UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA—Neanderthals behaved not so differently from us in raising their children, whose pace of growth was similar to Homo sapiens.
Thanks to the combination of geochemical and histological analyses of three Neanderthal milk teeth, researchers were able to determine their pace of growth and the weaning onset time. These teeth belonged to three different Neanderthal children who have lived between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago in a small area of Northeastern Italy.
Teeth grow and register information in form of growth lines – akin to tree rings – that can be read through histological techniques. Combining such information with chemical data obtained with a laser-mass spectrometer – in particular strontium concentrations – the scientists were able to show that these Neanderthals introduced solid food in their children’s diet at around 5-6 months of age.
NOT CULTURAL BUT PHYSIOLOGICAL
Alessia Nava (University of Kent, UK), co-first author of the work, says: “The beginning of weaning relates to physiology rather than to cultural factors. In modern humans, in fact, the first introduction of solid food occurs at around 6 months of age when the child needs a more energetic food supply, and it is shared by very different cultures and societies. Now, we know that also Neanderthals started to wean their children when modern humans do”.
“In particular, compared to other primates – says Federico Lugli (University of Bologna), co-first author of the work – it is highly conceivable that the high energy demand of the growing human brain triggers the early introduction of solid foods in child diet”.
Neanderthals are our closest cousins within the human evolutionary tree. However, their pace of growth and early life metabolic constraints are still highly debated within the scientific literature.
Stefano Benazzi (University of Bologna), co-senior author, says: “This work’s results imply similar energy demands during early infancy and a close pace of growth between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Taken together, these factors possibly suggest that Neanderthal newborns were of similar weight to modern human neonates, pointing to a likely similar gestational history and early-life ontogeny, and potentially shorter inter-birth interval”.
HOME SWEET HOME
The three milk teeth analyzed in this study were found in a limited area of Northeastern Italy, between the current provinces of Vicenza and Verona: in the Broion Cave, in the Fumane Cave and in the De Nadale Cave. Other than their early diet and growth, scientists also collected data on the regional mobility of these Neanderthals using time-resolved strontium isotope analyses.
“They were less mobile than previously suggested by other scholars”, says Wolfgang Müller (Goethe University Frankfurt), co-senior author. “The strontium isotope signature registered in their teeth indicates in fact that they have spent most of the time close to their home: this reflects a very modern mental template and a likely thoughtful use of local resources”.
“Despite the general cooling during the period of interest, Northeastern Italy has almost always been a place rich in food, ecological variability and caves, ultimately explaining the survival of Neanderthals in this region till about 45,000 years ago”, says Marco Peresani (University of Ferrara), co-senior author and responsible for findings from archaeological excavations at sites of De Nadale and Fumane.
This research adds a new piece in the puzzling pictures of Neanderthal, a human species so close to us but still so enigmatic. Specifically, researchers exclude that the Neanderthal small population size, derived in earlier genetic analyses, was driven by differences in weaning age and that other biocultural factors led to their demise.
This will be further investigated within the framework of the ERC project SUCCESS (The Earliest Migration of Homo sapiens in Southern Europe – Understanding the biocultural processes that define our uniqueness), led by Stefano Benazzi at the University of Bologna.
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Thanks to the combination of geochemical and histological analyses of these three Neanderthal milk teeth, researchers were able to determine their pace of growth and the weaning onset time. Federico Lugli
American Association for the Advancement of Science, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Arizona State University—In two studies, researchers provide evidence that expands our understanding of modern humans in Eurasia and their interactions with their most elusive cousins, the Denisovans. While admixture between humans and Denisovans is widely recognized, physical remains of the archaic hominin species are exceedingly rare. What’s more, ancient genomic evidence from early modern humans in eastern Asia, which would capture the nature of admixture events between the two species and inform on humans’ timing and movement into and across Asia, is lacking. Research conducted by separate teams has provided additional insight into early human population history in Eurasia.
Denisovan DNA in the Genome of Early East Asians
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology—In 2006, miners discovered a hominin skullcap with peculiar morphological features in the Salkhit Valley of the Norovlin county in eastern Mongolia. It was initially referred to as Mongolanthropus and thought to be a Neanderthal or even a Homo erectus. The remains of the “Salkhit” individual represent the only Pleistocene hominin fossil found in the country.
Ancient DNA extracted from the skullcap shows that it belonged to a female modern human who lived 34,000 ago and was more related to Asians than to Europeans. Comparisons to the only other early East Asian individual genetically studied to date, a 40,000-year-old male from Tianyuan Cave outside Beijing (China), show that the two individuals are related to each other. However, they differ insofar that a quarter of the ancestry of the Salkhit individual derived from western Eurasians, probably via admixture with ancient Siberians.
Migration and interaction
“This is direct evidence that modern human communities in East Asia were already quite cosmopolitan earlier than 34,000 years ago”, says Diyendo Massilani, lead author of the study and researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “This rare specimen shows that migration and interactions among populations across Eurasia happened frequently already some 35,000 years ago”.
The researchers used a new method developed at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to find segments of DNA from extinct hominins in the Salkhit and Tianyuan genomes. They found that the two genomes contain not only Neanderthal DNA but also DNA from Denisovans, an elusive Asian relative of Neanderthals. “It is fascinating to see that the ancestors of the oldest humans in East Asia from whom we have been able to obtain genetic data had already mixed with Denisovans, an extinct form of hominins that has contributed ancestry to present-day populations in Asia and Oceania”, says Byambaa Gunchinsuren, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. “This is direct evidence that Denisovans and modern humans had met and mixed more than 40,000 years ago”.
“Interestingly, the Denisovan DNA fragments in these very old East Asians overlap with Denisovan DNA fragments in the genomes of present-day populations in East Asia but not with Denisovan DNA fragments in Oceanians. This supports a model of multiple independent mixture events between Denisovans and modern humans”, says Massilani.
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The skullcap found in the Salkhit Valley in eastern Mongolia belonged to a woman who lived 34,000 years ago. Analyses showed: She had inherited about 25 percent of her DNA from Western Eurasian. Institute of Archaeology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
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New Denisovan DNA expands diversity, history of species
Arizona State University—While the continents of Africa and Europe have been obvious and fruitful treasure troves for exploration and discovery of our modern human origins, Asia has been somewhat overlooked. Scientists have thought that modern humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago and, as they colonized Western Eurasia, found a world empty of any other archaic hominin species. This assumption stemmed in part from the fact that the prehistory of Asia is poorly known compared to that of Africa and Europe.
But research* published this week in the journal Science adds more evidence to the record that Denisovans, a group of extinct hominins that diverged from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago, may have more widely inhabited northeast central Asia. Ancient Denisovan mitochondrial DNA has been recovered in sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave, a limestone cave at the northeast margin of the Tibetan Plateau, 3280 meters above sea level. Samples of sediments were analyzed by an international team including ASU researcher Charles Perreault. Denisovan mitochondrial DNA was recovered that have been dated from around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, and also possibly as recently as 45,000. If true, this last date may overlap with the presence of modern humans in northeast central Asia.
Perreault is a research affiliate with the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins and an associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
“When we started developing this project about 10 years ago,” said Perreault, “none of us expected Baishya Cave to be such a rich site. We’ve barely scratched the surface — three small excavation units have yielded hundreds of stone tools, fauna and ancient DNA. There’s a lot that remains to be done.”
A mandible fossil (the “Xiahe mandible”) from the same cave and dated to 160,000, had been previously identified, tenuously, as Denisovan, based on a single amino acid position. This current study dispels any doubt left that the Denisovans occupied the cave.
This discovery in Baishiya Karst Cave is the first time Denisovan DNA has been recovered from a location that is outside Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia — previously the single location in the world where a handful of DNA-bearing Denisovan fossil bones have been discovered. In 2010, a fingerbone belonging to a previously unknown hominin species was found buried in Denisova Cave in the Russian Altai Mountains. Evidence of this new species forced anthropologists to revise their model of human evolution outside of Africa.
Finding Denisovan DNA on the Tibetan Plateau itself is surprising. Evidence of archaic hominins 2000 meters above sea level is unusual. Life this high on the plateau is harsh for many reasons, including its thin air, and humans can develop altitude sickness anywhere above 2500 meters above sea level. This suggests that the Denisovans may have evolved adaptations to high altitude, much like modern Tibetans. The dates of the sediments with mitochondrial DNA, along with the older 160,000-year-old Xiahe mandible, suggest that the Denisovans have been on the Plateau perhaps continuously for tens of thousands of years — more than enough for genetic adaptations to emerge.
Getting DNA samples from geographic locations outside of Siberia is also important to understand the genetic diversity and the population structure and history of the Denisovan group as a whole. Researchers suspected that Denisovans were widespread in Asia, based on the widespread Denisovan genomic signal among present-day Asians.
The Denisovan fossil and the DNA it contained, indicate that early modern humans coexisted in Asia with other archaic hominin species, but, unexpectedly, that they interbred with them. Like Neanderthals, Denisovan population intermixed with modern humans as they dispersed into Asia. In fact, there’s evidence that the genetic adaptations to high altitude in present-day Tibetans come from Denisovans. If confirmed, this is a great example of how intermixing with local archaic populations has shaped, and helped, the spread of modern humans around the world. In this case, it allowed humans to colonize the Tibetan Plateau perhaps faster than they would otherwise have been able to.
“Baishiya Cave is an extraordinary site that hold tremendous potential to understand human origins in Asia,” said Charles Perreault. “Future work in Baishiya Cave may give us a truly unique access to Denisovan behavior and solidifies the picture that is emerging, which is that Denisovans, like Neanderthals, were not mere offshoots of the human family tree — they were part of a web of now-extinct populations that contributed to the current human gene pool and shaped the evolution of our species in ways that we are only beginning to understand.”
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Tibet cave site. Charles Perreault
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*”Denisovana DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Kartst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau,” Science. Dongju Zhang et al.
For well over four centuries, early American colonists, historians, and archaeologists have wondered and opined about one of America’s most enduring historic cold case mysteries — the mysterious fate of the first British colonists on American soil — the famous “lost colony” of Roanoke. Now, archaeologists have uncovered some tantalizing new evidence that could pave the way to finally solving the age-old mystery.
The story began over 430 years ago, when Queen Elizabeth’s Sir Walter Raleigh chartered and financed several initial voyages bearing British subjects to the shores of what is today North Carolina, more than two decades before the establishment of James Fort in 1607, the start of the first successful British colony in the Americas. Of the several voyages chartered by Raleigh, only the third one consisted of a mix of men and women with the mandate to establish a true permanent colony with a start-up group of 118 men, women, and children. Explorer John White was commissioned as the expedition’s leader and colony governor. Along with him came his daughter Ellinor and son-in-law Ananias Dare. They established their initial presence on Roanoke Island, but as it turned out, the effort was short-lived. After six weeks, White left the colony to return to England for much-needed supplies and reinforcements, leaving behind the bulk of the group, including his daughter, son-in-law, and new granddaughter Virginia, the first English person to be born on American soil, to thrive as best they could until his return.
He could not return for another three years. When he finally did arrive at the site of the settlement, not a single settler could be found. In a subsequent letter to a friend and colleague, he summed up the mystery and misfortune with the words “as luckless to many, as sinister to myself”.
For decades, archaeologists have been surveying and excavating on Roanoke Island and other locations to find clues to the fate of colony, as well as insights to their presence and activities on the island. Beginning with archaeologist Jean “Pinky” Harrington in 1947 and 1948 in the area now marked by the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, teams have uncovered a series of artifacts and features at several locations that have testified to the presence of colonists. But other sites further into the mainland and south along the coast have recently yielded intriguing new finds that could tell a story of movement and re-settlement of the original colonists away from the first settlement site on Roanoke. One such location is the Salmon Creek site (now popularly referred to as “Site X”, located inland and adjacent to the western Albemarle Sound), where from 2012 through 2017 archaeologists of the First Colony Foundation recovered 40 sherds representing perhaps 6 or 7 vessels of 16th century Surrey-Hampshire Border ware; 8 sherds representing a North Devon plain baluster jar—both types of ceramic ware commonly used during the 16th and 17th centuries, the baluster jar having been typically used as a provisioning jar on sea voyages; and two tenter hooks, among other artifacts. Most recently, First Colony Foundation archaeologists recovered more 16th century pottery sherds at a site designated Site Y (near the Chowan River, north of Site X). This collection of sherds exceeded that found at Site X. According to archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti, director of the excavations, the finds suggest there was a small contingent of colonists for a short time period at these locations. More compelling still, a significant collection of 16th century European artifacts have been unearthed at sites on Hatteras Island (known in the late 16th century as Croatoan Island after the name of its Native American inhabitants of the time), beginning in the late 1990’s under excavations conducted by David Phelps of East Carolina University, and then from 2012 through 2013 under excavations conducted by the University of Bristol’s Dr. Mark Horton with help from volunteers of the island’s Croatoan Archaeologicl Society. Finds from these two investigations included a late 16th century snaphouse gunlock; a well-preserved 16th century style bronze signet ring; a silver ring—likely once belonging to a woman, given its finger size; an Elizabethan period copper aiglet (likely used at one time to secure the end of a shoe lace); a 16th century Nuremberg token; a 16th century lead pencil and writing slate fragment featuring drawing and other clearly human-made markings; and a fragment of a 16th century swept hilt rapier. These artifacts are but a partial list of the 16th century finds recovered on Hatteras.
Archaeologists plan to continue their investigations both inland from Roanoke Island and south along the coast on Hatteras Island. A more in-depth account of the archaeological explorations can be found in the article, The Case for Hatteras: Unearthing New Clues to America’s Historic “Lost” Colony, published as a major feature premium article in Popular Archaeology Magazine.
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The excavation team at work at two of the Hatteras Island excavation units. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society
PLOS—Recently discovered rock art from caves in Northern Spain represents an artistic cultural style common across ancient Europe, but previously unknown from the Iberian Peninsula, according to a study* published October 28, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Diego Garate of the Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones Prehistóricas de Cantabria, Spain, and colleagues.
The history of ancient human art includes various cultural complexes characterized by different artistic styles and conventions. In 2015, new instances of rock art were discovered in three caves in Aitzbitarte Hill in northern Spain, representing an artistic style previously unknown from the Iberian Peninsula. In this study, Garate and colleagues compare this artistic style to others from across Europe.
The artwork in the Aitzbitarte caves consists mostly of engravings of bison, complete with the animals’ characteristic horns and humps. The authors note the particular style in which the animals’ horns and legs are drawn, typically without proper perspective. Pairs of limbs are consistently depicted as a “double Y” with both legs visible, and the horns are similarly draw side-by-side with a series of lines in between.
This is consistent with the artistic style of the Gravettian cultural complex, characterized by specific customs in art, tools, and burial practices between about 34,000 and 24,000 years ago. This culture is known from across Europe but has not been seen before on the Iberian Peninsula. The authors combine this new discovery with data from around Europe to show that the Gravettian culture was more widespread and varied than previously appreciated.
The authors add: “The study analyses the particularities of Palaeolithic animal engravings found in the Aitzbitarte Caves (Basque Country, Spain) in 2016. These prehistoric images, mainly depicting bison, were drawn in a way that has never before been seen in northern Spain; in a kind of fashion in the way of drawing the engravings that is more characteristic of southern France and some parts of the Mediterranean. The study has shown the close regional relationships in Western Europe cave art since very early times, at least, 25,000 years ago.”
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Photograph and tracing of horse B.II.1, engraved on the right-hand wall in Aitzbitarte Cave III (O. Rivero and D. Garate). Garate et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)
*Garate D, Rivero O, Rios-Garaizar J, Arriolabengoa M, Intxaurbe I, Salazar S (2020) Redefining shared symbolic networks during the Gravettian in Western Europe: New data from the rock art findings in Aitzbitarte caves (Northern Spain). PLoS ONE 15(10): e0240481. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240481
EUROPEAN SYNCHROTRON RADIATION FACILITY—Scientists led by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have discovered the composition of red and black inks in ancient Egyptian papyri from circa 100-200 AD, leading to different hypotheses about writing practices. The analysis, based on synchrotron techniques, shows that lead was probably used as a dryer rather than as a pigment, similar to its usage in 15th century Europe during the development of oil paintings. They publish their results today in PNAS.
