FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY—GAINESVILLE, Fla.—Christopher Columbus’ accounts of the Caribbean include harrowing descriptions of fierce raiders who abducted women and cannibalized men – stories long dismissed as myths.
But a new study suggests Columbus may have been telling the truth.
Using the equivalent of facial recognition technology, researchers analyzed the skulls of early Caribbean inhabitants, uncovering relationships between people groups and upending longstanding hypotheses about how the islands were first colonized.
One surprising finding was that the Caribs, marauders from South America and rumored cannibals, invaded Jamaica, Hispaniola and the Bahamas, overturning half a century of assumptions that they never made it farther north than Guadeloupe.
“I’ve spent years trying to prove Columbus wrong when he was right: There were Caribs in the northern Caribbean when he arrived,” said William Keegan, Florida Museum of Natural History curator of Caribbean archaeology. “We’re going to have to reinterpret everything we thought we knew.”
Columbus had recounted how peaceful Arawaks in modern-day Bahamas were terrorized by pillagers he mistakenly described as “Caniba,” the Asiatic subjects of the Grand Khan. His Spanish successors corrected the name to “Caribe” a few decades later, but the similar-sounding names led most archaeologists to chalk up the references to a mix-up: How could Caribs have been in the Bahamas when their closest outpost was nearly 1,000 miles to the south?
But skulls reveal the Carib presence in the Caribbean was far more prominent than previously thought, giving credence to Columbus’ claims.
Face to face with the Caribbean’s earliest inhabitants
Previous studies relied on artifacts such as tools and pottery to trace the geographical origin and movement of people through the Caribbean over time. Adding a biological component brings the region’s history into sharper focus, said Ann Ross, a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and the study’s lead author.
Ross used 3D facial “landmarks,” such as the size of an eye socket or length of a nose, to analyze more than 100 skulls dating from about A.D. 800 to 1542. These landmarks can act as a genetic proxy for determining how closely people are related to one another.
The analysis not only revealed three distinct Caribbean people groups, but also their migration routes, which was “really stunning,” Ross said.
Looking at ancient faces shows the Caribbean’s earliest settlers came from the Yucatan, moving into Cuba and the Northern Antilles, which supports a previous hypothesis based on similarities in stone tools. Arawak speakers from coastal Colombia and Venezuela migrated to Puerto Rico between 800 and 200 B.C., a journey also documented in pottery.
The earliest inhabitants of the Bahamas and Hispaniola, however, were not from Cuba as commonly thought, but the Northwest Amazon – the Caribs. Around A.D. 800, they pushed north into Hispaniola and Jamaica and then the Bahamas where they were well established by the time Columbus arrived.
“I had been stumped for years because I didn’t have this Bahamian component,” Ross said. “Those remains were so key. This will change the perspective on the people and peopling of the Caribbean.”
For Keegan, the discovery lays to rest a puzzle that pestered him for years: why a type of pottery known as Meillacoid appears in Hispaniola by A.D. 800, Jamaica around 900 and the Bahamas around 1000.
“Why was this pottery so different from everything else we see? That had bothered me,” he said. “It makes sense that Meillacoid pottery is associated with the Carib expansion.”
The sudden appearance of Meillacoid pottery also corresponds with a general reshuffling of people in the Caribbean after a 1,000-year period of tranquility, further evidence that “Carib invaders were on the move,” Keegan said.
Raiders of the lost Arawaks
So, was there any substance to the tales of cannibalism?
Possibly, Keegan said.
Arawaks and Caribs were enemies, but they often lived side by side with occasional intermarriage before blood feuds erupted, he said.
“It’s almost a ‘Hatfields and McCoys’ kind of situation,” Keegan said. “Maybe there was some cannibalism involved. If you need to frighten your enemies, that’s a really good way to do it.”
Whether or not it was accurate, the European perception that Caribs were cannibals had a tremendous impact on the region’s history, he said. The Spanish monarchy initially insisted that indigenous people be paid for work and treated with respect, but reversed its position after receiving reports that they refused to convert to Christianity and ate human flesh.
“The crown said, ‘Well, if they’re going to behave that way, they can be enslaved,'” Keegan said. “All of a sudden, every native person in the entire Caribbean became a Carib as far as the colonists were concerned.”
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Researchers analyzed the skulls of early Caribbean inhabitants, using 3D facial “landmarks” as a genetic proxy for determining how closely people groups were related to one another. Ann Ross/North Carolina State University
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE—New dates from the World Heritage archeological site at Sangiran on the island of Java suggest that that the first appearance of Homo erectus occurred more recently than previously thought, researchers report. The new findings place the arrival of the first hominins in Sangiran between 1.3-1.5 million years ago (Ma), suggesting that early humans migrated from Asia to Southeast Asia and Java nearly 300,000 years later than previously believed. The fossil-rich Sangiran dome in Java contains the oldest human fossils in Southeast Asia and is widely regarded as one of the most important sites in understanding the evolution of our early ancestors and their slow march across the globe. To date, more than 100 specimens from at least three different hominid species have been recovered from Sangrian sediments. However, despite decades of research, the site’s chronology remains uncertain and controversial, particularly the timing of H. erectus‘ first appearance in the region, and the current widely accepted dates are difficult to reconcile with other early sites in Asia. An accurate understanding of the Sangiran chronology is crucial for understanding the earliest human migrations and settlements in Asia. To resolve this debate, Shuji Matsu’ura and colleagues used a combination of fission-track and Uranium/Lead (U/Pb) dating to determine the age of volcanic zircons found above, below and within the hominin-bearing layers of the Sangiran fossil deposit. While previous estimates have estimated hominin arrival as early as 1.7 Ma, Matsu’ura et al.’s findings suggest a much younger date; likely by 1.3 Ma, however no earlier than 1.5 Ma. In a related Perspective, Boris Brasseur discusses the study’s findings in more detail.
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Homo erectus (cranial illustration). Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
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*”A younger ‘earliest human migration’ from Asia to Southeast Asia,” by B. Brasseur at UMR7058 EDYSAN in Amiens, France; B. Brasseur at Université de Picardie Jules Verne Pôle Santé in Amiens, France.
UNIVERSITY OF KENT—Early Stone Age populations living between 1.8 – 1.2 million years ago engineered their stone tools in complex ways to make optimized cutting tools, according to a new study by University of Kent and UCL.
The research, published in the Journal of Royal Society Interface, shows that Palaeolithic hominins selected different raw materials for different stone tools based on how sharp, durable and efficient those materials were. They made these decisions in conjunction with information about the length of time the tools would be used for and the force with which they could be applied. This reveals previously unseen complexity in the design and production of stone tools during this period.
The research was led by Dr Alastair Key, from Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation, and is based on evidence from mechanical testing of the raw materials and artifacts found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania—one of the world’s most important sites for human origins research.
Dr Key collaborated with Dr Tomos Proffitt, from UCL Institute of Archaeology, and Professor Ignacio de la Torre of the CSIC-Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales in Madrid, for the study.
Their research, which employed experimental methods more commonly used in modern engineering research, shows that hominins preferentially selected quartzite, the sharpest but least durable stone type at Olduvai for flake tools; a technology thought to have been used for expedient, short-lived cutting activities.
Chert, which was identified as being highly durable and nearly as sharp as quartzite, was only available to hominins for a short 200,000 year period. Whenever it was available, chert was favored for a variety of stone tool types due to its ability to maximize cutting performance over extended tool-use durations. Other stone types, including highly durable lavas, were available at Olduvai, however their use varied according to factors such as how long a tool was intended to be used for, a tools potential to create high cutting forces, and the distance hominins had to travel to raw material sources.
The study reveals a level of complexity and flexibility in stone tool production previously unseen at this time. Earlier research had demonstrated Early Stone Age populations in Kenya to select highly durable stone types for tools, but this is the first time cutting edge sharpness has been able to be considered. By selecting the material best suited to specific functional needs, hominins optimized the performance of their tools and ensured a tools efficiency and ‘ease-of-use’ was maximized.
Dr Key said: ‘Why Olduvai populations preferentially chose one raw material over another has puzzled archaeologists for more than 60 years. This has been made all the more intriguing given that some stone types, including lavas and quartzite, were always available.
‘What we’ve been able to demonstrate is that our ancestors were making quite complex decisions about which raw materials to use, and were doing so in a way that produced tools optimized for specific circumstances. Although we knew that later hominin species, including our own, were capable of such decisions, it’s amazing to think that populations 1.8 – 1.2 million years ago were also doing so.’
Dr Proffitt added: ‘Early hominins during the Oldowan were probably using stone flakes for a variety of tasks. Mostly for butchering animals whilst scavenging, but also probably for cutting various plants and possibly even shaping wood. A durable cutting edge would have been an important factor when using these tools.
‘There are many modern analytical techniques used in material sciences and engineering that can be used to interrogate the archaeological record, and may provide new insights into the mechanical properties of such tools and artifacts. By understanding the way that these tools work and their functional limits it allows archaeologists to build up a greater understanding of the capabilities of our earliest ancestors at the dawn of technology.’
The team now hopes that researchers at other archaeological sites will want to apply similar mechanical tests and techniques to help understand the behavior of Stone Age populations.
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Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, East Africa. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
*’Raw material optimization and stone tool engineering in the Early Stone Age of Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania)’ is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
There are few archaeological sites so steep in controversy as Vergina in northern Greece; perhaps with the exception of ‘Troy’ where Heinrich Schliemann spirited away ‘Priam’s treasure’ from Turkish authorities, and Howard Carter’s bureaucracy-hampered digs in the Valley of the Kings. But the politicking at Vergina has been altogether subtler and more enduring.
Forty years ago, on 8 November 1977, Manolis Andronikos was lowered through the vaulted roof of a ‘Macedonian-style’ tomb, after the keystone had been removed in a reenactment of the favored entry technique of tomb robbers of old. Priests, press and politicians amassed at the archaeological site, set in the rolling countryside backdropped by the Pierian Hills. Word had spread that a newly-unearthed tomb appeared to be intact. Andronikos was tasked to lead excavations at the site under the auspices of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Optimism at finding an intact burial chamber was suppressed by the knowledge that fifty of the fifty-one tombs already discovered in the region had been robbed long ago. But what Andronikos witnessed that day was quickly dubbed the ‘archaeological find of the century.’ His momentarily conflicted emotions of the ‘scientist’s elation’ with the ‘desecrator’s guilt’ was quickly cast aside when it became clear he had finally identified the long-lost city Aegae, the first capital of Macedon and the burial ground of its kings.
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The ruins of the palace and theatre at Aegae in the early 1980s. Grant (2019), color plate.
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The roof and facade of the vaulted tomb emerging from the soil, October 1977. Grant (2019), p. 51
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The keystone being removed from the vaulted roof of Tomb II. Grant (2019), p. 51
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The Controversy of the Cluster
The vaulted structure (labeled ‘Tomb II’) resided in a cluster of four; Tomb I was a simpler cist grave which had already been looted in antiquity, but it was adorned with a haunting wall painting depicting the Abduction of Persephone. Immediately adjacent was the foundation of what appeared to be a shrine, suggesting the worship of an occupant. Unlooted Tomb III contained the bones of a male adolescent and was soon referred to as the ‘Tomb of the Prince’. The last structure, Tomb IV, lay in ruins apart from free-standing columns framing the entrance to the largest and deepest chamber of all at the very edge of the tumulus.
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The relative positions of the tombs and shrine under the Great Tumulus. Grant (2019), p. 48
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In the opinion of the excavator, a chronology was being presented by this progression in tomb design, an observation which extended to the transitional architecture in the nearby ‘Tomb of Eurydice’ and even the Philippeion at Olympia.
In the main chamber of Tomb II, a fine gold ossuary chest held the cremated bones of a male, while a similar gold chest in the antechamber contained the cremated skeletal remains of a woman. Analysis indicated they were interred at the same time. This double burial hinted at unique historical circumstances, and the notion of forced or ritual suicide was voiced by commentators to explain their simultaneous interment.
The artifacts in Tombs II and III were visually dated to the mid-to-late fourth century BC, corroborated by pottery, ornate metalworking and the developed stage of the Macedonian vaulted tomb design. This dating spanned the reigns of Philip II (359-336 BC) and his son Alexander III, the ‘Great’ (336-323 BC), and the regal nature of the find was reinforced by the unique ‘Vergina Sun’ or ‘Star’ emblem of the Argead royal clan embossed on the lids of the two gold chests. The grouping of tombs was confidently dubbed ‘the cluster of Philip II’.
The discoveries at Vergina were first published in 1978. When referring to the tombs, Andronikos concluded they ‘belong to a time span which does not exceed that of one generation’. He added that ‘the date of all our finds was between 350 BC and, at the latest, 325 BC’, though he conceded they could stretch down to 310 BC, as that encompassed the murder of Alexander’s youngest son, potentially the ‘prince’ in Tomb III.
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A cross-section of Tomb II. Grant (2019), p. 53.
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The gold larnax from the main chamber of Tomb II in which the bones were laid. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – Vergina Excavation Archive. Grant (2019) color plate.
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The dating was both ‘fascinating and frightening’ to Andronikos. “From 359 BC to 336 BC … there was only one king in Macedon, Philip II … Alexander the Great, who succeeded Philip in 336 BC and reigned until 323 BC, was buried in Egypt. Thus, we are almost forced to the startling conclusion: if the deceased had been a king, he was Philip!” he concluded, with the exclamation mark. Andronikos logically went on to suggest, with a little too much haste, that the female in Tomb II was Philip’s last wife, Cleopatra.
When proffering the identifications, the excavator was not blind to his self-perpetuating logic in which the argument and conclusion were mutually justifying loops. “The sequence of thought I have followed, from the chronological framework 350–310 BC for the objects which cannot be challenged … leads us to the inevitable conclusion that Alexander buried his father in the great tomb after his murder in Aegae” in 336 BC. “From this we formulate the very useful conclusion that all the objects in the tomb [II] date to before 336 BC.” Andronikos was unrepentant about his ‘vicious circle of progression’ and added: “I believe that only by such a dialectical approach … can academic thinking move to its ultimate conclusions.”He did not foresee the backlash it was about to ferment.
The ‘Battle of the Bones’
Despite the labeling of the cluster, in the absence of tombstones, contemporary inscriptions or epitaphs, the excavator’s conclusions remained open to question. There began a thirty-year-long bitter ‘battle of bones’ waged through a series of academic papers designed to refute each other and challenge every assumption: the tomb occupants, their relative dating and ‘royalty’.
At the centre of the debate lay an ‘unfortunate symmetry’. When anthropologists first aged the Tomb II skeletal remains, it was determined that the male was 35-55 at death and the female aged 20-30. This permitted the notion that the occupants were either Philip II and his final far-younger bride Cleopatra who was executed with her baby daughter soon after his death by Alexander’s mother Olympias; or they were the skeletal remains of Philip’s half-witted son Arrhidaeus, who died twenty years later when of similar age and with an equally young bride. They were executed together by Olympias in her bid for survival in the post-Alexander world, which would explain the double burial in Tomb II.
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The entrance to the subterranean Archaeological Museum of Vergina. Grant (2019), color plate.
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Arguments for and against each pair revolved around wounds evident or invisible on the male bones when compared to the wounds Philip II received in battle; those famously listed in Demosthenes’ elegant oration On the Crown, for example. While some anthropologists claimed to see trauma, others argued the cracks and notches came from bone cracking in cremation. The tell-tale signs of a ‘flesh-burned’ cremation was presented as evidence of the immediate burning of the deceased, as opposed to the later ‘dry-boned’ burning of the already-long inhumed.
Besides bones, the hunting scene painted above the entrance to Tomb II, and even condiment pots found on the floor, were next proffered as dating witnesses. But it was always debatable whether the twenty years between the death of Philip II and his half-witted son Arrhidaeus could be discerned by purely visual interrogation of artifacts.
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The facade of Tomb II showing the entrance doors and remains of the hunting scene frieze above. Grant (2019), color plate.
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Recurring questions filled academic papers: Did vaulted roofs exist in Greece in Philip’s reign, or were they developed later following eastern inspiration after Alexander’s campaigns? Was the hunting fresco, with its depiction of a lion in the quarry, inspired by the Persian game parks he and his men hunted in, because lions were surely extinct in Macedon by Philip’s reign?
Counter arguments pointed out that Persian artistic influences had appeared in Macedon since its occupation by Darius I’s advanced expedition forces in the late-6th century BC, and vaulted structures in Persia had been built by Greek stonemasons centuries before. In Macedon the lion was a symbol of kingship and had been depicted on coins for generations, moreover Herodotus claims lions attacked Xerxes’ camels in Macedon en route to his invasion of Greece.
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Lion-hunt mosaic found at Pella with similar dating to the tombs. Grant (2019), color plate.
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But a more fundamental challenge emerged to threaten the whole debate: the very identification of the ruins at Vergina with the ancient city Aegae was being called into question. Greek archaeologist Photius Petsas had a well-known and long-standing antagonism with Manolis Andronikos dating back to their student days and competing excavations. Petsas had been vocal on the ‘incorrect identification of Vergina’ issue since 1977, when a transcript of his interview on the topic was published in the New York Times.
Potentially more damaging to Andronikos’ reputation was a letter to an Athens newspaper on 13 February 1978 by Dr Zachos of the University of Paris. His correspondence alleged that when Andronikos announced he might have found the remains of Philip II he was following a political agenda: the ‘nationalism’ evoked by the discovery aimed at securing victory for Konstantine Karamanlis’ New Democracy party in the 20 November general election of 1977. What Zachos failed to remind his readers was that Andronikos’ public statement, which ‘armed the quiver of Hellenism’, took place on 24 November, four days after the vote.
Opposing views were supposed to have been embraced in the search for answers, but instead a caustic schism had developed which, in some cases, hark back to decades-old personal rivalries and political divides. ‘Archaeology is not a science, it’s a vendetta,’ was the rather-apt summation of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the British archaeologist who died a year before Andronikos found Tomb II.
