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Trinity College Dublin—Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, together with an international team of researchers, have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs – the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art – by analysing 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 millennia and stretching from Siberia to Britain. 

The aurochs roamed in Europe, Asia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. Adorned as paintings on many a cave wall, their domestication to create cattle gave us a harnessed source of muscle, meat and milk. Such was the influence of this domestication that today their descendants make up a third of the world’s mammalian biomass.

Dr Conor Rossi, Trinity, first author of the article that has just been published in leading international journal Nature, said: “The aurochs went extinct approximately 400 years ago, which left much of their evolutionary history a mystery. However, through the sequencing of ancient DNA, we have gained detailed insight into the diversity that once thrived in the wild as well as enhanced our understanding of domestic cattle.” 

Although fossils of aurochs found in Europe date back 650,000 years ago, about the time archaic species of human appeared in the continent, animals from the east and west extremes of Eurasia share a much more recent common ancestry, pointing toward a replacement around 100,000 years ago, probably by migrations out of a southern Asian homeland. 

In an echo of human prehistory, this replacement was not complete, with traces of earlier ancestry surviving in European aurochs.

Dr Mikkel Sinding, co-author and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, said: “We normally think of the European aurochs as one common form or type, but our analyses suggest there were three distinct aurochs populations alone in Europe – a Western European, an Italian, and a Balkan. There was thus a greater diversity in the wild forms than we had ever imagined.”

Intriguingly, climate change also wrote its signature in aurochs genomes in two ways:

First, European and north Asian genomes separated and diverged at the beginning of the last ice age, around 100,000 years ago, and did not seem to mix until the world warmed up again at its end. And second, genome-estimated population sizes dropped in the glacial period, with a more pronounced hard time endured by European herds. These lost the most diversity when they retreated to separated refugia in southern parts of the continent before repopulating it again afterwards.

The most pronounced drop in genetic diversity occurs between the period when the aurochs of southwest Asia were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent, just over 10,000 years ago, to give the first cattle.  Remarkably only a handful of maternal lineages (as seen via mitochondrial DNA which is handed down via mothers to their offspring) come through this process into the cattle gene pool.

“Although Caesar exaggerated when he said it was like an elephant, the wild ox must have been a highly dangerous beast and this hints that its first capture and taming must have happened with only a very few animals,” said Dan Bradley, Professor in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, who led the study.

“However, the narrow genetic base of the first cattle was augmented as they first travelled with their herders west, east and south. It is clear that there was early and pervasive mating with wild aurochs bulls, leaving a legacy of the four separate preglacial aurochs ancestries that persists among the domestic cattle of today.”

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An aurochs skull, from St Petersburg. Prof Dan Bradley, Trinity College Dublin.

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Article Source: Trinity College Dublin news release

10.1038/s41586-024-08112-6 

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PLOS—Settlements in northern Arabia were in a transitional stage of urbanization during the third to second millennium BCE, according to a study published October 30, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guillaume Charloux of the French National Center for Scientific Research, Paris and colleagues.

The development of large urban settlements was a major step in the evolution of human civilization. This process of urbanization has proven difficult to study in northern Arabia, due in part to a lack of well-preserved archaeological sites in the region compared with better understood areas such as the Levant and Mesopotamia. In recent decades, however, excavations have uncovered exceptional sites in northern Arabia that provide insights into the early stages of urbanization.

In this study, Charloux and colleagues provide a detailed description of the Bronze Age town of al-Natah in Medinah province, occupied from around 2400-1500BCE. The town covered approximately 1.5 hectares, including a central district and nearby residential district surrounded by protective ramparts. A cluster of graves represents a necropolis, with burial practices indicating some degree of social stratification. The authors estimate the town was home to around 500 residents. The size and organization of al-Natah is similar to other sites of similar age in northern Arabia, but these sites are smaller and less socio-politically complex than contemporary sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia.

The researchers suggest that al-Natah represents a state of ‘low urbanization,’ a transitional stage between mobile pastoralism and complex urban settlements. Archaeological evidence so far indicates that northern Arabia was dotted with small fortified towns during the Early-Middle Bronze Age, at a time when other regions exhibited later stages of urbanization. Further excavations across Arabia will provide more details about the timing of this transition and the accompanying changes in societal structure and architecture.

The authors add: “For the first time in north-western Arabia, a small Bronze Age town (c. 2400-1300 BCE) connected to a vast network of ramparts has been discovered by archaeologists, raising questions about the early development of local urbanism.”

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3D virtual reconstruction of the Bronze Age site of al-Natah. Reprinted under a CC BY license, with permission from AFALULA-RCU-CNRS, 2024. Charloux et al., 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Charloux G, Shabo S, Depreux B, Colin S, Guadagnini K, Guermont F, et al. (2024) A Bronze Age town in the Khaybar walled oasis: Debating early urbanization in Northwestern Arabia. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0309963. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309963

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Tulane University—Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization’s extent and complexity.

The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto.

The team used lidar, a laser-based detection system, to survey 50 square miles of land in Campeche, Mexico, an area largely overlooked by archaeologists. Their findings included evidence of more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic structures, including a previously unknown large city complete with iconic stone pyramids.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in Tulane’s Anthropology Department and instructor at Northern Arizona University. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University has been pioneering the use of lidar technology in archaeological research. Over the past decade, the MARI has built a state-of-the art Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab, managed by Francisco Estrada-Belli, to analyze remote sensing data, such as lidar.

Lidar technology uses laser pulses to measure distances and create three-dimensional models of specific areas. It has allowed scientists to scan large swaths of land from the comfort of a computer lab, uncovering anomalies in the landscape that often prove to be pyramids, family houses and other examples of Maya infrastructure.

“Thanks to generous funding from the Hitz Foundation, MARI has been at the forefront of the use of lidar technology in archaeological research over the past decade,” said Canuto, director of the MARI. “Now our efforts are expanding from data analysis to data collection and acquisition. The work conducted on these data from Campeche represent how MARI’s ‘lidar footprint’ is expanding.”

This research may also help resolve ongoing debates about the true extent of Maya settlements.

“Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge,’” Auld-Thomas said. “The counterargument was that lidar surveys were still too tethered to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and therefore had developed a distorted image of the Maya lowlands. What if the rest of the Maya area was far more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception instead of the rule?”

The study highlights the transformative power of lidar technology in unveiling the secrets of ancient civilizations. It also provides compelling evidence of a more complex and varied Maya landscape than previously thought.

“Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Canuto said. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society.”

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The remains of the ancient Maya city of Calakmul, visible within the thick jungle shroud of Campeche, Mexico. Jorgerom, Pixabay

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Article Source: Tulane University news release

*Running out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico, Antiquity, 29-Oct-2024. 10.15184/aqy.2024.148 

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Prehistory is a modern idea. The word was “coined” only in the 1830s. Before the 19th century, we didn’t know much about dinosaurs or cavemen, and fossils remained a scientific curiosity. When French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published his notorious Histoire naturelle (1749–1788), suggesting that nature had a history and proposing the first reproduction theory, the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne University in France condemned it and threatened him with repercussions. He eventually had to publish a retraction.

Similarly, when Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his On the Origin of Species (1859), his compatriots in the United Kingdom and Europe still believed that God made man “in his own image,” as stated in the Bible (Genesis 1:27). Anyone claiming that all animals came from the same origin, and apes were somehow our distant cousins, was considered a fool or a heretic.