In ancient Egypt, Egyptians used black ink for writing the main body of text, while red ink was often used to highlight headings, instructions or keywords. During the last decade, many scientific studies have been conducted to elucidate the invention and history of ink in ancient Egypt and in the Mediterranean cultures, for instance ancient Greece and Rome.
A team of scientists led by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, and the University of Copenhagen used the powerful X-rays of the ESRF to study the red and black ink in papyri from the only large-scale institutional library known to have survived from ancient Egypt: the Tebtunis temple library. The samples studied in this research project are exceptional, not only because they derive from the famous Tebtunis temple library, but also because the analysis includes as many as 12 ancient Egyptian papyrus fragments, all inscribed with red and black inks.
“By applying 21st century, state-of-the-art technology to reveal the hidden secrets of ancient ink technology, we are contributing to unveiling the origin of writing practices.”, explains Marine Cotte, scientist at the ESRF and co-corresponding author of the paper.
“Something very striking was that we found that lead was added to the ink mixture, not as a dye, but as a dryer of the ink, so that the ink would stay on the papyrus”, says Cotte. The researchers came to this conclusion because they did not find any other type of lead, like lead white or minium, which should be present if lead was used as a pigment. “The fact that the lead was not added as a pigment but as a dryer infers that the ink had quite a complex recipe and could not be made by just anyone.”, adds Thomas Christiansen, Egyptologist from the University of Copenhagen and co-corresponding author .
A surprising fact is that the ink recipe can be related to paint practices developed many centuries later during the Renaissance. “In the XV Century, when artists rediscovered the oil painting in Europe, the challenge was to dry the oil in a reasonable amount of time”, says Marine Cotte. “Painters realized that some lead compounds could be used as efficient dryers”, she explains.
This finding was only possible thanks to the different techniques the team used at the ESRF’s beamline ID21 to study the fragments of papyri. They combined several synchrotron techniques (micro X-ray fluorescence, micro X-ray diffraction and micro-infrared spectroscopy) to probe the chemical composition from the millimeter to the sub-micrometer scale to provide information not only on the elemental, but also on the molecular and structural composition of the inks. The scientists discovered that lead was associated to different elements: a complex mixture of lead phosphates, potassium lead sulphates, lead carboxylates and lead chlorides.
Expectedly, the scientists found that the red color in the ink is given by the ochre. More surprisingly, they discovered that this red pigment is present as coarse particles while the lead compounds are diffused into papyrus cells, at the micrometer scale, wrapping the cell walls, and creating, at the letter scale, a coffee-ring effect around the iron particles, as if the letters were outlined. “We think that lead must have been present in a finely ground and maybe in a soluble state and that when applied, big particles stayed in place, whilst the smaller ones ‘diffused’ around them”, explains Cotte. In these halos, lead is associated with sulphur and phosphorus. The origin of these lead sulphates and phosphates, i.e. were they initially present in ink or did they form during ink alteration, remains an open question. If they were part of the original ink, understanding their role in the writing process is also puzzling and the motivation of on-going research.
The team that came to the ESRF brings together chemists, physicists and Egyptologists. Sine Larsen, former director of research at the ESRF and currently Emerita professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, was the mastermind that put the group together, back in 2016, and has coordinated it ever since. Several publications later, the collaboration keeps going strong. “I am fascinated by this subject of research, but also by the very diverse profiles that make up this truly interdisciplinary and successful collaboration”, she says.
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Detail of a medical treatise (inv. P. Carlsberg 930) from the Tebtunis temple library with headings marked in red ink. Image credit: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. ______________________________
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A papyrus fragment from a long astrological treatise (inv. P. Carlsberg 89) from the Tebtunis temple library and the ESRF X-ray fluorescence maps showing the distribution of iron (red) and lead (blue) in the red letters that write out the ancient Egyptian word for “star”. Image credit: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and the ESRF. The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and the ESRF.
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Aerial view of the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, the world’s most brightest synchrotron, producing X-rays 10 trillion times brighter than medical X-rays. ESRF/Stef Candé
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY—There is much debate surrounding the age of the Clovis — a prehistoric culture named for stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico in the early 1930s — who once occupied North America during the end of the last Ice Age. New testing of bones and artifacts show that Clovis tools were made only during a brief, 300-year period from 13,050 to 12,750 years ago.
Michael Waters, distinguished professor of anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, along with Texas A&M anthropologist David Carlson and Thomas Stafford of Stafford Research in Colorado, have had their new work published in the current issue of Science Advances.
The team used the radiocarbon method to date bone, charcoal and carbonized plant remains from 10 known Clovis sites in South Dakota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Montana and two sites in Oklahoma and Wyoming. An analysis of the dates showed that people made and used the iconic Clovis spear-point and other distinctive tools for only 300 years.
“We still do not know how or why Clovis technology emerged and why it disappeared so quickly,” Waters said.
“It is intriguing to note that Clovis people first appears 300 years before the demise of the last of the megafauna that once roamed North America during a time of great climatic and environmental change,” he said. “The disappearance of Clovis from the archaeological record at 12,750 years ago is coincident with the extinction of mammoth and mastodon, the last of the megafauna. Perhaps Clovis weaponry was developed to hunt the last of these large beasts.”
Waters said that until recently, Clovis was thought to represent the initial group of indigenous people to enter the Americas and that people carrying Clovis weapons and tools spread quickly across the continent and then moved swiftly all the way to the southern tip of South America. However, a short age range for Clovis does not provide sufficient time for people to colonize both North and South America. Furthermore, strong archaeological evidence “amassed over the last few decades shows that people were in the Americas thousands of years before Clovis, but Clovis still remains important because it is so distinctive and widespread across North America,” he said.
Waters said the revised age for Clovis tools reveals that, “Clovis with its distinctive fluted lanceolate spear point, typically found in the Plains and eastern United States, is contemporaneous with stemmed point-making people in the Western United States and the earliest spear points, called Fishtail points, in South America.
“Having an accurate age for Clovis shows that people using different toolkits were well settled into multiple areas of North and South America by 13,000 years ago and had developed their own adaptation to these various environments.”
Waters noted that a new accurate and precise age for Clovis and their tools provides a baseline to try to understand the mystery surrounding the origin and demise of these people.
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Clovis spear points from the Gault site in Texas. Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University
Best known for fishing and as a popular vacation destination for tourists, Hatteras Island snakes down a long 42 miles beginning just beyond the southern end of the bustling northern Outer Banks vacation communities of Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, just off the coast of North Carolina.Constituting the greater part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, it is far less populated and commercial than its adjoining Outer Banks neighbors to the north. Traveling south, I drove a seemingly endless, quiet, almost pristine ribbon of sand, with a view of the Atlantic Ocean waves crashing against it to the east on the left and the Pamlico Sound lapping up against it to the west on the right. I encountered almost nobody along the way. The ocean shelf just beyond the beaches is a virtual graveyard of shipwrecks, accumulated over the centuries on a stormy, watery stage that historically also saw the likes of Edward Teach, otherwise infamously known as Blackbeard the Pirate. Today, every summer, some discriminating vacationers avoid the crowds of the beach communities in the north and rent their getaway homes and cottages in or near the island’s tiny towns of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco, and Hatteras Village. But in recent years, despite its quiet, off-the-beaten-path character, something quite extraordinary has been happening on Hatteras. At its far southern end, near the communities of Frisco, Buxton and Hatteras Village, teams composed of students and local volunteers, led by a U.K. archaeologist from the University of Bristol, have been digging into the soil sediments to uncover the island’s history—a history that may have a profound impact on solving a 433-year-old cold case mystery.
For Scott Dawson, a teacher, firefighter and EMT in his early 40’s, it would be no exaggeration to say that this has been the adventure of a lifetime. Dawson is deeply connected to the island. His family roots here go back over three hundred years into the 17th century. Over the years his passionate interest in the history and archaeology of the island has led him to dive intensely into the historic documents that underpin the real story of the indigenous Native American inhabitants of Hatteras—the Croatoan—and the earliest British newcomers who first came to explore and settle the region over 430 years ago. That story happened over 20 years before colonists set foot on what became Jamestown in present-day southern Virginia. Now, as founder and President of the non-profit Croatoan Archaeological Society, he and the society’s membership have played a key role in archaeological investigations related to that earliest colony under the direction of the University of Bristol’s Dr. Mark Horton.
When I initially spoke with Dawson about the investigations, I was in the process of reading his book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, and the fascinating artifact discoveries from Horton’s excavations he described within. I already knew the story of the famous ‘lost colony’ from my own readings, so I did what all too many people in my position did—skip immediately to the second part of his book, which related in detail the story about the latest artifact findings that had commanded so much attention from the popular press in recent years.
Before I could get very far in our conversation, he stopped me.
“Did you read Part 1 of the book?”, he asked.
With a sense of embarrassment, I answered him. “No.”
And that is where the entire direction of the discussion changed. “That’s a common mistake,” he said. “In order to really understand the significance of our finds, you need to understand the true history behind them. Most people who have read about the Croatoan and the lost colony think they know the story. But they don’t. What we have learned in school is not accurate.”
Dawson knows this because he was exposed to the same misinformation as a child growing up on the island—until he decided to really dig for the truth by going to the primary first-hand accounts and historic records.
Understanding what the latest finds mean requires going back to the historic backdrop that defined their significance………
Raleigh’s Chartered Voyages
Written history tells us that it was on the shores of the Outer Banks where the very beginnings of English colonization took place. And though far from the Elizabethan England of its time, these initial explorations and attempts owe their inception in large measure to the geopolitics, culture and economic enterprise of the broader European 16th century stage. Queen Elizabeth I and her England, with its upstart naval prowess, were challenging Spain’s undisputed position as the world’s preeminent naval power. News of Spain’s solid and strengthening foothold in the New World and the vast new resources—especially gold—that flowed from it, quickly caught the attention of the Queen and her chief playmakers—men like the favored and influential courtier Sir Walter Raleigh.
Keen to make England the most powerful monarchy of Europe, the Virgin Queen and Raleigh knew that enlarging the royal treasury and expanding the kingdom’s economy was key. Steeped in the politics of the times, they aimed to explore the New World and establish colonies to stake England’s claim and to also act as a springboard for launching raids on the Spanish West Indies and Spain’s treasure fleets. The Queen granted Raleigh a royal charter, authorizing him to explore, colonize, and control any “remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, or inhabited by Christian People,” in return for a portion of all the gold and silver that might be acquired there.* Simultaneously, while navigating the currents of the Atlantic from England to the Caribbean and up North America’s eastern seaboard of what is today the United States, the Queen’s privateers would, and did, aggressively encounter and loot the Spanish treasure ships as they sailed in return from their conquered and established sources in the Americas. But there was another side to England’s design in this venture. The English sought to undermine the Spanish foothold among the Native Americans, who the Spanish had systematically and cruelly subjugated, plundered and murdered ever since the Christopher Columbus voyages, as a means of attaining their desired preeminence in the new-found lands. Known as the “Elizabethan Model” for colonization, it was a vision of conquest through befriending and trading with the natives, as opposed to domination and subjugation. The concept was first espoused and advanced by the Queen’s preeminent historian Richard Hakluyt in his Discourse Concerning Western Planting, published in 1584. This approach was immediately and officially adopted as a means for English colonization. Hakluyt, also a geographer, became a principal member of the first voyages. And as will be seen later, the “Elizabethan Model” proved key to the survivability of the early colonists.
With that, Raleigh financed, solicited investors, and organized the first English expeditions. It was first and foremost an economic and military venture, as well as a vanguard undertaking in scientific research. The initial two expeditions, the first a reconnaissance mission headed by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, and the second a military mission commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, which were launched in 1584 and 1585 respectively, explored primarily Croatoan (today’s Hatteras Island). The expeditions were fruitful, bringing back knowledge of the resources and inhabitants of the newly found land. Discovered and documented in detail through notes, watercolors and drawings by expedition artist, cartographer and explorer John White and expedition scientist Thomas Harriot, the earliest expeditions produced for the first time a picture of “the new found land of Virginia,” and of “the commodities and of the nature and manners of the natural inhabitants” for Raleigh and the expedition’s gentlemen British investors—and perhaps more importantly, from the Crown’s perspective, rumors of gold and a passage to the South Sea.* Equally important, friendly relations were established with the natives, of whom the famous Manteo and Wanchese were leading members, voyaging back to England with Grenville to visit as arguably America’s first Native American ambassadors. At the same time, however, acts perpetrated by the military expedition of 1585 saw the making of new enemies among the native tribes, especially the Secotan, the repercussions of which would continue to flow through the dynamics of subsequent ventures and relationships. This could explain at least in part why Wanchese was suspicious of the English. He ended his relationship with the English, but Manteo and others of his tribe remained staunch friends and allies. Thus, though the returns from the first two reconnaissance missions were mixed, it was enough in the beginning to incentivize and outfit a civilian expedition to permanently colonize the new territory with a start-up group of 118 men, women, and children. The objective was to find a deep harbor in the Chesapeake Bay area to establish a port town, and to stop briefly at Roanoke Island to retrieve 15 soldiers left on the island by the 1585 expedition. Circumstances, however, proved to alter the original plans and the colonists ended up remaining on Roanoke.
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Map by John White, dated 1590, of the coast of present-day North Carolina where the English first began their colonization efforts. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
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Veteran explorer John White was commissioned as the expedition’s leader and colony governor. In addition to the enormous responsibility for the welfare and protection of friends and families under his command, his stake in the mission was also deeply personal—along with him came his daughter Ellinor and son-in-law Ananias Dare. It was an unprecedented experiment in English civilian colonization on North American soil.
But, as it turned out, the effort was short-lived. After six weeks, White left the colony to return to England for much-needed supplies and reinforcements, leaving behind the bulk of the group, including his daughter Ellinor, son-in-law Ananias, and new granddaughter Virginia, the first English person to be born on American soil, to thrive as best they could until his return.
A return that wouldn’t occur for another three years.
The Queen needed every ship she could muster to defend England against the impending Spanish threat, and that, along with other complicating circumstances, locked White into a furiously frustrating wait until resources could finally be made available for the return trip.
Finally, in the year 1590, White stepped back onto Roanoke Island and into the site of the settlement on August 18, serendipitously coinciding with the third birthday of his granddaughter, Virginia. But there was no birthday celebration, for as White and his party could see, not a single settler remained.
“We passed toward the place where they were left in sundry houses,” White wrote in his account, “but we found the houses taken down, and the place very strongly enclosed with a high palisado of great trees, with cortynes and flankers very fort-like, and one of the chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the bark taken off, and 5 feet from the ground in fair capital letters was [en]graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress…..”**
White and the settlers had agreed that a cross symbol would be engraved if the settlers had encountered trouble or distress before, or as the cause for leaving, should they have to abandon the settlement. Clearly from the lack of such signage, all seemed to be well. Engraved into the tree post was ‘CROATOAN’, the name of a native group. Had the colonists gone to live with the natives? To White, this would make perfect sense. Manteo, who was left with the 1587 colonists after his return from England, was a great friend and asset to the colonists. He was a critical link to the Croatoan, the group of natives with whom the early explorers and colonists had already established a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship, and White likely knew that he would be critical to the colony’s survival during his absence. Moreover, White knew where the Croatoan lived—on the island known today as Hatteras.
White and his party then sailed south toward Hatteras. But a violent storm drove his ship out to sea. The attempt was abandoned and he returned to England, never to return again.
One can only imagine White’s heartbreak and the enduring haunt that likely plagued the rest of his days. His last years are lost to history, but in a letter he wrote to Hakluyt, who wrote about the early English experience in America, he summed up his final trip with the words “as luckless to many, as sinister to myself”.