In 1987 the gloves finally came off in the ‘battle of the bones’ when historian Eugene Borza articulated a direct challenge to Andronikos over his identification of an elusive sceptre in his 1978 report. A sceptre, Borza claimed, would have been passed down through the generations of kings, as it was in the Iliad from the gods through Pelops, Atreaus, Aegisthos and on to Agamemnon the king of Mycenae. Similarly, an Argead sceptre would not have been buried with Philip II, but passed on to his son Alexander the Great, and, in turn, on to his successor Arrhidaeus who was made co-king at Babylon.Borza went on to argue that a sceptre could, however, have been interred with Arrhidaeus because he was the last male of Philip’s direct line.
In personal correspondence, Borza asked Andronikos to explain why references to the sceptre had disappeared from his later reports. Andronikos explained that he had been mistaken in the original identification. Borza remained suspicious and inferred that once Andronikos had realized the relic weakened his argument for Philip II, he spirited it away.
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The royal line of Macedon in the 4th Century BC. Grant (2019), p. 76
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‘New Barbarians’ to the North
In 1991, while the ‘battle of the bones’ raged on, Yugoslavia dissolved and out of the fallout emerged a new socialist republic to Greece’s north. Its borders fell between Albania and Bulgaria in what would have occupied ancient Paeonia and western Thrace in the time of Philip II’s predecessors. Arguably a slither of ancient ‘Upper Macedonia’, the northern cantons annexed by Philip in his expanded realm, fell into the new state. Despite the questionable geopolitics, the new Republic of Macedonia immediately adopted a twelve-point Vergina starburst of the Argead kings to adorn its national flag. Blood ran hot in nationalistic veins from Athens to Thessaloniki.
Greece saw the republic’s name and its flag as national identity theft and demanded both be changed. Street protests followed on both sides of the border and airport names were changed in line with each nation’s cause. The new regime was duly recognized by the United Nations in 1993, but only under the title ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ (‘FYROM’). Claiming ancient roots in the region under a tide of nationalism, FYROM accused its neighbor of stealing the biggest part of ‘Aegean Macedonia’ and incorporating it into northern Greece. The response from Athens was a blockade of the new Balkan player staking identity claims to the kings buried below Vergina.
The ancient Macedonians were Greeks, claimed domestic political commentators. ‘Our Philip and Alexander remain standard bearers of Greek culture and a Hellenistic Era when Greek culture spread to enlighten the known world’, the state newspapers reminded the world.
The stance remains somewhat ironic. Those born outside the borders of ancient Hellas were referred to wholesale as ‘barbaroi’, principally due to the noise of their harsh, discordant speech. The Peloponnesian War historian, Thucydides, who owned land in the Strymon River basin in the heartland of ancient Macedon, termed the ‘Upper’ Macedones ‘barbarians’ and contemporary Athenian orators like Demosthenes had hissed that the ‘Macedonians did not even make good slaves’. Moreover, the Macedonian army of Philip and his son smashed Greek power at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, thereby ending one-hundred-and-fifty-seven years of ‘democracy’ and Greece’s creative Classical Age.
Despite the enduring tomb uncertainties, by the time the Archaeological Museum of Vergina opened its doors to the public in 1997 under a reconstructed tumulus, the curators had no doubt about the labeling of the group: Tomb II was the resting place of King Philip II of Macedon, in the antechamber was probably his obscure Thracian wife Meda, while Tomb III did probably hold the bones of King Alexander IV, the murdered teenage son of Alexander the Great. The ‘official’ literature that followed was even more unequivocal on names, causing Eugene Borza to comment on one title: “The text is marred not only by the worst sort of nationalistic archaeology, but also by serious lapses in reasoning.” Yet these identifications ensured the museum was a commercial success, and this is how they remain today.
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Ancient Macedon and its occupied territories in 359 BC at the beginning of the reign of Philip II. Grant (2019), p. 16.
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The Tomb II Stalemate
Historian Dr. Miltiades Hatzopoulos is an expert on ancient Macedon. Watching on as various teams of archaeologists and historians drew polarized conclusions, he issued his summation in 2008 of the ‘cottage industry of Verginana’, as he termed it: “It is true that the issue has been obscured by precipitate announcements, the quest for publicity, political agendas and petty rivalries, which have led to an inconclusive series of down-datings and up-datings, finally disqualifying all the ‘scientific’ criteria – including forensic medicine – invoked.”
By 2009, the ‘battle of the bones’ had reached a stalemate when academics ran out of debating ammunition. Recognizing the impasse for what it was, The American Journal of Archaeology even called for a moratorium on ‘Vergina papers’ until new evidence came to light.
New Methodology, New Momentum
The tides of politics always tugged at the Vergina excavations, and the lack of harmony between ministries responsible for antiquities resulted in a chronic lack of funding for tomb forensics. Responsibility for the excavations have always been divided between the University of Aristotle in Thessaloniki, and the Ministry of Culturewhich oversees sixteen other projects with a total budget of 32 million euros for museums, monuments and archaeological sites in the region of Emathia. Over 7 million euros of development capital for the subterranean Vergina museum had already arrived from EU Community programs. Sadly, none of it had been allocated to studies on the bones.
The tomb debate was finally given forward momentum in 2010 when an anthropological team led by Professor Theo Antikas and material scientists led by Dr. Yannis Maniatis, with a modest 6,000-euro grant from the Aristotle University, commenced a several-month task of cataloguing the Tomb II bones; their ground-breaking study would last five years.
Complicating the anthropological work was the methodology of earlier studies: preserving solutions of silicon-based polymers covered the bones, while resins and adhesives had been used in bone moulds. Alginate residues with plaster featured in a facial reconstruction of the male, all of which left some form of contamination.
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The jaw and facial bones of the Tomb II male. Grant (2019), p. 131.
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To effectively analyze and catalogue the Tomb II remains, the team applied CT scanning and then each bone was catalogued with a unique number, with entries on weight, condition and morphological changes such as color, warping or cracking. Any signs of foreign materials such as rare minerals were noted, along with comments on the conservation condition from previous handling. They next photographed each fragment from every anatomical plane, capturing over 4,000 images.
The anthropologists were able to determine the male suffered from a respiratory problem, a chronic condition that could have been pleurisy or tuberculosis, evidenced by the pathology they found on the inside surface of his ribs. Visible ‘wear and tear’ markers on his spine indicated he had experienced a life on horseback, while further age-related changes to the male skeleton which had not been brought to light before, allowed the Antikas team to narrow down the estimate of the Tomb II male to 45 +/– 4 years at death. They did however find a trauma on his hand which could finally correlate with one of the injuries Philip reportedly received in battle.
Under similar scrutiny, in 2014 they found new incontrovertible age evidence on previously unanalyzed female bones from the antechamber. Her pubic symphysis, a reliable aging marker, put her at 32 +/- 2 years at death, ruling out Philip’s older brides as well as his young final wife Cleopatra, and discounting Arrhidaeus’ teenage wife completely and him by association. Spinal markers made it clear she had also endured a life in the saddle.
The identity debate always had to accommodate an ‘intruder’ weapon: with the female rested a gold-encased Scythian ‘gorytos’ in the style of the hip-slung bow-and-arrow quivers of the formidable Scythian archers. Over 1,000 excavated graves in Ukraine and the Russian Steppeshave proven the existence of these female warriors who were often buried with horses, weapons, tools and their typical jewelry: glass beads, earrings and necklaces of pearls, topaz, agate and amber, as well as bronze mirrors and distinctive bracelets.
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Scythian archer, beardless and so possibly female, on an Attic plate dated to 520 – 500 BC, showing the traditional hip-slung ‘gorytos’ and compound bow. Grant (2019), p. 71.
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Andronikos originally mused that the Tomb II woman had ‘Amazonian leanings.’ Others were more skeptical of the ‘weaponized warrioress’ association. In what might be considered a case of archaeological gender bias, the subterranean Archaeological Museum of Vergina displays the statement: ‘Weapons were for men what jewels were for women’, despite the fact that no jewelry was found with the Tomb II female, apart from a sumptuous diadem and an austere Illyrian-type pin. The curators believed the quiver, greaves and spears in her chamber were not hers at all, but belonged to the ‘king’ next door, as their upright position against the dividing door could suggest.
The Antikas team put an end to that theory in another ‘eureka moment’ in 2014. They identified a previously overlooked shinbone fracture which had shortened her left leg. This was finally proof that the armor and weapons in the Tomb II antechamber belonged to her, because one of the gilded-bronze greaves in her chamber was 3.5 cm shorter and also narrower than the other and had obviously been fashioned to fit to her deformity.
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Professor Theodore Antikas with Laura-Wynn Antikas holding the shorter greave in front of the display cabinet in the Archaeological Museum of Vergina. Antikas team archive. Grant (2019), color.
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When compared to the three sets of same-sized greaves found in the male chamber next door, they had always looked rather feminine in proportion; she had indeed been honored as a warrior. If the tomb contents were redolent of the life and career of the chamber occupants, as commentators were inclined to believe, then this further narrowed down the list to females recorded as showing martial or pugnacious persuasions.
At one point, Philip II allied with a Danube-region Scythian king, Atheas, who resorted to adopting the Macedonian king to seal the treaty. So a daughter, given freely or captured after battle when relations broke down, might have become a final wife or captive concubine who was interred in Tomb II, explaining the presence of the quiver. But a Scythian daughter was never mentioned in the sources.
Neither were the Scythians renowned as metal smiths; the exquisite jewelry in their graves is of local Greek workmanship, likely from Panticapaeum in the Kingdom of Bosporus by today’s Crimea. But there was also a thriving metalworking industry in Macedon, where weapons and armor were fashioned for Philip II. The possible domestic manufacture of what could have included ornate goods for export to Scythian warlords in this unique era of diplomacy means the ‘Amazon’ of Vergina could have been born rather closer to home.
Problems with Provenancing Gold
Several more quivers have been found in Scythian regions with almost identical patterns beaten into the gold and they might be traceable to a single Greek workshop and artisan. Unfortunately, it remains troublesome to prove the provenance of gold ore from its ‘signature impurities’ such as platinum group elements. Many artifacts of the period were in fact made from electrum with a high silver and trace copper content. But the analysis of electrum is complicated when craftsmen ‘enhanced’ it by ‘whitening’ with added silver, or ‘reddening’ it with increased copper, after the separation process known as ‘cupellation’ from the base ore.
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Scythian gold-encased bow-and-arrow quiver found at Chertomylk, Ukraine. The overall layout and position of images is remarkably similar to the Vergina Tomb II example. The mounting of a gold ‘gorytos’, Scythian, Russia, 6th-4th century BC. Artist: Werner Forman. Grant (2019), p. 215.
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There also remains an unspoken ‘elephant in the room’: there is no mention in texts of any wife being buried with Philip II at Aegae, and if Andronikos was correct, inconsistencies in the dimensions of the vaults of the two chambers forming Tomb II suggest they were built or completed in different stages. The male and female were not necessarily cremated together or even at the same time; the different color of her unwashed bones reinforces that.
The Tomb I Bombshell
A further discovery had already put an end to one tenacious but erroneous avenue of the identity debate which misdirected scholars for decades. In 2014, forgotten and unanalyzed skeletal remains from Tomb I were found in storage below the Vergina laboratory; they were probably consigned to thirty-five years of obscurity in the aftermath of the ‘great’ Thessalonica earthquake of 20 June 1978 when the preservation of unlooted Tombs II and III was the focus of attention.
These additional Tomb I bones meant that the remains of at least seven individuals were identifiable, not only a male, female and a baby as one anthropologist had previously concluded from the few fragments he briefly saw; that had led to the notion that Philip II, Cleopatra and their executed infant were actually interred there and not in Tomb II, where, logic suggestedArrhidaeus and wife were interred.
‘Amphipolitics’
Greek nationalism and a renewed interest in Macedon’s archaic past were heightened when archaeologists made their first entry into the massive tomb structure at Amphipolis in the summer of 2014. The Casta Hill tomb lay inside a 155-meter high mound surrounded by a 500-meter perimeter wall which lay outside Amphipolis’ once fortified city walls.
On 12 August 2014, as excavators prepared to go in, the Greek Minister for Culture and Sports enthusiastically exclaimed: “We have been waiting for this tomb for 2,300 years.” The Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, hurried to the site with TV cameras in tow and promised that the dig in the “land of our Macedonia would be completed within a couple of days”. The Bishop of Thessaloniki promptly added: “Whoever may be buried inside the tomb, he is bound to be Greek.” These were deliberate slights to the parliament of the Slavic Macedonia in Skopje. ‘Amphipolitics’ was hitting the news and conveniently diverting the country’s attention from rising unemployment and Greece’s European Union bailout program which was supposed to end that year.
But the ongoing Vergina controversy extended beyond the Tomb II bones. Two extremely large fused-together leg bones, which supposedly originated in Tomb I, made their way to the bone collection during a study by a Greek paleoanthropologist published in 2015. Dr Antonis Bartsiokas allegedly found them amongst the Tomb I skeletal fragments, even though they were absent from the original excavator’s report. The awkwardly angled knee bones, he argued, were ‘proof’ of the terrible wound Philip may have suffered in Thrace resulting in his well-documented limp. But on closer inspection they appeared to be ‘intruders’; Professor Xirotiris, who had worked with Andronikos when the tombs first emerged, publicly stated that he doubted the Bartsiokas-presented bones came from Tomb I, with all the implications that carried.
The ground-breaking finds of the Antikas-Maniatis teams were finally published in an academic journal in 2015. Microscopic forensics had identified textile stains on the cremated remains, while melted gold was seen on the cremated upper vertebrae of the male. Within a composite material found clinging to the male bones, the rare white mineral huntite and Tyrian Purple were bound in layers with egg white and clay, suggesting an undocumented Orphic funeral rite involved a striking ceremonial face mask, or posthumous death mask, redolent of the gold example from Mycenae termed the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’.
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The so-called ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ found at Mycenae. National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Grant (2019), color plate.
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The melted gold droplets begged the question of whether the ‘king’ was initially wearing his wreath as flames licked the funeral pyre, because the incomplete gold wreath found inside the ossuary chest showed signs of intense heat and lacked the pieces found in the pyre remains on the tomb roof. An ivory-and-glass-decorated ceremonial shield also showed signs of exposure to fire. It appears the dead king was presented to the onlookers ‘battle ready’ in his finery as the fire began cleansing his corpse, before being whipped away for interment below with his later-collected and washed bones.
Although hampered by underfunding and a lack of support from the Ministry of Culture, the teams continued to push for ‘next-generation’ forensics: DNA testing, radiocarbon dating, and stable isotope analysis of the bones from unlooted Tombs II and III. DNA could reveal any genetic family relationships, C14 dating of the bones would be a cross-check to the age of the tombs, and strontium isotope signatures might reveal where the occupants spent their early years.
The Ministry of Culture denied permission in 2016. Instead, the scientists were allowed to test the scattered bones found in looted Tomb I and a nearby ‘hidden’ grave near the city agora, possibly the secret burial site of Alexander’s murdered teenage son Heracles. But no formal funding was provided. Although the Tomb I bones lay exposed in soil for over two millennia at various levels, meaning it was difficult to establish who the original tomb occupants were, dating evidence and DNA results were successfully extracted, against all expectations, blowing apart yet more of the old identity theories.
The ‘Speaking Papyrus’
More recently, in 2017, Professor Richard Janko, one of the world’s leading papyrologists was able to identify letters on reassembled papyrus fragments from Tombs II and III. On a Tomb II fragment the letter Sigma was written in an older style symbol more consistent with the reign of Philip II, whereas on a fragment from Tomb III the same letter had developed into what is known as a ‘lunate C’; it appeared to be part of a list of chattels and tools for construction of funerary furniture, thus contemporary with the sealing of the tomb. The development of the Sigma argued that the Tomb III papyrus was written some years since the sealing of Tomb II, undermining the notion that Arrhidaeus was buried there.
What had become clear from the work of the material scientists was that an analysis of all contents of the tombs was required to piece together the identity puzzle, besides the skeletal remains and precious artifacts. The remains of wood, leather and potentially more papyrus still sits in storage with a semi-decomposed mass of as-yet unanalyzed material from the floors of the chambers.
With the possible candidates greatly narrowed down by the recent studies, further forensic analysis on the bones of the ‘king’, ‘queen’ and ‘prince’ might solve the identity puzzle once and for all. That is, if the Greek Ministry of Culture is prepared to let science challenge the name plaques at Vergina.
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The palace at Vergina undergoing reconstruction work, 2018. Photo by David Grant.
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Editor’s Supplement: The Treasures of Vergina
A Pictorial
The following represents a sampling of the remarkable finds from the excavations at Vergina, as currently exhibited to the public.
Tomb II (“Tomb of Philip II”) at Vergina. Back of facade and exterior of barrel vault with remains of funeral pyre. Mark Landon / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0
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The Golden Larnax (Chrysi Larnaka) (with the Sun of Vergina on the lid) that contains the remains (bones) from the burial of King Philip II of Macedon and the royal golden wreath. Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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The silver-gilt diadem from the tomb of King Philip II of Macedon at Vergina, Greece. Mmurp105, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
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Queen Meda’s Gold Myrtle Wreath from the antechamber of tomb of Philip II of Macedon Aigai Vergina 336 BC. Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Royal Crown. Rjdeadly, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Royal armor of Philip II. Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Bronze greaves (Leg Guards) from the tomb of Philip II of Macedon 4th century BCE Aigai, Vergina Greece. These pieces of armor were custom made for Philip II as he suffered a broken tibia, leaving one of his legs deformed. Mary Harrsch, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Detail of wall painting in the Royal Tomb at Vergina. Holger Uwe Schmitt, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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The gold gorytos (combination quiver and bow case), shin-guards and neck armor of female in unlooted 4th Century BCE tomb of Philip II Vergina, Greece thought to be Queen Meda of Odessos, Philip II’s sixth wife, a Thracian princess who hurled herself onto Philip’s funeral pyre. David Grant, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
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Hades abducting Persephone, fresco in the small royal tomb at Vergina, Macedonia, Greece. Yann Forget, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
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Gold two-pin fibula with housing and chain tied in a Herakles tomb of Philip II Macedon Aigai Vergina Greece 336 BCE. Mary Harrsch, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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Bronze Lychnouchos (lantern) with Pan relief from the tomb of Philip II of Macedon in Aigai 336 BCE. This ornate bronze lantern housing a black-glazed terracotta lamp illustrates the originality and sophistication of the metal workshops of the ancient Macedonian court. The relief masks representing the god Pan and the decoration of the ivy leaf suggest that this lantern was used during royal symposia. Mary Harrsch, CC-BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Peloponnese, Greece—About 3,500 years had passed before anyone seriously laid hands on the stones that defined the upper reaches of the tombs.Hidden below grape vines in a field not far from the remains of the ancient palace of the mythological and legendary King Nestor himself, most visitors walking along this elevated vista overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in southern Greece would never have suspected the significance of what lay buried beneath their feet.