Then the first caves were excavated revealing extensive and intricate artwork on their walls. In 1879, archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola explored a new cave in Altamira, northern Spain, and brought his young daughter, Maria, with him. She spotted vivid depictions of bison and masterfully painted scenes on the cave’s ceiling. These cave paintings were initially dismissed as forgeries, as scholars of the time, with the positivist mindset, could not imagine that people from the Paleolithic were sophisticated enough to produce such complex artworks. By the early 20th century, however, as archaeologists uncovered more ancient skeletons, bones, fossils, and early human art in caves and other sites, their discoveries started to raise curiosity beyond the scientific community. Writers, intellectuals, and the public were captivated by these glimpses into our distant past.

Artists were intrigued, sometimes amazed by the mind-blowing quality of parietal art, indecipherable, complex abstract shapes and objects, and what was perceived as scenes depicting animals and humans in rituals or sacrifices. The drawings, paintings, and etchings that endlessly decorated the walls, ceilings, and floors of caves in subtle colors were often mesmerizing. Picasso was particularly inspired by various prehistoric elements, as the 2023 exhibition No Past in Art: How Prehistory Inspired Picasso’s Work at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris showed. Gauguin, Cézanne, and later the symbolists and primitivists, also dedicated various paintings and sculptures to what they perceived as representations of our origins, rituals, and myths.

Prehistory has never stopped inspiring artists since then, captivating the most important modern art figures like Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Joan Miró; Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Marguerite Duras, Barbara Hepworth, Yves Klein, and Robert Smithson. It continues to be an inspiration among our contemporaries, including Dove Allouche, Miquel Barceló, Tacita Dean, Marguerite Humeau, Pierre Huyghe, and Giuseppe Penone, to name just a few, whose works were showcased during the 2019 exhibition, Préhistoire, une énigme moderne (Prehistory, a Modern Enigma).

This landmark exhibition, which took place at the Pompidou Center in Paris, inspired me and initiated my interest in prehistory. It is not the first museum show dedicated to the topic: fossils, artifacts, and artworks discovered in caves, as well as tools, ornaments, and sculptures made from natural rocks, have been exhibited in major art institutions since the end of the 19th century.

Most of these exhibitions have already created fruitful dialogues between the past and present and parietal art and its representation by contemporary artists. When it opened its Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology in 1898, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris commissioned the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet and the painter Fernand Cormon to create a vast decorative program. Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York, 1937) showed monumental surveys of cave paintings with a selection of contemporary works by Miró, Klee, and Ernst, among others, in echo. “That an institution devoted to the most recent in the art should concern itself with the most ancient may seem something of a paradox,” MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. wrote in his preface to the exhibition catalogue. “Yet, for Barr, this past had already influenced modern art, and could potentially offer museum visitors a prehistoric pedigree for it,” states the MoMA website. Another major exhibition, 40,000 Years of Modern Art, organized by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1948, mixed prehistory and non-Western art with surrealist, expressionist, and abstract works.

But there is a major problem, particularly, concerning the so-called “primitive art,”—a highly contested term now. The clichés and stereotypes that this notion implies were also abundant in the early “scientific” literature dedicated to our ancestors. The first paleontologists were poisoned by plain racist prejudices, explains paleo artist and author Mark P. Witton in his 2020 blog. George Cuvier (1769–1832), the father of vertebrate paleontology whose famous taxonomy incorporated both fossils and living species, “viewed whites as the pinnacle of creation, but Blacks as ugly, barbaric persons of monkey-like appearance,” writes Witton. “His work on dividing humans into ‘scientifically validated’ races was instrumental in later attempts at biological justifications of racism.”

In the United States, the influential president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) was a supporter of Hitler. He exploited his research to promote racist and eugenicist ideas, points out Witton. Osborn commissioned one of the earliest depictions of prehistoric life, Charles Knight’s mural “Neanderthal Flintworkers” (1924), hung in AMNH’s Hall of the Age of Man. Many of Osborn’s contemporaries, including Margaret Mead, were troubled by the racist character of the imagery. The faces and looks of the Neanderthal men and women depicted in this iconic—though controversial and scientifically incorrect work—were inspired by features of non-white peoples, instead of being deduced from their bones.

A Eurocentric mindset has continued to characterize the collective representation of prehistory until recently, sometimes reducing it to a more subtle form of “primitive art.” In 1984, MoMA dedicated a survey exhibition to “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. MoMA bragged about being the first institution to “juxtapose modern and tribal objects in the light of informed art history.” But the exhibition omitted dates of the Indigenous works and explanations of their functions, as art historian Thomas McEvilly remarked in his Artforum review of the show. He criticized Primitivism in 20th Century Art as expressing “Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism.” Since then, the museum has made its mea culpa, addressing the controversy on its website.

The Pompidou exhibition’s three curators, Cécile Debray, Rémi Labrusse, and Maria Stavrinaki, write on the museum website that Primitivism in the 20th Century Art did not include prehistory “which, in fact, is fundamentally different from it. For the modern Western world, the ‘primitive’ is generally rooted in specific cultures, usually described as exotic; the question of temporality is secondary to its geographical and cultural otherness. Prehistory, on the other hand, is seen above all as an indefinitely stretched time span, and thus largely indecipherable (whether in terms of nature or the first human cultures).” Labrusse dedicated a book to this paradoxical situation. “Prehistory is precisely what is pre, meaning out of history,” he told me in an interview in October 2024. It “radically overturned our dream of mastering linear time, as 19th-century historicism chose to formulate it.” Here lies the paradox that attracts so many artists to prehistory, according to Labrusse: “Because it is largely indecipherable (whether in terms of nature or the first human cultures), it remains fascinating.”

From Prehistory, a Modern Enigma, I remember the scenography. Tall walls, obscure corridors, grandiose frescos, and a prehistoric cave reconstituted at the center of it. In this spectacular setting, amid fossils, Cro-Magnon skulls, tools, and Paleolithic carvings, there were more than 300 works of art by modern and contemporary artists. Plus elements of popular culture: surveys of archaeological excavations, advertisements, and extracts from books (The Quest for Fire, a hugely popular Belgian 1911 fantasy novel) and cult films such as The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This undertone in the exhibitions shows what the curators of the Pompidou exhibition describe as the “invention of the concept of prehistory.” How artists and society have succumbed to the appeal of origins in the modern era, “yielding to a fantasized vision of what came before history.”

The exhibition opened with Odilon Redon and Paul Cézanne, at the turn of the 20th century. Cézanne was an amateur student of geology and paleontology. He visited prehistoric caves and painted the rocks on the Mediterranean coast with his close friend Antoine-Fortuné Marion (1846–1900), who later became a noted geologist and paleontologist. The show also exposed the Venus of Lespugue, the famous prehistoric ivory statuette, dated around 23,000 years ago, which inspired Picasso and Giacometti (both owned plaster casts of it). She stands there, in an exhibition room at the Musée de l’Homme, surrounded by bronzes from Matisse, Miró, and other modern artists who were equally fascinated by her and other statues from that time.

“Préhistoire, une énigme moderne” brilliantly demonstrated how prehistory inspired modernity, an artistic movement that was, paradoxically, about the future. Photos of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair show how the Eiffel Tower and various cutting-edge technologies were exhibited alongside Neanderthal skeletons. A Max Ernst painting of “petrified forests, glacialized landscapes, and sedimented earth,” created after World War I, raised questions about whether these were depictions “from after humanity, or before it?” as modernism developed toward “a prehistoric vision of time before humankind,” according to a 2019 New York Times article.