Needless to say, the fate and whereabouts of the “lost colony”, as it came to be called in the popular literature, has been the subject of historical and archaeological investigation for many decades. But the story and mysteries of the first English settlement go well beyond the “lost colony”, and archaeologists and historians have been busy, off and on and as resources have allowed, conducting research to find the answers.
The search began on the north end of Roanoke Island, where some surface features and finds gave clues to the past presence of the first colony.
The Elusive Settlement
Edward “Clay” Swindell, who is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archaeologist for the U.S. Navy, led me down narrow paths in a thicket of woods within what is today the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site area. Swindell has been a key member of a team that has recently uncovered artifacts that could give new clues about the final whereabouts of at least some of the members of the lost colony. But here, in these woods on the Island of Roanoke, North Carolina, he guides me to four places where scientists over the decades have unearthed some tantalizing traces of this first English presence in America.
One such place is the famous earthwork “fort”, the most prominent and visible feature on the historical landscape surrounding the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site visitor center. It was in this immediate area where the first full professional excavations on the island began under the direction of National Park Service archaeologist Jean “Pinky” Harrington in 1947 and 1948. What he excavated then, however, was a faint physical reminder of what once stood here. Visitors today see the reconstructed earthwork, actually constructed in the 1950’s, the way researchers and archaeologists suggest the “fort” may have appeared in its day. For years, historians and archaeologists have suggested that the simple earthwork sconce, or ‘fort’, served as the major defensive function for the early colonists, featuring perhaps the placement of cannon directed to the nearby shoreline to protect the main colony from potential Spanish attack or advances. But today archaeologists, including Swindell, disagree with that scenario.
“It’s just too far from the shoreline for that to work,” he says. “It wouldn’t make sense.”
The reconstructed earthwork, showing excavations in progress at the site. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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The shoreline has changed over time since the late 16th century. But even given the original shoreline, the distance would have been too great for the fort placement to make sense. Swindell suggests that the earthwork may have been constructed as a quickly-raised earthen sconce to defend or protect an element of the early colony from nearby natives, known to be living in an established village just north of the location—or that it may have served some purpose other than defense of the colony from threats from the sea. Harrington and his team uncovered musket balls, sherds of small crucibles, olive jars, German jettons, and copper nuggets from the earthwork site. Further excavations just west of the earthwork in 1982 and 1983 by the Southeast Archaeological Center of the National Park Service also revealed similar Elizabethan period artifacts, including sherds of crucibles, more Normandy flasks, and tin-glazed ointment pots. And most recently, in 2010, ground-truthing excavations connected to a 2008-2009 Radar Tomography survey uncovered a spread of charcoal. More telling was Harrington’s excavation in 1965, including later excavations by the late Ivor Noël Hume of the Colonial Willamsburg Foundation, which revealed another adjacent site, defined by a nine-foot-square line of postmolds (dark soil where wooden posts in the ground had long rotted away) and a one-foot-deep sunken floor that featured three pits. One of the pits contained bricks, some of which were modified, 16 sherds of a Normandy flask, and native pottery. The consensus among archaeologists now suggests that this site was Thomas Harriot’s “workshop” or “science center”, a place where he, as the expedition ‘scientist’, conducted work to extract minerals and other resources – a metallurgical workshop of sorts. The charcoal feature at the earthwork uncovered in the 2010 excavations has also since been identified as fuel made by Harriot and his workmen, likely during the 1585 expedition. The archaeology has shown that this workshop site may actually have preceded the earthwork. So it is not an altogether unsupportable suggestion that the earthwork feature might have been designed to protect the workshop due to worsening relations with the neighboring natives.
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The workshop or “science center” site under excavation. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Walking further north, Swindell leads me to a place where, in 2008, 2009, and 2010, archaeologists uncovered more artifacts. As we swat mosquitoes from our faces, he points and delineates the area where the excavations took place. One would hardly know any excavation had ever taken place here. Tucked deep in the woods along a nature trail, it appeared virtually untouched by the human hand. But in 2008 archaeologists had to dig 3 feet down through sand in this place before they could reach any signs of past cultural activity. The dune build-up over time had covered over the original late 16th century surface. Today the place is known as the ‘Harriot Woods’ site, where excavators uncovered two cache pits containing European artifacts, including a necklace made of diamond-shaped copper plates (a likely trade item of high value to the local Algonquian natives of the time), copper aiglets typically used to lace up Elizabethan clothing, a fragment of lace, and glass Venetian beads (also a valued trade item among the local Indians). Further excavation at the site revealed a slot trench feature that was identified as evidence of a palisade fence that ran northward toward the shoreline. Radiocarbon dating of organic material found at the site indicated a date range of 1540 – 1640 AD.
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Above and below: The ‘Harriot Woods’ site under excavation. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Copper plates, thought to have been components of a necklace, unearthed at the Harriot Woods site. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Sample of organic cordage found in association with the copper necklace. It is thought to have been part of a container or bag in which the necklace was placed. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Was this, along with the earthwork and the ‘science center’ site, part of the remains of the main settlement and fort documented in the historical accounts?
Archaeologists have their doubts.
“None of the artifacts or features here are evidence of domestic activity,” says Swindell.“Harrington’s work, Hume’s work, and our (more recent) work didn’t show any kind of habitation here (that would be characteristic of a domestic settlement, such as at Jamestown).” And even the earthwork, interpreted as a defensive feature, would not be substantial enough to be considered a fort of the type that the colony would need for overall defense. Now, archaeologists question the earlier suppositions that the main settlement site has been found. Nonetheless, the earthwork site and the other sites nearby clearly indicate a 16th century European presence on the island.
Much more work needs to be done before solid conclusions can be drawn, says Swindell. That work will be challenging, and part of that challenge has to do with the changing environment and the dunes. Dune formation in this area has covered the surface to the point where one must typically excavate at least several feet before reaching any cultural layers that could be identified with the colonial period. Significant shoreline erosion has been another culprit. Swindell walked me eastward along a narrow trail through the woods to a point on the shoreline. We emerged at the edge of a high sand dune bluff overlooking the shoreline. It was sculpted by the unrelenting elements of water and wind over time. Called “Barrel Beach”, this is where archaeologists recovered the lower part of a wooden barrel and a hollowed-out log in shallow water along the shore in 1982. Radiocarbon-dated to the late 16th century, they are thought by some archaeologists to be parts of a well facility established by the colonists for access to fresh water. Here also archaeologists found Iberian olive jar sherds and a few 16th century objects, including an axe. But the point is that none of these objects would have been found at the time if it hadn’t been for the extensive, ongoing erosion of the deep dune layers along the shoreline. The erosion, in a sense, did the digging for them. Yet even this has its drawbacks. “It’s a race against time,” says Swindell. “In 2006 test units were excavated at this spot above the shoreline. Now that surface is gone. We’ve probably lost about 50 feet of shoreline due to erosion over the past decade. There was potentially an Elizabethan component here. Underwater testing has been done, but it hasn’t turned up much.” Swindell added that much of the dune accumulation, shifting and erosion we see today occurred since the early 19th century after logging removed the foliage critical for supporting and protecting the land surface from sand encroachment and erosion. It has vastly complicated efforts to investigate what lies beneath.“In some places the sand could be as much as 10 to 12 feet above the original 16th century land surface,” he says.
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16th century ceramic fragments found near Barrel Beach. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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So, with the doubts about the “Fort Raleigh” earthwork site as a viable candidate for the colony’s main settlement site and no evidence of artifacts or structures in the area that would signal domestic habitation, I asked Swindell where he thought the main settlement could possibly be.
We hopped into his SUV and proceeded south from the archaeological sites along highway 64 toward Manteo, the modern town on Roanoke.“Even Pinky (long before the popular perception that the main settlement was located around or near the earthwork) suspected that the main settlement and fort was down south in the vicinity of Shallowbag Bay,” said Swindell. Manteo abuts Shallowbag Bay, home to the town’s main marina and an ideal waterfront for docking boats of a variety of capacities. The trip took only 5 minutes, and we were soon walking up a peer that jutted into the bay. We stopped at the end of the pier, at the edge of the water.
Looking at it, and comparing it to the shore area further north near the archaeological sites, it was easy to see how this would have been a much more desirable place to establish a fort and settlement.
“This is a nice, deep area for portage and docking,” he says. “The entrance to the Outer Banks is more easily accessible. You have this nice sheltered bay that better accommodates the docking of ships. So you can imagine that this would be a better place to protect your ships and to actually bring supplies in, whereas toward the north (where the current archaeological sites are) there is really no (workable) place to keep your boats and offload supplies.”
“This isn’t a new revelation or proposal,” he continues, “but the traditional ‘Fort Raleigh’ location identified with the earthwork further north at the Park acted like a ‘red herring’, diverting attention from further exploration or consideration of this location.”
He points to another side of the bay, a concentration of condos along the shoreline. “That is one of the areas we are interested in—back in the 30’s, there was a young man who found an English sixpence in that area. Other (unprovenanced) small finds have cropped up in the area. None of them have been pursued archaeologically. We are hoping to pursue some of these leads, among other things.”
But none of this is to say that investigations at the traditional ‘Fort Raleigh’ site on the north of the island are over.
“People think there is nothing left to find here,” says archaeologist Eric Deetz, a member of the First Colony Foundation team and lecturer at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “I don’t buy that.”
Deetz conducted a limited excavation at the workshop/science center site in 2017, re-investigating what has already been done to clarify and hopefully find answers to some outstanding questions—like uncovering and identifying postholes for missed clues to any structures. He suggests that during Harrington’s time, the excavators were not as adept at recognizing the subtle soil features that give clues to the presence of past structures. Deetz applies his years of experience from the Jamestown excavations, where they uncovered the many subtle posthole traces of the (what was thought to be long lost) palisade trenches defining James Fort, as well as its other associated structures.
“I have a dream,” he says. “And I think it’s going to come to pass.”
Like the renewed workshop/science center excavation, Deetz hopes to re-excavate many of Harrington’s old, now re-filled trenches. He shows me a site plan made of Harrington’s old trenches. He argues that the level and intensity, and thus the thoroughness, of the investigations and excavations conducted at the present-day Fort Raleigh National Historic Park area never approached the level and intensity given to the Jamestown site further north in Virginia. To illustrate this further he describes an excavation conducted in 2009-2010 that uncovered traces of a previously undetected slot trench not far from where excavators found the copper necklace and trade beads (see above). “It could be a 16th century palisade,” he speculates, “or it could be some place where they built a fence for a pigsty in 1760.” No artifacts were found that could help date the feature. However, archaeologists took soil samples from the site and sent them for OSL (Optimally Stimulated Luminescence) testing. “So if we get results indicating it could be 16th century,” he exclaims with a hopeful gleam in his eye, “then we’re off to the races.”
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Above and below: Deetz’s 2017 excavated unit at the site of the Harriot workshop/science center.
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Artifacts recovered from the 2017 excavated unit at the Harriot workshop/science center site. They were found within the back-fill from the old Harrington excavations. At least two of the fragments are 16th century ceramic ware.
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The North Side Story: Clues to the Lost Colony
A number of accounts and theories have been advanced over the years by historians and scholars about the fate of the ‘lost colonists’. But recent archaeological investigations may be shedding new light…………
Site X
Most archaeologists who have been involved in the ongoing research related to the first English colonial ventures on the present-day Outer Banks would say that it was unlikely that everything happened in one place. As Swindell maintains, the early expedition operations and colonial attempts likely extended beyond the single settlement locale most often depicted in popular perception. The first two voyages spent much of their time in and around Croatoan — Hatteras Island — where they initially encountered the Croatoans and established a friendly, mutually beneficial trade relationship. This is where they met Manteo, the great friend, ally, and interpreter for the early colonists, and who also famously visited with the Queen on his first voyage to England. And based on the historical accounts alone, we also know that Raleigh’s explorer-colonists were keenly interested in exploring into the interior of the land, with the prospect of claiming and settling new territory and tapping into new resources for the English Crown. The Virginea Pars map, originally drawn by John White, shows a strong interest in what is today the western Albemarle Sound. Indeed, according to White, there were plans to “remove 50 miles into the Main” from Roanoke Island. Combined with the evidence of White’s map, that would place their intentions into the lands bordering the western Albemarle Sound.
Could this be where at least some of the members of the ‘lost colony’ ended up?
Archaeologists of the First Colony Foundation think this is an explanation that cannot be dismissed. Established in 2004, the First Colony Foundation has been dedicated primarily to conducting archaeological and historical research on American beginnings related to the Elizabethan expeditions and colonies of the 1580’s.
“Work and resources shifted away from Roanoke to the Salmon Creek area (adjacent to the western Albemarle Sound) after about 2009,” said Swindell. “With pending construction of new developments in the area, the James River Institute (a cultural resources management firm) was enlisted to survey the area. One of the sites surveyed yielded early ceramics that hinted at a European presence that appeared to predate the later colonial settlements of the area.”
The Salmon Creek site (now popularly referred to as “Site X”) was actually first identified in 2007 through an archaeological shovel test survey and later through test pits. During the surveys, archaeologists recovered a mix of Native American and early English ceramic artifacts, artifacts indicating evidence of 17th and 18th century English activity or settlement. But some of the ceramic fragments, based on later expert examination, suggested late 16th century, the time of Raleigh’s expeditions. Subsequently, the First Colony Foundation began excavations at the site in 2012—and this is where the story really took off.It began when Brent Lane, professor of Heritage Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, requested the British Museum to examine White’s 1585 Virginea Pars map. The document was being used by the Foundation to inform their research and surveys in the area. “We noticed the patches on the White map and asked the British Museum to place the map (the original being located at the Museum) on a light table,” said Swindell. “This revealed a symbol or shape beneath that looked much like a fort. We had already done work in that area, so we went back to look at it again, what had been found (the early ceramics), and renewed excavations there.”
What they discovered, and the resulting interpretation of the finds, has since become a major media splash that has captured the attention of the general public and scholars alike. Beginning in 2012 and ending in 2017, with each season lasting from 7 to 10 days, archaeologists dug a total of 53 two-meter-square units over 2,250 square feet, recovering a variety of artifacts and features providing evidence mostly of a Native American, but also, to a much smaller degree, a possible European/English presence. Most noteworthy were objects, for these purposes, consisting of 40 sherds representing perhaps 6 or 7 vessels of 16th century Surrey-Hampshire Border ware; 8 sherds representing a North Devon plain baluster jar—both types of ceramic ware commonly used during the 16th and 17th centuries, the baluster jar having been typically used as a provisioning jar on sea voyages; two tenter hooks, of a type similar to that used at the early Jamestown settlement and possibly used to stretch canvas (sail cloth) to create temporary shelters or to stretch and dry animal skins; and an aiglet of the type that would have secured Elizabethan clothing, among other artifacts. The finds were generally concentrated in two of the 53-unit total excavation area. It is worth noting that the artifacts are also significant in that the earliest recorded presence of English settlement in the western Albemarle Sound area did not occur before about 1655.
So what do these finds mean? Is this evidence of the lost colony?
Perhaps. But the accounts of the Raleigh expeditions also record initial exploratory forays westward into the mainland under the leadership of Philip Amadas and Ralph Lane, leaders of the first expedition in 1585. Could the artifacts represent traces of those ventures?
