Oman

Posted on November 16, 2014 by No Author -

Much is still unknown about these people who once occupied present-day northeastern Oman about 5,000 years ago. They left no written records, at least none that have been found to date. They made up what scholars and historians have referred to as the ancient Magan civilization.

“The people of Magan did not use writing or glyptic arts to record their history or organize their societies, so we know very little about their way of life,” write Christopher Thornton, Charlotte Cable and colleagues about the ancient society.* Discovering more about it must be left to the tools and methods of archaeology.

Thornton, a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum, has been co-directing the Bat Archaeological Project since 2007. Bat, the focus of investigations under the Project, is a settlement identified with the Magan civilization. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the interior of the country. It features a large Bronze Age cemetery and other evidence of 3rd millennium BCE settlements near large, circular structures called “towers”, which have been the subjects of their excavations from 2007 to 2012. But in 2013, they shifted to exploring a series of Bronze Age domestic structures, including 3rd millennium BCE structures excavated in 2014 that give clues to the transition from an early agricultural settlement to a developed center for trade and production.

“Bat is unusual in eastern Arabia for its relatively deep stratigraphic sequence (1-3 meters), in which earlier houses are overlain by later houses,” state Thornton and colleagues in a summary brief. “While common in other regions of the world, Bat has the potential to provide the first radiocarbon-dated stratigraphic sequence of the 3rd millennium BCE on the Omani Peninsula, and our first glimpse of settlement evolution in the Bronze Age of this area.”**

Bat, along with the sites of al-Khutm and al-Ayn, are thought by scholars to be ancient centers that traded extensively with Mesopotamia between 3000 and 2000 BCE. Sumerian cuneiform texts make reference to Magan as a major source of copper and diorite in 2300 BCE, describing ships with cargo capacities of 20 tons journeying up the Arabian Gulf, stopping at ancient Dilmun along the way. They also record Indus Valley merchants and others traveling to Magan. Research in this area of Arabia has identified large copper deposits, in addition to more than 150 medieval smelting sites, reinforcing the notion that the region had the natural resources to suggest that this was, indeed, where ancient Magan was located.

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Scattered remains of ancient tombs at Bat. Stefan Karsowski, Wikimedia Commons

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Thornton and Cable plan to return to Bat in 2015 with a team of archaeologists, other specialists and student volunteers to further investigate the domestic structures, in addition to nearby abandoned Late Islamic/pre-Modern mud-brick village structures, working alongside the local community to study how the village spaces were used.

They plan to have the people of the local community assume a significant role in the research, an element that is fast becoming an important trend in archaeological projects and activities throughout the world. “With the conferring of World Heritage (WH) status to the adjacent Bronze Age cemetery and settlement of Bat”, report Thornton, et al., “the people of Bat have increasingly become interested in their own recent history and its meaningful role in the development and articulation of their identity, and are very keen to develop the heritage and tourist potential of the Oasis and site.”**

The Bat project directors are calling for help from students and volunteers all over the world. For more information, see the project field school website.

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*http://ifrglobal.org/programs/me/oman-bat?utm_source=IFR+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6c7212178d-Oman_Bat_Permit_Received11_12_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5da3ddc8ef-6c7212178d-326738257

**http://ifrglobal.org/images/2014/Syllabus/Syllabus-Oman_BAT_2014.pdf

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Archaeologists Investigate Underground Pyramidal Structure Beneath Orvieto, Italy

Posted on November 11, 2014 by No Author -

Archaeologists are scratching their heads about an underground pyramid-shaped structure they have been excavating beneath the historic medieval town of Orvieto in Italy. But it may not be a mystery forever. They hope to find answers as they continue to tease artifacts and architectural materials from the soil.

“We discovered it three summers ago and still have no idea what it is,” write Prof. David B. George of St. Anselm College and co-director Claudio Bizzarri of PAAO and colleagues about the site. “We do know what it is not. It is not a quarry; it’s walls are too well dressed. It is not a well or cistern; its walls have no evidence of hydraulic treatments.”*

Calling it the “cavitá” (‘hole’ or ‘hollow’ in Italian), or hypogeum, the archaeologists have thus far excavated about 15 meters down. They marked their third year at the site in 2014. By then they had uncovered significant amounts of what they classify as Gray and Black bucchero, commonware, and Red and Black Figure pottery remains. They have dated deposits to the middle to the end of the 6th century BCE.