But a team of archaeologists knew the potential of the field. As is typical at the beginning of any excavation or survey, they began clearing the surface of vegetation — not a particularly enjoyable start. The team consisted of director archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, along with a group of student volunteers, from the University of Cincinnati.
Vegetation notwithstanding, the most arduous task was actually still to come. “There were noticeable concentrations of rocks on the surface once we got rid of the vegetation,” said Stocker.* These were watermelon-sized stones.
And there were thousands.
They were the remains of collapsed beehive-shaped (tholos) tombs the ancients constructed at this location millennia ago, during the Late Bronze Age. In the spirit and style of archaeology, the team removed them carefully one at a time. The painstaking work eventually revealed two tombs, one of them as deep as nearly 15 feet below the surface. “It was like going back to the Mycenaean Period. They had placed them by hand in the walls of the tombs and we were taking them out by hand,” Stocker said.*
Like a Gold Mine……..
Their work soon began to pay off. “By the end of the first week we knew we had something that was really important,” said Stocker.* And the finds were remarkable. These were clearly princely tombs. Excavations yielded “thousands of small pieces of gold foil, beads, pieces of faience, small bits of bronze and the occasional piece of silver”, according to Stocker; and though they did not give up intact bronze vessels and weaponry as was the case in the nearby ‘Griffin Warrior’ tomb, also excavated by a team led by Davis and Stocker in 2015 (see below), they did yield an agate sealstone emblazoned with two genii (mythological lion-like creatures), a gold ring featuring two bulls flanked by sheaves of barely grain, and a gold pendant showing what could be the Egyptian goddess Hathor. These finds, along with the small fragments of gold foil and other small artifact fragments, clearly suggested wealth and status. Some news releases reported that the gold foil indicated the walls had once been covered in gold leaf. But “there is no evidence that the tomb walls were actually covered with gold leaf,” says Stocker. “[Carl] Blegen speculated as much, based on the quantity of gold leaf that was found in Tholos IV, which was excavated by his team member, Lord William Taylour, in 1953”. (Blegen, a Classics professor also with UC, was known for his excavation of the now famous remains of the nearby ‘Palace of Nestor” in 1939. See below.) Nonetheless, the finds and materials clearly point to tombs that once interred individuals or families of singular wealth and/or status, as well as a capacity to carry out a broad network of trade relationships in the Eastern Mediterranean — materials included amber from the Baltic, amethyst from Egypt, and imported carnelian, for example. The researchers employed extensive use of photogrammetry and digital mapping to record and document in detail the location and orientation of all objects within the tombs. This was important, according to director Davis, as it afforded the ability to “see all levels as we excavated them and relate them one to the other in three dimensions,” essential for analyzing, understanding and interpreting the tombs and the significance and meaning of their contents.*
Any scholar familiar with the archaeological remains of this region would say, however, that a more complete understanding of these newly excavated tombs has to take into account the larger context within which the tombs were found — Pylos.
Unearthing Ancient Pylos
…….we went to Pylos and to Nestor, the shepherd of the people, and he received me in his lofty house and gave me kindly welcome, as a father might his own son who after a long time had newly come from afar: even so kindly he tended me with his glorious sons…….
The words of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope as penned by Homer in Book 17 of the Odyssey give us this ancient literary glimpse of Pylos, where the legendary King Nestor made his domicile. But beyond Homer the excavations over the last century have revealed a tangible place — a Pylos that can actually be seen and touched, verifying the historicity of the legendary place.
Evidence for human settlement at Pylos extends as far back as the Neolithic, though it is best known as an important center during Mycenaean times (1600 -1100 BC). Pylos as a state extended over 2,000 square kilometers (770 sq mi) with a population that may have ranged from 50,000 to as many as120,000 people. In 1939, a joint Hellenic-American expedition was formed with the Greek Archaeological Service under Epano Englianos and Carl Blegen with the University of Cincinnati. Excavations began on 4 April 1939, with dramatic results.Almost immediately, stone walls, fresco fragments, Mycenaean pottery and inscribed tablets were unearthed. Blegen identified monumental structural remains as the great “Palace of Nestor”, and although it is not certain that this was indeed such, Linear B tablets found during the excavations indicated that the site in which the structure is located was anciently called Pylos. In fact, about 1,000 Linear B tablets were unearthed. Translation of the tablets confirmed that they were part of a royal archive, and that the palace functioned as the administrative, political and financial center of the Mycenaean region of Messenia.
From 1952 to 1966, yet more of the Palace was uncovered, including areas identified to be part of the acropolis. Evidence attests to the conclusion that Pyloswas abandoned at some point after the 8th century BC and ended in a fiery conflagration.
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Aerial view showing the Tholos IV tomb, far left, found by UC archaeologist Carl Blegen in 1939 in relation to the two family tombs called Tholos VI and Tholos VII, recently excavated by UC archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker. Denitsa Nenova/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Aerial view of one of the recently excavated tombs, Tholos VI. Denitsa Nenova/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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The floor of Tholos VI, featuring giant stone slabs (ashlars) likely removed from the remains of the nearby Palace of Nestor. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Carnelian sealstone featuring two mythological creatures called genii, which are lionlike mythological creatures, holding serving vessels and an incense burner over an altar beneath a 16-pointed star. Jeff Vanderpool/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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A modern putty impression of the carnelian seal stone. Jeff Vanderpool/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Gold pendant found in the family tombs, featuring the likeness of Hathor, an Egyptian goddess who protected the dead. Vanessa Muro/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
Plan of the excavated remains of the Palace of Nestor. 1-Entrance. 2-Court. 3-Anchamber. 4-Megaron(main hall). 5-Storerooms with olive oil. 6-Storerooms with wine. 7-Archives. 8-Propylon. 9-Bath. 10-Small megaron. Janmad, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International , Wikimedia Commons
This cross section drawing of the Treasury of Atreus typifies a tholos (beehive) tomb.
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The Griffin Warrior Tomb
Arguably one of the most remarkable discoveries at Pylos emerged in 2015, as an archaeological team headed by Davis and Stocker (University of Cincinnati) were excavating what appeared at first to be an otherwise unremarkable stone-lined shaft tomb. This description changed very quickly, however, as they began to encounter relatively intact objects made of bronze. Their efforts eventually led to the skeletal remains of an adult male and nearly 1500 artifacts, some of the artifacts featuring rich iconography, and all associated with a single burial. Dated to about 1500 B.C. based on pottery shards found at the location, the shaft tomb and its contents have turned out to be, according to Stocker, “one of the most magnificent displays of prehistoric wealth discovered in mainland Greece in the past 65 years.”** Stocker would know—after years of experience investigating an area rich with evidence of an ancient presence long before the classical Greeks, she had never personally encountered a single burial quite like this one.
The inventory of finds was astounding. As reported by M.B. Reilly of the University of Cincinnati in the related UC Magazine article, the object tally included the following:
The skeleton of an adult male, age approximately 30 – 35 years who would have stood about five-and-a-half feet tall, placed upon his back when buried;
At his left chest, a sword, three feet in length, featuring an ivory hilt decorated with gold in an embroidery design;
Beneath the sword, a small dagger featuring a similarly designed gold hilt;
More bronze weapons laying at his legs and feet;
Four solid gold seal finger rings;
A 30-inch long necklace of box-shaped gold wires with two gold pendants decorated with ivy leaves;
Numerous well-preserved gold beads;
Two gold cups and six silver cups, one with a gold rim;
Bronze cups, bowls, amphora, jugs, and a basin;
More than 50 seal stones featuring intricate carvings of goddesses, altars, reeds, lions, bulls – some with human bull jumpers flying over their horns. All seal stones were in Minoan style and likely originated in Crete;
Pieces of carved ivory, one featuring a griffin with large wings and another showing a lion attacking a griffin;
Six ornate ivory combs, implying that he may have had long hair;
Over 1,000 beads of carnelian, amethyst, jasper and agate. Archaeologists suggest that some of the beads may have decorated a fabric burial shroud – as suggested by several square inches of associated woven threads;
Thin bands of bronze, likely from long decayed body armor; and
Wild boar’s teeth, likely from a warrior’s helmet.**
From a Mycenaean chamber tomb, elephant tooth warrior head wearing boar tusk helmet. Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic License
From analysis of the burial, archaeologists could see that many of the burial objects were originally placed above the interred on top of his wooden coffin, which had been initially crushed by a fallen one-ton stone (likely the cap stone of the burial), the wooden coffin having long since decayed and collapsed and leaving the objects resting upon the skeleton. Further analysis of the skull indicated that he had a broad face with close-set eyes and a strong jaw.
The skeletal remains within the context of these finds clearly suggested the burial of a high status individual, perhaps even a king, or wanax, as Mycenaean kings or lords were called anciently. The man represented by the remains has been dubbed the “griffin warrior” by Davis and Stocker based on the griffin iconography and weaponry and armor found in the tomb.
More than a year later, conservationists in the lab revealed another stunning find from the tomb. After meticulous cleaning of a limestone-encrusted seal stone, they exposed an intricatelydetailed etching of a combat scene on a hard stone measuring only 3.6 centimeters, 1.4 inches, in length. In fact, many of the fine details become clear only when revealed through photomicroscopy.
“Some of the details on this are only a half-millimeter big,” said Davis. “They’re incomprehensibly small.”***
The image on the stone portrayed a warrior in the process of defeating two opponents, one already laying dead at his feet, and in the act of plunging a sword into the neck of the shielded second opponent — a scene of Achaean combat that could be likened to any event from the pages of Homer’s Iliad.
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Viewed from above, the excavated Griffin Warrior Tomb, with the one-ton capstone which dominated the scene of the tomb details during the excavation. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Graphic illustration of the shaft tomb, showing the spatial relationships of the various artifacts with the skeletal remains found within the tomb. Archaeologists noted that weapons had been placed on the left side of the body at burial while items such as the seal stones and rings were placed on the right. They also noted that some of the images represented on the rings correlated with actual artifacts within the tomb. Davis and Stocker hypothesize that these patterns suggest some purposeful intent at the time the body was interred. Denitsa Nenova,Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Above and below: The three-foot sword found next to the skeletal remains. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Found within the tomb: A meter-long slashing sword with an ivory handle covered in gold. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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A bronze mirror with an ivory handle, found within the tomb. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Ivory comb, one of six, found within the tomb. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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One of four solid gold rings found within the tomb. This one features a Cretan bull-jumping scene. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Shari Stocker stands within the excavated shaft tomb. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Early Mycenaeans
Most significantly, the findings from the family tholos tombs and the Griffin Warrior tomb at Pylos have provided a tantalizing window on the early formative period of the Mycenaean civilization. “The new tombs are much larger than the Griffin Warrior grave and were used for multiple burials,” says Stocker. But the newly excavated tombs, thus far, have told us a story that is somewhat more obscure about the Mycenaean inhabitants at Pylos than what has been portrayed by the Griffin Warrior tomb. Speaking of the tholos tombs, continued Stocker, “they were certainly once as wealthy, but objects were removed in Mycenaean times and then they were looted after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, so we don’t know what they originally contained.” Nonetheless, she concludes, “it is clear from the discovery of the new tholos tombs that several elite families were vying for power and status already at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. Eventually one individual, perhaps the warrior buried in the Griffin Warrior grave, was able to emerge with the sort of powers we imagine a Mycenaean wanax had, though we cannot be sure that the title was yet used, of course.We now understand that Pylos was a very important center of power in the formative stages of Mycenaean civilization and that members of the elite were receiving luxury imports from all over the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.”*
To be sure, the recent discoveries at Pylos have changed perceptions about the sophistication of early Mycenaean art and craftsmanship. The artifacts recovered from both the Griffin Warrior shaft tomb and the tholos tombs have been particularly enlightening. But the finest example was exemplified by the combat scene seal stone (mentioned above) uncovered within the Griffin Warrior tomb, known as the Pylos Combat Agate. “What is fascinating is that the representation of the human body is at a level of detail and musculature that one doesn’t find again until the classical period of Greek art 1,000 years later,” said Davis.*** The style of the piece suggests a Minoan-Mycenaean connection or influence, though the skill that must have been required to produce it appears to exceed anything else known from that Minoan-Mycenaean time period. “It seems that the Minoans were producing art of the sort that no one ever imagined they were capable of producing,” continued Davis. “It shows that their ability and interest in representational art, particularly movement and human anatomy, is beyond what it was imagined to be. Combined with the stylized features, that itself is just extraordinary.”***
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The tiny sealstone depicting warriors in battle measures just 1.4 inches across but contains incredible detail. Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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A digitally altered illustration of the seal found in the tomb of the Griffin Warrior. ourtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Moreover, regarding the Griffin Warrior tomb, it became clear that a substantial portion of the tomb’s objects actually originated in Crete, exhibiting a characteristic Minoan (3650 – 1450 B.C.) style and technique that differentiated from other objects more typically identified with mainland Greece in the 15th century B.C. Thus, given the nature of some of the key artifacts and the dating of the shaft tomb and its contents, archaeologists could see that there was an apparent Minoan connection here. Based on the dating of the tomb, “we are in the period subsequent to the eruption of the Thera volcano, in a time of intense interaction between the Greek mainland and the so-called Minoan “New Palaces,” says Stocker.
The Thera volcano is today a caldera remnant that forms the present-day island of Santorini (anciently known as Thera), a member of the Cyclades islands southeast of Greece. In the 17th century B.C., it was a fully formed volcano, the most prominent landmark of an island that was home to Akrotiri, a major Minoan city. But around 1600 B.C. the volcano’s massive eruption and destruction buried the Minoan presence there and profoundly affected the entire Minoan civilization, including their main settlements on Crete. The Minoans subsequently rebuilt their destroyed Cretan settlements and palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, Zakros and Malia. It was the time period of these new palaces that witnessed extensive contact and trade between Minoan Crete and the emerging Mycenaean civilization on mainland Greece. The influence can be seen, for example, with the evidence of Minoan handcrafted items on the Greek mainland, indicating a likelihood that the ruling houses of Mycenae were connected to the Minoan trade network. To possess goods of fine Minoan craftsmanship would be considered a sign of status, wealth and prestige. “This latest find is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, who [according to Greek mythology] headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer’s ‘Iliad’,” said Stocker. “Nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus. This find may be even more important because the warrior pre-dates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years. That means he was likely an important figure at a time when this part of Greece was being indelibly shaped by close contact with Crete, Europe’s first advanced civilization.”* Thus the Griffin Warrior tomb, though rare in terms of its unlooted condition and the richness of its finds, may actually not have been atypical for the burial of a member of the elite structure of early Mycenaean times. By around 1500—1450 B.C., near the end of the early Mycenaean period and the time to which the shaft tomb is dated, archaeologists and historians know that a number of power centers had already emerged in the Greek southern mainland, dominated by a warrior elite society. Christofilis Maggidis, archaeologist and President of the Mycenaean Foundation and one of the world’s foremost authorities on Mycenaean culture, summarizes the Mycenaean world of this time:
“Rising to power was a long process through trade, diplomatic contacts, and constant warfare abroad and at home during the formative Early Mycenaean period (Late Helladic I-IIA/B, ca. 1650-1420/1410 BC). The Mycenaeans proved to be meticulous students: through increasing contacts with Minoan Crete, their trade horizons gradually expanded from the Balkans and Northern Europe to Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, and Asia Minor. This gradual expansion is documented in the multicultural amalgam of stylistic, iconographic, technical elements and materials of the exquisite finds in the royal Shaft Graves at Mycenae (Minoan, Egyptian, European/Balkan, Hittite, and Helladic influences), the extensive corpus of foreign imports in Greece (orientalia and aegyptiaca), and the increasing Mycenaean exports abroad. Contemporary iconographical evidence (e.g. flotilla fresco from Akrotiri at Thera, silver Siege Rhyton from Grave Circle A at Mycenae) illustrate some of the early military achievements of the rising new power abroad: raiding jointly with the Minoan fleet foreign exotic lands (Egypt?), sieging and sacking foreign towns.”****
With this description, it is easy to see the fitting context of the man in the tomb. “Whoever he was,” speculates archaeological team co-leader Jack Davis, “he seems to have been celebrated for his trading or fighting on the nearby island of Crete and for his appreciation of the more sophisticated and delicate art of the Minoan civilization (found on Crete), with which he was buried.”* The Pylos Combat Agate seems to suggest both traits.
As recorded history and archaeology would testify, the Mycenaean warrior kings continued to dominate their expanding domain in the ensuing centuries, eventually conquering their own Minoan trading partners on Crete following the debilitating disruption of Minoan power and society, caused perhaps, at least in part, by the Thera eruption. Knossos and the other Minoan centers on Crete became predominantly Mycenaean, as evidenced by the archaeology and even the language.“At some point the palaces on Crete are destroyed, probably by Mycenaean invaders,” says Stocker, “and Greeks take control of Knossos and established an administration that kept records in Greek in the Linear B, as opposed to the old Linear A, script.”
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The famous “Mask of Agamemnon”, found in Tomb V in Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876. Dated to the 16th century BC, it would have been an early Mycenaean work of art. Xuan Che, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
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Work at Pylos is expected to continue. But the archaeology, as is the case with any major site, will involve much more than excavation and work in the field. Study and research related to the finds will go on, conceivably for decades. And equally important is the ongoing task to preserve what has been uncovered. Archaeological excavation is by its nature a destructive process, despite its careful and systematic process, and it exposes the remains to elements of the environment that would otherwise not be factors if the buried structures and objects had been left untouched. Stocker has been quick to emphasize this.