The Foundation report dismisses this explanation. “The excavation of domestic table wares from several different diagnostic vessels along with other less diagnostic, but possibly contemporaneous artifacts, strongly suggests that the above mentioned European presence was of a longer duration and the activities different from those recorded for the pre-1587 English exploration of the lower Chowan River basin [as documented in the historical record].”***
But were the artifacts simply transported there by the Native Americans through trade? Possibly—Site X is primarily a Native American settlement site, and the native inhabitants of the time had a known, active trade network. The early colonists exchanged goods with them as needs dictated. European objects, unique and novel to the native inhabitants, were highly valued, especially items of iron, iron tools, objects made of copper, and glass Venetian beads. But, reports the Foundation team, “missing at Site X are the most common trade goods, like beads…….fragments of European pottery do occur in a few VA/NC Indian site assemblages that probably date as early as the 1660s, but they are not common, and it seems that ceramics were not routinely carried into Indian country by traders until the mid-1700s.”*** The report further notes that there are no records that indicate the presence of European traders in the area prior to 1655.And even the Native American artifacts provide some clues, suggest the report authors — “preliminary analysis of the Colington series [a type of Native American pottery] ceramics from Site X suggests that this phase of Carolina Native American occupation occurred before the 17th century. Years of regional research informs us that this shell-tempered ware is representative of the Carolina Algonkians, or the group of Native American Indians occupying the region at the time of Elizabethan exploration in the 16th century.”***
Nonetheless,”we do not have the smoking gun,” said archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti, director of the Site X excavations. “We have no features of European-built structures. We have not found a fort. Nor do we claim to have found the main relocation site or even the main group of the 1587 Roanoke colonists” at this site.“Quite the contrary, we believe that a small number of Roanoke colonists resided for a few years at Site X—a contention based on circumstantial evidence.”****
The First Colony Foundation team thus suggests that any habitation by Roanoke colonists at the site may have only consisted of a small surviving part of the original 1587 group, similar in vain to the accounts acquired by some Jamestown colonists from the Native Americans about the presence of other ‘white people’ in other places in the region, as later recorded on the Zuniga map of 1608. (The reported locations were placed on a map of the region, the original having been lost. But a Spanish spy sent a copy, the so-called Zuniga Map, to the Spanish court. The map indicated two locations along tributaries to the North Carolina Sounds where survivors of the 1587 colony may have resided).
Site Y
Notwithstanding the intriguing implications of Site X, it was not the only site where the First Colony Foundation uncovered some fascinating new clues. Most recently, archaeologists excavated at a location near the Chowan River, north of Site X. Here, after surveys and subsequent excavation of 72 test units, they unearthed what was identified as 16th century pottery sherds—London redware, a North Devon baluster jar, Spanish olive jars, Martincamp stoneware, Essex fine redware, and, like that found at Site X—Surrey Hampshire borderware. In all, this collection of sherds exceeded that found at Site X, and the archaeological team has concluded that the ceramic-ware finds were likely not the result of trade, in which the Natives acquired them earlier from Europeans and retained and used them for some time after. According to Lucketti, the finds suggest that there was a small contingent of colonists for a short time period at this location, much like Site X. The finds point to the possibility that the original colonists at Roanoke split up into smaller groups or families, some of them moving inland to locations like that of Site X and Y, others perhaps to Hatteras. But the jury is still out on where the main, or larger, body of the 1587 colonists may have moved or settled.
The First Colony team is now deliberating on where to go next. The story unfolding for this region remains wide open.*****
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Excavations at the Salmon Creek site, or ‘Site X’. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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16th century aiglet excavated at Site X. This was typically used to secure clothing, much like a button. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Sherds of yellow and green glazed Surrey-Hampshire Border Ware, excavated from Site X. Courtesy First Colony Foundation, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Assuming that what the Foundation archaeologists are suggesting is true, what about the rest of the colonists? And what about the letters White observed carved into a tree and post at the abandoned 1587 colony site, which seemed to indicate that the colonists had moved to live with or near the Croatoans, who inhabited present-day Hatteras Island at the time?
Compelling new evidence unearthed on Hatteras Island may provide some clues………….
The South Side Story: Area 31DR1, The Hatteras Excavations
As is often the case with archaeology, the first leads to making discoveries sometimes begin with random findings made by locals and non-professionals. This was the case for Hatteras early in the 20th century when, for example, a mostly intact 16th century Spanish olive jar was found by local islander Eustes White; an “old sword’, along with bones, buttons, arrowheads, and a pot were reportedly found by another local Charles Miller; and a Nuremburg token (casting counter that looks like a coin and used, for example, on 16th century ships to count inventory), was found in the 1930’s and later brought to the attention of archaeologist J.C. Harrington by a Hatteras local named Tandy. Harrington was excavating (from 1947 and 1953) on Roanoke Island at the time. Reports like this also likely led to survey work by the National Park Service, which designated the island, and particularly an area near Buxton, as a location of archaeological interest —what became known as Smithsonian designated area ‘31DR1’.
To be accurate, the archaeological record on Hatteras Island, both discovered and yet undiscovered, is overwhelmingly reflective of the indigenous Native American populations that have historically inhabited the island for thousands of years, extending back deep into Paleolithic times. The most numerous finds and archaeological features uncovered thus far represent the native groups of the Late Woodland Period (AD 900 until 1650), particularly that of the Croatoan culture. This was also a time period, especially in the 17th century, when this indigenous society underwent significant social and cultural transformations through contact with the new European arrivals. The beginning of this contact period has formed the context for understanding what was happening on the island during and after the time of Raleigh’s initial exploratory and colonization efforts from 1584 to 1587.
It was in area 31DR1 where perhaps some of the most sensational finds were uncovered by archaeologist Dr. David Phelps of East Carolina University and his team during a full scale archaeological excavation beginning in 1998. Along with an abundance of both Native American and European artifacts — mostly Native American — including such objects as lead shot, Native and European pipe fragments, nails, glass beads, copper items, bricks, ceramic ware, and glass fragments and bottles, they uncovered a late 16th century snaphouse gunlock and a well-preserved 16th century style bronze signet ring. Though no more important archaeologically speaking than the other finds, these latter two items became the ‘poster child’ finds from the excavation, garnering the attention of local and national media reporters and writers. The finds became a sensation not only because these were the ‘sexiest’ objects found, but at least in part because they were pulled from carefully recorded, stratified deposits through systematic, professionally controlled excavations — not random surface or digging finds happened upon by local adventurers or others going about their own business or hobbies. And they were clearly evidence for the presence of, or trade with, late 16th century Europeans on Hatteras Island.
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The 16th century gunlock. Courtesy Dr. David S. Phelps and Charles L. Heath, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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The bronze signet ring. Courtesy Dr. David S. Phelps and Charles L. Heath, from the previous article published on the same subject.
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Fast forward to 2007, when local heritage enthusiast and historian Scott Dawson self-published a book entitled Croatoan: Birthplace of America, which, along with word of mouth about Dawson at an event at the Festival Park in Manteo, caught the attention of attending archaeologist Dr. Mark Horton of the University of Bristol (UoB). Horton, already interested in the history of the Outer Banks as it related to the first English attempts at colonizing the Americas, connected with Dawson. A number of discussions and email exchanges later, and Horton and PhD candidate Louisa Pittman and other UoB students were on the island in November of 2009 conducting test pits and full scale excavations, with the sponsorship and help of volunteer members of the newly formed Croatoan Archaeological Society. Dawson, one of the founders and now President of the organization, was among the participants of these excavations. Within the first few years of careful and painstaking digging and recording, they encountered some intriguing new finds and, like those of the previous Phelps excavations, they generated public notice through a flurry of news and magazine articles……….
Whisperings of a Vanished World
When traveling south along NC 12, the main road or highway through the tiny town of Hatteras Village at the southern tip of Hatteras Island, it is easy to miss the little, and only, public library. It is a component of a larger set of buildings that define the town’s community center. It might typify the kind of library one would naturally expect for a community this size, except for one thing—this facility features, at least archaeologically speaking, Hatteras Island’s biggest claim to fame—artifacts that tell a story of Croatoan Native Americans who inhabited the island and built a thriving culture here centuries ago. Along with these artifacts are objects that also evidence the presence of Europeans near or among them as early as the late 16th century—the time of the ‘lost’ colony.
I met Dawson there early one bright October morning. With masks donned (COVID-19 precautions were still in full force), he led me into the library, and more specifically, a large room facilitated to exhibit some of the “star” artifacts excavated by archaeological teams over the years. According to Dawson, these represented but a tiny fraction of the thousands of cultural and faunal finds unearthed by Horton and his mixed team of students and volunteers over recent years at several sites in the Buxton/Frisco/Hatteras Village area. It was “a ridiculously high number,” said Dawson. “Enough to fill a garage with bins—mostly bits of brick, glass, pig teeth, peach pits, pottery, pipes, little copper squares and hooks, net weights.” Consisting mostly of artifacts and other finds related to the Native American inhabitants of the island, the massive haul is now housed and managed at a storage facility in Currituck, far to the north on the North Carolina mainland. What we saw in this refitted library room was, however, according to Dawson, the really “sexy stuff”. He led me to a large, glass climate-controlled case wherein laid the star attractions of the exhibit—the late 16th century European artifacts unearthed during the Horton team’s 2012-2013 seasons. They included a silver ring—likely once belonging to a woman, given its finger size; an Elizabethan period copper aiglet (likely used at one time to secure the end of a shoe lace); a smelted copper bun, the product of smelting typically done during the European metallurgical operations performed in the area by the earliest European arrivals; a 16th century firebar, also a product of 16th century metallurgy; a 16th century brass apostle that once held gunpowder; a fragment of a 16th century Germanic stoneware jug; a 16th century Nuremberg token; a 16th century glass arrowhead, fashioned from European glass; a 16th century lead pencil and writing slate fragment featuring drawing and other clearly human-made markings; and perhaps most interesting of all—a fragment of a 16th century swept hilt rapier. Some of these objects were not typical items valued for trade by the Native inhabitants, based on what scholars know from historical documents. And aside from the type style of the individual artifacts, the excavation layer in which these artifacts were found was dated to the late 16th century—the time period of the “lost” colony—so they were likely not objects long held over from a previous time period and deposited in sediments dated to a later time. They were all located among other finds of a Croatoan village, also likely a village that flourished during the late 16th century, as the Croatoan pottery sherds found within the mix were characteristically or stylistically typical for pottery made and used by the Native Americans before the 17th century. “Almost all natives on the east coast had a particular style in the 1500s where the lip of the vessel flares out then curves in then back out so that it’s like a backwards “S” or a “z” with curves,” said Dawson. “The Native pottery in the 1600s is straighter, on the whole smaller and in my own opinion less decorative.” Moreover, added Dawson, “the big change in the 1500s vs 1600 is the absence of glass beads [a popular trade item between the Europeans and the Native Americans] and tidewater pipe bowls we find constantly in the 1600s.”
Artifacts were not the only hints to a 16th century European presence. One of the special skills archaeologists acquire is the ability to recognize and identify the subtle changes in soil texture, color and consistency as they dig progressively down through the layers. Like shadows in the earth, the various forms of things, especially organic objects such as wood that disintegrated over time, leave behind their effects in the sediment. Horton and his team encountered and mapped numerous postholes left by the wood frames of the Croatoan houses and other structures. These postholes were typically round. But among them were larger, square postholes, as well—not a feature ever found related to Native American structures, at least in this region of the country. Dawson suggests that these were the traces of 16th century European structures/houses. And they could not have been from the first two Raleigh expeditions, which were largely military—based on historical documentation, they sojourned in this area in tent. The square postholes had to evidence a more permanent European presence. Could these have been structures built by the “lost” colony among the Croatoan villagers?
As exciting as these artifacts are, Dawson believes that most people who come to visit this place are really ‘missing the elephant in the room’. For him, perhaps the bigger story is how an entire nation of Native Americans, the Croatoans, largely vanished from American history, forgotten in the limelight of the history that is typically taught in American schools and American history books. This needs to change, he says. The countless artifacts uncovered in the excavations provide a testament to this lost history.
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Above and below: The excavation team at work at two of the Hatteras Island excavation units. Note the numerous postholes. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society
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A t trench excavation unit, showing how the soil gives clues to history. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society
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The library in Hatteras Village where the artifacts are currently on display for the public.
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The copper aiglet, or shoelace tie, dated to the 16th century. Found in a purely Native context along with the Nuremburg token, silver ring, copper bun, and fragment of 16th century German stoneware. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society.
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The silver ring, found in a 16th century context. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society.
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The copper bun. It is formed by smelting copper and then pouring it into a mold to cool, which creates the bun shape shown here. This type of metalworking was not done by the Native Americans during the 16th century, the date of the context from which this bun was excavated. It was found in the same 16th century layer as the Nuremburg token and other objects.
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Iron firebar, used in metalworking, found next to the copper bun.
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A 16th century apostle, or gunpowder flask, found in the excavations. This was hung across the chest like a bandolier. An identical apostle was found on an Elizabethan shipwreck.
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The 16th century lead pencil and part of the writing slate.
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Arrowhead, made by the Croatoan villagers from European glass.
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Above and below: The 16th century swept hilt rapier fragment.
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Lead shot and lead shot waste found during the excavations. The lead shot was found less than 100 feet from the location of a 16th century gunlock found in a previous excavation. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society
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Following the Tokens
This much is certain: the ongoing search for the “lost” colony’ on Hatteras Island is not over. For one thing, one find may likely open a new chapter — the Nuremberg token found by Tandy on Hatteras in the 1930’s that ended up in the hands of J.C. Harrington in the 1950’s while he worked at the early Roanoke excavations. It matched two of three almost identical tokens found on Roanoke. Moreover, another identical token was unearthed later during Horton’s Hatteras excavations in 2013. The first token found by Tandy had no provenance in terms of excavation. But the token recovered on Hatteras in 2013 had a clear provenance documented through systematic excavation. It was stratified — confirming that the token dated to the 16th century.
Horton was keenly curious about where the Tandy token was originally found on Hatteras. Doing some research on his own, fellow excavator Dawson found the answer. A copy of a report by archaeologist William Haag from previous investigations indicated the latitude in which the token was found. With this, Dawson led Horton to the general location in which the token was found by Tandy in 1938. Nowhere near the location of Horton’s recent excavations — the site of the Croatoan village — this raised another question: how did it get there, and why so far from a habitation site?
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The Nuremburg token found decades ago in the area of the possible ‘fort’ location on Hatteras Island. Courtesy Croatoan Archaeological Society
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To Dawson and Horton’s knowledge, no excavations had ever been conducted in this area, so absence of evidence did not necessarily mean evidence of absence. Compounding things, this location was on private property, so Horton and his team had no permission and mandate to do any test digging. But as an archaeologist familiar with the array of new tools available to archaeologists today, Horton knew what to do. He employed a drone, equipped with remote sensing technology, to conduct an aerial survey of the area of the property in which the token was found. With this, Horton hoped to detect any evidence in the landscape that would provide clues to any structures or possible human activity leaving its mark in the landscape in the past. After the drone had completed its work, the data was entered into a computer for imaging.
What they found did not disappoint.
Imaging revealed evidence of a perfectly rectangular formation, a feature that could not be seen standing at ground level. It was certainly not a natural feature. It had to be human-made. Someone, at some time in the past, had created or constructed something on this ground. It was in a field at an elevated point, surrounded on three sides by woods and a good view of the sea on the remaining side. According to Dawson and Horton, this would have been an ideal strategic location for a fort or colony ‘survivors’ camp’—good for keeping a watch on the Spanish along the coast and perhaps the still hoped-for returning resupply ships with John White — and not too far from their supportive friends, the Croatoan.
I asked Dawson during our discussion at the library why he referred to this finding as a possible ‘fort’. He led me over to a table within the artifact exhibit and flipped to a blank page in the exhibit guest book. Grabbing a pen, he drew a rough outline of the image their remote sensing revealed. It was a rectangle to be sure, but on at least two of the rectangle corners he drew square extensions—resembling in principle the same bulwark features discovered at the corners of the James Fort remains unearthed much farther north at Jamestown in Virginia, though the James Fort bulwarks were round in shape. The remote sensing imaging was not clear enough to determine the presence of similar extensions on the other two corners. In addition, said Dawson, the imaging map revealed another interesting feature—possible square postholes positioned within the area encompassed by the rectangular boundary. Was this evidence for support for a large structure within the ‘fort’? One could only speculate at this point.