This feeling got stronger with the tragedies of World War II when many intellectuals and artists turned their back on the notion of progress, digging in reverse into the beginning of life, extinct species, the first hominids, the lost cultures of the Paleolithic era, and the Neolithic revolution to grapple with the possibility of extinction, of earth without humankind. “Nourished by archaeological discoveries, but far from simply reflecting on them,… prehistory…[functioning] as a powerful machine for stirring up time,” write the curators. “This time machine constantly shapes the mental boundaries of modernity and provides concrete models for all sorts of experiments.”

The exhibition also explores the mysteries of shaped rocks and tools, an intimate relationship to animals, ecological issues, and apocalyptic wonder in chronological and thematic parcourse. These themes are part of the collective representation, the idea of what prehistory is and how the inspired artists, whose works were exhibited, felt from Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Max Penck, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson in the 1980s, the Chapman brothers, Pierre Huyghe, Tacita Dean, Marguerite Humeau, Dove Allouche, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Jean-Pascal Flavien, and Bertrand Lavier in the last few years. “Prehistory is not an object given to artists to interpret; it is created by them” states Labrusse.

“I think artists are either Paleolithic or Neolithic. I am decidedly the latter said minimalist artist Carl Andre, according to the previously mentioned NYT article. His Stone Field Sculpture in Hartford, Connecticut, could have belonged to the Neolithic times. Painters and sculptors sometimes like to experiment with the artistic canons and the tradition of “getting back to our roots,” to the “early man,” as a 2024 exhibition at the Hole Gallery shows. “Based around an out-of-print anthology devoted to prehistoric collections unearthed by archaeological expeditions in Algeria, French artist Camille Henrot’s… [Prehistoric Collections] treats this ethnographic material as motifs of a contemporary grotesque,” states the Perimeter Books’s website.

Meanwhile, Mark Dion’s immersive, uncanny installation at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in September 2024, Excavations, displayed new work alongside “early museum murals, dioramas, and maquettes of Ice Age mammals in a playful… presentation,” the museum website states.

Labrusse recalls feeling “powerless” when he started applying his scientific skills and methods to prehistoric art (he is a professor of art history at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). “History requires context, facts, and elements to narrate it. These things are almost nonexistent when one looks back so far behind in time,” he explains. Many social scientists who study prehistoric history testify to a similar challenge. There is little evidence from prehistoric times and huge gaps of time for which the evidence is completely missing. “Prehistorians have the scientific honesty to recognize an irreducible ignorance, an impossibility of bringing out meaning,” notes Labrusse. “It is impossible to give a social, political, or aesthetic meaning to these societies.” During a podcast interview in 2019, he explained feeling first “like falling into a hole, caught up in an abyss of darkness. Then, as in Alice in Wonderland, you start to see through the looking glass.”

For him, the turning point came while exploring a prehistoric cave, a “very intimate, life-changing experience,” he says during the interview with me. Discovering parietal scenes in the cave of Roucadour, Labrusse felt “as if they were contemporary. There is no context there, and things seem to float outside of any attributable meaning, so their appropriation is immediate, easy.” I learned this way to “let go of the burden of history,” which “dissolved like a soap bubble.” He recalls being tempted to touch these walls, reproducing these same gestures that the first men did back then. “Science now tells us that Homos sapiens has been the same for 100,000 years, even 300,000 years. Individuals have the same capacities, even possibly the same feelings as us today.”

The limits of science, when confronted with prehistory, are also an opportunity that artists have often seized to contribute to the field in their own way. It gives them a chance to tell this story differently. Aware of this, contemporary prehistorians sometimes invite painters or sculptors to work with them to create interdisciplinary meaning, an epistemology articulating a subjective point of view (art) with an objective approach (science).

The French government invited artists Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Giuseppe Penone, and Miquel Barceló, among others, to bring “Other Perspectives” to the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave. To understand how a howl decorating the cave had been originally drawn, Barceló recreated first the same wet surface that was used by his predecessor as a canvas 35,5000 years ago. He then drew a few lines like a graffiti artist in less than 10 seconds. His audacious and instinctive gesture was brilliant: the resulting drawing looked remarkably similar to the original one. “Only an artist can do this with his subjective impulsivity,” comments Labrusse. “A historian would not have dared to do it, keeping a rigorous mindset in his attempt to reproduce the drawing and, ultimately, failing to do so.”

In another style, the notorious Adrie and Alfons Kennis, twin brothers who are “paleo artists,” are creating lifelike figures of early man that are touring museums and galleries around the world. Their hominids are fascinating and are another example of what art and science can do when working hand in hand.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Cover Image, Top Left: Cave painting detail replica from Altamira Cave in Spain. Jose-Manuel Benito, Locutus Borg, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Somma Vesuviana, Italy

By any measure, this appeared to be the most massive ancient villa I had ever seen. Walls towered over me. Peering upward, I stretched my neck to observe their height — at least what was left of their full dimension after their destruction 1600 years ago. Metal scaffolding enveloped them and an enormous metal roof occupied space far above them, shielding them from the sun, wind, rain and other elements of the world outside. I was looking up from deep below ground surface. In contrast to the warmth of the sun’s radiation at ground level above me, the air was cool within this gargantuan, carefully and painstakingly excavated pit and I needed no hat to shield my head and face from the sun’s rays above. 

Located near the small town of Somma Vesuviana at the foot of the northern slope of Vesuvius (opposite and invisible from ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum and referenced by some as the ‘dark side’ of Vesuvius), this site was initially discovered in the 1930’s with limited excavation. But the most extensive investigation began in 2002 through a multidisciplinary project with the University of Tokyo. Those excavations, now ongoing, have revealed the walls preserved to a remarkable height, doorways decorated with Dionysiac motifs, a pilastered arcade, apses and interior room walls decorated with frescoes, cisterns, terraces, colonnades — emblematic of spaces created to impress large public audiences — and a large wine cellar with dolia (large earthenware jars), some of which can be seen still buried to their lips in the ground. Scholars have determined that they still contained fermenting grape juice when the eruption occurred. For a time, this was clearly more than a wealthy person’s villa — it was also a production facility for wine, the principal product of the region. Many artifacts, including a marble statue of Dionysus, the god of wine himself, were also recovered in the process. But what we see today is but a fraction of the entire complex that once existed……

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Washington University in St. Louis—The first-ever use of cutting-edge drone-based lidar in Central Asia allowed archaeologists to capture stunning details of two newly documented trade cities high in the mountains of Uzbekistan.

A team of researchers led by Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Farhod Maksudov, director of the National Center of Archaeology in Uzbekistan, used drone-based lidar to map the archaeological scale and layout of two recently discovered high-elevation sites in Uzbekistan.  The medieval cities are among the largest ever documented in the mountainous parts of the Silk Road, the vast network of ancient trade routes that connected Europe and Eastern Asia. 

Images and details of the discovery were recently published in Nature*. Co-authors include Jack Berner, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at WashU; Edward Henry, an assistant professor of anthropology and geography at Colorado State University and WashU alum (PhD ’18);  Tao Ju, a professor of computer science and engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU; and Xiaoyi Liu, an undergraduate student in the McKelvey School of Engineering at WashU. The expedition was supported by the National Geographic Society.