“We will look for funding to stabilize and conserve the monuments and collaborate with the [Greek] Ministry of Culture to help where we can.”
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Map of the site shows the two family tombs (Tholos VI and Tholos VII), including the previously excavated Tholos IV tomb, in relation to the tomb of the Griffin Warrior and the Palace of Nestor. Denitsa Nenova/Courtesy Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati
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Although the tomb excavations and studies have been conducted through the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati, with sponsorship from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and permits from the Greek Ministry of Culture, research in the region of the tomb’s location has long been conducted under the auspices of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project(PRAP), a project that has been underway for well over two decades. Undertaken as a multi-disciplinary endeavor to explore prehistoric and historic settlement in the area of the Bronze Age administrative center of the Palace of Nestor in the western Messenia region of Greece, the project has served to shed additional new light on a region that played a salient role in the prehistoric and Mycenaean history of Greece. Separate from PRAP, recent surveys and excavations in the area have also located and identified remains of houses of the Mycenaean palatial period, as well as remains of the Middle Bronze Age before the emergence of the Mycenaeans.
More information about the PRAP and other projects and organizations involved in the Messenia region can be obtained at the website.
Readers who wish to support the conservation and study of the shaft tomb discoveries may click here and enter Friends of Pylos in the comment box.
It was fitting that her ashes found their final resting place in this place. Set high on the summit within the jungle-choked ruins of the ancient Maya acropolis of Piedras Negras in Guatemala, a small, simple, rectangular grave stone marks an almost wordless epitaph — only her name and the years that defined her birth and death are inscribed upon the marker. In life, those who knew her well called her simply ‘Tania’. But in death, written history best knows her as Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and it was here, in Piedras Negras, where her legacy really began.
Tatiana was born a world away from Piedras Negras in Tomsk, Russia, to a physician mother, Alia Nekrassova, and chemist and engineer father, Avenir Proskouriakoff. Her family moved to Ohio when she was only five years old. It was 1916, and by then the world had already erupted into war, her father having been tasked to oversee production of munitions for the Russian war effort. Plans were to return to Russia after his assignment. It seemed world events had other plans for this family, however. The Russian Revolution in 1917, which saw the end of Avenir’s Tsarist overseers, sealed the family’sfate in the United States. They were never to permanently return. Tatiana became an American.
In the early years, her parents must have been clueless about her developing gifts until she demonstrated a remarkable proficiency to read at age 3 and showed an unusual talent for drawing. Her brilliance flourished after moving to Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, after which she graduated valedictorian of her high school class. But it was her drawing talent and education in architecture at the Pennsylvania State College School of Architecture a few years later that set the stage in launching a career of achievements that would revolutionize our understanding of one of the world’s greatest civilizations — the ancient Maya.
Revelations along the Usumacinta
Graduation from college came just in time for the devastation of the Great Depression, forcing Tatiana, like so many others in those times, to place her dreams on hold. A career in architecture had to wait. But, as the adage goes, where doors close, new windows open, and she took an opportunity to volunteer for the Classics Department of the University of Pennsylvania as a volunteer, producing archaeological illustrations. Her artistic excellence and architectural rendering caught the eye of Linton Satterthwaite, then the Assistant Curator of the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (henceforth in this writing — the Museum, popularly known today as the Penn Museum). He knew she was fascinated with the archaeological exhibits at the Museum. Why not have her join the University’s ongoing excavations at Piedras Negras, a project also under Satterthwaite’s direction, to do architectural drawings of the monumental remains? Satterthwaite likely anticipated what Tatiana’s response to the offering would be — 1936, and it was off to the jungles of Guatemala.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff, the expedition architect for Piedras Negras in 1936. Penn Museum image #37401.
Piedras Negras hugs the eastern banks of the Usumacinta River, which forms a natural border between Mexico and Guatemala. Anciently, the river served as the vital lifeblood for Maya centers built near or along its route, not only as a source of water but also as an important trade route of goods between centers. Among the settlements were Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras, two of the most powerful cities of the Maya Classic Period. Situated high on the north bank of the river in northeastern Guatemala, Piedras Negras (anciently called Yo’k’ib’ or ‘great gateway’), was occupied since the 7th century BCE with a Late Preclassic period peak in about 200 BCE and another great florescence during the Late Classic period. It became the focus of extensive excavations by the Museum beginning in 1931.
Tatianna arrived at the site just three years before the Museum excavations closed, and by then the site had already revealed its distinctive character as a massive center featuring numerous beautifully sculpted stelae and hieroglyphic inscriptions. She soon demonstrated her remarkable gift for rendering the ancient architecture at the site, particularly her unique ability to visualize, based on analysis of the remains, how the structures would have appeared in their complete, reconstructed state.
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Tatiana Proskouriakoff worked extensively at Piedras Negras. Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
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“The acropolis at Piedras Negras. Restored view.” Watercolor by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, 1939. UPM neg. T4-206″. Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
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Notwithstanding her significant contributions to the visualization of Maya monumental architecture, it was actually years later when she made the discovery that arguably defined her greatest contribution to Maya research and archaeology. During the late 1950’s she returned to the Piedras Negras monumental record again to study the Maya glyphs that adorned the many stelae discovered at the site. Her previous work at other sites, especially Copán and its famous Hieroglyphic Stairway, led her to formulate a compelling new question:Do the glyphs that so copiously illustrate Maya monuments actually represent Maya history and its rulers, and not religious or priestly matters, as the prevailing thought among scholars at the time suggested? The numerous beautifully carved stelae with their prolific range of glyphs at Piedras Negras provided a perfect test case for research. Tatiana went to work. Focusing on the inscriptions, she observed certain glyph repetitions or patterns common to all monuments. She eventually determined that some glyphs must have stood for birth and others for death, and yet others represented the names of rulers, lineage, capture of enemies, and other events and characteristics of Maya rulers. In other words, her earlier hypothesis gleaned from her study of the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copán was confirmed — the inscriptions on the monuments represented the actual history, in this case, of Piedras Negras.
Tatiana’s finding was a game-changer for understanding the Maya. “In Tatiana’s day, people believed Maya cities weren’t really cities,” says Simon Martin, currently Associate Curator and Keeper of Collections in the American Section of the Penn Museum. “They were [considered to be] ceremonial centers ruled by priests. It was thought that the population didn’t live in the centers. They were scattered around in the forest, and they might have just gathered together [in the centers] for ceremonies and rituals.” Martin points to a key monument designated as “Stela 14”, now housed and on display in the Museum’s newly opened Mexico and Central America Gallery. It once resided with 39 other stelae at Piedras Negras. “The figures on Stela 14 were originally thought to be a god and then [depicted] down below a priest, who is making offerings toward her [see image right]” But at Piedras Negras, says Martin, “Tatiana started working on chronology and the relationship between particular dates and particular images on the monuments”. Referring to Stela 14, Martin says that Tatiana was able to recognize or identify a glyph inscribed with a series or column of glyphs on the side of the stela as an “event glyph”, which signified the occurrence of a very significant event in the Maya chronology of the site. “She hypothesized that this event glyph referred to someone becoming a king, which turned out to be completely correct. Thanks to Tatiana’s work, we realize that the seated figure is a king, and the one standing below is a queen.” Many Maya hieroglyphs, it turned out, were actually a record of the kings and queens and the associated events of their times. And more than that, Tatiana’s work was ultimately a key to deciphering the Maya script, something that had eluded scientists and scholars for years. Stela 14, and the other stelae discovered and studied at Piedras Negras, acted like a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for translating ancient Maya history and culture.
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Stela 14 at Piedras Negras. Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
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Glyph column along the left side edge of Stela 14, shown in foreground of exhibit space at the Penn Museum.
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Detail of the glyph column. The glyph at the bottom right is the ‘event glyph’ identified by Tatiana Proskouriakoff.
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Bringing the Ancient Maya to Our Back Yard
As was common among university museum-led archaeological expeditions of the time, a number of monuments excavated at Piedras Negras were borrowed and transported to the Penn Museum for exhibition and further study. Most of those monuments were returned to Guatemala in 1947, but today two objects, the aforementioned famous Stela 14 and a leg support for Altar 4, remain at the Museum and are now on display in the new Mexico and Central America Gallery.
The Penn Museum boasts “the largest collection of Maya stelae than anywhere outside of Mexico or central America,” says Martin. Those stelae now grace the exhibit space of the new gallery, including Stela 14. While the gallery is the largest exhibit of Maya stone monuments in the United States, it also makes clear that there was much more to ancient Central America than the Maya, and it displays this in a well-appointed array of select artifacts and other objects, organized by the various ancient cultures that defined this region of the world for centuries, such as the Olmec, Teotihuacán, the Aztec, and others. Martin’s hand is reflected in the displays. As an epigrapher, he has been actively engaged in research related to the continuing efforts to unlock the meaning of the Maya script and what they say about the story and culture of the ancient Maya. “Scholars today are moving on from Tatiana’s insights,” he says. Although much if not most of the script can now be deciphered, “we’re [still] trying to understand how the language was structured. We’re trying to decipher some of the unknown signs, and, more importantly, we’re trying to put it all together to understand ancient Maya society.” But time has unfortunately also taken its toll on recovered remains, frustrating scholarly efforts. “Stela 14 once had a longer text, but that is now eroded away,” laments Martin. “It would be useful to know a bit more about this ruler, but Stela 14 itself can be no further help.” In addition to understanding this ancient culture, Martin is also hoping the ongoing decipherment of the Maya glyphs may shed some light on when and, especially, why, the Classic period monumental civilization that characterized the southern lowlands of the Maya so precipitously declined and ‘collapsed’ between the 8th and 9th centuries. Some of the artifacts therefor reflect the end of this Classic period. “My challenge at the moment is to understand the ninth century texts and see what they can tell us about the collapse,” wrote Martin to Popular Archaeology. Martin’s study of Caracol Altar 13, for example, now a part of the new gallery exhibit, has been part of his efforts (see below).
For anyone interested in the ancient civilizations of this region, the new gallery is a must-see. But it is also worth noting that it represents only a tiny percentage of the artifacts and monuments discovered and still undiscovered related to this region—a visible reminder of how much we know about these monumental cultures, and how much we still don’t.
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The view as one enters the new Mexico and Central America gallery at the Penn Museum.
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Simon Martin with Stela 14 at the new Penn Museum Mexico and Central America gallery.
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Caracol Altar 13, now exhibited at the Penn Museum’s Mexico and Central America Gallery. Martin is studying monumental remains like this with the hope of shedding new light on the political dynamics of 9th century Maya civilization. This altar depicts interaction between two figures, both presumably kings or royal figures, but from different cities. “The two characters,” explains Martin, “are twice linked in the text by the term ‘yichonal’, which means “before” or better “in his sight”. Everywhere we see that between two people it denotes that the first person is “overseen” by the second. The left-hand figure, Papmalil, is ascribed the ‘ochk’in kaloomte’ title, which denotes an especially high rank over that of a standard king. Papmalil is mentioned three times on the monument—an unprecedented emphasis for a visitor—while the local king is named only twice.” Martin is not certain where the scene is taking place. It may not be at Caracol but at Ucanal (the left-hand figure’s city) instead, meaning that K’inich Toobil Yopaat (the king of Caracol) may actually be the visitor.
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One of four support stones for Piedras Negras Altar 4 (see below), as exhibited at the new Penn Museum gallery. Dated to 790 CE. For ancient Maya people, stone was not lifeless rock but a living thing. They believed that sculptures were infused by an animating spirit or force.
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As exhibited in the Penn Museum gallery, a replica of the ‘Margarita Panel’, part of the 450 CE temple facade in Copan, Honduras. It was discovered by Penn Museum archaeologists in 1992. The temple shrine was found by deep tunneling through the city’s main acropolis.
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Fragment of a stela, exhibited at the new Penn Museum gallery. Stone, 600 – 800 CE. The inscription includes a very large number counting up to 43 million years from a date in the mythological past to another date in the Classic Period.
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Statue of Water Goddess of the Teotihuacan culture, exhibited at the new Penn Museum gallery. Stone, 100 – 550 CE, Teotihuacan. The Water Goddess was a deity of fertility and abundance.
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Readers can read more about the Mexico and Central America Gallery here.
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About the Penn Museum
The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.
The Penn Museum is located at 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (on Penn’s campus, across from Franklin Field). Public transportation to the Museum is available via SEPTA’s Regional Rail Line at University City Station; the Market-Frankford Subway Line at 34th Street Station; trolley routes 11, 13, 34, and 36; and bus routes 21, 30, 40, and 42. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and first Wednesdays of each month until 8:00 pm. Open select holiday Mondays. Museum admission donation is $15 for adults; $13 for senior citizens (65 and above); free for U.S. Military; $10 for children and full-time students with ID; free to Penn Museum Members, PennCard holders, and children 5 and younger.
Kate is an archaeologist and adventurer who is passionate about sharing her love of archaeology with the world. Her doctoral research focused on the Irish Late Bronze Age but her fieldwork has no borders! Over her career Kate has surveyed, excavated, and worked in museum collections on four continents. In 2016 she set off on a self-directed project, Global Archaeology, where she participated in 12 projects in 12 countries in 12 months.While lending an experienced helping hand to exciting archaeological projects she explored the world and documented the journey through social media (www.globalarchaeology.ca). For Kate, archaeology is fascinating because it reveals stories of our shared global past, but equally as important is the way these stories can connect people in the present. Now Kate has settled back in her home country of Canada where she is continuing to do archaeological writing while spending her days exploring the Rocky Mountains.
Naxos is the largest island in the Greek Cycladic group, located in the Aegean Sea between the Greek and Turkish mainlands. The islands’ varied landscapes combine to give it a special character. Known for its rich land and bountiful crops as well as for its beautiful white marble and abrasive emery, I could make a journey from a sandy beach to a leafy mountain village in about an hour. Wherever I looked my eye found archaeological treasure and history: from Classical temples to Byzantine architecture. It was also all around me as I made my way through the peaceful Naxian villages and towns. The winding medieval lanes of central Chora are perfect examples of places where one is completely immersed in a medieval town-scape with a view: from the top of the medieval Venetian kastro (castle) the Classical temple of Apollo can be seen across the harbor. However, less known to the world, recent archaeological excavations on Naxos have revealed a far older prehistoric legacy on this island.
Beginning in 2013, an international team led by Dr. Tristan Carter of McMaster University through the Canadian Institute in Greece, and his co-director Dr. Demetris Athanasoulis of the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities of the Hellenic Republic’s Ministry of Culture and Sports, has conducted a series of ongoing excavations at what is currently the earliest known archaeological site in the Cycladic region. Located on Stélidahill on a promontory that juts out into the Aegean Sea, archaeologists and student volunteers of the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project(SNAP) have uncovered a wealth of lithic (stone) material suggesting that Stélida was a place used to acquire raw material to form stone tools as long ago as at least two hundred thousand years.
Digging Up an Ancient Quarry
In the summer of 2016 I spent a month with the SNAP team at Stélida as part of my Global Archaeologyproject. Standing at its summit, I could view the coastline and the sea spreading out before me toward the west. I could clearly see Naxos’s hilly neighboring island, Paros, across a short distance of water. The area is very dry, and the visual contrast between the dry yellow earth and vegetation and the vivid turquoise sea is striking. But what drew me to Stélida was not the view—it was the stone beneath my feet. Stélida was first identified as a significant source of chert in 1981 as part of a survey by the École Française d’Athènes under the direction of René Treuil. Chert is fine grained sedimentary rock that was commonly used in prehistory by hominins and anatomically modern humans for producing stone tools and weapons. SNAP excavation trenches are located on different parts of the hillside, with two archaeologists working at each trench. Every morning of the excavation season the team begins the daily climb from the bottom of the hill and ascends the 118 m hill to their designated trenches. The path is literally littered with lithics – stepping on archaeological material is impossible to avoid at Stélida. By spreading the team across a large area, many different aspects of the prehistoric activities once carried out there can be investigated simultaneously and a more informed picture of the use of this landscape can be developed. This has also allowed the team to refine their research focus over time and explore specific areas of the hillside that are producing particular diagnostic types of lithics — stone material modified by hominins or early humans that are telling us something about when they were made and their material culture.
In 2016, SNAP was focused on opening a few new excavation trenches at the very base of the hill and towards the summit, as well as revisiting some that had been opened the previous year. I was tasked with opening and excavating a new 2m x 2m trench about ¾ of the way up the hill, positioned immediately at the base of a substantial chert outcrop. Without contest this is the most artifact-rich site I have ever excavated. The downside of such a rich site is that what I was excavating was mostly stone – not an easy material through which to shovel. We quickly developed a working rhythm with the passing of time, marked by the ferries sailing past us through the channel between our island, Naxos, and neighboring Paros. It seemed to be a contradistinction to be doing hard labor at a location surrounded by holiday villas and resorts where vacationers were being pampered. Our reward: only the archaeologists were afforded a view of the beautiful sunrise over the Aegean every morning from the top of Stélida hill.