“We know that the site was sealed toward the end of the 5th century BCE,” George, et al. continue. “It appears to have been a single event. Of great significance is the number of Etruscan language inscriptions that we have recovered – over a hundred and fifty. We are also finding an interesting array of architectural/decorative terra cotta.”*

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Overview of cavità, showing Etruscan tunnel and a locus with large quantities of pottery. Courtesy Daniel George, Jr.

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Excavation on the west wall of the hypogeum near the Etruscan tunnel that connects this pyramidal hypogeum (Room A) with an adjacent one (Room B). Courtesy Daniel George, Jr.

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Looking from Room B through the Etruscan tunnel into Room A. Courtesy Daniel George, Jr.

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Above and below: The medieval columbarium – a place for raising pigeons – in the cavità used as a lab to sort bucchero. Courtesy Daniel George, Jr.

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Orvieto has long been known for its scenic medieval architecture. Located in southwestern Umbria, Italy, it is situated on the summit of a large butte of volcanic tuff, commanding a view of the surrounding countryside, and surrounded by defensive walls built of the same volcanic tuff. Beneath it and in the surrounding areas of the medieval town, however, lie ancient Etruscan and Roman remains, a focus of archaeological investigations and excavations by various teams for decades. George’s excavations have centered on four different sites in the area, two (Coriglia and the Orvieto underground structures) of which will be further excavated in 2015. The Coriglia excavations have resulted in a wealth of finds, including monumental structures such as Etruscan and Roman walls, Etruscan and imported Greek ceramic materials, three large basins dated to the Roman Imperial period, and apsidal structures with associated features related to the management of water for baths or other purposes. “We have uncovered evidence for occupation of the site dating from the 10th century BCE all the way to the 16th century CE, as well as random realia from World War II,” write George, et al.**

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View of Orvieto. RDesai, Wikimedia Commons

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At Coriglia: Trench F showing a viscera with hydraulic cement and flooring with a collapsed vault to the right (Likely 2nd century CE). On the left a medieval industrial reuse of the structure. Courtesy David B. George

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‘Trench C’ showing the recently discovered caldarium of a Roman bath (Imperial period) at Coriglia. Courtesy David B. George

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Overall, excavations under George and Bizzarri’s direction in the area have recovered monumental structures, sculptures, mosaics, coinage, inscriptions, ceramics, frescoes, and numerous other artifacts. Looking forward, he anticipates new finds that will shed additional light and answer more questions about what the sites at Orvieto and Coriglia are all about. “We are still trying to determine how the structure was ‘killed’ [filled in and then abandoned] – in a short period of time confined over the course of a few months or over a much longer period,” says George, referring to the cavitá. “The tight dating of the Attic pottery seems to indicate a short period but the enormous quantity gives one pause. At Coriglia, our current hypothesis is that it is a sanctuary. We wish to test this by excavating in areas that should yield architectural and ceramic evidence that would be associated with such use. We are still working on the phasing of our walls and getting a handle on three periods of expansion, at least one of which followed a mudslide.”

Even more important, however, may be what their findings will ultimately say about the lives of people in the region so long ago. Write George, Bizzarri and colleagues, “based on what is known from similar sites in the region, the members of our archaeological expedition may be confident that they will make discoveries that will reflect daily life in the Etruscan and Roman periods.”*

More detailed information about the sites and excavation project can be obtained at the project website and here. The latter link includes information about how to apply, for those interested in participating in the excavations.

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*http://www.archaeological.org/sites/default/files/brochure2015_1.pdf

** http://digumbria.com/

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Researchers Challenge Accepted Theory on Tool Use Among Primates

Posted on November 11, 2014 by No Author -

Whether you are a human being or an orangutan, tools can be a big help in getting what you need to survive. However, a review of current research into the use of tools by non-human primates suggests that ecological opportunity, rather than necessity, is the main driver behind primates such as chimpanzees picking up a stone to crack open nuts.

An opinion piece by Dr Kathelijne Koops of the University of Cambridge and others, published today (12 November 2014) in Biology Letters, challenges the assumption that necessity is the mother of invention. She and her colleagues argue that research into tool use by primates should look at the opportunities for tool use provided by the local environment.

Koops and colleagues reviewed studies on tool use among the three habitual tool-using primates – chimpanzees, orangutans and bearded capuchins.

