The hunter-gatherers who settled on the banks of the Haine, a river in southern Belgium, 31,000 years ago were already using spearthrowers to hunt their game. This is the finding of a new study conducted at TraceoLab at the University of Liège. The material found at the archaeological site of Maisières-Canal permits establishing the use of this hunting technique 10,000 years earlier than the oldest currently known preserved spearthrowers. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, is prompting archaeologists to reconsider the age of this important technological innovation.
The spearthrower is a weapon designed for throwing darts, which are large projectiles resembling arrows that generally measure over two meters long. Spearthrowers can propel darts over a distance of up to eighty meters. The invention of long-range hunting weapons has had significant consequences for human evolution, as it changed hunting practices and the dynamics between humans and their prey, as well as the diet and social organization of prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups. The date of invention and spread of these weapons has therefore long been the subject of lively debate within the scientific community.
“Until now, the early weapons have been infamously hard to detect at archaeological sites because they were made of organic components that preserve rarely, explains Justin Coppe, researcher at TraceoLab. Stone points that armed ancient projectiles and that are much more frequently encountered at archaeological excavations have been difficult to connect to particular weapons reliably.” Most recently published claims for early use of spearthrowers and bows in Europe and Africa have relied exclusively on projectile point size to link them to these weapon systems. However, ethnographic reviews and experimental testing have cast serious doubt on this line of reasoning by showing that arrow, dart, and spear tips can be highly variable in size, with overlapping ranges.
The innovative approach developed by the archaeologists at TraceoLab combines ballistic analysis and fracture mechanics to gain a better understanding of the traces preserved on the flint points. “We carried out a large-scale experiment in which we fired replicas of Palaeolithic projectiles using different weapons such as spears, bows and spearthrowers,” explains Noora Taipale, FNRS research fellow at TraceoLab. By carefully examining the fractures on these stone points, we were able to understand how each weapon affected the fracturing of the points when they impacted the target”. Each weapon left distinct marks on the stone points, enabling archaeologists to match these marks to archaeological finds. In a way, it’s like identifying a gun from the marks the barrel leaves on a bullet, a practice known from forensic science.
The excellent match between the experimental spearthrower sample and the Maisières-Canal projectiles confirmed that the hunters occupying the site used these weapons. This finding encourages archaeologists to apply the method further to find out how ancient long-range weaponry really is. Future work at TraceoLab will focus on adjusting the analytical approach to other archaeological contexts to help reach this goal.
*Terminal ballistic analysis of impact fractures reveals the use of spearthrower 31 ky ago at Maisières-Canal, Belgium, Scientific Reports, 25-Oct-2023. 10.1038/s41598-023-45554-w
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS—A re-analysis of more than 300 sets of 5,000-year-old skeletal remains excavated from a site in Spain suggests that many of the individuals may have been casualties of the earliest period of warfare in Europe, occurring over 1,000 years before the previous earliest known larger-scale conflict in the region. The study, published in Scientific Reports, indicates that both the number of injured individuals and the disproportionately high percentage of males affected suggest that the injuries resulted from a period of conflict, potentially lasting at least months.
Conflict during the European Neolithic period (approximately 9,000 to 4,000 years ago) remains poorly understood. Previous research has suggested that conflicts consisted of short raids lasting no more than a few days and involving small groups of up to 20–30 individuals, and it was therefore assumed that early societies lacked the logistical capabilities to support longer, larger-scale conflicts. The earliest such conflict in Europe was previously thought to have occurred during the Bronze Age (approximately 4,000 to 2,800 years ago).
Teresa Fernández‑Crespo and colleagues re-examined the skeletal remains of 338 individuals for evidence of healed and unhealed injuries. All the remains were from a single mass burial site in a shallow cave in the Rioja Alavesa region of northern Spain, radiocarbon dated to between 5,400 and 5,000 years ago. 52 flint arrowheads had also been discovered at the same site, with previous research finding that 36 of these had minor damage associated with hitting a target. The authors found that 23.1% of the individuals had skeletal injuries, with 10.1% having unhealed injuries, substantially higher than estimated injury rates for the time (7–17% and 2–5%, respectively). They also found that 74.1% of the unhealed injuries and 70.0% of the healed injuries had occurred in adolescent or adult males, a significantly higher rate than in females, and a difference not seen in other European Neolithic mass-fatality sites.
The overall injury rate, the higher injury rate for males, and the previously observed damage to the arrowheads suggest that many of the individuals at the burial site were exposed to violence and may have been casualties of conflict. The relatively high rate of healed injuries suggests that the conflict continued over several months, according to the authors. The reasons for the conflict are unclear, but the authors speculate on several possible causes, including tension between different cultural groups in the region during the Late Neolithic.
*Large-scale violence in Late Neolithic Western Europe based on expanded skeletal evidence from San Juan ante Portam Latinam, Scientific Reports, 2-Nov-2023. 10.1038/s41598-023-43026-9
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE—Two-thousand years ago, forts were constructed by the Roman Empire across the northern Fertile Crescent, spanning from what is now western Syria to northwestern Iraq.
In the 1920s, 116 forts were documented in the region by Father Antoine Poidebard, who conducted one of the world’s first aerial surveys using a WWI-era biplane. Poidebard reported that the forts were constructed from north to south to establish an eastern boundary of the Roman Empire.
A new Dartmouth study analyzing declassified Cold War satellite imagery reveals 396 previously undocumented Roman forts and reports that these forts were constructed from east to west. The analysis refutes Poidebard’s claim that the forts were located along a north-south axis by showing that the forts spanned from Mosul on the Tigris River to Aleppo in western Syria.
“I was surprised to find that there were so many forts and that they were distributed in this way because the conventional wisdom was that these forts formed the border between Rome and its enemies in the east, Persia or Arab armies,” says lead author Jesse Casana, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Spatial Archaeometry Lab at Dartmouth. “While there’s been a lot of historical debate about this, it had been mostly assumed that this distribution was real, that Poidebard’s map showed that the forts were demarcating the border and served to prevent movement across it in some way.”
For the study, the team drew on declassified Cold-War era CORONA and HEXAGON satellite imagery collected between 1960 and 1986. Most of the imagery is part of the open-access CORONA Atlas Project through which Casana and colleagues developed better methods for correcting the data and made it available online.
The researchers examined satellite imagery of approximately 300,000 square kilometers (115,831 square miles) of the northern Fertile Cresent. It is a place where sites show up particularly well and is archaeologically significant, according to Casana. The team mapped 4,500 known sites and then systematically documented every other site-like feature in each of the nearly 5 by 5 kilometer (3.1 mile by 3.1 mile) survey grids, which resulted in the addition of 10,000 undiscovered sites to the database.
When the database was originally developed, Casana had created morphological categories based on the different features evident in the imagery, which allows researchers to run queries. One of the categories was Poidebard’s forts—distinctive squares measuring approximately 50 by 100 meters (.03 x .06 miles), comparable in size to about half a soccer field.
The forts would have been large enough to accommodate soldiers, horses, and/or camels. Based on the satellite imagery, some of the forts had lookout towers in the corners or sides. They would have been made of stone and mud-brick or entirely of the latter, so eventually, these non-permanent structures would have melted into the ground.