The drone-lidar scans provided remarkably detailed views of the plazas, fortifications, roads, and habitations that shaped the lives and economies of highland communities, traders, and travelers from the sixth through 11th centuries in Central Asia. The two cities are located in rugged terrain 2,000 to 2,200 meters above sea level (roughly comparable to Machu Picchu in Peru), making them unusual examples of thriving mountain urbanism.

The smaller city, today called Tashbulak, covered about 12 hectares, while the larger city of Tugunbulak reached 120 hectares, “making it one of the largest regional cities of its time,” Frachetti said.

“These would have been important urban hubs in central Asia, especially as you moved out of lowland oases and into more challenging high-altitude settings,” he said. “While typically seen as barriers to Silk Road trade and movement, the mountains actually were host to major centers for interaction. Animals, ores, and other precious resources likely drove their prosperity.”

“This site had an elaborate urban structure with specific material culture that greatly varied from the lowland sedentary culture,” Maksudov said. “It’s clear that the people inhabiting Tugunbulak for more than a thousand years ago were nomadic pastoralists who maintained their own distinct, independent culture and political economy.”

Lidar technology is commonly used to map archaeological landscapes blocked by dense vegetation, but it has additional value where vegetation is sparse, such as the mountains of Uzbekistan. “Drone operation is strictly regulated in Uzbekistan, so this discovery is also thanks to the political support and permissions we received through local partners and government,” Frachetti said.

The centimeter-level scans allowed for advanced computer analysis of the ancient archaeological surfaces, providing an unprecedented view of the cities’ architecture and organization. “These are some of the highest-resolution lidar images of archeological sites ever published,” Frachetti said. “They were made possible, in part, because of the unique erosion dynamics in this mountain setting.”

Frachetti, Maksudov, and their team first discovered the highland cities using predictive computer models and old-fashioned foot surveys between 2011 and 2015, tracing presumed routes of the Silk Road in southeastern Uzbekistan. The project took years to materialize. The extra time ultimately proved to be a blessing, allowing the researchers to make the most of the latest advances in drone-based lidar. “The final high-res maps were a composite of more than 17 drone flights over three weeks,” Frachetti said. “It would have taken us a decade to map such large sites manually.” 

A drone captured images of Tugunbulak in 2018. (Credit: M. Frachetti)

Frachetti and graduate students in his Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration (SAIE) Lab compiled the drone-lidar data into 3D models, which were passed to Liu and Ju, who applied computational algorithms to analyze the archaeological surfaces and auto-trace millions of lines to predict likely architectural alignments. The final step was to match the digital output with comparable architectural cases, revealing a huge ancient city otherwise invisible to the naked eye. “The project reflects a truly interdisciplinary effort,” Ju said. “The analysis techniques have potential applications in many domains that utilize lidar scans.”

Both cities warrant much closer inspection, Frachetti said. Preliminary digging at one of the fortified structures at Tugunbulak suggests that the fortress — a building protected by three-meter-thick rammed earth walls — might have been a factory where local metalsmiths turned rich deposits of iron ore into steel. Such industry would have been a key feature of the city and its economy.

It’s already clear that Tashbulak and Tugunbulak weren’t just remote outposts or rest stops. “The Silk Road wasn’t just about the endpoints of China and the West,” Frachetti said. “Major political forces were at play in Central Asia. The complex heart of the network was also a driver of innovation.”

Frachetti hopes to use the same combination of on-the-ground detective work and drone-based lidar to get pictures of other high-altitude settlements along the Silk Road and beyond. “We could really change the map of urban development in medieval Asia,” he said.

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A drone captured images of Tugunbulak in 2018. (Credit: M. Frachetti)

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Composite lidar view of Tugunbulak. (Credit: SAIElab/J.Berner/M.Frachetti)

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Article Source: Washington University in St. Louis news release.

*Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV–lidar in highland Central Asia, Nature, 23-Oct-2024. 10.1038/s41586-024-08086-5  

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Recently, a published scholarly study reported findings supporting a remarkable observation about the famous megalithic pillars of a nearly 12,000-year-old Neolithic site in southern Türkiye. In that study, the author suggests that certain symbols carved onto the faces of pillars at the site were made to track time and mark the changes of seasons by recording observations of the sun, moon and stars through a lunisolar calendar system. Moreover, the study posited that the markings also record the date when comet fragments impacted the Earth almost 13,000 years ago – or 10,850 BC.

The suggestion is remarkable because, if true, it would be the oldest such calendar ever discovered. It would also add to the implication that a Neolithic group of people were astute observers of their astronomical environment and that they were able to apply this knowledge in a sophisticated way to manage and work with their environment — capabilities not thought to have been developed for another few thousand years.

This discovery, if confirmed, exemplifies the game-changing revelations that have emerged from a group of sites in present-day Turkey, illuminating our understanding of the meaning and significance of the otherwise sketchy Neolithic peoples who inhabited this part of the world thousands of years before the florescence of the great agriculturally-based civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. These new insights are opening a window on societies that provided the foundation for the development of Old World civilization. One of these sites, known as Göbekli Tepe, has captured the imagination of the world….

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The Site

Göbekli Tepe is a prehistoric settlement inhabited from about 9500 BCE to at least 8000 BCE, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Southeastern Region of ancient Anatolia (modern day Türkiye). Most notable at this site are the large circular structures or enclosures that contain massive carved and shaped megaliths featuring carved anthropomorphic figures, clothing, and wild animals. These finds have been the subject of interpretation by archaeologists regarding the iconography and religious beliefs of the mysterious prehistoric people who inhabited and visited the site. The site also features a rich representation of domestic structures, other small buildings, cisterns, and quarries. Although the site’s original excavator, Klaus Schmidt, interpreted the site as a religious sanctuary established and visited by hunter-gatherers, more recent findings of domestic structures, the cisterns and evidence of water management, as well as tools associated with domestic activity, point to a relatively permanent, continuously inhabited settlement.

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Map showing location of Göbekli Tepe. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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Research History

Long before archaeological work began on the site, the rocky hill on which it is located was considered by local tradition to be a sacred place, although it was also under agricultural cultivation. Archaeologically speaking, the site was originally identified through a survey conducted by the Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1963.

It was not until October 1994 when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, having already worked at the site of Nevalı Çori, another ancient site in the area, began searching for other ancient sites, including the site identified by the survey in 1963. The Yıldız family, who owned the land where the site was located, directed him to the site. They had previously discovered finds (reported to the local museum) while ploughing. Schmidt recognized the finds as similar to those of Nevalı Çori, suggesting they were fragments of prehistoric megaliths. The following year he began official excavations, uncovering the first of the now-famous T-shaped pillars.

Schmidt directed ongoing excavations at Göbekli Tepe under the auspices of the Şanlıurfa Museum and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) until he died in 2014. The DAI has continued at the site under the direction of Lee Clare and since 2021 work has been a joint operation of Istanbul University, the Şanlıurfa Museum, and the DAI, under the direction of Necmi Karul.

Although it appears to the casual visitor that much of the site has been excavated, what we know from surveys incicate that less than 5% of the site had been excavated as of 2021. There is therefore much more to be revealed about Göbekli Tepe.

Excavation Results

Structural Remains

The earliest of the structures that have been excavated thus far indicate that they were built between 9500 and 9000 BCE, based on radiocarbon dating. Evidence suggests the site was greatly expanded during the early 9th millennium BCE. The settlement shows activity until about 8000 BCE. Excavation and research have revealed eight phases of development spanning at least 1,500 years.