Though the fort hypothesis was mere speculation, Dawson felt it was worth future investigation, once permission from the landowner was obtained to explore the matter further. “This will be a future activity of our project,” said Dawson.
But there was still plenty of work to do analyzing, interpreting and reporting the results of their last seasons of excavations. No conclusions can yet be drawn, and there is no ‘smoking gun’, says Horton.
The Myth of the Lost Colony
According to Dawson, archaeologists plan to return to the area during the spring of 2021 to continue the investigations. Though there is far more work to be done on Hatteras, Dawson believes that a workable hypothesis for the fate of the lost colony can already be formulated. “The lost colony is a myth created in 1937 by a play of the same name,” he explains. “When the governor [John White] returns with resupplies the colony has vanished, leaving behind no trace except for the word Croatoan carved onto a tree. In the myth no one knows what this word means. This mythology is also taught in schools and it is completely false. In reality, the colony was never lost and the word Croatoan has always been understood. Croatoan is on the maps from the time and even the latitude of the inlets is given. This is why we began to conduct archaeology on Hatteras Island, then known as Croatoan. And alas, we found them exactly where the colony indicated they had gone. This is the story of what we found, literally bringing the truth to the surface. This colony was never actually lost nor was the word Croatoan ever a mystery. The two peoples assimilated together and the archaeology demonstrates this beautifully.”
Saying goodbye to Dawson and thanking him for his valuable time and insights, I hopped back into my car. It would be a long drive up that lonely river of sand back to Nags Head — and perhaps back again to that museum at Fort Raleigh National Historic Park on Roanoke Island, where some of the most important finds of the Roanoke excavations are still housed and exhibited.
The story hasn’t ended. In December, 2021, a small group of volunteers, again under the direction of Horton, returned to dig near Buxton. What they uncovered was not inconsistent with the kinds of finds they have already encountered. Among them: Thousands of shards of Croatoan pottery; a grinding stone for corn; brick; animal bones and remains of shellfish; copper; iron nails; a bronze button; window glass and daub from a 16th century home structure; a dagger handle; a saker cannon ball (usually fired by a medium cannon, slightly smaller than a culverin, developed during the early 16th century and often used by the English); metal sea chest handles that had been modified into tools; dozens of pipes, both English and Croatoan; lead shot; glass beads; redware; a frizzen (part of a gunlock); and an English Tudor Rose decor that was once part of a horse bridle.
Not a bad haul, that.
Note: The author asked Dawson if there were plans to return again to excavate. “Yes,” he responded. “But the main focus with all we have found over the years is to build a museum on the island to showcase it all.”
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Scott Dawson, standing next to the case where the key artifacts are on display.
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You can read in much greater detail about the history and discoveries on Hatteras Island related to the lost colony by purchasing the book by Scott Dawson at Arcadia Publishing. You can also read more about the archaeological project and how to donate by going to http://www.cashatteras.com/ .
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* From Thomas Harriot’s “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia”.
** From Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1600).
*** From First Colony Foundation Report, An Archaeological Brief for Site X.
****From Nicholas Luccketti’s remarks at the OBX History Weekend Symposium, October 27-28, 2017, on Roanoke Island.
***** Kozak, Catherine, ‘Lost colony’ moved inland: Archaeologists, Coastal Review Online, October 16, 2020.
Freelance writer, researcher and photographer, Georges Fery (georgefery.com) addresses topics from history, culture, and beliefs to daily living of ancient and today’s indigenous societies of Mesoamerica and South America. His articles are published online at travelthruhistory.com, ancient-origins.net and popular-archaeology.com, and in the quarterly magazine Ancient American (ancientamerican.com). In the U.K. his articles are found in mexicolore.co.uk.
The author is a fellow of the Institute of Maya Studies instituteofmayastudies.org, Miami, FL and The Royal Geographical Society, London, U.K. (rgs.org). He is a member in good standing with the Maya Exploration Center, Austin, TX (mayaexploration.org) the Archaeological Institute of America, Boston, MA (archaeological.org),NFAA-Non Fiction Authors Association (nonfictionauthrosassociation.com) and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. (americanindian.si.edu).
The destruction of indigenous peoples’ secular and religious emblems, specifically those related to the record of their past, is often a common theme in the study of the Spanish conquest of the New World. In the annals of archaeology and anthropology, one needs to investigate behind the scene to bring a sharper focus on events that are not often what they seem to be. The case of the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa Calderón’s auto-de-fe, or “act of faith,” at Mani, in the peninsula of Yucatan, Mexico, is the most significant example often regarded as the historical “landmark” concerning the destruction, or burning, of the Maya “books.” In his 1566 Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, the friar documented the zeal and excess in his drive to “remove the demons” from the natives’ hearts. This story focuses on what led to that event and, specifically, what was really burned on July 12, 1562, and why……..
The Mission
Diego de Landa. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
Diego de Landa (1524-1579, portrait right) was among the first Franciscans to arrive in Yucatan. Part of Nueva España, or New Spain, it was then ruled by the Spanish viceroy and the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición (Holy Office of the Inquisition) in Mexico City, established by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1478. Diego de Landa was born in the town of Cifuentes, in the Spanish province of Alcaria, on November 12, 1524. At that time, the Franciscan order in America had the religious monopoly in conquered lands and answered to the seat of the Holy Inquisition in Mexico City, administrator of religious affairs. Of note is the fact that the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1524 granted the rights of conquest of most of the Americas to Spain, with the understanding that the conquistadores would conquer land and riches for the Kings at Granada, but harvest souls for the Pope in Rome.
De Landa arrived in Merida from Spain in 1549, a few years after the death of his wife Inesa de Inchaurduy, with whom he had two sons, Diego and Juan. He renounced his position as Royal Notary and, in 1541, joined the Order of Friars Minor, a religious order of the Franciscans in the convent of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo. His initial appointment in Mexico was to the mission, later convent, of San Antonio de Padua in the town of Izamal, Yucatan, where he became known as a hardworking friar. He undertook his mission by first learning the Yucatec language, walking barefoot as he visited villages on the peninsula, at that time divided into nineteen independent chiefdoms. He learned about the land, the people and local customs. His direct approach, sometimes in hostile villages where the legacy of the brutal conquest still lingered after 30 years, convinced him of his mandate to convert. He was, however, welcomed in many communities, and that helped him understand the people and his ecumenical mission. It was at that time that he saw figures and signs drawn or painted on sheets made of vegetal material, which he interpreted as idolatry and messages of the devil. They were, in fact, the only “written” record of the indigenous Yucatec communities.
De Landa distinguished himself for his zeal in the conversion of the Mayas, resorting to excessive pressure and physical abuse. The Spanish Crown and the Inquisition, however, had already forbidden the use of duress to convert indigenous people, because it was understood that the Christian doctrine could not be grasped within a generation or two after the conquest. It was also unanimously understood that the Mayas, and other indigenous groups, needed more time to convert and, therefore, could not be guilty of heresies when they had no sense of what the Christian doctrine was all about. It took thirty-five to forty years for the religious orders to develop conversion protocols for indigenous people. The explicit mission of the Franciscans at that time was to protect the Maya communities from the abuses of the Spanish encomenderos, individuals that were duly recognized among the conquistadores of the land. As a reward for their military service to the crown, they received encomiendas or donations of populated lands; they were also called colonists.
Seal of the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition Public Domain
De Landa, however, ignored the Inquisition’s mandate to stop forced conversion and persisted in eradicating traditional indigenous beliefs and rituals. His zeal to convert and expunge idolatry was adopted by lower ranked friars and lay people, practicing coercion so extreme that it drove many people to take their own lives by hanging (deLanda, 1959/148-9). The historic record confirms that if he was excessive in his preaching methods, he was not wrong on his views of the most egregious indigenous ritual, the practice of human sacrifice, which persisted throughout the Yucatan even forty-five years after the conquest. As a man of his time, therefore, de Landa dealt in absolutes and believed that the original Inquisition mandate to convert had to be vigorously enforced in his diocese, if for no other reason than for saving the lives of sacrificial victims.
The Secret Place
In June, 1562, two boys exploring the countryside found a traditional place of worship hidden in a cave near Mani, in southwest Yucatan, where the Mayas performed their devotions to ancestors and deities (deLanda –Documento Uno, 1959/144-5). They found clay figurines and human skulls, the latter covered with copal incense. Frightened, they called the town custodian friar. Informed of the event, from his seat then in Merida, de Landa called on local Spanish civil authorities and Merida’s alcalde mayor to investigate, while organizing an investigating team that included halac huinics, or indigenous leaders. Also attending as “ordinary inquisitors” for the Holy Inquisition, were friars Miguel de la Puebla, Juan Picarro, Pedro de Ciudad Rodrigo, Antonio Verdugo and Francisco Aparicio (deLanda –Documento Uno, 1959/147). Once on site, the team proceeded to brutally question the people of Mani and those of nearby villages about this hidden place of forbidden worship. Under extreme duress, some of them confessed even when they did not know what they were confessing about, while others in desperation committed suicide. People were burned in their thatched houses, others were flogged, and still others were hung from trees, while young children were tied up to their mother’s ankles (deLanda, 1959, XV/26-28).
The severe excesses employed by the friars to denounce the “worship of evil” and to identify priest-shamans, community leaders, and people that ministered to the forbidden ceremonies, was without doubt unjustifiable by today’s standards. It was, however, no different from what was happening in sixteenth century Spain. The events at Mani and other places merely underlines the fundamentalist religious mindset of the times. Locally, even the encomenderos and other colonists and Spanish residents were horrified bywhat happened at Mani (deLanda – Documento Uno, 1959, XIII/160-1). Let us then shed light on the limited, and at times contradictory, record we have of the Mani “act of faith”, or public burning, that took place on July 12, 1562, to understand what this event was truly about.
Tragedy of the Burning
Mani was the home of the Tutul-Xiu, the Yucatec Maya dynasty that moved its capital from Uxmal to Mani in the thirteenth century. The Xiu were the dominant power in western Yucatan after the fall of Mayapan in 1441. Their fierce antagonists were the Cocom of Sotuta. Mani hosts an old Franciscan monastery, the Paroquia y Convento de San Miguel Arcángel, founded in 1549. Its architecture was adapted to meet the indigenous converts to the new faith, with a large open chapel on its north side. The open chancel was covered with an exposed ramada or open shelter, built at a right angle from the building, to protect parishioners from sun and rain. Facing the monastery is the large esplanade were the bonfires of the auto-de-fe or “act of faith” were placed.
The so called “codices” burnt at Mani, Sotuta, and other locations were not in any way, shape or function related to the better known post-Classic codices. The Spanish called them “books” because they did not know what else to call them. They were in fact canvases mostly conceived of a single sheet of varying size, and locally made from local material, such as the light colored dried bark of trees (the wild fig tree amate or Ficus glabrata for example) soaked and dried, fashioned into thin mats made of woven plant fibers covered with finely ground limestone. The record of country folks were simple motifs related to community and family. They drew their homestead on crude local maps with their milpa or maize fields, family lineage, and their count-of-days calendar system, among others. The number of canvases burned that day at Mani is disputed, but estimates may suggest a hundred or less. In his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, de Landa tells us about the sorrow and grief of the local people at their destruction: “We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction (McAnany, 1995).
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Post Classic Dresden Codex (1250-1350AD) Public Domain
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The reason for the limited number of canvases lies in the fact that they were mostly used by halac huinicsorlineage heads, the “true righteous men” and principals, while most people were illiterate. Family heads, however, knew enough to record their lineage and a rough description of their property’s location and homestead. Of note is the fact that the glyphs used on the burnt canvases were not the ones of Classic times, for the glyphs on ancient stone stelas could not be read by sixteenth century Mayas. The records ofthose canvases were important, for they succinctly described information such as the cycles of the sun and moon according to agrarian cycles, numbering structure, time recording method, and concomitant religious filiation. They also recorded secular information on villages, families, water rights and properties. Furthermore, de Landa stresses that several thousand wood artifacts, and small bundles called bultos that contained remains of deified ancestors represented most of the items burned. Also burned were hundreds of small humanlike shaped clay figurines that held ancestral remains. The question then is, if there were a relatively limited number of canvases, were they the only reason why the friars insisted that they be destroyed, or were the canvases, and the wood implements and bundles with ashes of selected forebears, the real aim of the “act of faith”?
Punuk Wood Figure – Sotheby’s Sale 6733 Public Domain
From time immemorial to this day, the record of ancestors’ predominance in social groups worldwide is at the core of ancient spirituality, silent testimony of filiation to ancestry and patrimony.Figurines representative of deities were made of clay, but those made of wood were especially revered because they were carved to resemble human figurines. De Landa’s description of the process is as follows:“…the people of position made for their deceased fathers wooden statues of which the back of the head was left hollow; they then burned a part of the body and placed its ashes there, then plugged it up; …they then buried the rest and…preserved these statues with a great deal of veneration among their idols” (deLanda – 1959, XXXIII/59).Freedman corroborates the pattern that ancestor veneration is a selective process and does not extend equally to all deceased progenitors (1966). The Punuk (Esquimo) wood figure is the closest to those of 6th century Yucatan, for none have been found to date. The bundle tradition of carrying tutelar gods and ancestors’ remains, especially on migration, can be traced as far back as the Olmec culture (2,500BC), through Maya and Aztec times, as well as in most present-day cultures of the Americas.
These wood and clay representations of ancestors were important family heirlooms, so much so that they were integral to the descendants’ inheritance (deLanda –1959/XXVII.48). They were intangible witnesses of the family belonging to that ethno-linguistic community, with all the rights attached to household and land. Together with the canvases, they were the family seals of property. The foreign priests did not (or did they?), understand the significance of what they called superstition and idolatry when they burned these “idols.” By destroying these articles, they literally ripped the peoples’ identity, their standing in the community and “title” to their land and property. These facts, therefore, demand that we raise the importance of how and why ancestors fitted into the economy and the daily lives of families, because ancestral traditions lie at the roots of this tragedy.
As in traditional Maya communities today, each maize field holds a foundation shrine dedicated to deified ancestors who left land and other resources to their descendants. At these sites, prayers and incantations take place at each planting-harvesting cycle, as well as at dedicated times throughout the year. Ruth Bunzel, in Barbara Tedlock (1982/95), noted that ancestors are the power whose influence on human affairs is continuous and unremittingsince they are the former owners of the house and land. She further added that land is conceived as belonging to the ancestors; one lives upon it by their grace; one does not own land, it is merely loaned to one as a lodging in the world. In the final analysis, ancestors provide a bridge between generations for the benefit of the descendants standing in their community, because ancestors are invoked to legitimize and bring order to daily family and communal existence.De Landa and his friars dismissed the significance of these icons on grounds of idolatry, which in their view was merely a means of escape from the new religion. But was it the only motive, or were the Friars in partnership with local unscrupulous encomenderos and mestizo colonists who were then able, through burning the only indigenous “property record,” to seize “undocumented” land?
In Mexico today, ancient canvases found in traditional communities are recorded with the National Museum of Anthropology and History (MNA, INAH), as well as with local land surveyarchives. Under Article 27 of the Agrarian Law the canvases are acknowledged as legal property records. Copies of these ancient documents are still used in land claim resolution and are legally binding between parties. The case of the Lienzo de Coachimalco in the late 1970s illustrates the importance of such records. The rare lienzo or canvas is dated in the first part of the 17th century. It is made of five panels of jolote fibers sewn together, then covered with a thin coat of finely ground limestone, on which are drawn a crude map and figures of the village of Coachimalco. The lienzo is legally recognized as proof of ancestral property and residence by local landowners and they document the descendants’ claim to property.