Chimpanzees use a variety of tools in a range of contexts, including stones to crack open nuts, and sticks to harvest aggressive army ants. Orangutans also use stick tools to prey on insects, as well as to extract seeds from fruits. Bearded capuchin monkeys living in savannah-like environments also use a variety of tools, including stones to crack open nuts and sticks to dig for tubers.

The researchers’ review of the published literature, including their own studies, revealed that, against expectations, tool use did not increase in times when food was scarce. Instead, tool use appears to be determined by ecological opportunity – with calorie-rich but hard-to-reach foodstuffs appearing to act as an incentive for an ingenious use of materials.

“By ecological opportunity, we mean the likelihood of encountering tool materials and resources whose exploitation requires the use of tools. We showed that these ecological opportunities influence the occurrence of tool use. The resources extracted using tools, such as nuts and honey, are among the richest in primate habitats. Hence, extraction pays off, and not just during times of food scarcity,” said Koops.

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This image shows a chimpanzee using a stone to crack a nut. Courtesy Kathelijine Koops

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Tool use—and transmission of tool-making and tool-using skills between individuals—is seen as an important marker in the development of culture. “Given our close genetic links to our primate cousins, their tool use may provide valuable insights into how humans developed their extraordinary material culture and technology,” said Koops.

It has been argued that culture is present among wild primates because simple ecological and genetic differences alone cannot account for the variation of behaviour – such as tool use – observed across populations of the same species.

Koops and co-researchers argue that this ‘method of exclusion’ may present a misleading picture when applied to the material aspects of culture.

“The local environment may exert a powerful influence on culture and may, in fact, be critical for understanding the occurrence and distribution of material culture. In forests with plenty of nut trees, we are more likely to find chimpanzees cracking nuts, which is the textbook example of chimpanzee material culture,” said Koops.

“Our study suggests that published research on primate cultures, which depend on the ‘method of exclusion’, may well underestimate the cultural repertoires of primates in the wild, perhaps by a wide margin. We propose a model in which the environment is explicitly recognised as a possible influence on material culture.”

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The opinion piece ‘Ecological conditions influence primate cultures’ is published by Biology Letters. The authors are Kathelijine Koops (University of Cambridge, Archaeology and Anthropology and University of Zurich, Anthropological Institute and Museum), Elisabetta Visalberghi (CNR, Institute of Cognitive Sciences) and Carel van Schaik (University of Zurich, Anthropological Institute and Museum).

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Source: University of Cambridge Press Release

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Archaeologists Uncover Massive Fortifications in Ancient City of King Midas

Posted on November 5, 2014 by No Author -

A team of archaeologists have unearthed new evidence of massive, monumental defensive works at the Citadel Mound site of ancient Gordion in Turkey. Excavations have also revealed ancient industrial activity dating back to the 11th century BCE.

Located about 70–80 km southwest of Ankara in western Turkey, Gordion, the ancient city best known as the residence of the legendary King Midas, has been the focus of on-and-off excavations since it was discovered in 1893 by Alfred Körte, who initiated exploratory excavations at the site in 1900. Now, Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have uncovered massive defensive walls, part of a road, and industrial work spaces dated back to some of the earliest periods of the site. During the early first millennium B.C., Gordion was the power center of the Phrygian kingdom, ruling much of Asia Minor. It was under King Midas and later rulers that the kingdom reached its apogee.

“Gordion’s historical significance derives from its very long and complex sequence of occupation, with seven successive settlements spanning a period of nearly 4500 years,” says Rose. “What we discovered was a large glacis or stepped terrace wall over 2.5 m in height, dating to the Early Phrygian period, that supported a substantial fortification wall nearly 3 m. wide. This had proven that the western side of the mound was fortified, and that those fortifications had already been established in the Early Phrygian period (9th c. B.C.), neither of which had been known previously.”*

Other massive fortifications, particularly on the eastern side of the Citadel Mound, were uncovered through previous expeditions. But in the last two seasons, beginning in 2013 under Rose’s renewed excavations at the south side of the Citadel Mound, solid new evidence has emerged for additional defensive works.