The major structural finds were defined by large circular enclosures or compounds, the earliest of which date to the second half of the 10th millennium BCE. Floors of the enclosures were made of burnt lime or simply left as bedrock. Their most prominent characteristic features massive T-shaped limestone pillars, some standing over five meters tall and weighing several tons, spaced evenly apart within surrounding stone walls. massive Two taller pillars were placed in the center of each circle. The pillars are considered to be the oldest known megaliths in the world. The enclosures also featured benches defining their interior perimeters, thought to have been designed for sitting. It is not known if the enclosures were roofed. Although four of these enclosures have thus far been excavated, surveys suggest the presence of 16 more, each containing eight possibly similar pillars. Investigation of the site indicates that the material for the pillars were transported as slabs from a point about 100 meters (330 feet) away from the site. After their transfer, they were worked with flint tools to create the carved features we see on them today.

Although the carved decorations on the pillars remain largely enigmatic, most of them appear to be symbolically abstract pictograms and animal reliefs. Archaeologists theorize that the pictograms represent sacred symbols, similar to what have been found as Neolithic cave paintings in other locations. The animal reliefs have been interpreted to include boars, foxes, donkeys, gazelle, bulls, birds — most prominently vultures — snakes, other reptiles, insects and arachnids. Some pillars feature human arm symbols and others appear to show loincloths. One recent study and analysis of a pillar suggests that its markings may represent the world’s oldest solar calendar, and even posits that it was created as a memorial to a comet strike.

Also uncovered were small carved stones, depicting mostly animals, and some humans.

Later-dated enclosures, in contrast to the earliest enclosures, were rectangular in shape, though they continued to feature T-shaped pillars, with several tall pillars occupying the centers of the rooms. One of the enclosures has been designated the “lion pillar building” because of a pair of central pillars that featured carved, fierce lions.

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The archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe: main excavation area with four monumental circular buildings and adjacent rectangular buildings (German Archaeological Institute, photo E. Kücük). Text and image CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Göbekli Tepe circular enclosure with monumental pillars. TaylanOzgurUksal, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Broad view of central excavation. Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 PL, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and below: Details of Building B, located in the Southeast-Hollow (Main Excavation Area) of Göbekli Tepe.
It has a round ground plan and measures roughly 10 metres in diameter. A total of seven T-shaped limestone pillars have so far been discovered set into its circular wall. The two central T-pillars brings the total number of monoliths in this building to nine. However, as the building is not yet excavated in its entirety, further pillars may still be found. The floor of the building was excavated over several square metres in the area between the two central pillars. The floor of this building is made of a lime mortar (terrazzo floor). The inner-facing broad sides of the two central pillars carry depictions of life-size foxes (in low relief). It dates from the 10th-9th mill. BC. Dosseman, Image and text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Vulture Stone, Gobekli Tepe. The Vulture Stone is thought to be the world’s first pictograph. It depicts a human head in the wing of a vulture and a headless human body under the stela. There are various figures like cranes and scorpions around this figure. Sue Fleckney, Image and text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and below: Animal stones uncovered at the site. Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Göbekli Tepe animal statuettes, Şanlıurfa Museum, Turkey. Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 PL, Wikimedia Commons

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Stone Tools

Excavations at Göbekli Tepe have yielded a prolific assemblage of flint artifacts, most of which are similar to artifacts found at other sites in the northern Levant dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

In the first year of full excavation alone (1963) more than 3,000 stone tools were discovered, mostly made of flint but a few from obsidian. The assemblage consisted of a variety of tool types, including cores, flakes, choppers, blades, burins, scrapers, and projectile points, offering insights on the human activities at the site.

Of particular note are the results of excavations in a part of the site designated as Space 16, identified as a building construction near enclosure D. This space yielded nearly 700 tool artifacts, consisting of scrapers, glossy objects, perforators, and many retouched tools.

Significant to the activity of food production and processing, more than 7000 grinding stones were recovered across the site. Evidence from phytoliths found in the associated soil suggests that the grinding stones were used to process cereal grains. Archaeologists have yet to affirmatively conclude that the cereals were wild or cultivated.

What excavations have revealed about the evolution of the site

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Cover Image, Top Left: TaylanOzgurUksal, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Florida Museum of Natural History—During the late middle Pleistocene, between 300 and 400 thousand years ago, at least three ancient elephant relatives died near a river in the Kashmir Valley of South Asia. Not long after, they were covered in sediment and preserved along with 87 stone tools made by the ancestors of modern humans.

The remains of these elephants were first discovered in 2000 near the town of Pampore, but the identity of the fossils, cause of death and evidence of human intervention remained unknown until now.

A team of researchers including Advait Jukar, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, published two new papers* on fossils from the Pampore site. In one, researchers describe their discovery of elephant bone flakes which suggests that early humans struck the bones to extract marrow, an energy-dense fatty tissue. The findings are the earliest evidence of animal butchery in India.

The fossils themselves are also rare. In a second study the researchers described the bones, which belong to an extinct genus of elephants called Palaeoloxodon, whose members were more than twice the weight of today’s African elephants. Only one set of Palaeoloxodon bones for this species had been discovered previously, and the fossils from this study are by far the most complete.

To date, only one fossil hominin — the Narmada human — has ever been found on the Indian subcontinent. Its mix of features from older and more recent hominin species indicate the Indian subcontinent must have played an important role in early human dispersal. Prior to the fossil’s discovery in 1982, paleontologists only had stone tool artifacts to give a rough sketch of our ancestors’ presence on the subcontinent.

“So, the question is, who are these hominins? What are they doing on the landscape and are they going after big game or not?” Jukar asked. “Now we know for sure, at least in the Kashmir Valley, these hominins are eating elephants.”

The stone tools likely used for marrow extraction at the Pampore site were made with basalt, a type of rock not found in the local area. Paleontologists believe the raw materials were brought from elsewhere before being fully knapped, or shaped, at the site. Based on the method of construction, they concluded that the site and the tools were 300,000 to 400,000 years old.

Previously, the earliest evidence of butchery in India dated back less than ten thousand years.

“It might just be that people haven’t looked closely enough or are sampling in the wrong place,” Jukar said. “But up until now, there hasn’t been any direct evidence of humans feeding on large animals in India.”

Most of the Pampore site’s elephant remains came from one mature male Palaeoloxodon. The inside of its skull showed abnormal bone growth that likely resulted from a chronic sinus infection.

While it was clear that early humans exploited the carcass, there was no direct evidence of hunting, such as spear points lodged in the bones. The hominins could have killed the elephant or simply found the carcass after it died of natural causes — weakened by its chronic sinus infection, the elephant could possibly have gotten stuck in the soft sediments near the Jhelum River, where paleontologists eventually found it.

The Palaeoloxodon skull is the most complete specimen of its genus found on the Indian subcontinent. Researchers identified it as belonging to the extinct elephant Palaeoloxodon turkmenicus, fossils of which have only been found on one other occasion, in 1955. This earliest fossil was of a partial skull fragment from Turkmenistan. While it looked different from other members of the genus Palaeoloxodon, there wasn’t enough material to determine with certainty whether it was, in fact, a separate species.