While most of the forts that Poidebard documented were probably destroyed or obscured by agriculture, land use, or other activities between the 1920s and 1960s, the team was able to find 38 of 116 of Poidebard’s forts, in addition to identifying 396 others.
Of those 396 forts, 290 were located in the study region and 106 were found in western Syria, in Jazireh. In addition to identifying forts similar to the walled fortresses Poidebard found, the team identified forts with interior architecture features and ones built around a mounded citadel.
“Our observations are pretty exciting and are just a fraction of what probably existed in the past,” says Casana. “But our analysis further supports that forts were likely used to support the movement of troops, supplies, and trade goods across the region.”
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CORONA images showing major sites: A) Sura (NASA1401); B) Resafa (NASA1398); and C) Ain Sinu (CRN999). Figure by J.Casana et al.; CORONA imagery courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
PLOS—Ancient people immigrated to Cancun Island and were treated just like locals, according to a study published October 25, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andrea Cucina of the Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico and colleagues.
The Late Postclassic (AD 1200-1500) in the northern Maya lowlands was a period of major changes, including the development of many settlements along the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, influenced in part by expanded trade routes. Previous research has found that these settlements were home to many non-local individuals, but it remains unclear whether these people were treated as “foreigners” or if they were integrated into local society.
In this study, Cucina and colleagues analyzed the remains of 50 individuals from two archaeological sites on Cancun Island dating to the Late Postclassic. Investigating strontium isotope signatures in teeth, the team determined that seven of these individuals appear to have been born elsewhere in the Maya lowlands, not local to these sites. However, examination of carbon isotopes (as a proxy for diet) and the construction of the graves of these individuals found no significant difference between locals and non-locals, suggesting that they were all treated similarly in terms of the food they ate and how they were buried.
These results suggest that these non-local individuals had integrated into local culture despite being from other regions. The fact that the non-local people included adults and children suggests that whole families, not just individuals, were in the habit of moving residence. One notable limitation of this study is that these techniques cannot detect “second generation immigrants”, a potentially valuable source of information that will have to be investigated using different methods. Analyzing patterns of mobility in Prehispanic Mesoamerica is essential for a thorough understanding of cultural networks of the time.
The authors add: “In the Postclassic period (AD 1200-1520) the east coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula saw the arrival of foreign people, who were assumed, based on archaeological and architectural records, to come from several locations in central Mexico. However, the current research shows migration from within the Maya cultural region (from what is now Belize, Peten, Guatemala and other parts of the Yucatan Peninsula). Migration for economic, environmental, political or kinship considerations is a familiar part of the human experience, and the current study documents the past movement and integration of individuals, and possibly entire families, into new communities. People may have relocated for similar reasons as they do today—for economic, environmental, political or kinship considerations.”
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El Rey Archaeological Structure type palace with columns. This kind of structure was common in the east coast of the peninsula of Yucatan during AD 1200-1520. Allan Ortega-Muñoz, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
*Cucina A, Thornton EK, Ortega-Muñoz A (2023) Human mobility on Cancun Island during the Late Postclassic: Intra- and inter-site demographic interactions. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0292022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292022
UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ—In ancient Egypt, various deities were portrayed as animals. Thoth, the god of learning and wisdom was represented by a hamadryas baboon. Baboons, probably held in captivity in Egypt, were mummified as votive offerings after their deaths. Today, no wild baboons live in Egypt, and there is no evidence to suggest that these primates did so in the past. In an interdisciplinary project involving biologists, Egyptologists and anthropologists, Gisela Kopp, a biologist from Konstanz who conducts research on non-human primates, pursued the question of how and from where baboons came to Egypt. The results have been published in the current issue of the journal eLife.
Baboons were imported To pay homage to the deity Thoth, baboons were probably imported from distant regions and kept in captivity in ancient Egypt. As studies of skeletons show, they had their dangerous canine teeth removed. To determine the geographic origin of the baboons, Gisela Kopp and her team used genetic analyses. The region from which the animals originate can be determined with the help of the mitochondrial genome of the animal mummies. The distribution of baboons across the African continent and their genetic diversity is well studied.
“We have comparative samples from almost all regions where baboons live today,” Gisela Kopp says. These were supplemented with approximately 100 to 150-year-old specimens from museum collections. Comparisons of samples from the widely separated time periods are possible because the location of the different genetic variants of the baboon populations is very consistent over time.
Comparative sample points to Adulis One of the study’s collaborators, anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy from Dartmouth College in the United States, had already used stable isotopes to identify the respective geographic locations of mummified baboons. This method of using chemical signatures can be employed to distinguish between where animals were born and where they grew up. The study*, published in 2020, was able to identify the Horn of Africa as the baboons’ region of origin. Using genetic analysis, which has higher geographic precision and can also determine where the animals and their ancestors came from originally, the location was narrowed down to a well-defined area in Eritrea and neighboring regions. A comparative sample that was most similar to the genetic variant of the mummy specimen originates from the coastal region in Eritrea, where, in ancient times, the port of Adulis was probably located. Ancient texts refer to Adulis as a trading place for luxury goods and animals.
The mummy specimen used by Gisela Kopp and her team was excavated in 1905 in the “Valley of the Monkeys” and is now held in the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. The mummy is estimated to date back to between 800 and 500 BCE in the Late Period of ancient Egypt. This is long before Adulis flourished as an important trading centre and port.
Early historical texts mention Punt as the baboons’ place of origin, a legendary region from which Egypt imported luxury goods for centuries until early in the first millennium BCE. However, the exact location of Punt is unknown. “Egyptologists have long puzzled over Punt, since some scholars have seen it as a location in early global maritime trade networks, and thus the starting point for economic globalization”, says Gisela Kopp.
Egyptology provides the link between Punt and Adulis Punt is documented in ancient illustrations and texts from the same period as the mummy specimens. The Egyptological expertise in the project made it possible to link Punt to Adulis. “The specimen we studied fits chronologically with the last known expeditions to Punt. Geographically, however, it fits Adulis, a location that, centuries later, was known as a trading place, also for primates. We hypothesize that Punt and Adulis are two different names for the same place that were used at different points in time”, Gisela Kopp says. And: “It was only after we put our biological findings in the context of historical research that the story really came together.”
In the field of biology itself the findings are a scientific breakthrough, because it was the first time that ancient DNA from mummified non-human primates was analyzed successfully. This opens up opportunities to study, for example, the impact of human-wildlife interactions on genetic diversity and their role in the transmission of diseases. The contact ancient Egyptians had with exotic animals is evidence for early intensive interactions between wild animals and humans. The mass mummification of different animal species and primates is a very extraordinary cultural practice.
The representation of baboons in images and artwork since antiquity is only found in Egypt. We do not know what made these primates special to people at that time and why they were elevated to the role of representing the deity Thoth. People that share an environment with baboons usually do not hold the animals in high regard. For these people, baboons were and are considered a nuisance and pest for damaging crops.