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Stélida as viewed from the north on Naxos. D. Depnering
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View from Stélida toward the sea. Kate Leonard
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The 2016 excavation trench. Kate Leonard
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Stone tools and other lithics in situ at Stélida. Kate Leonard
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New Data, New Insights
More recently, the SNAP team has focused on evidence from a particular excavation trench — DG-A/001 — laid out toward the summit on the western side of the hill on a debris cone at the base of a chert outcrop. The 2 m by 2 m excavation trench was dug to a depth of 3.8 m through stratifiedcolluvial deposits — translated, this means the excavators dug twice the height of a tall man through sediment and stone that had both originated at that specific location and washed down the slope from the summit over hundreds of thousands of years. This is tough work through mostly stone compressed in a matrix of soil – not the type of excavation that uses brushes to expose delicate surfaces. In the process, excavators revealed more buried prehistoric soil layers. Using infrared stimulated luminescence dating, a technique used to measure the time elapsed since the last exposure of soil samples to sunlight, levels were dated from 13.8-12.1 thousand years ago toward the top of the trench to 219.9-189.3 thousand years ago toward the bottom of the trench. From this trench, approximately 12,000 artifacts were excavated and over 9,000 of those were in strata (layers or levels) dated to the Pleistocene. The diagnostic lithics (stone objects indicative of particular time periods and/or cultural groups) found in DG-A/001 included Upper Palaeolithic tools — usually associated with modern humans, or Homo sapiens — Middle Palaeolithictechnologies (such as Mousterian — usually associated with Neanderthals ), and examples of Mediterranean tool-making traditions from the early Middle to Lower Palaeolithic. Middle and Lower Paleolithic activity at Stélida was also evident in 159 diagnostic artifacts previously identified during surface surveys on the hillside.
The calcareous soil at Stélida was not conducive to the preservation of organic materials and so the excavators worked down through layer upon layer of mostly stone flakes, cores and debitage. When I dug with SNAP, for more than a meter below the modern ground surface the material I was excavating was over half composed of lithic debitage. In terms of volume of artifacts vs. non-artifacts, Stélida is by far the most artifact-rich site I have ever excavated. Like many prehistoric and historic quarry sites the artifacts that were uncovered at Stélida represent the early stages in the production of stone tools and as such the excavation team did not uncover many easily identified stone tools like those that would be found on a habitation site. The majority of what they uncovered was the material evidence of stone extraction and reduction activities. The team was digging through the evidence of quarrying (extraction) and the initial formation of pieces like rough cores (reduction). From the type of lithic material that was found in the excavations at Stélida it can thus be assumed that the higher quality pieces of chert were selected and taken elsewhere by the ancient toolmakers for final processing and use.
While much of the lithics excavated from Stélida are not easily discernible artifact types and analysis is often done of material from the early stages of the reduction process, there have nonetheless been some diagnostically identifiable types excavated from well-sealed and dated contexts. Some of the lithics from Stélida are consistent in their form and modification with artifacts from other well-dated Mesolithic and Lower to Upper Palaeolithic sites in Greece and Anatolia. There is also known Middle Palaeolithic activity at Stélida identified from diagnostic prepared core technology. This means that some of the anthropogenic (human-modified) material found here can be securely dated to the time when Neanderthals were living in Europe. But what the newly published evidence from Stélida tells us is that it is possible there were other hominid species quarrying and using Stélida chert even earlier. For instance, there is potential evidence for Lower Palaeolithic activity at Stélida in the form of possible bifaces that could be interpreted as handaxes. It is plausible that these large heavy tools could have been made by Homo heidelbergensis, the predecessor of the Neanderthals in Europe. The possibility for evidence of these early hominids living on what are now the Cycladic Islands has not been seriously investigated before—until now.
Activity Patterns and Behavior
As an archaeologist, I was interested in knowing if the SNAP team had come across any patterns in the evidence they were revealing. Were similar types of artifacts found in the different trenches? Or do the artifacts suggest different periods of use in different areas of the Stélida hillside? As I corresponded with Carter, he told me that “for the most part we [the SNAP project team] seem to be finding a lot of similar stuff across the site” but noted, however, that “there are some greater concentrations of certain periods”. So the team has identified that generally, similar types of lithic material are found across the hillside, with some concentrations demonstrating more intensive use at certain locations during certain periods. For instance, surface surveys have uncovered more Middle and Lower Palaeolithic material from the areas toward the summit of the hill in front of two identified rock shelters and in the vicinity of the coast at the bottom of the hill, than in other areas. From the evidence uncovered in the excavation trenches the Mesolithic is best represented by the materials uncovered at the top of the Stélida hill, Upper Palaeolithic material is found “everywhere”, and Middle Palaeolithic evidence found below the summit and in the middle of the hill’s slope (although intermixed with later material). Interestingly, the loose concentration of excavated Middle Palaeolithic material comes from an area associated with both a rock shelter and an ancient spring.
Carter revealed another fascinating observation. “The work of my colleague Dr. Dora Moutsiou suggests that there are hints of raw material preferences through time.”—With this statement, he suggests that the evidence from Stélida may show that particular types of chert may have been preferred by different hominins at different times. Middle Palaeolithic materials are more often the slightly grainy grey and orange cherts sourced from around Stélida’s Rock Shelter A (basically an area of collapsed rocks upslope from a spring) and further north on the hill, while the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic materials are more often made of the lustrous white-blue chert sourced from the southern summit of Stélida. The suggestion therefore is that when they visited Stélida to quarry, Neanderthals were looking for grainy grey-orange chert and, later, Homo sapiens were looking for smooth white-blue chert. Perhaps this was part of the prehistoric oral history of Stélida – passing down through generations not only what the landscape was like and how to get there, but what sort of stone tool making materials would be found once they arrived.
The assemblage excavated by SNAP from Stélida is comprised exclusively of lithics due to the highly alkaline nature of the hills’ calcareous soil. The only location so far excavated by SNAP that may produce information about any organic presence on the hillside in the prehistoric period comes from a trench located in front of Rock Shelter B. But Carter clarified for me that “we are not permitted at present to excavate inside the two shelters […] as that falls under jurisdiction of a different bureau of the Greek Ministry of Culture”. The trench just outside of Rock Shelter B contained traces of in situ hearths that may be of Upper Palaeolithic date. According to Carter the fauna from this context is microscopic and is being investigated by a specialist in sedimentary aDNA analysis (a technique to identify evidence of animals and plants via extracted traces of aDNA from soil samples) at the McMaster University ancient DNA laboratory. It is hoped that this innovative technique will expose another facet of what the environment was like at Stélida in the Palaeolithic. Tantalizingly, Carter stated that some of the plant remains from the potential hearths “might be material for matting [or] fuel”. There will be more to come on this once the data is published.
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Aerial view of Trench DG-A/001 (or ‘Trench 1’). Evaggelos Tzoumenekas
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Team member Irina Kajtez (Belgrade University) excavating Trench 1 (DG-A/001) in 2015. Rachit Srivastava
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Shannon Crewson (McMaster University undergraduate in 2015) documenting the excavation of Trench 3 (DG-A/003) in 2015. Rachit Srivastava
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Ioanna Aslamatzidi (undergraduate Athens University) and Hanna Erftenbeck (PhD candidate Note Dame University) screen for finds on Stelida, 2017. Jason Lau
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Justin Holcomb (co-author and PhD candidate Boston University) takes and prepares a soil sample from the lower levels of DG-A/001 (‘Trench 1’) for micromorphological studies to understand the development of the deep archaeological sequence. Jason Lau
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Geological hand sample of Stelida chert. Nikos Skarpelis
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Beatrice Fletcher (PhD candidate McMaster University) studies a stone tool from the excavations, 2015. Rachit Srivastava
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Implications: A Shifting Paradigm
When the Stélida area was first reached by hominins the landscape would have been much different than what we see today. Scientific investigations into the ancient environment suggest that the modern islands of Naxos and Paros were joined with others as part of one great island known as the ‘Cycladean Island’ during the glacial maximum (the stage of the Ice Age when the maximum amount of sea water was trapped in glaciers). Paleogeographic reconstructions of the area indicate that during the interglacial periods of the Quarternary (the time period from 2.59 million years ago to the present), sea levels may have been low enough to expose a land bridge between the Greek and Anatolian peninsulas that would have resembled a wetland environment rich in resources. One can envision that tens of thousands of years ago when hominins and anatomically modern humans climbed the hill at Stélida to reach the chert outcrops they would have been looking out over a green, grassy plain, an estuary or even a lagoon, with the sea many kilometers away. It is likely that they were not only attracted to the great Cycladean Island for the Naxian emery, chert at Stélida, or the basalt and obsidian of the nearby island of Melos, but equally for the hunting and foraging opportunities provided by the surrounding wetland environment.
The average person with an average lifespan would find it difficult to fathom a time span of 1 million years. This is the amount of time that has passed since hominins first moved into Europe from Africa, during the Lower Palaeolithic and before anatomically modern humans had even evolved. There is no current way to know if Stélida or somewhere else in the vicinity was a location used for long-term habitation during the Palaeolithic. Due to the nature of the site and the material record available for dating, precise dates for the exploitation events at the chert source are not possible. It is unclear whether the use of the site in the Lower to Middle Paleolithic was intermittent, opportunistic or consistent. Nevertheless, the archaeological material being uncovered suggests that Stélida was a place hominins and anatomically modern humans came back to again and again to extract chert. The question remains: how did they get there?
Early Mariners?
It has always been assumed that these early hominin explorers of Europe were not able to make boats (even the most basic) and so could never have traversed large bodies of water like seas. However, the current evidence from the Palaeolithic environment models tell us that there would not have been large bodies of water to cross in the region of Naxos. At worst, the crossings would have been much smaller, with hominins likely seeing the next landfall within sight of their point of origin. Tides would still have had an effect and at different periods in prehistory the depth and width of the water being crossed would have varied depending on the total glaciation. If water crossing was necessary (as opposed to land bridges) the craft fashioned by the early quarriers may not have resembled what we think of as boats today, but clearly they were effective in allowing Stélida to be accessed again and again for hundreds of thousands of years. The results from SNAP can therefore be described as ground-breaking evidence for alternative route-ways for Homo sapiens and their ancient predecessors’ movements from Asia into Europe.
With this, the possibility of pre-sapiens accessing locations like Stélida triggers a new understanding of what these hominins may have been capable of cognitively. This includes the capacity to communicate complex ideas through shared language, perhaps the construction of vessels to carry them across bodies of water, an understanding of the moon and tides, likely the ability to identify landmarks and return to a site previously visited and/or to follow directions passed on from another, and the ability to navigate a landscape and environment quite different from those elsewhere in Eurasia. To support such a fundamental shift in our understanding of pre-sapien hominin capabilities, a robust data set and sample size that can be scientifically dated from a clearly stratified excavation, like Stélida, is required.
The SNAP excavations and analysis has revealed the first stratified, large, and well-dated Pleistocene lithic assemblage from the Cyclades that allows for the assertion that hominin and anatomically modern human dispersals into Europe traversed through areas, like the Aegean Basin, that have been previously viewed as inaccessible. The team suggests that instead of a single route into Europe from the Anatolian peninsula it is more likely that pre-sapiens and anatomically modern humans took a variety of routes for a variety of reasons. Until now there has been no robust evidence for Middle Pleistocene cultural activity in the central Aegean; Neanderthals and earlier hominins were thought to have been present only on either side of the region, continental Greece and the Anatolian peninsula. Now, new evidence suggests that the Aegean Basin region was open for consistent use by hominins throughout the Palaeolithic.
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Location of Stélida archaeological site and hypothesized hominin dispersal routes: 1, Stelida; 2, Rodafnidia; 3, Karaburun; and 4, Plakias. Base map modified from Lykousis 2009 (22). Figure by J.H.
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Reconstruction of prehistoric spearheads hypothesized to have been made from stone material at Stélida – of Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, plus Mesolithic date (L-R). Kathryn Killackey
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Select artifacts from Stélida. Flakes unless otherwise noted. a, scraper; b, backed flake; c, bladelet; d, piercer; e, piercer on blade-like flake; f, piercer; g, combined tool (burin and scraper on chunk); h, nosed scraper; i, combined tool (inverse scraper/denticulate/notch); j, denticulate (LU5); k, flake; l, denticulated blade-like flake (LU7); m, piercer; n, denticulate; o, denticulate; p, piercer; q, combined tool (linear retouch/denticulate); r, scraper; s, convergent denticulate (Tayac point); t, blade; u, scraper; v, denticulate; w, linear retouch; x, tranchet; and y, blade-like flake (LU6). Photographed by J. Lau and modified and page set by N. Thompson.
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Moving Forward
The SNAP team will be returning to Stélida for another season of excavation in 2020, with continued support from the Canadian Institute in Greece for a new five-year research permit from the Greek Ministry of Culture. Carter plans to return to some very deep (4.5 m) trenches that were opened in previous seasons to obtain further dates, and to start some new excavation trenches in areas of the hillside that may contain less disturbed deposits. The positioning of the new trenches is based on a detailed topographic analysis, says Carter: “We used drone photography to produce a 5 cm resolution digital elevation model and using that with GIS to reconstruct micro-watersheds, and interrogate artifact distribution”. Further work will also be done at the summit of Stélida, but Carter is currently tight-lipped about additional new discoveries the team has been making there — a clue that Stélida will continue to reveal new boundary-pushing evidence of early hominin and anatomically modern human activity in the Aegean.
Arianna Zakrzewski is an intern and writer for Popular Archaeology. She is also a graduate from Rhode Island College with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. She has had an interest in archaeology since elementary school, specifically Egyptology and the Classics. In recent years, she has also gained an interest in historical archaeology, and has spent time in the field working in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, participating in excavation and archival research. Most recently, she completed her MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. She is currently focused on collections management and making archaeological discoveries accessible and exciting to the public.
When one hears the name Pontius Pilate, an indelible image comes to mind: the infamous tunic-and-toga cladded Roman prefect of Jerusalem who played a salient role in the judgment, conviction and crucifixion of Jesus. Though this remains the popular depiction of the man, scholarship and archaeology has, over the years, painted a more complex portrait of this, the Roman Emperor’s official representative to the ancient city. He was also a governor assigned the thankless task of negotiating and, at times ruthlessly, managing volatile and resistant, adversarial groups within the population.
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And like King Herod the Great himself, he was also, albeit to a lesser degree, a builder.
So suggests the findings of a recent study published by Nahshon Szanton, Moran Hagbi, Joe Uziel and Donald T. Ariel in Tel Aviv:Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, which details new excavation findings that lead researchers to conclude that a street in Jerusalem leading to the Temple Mount, the largest urban building project in Jerusalem in antiquity, was constructed under Pilate’s governance.
Prior Excavations
Excavations on what has been called the ‘stepped street’ actually began in the late 19th century. Since then, numerous researchers have attempted to find answers to research questions, including the timeframe of the street’s construction. Historically, one consensus suggests the time range between Herod and his grandson,Herod Agrippa—which places the construction timeline anywhere between 37BCE and 66CE.
There have been a total of fourteen excavations on the stepped street since 1867, with each new dig unveiling more of the street’s history. The first two excavations, ranging approximately from 1867 to 1897, revealed a drainage channel that ran the course of the street, appearing in both excavations in different areas of the site. The street has been traced from the southern gate near the Siloam Pool north to the Temple Mount. Material evidence from a 2007-8 excavation conducted by Onn yielded ceramics within the pavement that provided a secure date within the 1st Century CE. Years later in 2011, Shukron recovered two ritual baths—one next to the Western Wall, and one further north—which contained coins that could be dated between 17/18 CE and 24/25CE in the first bath, and 5/6 CE during the rule of Augustus in the second bath.
According to new data, however, researchers have been able to narrow down the street’s construction significantly. The new data suggests construction on the stepped street began after 17/8 CE, and that the project was completed after 30/1 CE and no later than 41/2 CE……….
Current Excavations
Since 2013, two excavations have exposed elements related to the stepped street. The first location was at the southern extent of the Tyropean Valley, exposed from the Siloam Pool for a length of 220m. This area has been designated Area S. Here, the excavation team has discovered that the street measures approximately 7.5m wide, with 0.6m curb stones that have been finely carved from limestone, making the street wider than 8m when the curb is included. Artifacts recovered beneath a thick destruction layer above the street feature include pottery sherds, glass, metal, and—most interestingly—coins dating to the days of the First Jewish Revolt. This means that the street was destroyed and no longer used after 70 CE. Probes were dug in several locations beneath the street pavement, yielding more material evidence providing a terminus post quem for the construction of the street.A total of 22 coins were found in three probes, with the most recent coin dating back to 30/1 CE during the rule of Pontius Pilate.
At a second location, 360m north of Area S, archaeologists excavated the southwest corner of the Temple Mount. Alternating layers of fill yielded pottery, glass, animal bones, and coins dated back to the 1st Century CE. Three chambers along the wall that measured 2m x 2m were also excavated in this area, which contained pottery—including a tall stand dating to the 1st Century CE—animal bones, charcoal, and more coins. There were 79 coins found in these fills, with the most recent dating back to the rule of Tiberius, approximately 17/8 CE to 24/5 CE. The walls were built before the street; we know this because the coins in the construction fill of the drainage system match with the coins found beneath the street.
The study presented by Szanton, Hagbi, Uziel and Ariel (noted above) presents evidence that backs up previous claims that the street’s construction took place in the 1st Century CE. The most recent data presented in this study places the terminus post quem at 30/1 CE. The excavation of 101 coins made reevaluating the dating possible, allowing researchers to narrow down the date of construction even further. Based on their findings, the researchers argue that the construction of the stepped street had to be attributed to the governing prefect prior to Agrippa I. This would be a prefect under Tiberius’ rule. Since there were many prefects in Jerusalem at different times, it is nearly impossible to say for certain the exact prefect stationed in the city at the time of the street construction as there are no written records to confirm. However, the current consensus among researchers is that the street was built under Pontius Pilate’s rule.
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Location map, marking excavation sites. D. Levi, IAA; printed by permission of the Survey of Israel.
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The pavement of the street and the solid foundation that was exposed in a place where no paving stones were preserved. A. Peretz, IAA
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View of the foundations of the Western Wall (left) and the retaining wall that abutted it, built on bedrock (below). To the right are the constructive layers that filled the support system. M. Hagbi, IAA
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Pontius Pilate the Builder
Pontius Pilate was the most prominent prefect during the beginning of construction (17/8 CE-24/5 CE) as well as its completion (40/1 CE). We know the street’s construction was completed prior to 40/1 CE because of the lack of coins minted by Agrippa I, who would have minted coins starting in 40/1 CE. Therefore, the street’s construction must have been completed no more than between 30 CE and 40 CE. This also means that the construction would have begun in the 20s. There are two dates that are debated as the start of Pilate’s reign: 19 CE, and 26 CE. However, the range of construction dates proposed by the researchers matches both contested dates of the start of Pilate’s reign, which further supports the contention that the street was built under his rule. In addition to this, Pilate had a history of building projects with his name attached. Although the archaeological evidence is still scant compared to that of Herod’s building projects, in addition to the street, the construction of the aqueduct has also been attributed to the Roman prefect, as was the construction of the Tiberieum in Caesarea. Thus it can be argued that the stepped street is the second Jerusalem building project to be attributed to a Roman governor, along with the aqueduct, both of which can be attributed to Pilate.