“The problem with Palaeoloxodon is that their teeth are largely indistinguishable between species. So, if you find an isolated tooth, you really can’t tell what species of Palaeoloxodon it belongs to,” Jukar said. “You have to look at their skulls.”

Fortunately, the Pampore specimen’s hyoids — bones at the back of the throat that attach to the tongue — were still intact. Hyoids are fragile but distinctive between species, providing a special tool for taxonomizing.

Palaeoloxodon originated in Africa about a million years ago before dispersing into Eurasia. Many species in the genus are known for having an unusually large forehead unlike that of any living elephant species, with a crest that that bulges out over their nostrils. Earlier species of Palaeoloxodon from Africa, however, do not have the bulge. Meanwhile, P. turkmenicus is somewhere in between, with an expanded forehead with no crest.

“It shows this kind of intermediate stage in Palaeoloxodon evolution,” Jukar said. “The specimen could help paleontologists fill in the story of how the genus migrated and evolved.”

Given that hominins have been eating meat for millions of years, Jukar suspects that a lot more evidence of butchery is simply waiting to be found.

“The thing I’ve come to realize after many years is that you just need a lot more effort to go and find the sites, and you need to essentially survey and collect everything,” he said. “Back in the day when people collected fossils, they only collected the good skulls or limb bones. They didn’t collect all the shattered bone, which might be more indicative of flakes or breakage made by people.”

The stone tool and elephant butchery study was published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The taxonomy study was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Scientists studied stone tools, bone flakes and rare elephant remains at a middle Pleistocene site. Their findings shed light on the evolution of giant elephants and humans alike. Illustration by Chen Yu

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Article Source: Florida Museum of Natural History news release.

*Human exploitation of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon) in Middle Pleistocene deposits at Pampore, Kashmir, India, Quaternary Science Reviews, 15-Oct-2024. 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108894 

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When one thinks of ancient Aegean civilizations, especially during the Bronze Age, it is easy to visualize the great palaces, art, and other monumental achievements of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the people who built the iconic architectural remains we see today at Knossos on Crete and Mycenae in mainland Greece. The magnificent early fresco wall paintings of the Cycladic people at ancient Akrotiri on the island of Santorini bear images of a sophisticated community of artists, agriculturalists, maritime traders, religion, and other elements of a highly developed society. Those frescoes also reveal a rich example of clothing style and fashion, unique to the people who inhabited the island over 3500 years ago. One sees it in the stylistic depictions of beautifully adorned young women, such as those illustrated on the excavated walls of the House of the Ladies at Akrotiri.

In the latest released episode of Dr. Ester Salgarella’s podcast series, Aegean Connections, Dr. Sophia Vakirtzi of Greece’s Hellenic Ministry of Culture shares her knowledge and discusses her research related to the artifacts and other evidence for the extensive and sophisticated textile industry of the Aegean peoples. She relates how the study of the tools, such as weaving equipment, spindle whorls, loom weights, imprints of threads and strings, and other objects or evidence have shed light on the ancient Aegean Bronze Age manufacture of clothing and other fiber/fabric objects and elements.

It is a fascinating window on a topic where the evidence, though perhaps not as robust and ‘flashy’ as other material forms of evidence for other aspects of ancient society, reflects the significance of the industry’s importance and presence among these ancient peoples.

The podcast is free and available for your listening ear here. 

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Agate spindle whorl. Minoan, ca. 2200–1450 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

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Cover Image, Top Left: Minoan spindle whorl, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain

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The province of Granada in southeastern Spain is perhaps best known for its namesake capital city, Granada, which draws thousands of tourists every year to see the iconic Alhambra World Heritage site, among the many other spectacular Moorish architectural wonders of the city. The province also features mountain areas such as the Sierra Nevada with Europe’s most southerly ski resort, as well as the popular beach resorts of the Costa Granadina.

Less known to the general public and the tourist crowd, however, is a geological wonder called the Guadix-Baza Basin. It is a wonder because, through erosion and other natural activity over geologic time, it has revealed a rich and complete series of sediments with a fossil record dated from the Miocene to the Pleistocene. The paleontological faunal remains have drawn scientists to the area for decades. Within this semi-arid Basin, extraordinary events began to unfold in the 1970’s that really placed the Basin’s little village of Orce on the world’s map…….

Orce Man

It was in 1976 and 1979 when the late Josep Gibert i Clols, a paleontologist and geologist, conducted the first field surveys of the region surrounding Orce. Here, he found a remarkable series of fossil-bearing sediments. His son, Luis Gibert, who accompanied him at only 10 years old, described the experience. “As a geologist he [my father] knew that the Baza basin, where Orce is located, was a good target for new early Pleistocene discoveries because this region used to have an extensive lake and the shores of the lakes are good places to preserve fossils and evidences of human activities.”

What Josep was exploring near Orce were the shores of an ancient Pleistocene paleo-lake.

“I explored the region with my father looking for new sites,” continued Luis, “We had lunch with Tomas and his wife, Mariana [local residents and friends], at their house-cave, and we sieved sediments to collect small mammals [fossils] to give an approximate age to the sites in the Salar Valley near Tomas cave. That was a productive trip and new paleontological levels along the Vélez Valley were found.” Luis, following in the professional footsteps of his father, eventually became an active explorer of the region and now holds a professorship at the University of Barcelona.

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The Orce landscape. Northwards view from Barranco de los Conejos of the Early Pleistocene succession at Orce. The bottom of the valley is about 2 million years old and the top is about 1 million years old. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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Josep and his son Luis. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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Luis Gibert today. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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But it was in 1982 when the most extraordinary finds emerged in the same region at a site near the village of Venta Micena. Josep had organized and conducted the first of succeeding excavations of the sediments here with a team of high school students. Among the fossil finds were what he identified as cranial fragments of an infant hominin species of the Homo genus, the genus to which humans belonged. The fragments included two parietal bones and an occipital bone with an endocranial crest, all found within the context of sediments containing early Pleistocene fossilized fauna initially dated to more than 1 million years ago. This would make the hominin find, in association with the faunal finds, the oldest such human ancestral remains in Western Europe.

“I remembered that my father was skeptical while other colleagues were very enthusiastic,” said Luis. “He was skeptical because if this was confirmed it would break a scientific paradigm, which proposed that humans left Africa and reached Europe very late, at around 0.6Ma. The preliminary chronology based on the fauna for this skull suggested an age older than 1 Million years, which represented a much older age than accepted [by most scholars] in 1982. So human remains in Europe older than 1Ma for sure would be controversial, as usually happens in paleoanthropology each time there is a new important discovery”.

The remains were henceforth nick-named in the popular literature as ‘Orce Man’.

But Orce Man was too old and the fossil identification too sketchy for many scholars’ taste.

Until 1995….

The Conference and More

Scholars disputed the finds at Venta Micena as hominin, including the suggested dating at over 1 million years ago. According to Luis, changing this environment became much easier after the presentations and deliberations at a major meeting of the minds in late 1995.

“The first challenge was to convince the administrative and scientific community that there was human presence at Orce older that 1Ma,” said Luis. “This was achieved during the international conference in 1995 where more than 300 scientists from 18 countries met at the small town of Orce. Participants were very excited about the sites and the finds. After that event, Orce appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Orce was named the Spanish Olduvai (Zihlman, A.L. & Lowenstein 1996), and scientists that attended the meeting, including Prof. Phillip V. Tobias from South Africa, Nobel Award nominated for his description of Homo habilis, supported the human presence at Venta Micena”.