An ancient Egyptian canopic jar with head of Thoth, represented by the babboon. In the process of mummification, the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines were removed, separately embalmed, and stored in specialized jars known as canopic jars (after a sailor in Greek mythology, who died at the town of Canopus in the Nile Delta and was worshipped there in the form of a human-headed jar). Each organ was identified with one of four funerary deities collectively known as the Sons of Horus: the liver with Imsety (man’s head), the lungs with Hapy (baboon’s head), the stomach with Duamutef (jackal’s head), and the intestines with Qebehsenuef (falcon’s head). It was their duty to protect the deceased and restore to him his body parts in the hereafter. The Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, Wikimedia Commons
CNRS—Before modern humans settled definitively in Europe, other human populations left Africa for Europe beginning approximately 60,000 years ago, albeit without settling for the long term. This was due to a major climatic crisis 40,000 years ago, combined with a super-eruption originating from the Phlegraean Fields volcanic area near current-day Naples, subsequently precipitating a decline in ancient European populations. To determine who the first modern humans to settle definitively in Europe were, a team led by CNRS scientists 1 analyzed the genome of two skull fragments from the Buran Kaya III site in Crimea dating to 36,000 and 37,000 years ago. By comparing them to DNA sequences from human genome databases, they revealed the genetic proximity between these individuals and both current and ancient Europeans, especially those associated with the Gravettian culture, known for producing female figurines referred to as “Venuses”, whose apogee in Europe came between 31,000 and 23,000 years ago. The stone tools found at Buran Kaya III also resemble some Gravettian assemblages. The individuals studied here therefore contributed both genetically and technologically to the population that gave rise to this civilisation around 5,000 years later. This research*, which was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on 23 October, documents the first arrival of the ancestors of Europeans.
1- From the Institute Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université Paris Cité), in collaboration with archaeologists from the Natural History of Prehistoric Humans laboratory (CNRS/MNHN/UPVD) working at the Musée de l’homme and at the Institute of Human Palaeontology, in addition to The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
*Genome sequences of 36-37,000 year-old modern humans at Buran-Kaya III in Crimea. E. Andrew Bennett, Oğuzhan Parasayan, Sandrine Prat, Stéphane Péan, Laurent, Alexandr Yanevich, Thierry Grange and Eva-Maria Geigl. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 23 October 2023.
Editor’s Note: The following is a collection of three previously published feature articles bearing on the important archaeological discoveries related to the first fully successful British colony in North America—Jamestown. Founded in 1607 with James Fort, it defined the foundational kernel of what eventually became the United States. This collection is published in celebration of International Archaeology Day.
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Ground-Truthing History at Jamestown
It was an instance of serendipity when, one day in late October, 2017, I happened to cross paths with William Kelso. We had no plans to meet, but I recognized him as I was snapping some photos of the most recent excavations within the vicinity of the old Memorial Church at the Jamestown Island, Virginia, archaeological site. Kelso is best known for his pioneering work discovering and uncovering the remains of the long-lost James Fort, thought for decades, until 1994, to have vanished into the water of the James River long ago as the river eroded its way into the island over the centuries. That discovery, and the hundreds of thousands of artifacts that have since come to light about America’s first permanent English colony, have arguably for many defined one of the great archaeological discovery stories of the past century.
We spoke only briefly, but it was enough to generate the distinct impression that Kelso, currently Head Archaeologist for the Jamestown Rediscovery Project and veteran of decades of research, had no plans to retire soon. His legacy, however, has already been made. Standing to witness were the manifestations of evidence for America’s first permanent English colony surrounding us as we talked, from sections of the reconstructed post-in-ground palisade walls of the original 1607 James Fort to the partial reconstruction overlying the footprint of the first-ever church structure built at the site, where Pocahontas and John Rolfe exchanged their marriage vows in 1614. This is aside from the more than two million total artifact haul accumulated since Kelso’s excavations at the site began, most of which is unseen by the public eye but some of which, over 4,000 strong, can be seen in the Archaerium museum only steps away from where we stood to talk.
For most people it would be enough to walk about the site. It is certainly impressive enough. But for other members of the public, like me, curiosity can only be sufficiently quenched by thoroughly reading about the details of the groundbreaking (pun intended) discoveries that have been made here over the past 20+ years. Kelso has made this possible with the publication of his most recent book, Jamestown,The Truth Revealed.
Kelso qualifies by making no secret of the fact that fully 60 percent of the book constitutes a re-publication of his previous book, The Buried Truth, to provide a fuller context or precursor to the discoveries made in more recent years, equally compellingly documented in the book’s second part, “More Buried Truth”.
It is the book’s second part, and more, that is the focus here. I relate it by way of the chapter headings assigned within the book itself:
Holy Ground
As the title of Part II’s first chapter suggests, excavation work at the site has uncovered some tantalizing evidence of the central role the English, or Anglican, Church played in the culture of Jamestown’s first colonists. Wasting little time after their arrival in 1607, the colonists, under the direction of its leadership, constructed one of America’s first English ecclesiastical buildings — a simple post-in-ground structure that saw several renovations or revisions in very short order. William Strachey, writer and Secretary of the Colony in 1610, wrote this first-hand account of the structure, in which Pocahontas and John Rolfe were famously married in 1614. It describes the church as it appeared during his tenure:
In the middest [of the fort]…is a pretty chapel…It is in length threescore foot, in breadth twenty-four…a chancel in it of cedar and a communion table of black walnut, and all the pews of cedar, with fair broad windows to shut and open…and the same wood, a pulpit of the same, with a front hewn hollow, like a canoe, with two bells at the west end. (1)
It was Strachey’s account of the structure, clues from other sources, and excavations in the southeastern sector of the James Fort that turned up the tell-tale signs of the building, revealing deep post-holes all in alignment very close to the dimensions Strachey described, and four burials located in what would be the chancel area of the church.
Although the traces of the church structure was big news when archaeologists first revealed the remaining soil stains left by the structure’s long-decayed post architecture, it was the burial discoveries that eventually commanded the most attention from the press and public. That is because, consistent with the long-held burial practice of English society at that time, high-status individuals were found to be buried beneath church chancels — and, in this case, it would be individuals who had played essential leadership roles in the founding and settlement development of Jamestown in its very earliest years. Forensic analysis of the skeletal remains, other archaeological evidence, chemical analysis, and historical documents confirmed with a confident degree of certainty that the individuals buried within the chancel space were likely Reverend Robert Hunt, Sir Ferdinando Wenman, Captain Gabriel Archer, and Captain William West, all known “movers and shakers” of the Jamestown settlement. Kelso, without getting the reader lost in what could have been a mind-numbing technical report, nonetheless goes into meticulous and satisfying detail about the discoveries in the text of the chapter.
Identifying the big names was sensational, without question. But how did the early church finds add to what we already knew about the first years of the Jamestown settlement?