Most significantly, the excavations have also now revealed fortifications spanning the entire time period of Phrygian rule in the region. “We were fortunate this year in uncovering new fortifications dating to three different periods: Early Phrygian (9th c. BC), Middle Phrygian (8th c. BC) and Late Phrygian (6th c. BC)…….it is already clear that the scale of the citadel fortifications throughout the entire Phrygian period was much more ambitious than formerly suspected.”*

The Outer Town

Concurrent with the excavations and conservation efforts at Gordion, a team under the direction of Stefan Giese and Christian Huebner of GGH in Freiburg, Germany, has been conducting a geophysical survey of the ‘Outer Town’ using magnetometry and electric resistivity techniques. The Outer Town is a second residential area with detected remains just west of the Lower Town, another residential area that extends below the Citadel Mound. What they found has been no less revelatory than the Citadel Mound discoveries. They detected signs that the Outer Town was “bordered by a ditch with a defensive wall on its interior”*, which the team believes surrounded the entire Outer Town. The findings include other features that suggest a monumental fort. These preliminary finds are similar to those previously discovered in the Lower Town, which also features a defensive wall and ditch.

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View of the Gordion Citadel Mound and previously excavated fortifications. Note the scaffolding at the Citadel Gateway in the background, a visible reminder of the ongoing architectural conservation and restoration work at the site. Vikicizer, Wikimedia Commons

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Elevated overview of the Citadel Mound area. Stipich Bela, Wikimedia Commons

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Although archaeological excavations have taken place at Gordion over decades through a number of expeditionary endeavors, the best known excavations were conducted under the directorship of Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) beginning in the 1950’s. His excavations over 17 seasons uncovered major sections of the Phrygian period Citadel Mound, including overlying Hellenistic towns, and a mudbrick fortress and defensive walls of a Lower Town near the Citadel. During the first years of his excavations, he encountered earlier Bronze Age settlement remains, but investigations of these levels were limited. Young also uncovered 30 burial tumuli, which included the sensational royal ‘Tumulus MM‘ (Midas Mound) and a nearby tomb of a wealthy Phrygian child (Tumulus P).

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The Tumulus MM, showing entrance to the associated museum. Tipich Bela, Wikimedia Commons

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Rose will be continuing excavations at the site in 2015 and ensuing years under the auspices of the Penn Museum, efforts that have included extensive architectural conservation and restoration work, notably at the spectacular Early Phrygian Gate, considered the best preserved citadel gate of Iron Age Asia Minor.

“We have not yet determined the city plan of the settlement,” says Rose, “but by combining excavation with remote sensing (radar, magnetic prospection), we should be able to do it.”

More information about the Gordion Archaeological Project can be found at the website. In addition, an in-depth article about Gordion and the excavations will be published in the Winter 2014/2015 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.

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* Rose, C. Brian and Gürsan-Salzman, Ayse, Friends of Gordion Newsletter, September 2014

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Pirate Blackbeard’s Newly Recovered Cannon to be Shared with Public

Posted on October 31, 2014 by No Author -

GREENVILLE, N.C. — Just in from the Atlantic Ocean, the 23rd cannon recovered from the
Queen Anne’s Revenge wreck site will be one of the stars of the free Open House at the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab in Greenville Nov. 15, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. The 4 foot cannon and other artifacts recovered during the Oct. 6-27 expedition will be displayed. It’s an ideal opportunity for those fascinated by pirates, archaeology and interested in conservation. No registration is required.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge was the flagship of the famous pirate known as Blackbeard, or Edward Teach, whose ship ran aground and sunk off Beaufort Inlent, North Carolina in 1718.

The open house will allow visitors of all ages to learn about recovery and conservation of Blackbeard’s cannons, and even take a picture with the cannon most recently recovered. Guests can look through a microscope at the smallest objects recovered over the years and see mysteries revealed in x-rays.

Archaeologists with the Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources executed the most recent excavation operation in the fall, 2014, at the wreck site of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR), near Beaufort. In addition to the cannon, nine cannonballs, bar shot halves, an iron bolt and a grenade were recovered.

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The cannon raised during the October, 2014 expedition. Credit N.C. Department of Cultural Resources

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A cannon as it was being raised from the site of QAR during a previous expedition. Credit North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

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Among researchers on the excavation was Conservator Kimberly Kenyon, who recorded and tagged each artifact as it was reclaimed from the sea. The cannon was an expected recovery, the grenade was not.