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The conference. Courtesy Luis Gibert

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The finding of two hominin humeral shafts, a limited lithic assemblage, and evidence for the processing of animal tissues with stone tools added to the story of Venta Micena. Additionally, finds at two other nearby sites within the same approximate geologic horizon expanded upon the picture that was slowly emerging for the region. The sites of Barranco León-5 and Fuente Nueva 3 yielded what were identified as two deciduous human molars, thousands of stone tools characterized as belonging to the Oldowan industry (similar to those found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania), and cut marks on animal bones. Oldowan tools are considered the second oldest stone tool industry produced and used by hominins in the archaeological record, beginning around 2.9 million years ago in Africa.

To help confirm the human presence and the legitimacy of the Homo descriptor for the fossils, two separate laboratories carried out immunological testing on residual protein samples extracted from the fossils. Their results showed that the fossils did indeed belong to the hominin Homo genus.

Finally, as remarked by the famous British archaeologist Derek Roe about the finds, as stated in a 1996 article published in Current Anthropology:

“….whether or not the disputed bones were those of Homo, the finds of undoubted artifacts in situ at Fuente Nueva 3 and Barranco Leon made it perfectly clear that humans had been present in the area during the Lower Pleistocene….”*

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The Heritage Management Organization (HERITΛGE)  is pleased to announce the launch of a new project contributing to the protection of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Architectural Heritage Preservation in Times of War: The Ukrainian Model is a two-year project that will train architecture students in 3D documentation, architectural documentation, heritage analysis, conservation assessment, international conservation standards, and local regulations. 

Implemented by HERITΛGE, the Kharkiv School of Architecture (evacuated to Lviv), and Skeiron, the project is generously supported by the Public Diplomacy Section of the U.S. Embassy to Ukraine. *

The teaching will combine theoretical and practical components, including on-the-job training that will result in datasets usable in conservation. In the first year, 20 students from the Kharkiv School of Architecture will be trained as well as 10 students from Kherson, Odessa, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Lviv, and Chernivtsi.

The initiative will also provide training to two cohorts of academics from architectural schools across Ukraine, supporting them in establishing architectural conservation curricula in their institutions. 

Dr Iryna Matsevko, Chancellor of the Kharkiv School of Architecture said:

“Heritage studies is a relatively new field for Ukrainian universities. The current war has highlighted a lack of modern restoration and documentation experts. Through participation in this project, our university aims to address the needs of future architects and the broader Ukrainian society by training specialists who can preserve, document, and integrate heritage into sustainable urban and community development. We are excited to collaborate with Skeiron, Ukrainian experts in digital documentation, and the HERITAGE team, whose international expertise is vital to the success of this initiative.”

Project Launch 

On 27th September the project was launched in Lviv with a discussion on ‘Planning for the Post-War Rehabilitation of Ukraine’s Architectural Heritage’. Hosted by the Kharkiv School of Architecture and moderated by Dr Maja Kominko, Director of Projects at HERITΛGE,  the panel brought together Ukrainian and international experts. Liliya Onyshchenko, Advisor to the Mayor of Lviv on the protection of the historical environment and former Head of the Department of Historic Environment Protection of Lviv City Council, and Ihor Poshyvaylo, co-founder of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) and a member of the National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the War, spoke about their experience protecting heritage protection during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yuriy Prepodobnyi, co-founder of Skeiron and the #SaveUkrainianHeritage initiative discussed the urgency of documentation. Dr. Iryna Matsevko, the Chancellor of the Kharkiv School of Architecture and a historian, outlined the challenges of forming a new generation of architects who can meet the challenges of post-war rehabilitation of the heritage of Ukraine.  Saleem Al-Mennan, a conservation architect, complemented the discussion by speaking about his extensive experience with post-war rehabilitation projects in Iraq, including projects supported by the American Ambassadors’ Fund for Cultural Preservation.

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Image courtesy Heritage Management Organization

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Article Source: Heritage Management Organization news release.

Cover Image, Top Left:  Courtesy Heritage Management Organization

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*Views expressed do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government.

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PHILADELPHIA, October 8, 2024—The Penn Museum has launched its first-ever mobile guide via the free Bloomberg Connects app and expanded access to its collections through the Google Arts & Culture platform. Free for all to use, both digital resources amplify the Museum’s ability to deepen engagement with its regional, national, and international visitors—both in person and virtually, from anywhere.

With nearly four million users, Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture app, provides an easy-to-navigate guide, placing the Penn Museum’s world-renowned collections and stories in the palm of one’s hand—on a mobile device.

Joining nearly 600 cultural institutions worldwide on Bloomberg Connects, the Penn Museum’s digital guide offers video highlights of its history and commitment to cultural heritage; audio tours showcasing fascinating stories behind objects on display; and dynamic wayfinding maps with pinch-and-zoom capability for an enhanced on-site experience. It is accessible in 42 languages and provides centralized resources for users interested in exploring the 10,000 years of history and living cultural traditions represented throughout the Penn Museum.

The Bloomberg Connects app is available for free download here.

“It is a vital part of the Museum’s mission to make the collections in our care accessible to the widest possible audience,” explains Dr. Christopher Woods, Williams Director at the Penn Museum and Avalon Professor for the Humanities in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences. “These free digital resources will expand access for online visitors around the world and ensure that those who do visit us in person deepen their connection to the stories our galleries tell.”

To mark its first weekend, visitors who present their Bloomberg Connects app at the Museum Café will receive 20% off their purchase from Friday, October 11 through Sunday October 13.

In addition, more than 280 objects from the Penn Museum’s collections are now available through the web- and mobile-based platform Google Arts & Culture—sharing art, culture, and histories from more than 3,000 cultural institutions in 85 countries. With features such as zoom views of high-resolution images and intuitive search functions to navigate related content, every object connects to similar collections, creating a rich, accessible global resource of cultural heritage. For its online exhibit, the Penn Museum’s “Collections from Across the Globe,” offers virtual visitors an avenue to examine the stunning jewelry of a Mesopotamian queen, a statue of a wrathful deity from Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, and other objects that tell the stories of diverse peoples and cultures.

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ABOUT BLOOMBERG PHILANTHROPIES

Bloomberg Philanthropies invests in 700 cities and 150 countries around the world to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people. The organization focuses on creating lasting change in five key areas: the Arts, Education, Environment, Government Innovation, and Public Health. Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of Michael R. Bloomberg’s giving, including his foundation, corporate, and personal philanthropy, as well as Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consultancy that advises cities around the world. In 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies distributed $3 billion. For more information, please visit bloomberg.org, sign up for its newsletter, or follow on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, Facebook, and X.

ABOUT GOOGLE ARTS & CULTURE

Google Arts & Culture puts the collections of more than 2,000 museums at your fingertips. It’s an immersive way to explore art, history, and the wonders of the world, from Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings to the women’s rights movement and the Taj Mahal. The Google Arts & Culture app is free and available online for iOS and Android. Its team has been an innovation partner for cultural institutions since 2011. They develop technologies that help preserve and share culture and allow curators to create engaging exhibitions online and offline, inside museums.

ABOUT THE PENN MUSEUM

The Penn Museum’s mission is to be a center for inquiry and the ongoing exploration of humanity for our University of Pennsylvania, regional, national, and global communities, following ethical standards and practices.