Kelso emphasizes at least several major takeaways. First, that “the biographies of four practically anonymous Jamestown leaders have come to life,” and that “Wenman and West, both relatives of De La Warre [the Jamestown leader best known for having commanded the supply fleet that arrived in Jamestown in June 1610 after the ‘starving time’, in time to save the colony from a final collapse], were held in high esteem at Jamestown.” Second, it suggested how the established system of English hierarchy was transported to the New World, with the Anglican Church as the “center of the James Fort’s society, spiritual and secular.” And third, the excavation results confirmed that the first, 1608 – 1616 church structure stood apart and separate, although only yards away, from the later church built upon a brick-on-cobble foundation, the one initially built in 1617 and in which America’s first democratic assembly met in 1619. The church where Pocahontas was married was not the same church in which the seeds of the U.S. American government were planted. (2)
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Aerial view of the excavated features of the 1608 church. Photographed detail of an informational placard at the Jamestown historic site.Jamestown Rediscovery project, Preservation Virginia
Excavated burials in the 1608 church chancel area. Photographed detail of an informational placard at the Jamestown historic site. Jamestown Rediscovery project, Preservation Virginia
Above: Archaeologists unearthed a small silver box, placed at the time of his burial on top of Gabriel Archer’s coffin. Micro CT scanning analysis revealed it to be a reliquary, which is a container for holy relics. Although corrosion has precluded analysts from opening the box, scanning revealed that it contained fragments of bone, likely human, and fragments of a lead ampulla. Ampullae were small flasks used to carry blood, holy water, or oil. Why it was placed on Gabriel Archer’s coffin remains a mystery.
Artist’s illustration depicting the form and dimensions of the 1608 church as it would have appeared in its day. Photographed detail of an informational placard at the Jamestown historic site. Jamestown Rediscovery project, Preservation Virginia
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Above and below: Views of the partially reconstructed 1608 church, after excavations.
Although Jamestown’s claim to fame has rested primarily on its mantle as America’s first successful English colony, a darker side to its story tells how close the fledgling colony came to failure. That close call, as most people who have followed the Jamestown story know, was due most acutely to the horrendous period of starvation the colonists faced during the winter of 1609 – 1610. Brought on by a combination of concurrent factors, such as crumbling relations with the local Powhatan resulting in hostility and siege of James Fort, a drought, and dwindling food supplies and sources, it became known to history as the “starving time”. The written record has recounted this episode with some startling narrative:
Wee cannot for this our scarsitie blame our Comanders here, in respect that our sustenance was to come from England…soe lamentable was our scarsitie that we were constrayned to eat Doggs, Catts, rats, Snakes, Toadstooles, horse hides and wt nott, one man out of the mystery that he endured, killinge his wiefe powdered her app to eate her, for wch he was burned. Many besides fedd on the Corps of dead men…and one who had gotten unsatiable, out of custome to that foode could not be restrayned, untill such tyme as he was executed for it.(3)
The historical narrative is powerful and excruciatingly detailed, but generations of scholars and the public had to rely on the truthfulness and accuracy of the written word for these events — the physical evidence was absent. Until, that is, Kelso and his team began uncovering artifacts and bones that indicated something terrible was happening at Jamestown during this period. Excavations yielded burials, bones, artifacts and contexts that, after analysis, provided plausible evidence that the “starving time” did indeed occur and was likely as horrific and severe as documented. The one discovery that captured the imagination of scholars and the public alike, however, was the recovery of the remains of a 14-year old girl. Kelso relates the details of this story in the chapter, Jane. Reading almost like a detective mystery, Kelso does not scrimp on the thorough telling of how the researchers, through archaeological and forensic anthropological analysis, determined that the skeletal remains, consisting of more than a dozen specimens including a female human skull, jaw with teeth, and shin bone — all found with discarded “starving time” trash in a cellar/kitchen fill — had been butchered in an act of cannibalism. Doug Owsley, the Smithsonian Institution’s renowned forensic anthropologist and a consultant to the Jamestown excavations, was key to making the determination:
Owsley determined that the skull and leg bone had undergone sustained blows, chops, and cuts from several sharp, metal implements, reflecting a concerted effort to separate the brain and soft tissue from bone. Months of intensive scientific testing — including high-magnification technology, stable isotopic tests for oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, and tests for lead — determined that the bones were the remains of a fourteen-year-old English girl of lower status, probably raised in southern England. Owsley concluded that the rigorous postmortem cuts to the skull and jaw, and the way the leg was severed, were clear evidence of cannibalism.(4)
Researchers have been unable to pinpoint the girl among the roster of settlers, and thus she remains unidentified. She is known simply by the name, for lack of any other, assigned to her: “Jane”.
Researchers have since created a believably lifelike and, by professional standards, accurate forensic sculptural reconstruction of Jane’s face and skull using a digital resin copy of her skull based on the skeletal finds. In addition to reading about the Jane story in Kelso’s book, it is well worth the visit to the Archaerium museum at the Jamestown site to view the reconstruction.
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The cannibalized remains of Jane, all constituting parts of the (1) skull; (2) shin bone; and (3) jaw. Photographed from a public display illustration in the Archaerium.
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Jane’s skull. Smithsonian image
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Forensic sculpture reconstruction of Jane’s face. Studio EIS
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Company Town
Archaeologists get very excited about finding middens (old refuse dumps) and wells. There is good reason for that. Like treasure chests for archaeologists, they often contain the greatest concentration of the bits and pieces of past civilizations. This has been particularly true for Jamestown. In the book’s final chapter Kelso covers a lot of ground, but his discussion of what Jamestown excavators have recovered from the historic James Fort wells dominates the narrative. And rightly so. The wells, particularly the two described in “Company Town”, have yielded some of Jamestown’s most intriguing artifacts. Although thousands of artifacts were recovered, one of the wells, associated with an excavated storehouse and its cellar, constructed inside the James Fort palisade triangle, gave up two objects worth noting here:A 5” by 8” slate tablet featuring inscriptions of words, symbols, numbers, and drawings of people, animals and plants; and fragments of 8 curiously marked Robert Cotton* clay tobacco pipes. The slate tablet discovery, which Kelso described as “not unlike finding the proverbial lost letters in an attic trunk,” had the distinction of being “both an archaeological find and a historical document.”(5) But accurately reading and interpreting the inscriptions on its face have been challenging, to say the least. Nonetheless, Kelso devotes fully 8 pages to describing the inscriptions, the efforts to understand them, and what they mean in terms of understanding what was happening at Jamestown. A close second in terms of the chapter content is the 7-page description of the pipe finds. These pipe fragments were interpreted to bear the names of 8 well-known English gentlemen: Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord De La Warre, Captain Samuel Argall, Sir Charles Howard, Henry Wriothesley, (the Earl of Southampton), Captain Francis Nelson, Sir Walter Cope, and Robert Cecil (Lord Salisbury) — all gentlemen associated with the Jamestown venture in different ways. “Why Cotton had to name them remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of the abandoned cellar/well finds,” Kelso writes. “Like the writing slate, however, the names on the pipes are examples of some of the surprisingly literal messages left to us by Jamestown’s past.”(6)
The second of the two wells, described by Strachey as intended to replace the old storehouse/cellar well, was discovered about 80 feet further north of the old well, but still within the James Fort palisade triangle. Its story is as much about its original construction as the artifacts found within. As the archaeologists excavated, they discovered that “at a depth of eight feet, six inches, the soil became moist, and remnants of timber lining appeared. Digging below that revealed more and more intact remnants of the lining until the timber was completely preserved to the bottom, fourteen feet below grade.”(7) The latter part of the excavation had to be conducted in water — a difficult situation — but in addition to the timber, the conditions produced by the water in the bottom portion of the well helped to preserve some other tantalizing finds, such as the remains of a child’s leather shoe and what is thought to have been Lord De La Warre’s ceremonial halberd, intact and remarkably preserved. An elegant loaded pistol, of a type that was likely considered state-of-the-art for its day (apparently finding its way into the well between 1610 and 1617), was also found, as well as a lead “Yames Towne” shipping tag.