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A single inscription by Pilate has survived at the ancient site of Caesarea, on the so-called “Pilate Stone”. The (partially reconstructed) inscription is as follows: “Tiberium [?of the Caesareans?] Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea [ .. has given?]”. The stone attests to Pilate’s title of prefect and the inscription appears to refer to a building called a Tiberieum at Caesarea. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Image
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Model of the City of David, in the south of the Old City of Jerusalem, where the stepped street was constructed passing near the Siloam Pool close to where archaeologists excavated and exposed a portion of the street. Berthold Werner, Wikimedia Commons public domain image
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Exposed portion of the stepped Pool of Siloam. Abraham, Wikimedia Commons public domain image
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Keeping the Peace
While depictions of the prefect are typically quite negative in the historical sources, Pilate’s history of building projects and reign in Jerusalem suggest a man who was clearly a loyal officer of Rome and Caesar, and who strove for stability in the province for which he was responsible. The construction of the aqueduct and the large stepped street were building improvement projects likely meant to glorify Jerusalem by introducing quality architecture from the Roman world. In the case of the stepped street, Pilate constructed a convenient road for the people of Jerusalem to travel on going to and from the Temple Mount from the southern gate of the city by the Siloam Pool, thus making the trek to their place of worship easier.
Though Pilate could arguably be placed on the list of the world’s great villains, one could also make a case that he was also doing what any Roman prefect in an occupied community would have been tasked to do—keeping the peace in any way he could.
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).
What we see is not always what we expect, whether it is natural or man-made. This is often true with archaeological remains of cities or human settlement, when new discoveries shed unexpected light on old finds, leaving new questions in their wake. Chichén Itzá, the great ancient Maya city in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is a good case in point. Well-known to thousands of visitors world-wide, it is a place popularly thought to have been thoroughly explored and revealed.
Or so we may think……
At spring and fall equinoxes as it moves from east to west, the sun plays with the angles of the northeast stairway of Chichén Itzá’s Kukulcán pyramid, called El Castillo in Spanish. The course of the sun projects the shadows of the corners of the pyramid onto the vertical northeast face of the stairway balustrade, giving the visual impression of the body of an undulating serpent slowly crawling down toward its stone head at the bottom.
Thousands of tourists gather on the Grand Plaza to witness the event. They come to share in a communal spirit that transcends time and culture. In our time of extraordinary changes in science and technology, unimaginable only twenty years ago, people still search for mythical answers to contradictions and mysteries in a swiftly moving world.
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The Kukulcan Spring Equinox shadow.
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The Shadow and the Equinox
For the ancient Maya, the Kukulcán pyramid was representative of the four-sided temple-mountain, or the fourfold partitioning of the world. The name of its deity is a Maya-Yucatec translation from the name Quetzalcoatl in the nahuatl language. It translates as “Quetzal feathered serpent”, whose religious concept came from Tula, in central Mexico. The record shows that the ideology spread throughout Mesoamarica by the Late Maya Classic period (600-950AD).
Kukulcán is believed to represent the Creation Mountain, with its Feathered Serpents’ head and mouth agape at the base of both balustrades of the north stairway. The serpent symbol, in Maya iconography, appears profusely on numerous stone stelae, temple columns and painted ceramics. The shedding of the serpent’s skin was understood as the renewal of time and life through nature’s repeated cycles. This perception explains why the serpent symbol, attached to both life and death events, is so widespread throughout the ancient cultures of the Americas, and beyond.
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The Temple-Pyramid of Kukulcan
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The temple-pyramid is not cardinally oriented, although mythologically, it sits at the center of time and space. The pyramid’s corners are lined up on a northeast-southwest axis toward the rising sun at the summer equinox, and its setting point at the winter equinox, making Kukulcán a monumental sun dial for the solar year. Each of the temple-pyramid’s 52 panels contained in its nine terraced levels equal the number of years in the Maya and Toltec agrarian calendars. The nine levels are reminders of the nine steps to Xibalba, the underworld. Above all, Kukulcán is an instrument dedicated to the deities of nature and their role in the repeated night-day alternations, and in life and death.
The main doorway of the outer temple at the top of the pyramid opens to the north. The four stairways ascending the pyramid, one on each side, have 91 steps each, totaling 364 steps that, with the temple at the top, constitute the 365 days of the solar year, the haab’, in Maya. The north stairway is the main sacred path, and it is on its northeast balustrade that the sun casts the triangular shadows. Of note is the fact that, in Maya culture, north equals the departure of the power of nature and anchors the sun in culture. It is a metaphor associated with understanding mankind’s burden and commitment in the universe.
The Great Plaza, Kukulcán and the Primordial Sea
The Great Plaza that surrounds ElCastillo on four sides is part of the New Chichén (900-1500AD), a portrayal of the Primordial Sea of Creation from which, according to Maya tradition, all life sprung at the beginning of time. The plaza’s north side, on which Kukulcán is built, was also the area where major ceremonies took place. It is bordered by the Venus Platform, close to that of the Jaguars and Eagle Warriors. Behind it is the massive skull rack, or tzompantli in Nahuatl; it is 164 feet long by 40 feet wide and may be the second largest in Mexico. On the skull rack was a scaffold-like construction of wood poles built over the stone structure, on which hundreds of skulls of war captives and sacrificial victims were displayed anciently.
On the east side of the Great Plaza is the massive Temple of the Warriors, and the no less important Ball Court to the west—the largest in the Americas, it is 552 feet long by 300 feet wide, with walls that rise 20 feet. The Great Plaza was enclosed by a wall over seven feet high, with a limited number of guarded entrances, among which is the one leading to the sacred well, the sacbeh.1 or “white road”; there are over 34 sacbeob (plural for sacbeh), in Chichén. Most buildings are oriented 17 degrees off true north; Kukulcán is 23 degrees off.
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The Great Plaza at Chichén Itzá
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Chichén Itza’s Spiritual Gateways
Two other portals, or spiritual gateways, are linked to the temple-pyramid; one natural, the other man-made. The first is the huge sacred cenote, or sink hole, referred to as the “Great Well of the Itza”. This natural well was not used for domestic purposes, but exclusively for rituals. It is reached by the large elevated sacbeh.1, heading 900 feet northward from the Great Plaza and the Venus Platform. The cenote was believed to be the place of communication with the gods of Xibalba, the “Place of Awe”, or underworld, as well as with Cha’ak, the powerful Maya god of rain, lightning and thunder.
The second gateway was the ballcourt where, in accordance with the Maya-Kichè sacred book, the Popol Vuh or Book of Counsel, men and deities of the underworld battle for supremacy, for one or the other team in the real world during ritual ballgames. According to Maya tradition, it is only when ritual games with the deities of the underworld interface simultaneously with a game in the world above that interaction between the two worlds, or field of opposites, was believed to take place. There was no interaction with the deities of the underworld during secular or common games.
The seasons and the metronomic passage of heavenly bodies were understood by the Maya as essential markers to alleviate anxieties of daily life by their repeated familiarity. Their transit through both day and night is enshrined in belief structures and ceremonies spanning thousands of generations. After all, the Maya believed that the sun did not set, but continued its course as the “black sun” at night, to gloriously rise again the following morning. Most ancient monuments are also associated with this spiritual view of the world, essential to carrying out the secular and spiritual functions of cultures.
The Cenote of Sacrifice, the First Gateway
The sacred well is oval shaped (164 feet by 200 feet). From its lip to the water the drop is 72 feet and its depth is 65 feet; there is a bed of mud about 20 feet thick at the bottom.
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The Well of Sacrifice
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In one of the rooms of the structure built on the lip of the Well of Sacrifice was the temazcal, or steam bath, to purify sacrificial victims to Cha’ak, god of rain and thunder, and its deities. Gifts were of precious jade and gold, fine ceramics—and human lives—as human remains found at its bottom testify. Noteworthy is the absence of Toltec material in the cenote. Each offering was made in accordance with the needs of the time and the demands of the gods. The archaeological record shows that human sacrifices were of both gender and of any age. In time of dire needs such as a persistent drought, a community would sacrifice its best, not the sickly or the maimed. Sacrificed victims had to be able and in their prime and, the younger the better, for Cha’ak would not accept anything less.
Fundamentals in Maya Belief Structure
The socio-economic organization of ancient Maya communities was based on agriculture, grounded in two seasons at that latitude, which meant two harvests. Hence the Maya belief structure and religious organization that adhered to their seasonal and daily partnership with nature. The gods and deities from their pantheon were those driving the fundamentals of nature they knew: the sun, rain and the vegetable world.
These fundamentals are enshrined in the Popol Vuh, which describes the creation of the universe by the gods who, after failing four times, succeeded in creating mankind out of maize dough. Above all, concurrently with the deities, ancestors were believed to participate at every stage of family daily life and, for this reason, were prominent recipients in self-sacrifice ceremonies.
The serpent sculpted on monuments at Chichén Itzá and other ancient Mesoamerican and Mexican sites is a metaphor. It was perceived that its body as it moves is comparable to the swirls of smoke after a self-sacrifice by members of the nobility or the priesthood, when a person’s blood falls on bark paper that is then burned. The swirling smoke was then believed to carry the prayers of the supplicant to ancestors and deities, seeking their guidance for living another day in a dangerous world. In ceremonies today, copal nodules, known as pom in Maya-Kichè, are used instead of human blood. Copal, copalli in Nahuatl, is a resin obtained from thesap of tropical trees, believed to be the equivalent of the “blood” for the vegetal world.
Planting and harvesting were therefore essential daily concerns, together with the weather—rain specifically—because its delay or limited downpour could translate into a bad crop, or no crop at all, and its consequences: famine, death, and the return of anguish and fear. The milpero’s (farmer’s) profound mystical relationship to corn’s mythological substance, and not just its use for actual sustenance, to this day results in a way of life entirely alien to non-traditional communities.
The Great Ball Court, the Second Gateway
The second portal at Chichén is the man-made spiritual gateway, the Great Ball Court, located on the west side of the Plaza together with the Temple of the Jaguars. For the ancient Maya, ball courts, through specific ritual games, were believed to open into the “other world.” This “opening”, however, could only take place during a ritual fateful game destined to end in sacrifice.The deities of Xibalba, the underworld, did not play unless a ritual contest took place above ground at the same time. It is only when the ritual games were concurrent in this world and the “other” that the interplay between the participants in the two worlds were believed to materialize. The metaphor that took place in the ballcourt reflected the tribulations of life and death that define human struggle and tragedy.
Through history the universal use of games for secular and ritual reasons underlines the same need for maintaining peace and balance within communities. Essential to ritual games, and to a certain extent secular games as well, was the need to keep in check latent antagonism between factions of the same polity, as well as between polities.
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The Great Ball Court
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The concept of Kukulcán, or “Feathered Serpent,” dates to the Maya Late Classic Period (600-900AD), when the serpent was known as waxaklahun ubah’kan. In Guatemala the deity was called Guqumatz by the Maya-Kichè, but was an evil monstrous snake, the pet of the sun god, with the Maya-Lacandón. Kukulcán is also the Maya name for the god of agriculture, wind, and storms. He also appears in Postclassic period (900-1500AD), as the Vision Serpent. The god came in the early 7th century with the Toltecs that migrated from Tula. The record shows a long history with Teotihuacán and Tula, on the central plateau of Mexico.
The Maya were already trading with cities of central Mexico with the concurrent exchange of technologies and beliefs inherent with such contacts. Toltec groups migrated sporadically to the Yucatán throughout the 6th century and possibly earlier. Together with Maya-Chontal, called the Itzá that came from Ppolè on the Yucatán’s south coast, they united their forces at Cobá, about 62 miles on the connecting sacbeh to Yaxuná, and 13 miles from Chichén, with those of the Toltecs. From there, they conquered Chichén Itzá in 987. This event is recorded as “the great descent.”
The Mexicans introduced human sacrifice on a scale unknown before by the Maya. Their military expansion aimed at dominating the surrounding land and people, together with control of the important salt trade and sea routes around the peninsula. Their main anchor on Isla Cerito gave them and their allies command of the Yucatán coastal trade routes. Meanwhile in the countryside Maya gods and deities remained mostly unchanged, since the cult of Toltec deities centered in large towns and cities.
The First Pyramid and the Cenote Within
Chichén Itzá today is not the city that was conceptualized by the Maya before the arrival of the Toltec-Itzá invaders. Long before it was called Uuc Yab’nal (the city’s name in Maya-Yucatec). In the early 1950s investigations brought to light a smaller pyramid of nine terraced levels within Kukulcán. Building a larger structure over a smaller one was common practice in the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures. The was because the first structure was believed to be saturated with ancestor power that could not be denied through destruction or return to nature through demolition or decay, under pain of failure of the new generation and its ultimate demise.
The single stairway of the buried temple faces northwest; it has 61 steps and a temple on top with two parallel galleries. There is a triple molding on its façade and a frieze showing a parade of jaguars, shields and two intertwined serpents over the entrance. The similarities between the two pyramids indicate that the one within may also be of Toltec origin.
In the antechamber of the inner temple archaeologists found a red jaguar that may have served as a throne for the High Priest. On the seat was an offering of a turquoise mosaic disk. The jaguar is painted red on limestone; the teeth are made of flint, and there are incrustations of fine jade disks for its eyes and on its body, for the animal’s spots.
In 1958 a cenote and a cave were found 50 feet below the pyramids; the discovery was sealed off from the outside world, probably for lack of resources for further exploration at the time. The cenote and the cave system were “re-discovered” during the ongoing research program of the “Great Maya Aquifer”, and “Chichén Itzá Underground” research programs, approved in 2016. The 1500-foot long cave is called Balamkú, or “God Jaguar” in Maya, but its ancient name is unknown. The jaguar is a central figure in Mesoamerican and other mythologies of the Americas because of the belief in the animal’s ability to enter and leave the underworld at will.
Balamkú remained sealed for more than 50 years after its discovery; it was reopened in 2018 by National Geographic’s Explorer Guillermo de Anda and his team of investigators from the Great Maya Aquifer Project (GAM), during their search for the extent of the water table beneath Chichén Itzá. Exploration of the system was funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society, and in cooperation with the University of California at Los Angeles.
Thus far, over 170 ceramic bi-conical censers were found in seven small rooms carved from the limestone, identified as those of the Toltec god Tlaloc. The ceramics are dated from the Late Classic (700-800AD) to the Terminal Classic (800-1000AD). This important discovery will no doubt help rewrite Chichén Itzá’s history.
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Tlaloc Bi-Conical Censers
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INAH-GAM archaeologist Guillermo de Anda suggests that Balamkú appears to be the “mother” of Balankanchè cave, 1.5 miles away. “I don’t want to say that quantity is more important than information,” he states, “but when you see that there are many, many offerings in a cave that is also much more difficult to access, this tells us something.” Archaeologists now have the opportunity to answer some of the most perplexing questions that continue to stir controversy among mayanists, such as the level of contacts and influence exchanged between different Mesoamerican cultures, and what was going on in the Maya world prior to the fall of Chichén Itzá.
Chichén Yet to be Discovered
Then as today, traditions were comparable to those seen on more recent temple-pyramids, which symbolically show the same concern for life’s daily predicaments, and societies’ dependence on agriculture. Was the serpent’s shadow also seen on equinoxes on the now-hidden pyramid within Kukulcán? We do not know. The sun’s shadow, as seen on the more recent structure may not have been visible then, given its smaller size and angle of the buried structure.
There will be much more to be said about Chichén Itzá, since much is still hidden, as work on the Balamkú cave has attested. Furthermore, excavation programs in the Great Plaza, initiated in 2009, revealed buried structures that pre-date Kukulcán. By 2009 we already knew about the pyramid within. Puzzling discoveries and wonders are certain to continue. Mysteries remain: What else does Chichén Itzá, and its great pyramid hold? What happened to Kukulcán after the defeat of Chichen Itza by Unac Ceel, ruler of Mayapan in the 13th century? The deity moved with the conqueror to the new Maya political epicenter, 65 miles to the west; but that is another story.
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Great Plaza Discoveries
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This narrative is only a glimpse of the ancient city’s complex history. Understanding the questions about its great past will take more “stories” and, no doubt, new interpretations in light of ongoing discoveries. As well, other major monuments of the ancient city can be presented together with their history and purpose, from Old Chichén, to the Observatory (or Caracol), the Temple of the Warriors, Temple of the Three Lintels, the common well Xtoloc or “iguana”, the Chinchán-Chob or Red House, the Osario and its cenote below, and the Nunnery that together with the Akab-Dzib, are among the oldest buildings, and much more.
UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND—”The inhabitants of the Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the Kwazulu-Natal/eSwatini border were cooking starchy plants 170 thousand years ago,” says Professor Lyn Wadley, a scientist from the Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (Wits ESI). “This discovery is much older than earlier reports for cooking similar plants and it provides a fascinating insight into the behavioral practices of early modern humans in southern Africa. It also implies that they shared food and used wooden sticks to extract plants from the ground.”
“It is extraordinary that such fragile plant remains have survived for so long,” says Dr Christine Sievers, a scientist from the University of the Witwatersrand, who completed the archaeobotanical work with Wadley. The underground food plants were uncovered during excavations at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains (on the border of KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, and eSwatini [formerly Swaziland]), where the team has been digging since 2015. During the excavation, Wadley and Sievers recognised the small, charred cylinders as rhizomes. All appear to belong to the same species, and 55 charred, whole rhizomes were identified as Hypoxis, commonly called the Yellow Star flower. “The most likely of the species growing in KwaZulu-Natal today is the slender-leafed Hypoxis angustifolia that is favored as food,” adds Sievers. “It has small rhizomes with white flesh that is more palatable than the bitter, orange flesh of rhizomes from the better known medicinal Hypoxis species (incorrectly called African Potato).”