Through conducting research, stewarding collections, creating learning opportunities, sharing stories, and creating experiences that expand access to archaeology and anthropology, the Museum builds empathy and connections across diverse cultures.

The Penn Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. On first Wednesdays of the month, it is open until 8:00 pm. The Café is open Tuesday–Thursday, 9:00 am–3:00 pm and Friday and Saturday, 10:00 am–2:00 pm. On Sundays, the Café is open 10:30 am–2:30 pm. For information, visit www.penn.museum, call 215.898.4000, or follow @PennMuseum on social media.

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Article Source: Penn Museum news release.

Cover Image, Top Left: The Bloomberg Connects app helps guide on-site guests during their exploration of the Penn Museum. Credit: Bloomberg Connects for the Penn Museum. 

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Washington University in St. Louis—Archaeological surveys led by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island.

A new study* in PLOS ONE reports and assesses the contents of 25 caves and rock shelters, most of them first identified between 1870 and the 1990s but essentially lost to science over time. Study authors also conducted new land and underwater surveys in previously unexplored coastal areas and uncovered three new sites that contain potentially important archaeological sediments.

“What we are looking for is not just the first person who arrived, but the first community,” said Ilaria Patania, an assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences. “Understanding the timing of the initial colonization of Sicily provides key data for the pattern and mode of the early expansion of Homo sapiens into the Mediterranean.”

Sicily is considered by many scholars to be the earliest island in the region to be permanently occupied by human ancestors, but when and how the early migrants accomplished this feat remains unknown. Sicily is less than two miles from mainland Italy, but the water crossing would have been extremely difficult for early humans.

Other studies have primarily focused on possible entry points on the island’s northern side.

“This research shows that new ways of thinking and looking can reveal patterns that weren’t visible before,” said T.R. Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at WashU, a co-author of the new study.

“Previous scholars assumed that sites on the southern coast of Sicily would be eroded or too damaged to yield useful information,” Kidder said. “But finding underwater sites opens up a whole new terrain to study. It allows us to reconsider routes of migration of these earliest modern human ancestors.”

Dangerous water crossing

Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, is located just off the “toe” of Italy’s boot.

In the ancient Greek poem the “Odyssey,” Homer describes how Odysseus sailed his ship past the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis as he crossed the Sicily strait. The strait was well known to sailors of the past; they attributed the deadly forces of its waves and whirlpools to powerful monsters.

In modern times, thousands of migrants from North Africa attempt to cross the strait each year. Many don’t make it, some capsizing just a few hundred meters from landing.

Patania, a native of the island of Sicily, has a deep respect for the power of the sea. Her grandfather was a fisherman who worked on the same shores she now studies.

“Very early on, I was taught that the sea can be a great resource,” she said. “At the same time, you never turn your back on the sea. The sea can be very dangerous.”

This idea plays out in her research. “I’m very interested in how humans occupy marginal environments,” Patania said. “These are environments where if everything goes well, we are in perfect harmony with nature. But if something changes — and this could be something like global climate change, or something smaller, like the arrival of a new animal — it could be a catastrophe.”

Scholars of the region agree that humans had made it to Sicily by 16,000 years after the last glacial maximum. But that established date is puzzlingly late, given that humans are known to have dispersed by land into Siberia about 30,000 years earlier. The discrepancy has led some to wonder if humans actually arrived on Sicily much before the currently accepted dates.

Also, no one yet knows whether humans arrived on Sicily by seafaring, or by foot over a land bridge — or even what direction they came from.

“A challenge for understanding the spread of early modern human ancestors is that we don’t fully understand how they spread and colonized the world at a very early stage,” Kidder said. “As Ilaria says, this is a very marginal environment. Did folks come down from Italy and cross the Straits of Messina, or did they come from the south along the African coast? Or, is it possible that they were island hopping across the Mediterranean? Locating sites on the south coast helps us consider pathways and thus modes of behavior.”

Eyes on the sea

Patania leads a long-term research project focused on the early occupation of Sicily. “In southeast Sicily, very few Upper Paleolithic sites have been excavated and analyzed using scientific methods,” she said.

“Our project is still in its early stages, but already we have identified and assessed over 40 sites of interest, of which about 17 are sites that have been relocated with greater precision based on older identifications,” Patania said.

She and her team prepared for their recent cave explorations by poring through the archives of local town libraries in Sicily, reading historical bulletins and news articles as far back as the 19th century.

The researchers identified potential sites and reviewed records and photographs of materials recovered by local avocational archaeologists. When possible, they interviewed workers that had been involved in earlier excavations, and they also talked with local recreational divers and fishermen.

For example, one of the co-authors on the new study is a retired tugboat captain. He has no formal scientific training, but he spent decades working on the decks of boats in and around the Port of Augusta.

“The moment I said that I was looking for paleosols, and that paleosols look like clay dirt that could be red or gray underwater, he said, ‘I know exactly what you are looking for,’” Patania said.

Patania also partnered with the superintendent of cultural and natural heritage of Siracusa and Ragusa (two provinces of Sicily) and the superintendent of the sea of Sicily to locate and recruit other local experts and stakeholders.

As the research has progressed, Patania also has spoken with officers in the Italian navy about training members of their specialized dive team to help identify underwater archaeological features. These divers spend a lot of time in local waters completing their regular tasks related to clearing ordnance and other debris from World War II.

“We’ve started with the area close to the coast, and we’re slowly going to move further out in the years to come,” Patania said.

Excavations continue

Two of the new sites in the PLOS ONE study may contain Upper Paleolithic human occupation traces, including fossil fauna, study authors said.

Corruggi is located at the southernmost tip of Sicily. The site was originally identified by other researchers in the 1940s.

“This site is where a second land bridge would have connected this island with the island of Malta,” Patania said.

“When we inspected this site, we found teeth from a European wild ass and stone tools,” she said. “Analyzing the remains from this site might give us insight on the very last leg of the human journey south into the southernmost coast of Sicily and off toward Malta.”

During summer 2024, project team members worked on excavating the second site, a cave called Campolato.

“Here we have discovered evidence for sea-level changes caused by the last glaciation and a localized earthquake that we are still investigating,” Patania said.

“We hope to reconstruct not only the timing of human occupation, but also the environment these people lived in and how they negotiated with natural events like earthquakes, climatic and environmental changes and maybe even volcanic eruptions,” she said.

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WashU archaeologists are investigating coastal and underwater caves in southeastern Sicily, tracing early human dispersal onto the island. (Photo: Ilaria Patania). Credit: Ilaria Patania

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Coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island, according to a new study in PLOS ONE.
Some of the sites are above ground, while others are submerged caves and hidden grottos accessible only by sea. Credi: Ilaria Patania

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WashU archaeologists have recovered and analyzed stone tools and other items of interest from underwater caves and other coastal sites in southern Sicily. Credit: Ilaria Patania

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Article Source: PLoS ONE news release.

*PLoS ONE, 9-Oct-2024. 10.1371/journal.pone.0299118 

_______________________________

EXPLORE THE ANCIENT ETRUSCANS IN PERSON!
Experience a unique, up-close-and-personal hike among ancient hilltop towns in central Italy. You will walk the sensational countryside of the regions of Umbria and Tuscany, soaking in important sites attesting to the advanced Etruscan civilization, forerunners of the ancient Romans; imposing architectural and cultural remains of Medieval Italy; local food and drink; and perhaps best of all — spectacular scenic views! Join us in this collaborative event for the trip of a lifetime!