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The slate tablet, as exhibited in the Archaerium
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A selecion of the pipe stems, as exhibited in the Archaerium
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Detail of a lead Jamestown shipping tag, dated to 1611, found in the timber-lined well. As exhibited in the Archaerium
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Holy Ground, Again
The book notwithstanding, it does not tell the end of the Jamestown excavations story. Indeed, the ink had barely dried with the book’s publication as excavations progressed full swing within the 1906 Memorial Church, today the most prominent architectural feature at the James Fort site. One of the excavation’s objectives, as with the first post-in-ground church dig to its northeast, is to uncover and hopefully identify who was buried in the church chancel — likely, as English tradition held in the early 17th century, burial remains of some of Jamestown’s most notable citizens.
Could the burials include Lord De La Warre, otherwise known as Thomas West, the leader who rescued the Jamestown colony from collapse with new supplies after the starving time, John Rolfe, the first successful tobacco planter and husband of Pocahontas, and George Yeardley, one of colonial Virginia’s early governors?
Intriguing new evidence unearthed within the chancel area of the church might possibly provide some clues. Archaeologists have already revealed evidence of burials, the presence of which were known from previous excavations conducted soon after the turn of the 20th century. Examination of recovered bones from the recent excavations by Smithsonian scientists in the lab are beginning to yield new information about who the bones represent, but nothing yet definitive in terms of identifying the buried. One set of bones, however, exhibited signs that the individual was robust, a man in his forties, and had tell-tale signs of having been a horseman. At least two out of the three findings thus far are consistent with what is known about Lord De La Warre.
It will take some time to ferret out the findings at the site and in the lab. For one thing, previous excavations and disturbances have vastly complicated the process.“We have not uncovered any more bones in place as of yet,” Kelso told Popular Archaeology. “We are still trying to sort out which graves came before which graves by the disturbed soil above the actual buried skeletal remains.”
One additional recent discovery is worth noting — a small metal box containing what has been detected by x-ray examination to be a piece of folded paper was unearthed in the northeast corner of the church foundation. A written note? “The paper is unreadable so far and probably never will be,” said Kelso. “Of course there is no doubt that the tin container was purposely buried [by the early excavators] under the north corner of the 1640s church during the 1901 digging.” The find exemplifies the many limitations and mysteries that may always remain about historic Jamestown, even through to the 20th century.
One thing should be emphasized — there is much more to the Memorial Church excavations than unearthing burials, (all of which, once recovered and researched, will be re-buried in accordance with the requirements of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources). The current structure, after all, lies above the foundation of the original 1617 structure, the church in which the first English governing representative assembly in America met. It was, among other things, the birthplace of the kind of government that eventually became the United States as we know it today and the center of the religious culture that helped to define a nation. Archaeologists are, at this writing, exploring the old foundations and recovering artifacts that will help to develop a deeper understanding of that historic site and its place in the American heritage.
Interested readers may obtain a copy of Kelso’s latest book, Jamestown, The Truth Revealed, by going to the University of Virginia Press website. The book is, in this writer’s opinion, a must-read for those who want an in-depth, engaging, and easily understood source for the story of how archaeology is both affirming and revealing important beginnings of the American experience.
Kelso, William M., Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 2017 University of Virginia Press, pp. 182 – 184.
A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, 1610, and The Tragical Relation of the Virginia Assembly, 1624, in Tracts and Other Papers, ed. Peter Force, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1836 – 46), 3:16.
Kelso, William M., Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 2017 University of Virginia Press, p. 189.
Kelso, William M., Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 2017 University of Virginia Press, pp. 210 – 211.
Kelso, William M., Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 2017 University of Virginia Press, p. 226.
Kelso, William M., Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 2017 University of Virginia Press, p. 228.
*Robert Cotton was a pipe-maker sent to Jamestown as part of a re-supply in 1608, and is responsible for the making of a number of pipes found at the Jamestown excavations.
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1619: Archaeology and the Seeds of a Nation
July 30, 1619 — It must have been a very auspicious occasion for the newly established land-owning settlers when Governor George Yeardley stepped into the church for the very first meeting of the Virginia General Assembly at Jamestown. Months before, while still in England, he was appointed by the King to succeed Lord De La Warr who, to everyone’s surprise, had died at sea on a return voyage to the young but burgeoning Virginia colony. For extra measure, the King knighted Yeardley, had him provisioned to set sail, and ensured him detailed instructions from the Virginia Company to institute a comprehensive body of reforms. Those reforms would establish the rule of law based on English precedent in the home country, protect the individual rights and private property of the new Virginia landowners, and establish a General Assembly of representatives (consisting of his four councilors and 22 burgesses selected from the settlements along the James River) who would look out for the interests of the colonists.
For the untested frontier of Virginia and the New World, this was akin to a grand experiment in democracy, and deemed necessary to ensure the continuing development and prosperity of a fledgling colony that, just nine years before, was on the brink of collapse. By 1619, however, Jamestown had expanded well beyond its original Fort, even sporting well-appointed homes of gentlemen planters, surrounded by new plantations that defined the foundations of Virginia’s embryonic economic prowess as a tobacco-exporting powerhouse. Although Yeardley and his Virginia Company instructors were not fully aware at the time of the import of the first assembly, it was unique, constituting the seed of democracy in the Western Hemisphere.
It was appropriate that the first assembly convened in an early church structure built by the colonists. It was a comparatively spacious, single-room public structure, a 50-ft. by 20-ft. timber frame constructed over a brick and cobblestone foundation in 1617 when Deputy Governor Samuel Argall was still in control of the colony. This is small by today’s standards, but back then it was enough room for the first representatives to sit themselves comfortably into the “quire” (choir) space for six days during a hot summer.
The original church structure no longer exists. It was replaced over its remaining footprint by another church, this time constructed of brick beginning in 1639 and completed at the end of the 1640’s. Overall, the site has seen a succession of four different iterations, obscuring from sight all traces of the original timber frame structure of 1617, the building in which America’s first General Assembly convened.
Uncovering Lost Walls, and a Sensational Burial Find
It wasn’t until archaeologists began excavating within the church (now the Memorial Church, built in 1907 at the same location) in November of 2016 that excavators eventually uncovered the evidence defining the complete original dimensions and foundational features of the 1617 church. This included, among other discoveries, remnants of a clay and cobblestone wall foundation while excavating the northeast corner of the chancel area of the church, and a narrow line of a brick-capped clay and cobblestone wall foundation running north-south through the center of a unit being excavated in the old church tower at the south end of the currently standing Memorial Church. Given the excavations and research conducted to this point, and the historical record of the original 1617 church at this location, archaeologists concluded that they had finally discovered the eastern and western wall foundations of the 1617 church. Material evidence of all four walls of the church in which America’s first representative assembly had met in 1619 had not been completely destroyed.