The Border Cave plant identifications were made on the size and shape of the rhizomes and on the vascular structure examined under a scanning electron microscope. Modern Hypoxis rhizomes and their ancient counterparts have similar cellular structures and the same inclusions of microscopic crystal bundles, called raphides. The features are still recognizable even in the charred specimens. Over a four-year period, Wadley and Sievers made a collection of modern rhizomes and geophytes from the Lebombo area. “We compared the botanical features of the modern geophytes and the ancient charred specimens, in order to identify them,” explains Sievers.
Hypoxis rhizomes are nutritious and carbohydrate-rich with an energy value of approximately 500 KJ/100g. While they are edible raw, the rhizomes are fibrous and have high fracture toughness until they are cooked. The rhizomes are rich in starch and would have been an ideal staple plant food. “Cooking the fibre-rich rhizomes would have made them easier to peel and to digest so more of them could be consumed and the nutritional benefits would be greater,” says Wadley.
Wooden digging sticks used to extract the plants from the ground
“The discovery also implies the use of wooden digging sticks to extract the rhizomes from the ground. One of these tools was found at Border Cave and is directly dated at circa 40,000 years ago,” says co-author of the paper and co-director of the excavation, Professor Francesco d’Errico, (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, France and University of Bergen, Norway). Dr Lucinda Backwell (Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales, ISES-CONICET, Tucumán, Argentina) also co-authored the paper and was a co-director of the excavation.
The plants were cooked and shared
The Hypoxis rhizomes were mostly recovered from fireplaces and ash dumps rather than from surrounding sediment. “The Border Cave inhabitants would have dug Hypoxis rhizomes from the hillside near the cave, and carried them back to the cave to cook them in the ashes of fireplaces,” says Wadley. “The fact that they were brought back to the cave rather than cooked in the field suggests that food was shared at the home base. This suggests that the rhizomes were roasted in ashes and that, in the process, some were lost. While the evidence for cooking is circumstantial, it is nonetheless compelling.”
Discoveries at Border Cave
This new discovery adds to the long list of important finds at Border Cave. The site has been repeatedly excavated since Raymond Dart first worked there in 1934. Amongst earlier discoveries were the burial of a baby with a Conus seashell at 74,000 years ago, a variety of bone tools, an ancient counting device, ostrich eggshell beads, resin, and poison that may once have been used on hunting weapons.
The Border Cave Heritage Site
Border Cave is a heritage site with a small site museum. The cave and museum are open to the public, though bookings are essential [Olga Vilane (+27) (0) 72 180 4332]. Wadley and her colleagues hope that the Border Cave discovery will emphasize the importance of the site as an irreplaceable cultural resource for South Africa and the rest of the world.
About Hypoxis angustifolia
Hypoxis angustifolia is evergreen, so it has visibility year-round, unlike the more common deciduous Hypoxis species. It thrives in a variety of modern habitats and is thus likely to have had wide distribution in the past as it does today. It occurs in sub-Saharan Africa, south Sudan, some Indian Ocean islands, and as far afield as Yemen. Its presence in Yemen may imply even wider distribution of this Hypoxis plant during previous humid conditions. Hypoxis angustifolia rhizomes grow in clumps so many can be harvested at once. “All of the rhizome’s attributes imply that it could have provided a reliable, familiar food source for early humans trekking within Africa, or even out of Africa,” said Lyn Wadley. Hunter-gatherers tend to be highly mobile so the wide distribution of a potential staple plant food would have ensured food security.
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Border Cave excavation. Dr. Lucinda Backwell
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Border Cave entrance in the Lebombo Mountains, South Africa. Ashley Kruger
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Hypoxis angustifolia growth habit. Prof. Lyn Wadley/Wits University
THIS IS NOT AN ORDINARY TOUR. Popular Archaeology is joining forces with Education First International and Dr. Anabel Ford of the MesoAmerican Research Center to host a one-of-kind group visit to iconic ancient Maya sites in Guatemala, Mexico and Belize. We say ‘one-of-a-kind’ because, unlike all other typical tours of ancient Maya sites in Central America, this one is archaeologically intense, visiting 15 ancient May centers in as many days and also focusing on subjects and issues not often touched upon through other more standard tours. Did the ancient Maya civilization really ‘collapse’ at all, as so many scholars have suggested? What is the evidence to suggest otherwise? What new lessons can we learn from the ancient Maya about sustainable living in an age of global climate change? How should the ancient monumental remains of the Maya be properly conserved and studied? Does the new remote sensing technology provide us with the best or ultimate means to uncovering the evidence of what the ancient Maya built and how they lived? These and many other questions and topics will be addressed on the scene by our expert host, Dr. Ford, who will accompany us to a variety of sites, including Tikal, Palenque, Calakmul, Yaxha, Lamanai, El Pilar, and many others, through three countries in Central America. Because of her decades of in-depth and unique research in the world of the ancient Maya, she will provide a perspective unlike what you can find with most other scholars in the field. Read more about her by going to http://www.marc.ucsb.edu/about/director, and by reading her profile at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabel_Ford). Whether you have visited many of these ancient sites or not, this travel opportunity promises to provide an experience unlike anything else in this region of the world. The travel group spaces will be limited in number so if you are seriously interested please let us know by sending an email to popularchaeology@gmail.com. The itinerary is now close to completion and the draft program, cost and tentative dates will be sent to you after we hear from you!
A look back on 2019: As we leave 2019 and look forward to another year of great articles in 2020, here is an encore of Popular Archaeology’s best stories of 2019!
Writing for young readers, author Laura Scandiffio relates the detailed story about the remarkable burial discovery of King Richard III and what it says about the real king, beyond the popular accounts and tales of infamy.
Archaeological excavations at Jamestown in Virginia are yielding new material finds related to the Western Hemisphere’s first representative government, and the beginnings of slavery in the British colonies.
Fossil evidence bearing on the earliest peopling of the Americas.
Image above: Researchers in the East Chamber, Denisova cave, with (left to right) Michael Shunkov, Katerina Douka, Tom Higham, Maxim Kozlinkin. (photo credit/copyright Sergey Zelinski, Russian Academy of Sciences).
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY—People transported animals over huge distances for mass gatherings at one of Ireland’s most iconic archaeological sites, research* concludes.
Dr Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University led the study, which analyzed the bones of 35 animals excavated from Navan Fort, the legendary capital of Ulster. Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, Memorial University Newfoundland and the British Geological Survey were also involved in the research.
The site had long been considered a center for ritual gatherings, as excavations found a huge 40m diameter building and a barbary ape cranium, likely from at least as far as Iberia. Results suggest the pigs, cattle and sheep were brought from across Ireland, perhaps being reared as far afield as Galway, Donegal, Down, Tyrone and Antrim. Evidence suggests some were brought over more than 100 miles.
Dr Madgwick, based in Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: “Our results provide clear evidence that communities in Iron Age Ireland were very mobile and that livestock were also moved over greater distances than was previously thought.
“The high proportion of pig remains found there is very rare for this period. This suggests that Navan Fort was a feasting centre, as pigs are well-suited as feasting animals and in early Irish literature pork is the preferred food of the feast.
“It is clear that Navan Fort had a vast catchment and that the influence of the site was far-reaching.”
Researchers used multi-isotope analysis on samples of tooth enamel to unlock the origins of each animal. Food and water have chemical compositions linked to the geographical areas where they are sourced. When animals eat and drink, these chemical signals are archived in their teeth, allowing scientists to investigate the location where they were raised.
Co-author of the research, Dr Finbar McCormick, of Queen’s University, Belfast, said: “In the absence of human remains, multi-isotope analysis of animals found at Navan Fort provides us with the best indication of human movement at that time.
“Feasting, almost invariably associated with sacrifice, was a social necessity of early societies where the slaughter of a large domesticate necessitated the consumption of a large amount of meat in a short period of time.”
Earlier this year, Dr Madgwick’s research of 131 pigs found at sites near Stonehenge revealed animals came from as far away as Scotland and numerous other locations across the British Isles. Before this, the origins of people who visited this area and the extent of the population’s movements at the time had been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory.
Dr Madgwick added: “Transporting animals across the country would have involved a great deal of time and effort so our findings demonstrate the important role they played in society. Food was clearly a central part of people’s exchanges and traditions.”
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One of the analyzed pig jaws for the study. Dr Richard Madgwick
FLINDERS UNIVERSITY—Ancient Neolithic villagers on the Carmel Coast in Israel built a seawall to protect their settlement against rising sea levels in the Mediterranean, revealing humanity’s struggle against rising oceans and flooding stretches back thousands of years.
An international team of researchers from the University of Haifa, Flinders University in Australia, the Israel Antiquities Authority and The Hebrew University uncovered and analyzed the oldest known coastal defence system anywhere in the world, constructed by ancient settlers from boulders sourced in riverbeds from 1-2km near their village.
In a study published today in PLOS ONE, Dr Ehud Galili from the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, explains that the over 100 meter long seawall proved to be a temporary reprieve and the ancient village was eventually abandoned and inundated.
This discovery provides new insights into ancient human responses to current threats posed by sea level rise.
“During the Neolithic, Mediterranean populations would have experienced a sea-level rise of 4 to 7 mm a year or approximately 12-21cm during a lifetime (up to 70 cm in a 100 years). This rate of sea-level rise means the frequency of destructive storms damaging the village would have risen significantly,” says Dr Galili.
“The environmental changes would have been noticeable to people, during the lifetime of a settlement across several centuries. Eventually the accumulating yearly sea-level necessitated a human response involving the construction of a coastal protection wall similar to what we’re seeing around the world now.”
In a scenario comparable to the sinking capital of Jakarta today, ancient Tel Hreiz was built at a safe elevation of up to 3 meters above sea level but post glacial sea-level rises of up to 7mm a year posed a threat to settlers and their homes.
Coauthor Dr Jonathan Benjamin from Flinders University in Australia says the Tel Hreiz settlement was first recognized as a potential archaeological site in the 1960’s but the relevant areas that were exposed by natural processes in 2012, revealed this previously unknown archaeological material
“There are no known or similar built structures at any of the other submerged villages in the region, making the Tel Hreiz site a unique example of this visible evidence for human response to sea-level rise in the Neolithic.”
“Modern sea-level rise has already caused lowland coastal erosion around the world. Given the size of coastal populations and settlements, the magnitude of predicted future population displacement differs considerably to the impacts on people during the Neolithic period.”
Current estimates predict 21st century sea level rise to range from 1.7 to 3mm per year, representing a smaller change when compared to the threat experienced by the Neolithic community that built the ancient sea wall, however many of the same challenges will be posed according to the authors.
“Many of the fundamental human questions and the decision-making relating to human resilience, coastal defense, technological innovation and decisions to ultimately abandon long-standing settlements remain relevant.” says Dr Galili.
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Eastern Mediterranean and the Israeli coast: Submerged Neolithic settlements off the Carmel coast 2019. John McCarthy after Galili et al.
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Photographs of finds from the Tel Hreiz settlement: (a-b) exposure of stone-built features in shallow water. (c) wooden posts dug into the seabed. (d) bifacial flintadze. (e) in situ stone bowl made of sandstone. (f) in situ basalt grounding stone (scale = 20cm); (g) burial 1. (h) suspected stone-built cist grave – view from the east (scale = 20cm). (i) in situ antler of Mesopotamian fallow deer, Dama dama mesopotamica. All photographs by E. Galili with the exception of Fig 3G by V. Eshed
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Isometric modeling of the Tel Hreiz seawall based on an aerial photograph of the site and its hinterland: (b) schematic cross section of the site today; (c) during the Pottery Neolithic period. J. McCarthy, E. Galili, and J. Benjamin.
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA—Homo erectus, one of modern humans’ direct ancestors, was a wandering bunch. After the species dispersed from Africa about two million years ago, it colonized the ancient world, which included Asia and possibly Europe.
But about 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus essentially vanished. The lone exception was a spot called Ngandong, on the Indonesian island of Java. But scientists were unable to agree on a precise time period for the site–until now.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers led by the University of Iowa; Macquarie University; and the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia, dates the last existence of Homo erectus at Ngandong between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago.
The researchers time-stamped the site by dating animal fossils from the same bonebed where 12 Homo erectus skull caps and two tibia had been found, and then dated the surrounding land forms–mostly terraces below and above Ngandong–to establish an accurate record for the primeval humans’ possible last stand on Earth.
“This site is the last known appearance of Homo erectus found anywhere in the world,” says Russell Ciochon, professor in the Department of Anthropology at Iowa and co-corresponding author on the study. “We can’t say we dated the extinction, but we dated the last occurrence of it. We have no evidence Homo erectus lived later than that anywhere else.”
The research team presents 52 new age estimates for the Ngandong evidence. They include animal fossil fragments and sediment from the rediscovered fossil bed where the original Homo erectus remains were found by Dutch surveyors in the 1930s, and a sequence of dates for the river terraces below and above the fossil site.
In addition, the researchers determined when mountains south of Ngandong first rose by dating stalagmites from caves in the Southern Mountains. This allowed them to determine when the Solo River began coursing through the Ngandong site, and the river terrace sequence was created.
“You have this incredible array of dates that are all consistent,” Ciochon says. “This has to be the right range. That’s why it’s such a nice, tight paper. The dating is very consistent.”
“The issues with the dating of Ngandong could only ever be resolved by an appreciation of the wider landscape,” says Kira Westaway, associate professor at Macquarie University and a joint-lead author on the paper. “Fossils are the byproducts of complex landscape processes. We were able to nail the age of the site because we constrained the fossils within the river deposit, the river terrace, the sequence of terraces, and the volcanically active landscape.”
Previous research by Ciochon and others shows Homo erectus hopscotched its way across the Indonesian archipelago, and arrived on the island of Java about 1.6 million years ago. The timing was good: The area around Ngandong was mostly grassland, the same environment that cradled the species in Africa. Plants and animals were abundant. While the species continued to venture to other islands, Java, it appears, likely remained home–or least a way station–to some bands of the species.
However, around 130,000 years ago, the environment at Ngandong changed, and so did Homo erectus‘s fortunes.
“There was a change in climate,” Ciochon explains. “We know the fauna changed from open country, grassland, to a tropical rainforest (extending southward from today’s Malaysia). Those were not the plants and animals that Homo erectus was used to, and the species just could not adapt.”
Ciochon co-led a 12-member, international team that dug at Ngandong in 2008 and in 2010, accompanied by Yan Rizal and Yahdi Zaim, the lead researchers from the Institute of Technology, Bandung, on the excavation. Using notes from the Dutch surveyors’ excavation in the 1930s, the team found the original Homo erectus bone bed at Ngandong and re-exposed it, collecting and dating 867 animal fossil fragments. Meanwhile, Westaway’s team had been dating the surrounding landscapes, such as the terraces, during that time.
“It was coincidental” the teams were working in the same place–one group at the fossil bed, the other group dating the surrounding area, Ciochon says.
“With the data we had, we couldn’t really date the Ngandong fossils,” Ciochon continues. “We had dates on them, but they were minimum ages. So, we couldn’t really say how old, although we knew we were in the ballpark. By working with Kira, who had a vast amount of dating data for the terraces, mountains, and other landscape features, we were able to provide precise regional chronological and geomorphic contexts for the Ngandong site.”
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Excavators at the site of Ngandong. Screenshot from the subject University of Iowa video release.
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Closeup of Homo erectus skull caps excavated at Ngandong. Screenshot from subject University of Iowa video release.
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University of Iowa anthropologist Russell Ciochon led an international team that has determined the age of the last known settlement by Homo erectus, a direct ancestor to modern humans. Tim Schoon, University of Iowa
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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece.
The UC archaeologists announced the discovery Tuesday in Greece.
Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, archaeologists in UC’s classics department, found the two beehive-shaped tombs in Pylos, Greece, last year while investigating the area around the grave of an individual they have called the “Griffin Warrior,” a Greek man whose final resting place they discovered nearby in 2015 [see the in-depth article, The Tomb of the Griffin Warrior, about this important discovery].
Like the Griffin Warrior’s tomb, the princely tombs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea also contained a wealth of cultural artifacts and delicate jewelry that could help historians fill in gaps in our knowledge of early Greek civilization.
UC’s team spent more than 18 months excavating and documenting the find. The tombs were littered with flakes of gold leaf that once papered the walls.
“Like with the Griffin Warrior grave, by the end of the first week we knew we had something that was really important,” said Stocker, who supervised the excavation.
“It soon became clear to us that lightning had struck again,” said Davis, head of UC’s classics department.
The Griffin Warrior is named for the mythological creature — part eagle, part lion — engraved on an ivory plaque in his tomb, which also contained armor, weaponry and gold jewelry. Among the priceless objects of art was an agate sealstone depicting mortal combat with such fine detail that Archaeology magazine hailed it as a “Bronze Age masterpiece.”
Artifacts found in the princely tombs tell similar stories about life along the Mediterranean 3,500 years ago, Davis said. A gold ring depicted two bulls flanked by sheaves of grain, identified as barley by a paleobotanist who consulted on the project.
“It’s an interesting scene of animal husbandry — cattle mixed with grain production. It’s the foundation of agriculture,” Davis said. “As far as we know, it’s the only representation of grain in the art of Crete or Minoan civilization.”
Like the grave of the Griffin Warrior, the two family tombs contained artwork emblazoned with mythological creatures. An agate sealstone featured two lion-like creatures called genii standing upright on clawed feet. They carry a serving vase and an incense burner, a tribute for the altar before them featuring a sprouting sapling between horns of consecration, Stocker said.
Above the genii is a 16-pointed star. The same 16-pointed star also appears on a bronze and gold artifact in the grave, she said.
“It’s rare. There aren’t many 16-pointed stars in Mycenaean iconography. The fact that we have two objects with 16 points in two different media (agate and gold) is noteworthy,” Stocker said.
The genius motif appears elsewhere in the East during this period, she said.