“We knew cannonballs were attached to the cannon, but the grenade was something of a surprise,” Kenyon observes. “It’s hollow in the center and would have been filled with gunpowder. Now we have recovered seven grenades and 23 cannons. We brought them all to the conservation lab for treatment.”

Kenyon and UAB Archaeologist/Conservator Nathan Henry did much of the work to prepare the cannon for lifting. The initial plan had been to recover two cannons, but weather conditions and the difficulty of separating the two cannons prevented that. The team was working on one complex mass at the site composed of four cannons and an anchor held together by a coating of sand, marine life and shells called concretion.

Another surprise awaited the team. When the recovered cannon was lifted, yet another small cannon was discovered under the one left behind. Historical records indicate that Blackbeard equipped the QAR with 40 guns, so additional cannons not yet mapped may be discovered. Donations to help the project and research can be made to the Friends of Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Archaeologists and historians with the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources have led recovery efforts at the shipwreck site since 1997. Cannons, platters, medical and scientific instruments used by 18th century pirates have rested on the floor of the Atlantic since 1718. Tens of thousands of artifacts have been recovered.

Intersal, Inc., a private research firm, discovered the site believed to be Queen Anne’s Revenge Nov. 21, 1996. QAR was located near Beaufort Inlet, N.C., by Intersal’s director of operations, Mike Daniel, who used historical research provided by Intersal’s president, Phil Masters. Daniel now heads up Maritime Research Institute, the nonprofit corporation formed to work on the project in cooperation with state archaeologists and historians of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History.

For additional information, please call (252) 744-6721. The Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project is within the Office of State Archaeology in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. In-depth information about the excavations can be obtained in this article and at the project website.

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Source: Adapted and edited from a press release of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

About the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources (NCDCR) is the state agency with a vision to be the leader in using the state’s cultural resources to build the social, cultural and economic future of North Carolina. Led by Secretary Susan W. Kluttz, NCDCR’s mission is to enrich lives and communities by creating opportunities to experience excellence in the arts, history and libraries in North Carolina that will spark creativity, stimulate learning, preserve the state’s history and promote the creative economy. NCDCR was the first state organization in the nation to include all agencies for arts and culture under one umbrella.

Through arts efforts led by the N.C. Arts Council, the N.C. Symphony and the N.C. Museum of Art, NCDCR offers the opportunity for enriching arts education for young and old alike and spurring the economic stimulus engine for our state’s communities. NCDCR’s Divisions of State Archives, Historical Resources, State Historic Sites and State History Museums preserve, document and interpret North Carolina’s rich cultural heritage to offer experiences of learning and reflection. NCDCR’s State Library of North Carolina is the principal library of state government and builds the capacity of all libraries in our state to develop and to offer access to educational resources through traditional and online collections including genealogy and resources for people who are blind and have physical disabilities.

NCDCR annually serves more than 19 million people through its 27 historic sites, seven history museums, two art museums, the nation’s first state-supported Symphony Orchestra, the State Library, the N.C. Arts Council and the State Archives. NCDCR champions our state’s creative industry that accounts for more than 300,000 jobs and generates nearly $18.5 billion in revenues. For more information, please call (919) 807-7300 or visit www.ncdcr.gov.
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Unearthing the City of King Midas

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Winter 2015 Issue of Popular Archaeology Released

Affluence Explains Rise of Moralizing Religions, Suggests Study

Archaeologists Excavate Ancient Wari Temple in Peru

Penn Museum Exhibits Spectacular Finds from Ancient Panama

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Archaeologists Discover First Evidence of Frankincense in British Roman Burials

King Richard III Case Closed After 529 Years

Mastodons Disappeared From Ancient Beringia Before Humans Arrived

Researchers Investigate ‘Vampire’ Remains in Polish Cemetery

Prehistoric Farming on the Tibetan Plateau

Archaeologists Excavate Imperial Roman Structure

Climate Change Not a Cause of Bronze Age Collapse

Popular Archaeology Now Top-Ranked

Archaeologists Excavate Ancient Bronze Age Remains in Oman

Archaeologists Investigate Underground Pyramidal Structure Beneath Orvieto, Italy

Researchers Challenge Accepted Theory on Tool Use Among Primates

Archaeologists Uncover Massive Fortifications in Ancient City of King Midas

Pirate Blackbeard’s Newly Recovered Cannon to be Shared with Public

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