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The brick, mortar and cobblestone foundation of the south wall of the 1617 church exposed.
But perhaps the most sensational find emerged while archaeologists were excavating within the area of the church that once featured the central east-west running aisle of the 1617 church. Here, evidence of a relatively large grave shaft was uncovered. Soil stain and multiple nails indicated that a hexagonal-shaped coffin running east-west had decayed away in this place long ago. Its shape was similar in style to those uncovered a few years before in the excavated footprint of the earlier, 1608 church (where John Rolfe and Pocahontas were married) discovered only a few yards away. In that excavation, the remains of Reverend Robert Hunt, Sir Ferdinando Wenman, Captain Gabriel Archer, and Captain William West, all known “movers and shakers” of the Jamestown settlement, were identified. They had been buried in the chancel area of the church. And like those earlier burials, the burial in what would have been the aisle of the 1617 church would have been a prime location for a prominent individual. Then, before excavating any further, the use of high-frequency GPR and the resulting data indicated the presence of bones and the orientation of a skeleton within the grave — something that had never been done before through GPR applications.
The aisle burial excavation was executed quickly, from Friday, July 21st, through Sunday, July 23rd. This was necessary because they had arranged to have Doug Owsley, renowned forensic anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Skeletal Biology Program, and his crew, participate in the examination and exhumation of the bones on Monday the 24th.
But the skeletal remains uncovered in the grave shaft were missing one critical element — the cranium. This was essential to identifying sex, origin, and facial characteristics. The cranium also contains two bones that are key to acquiring DNA samples: the petrous temporal. Understanding the evolution of the church’s material history (burial disturbance being common in 17th century churches due to space limitations), the archaeological team searched for a cranium among the church excavation finds of the past year. As it happened, there were three crania candidates, one of which had already been found in articulation with other skeletal remains, and two others. By successfully matching disarticulated teeth uncovered in the aisle burial with one of the remaining two skulls, the archaeologists were able to identify the skull that originally belonged to the skeleton in the aisle burial. They now had a skull to complete the forensic analysis, along with genomic (DNA) analysis, important for a definitive identification of the remains.
Who was this individual?
David Givens, Director of Archaeology with the Jamestown Rediscovery Historic Jamestowne Project, and his colleagues suggest this might be the remains of Governor Sir George Yeardley himself.
What are the clues that back them up?
Givens and his team point to several things. First, the remains were found in a grave shaft located in the central aisle, near the chancel area of the 1617 church footprint — a burial location that would be reserved for a very prominent individual during that time. Second, forensic analysis of the skeletal remains revealed that this individual was male, around 40 years old, was accustomed to light work (not heavy work as would be typical for a common laborer), likely spent considerable time on horseback and/or wearing armor, and consumed foodstuffs indigenous to this New World area, indicating considerable time spent in the New World. These characteristics would have been consistent with the historical profile of George Yeardley. Thirdly, a 32″ by 68″ distinctive Belgian black limestone tombstone (dubbed the “Knight’s Tombstone”, discovered years earlier at what would have been the southern entrance to the later 1640’s brick church that was constructed over the same site ), now thought to have been originally located where the center aisle burial of the 1617 church was discovered, features engraved depressions depicting a gentleman in armor typically for that of a knight. As noted earlier, Yeardley was knighted before he left England again for the Americas. But Yeardley was one of two knights who died during the time period of the second church (c.1617 to c.1639), the other being Lord Delaware, or Sir Thomas West, the colony’s first governor. Nonetheless, researchers suggest that the tombstone was likely Yeardley’s, as the will of his step-grandson, Adam Thorowgood II, notes a request that his tombstone be engraved similarly to that depicted on the Knight’s Tombstone.
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The Knight’s Tombstone
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The Knight’s Tombstone undergoing tedious restoration.
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None of this, however, would prove to be definitive evidence attesting to the identification of the remains of George Yeardley without corroborating results from genomic, or DNA, testing. To this end, Givens and his team began collaborating with Dr. Turi King of the University of Leicester, the geneticist who previously directed genomic research to identify the remains of King Richard III in 2013. Teamed with experts from the FBI’s DNA Support Unit (DSU) laboratory, King and colleagues were able to extract enough DNA material from the remains to achieve a 75% recovery rate, which led to building a full DN sequence on the individual. While research and analysis continues, researchers suggest the possibility that the results could yield information about the individual as detailed as hair and eye color. But while the genomic research under her direction has progressed satisfactorily, the genealogical search needed to find the right living relative for the comparative DNA analysis has thus far proven to be a “sticky wicket”, as Givens phrased it. This is in part due to the fact that Yeardley’s mother was adopted, so tracing the lineage forward from her using mitochondrial DNA (a proven method long used by geneticists for such endeavors) would lead them nowhere. But tracing through his natural grandmother (mitochondrial), or his father or grandfather through Y-chromosome analysis could produce results once the right living relative could be identified through genealogical research. Enter here University of Leicester’s Kevin Schürer who, like King, was involved in the investigations to identify the remains of King Richard III. Brought in by Given’s team for his expertise in genealogical research, Schürer is endeavoring to test the recovered DNA against DNA from at least one relative in the direct line of descent from Yeardley. Thus far, Schürer has identified 26 female lines of descent four generations deep, and work continues.
Meanwhile, forensic analysis of the bones continued to reveal new results. Owsley and his Smithsonian team have been busy developing a full forensic profile of the remains, which will tell us more about the life that belonged to the bones before death. Moreover, Dr. Peter Quinn and Dr. Greg Maslow of the University of Pennsylvania, along with others from Penn Medical, the Penn Museum and Penn Dental, have examined the remains, resulting in observations that could reveal new facts that, if the bones prove definitively to be those of Yeardley, will tell us personal medical details untold by historical documents. According to these researchers, this man suffered from a crippling ailment: osteomyelitis—a severe and painfully worsening bone infection that paints a profile of a person in declining health at the end of his life.
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Panoramic view of the aisle burial excavation area. A sealed structure was built over the excavation area to reduce DNA contamination. The “tent” was positively charged with filtered air conditioning and all tools and equipment were sterilized prior to the dig. Excavators were donned in special suits for the same purpose. Courtesy Jamestown Rediscovery
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Director of Archaeology David Givens and Senior Staff Archaeologist Mary Anna Hartley carefully excavate maxillary incisors adhered to the first cervical vertebra of the skeleton.Using fine tools and techniques, excavating the delicate remains was a slow and meticulous process. Courtesy Jamestown Rediscovery
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A tooth recovered from the individual (adhered to the first cervical vertebra). Teeth are critical for DNA analysis. Courtesy Jamestown Rediscovery
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Overhead view of excavators hard at work on the skeletal remains. Courtesy Jamestown Rediscovery
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Overhead view of the completely excavated skeletal remains. Notice the missing skull. Courtesy Jamestown Rediscovery
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Yeardley, Slavery, and More Burials
While Yeardley played a key role in establishing the first seeds of freedom and democratic governance in the New World, some irony or incongruity is not lost on the fact that he was also among the first ‘slaveholders’ in America. Ships arrived at Point Comfort (on the coast of present-day Virginia) in 1619, the very same year of the First General Assembly, unloading a human cargo of Africans for sale to early English planters who transported them to the newly founded English colony and its surrounding developing plantations (see the article, Digging the Roots of American Slavery). Yeardley, also a prominent Virginia planter, likely became the recipient of some of these new servants.