In the appendices of the 1959 edition of the Relación are testimonies of the collusion between secular and religious members of the Yucatan government in Merida, albeit not for the same reasons. This collusion cannot be understood without bringing forward the Tax List of 1549. This list fixed the levies to be paid by each of the 175 towns in Yucatan and ten in Tabasco, as well as in other towns of the crown to its encomenderos for administrative control over an extensive administrative, military, and religious infrastructure. The taxation in kind was subject to the availability of local resources. It included, among others, manufactured material such as wool mantas or mantles, each made of nine-plus square feet at the rate of four hundred per year for an average town, beeswax (per 100-weights), drums of honey and other items and products, such as corn, beans and other foodstuff, as well as salt and dried fish from coastal communities. The record indicates that, for the year 1549, the levy of 53,285 mantles were collected upon the 175 towns, recorded on the Tax List in Yucatan” (Gates, 1937/213).
The tributes had to be delivered to encomenderos in the city of Merida at the rate of one-third every four months, with pack animals or carts for transportation supplied by the colonists. Indigenous communities had to help the colonists for this task with four Indian workmen for this service, to be fed and housed by him and taught the doctrine of Christianity. Material and products were also assigned to the crown and religious orders. For the following years, the levies varied with the size of towns, which steadily grew by reason of the forced resettlement, or repartimiento de indios of indigenous villages, when they were burned to the ground to further the policy for better socio-economic and religious control.
Among numerous testimonies is a report issued on March 15, 1563, by Hernando Dorado, Royal Notary in Merida, the ancient Ti’ho, witnessed by upstanding citizens who were deeply distressed by the abuses sustained by indigenous people at the hands of certain members of the church and the colonists. The report was sent to the Vice Royalty of New Spain in Mexico City, which was concerned with persistent rumors of civil unrest in the province. The central and local governments needed a stable church-state cooperation for the sake of socio-economic stability and development. Dorado’s report is significant in describing the use and abuse of power at the time, notably the appearance on the scene of a colorful figure, the alcalde mayor of Merida, Diego Quijada in 1561, which sheds a disturbing light on the events.
The 1563 and 1565 reports describe the events that happened at Mani, Sotuta, and other towns and villages. In Mani, flogging and burnings at the stake by the friars were directed by de Landa, assisted by friars Miguel de la Puebla, Pedro de Ciudad Rodrigo, and Juan de Picaro, referred to as “ordinary inquisitors” of the Inquisition. Mayor Diego Quijada also attended the dramatic events together with colonists. When convicted of lesser charges, Indians had their head shaved (de Landa – Documento Uno, 1959/147). and sent to forced labor for ten years or less as indentured servants in the haciendas of encomendoros and mestizo colonists’ friends of the mayor.
Penalties with payment in kind by indigenes were collected; the report mentions 4,340 gold pesos, 125,000 cacao beans (the local currency), as well as other charges for lesser penalties (de Landa – Documento Uno, 1959/149). The friars went further in desecrating the graves of indigenous ancestors by removing the buried bones which were then scattered in the fields or thrown into bonfires (de Landa – Documento Uno,1959/148). This was not an act of lunacy — it was grounded in a religious rationale that, by showing publicly the Maya’s ancestors’ impotence in the face of extreme adversity, it would achieve the eradication of ancestor worship.
The secular-temporal collusion in the region, if not always as extreme as at Mani, was the result of the tri-partite failure between the local governments, the encomenderos, other colonists and the religious order, each with their own agenda. This relationship went astray as such relationships often do and was highly damaging to the Yucatan socio-economic stability under the mayor and his accomplices. The friars, sanctioned by their custodian, ignored the mandate of the Holy Inquisition to cease forced conversion and maltreatment of the local people, while the mayor and his associates were driven by greed. Manuscript letters in Yucatec to the viceroy in Mexico City, signed by three governors, describe the brutality of the Franciscans, and asked for help and redress that often came too late. In many instances, local rage against the invaders ravaged the land. Near Valladolid, a revolt took the lives of seventeen Spaniards and several hundred mestizos. The villagers cut the hands and feet of their oppressors and sent them to towns and villages on the peninsula to sow a resistance movement that never had a chance to take hold.
Letter to the Viceroy, Page 3 – Archivas de Indias. Public Domain
The damning 1563 report is supported two years later by another, dated March 25, 1565, from Merida again, addressed to the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico City, and to the Council of the Indies in Spain by the Royal Notary, Sebastian Bazques (de Landa –Documento Uno-1959/143-157). This second report confirms the first regarding long lasting abuses of power that resulted in serious economic damage to the province while inciting dangerous restlessness within the indigenous population. In his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in 1552, by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, he relates a situation then widespread in New World territories. The book raised an uproar in Spain and all over Europe at the time.The Dominican friar’s supplications for relief notwithstanding, the destruction of many idols collected during idolatry trials by the Inquisition in the Yucatan was widespread and is found to occur in every chronicle of every entrada well into the seventeenth century.
That is the deplorable condition the Franciscan Francisco de Toral (1502-1571), the first bishop of the Diocese of Yucatan, found on his arrival in 1562. He quickly identified the ills that plagued the province and focused his attention on de Landa’s treatment of the native people. De Toral was appalled at their subjection and abuse and skeptical about the use of physical punishment to exert confessions. It was obvious to de Toral that de Landa ignored the orders of the Crown and that of the Inquisition and exceeded his ecumenical mandate. The antagonism between the two priests led de Toral to force de Landa to return to Spain in 1563 to face charges of abuse of his religious obligations at the Council of the Indies’ court in Seville. De Toral freed hundreds of Mayas that de Landa had imprisoned without cause, except for those guilty of instigating the egregious crimes of idolatry and human sacrifice.
The de Landa Legacy
When he first set foot on the peninsula in 1549, de Landa’s initial zeal to convert was driven not only by faith but also by an inquisitive mind genuinely interested in the land and its people. He crisscrossed most of the Yucatan bare foot and made valuable notes that went beyond the indigenous people’s beliefs and religious practices, and into all aspects of their lives. His first-hand observations embraced community and family organization, children education, burial practices, architecture, planting techniques and cycles, the calendar and numbering system, harvested products storage and distribution, the symbology of their writing, festivals, justice, hospitality, the fauna and flora of the land, and other relevant facts on communal and family daily life.
After his removal as “Provincial” in Merida by Bishop de Toral and his return to Spain in 1563, he took advantage of his suspension to write his seminal Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, the most comprehensive ethnographic document of his time. There is little doubt, however, that the “Relación was written in support of his claims to his duties and as exculpatory evidence to counter the accusations leveled against him.
His field work and observations, however, have been indispensable to anthropologists and scholars for the last hundred years. Among his invaluable notes, one stands out: his record of the Maya writing system based on information given to him by town and village spiritual and secular elders that phonetically and graphically helped him match glyphic symbols with the Spanish alphabet. Glyphs and letters did not always match, however, resulting in inconsistencies and duplicates that could not be resolved. Not until 1952 did the Soviet linguist and epigrapher Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922-1999) realize that the transcription was not that of an alphabet but the ideograms of a syllabary (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs). It was a momentous breakthrough in Maya glyph decipherment.
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De Landa’s Notes on Yucatec-Spanish Alphabet Public Domain
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De Landa stood trial in Seville where his actions were strongly condemned, but the investigation by scholars of the Council of the Indies absolved him in 1569 on the grounds that he acted within the bounds of his ecumenical mission, and under the provisions of the Holy Inquisition. Many religious and lay people in Yucatan were clamoring for his return, both with the viceroy in Mexico and the court in Spain. While retired in the Antonio de la Cabrera convent, he was not forgotten by King Philip.II. After consultation with the Council of the Indies and Franciscan elders, the king approved the appointment of Diego de Landa in 1572 as the second bishop of Yucatan, succeeding Bishop de Toral, who died in Mexico City in 1571. The second bishop landed in Campeche, Yucatan, in early 1573, together with a retinue of thirty Franciscan friars Philip II granted the Merida bishopric to further ecumenical work. After serving the Franciscan order for thirty-eight years, most of this time in Yucatan, Diego de Landa died of natural causes on April 29, 1579; he is buried in Merida’s cathedral.
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Merida Great Maya Museum Public Domain
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Bibliography
Diego de Landa C. – Relación de la Cosas de Yucatán, Ediciones Porrua, 1959
William Gates – Yucatán Before and After the Conquest – Forgotten Books, 1937
Diego Lopez de Cogolludo – Historia de Yucatán – Linkgua, 2006
Mircea Eliade – Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy – Princeton-U, 1964
Fash, Agurcia Fasquelle – Visión del Pasado Maya – Centro Editorial, 2003
Joan Halifax – Shamanic Voices – Arkana Book, New York, NY,1979
Stephen Houston – The Life Within– Leslie Fitch, 2014
Barbara Tedlock – Time and the Highland Maya – University of NM Press, 1982
R.P. Ximenez – Popol Vuh – Editorial José P. de Ibarra, Guatemala, 1701 (1973)
Diego Duran – Historia de las Indias de Nueva España – Imp. Escalante, 1880 David Freidel, Linda Schele, Joy Parker – Maya Cosmos, William Morrow, 1993
L. Mendez Martinez – Historia Mayab’ – Asociación Maya Uk’Ux’B’e, 2008
Patricia A. McAnany – Living with the Ancestors – University of Texas Press, 1995
Nelson A. Reed – The Caste War of Yucatán – Stanford University Press, 2001
Bartolomé de las Casas – Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias – 1965
Éric Taladoire – Les Trois Codex Mayas – Balland, Paris, 2012
Ruth Bunzel – Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village – Washinton Press.U, 1952
Shopkeepers had already retired to their homes — another routine night to relax and tend to their domestic matters after a long day’s work. At night it was usually very quiet among the closed shops that hug the environs of Rome’s Circus Maximus where, during daylight hours on some days, one could hear the roar of the crowds as they reveled in the excitement of the race. On this night, however, the quiet was broken with the whistle and howl of a robust wind.
An evening of hefty wind was nothing to cause alarm or fear. But when coupled with an errant flame in a flammable, unattended little shop, it could set the stage for a perfect storm.
It did.
To this day, no one knows exactly what caused the initial flame, but it quickly spread from its original shop to its neighbors. With next to no space separating one establishment from the next, and a wind that would respect no demand to stop, the flames engulfed and consumed anything that would burn, including the vulnerable upper story wood structure of the Circus Maximus itself.
Meeting no resistance, the fire spread up and across the monumental and palatial community of the Palatine Hill, where Rome’s imperial family and wealthy aristocracy resided. Those who could flee in time escaped with their lives, but the fire continued to ravage the city beyond the Palatine into the lower reaches of the city to destroy the crowded tenements that housed the city’s poorer classes, where the carnage was most devastating.
Rome is Burning
Known to history as the Great Fire of Rome, ancient scholars and writers have written their various accounts of the event. Now, author Anthony Barrett has produced arguably the most comprehensive and detailed treatment of the fiery disaster with the publication of his book, Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty, to be released by Princeton University Press in November, 2020. He draws upon the historical record and previous scholarship, including the writings of iconic ancient Roman writer/historians like Tacitus, Seutonias, and Cassius Dio, to not only paint a detailed portrait of the event but also suggest and expound on how it changed the course of Rome’s imperial history, particularly the Julio-Claudio dynasty, with Nero at the forefront of its demise.
What may be most compelling for readers and enthusiasts of archaeology, however, is his in-depth narrative treatment of the various archaeological discoveries that have revealed clear evidence attributable to the Great Fire destruction. Much of this evidence came to light during excavations beginning in 1981, and continuing from 1986 under the direction of Clementina Panella. In those investigations, for example, excavators uncovered fragments of the Doric frieze of an Augustan column, which showed unmistakable signs of having been burned; burned remains of steps that once led to a small temple located in the northeast corner of the Palatine; a grate that had been badly distorted by intense heat among fallen debris and basalt fragments clearly shattered by heat and bricks that had collapsed upon it; floors and pavements burned by intense fire; and burned shop and household items such as pots and other pottery, remnants of carbonized wood, ash, as well as burned metal objects.
Barrett also relates in detail the nature of the Fire’s aftermath through an analysis of the historical documents and literature and the archaeological evidence, including the persecution of the Christians, historically cited as one of Nero’s scapegoats for the Fire’s causation, and the New Rome that emerged architecturally from the ruins (which included Nero’s lavish new Golden House on the Palatine). Particularly noteworthy is his treatment of other conditions of the aftermath, such as the currency devaluation and financial crisis that impacted the Roman Empire for years to come.
All in all, Barrett’s work exemplifies the latest, most detailed and generously illustrated narrative about the Great Fire to date, and would be an asset on the shelf of anyone, scholar or enthusiast, interested in the archaeology and history of Rome.
Anthony A. Barrett is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and also a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg. His previous books include Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome and Caligula: The Abuse of Power, among others.
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Ancient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to the University of Cincinnati.
UC researchers discovered evidence of a filter system at the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the ancient Maya in what is now northern Guatemala.
A multidisciplinary team of UC anthropologists, geographers and biologists identified crystalline quartz and zeolite imported miles from the city. The quartz found in the coarse sand along with zeolite, a crystalline compound consisting of silicon and aluminum, create a natural molecular sieve. Both minerals are used in modern water filtration.
The filters would have removed harmful microbes, nitrogen-rich compounds, heavy metals such as mercury and other toxins from the water, said Kenneth Barnett Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.
“What’s interesting is this system would still be effective today and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago,” Tankersley said.
UC’s discovery was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The Maya created this water filtration system nearly 2,000 years before similar systems were used in Europe, making it one of the oldest water treatment systems of its kind in the world, Tankersley said.
Researchers from UC’s College of Arts and Sciences traced the zeolite and quartz to steep ridges around the Bajo de Azúcar about 18 miles northeast of Tikal. They used X-ray diffraction analysis to identify zeolite and crystalline quartz in the reservoir sediments.
At Tikal, zeolite was found exclusively in the Corriental reservoir.
For the ancient Maya, finding ways to collect and store clean water was of critical importance. Tikal and other Maya cities were built atop porous limestone that made ready access to drinking water difficult to obtain for much of the year during seasonal droughts.
UC geography professor and co-author Nicholas Dunning, who has studied ancient civilizations most of his career, found a likely source of the quartz and zeolite about 10 years ago while conducting fieldwork in Guatemala.
“It was an exposed, weathered volcanic tuff of quartz grains and zeolite. It was bleeding water at a good rate,” he said. “Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was.”
Dunning took samples of the material. UC researchers later determined the quartz and zeolite closely matched the minerals found at Tikal.
UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr, an expert in geographic information system mapping, also conducted work on the UC projects at Bajo de Azúcar and Corriental.
“It was probably through very clever empirical observation that the ancient Maya saw this particular material was associated with clean water and made some effort to carry it back,” Dunning said.
UC anthropology professor emeritus Vernon Scarborough, another co-author, said most research on ancient water management has tried to explain how civilizations conserved, collected or diverted water.
“The quality of water put to potable ends has remained difficult to address,” Scarborough said. “This study by our UC team has opened the research agenda by way of identifying the quality of a water source and how that might have been established and maintained.”
Of course, reconstructing the lives, habits and motivations of a civilization 1,000 years ago is tricky.
“We don’t have absolute proof, but we have strong circumstantial evidence,” Dunning said. “Our explanation makes logical sense.”
“This is what you have to do as an archaeologist,” UC biologist and co-author David Lentz said. “You have to put together a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.”
Lentz said the filtration system would have protected the ancient Maya from harmful cyanobacteria and other toxins that might otherwise have made people who drank from the reservoir sick.
“The ancient Maya figured out that this material produced pools of clear water,” he said.
Complex water filtration systems have been observed in other ancient civilizations from Greece to Egypt to South Asia, but this is the first observed in the ancient New World, Tankersley said.
“The ancient Maya lived in a tropical environment and had to be innovators. This is a remarkable innovation,” Tankersley said. “A lot of people look at Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere as not having the same engineering or technological muscle of places like Greece, Rome, India or China. But when it comes to water management, the Maya were millennia ahead.”