“One problem is we don’t have any writing from the Minoan or Mycenaean time that talks of their religion or explains the importance of their symbols,” Stocker said.
UC’s team also found a gold pendant featuring the likeness of the Egyptian goddess Hathor.
“Its discovery is particularly interesting in light of the role she played in Egypt as protectress of the dead,” Davis said.
The identity of the Griffin Warrior is a matter for speculation. Stocker said the combination of armor, weapons and jewelry found in his tomb strongly indicate he had military and religious authority, likely as the king known in later Mycenaean times as a wanax.
Likewise, the princely tombs paint a picture of accumulated wealth and status, she said. They contained amber from the Baltic, amethyst from Egypt, imported carnelian and lots of gold. The tombs sit on a scenic vista overlooking the Mediterranean Sea on the spot where the Palace of Nestor would later rise and fall to ruins.
“I think these are probably people who were very sophisticated for their time,” she said. “They have come out of a place in history where there were few luxury items and imported goods. And all of a sudden at the time of the first tholos tombs, luxury items appear in Greece.
“You have this explosion of wealth. People are vying for power,” she said. “It’s the formative years that will give rise to the Classic Age of Greece.”
The antiquities provide evidence that coastal Pylos was once an important destination for commerce and trade.
“If you look at a map, Pylos is a remote area now. You have to cross mountains to get here. Until recently, it hasn’t even been on the tourist path,” Stocker said. “But if you’re coming by sea, the location makes more sense. It’s on the way to Italy. What we’re learning is that it’s a much more central and important place on the Bronze Age trade route.”
The princely tombs sit close to the palace of Nestor, a ruler mentioned in Homer’s famous works “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” The palace was discovered in 1939 by the late UC Classics professor Carl Blegen. Blegen had wanted to excavate in the 1950s in the field where Davis and Stocker found the new tombs but could not get permission from the property owner to expand his investigation. The tombs would have to wait years for another UC team to make the startling discovery hidden beneath its grape vines.
Excavating the site was particularly arduous. With the excavation season looming, delays in procuring the site forced researchers to postpone plans to study the site first with ground-penetrating radar. Instead, Stocker and Davis relied on their experience and intuition to focus on one disturbed area.
“There were noticeable concentrations of rocks on the surface once we got rid of the vegetation,” she said.
Those turned out to be the exposed covers of deep tombs, one plunging nearly 15 feet. The tombs were protected from the elements and potential thieves by an estimated 40,000 stones the size of watermelons.
The boulders had sat undisturbed for millennia where they had fallen when the domes of the tombs collapsed. And now 3,500 years later, UC’s team had to remove each stone individually.
“It was like going back to the Mycenaean Period. They had placed them by hand in the walls of the tombs and we were taking them out by hand,” Stocker said. “It was a lot of work.”
At every step of the excavation, the researchers used photogrammetry and digital mapping to document the location and orientation of objects in the tomb. This is especially valuable because of the great number of artifacts that were recovered, Davis said.
“We can see all levels as we excavated them and relate them one to the other in three dimensions,” he said. UC’s team will continue working at Pylos for at least the next two years while they and other researchers around the world unravel mysteries contained in the artifacts.
“It has been 50 years since any substantial tombs of this sort have been found at any Bronze Age palatial site. That makes this extraordinary,” Davis said.
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UC archaeologists discovered two large family tombs at Pylos, Greece, strewn with flakes of gold that once lined their walls. The excavation took more than 18 months. UC Classics
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UC archaeologists found a sealstone made from semiprecious carnelian in the family tombs at Pylos, Greece. The sealstone was engraved with two lionlike mythological figures called genii carrying serving vessels and incense burners facing each other over an altar and below a 16-pointed star. The other image is a putty cast of the sealstone. UC Classics
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A gold ring depicts bulls and barley, the first known representation of domesticated animals and agriculture in ancient Greece. UC Classics
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY—Research on global biodiversity has long assumed that present-day biodiversity patterns reflect present-day factors, namely contemporary climate and human activities. A new study* shows that climate changes and human impacts over the last 100,000 years continue to shape patterns of tropical and subtropical mammal biodiversity today — a surprising finding.
The new research — coauthored by Kaye E. Reed and Irene Smail, Arizona State University; Lydia Beaudrot, Rice University; Janet Franklin, University of California Riverside; and John Rowan, Andrew Zamora, and Jason M. Kamilar, University of Massachusetts Amherst — will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Understanding the factors that structure global biodiversity patterns — the distribution and diversity of life on Earth — has been of long-standing scientific interest. To date, much of this research has focused on present-day climate, such as average temperature or rainfall, because climate is well-known to influence species geographic distributions and because human-caused climate change is a major threat. Likewise, other recent human impacts are well-known to influence biodiversity and are well-studied, such as deforestation and urbanization of wild lands that destroy habitats for many species.
What many of these studies overlook, however, is that present-day biodiversity patterns are the outcome of thousands of years of changes in Earth’s climate and, more recently, prehistoric human activity. Thus, present-day biodiversity patterns need not be primarily driven by recent climate or human impacts. A small but growing body of studies suggest that legacies of the ancient past continue to structure patterns of life on Earth today. Indeed, though this may be the case, global-scale analyses on this issue remained elusive until now.
To tackle this issue, the researchers analyzed a database of 515 mammal communities across the globe. For each community (i.e., an assemblage of mammal species occupying the same area), they collected data on the species present, their ecological characteristics (body size, diet, etc.) and their evolutionary relationships to one another. They used this information to measure the ecological and evolutionary structure of each community and then asked whether it was best explained by present-day climate (current temperature and rainfall), Quaternary paleoclimate changes (changes in temperature and rainfall from around 22,000 years ago and 6,000 years ago to the present), recent human activity (land-use change since the Industrial Revolution) or prehistoric human activity (human-driven mammal extinctions that happened over the last 100,000 years as humans spread across the globe).
The research findings show, for the first time, that current patterns of mammal diversity across the world’s tropical and subtropical regions are structured by both past and present climate and human impacts, but specific effects vary by region.
“We have long been interested in finding overarching explanations for what drives mammal diversity across the globe,” said John Rowan. “For our research group, this study made us realize that there probably isn’t one — every region of the world has its own distinct history, and that history matters today.”
In the Neotropics (South and Central America), for example, mammal communities are strongly influenced by prehistoric human-driven extinctions over the last 100,000 years. When humans arrived in the Neotropics, they caused massive extinctions of the region’s mammals, the effects of which linger today in the surviving communities. Conversely, Africa was lightly impacted by these extinctions, and the region’s present-day communities are mainly shaped by current and prehistoric climates. Southeast Asia and Madagascar also have their own suite of past and present climatic and human factors that shape them.
These global differences highlight an important finding of the study — there is no one-size-fits-all explanation for what structures mammal biodiversity across the world. Each of world’s major regions has a unique ecological and evolutionary history, and these histories continue to strongly influence the distribution and diversity of mammalian life on Earth.
“Now that we have a global study of the similarities and differences of the overarching effects on mammal communities,” said Kaye Reed, “we will continue to explore each region in depth to examine other factors that affected these communities in the past and what that might mean for the future.”
The climatic and human-impact legacies of the ancient past can be, and often are, as or more important than their present-day counterparts. As scientists continue to understand global patterns of biodiversity, the researchers suggest that past climate and human impact factors should be incorporated into future studies. They propose that this will result in a more holistic understanding of what drives biodiversity and how it may respond to ongoing and future human-caused changes in the 21st century.
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The tropics and subtropics cradle the vast majority of the world’s remaining large mammals. John Rowan
*Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Geographically divergent evolutionary and ecological legacies shape mammal biodiversity in the global tropics and subtropics. John Rowan, Lydia Beaudrot, Janet Franklin, Kaye E. Reed, Irene Smail, Andrew Zamora, Jason M. Kamilar.
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES—At a prehistoric archaeological site in Turkey, researchers have discovered two 8,500-year-old human teeth, which had been used as pendants in a necklace or bracelet. Researchers have never documented this practice before in the prehistoric Near East, and the rarity of the find suggests that the human teeth were imbued with profound symbolic meaning for the people who wore them.
During excavations at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey between 2013 and 2015, researchers found three 8,500-year-old-teeth that appeared to have been intentionally drilled to be worn as beads in a necklace or bracelet. Subsequent macroscopic, microscopic and radiographic analyses confirmed that two of the teeth had indeed been used as beads or pendants, researchers conclude in a newly published article in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
“Not only had the two teeth been drilled with a conically shaped microdrill similar to those used for creating the vast amounts of beads from animal bone and stone that we have found at the site, but they also showed signs of wear corresponding to extensive use as ornaments in a necklace or bracelet,” University of Copenhagen archaeologist and first author of the article Scott Haddow said. He added:
“The evidence suggests that the two teeth pendants were probably extracted from two mature individuals post-mortem. The wear on the teeth’s chewing surfaces indicates that the individuals would have been between 30-50 years old. And since neither tooth seems to have been diseased-which would likely have caused the tooth to fall out during life, the most likely scenario is that both teeth were taken from skulls at the site.”
Deep symbolic value
Researchers have previously found human teeth used for ornamental purposes at European sites from the Upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, but this practice has never been documented before in the Near East during these or subsequent timeframes. This makes these finds extremely rare and surprising.
“Given the amount of fragmentary skeletal material often circulating within Neolithic sites, not least at Çatalhöyük where secondary burial practices associated with the display of human skulls were frequent, what is most interesting is the fact that human teeth and bone were not selected and modified more often. Thus, because of the rarity of the find, we find it very unlikely that these modified human teeth were used solely for aesthetic purposes but rather carried profound symbolic meaning for the people who wore them,” Scott Haddow explained.
He concluded:
“The fact that the teeth were recovered from non-burial contexts is also highly interesting in that burials at the site often contain beads and pendants made from animal bone/teeth and other materials, indicating that it seems to have been a deliberate choice not to include items made from human bone and teeth with burials. So perhaps these human teeth pendants were related to specific – and rare – ritual taboos? Or perhaps we should look to the identity of the two individuals from whom the teeth were extracted for an explanation? However, given the small sample size, the ultimate meaning of the human teeth pendants will remain elusive until new findings at Çatalhöyük or elsewhere in the Near East can help us better contextualize the meaning these human teeth artifacts.”
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The two drilled 8,500-year-old human teeth found at Çatalhöyük in Turkey. University of Copenhagen
MCMASTER UNIVERSITY—New research from anthropologists at McMaster University and California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), is shedding light on ancient dietary practices, the evolution of agricultural societies and ultimately, how plants have become an important element of the modern diet.
Researchers examined plant remains found on ceramic artifacts such as bowls, bottles and jars, and stone tools such as blades and drills, dating to the Early Formative period (2000-1000 BCE), which were excavated from the village site of La Consentida, located in the coastal region of Oaxaca in southwest Mexico.
They focused on remnants of starch grains, which are where plants store energy, and phytoliths, also known as ‘microfossils,’ a rigid, microscopic structure made of silica which is produced by plants and can survive the decay process. Both types of microbotanical remains are routinely recovered from artifacts to analyze ancient foodways.
A careful analysis found the remains of flowering plants, wild bean families and grasses, including maize. The findings support existing evidence that the village was transitioning from a broad, Archaic period (7000-2000 BCE) diet to one based on agriculture.
“This is an important piece of the puzzle. The work provides us with a better idea of how plants became cultivated and how they made their way to our plates,” explains Éloi Bérubé, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University, who conducted the work with advisor Shanti Morell-Hart, an assistant professor of anthropology.
“It gives us a more complete understanding of the daily activities that played a significant role in ancient societies,” he says.
For example, researchers found maize microfossils pointing to the storage and processing of different parts of the plant, as well as indications of heat damage, likely caused by cooking. Evidence of maize and wild beans was also found in artifacts used for burial offerings.
“The Early Formative was a key moment of social transformation for native peoples of Mesoamerica,” says Guy Hepp, director of the La Consentida Archaeological Project and assistant professor of anthropology at CSUSB. “La Consentida was among Mesoamerica’s earliest villages, and these new dietary results help us better understand some of the changes the community was experiencing, including a shift toward permanent settlements and the beginnings of social complexity.”
Combined with other evidence from the site, including variations in burial offerings and the diversity of human depictions in small-scale ceramic figurines, this study suggests that the community was in the early stages of establishing a complex social organization.
The artifacts considered for the study come from a variety of contexts at La Consentida, including mounded earthen architecture, the spaces around ancient houses, and even human burials.
Pottery from the site includes jars used in domestic and communal cooking events and likely also for storage. Some of the jars were later reused as offerings with human burials. Decorative bowls were likely used for serving foods at communal feasts. Ceramic bottles, also found in feasting refuse, likely held beverages brewed from maize and possibly even cacao.
The research is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
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The site of La Consentida, Mexico. Guy Hepp
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An ancient bowl found at La Consentida, Mexico. Shanti Morell-Hart
UNIVERSITY OF BONN—Several years ago, Maya archaeologists from the University of Bonn found the bones of about 20 people at the bottom of a water reservoir in the former Maya city of Uxul, in what is now Mexico. They had apparently been killed and dismembered about 1,400 years ago. Did these victims come from Uxul or other regions of the Maya Area? Dr. Nicolaus Seefeld, who heads the project that is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation at the University of Bonn, is now one step further: A strontium isotope analysis by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) showed that some of the dead grew up at least 95 miles (150 kilometers) from Uxul.
Strontium is ingested with food and stored like calcium in bones and teeth. The isotope ratios of strontium vary in rocks and soils, which is why different regions on earth have their own characteristic signatures. “As the development of tooth enamel is completed in early childhood, the strontium isotope ratio indicates the region where a person grew up,” says Dr. Nicolaus Seefeld, who heads a project at the University of Bonn on the mass grave of Uxul and the role of ritualized violence in Maya society.
Together with researchers from the Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory of the Geophysics Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Seefeld took tiny samples of tooth enamel from a total of 13 individuals early this summer. “Unfortunately it was not possible to examine the strontium isotope ratio of the remaining individuals, because the teeth were too decayed and the result would have been distorted,” reports Seefeld.
The victims apparently had a high social status
The results of the isotope analysis show that most of the victims grew up at least 95 miles (150 kilometers) from Uxul in the southern lowlands, in what is now Guatemala. “However, at least one adult and also one infant were local residents from Uxul,” says the researcher. They were apparently mostly people of high social status, as eight of the individuals had elaborate jade tooth jewelry or engravings in their incisors.
In 2013, Seefeld was investigating the water supply system of the former Maya city of Uxul when he discovered a well, in which the remains of about 20 people had been buried during the seventh century AD. The excavations of this mass grave were carried out as part of the Uxul archaeological project by the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, which was headed by Prof. Dr. Nikolai Grube during the research period from 2009 to 2015. The investigations of the mass grave have been under the leadership of Dr. Seefeld and funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation since January 2018.
Detailed investigations revealed that, in addition to at least 14 men and one woman, the mass grave contained the remains of several adolescents and an 18-month-old infant. Nearly all the bones showed marks of cuts and injuries by stone blades. Their regular distribution clearly shows that the individuals had been systematically and deliberately dismembered. The victims were killed and decapitated outside the water reservoir, then dismembered and the body parts placed at the bottom of the reservoir.
Heat marks on the bones showed that the bodies were exposed to fire – presumably so that skin and muscles could be removed more easily. However, there were no human bite marks on the bones that would indicate cannibalism. After dismemberment, body parts that were originally connected were deliberately placed as far apart from each other as possible. “This clearly demonstrates the desire to destroy the physical unity of the individuals,” says Seefeld.
Killing and dismemberment as a demonstration of power
The latest results of the strontium isotope analysis and the anthropological investigations now allow more precise conclusions about the identity of the victims and the possible reasons for the killings. It is known from pictorial representations of ritual violence of the Classic Maya that the beheading and dismemberment of humans mostly occurred in the context of armed conflicts. These representations often show victorious rulers who chose to take the elites of the defeated city as prisoners of war and later publicly humiliate and kill them. “The documented actions in Uxul should therefore not be regarded as a mere expression of cruelty or brutality, but as a demonstration of power,” says Seefeld.
The most plausible explanation for the current evidence is that the majority of the victims were prisoners of war from a city in the southern Maya lowlands, who were defeated in a military confrontation with Uxul. These formerly powerful individuals were then brought to Uxul and killed. Seefeld recently presented his findings at the Archaeological Conference of Central Germany in Halle and at the conference “Investigadores de la Cultura Maya” in Campeche in Mexico.
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Tatiana’s finding was a game-changer for understanding the Maya. “In Tatiana’s day, people believed Maya cities weren’t really cities,” says Simon Martin, currently Associate Curator and Keeper of Collections in the American Section of the Penn Museum. “They were [considered to be] ceremonial centers ruled by priests. It was thought that the population didn’t live in the centers. They were scattered around in the forest, and they might have just gathered together [in the centers] for ceremonies and rituals.” Martin points to a key monument designated as “Stela 14”, now housed and on display in the Museum’s newly opened Mexico and Central America Gallery. It once resided with 39 other stelae at Piedras Negras. “The figures on Stela 14 were originally thought to be a god and then [depicted] down below a priest, who is making offerings toward her [see image right]” But at Piedras Negras, says Martin, “Tatiana started working on chronology and the relationship between particular dates and particular images on the monuments”. Referring to Stela 14, Martin says that Tatiana was able to recognize or identify a glyph inscribed with a series or column of glyphs on the side of the stela as an “event glyph”, which signified the occurrence of a very significant event in the Maya chronology of the site. “She hypothesized that this event glyph referred to someone becoming a king, which turned out to be completely correct. Thanks to Tatiana’s work, we realize that the seated figure is a king, and the one standing below is a queen.” Many Maya hieroglyphs, it turned out, were actually a record of the kings and queens and the associated events of their times. And more than that, Tatiana’s work was ultimately a key to deciphering the Maya script, something that had eluded scientists and scholars for years. Stela 14, and the other stelae discovered and studied at Piedras Negras, acted like a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for translating ancient Maya history and culture.
The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.
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