But were these first Africans actually slaves or something more akin to indentured servants who, after a period of time, were permitted to acquire their freedom and live independent lives? The probability is high that this may have been their status, as slavery as it was codified into law in the colonies decades later did not exist at that time in the form most familiar to American history. The first Africans’ experience nonetheless arguably laid the foundation upon which the institution of slavery was born and flourished through the subsequent decades. Thus began the story of the great American paradox, a reality that has haunted American society since its inception.
Beginning in 2017, Givens and his team began excavating an area within easy walking distance east of the original James Fort location in Jamestown. Historically, it is thought to contain evidence for the property of Captain William Pierce, among those of other wealthy planters. Like his peers, Pierce was an influential planter and merchant who built an impressive house within the newly developed town east of the James Fort area (known as New Towne) in the wealthy section known as ‘Back Street’. He was also the owner of a servant known from a 1624 muster (census) that recorded the presence of 21 Africans. One of them, a female African servant referred to as ‘Angela”, was documented as being connected to the Pierce household.Based on other historical documents, Angela is presumed to have been among the first group of Africans to arrive in Jamestown in 1619. The excavation has thus acquired the nick-name as the “Angela site”, and has been a focus of Givens’ research and investigations to define the greater James City that sprawled east of the original James Fort location. He has been working in collaboration with the National Park Service to this end.
What have they uncovered?
“A lot of people think we’re looking for Angela,” said Givens. “But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re looking at the contextual — the world in which Pierce was an actor [and by extension Angela].” And that context is slowly coming to light. Artifacts and other structural evidence of early 17th century occupation has emerged. Evidence of early 17th century posts have been uncovered at the site. Archaeologists interpret the finds as features of a gable end or addition to a house structure. But archaeology is a slow, painstakingly deliberate process, and the footprint of Jamestown in this area is exceedingly complex, given the continuous building, construction destruction and re-building, and turnover of occupants in succeeding generations of early Virginians who made their lives here. Moreover, the application of remote sensing techniques, such as LiDAR, is beginning to present some surprises, causing archaeologists to question the precise location of some town elements, such as the colonial road and other town structures that may potentially be found, possibly shifting the long-standing interpretation of the James City landscape.
GPR applications have also revealed another head-scratching development. Several burials were discovered. But these burials did not fit the pattern seen elsewhere at Jamestown — disparate, scattered in a corner lot, they defied the placement normally observed with families, lineages, or other groups on the historical landscape of Jamestown. Givens knew they had to be early burials, as no materials datable to later time periods were present at the burial locations.
This was something the archaeologists had not previously encountered. “We can’t ignore the fact that, spatially, we’re seeing something new and unique,” says Givens.
Popular Archaeology asked Givens if he had any thoughts about who these people may have been.“Indentured servants, perhaps,” he said. This could explain the nature of the burials.
Could they be some of the first Africans? It would be difficult to know without actually excavating the burials, and that would likely not happen soon, if at all, as permissions and approvals must be obtained before initiating any excavation of skeletal remains discovered in a grave site.
For now, they remain points on a newly emerging archaeological landscape.
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Above and below: Features emerging in the excavations at the ‘Angela site’ as of late April, 2019.
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Cowrie shells had monetary and spiritual value to enslaved Africans during the 17th and 18th century in the British colonies. This cowrie shell was excavated at the ‘Angela site’ at Jamestown.
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Digging the Roots of American Slavery
April, 2018 — For early April, archaeologists couldn’t ask for better weather. A gentle breeze, low humidity and comfortably cool shirt-sleeve temperatures were ideal for wielding a trowel and shovel.As I walked with camera in hand along a path through a grassy flat of land that was once graced with early 17th century structures, I spied a small team of archaeologists swarming about a single excavation unit — a shallow hole in the ground, squared off with near-perfect vertical walls defining its perimeter. They were digging up, with carefully managed precision, an old excavation unit completed in part in the 1930’s by a previous excavation team. They were going over old ground, but with new techniques and new objectives, digging deeper into a stratigraphy that began to yield artifacts — including early 17th century objects — not reached and recovered by the old excavation. Towering above them just a few yards away were the imposing ruins of the 18th century plantation mansion of Richard Ambler, one of Jamestown’s prominent and wealthiest citizens. I couldn’t resist snapping a few photos of this old house. It commanded the view of the landscape, drowning out, with its great architectural shout, everything else on the surface within its vicinity. But a far more compelling story was beginning to emerge as these archaeologists dug beneath the grassy yard in which the old ruin stood. It was far less noticeable to the visitor’s eye — but much more intriguing……….
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Ruins of the Ambler Mansion, built about 1750.
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Archaeologists at work on the lone excavation unit near the foot of the Ambler Mansion.
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The Back Street Boys
Leading the dig project was David Givens, a senior archaeologist with the Jamestown Rediscovery Historic Jamestowne project, under the auspices of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (or APVA/Preservation Virginia). The excavations at Jamestown have been best known in recent decades for the discovery of remains connected to the original 1607 James Fort under William Kelso, which have thus far yielded hundreds of thousands of artifacts and archaeological features that define the very first ‘footprint’ for successful permanent English settlement in the Americas. Excavations at the site of the Fort are ongoing. But beginning in 2017, Givens and his team began excavating an area within easy walking distance east of the original fort location. It contained evidence of occupation known historically as the property of Captain William Pierce*, a wealthy and influential planter and merchant who built an impressive house within the newly developed town east of the James Fort area (known as New Towne) in the wealthy section known as ‘Back Street’. His home was described as “one of the fairest in Virginia”, set in a neighborhood that housed the likes of the city’s most prominent and wealthiest citizens, such as Dr. John Pott, Governor Sir Francis Wyatt and Governor John Harvey. Future years saw the construction of even finer brick homes in this section by society notables like Richard Kemp, William Sherwood, Henry Hartwell and William May. It was here, also, where the before-mentioned planter Richard Ambler built his mansion in the 1750’s, the ruins of which still visibly mark the landscape today.
For its time, Back Street represented some of the finest physical fruits of colonial America’s richly bequeathed and successfully enterprising gentlemen visionaries, planters and merchants. But their high level of 17th century upscale living involved, among other things, the employment of labor through the servitude of others to do the work that the landed gentry would not do to support their privileged lifestyles. In early 17th century America, this meant the importation of human servants. Among them were the first Africans to land on American English colonial soil — the embryo of what would become slavery — and the households along New Towne’s illustrious Back Street were the first to take in African servants. For Givens and his team, the archaeology of the William Pierce property thus presented a unique opportunity to reveal the material and cultural context in which the first Africans, and thus the rudiments of the beginning of slavery, emerged. A mandate supported by initial funding from the National Park Service under a civil rights initiative grant during the Obama Administration made this possible.