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A temple rises above the rainforest at the ancient Maya city of Tikal. David Lentz
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UC researchers Nicholas Dunning, left, Vernon Scarborough and David Lentz set up equipment to take sediment samples during their field research at Tikal. Liwy Grazioso Sierra
Analysis of a 139-meter long drill core taken from a site in the Koora basin, Kenya, shows an environmental record of the past 1 million years in the East African Rift Valley, indicating an ancient fluctuation of the climate, landscape and ecosystem that precipitated a major transitional period in the course of human evolution in the region.
Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, along with a research team and collaborators from the National Museums of Kenya, have been conducting investigations and excavations in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya, for decades. Here, they have uncovered artifacts and other evidence of a hominin (human and human biological ancestor) presence spanning more than 1 million years. Olorgesailie is perhaps best known for its numerous Acheulean stone handaxes—a stone tool type produced by hominins and typically associated with the Homo erectus species. The form and prevalence of these artifacts remained remarkably consistent in the area for about 700,000 years. Beginning in 2002, Potts and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution, the George Washington University and the National Museums of Kenya began encountering artifacts that differed markedly from the Acheulean. Dated to as early as 320,000 years ago, they were smaller, more elaborate, and included projectiles. Many of them were made from materials that had to be acquired from relatively distant locations. Coloring materials were also uncovered. These discoveries suggested a different behavioral lifestyle and more advanced technology. Classified as Middle Stone Age materials, it seemed clear that a very different kind of hominin created them. The findings suggested an evolutionary transition had occurred.
In their effort to investigate more about this transition, however, Potts and his team were stymied by the discovery of a significant 180,000-year ‘gap’ in the environmental history, created by the geological erosion of layers corresponding to this time period. The ‘gap’ would have represented a record of the evolutionary transition. This led them to seek elsewhere for this missing time period.
Moving to a different location about 15 miles from their Olorgesailie excavations at Koora basin, they obtained services from a Nairobi company to drill a 139-meter core into the surface, obtaining a record of 1 million years of environmental history. Their subsequent analysis revealed a history of tectonic activity and ecological changes that showed the environment began to become much more variable at around 400,000 years ago, presenting new survival challenges to the animals, including the hominins, in the region. The changes coincided with the transitional period that featured the Middle Stone Age artifacts.
Pots and his team found the missing gap, and combined with analysis of the archaeological and fossil record in the area, they were able to reconstruct a time when early hominin adaptability to change, an important hallmark of humans, and particularly Home sapiens—the lone survivor of the genus Homo—opens a window on human evolution.
More detail can be read in the Oct. 21, 2020 issue of the journal Science Advances and the subject Smithsonian news release.
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Map of Kenya, showing location of Olorgesailie. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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Aerial photo of Olorgesailie. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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Olorgesailie Acheulean handaxes compared to Olorgesailie MSA points and pigments. Potts and colleagues documented a major behavioral and cultural shift among humans in 2018 based on artifacts recovered at the Olorgesailie archaeological site in modern day Kenya. Decades of study at Olorgesailie by Potts’ team and collaborators at the National Museums of Kenya have determined that early humans at Olorgesailie relied on the same tools, stone handaxes, for 700,000 years. Then, beginning around 320,000 years ago, people living there entered the Middle Stone Age, crafting smaller, more sophisticated weapons, including projectiles. At the same time, they began to trade resources with distant groups and to use coloring materials, suggesting symbolic communication. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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Topographic map of the drill site based on the TanDEM X Science DEM (DLR 2017). Courtesy of R. Dommain, University of Potsdam. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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View of the drill site, with apparatus in place. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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The LaCore Workshop. Drill cores were shipped to the National Lacustrine Core Facility (La Core) at the University of Minnesota. Colleagues in the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program and Department of Paleobiology and dozens of collaborators at institutions worldwide worked to analyze the environmental record they had obtained, which is now the most precisely dated African environmental record of the past 1 million years. Charting radioisotope ages and changes in chemical composition and deposits left by plants and microscopic organisms through the different layers of the core, the team reconstructed key features of the ancient landscape and climate across time. They found that after a long period of stability, the environment in this part of Africa became more variable around 400,000 years ago, when tectonic activity fragmented the landscape. By integrating information from the drill core with knowledge gleaned from fossils and archaeological artifacts, they determined that the entire ecosystem evolved in response. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
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Drill Core detail. The team’s analysis suggests that as parts of the grassy plains in the region were fragmented along fault lines due to tectonic activity, small basins formed. These areas were more sensitive to changes in rainfall than the larger lake basins that had been there before. Elevated terrain also allowed water runoff from high ground to contribute to the formation and drying out of lakes. These changes occurred during a period when precipitation had become more variable, leading to frequent and dramatic fluctuations in water supply. With the fluctuations, a broader set of ecological changes took place. The team found that vegetation in the region also changed repeatedly, shifting between grassy plains and wooded areas. Meanwhile, large grazing herbivores, which no longer had large tracts of land to feed on, began to die out and were replaced by smaller mammals with more diverse diets. The findings suggest that instability in their surrounding climate, land and ecosystem was a key driver in the development of new traits and behaviors underpinning human adaptability. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian; Core image courtesy of LaCore, University of Minnesota
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See also Olorgesailie, a free premium article published in the summer 2018 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.
SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE—Sweat baths have a long history of use in Mesoamerica. Commonly used by midwives in postpartum and perinatal care in contemporary Maya communities, these structures are viewed as grandmother figures, a pattern that can also be traced to earlier periods of history. At the site of Xultun, Guatemala, a Classic Maya sweat bath with an unusual collection of artifacts led archaeologists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), the Archaeology Program at Boston University and other collaborating institutions to gather new evidence of these beliefs and an early example of the related ritual practices.
Indigenous people of Mesoamerica see the natural world as a place populated by ancestors and supernatural beings, many of whom live within natural features and ancient buildings. This was certainly the case for the Classic Maya. Dating to the Early Classic period (250-550 A.D.), the sweat bath at Xultun, named Los Sapos, appears to have been embodied by an amphibian goddess. Outside the sweat bath, the scientists encountered a representation of this little-known Classic Maya deity, possibly “ix.tzutz.sak.” The goddess is depicted squatting in a toad-like position with legs ornamented with iguanas and cane toads (Rhinella marina).
“No other structure in Mesoamerica–sweat bath or otherwise–looks like this building,” said STRI archaeologist Ashley Sharpe, co-author of the study. “It would seem that when someone enters the front of the structure, they are entering the amphibian goddess who personified the sweat bath.”
“Although this goddess’ name remains undeciphered, proposed readings suggest she was responsible for gestation cycles, both of time and human life,” said Boston University archaeologist Mary Clarke, main author of the study. “Linking notions of birth to reptilian figures, however, is not uncommon among the Classic Maya as they express the verb ‘to birth’ as an upended reptilian mouth glyph. What we see at Xultun is an example where this reptilian goddess, as well as the ideas and myths she embodied, are expressed as a physical place.”
The Los Sapos sweat bath was an active part of the Xultun community for about 300 years. Around 600 A.D. an adult individual was interred within the doorway, after which the entire building was buried, even though the Maya continued living at Xultun for several more centuries. About 300 years later, the buried building was revisited, the majority of human remains removed and a new and unusual offering was presented to the structure, including a human child, juvenile animals including a puppy and birds, several complete cane toads and iguanas, and numerous stone tools and ceramic sherds.
The deposited items had varying degrees of heat damage. The Maya built a fire within the vacated tomb, where they began placing their offerings. For the authors, the selection of artifacts may have been associated with the sweat bath’s identity as a grandmother figure and the early understanding of the structure as a place of birth and human creation.
“Maya archaeologists often find artifact concentrations like these that were likely dedications to structures, but there is rarely an obvious link between the objects and the structure,” Sharpe said. “Because of the iconography on the outside of Los Sapos and because we know it was a sweat bath, we have a rare case where we can associate the offerings–an infant, figurines of women, and frogs and iguanas–with the role the structure played in the community.”
The Los Sapos deposit suggests that the sweat bath’s historical role in Xultun continued centuries after the building had been buried. As the goddesses related to sweat baths throughout Mesoamerican history are described as holding sway over the conditions for life on Earth, the offering was likely an attempt at requesting assistance from the goddess embodying the Los Sapos structure. This could have been a last effort to please the supernatural entity and prevent losing hold of their lands, which were abandoned soon after, around the Maya Collapse of 900 A.D.
“This supernatural figure is a ferocious embodiment of the Earth,” Clarke said. “When displeased, she may take revenge or withhold the things people need to survive. The offering at Los Sapos was both an attempt to appease this goddess and an act of resilience. Rather than seeing a population succumbing to collapse, we see them trying to negotiate with this goddess for their survival.”
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An assortment of toad bones was placed in the Los Sapos sweat bath offering. San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project
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The remains of a juvenile skeleton were recovered from the sweat bath offering, suggesting an early understanding of the structure as a place of birth and human creation. David Del Cid
FIELD MUSEUM—All good things must come to an end. Whether societies are ruled by ruthless dictators or more well-meaning representatives, they fall apart in time, with different degrees of severity. In a new paper, anthropologists examined a broad, global sample of 30 pre-modern societies. They found that when “good” governments–ones that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power–fell apart, they broke down more intensely than collapsing despotic regimes. And the researchers found a common thread in the collapse of good governments: leaders who undermined and broke from upholding core societal principles, morals, and ideals.
“Pre-modern states were not that different from modern ones. Some pre-modern states had good governance and weren’t that different from what we see in some democratic countries today,” says Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum and one of the authors of a new study in Frontiers in Political Science. “The states that had good governance, although they may have been able to sustain themselves slightly longer than autocratic-run ones, tended to collapse more thoroughly, more severely.”
“We noted the potential for failure caused by an internal factor that might have been manageable if properly anticipated,” says Richard Blanton, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University and the study’s lead author. “We refer to an inexplicable failure of the principal leadership to uphold values and norms that had long guided the actions of previous leaders, followed by a subsequent loss of citizen confidence in the leadership and government and collapse.”
In their study, Blanton, Feinman, and their colleagues took an in-depth look at the governments of four societies: the Roman Empire, China’s Ming Dynasty, India’s Mughal Empire, and the Venetian Republic. These societies flourished hundreds (or in ancient Rome’s case, thousands) of years ago, and they had comparatively more equitable distributions of power and wealth than many of the other cases examined, although they looked different from what we consider “good governments” today as they did not have popular elections.
“There were basically no electoral democracies before modern times, so if you want to compare good governance in the present with good governance in the past, you can’t really measure it by the role of elections, so important in contemporary democracies. You have to come up with some other yardsticks, and the core features of the good governance concept serve as a suitable measure of that,” says Feinman. “They didn’t have elections, but they had other checks and balances on the concentration of personal power and wealth by a few individuals. They all had means to enhance social well-being, provision goods and services beyond just a narrow few, and means for commoners to express their voices.”
In societies that meet the academic definition of “good governance,” the government meets the needs of the people, in large part because the government depends on those people for the taxes and resources that keep the state afloat. “These systems depended heavily on the local population for a good chunk of their resources. Even if you don’t have elections, the government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the local population, because that’s what funds the government,” explains Feinman. “There are often checks on both the power and the economic selfishness of leaders, so they can’t hoard all the wealth.”
Societies with good governance tend to last a bit longer than autocratic governments that keep power concentrated to one person or small group. But the flip side of that coin is that when a “good” government collapses, things tend to be harder for the citizens, because they’d come to rely on the infrastructure of that government in their day-to-day life. “With good governance, you have infrastructures for communication and bureaucracies to collect taxes, sustain services, and distribute public goods. You have an economy that jointly sustains the people and funds the government,” says Feinman. “And so social networks and institutions become highly connected, economically, socially, and politically. Whereas if an autocratic regime collapses, you might see a different leader or you might see a different capital, but it doesn’t permeate all the way down into people’s lives, as such rulers generally monopolize resources and fund their regimes in ways less dependent on local production or broad-based taxation.”
The researchers also examined a common factor in the collapse of societies with good governance: leaders who abandoned the society’s founding principles and ignored their roles as moral guides for their people. “In a good governance society, a moral leader is one who upholds the core principles and ethos and creeds and values of the overall society,” says Feinman. “Most societies have some kind of social contract, whether that’s written out or not, and if you have a leader who breaks those principles, then people lose trust, diminish their willingness to pay taxes, move away, or take other steps that undercut the fiscal health of the polity.”
This pattern of amoral leaders destabilizing their societies goes way back–the paper uses the Roman Empire as an example. The Roman emperor Commodus inherited a state with economic and military instability, and he didn’t rise to the occasion; instead, he was more interested in performing as a gladiator and identifying himself with Hercules. He was eventually assassinated, and the empire descended into a period of crisis and corruption. These patterns can be seen today, as corrupt or inept leaders threaten the core principles and, hence, the stability of the places they govern. Mounting inequality, concentration of political power, evasion of taxation, hollowing out of bureaucratic institutions, diminishment of infrastructure, and declining public services are all evidenced in democratic nations today.
“What I see around me feels like what I’ve observed in studying the deep histories of other world regions, and now I’m living it in my own life,” says Feinman. “It’s sort of like Groundhog Day for archaeologists and historians.”
“Our findings provide insights that should be of value in the present, most notably that societies, even ones that are well governed, prosperous, and highly regarded by most citizens, are fragile human constructs that can fail,” says Blanton. “In the cases we address, calamity could very likely have been avoided, yet, citizens and state-builders too willingly assumed that their leadership will feel an obligation to do as expected for the benefit of society. Given the failure to anticipate, the kinds of institutional guardrails required to minimize the consequences of moral failure were inadequate.”
But, notes Feinman, learning about what led to societies collapsing in the past can help us make better choices now: “History has a chance to tell us something. That doesn’t mean it’s going to repeat exactly, but it tends to rhyme. And so that means there are lessons in these situations.”
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The ruins of the Roman Forum, once a site of a representational government. Linda Nicholas, Field Museum
CELL PRESS—Of the six or more different species of early humans, all belonging to the genus Homo, only we Homo sapiens have managed to survive. Now, a study reported* in the journal One Earth on October 15 combining climate modeling and the fossil record in search of clues to what led to all those earlier extinctions of our ancient ancestors suggests that climate change–the inability to adapt to either warming or cooling temperatures–likely played a major role in sealing their fate.
“Our findings show that despite technological innovations including the use of fire and refined stone tools, the formation of complex social networks, and–in the case of Neanderthals–even the production of glued spear points, fitted clothes, and a good amount of cultural and genetic exchange with Homo sapiens, past Homo species could not survive intense climate change,” says Pasquale Raia of Università di Napoli Federico II in Napoli, Italy. “They tried hard; they made for the warmest places in reach as the climate got cold, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t enough.”
To shed light on past extinctions of Homo species including H. habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens, the researchers relied on a high-resolution past climate emulator, which provides temperature, rainfall, and other data over the last 5 million years. They also looked to an extensive fossil database spanning more than 2,750 archaeological records to model the evolution of Homo species’ climatic niche over time. The goal was to understand the climate preferences of those early humans and how they reacted to changes in climate.
Their studies offer robust evidence that three Homo species–H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, and H. neanderthalensis–lost a significant portion of their climatic niche just before going extinct. They report that this reduction coincided with sharp, unfavorable changes in the global climate. In the case of Neanderthals, things were likely made even worse by competition with H. sapiens.
“We were surprised by the regularity of the effect of climate change,” Raia says. “It was crystal clear, for the extinct species and for them only, that climatic conditions were just too extreme just before extinction and only in that particular moment.”
Raia notes that there is uncertainty in paleoclimatic reconstruction, the identification of fossil remains at the level of species, and the aging of fossil sites. But, he says, the main insights “hold true under all assumptions.” The findings may serve as a kind of warning to humans today as we face unprecedented changes in the climate, Raia says.
“It is worrisome to discover that our ancestors, which were no less impressive in terms of mental power as compared to any other species on Earth, could not resist climate change,” he said. “And we found that just when our own species is sawing the branch we’re sitting on by causing climate change. I personally take this as a thunderous warning message. Climate change made Homo vulnerable and hapless in the past, and this may just be happening again.”
UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE—Favorable climatic conditions influenced the sequence of settlement movements of Homo sapiens in the Levant on their way from Africa to Europe. In a first step, modern humans settled along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Only then did they spread out into the Sinai desert and the eastern Jordanian Rift Valley. This is the result of archaeological research conducted by Collaborative Research Centre ‘Our Way to Europe’ (CRC 806) at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen. The article ‘Al-Ansab and the Dead Sea: mid-MIS 3 Archaeology and Environment of the Early Ahmarian Population of the Levantine Corridor’ was published in PLOS ONE.
For more than ten years, the team has been analyzing sediments, pollen, and archaeological artifacts around the site of Al-Ansab 1 near the ancient ruin-city of Petra (Jordan). The goal was to gain an understanding of the environmental conditions that prevailed at the time of human expansion. ‘Human presence consolidated in the region under favorable climate conditions’, said Professor Dr Jürgen Richter, lead author of the study.
The success story of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa began about 100,000 years ago with well-known sites such as Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel. However, these early records only reveal a brief, temporary expansion of the territory into the Levant. Permanent settlement of the region only dates back to about 43,000 years ago, scientists believe. During the epoch of the so-called ‘Early Ahmarian’, modern humans gradually had been spreading throughout the Levant – a first step on their way to Asia and Europe.
Favorable climatic conditions were preconditions for permanent human settlement. On a large scale, this is illustrated by the presence of the so-called Lake Lisan. This freshwater lake was located where the Dead Sea is today. However, it was of a much larger extent and carried greater water volume. Most of the water evaporated only with the end of the last ice age, leaving behind the hypersaline Dead Sea known today.
Even on a small scale, the scientists were able to recognize the favorable environmental conditions: geo-archaeological teams from the University of Cologne and RWTH Aachen University examined the site of Al-Ansab 1. Whereas today, the Wadi Sabra, in which the site is located, is strongly shaped by seasonal flash floods, geomorphological and archaeological investigations showed that at the time of settlement, the conditions were less erosive and continuously wet, permitting the presence of humans.
‘This enabled the spread of humans from the coastal Mediterranean area to the formerly drier regions of the Negev desert and the eastern slopes of the Jordan Rift Valley. They hunted gazelles in the open landscape – a prey we found in many sites in the region from this period’, says Richter. ‘Humans did not come by steady expansion out of Africa through the Levant and further to Europe and Asia. Rather, they first settled in a coastal strip along the Mediterranean Sea.’
The region around the site of Al-Ansab 1 therefore was a stepping stone on Homo sapiens’ way – a journey that did not take a straight path to the European continent, but was guided by complex interactions between humans and their environment.
UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH—Today, ball games are one of the most popular leisure activities in the world, an important form of mass entertainment and big business. But who invented balls, where and when? The oldest balls that are currently known about were made in Egypt about 4,500 years ago using linen. Central Americans have been playing ball games for at least 3,700 years, as evidenced through monumental ball courts made of stone and depictions of ball players. Their oldest balls were made of rubber. Until now, it was believed that ball games in Europe and Asia followed much later: In Greece about 2,500 years ago and in China about 300 years after that.
Eurasia’s oldest known balls
Researchers from the University of Zurich, together with German and Chinese researchers, have now examined in more detail three leather balls found in graves in the old Yanghai cemetery near the city of Turfan in northwest China. The balls, measuring between 7.4 and 9.2cm in diameter, have been dated at around 2,900 to 3,200 years old. “This makes these balls about five centuries older than the previously known ancient balls and depictions of ball games in Eurasia,” says first author Patrick Wertmann of the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich. “Unfortunately, however, the associated archaeological information is not sufficient to answer the question of exactly how these balls were played.”
The earliest illustrations from Greece show ball players running, and depictions from China show riders using sticks. Comparable curved sticks were also found in Yanghai, but there was no apparent direct connection with the balls. Moreover, they are dated to a more recent period. “Therefore, the leather balls from Yanghai are not connected to early forms of field hockey or polo, even though two of the balls were found in the graves of horsemen,” says Wertmann.
New era of Central Asian equestrian warfare
In one of the riders’ graves, the preserved remains of a composite bow and a pair of trousers (1) were found, which were made in the region at that time and are among the oldest in the world. Both are signs of a new era of horse riding, equestrian warfare and fundamental societal transformations which accompanied increasing environmental changes and a rising mobility in eastern Central Asia. The current study shows that balls and ball games were part of physical exercise and military training from the very beginning. In addition, just like today, sport also played a central role in society and was a widespread leisure activity. The study’s findings once again highlight that this region was a center of innovation within Eurasia several millennia ago.
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The area near the city of Turfan in northwest China. (Picture: UZH)
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The three leather balls with diameters between 7.4 and 9.2 cm are between 3200 and 2900 years old.(Picture: UZH)
Science Advances—Neanderthal babies were born with the characteristic barrel-shaped rib cage shape previously identified in adult specimens, according to an analysis of digitally reconstructed rib cages from four Neanderthal infants. The findings suggest that Neanderthals’ rib cages were already shorter and deeper than that of modern humans at birth, rather than shifting their shape later in development. While scientists have known that adult Neanderthals were heavier than modern humans, requiring significant differences in skeletal shape, there have been few studies that have compared the earliest postnatal developmental stages of Neanderthals and modern humans, due to a lack of well-preserved fossil remains of Neanderthal children. To investigate whether the shape of this hominid’s thorax changed between birth and adulthood, Daniel García-Martínez and colleagues scanned and virtually reconstructed ribcages from 4 young Neanderthals estimated to be about 1 to 2 weeks old, less than 4 months old, 1.5 years old, and 2.5 years old. The most complete Neanderthal specimen (the 1.5-year-old) also revealed the species had relatively longer mid-thoracic ribs compared to its uppermost and lowermost ribs and a spine folded inward toward the center of the body, forming a cavity on the outside of the back. The researchers compared rib cage development in these specimens with a baseline for modern human development in the first three years of life, which they derived from a forensic assessment of remains from 29 humans. The Neanderthal specimens had consistently shorter spines and deeper rib cages, regardless of their age at death. García-Martínez et al. conclude that the bulky Neanderthal ribcage may have been genetically inherited, at least in part, from early Pleistocene ancestors.
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Development of the Neanderthal ribcage, from newborns to three years old. Marcos Galeano Prados/Dr. Daniel García-Martínez
AMERICAN FRIENDS OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY—A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority indicates that a workshop for smelting copper ore once operated in the Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva, the capital of the Negev Desert. The study, conducted over several years, began in 2017 in Beer Sheva when the workshop was first uncovered during an Israel Antiquities Authority emergency archeological excavation to safeguard threatened antiquities.
The new study also shows that the site may have made the first use in the world of a revolutionary apparatus: the furnace.
The study was conducted by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, Dana Ackerfeld, and Omri Yagel of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv University, in conjunction with Dr. Yael Abadi-Reiss, Talia Abulafia, and Dmitry Yegorov of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Dr. Yehudit Harlavan of the Geological Survey of Israel. The results of the study were published online on September 25, 2020, in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
According to Ms. Abulafia, Director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The excavation revealed evidence for domestic production from the Chalcolithic period, about 6,500 years ago. The surprising finds include a small workshop for smelting copper with shards of a furnace — a small installation made of tin in which copper ore was smelted — as well as a lot of copper slag.”
Although metalworking was already in evidence in the the Chalcolithic period, the tools used were still made of stone. (The word “chalcolithic” itself is a combination of the Greek words for “copper” and “stone.”) An analysis of the isotopes of ore remnants in the furnace shards show that the raw ore was brought to Neveh Noy neighborhood from Wadi Faynan, located in present-day Jordan, a distance of more than 100 kilometers from Beer Sheva.
During the Chalcolithic period, when copper was first refined, the process was made far from the mines, unlike the prevalent historical model by which furnaces were built near the mines for both practical and economic reasons. The scientists hypothesize that the reason was the preservation of the technological secret.
“It’s important to understand that the refining of copper was the high-tech of that period. There was no technology more sophisticated than that in the whole of the ancient world,” Prof. Ben-Yosef says. “Tossing lumps of ore into a fire will get you nowhere. You need certain knowledge for building special furnaces that can reach very high temperatures while maintaining low levels of oxygen.”
Prof. Ben-Yosef notes that the archeology of the land of Israel shows evidence of the Ghassulian culture. The culture was named for Tulaylât al-Ghassûl, the archeological site in Jordan where the culture was first identified. This culture, which spanned the region from the Beer Sheva Valley to present-day southern Lebanon, was unusual for its artistic achievements and ritual objects, as evidenced by the copper objects discovered at Nahal Mishmar and now on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
According to Prof. Ben-Yosef, the people who lived in the area of the copper mines traded with members of the Ghassulian culture from Beer Sheva and sold them the ore, but they were themselves incapable of reproducing the technology. Even among the Ghassulian settlements along Wadi Beer Sheva, copper was refined by experts in special workshops. A chemical analysis of remnants indicates that every workshop had its own special “recipe” which it did not share with its competitors. It would seem that, in that period, Wadi Beer Sheva was filled with water year-round, making the location convenient for smelting copper where the furnaces and other apparatus were made of clay.
Prof. Ben-Yosef further notes that, even within Chalcolithic settlements that possessed both stone and copper implements, the secret of the gleaming metal was held by the very few members of an elite. “At the beginning of the metallurgical revolution, the secret of metalworking was kept by guilds of experts. All over the world, we see metalworkers’ quarters within Chalcolithic settlements, like the neighborhood we found in Beer Sheva.”
The study discusses the question of the extent to which this society was hierarchical or socially stratified, as society was not yet urbanized. The scientists feel that the findings from Neveh Noy strengthen the hypothesis of social stratification. Society seems to have consisted of a clearly defined elite possessing expertise and professional secrets, which preserved its power by being the exclusive source for the shiny copper. The copper objects were not made to be used, instead serving some ritual purpose and thus possessing symbolic value. The copper axe, for example, wasn’t used as an axe. It was an artistic and/or cultic object modeled along the lines of a stone axe. The copper objects were probably used in rituals while the everyday objects in use continued to be of stone.
“At the first stage of humankind’s copper production, crucibles rather than furnaces were used,” says Prof. Ben-Yosef. “This small pottery vessel, which looks like a flower pot, is made of clay. It was a type of charcoal-based mobile furnace. Here, at the Neveh Noy workshop that the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered, we show that the technology was based on real furnaces. This provides very early evidence for the use of furnaces in metallurgy and it raises the possibility that the furnace was invented in this region.
“It’s also possible that the furnace was invented elsewhere, directly from crucible-based metallurgy, because some scientists view early furnaces as no more than large crucibles buried in the ground,” Prof. Ben-Yosef continues. “The debate will only be settled by future discoveries, but there is no doubt that ancient Beer Sheva played an important role in advancing the global metal revolution and that in the fifth millennium BCE the city was a technological powerhouse for this whole region.”
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Work on the dig in Beer Sheva. Anat Rasiuk, Israel Antiquities Authority
UNIVERSITY OF READING—Archaeologists have uncovered a warrior burial in Berkshire that could change historians’ understanding of southern Britain in the early Anglo-Saxon era.
The burial, on a hilltop site near with commanding views over the surrounding Thames valley, must be of a high-status warlord from the 6th century AD, archaeologists from the University of Reading believe.
The ‘Marlow Warlord’ was a commanding, six-foot-tall man, buried alongside an array of expensive luxuries and weapons, including a sword in a decorated scabbard, spears, bronze and glass vessels, and other personal accoutrements.
The pagan burial had remained undiscovered and undisturbed for more than 1,400 years until two metal detectorists, Sue and Mick Washington came across the site in 2018.
Sue said: “On two earlier visits I had received a large signal from this area which appeared to be deep iron and most likely not to be of interest. However, the uncertainty preyed on my mind and on my next trip I just had to investigate, and this proved to be third time lucky!”
Sue, who along with other members of the Maidenhead Search Society metal detecting club had visited the site several times previously, initially unearthed two bronze bowls. Realizing the age and significance of the find, she stopped digging and the Club, in line with best practice, registered this discovery with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. (PAS).
The PAS Finds Liaison Officer for Buckinghamshire undertook a targeted excavation to recover the very fragile bronze vessels and, in the process, recovered a pair of iron spearheads suggested that the context was likely to be an Anglo-Saxon grave.
Thanks to their actions, the bowls and spearheads were identified and conserved, and following Sue’s generous donation, are soon to go on display at Buckinghamshire Museum in Aylesbury.
Recognizing the importance of the burial and the need for more detailed archaeological investigation, a team led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading carried out a full survey and excavation in August 2020. The burial was at a very shallow depth, making the excavation crucial to protect it from farming activity.
Dr Gabor Thomas, a specialist in early medieval archaeology at the University of Reading, said: “We had expected to find some kind of Anglo-Saxon burial, but what we found exceeded all our expectations and provides new insights into this stretch of the Thames in the decades after the collapse of the Roman administration in Britain.
“This the first burial of its kind found in the mid-Thames basin, which is often overlooked in favor of the Upper Thames and London. It suggests that the people living in this region may have been more important than historians previously suspected.
“This guy would have been tall and robust compared to other men at the time, and would have been an imposing figure even today. The nature of his burial and the site with views overlooking the Thames suggest he was a respected leader of a local tribe and had probably been a formidable warrior in his own right.”
The early Anglo-Saxon period was one of great change in England with significant levels of immigration from the continent and the formation of new identities and power structures in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman administration around 400 AD. Around a century later – the period in which the Marlow Warlord lived -England was occupied by local tribal groupings, some of which expanded into Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, such as Wessex, Mercia and Kent.
The region of the mid-Thames between London and Oxford was previously thought to be a ‘borderland’ in this region, with powerful tribal groups on each side. This new discovery suggests that the area may have hosted important groups of its own. It is likely that the area was later squeezed out or absorbed into the larger neighboring proto-kingdoms of Kent, Wessex and Mercia.
A team involving archaeologists from the University of Reading and local volunteer groups carried out a two-week excavation of the site in August 2020 with the kind permission of the supportive landowner. This activity included geophysical survey, test excavations, and a full excavation of the grave site.
Found buried with the Marlow Warlord were a sword with an exceptionally well-preserved scabbard – making it one of the best-preserved sheathed swords known from the period -made of wood and leather with decorative bronze fittings, spears, bronze and glass vessels, dress-fittings, shears and other implements.
These objects are currently being conserved by Pieta Greaves of Drakon Heritage and Conservation. Further analysis of the human remains will be carried out at the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, to help determine the man’s age, health, diet and geographical origins.
Michael Lewis, Head of the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, said: “This is a great example of archaeologists and metal-detectorists working together. Especially important is the fact that the finders stopped when they realized they had discovered something significant and called in archaeological assistance. By doing so they ensure much more could be learnt about this interesting burial.”
The team are now hoping to raise funds to pay for further conservation work, to allow some of the finds to go on display to the public at the Buckinghamshire Museum in 2021, when their newly refurbished permanent galleries re-open.
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The remains of the warlord. University of Reading
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Overhead drone photo of the excavation at the burial site. University of Reading
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Sue Washington, the metal detectorist who discovered the burial. James Mather
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What may be most compelling for readers and enthusiasts of archaeology, however, is his in-depth narrative treatment of the various archaeological discoveries that have revealed clear evidence attributable to the Great Fire destruction. Much of this evidence came to light during excavations beginning in 1981, and continuing from 1986 under the direction of Clementina Panella. In those investigations, for example, excavators uncovered fragments of the Doric frieze of an Augustan column, which showed unmistakable signs of having been burned; burned remains of steps that once led to a small temple located in the northeast corner of the Palatine; a grate that had been badly distorted by intense heat among fallen debris and basalt fragments clearly shattered by heat and bricks that had collapsed upon it; floors and pavements burned by intense fire; and burned shop and household items such as pots and other pottery, remnants of carbonized wood, ash, as well as burned metal objects. 
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