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The “Cotter”map showing some of the previous archaeology done in New Towne, the 17th- century town that grew up east of James Fort. The grid system used 100′ blocks with trenching every 50′. Larger open areas were excavated around some sites and buildings. Archaeological excavations were last conducted in New Towne in the 1990’s. Archaeologists today are using the same grid system to tie in their excavations with the previous work. Image and text photographed from a plaque display near the site of excavations at the Pierce property site.
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The project area is on the Pierce property in New Towne, located just past the 18th-century Ambler mansion ruins, about 325 yards east of the tercentary obelisk monument. Image and text photographed from an informational plaque near the Pierce property excavation site.
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The targeted Pierce property excavation area near the Ambler Mansion. Courtesy David Givens and the Jamestown Rediscovery Historic Jamestown Project, Preservation of Virginia Antiquities
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Angela and the Beginnings of Slavery
Written history has not been generous to posterity about revealing the lives of English colonial America’s first Africans. But in early 17th century Jamestown, a 1624 muster (census) indicated the presence of 21 Africans. One of them, a female African servant referred to as ‘Angela”, was connected to the household of Captain William Pierce. Based on other historical documents, Angela is presumed to have been among the first group of Africans to arrive in Jamestown in 1619.
Interestingly enough, the historical context of her journey and arrival in America was actually defined by the intersection of the early 17th century world slave trade and high seas piracy.
Between 1618 and 1619, the Portuguese nobleman and colonial Governor Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos of Angola (in West Central Africa) led a series of campaigns that resulted in the capture of thousands of Kimbundu-speaking people —men, women and children — to populate six slave ships bound for Mexico. Well before the slave trade began to have any impact on the fledgling English colonies in America, the Spanish and Portuguese were funneling new slave power into the developing colonial economies of their realms in the New World — in this case, the rising economy of Vera Cruz in New Spain (present-day Mexico). Little did Vasconcelos know, however, that some of his cargo would ultimately end up at Jamestown, via pirating by the English in 1619. The ship São João Bautista, carrying about 350 enslaved Africans after departure from the port of São Paulo de Loanda, a Portuguese military outpost in West Africa, found itself about 50 slaves lighter after being intercepted by the White Lion and the Treasurer off the coast of Campeche (in present-day Mexico), both ships having sailed out of the Netherlands. The ships arrived at Point Comfort (on the coast of present-day Virginia) in 1619, unloading their human cargo for sale to early English planters who transported them to the newly founded English colony and its surrounding developing plantations. Angela was likely among them.
Were these first Africans, including Angela, actually slaves or something more akin to indentured servants who, after a period of time, were permitted to acquire their freedom and live independent lives? The probability is high that this may have been their status, as slavery as it was codified into law in the colonies decades later did not exist at that time in the form most familiar to American history. But these first Africans nonetheless arguably laid the foundation upon which the institution of slavery was born and flourished through the subsequent decades.
The Excavations
Contrary to what the popular perception might be about the newly opened dig, these excavators are not looking for the human remains of slaves.
“A lot of people think we’re looking for Angela,” said Givens. “But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re looking at the contextual — the world in which Pierce was an actor [and by extension Angela].”
It will be a long and tedious task. “There are 243 years of slavery under your feet,” Givens told me as we stood together next to the excavation unit as the archaeologists worked. “Here, folks came and went in fairly quick succession in the 17th century. And Pierce’s property was extensive, including two storehouses and planting areas.” It was located in a city, so this is “like searching for a needle in a stack of needles.” Givens showed me a selected sampling of artifacts unearthed from the unit. This assemblage included fragments of ceramic ware produced by a Jamestown potter during the 1st quarter of the 17th century. They were taken from three bulging paper bags of objects excavated only within the last week and a half from the single unit.
Givens leads me to a much larger excavated area only steps away from the smaller unit. He points out some exposed features at the location of the early 17th century Pierce residency. We were looking at what he described as possibly a “half cellar” space, tentatively and roughly dated, based on the finds within the cellar and its context, to no later than the 1630’s. Excavations have continued since my visit to the site. Since then, says Givens, “we are now finding artifacts that date prior to 1625. We are very near a component of the Pierce holdings”.
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A view of the excavation unit near the Ambler Mansion as it appeared in early April, 2018.
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A small sampling of the assortment of artifacts unearthed from the excavation unit during a single week and a half of work at the site.
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A view of the main excavation site at the location of the Pierce property as it appeared in early April, 2018.
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David Givens examines some recently excavated features at the site.
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This excavation is only in its beginning stages. There is a long way to go. The project could require, in Givens’ estimation, at least 10 years, “if not a career” to bring everything to a conclusion. More funding will be sought. The biggest takeaway will revolve around helping to elucidate the world in which Angela and her other First African contemporaries lived, and, if the archaeologists and historians are so fortunate, even add to our knowledge of specifically how Angela lived, what she ate, how she may have been treated, and what she may have seen or witnessed about early 17th century Jamestown.
“We will find the empirical evidence and test it against the historical record — a record that was produced primarily by rich, white, educated males,” said Givens. But, he added, “I think the archaeology and history is showing (at this early stage) how diverse the emerging colonial landscape was. Our modern notions of race and how folks negotiated their lives has been generalized (and perhaps white-washed) over the centuries. At Jamestown, archaeology can play a key role in reorienting our understanding of how First Africans impacted the material record of a very complex world of colonial entanglement. By unpacking this history, we are addressing the integral role individuals, like Angela, played in the growth of our Nation and how we view that past.”
Popular Archaeology will be covering new developments in the future as they emerge from the excavations.
Stay tuned.
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Members of the public visiting the excavation site. One of the reasons for selecting the site for excavation was because of its visibility and accessibility to the public. Courtesy David Givens and the Jamestown Rediscovery Historic Jamestown Project, Preservation of Virginia Antiquities
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Read more about the exciting archaeological work and latest discoveries on Virginia’s Jamestown Island by visiting this site.
*”A wealthy, influential planter and merchant who had arrived in Virginia in 1610, Peirce also owned a store in Jamestown. A “beloved friend” of Governor Francis Wyatt, Captain Peirce was the colony’s cape merchant and also served as lieutenant governor and commander of Jamestown Island. He was responsible for the island’s two blockhouses and appointed captain of the governor’s guard.” https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/103843198/william-pierce
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE—It’s a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.
But that story’s not true, according to research by University of Delaware anthropology professor Sarah Lacy, which was recently published in Scientific American and in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist.
Lacy and her colleague Cara Ocobock from the University of Notre Dame examined the division of labor according to sex during the Paleolithic era, approximately 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. Through a review of current archaeological evidence and literature, they found little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. The team also looked at female physiology and found that women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but that there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.
Lacy is a biological anthropologist who studies the health of early humans, and Ocobock is a physiologist who makes analogies between modern day and the fossil record. Friends in graduate school, they collaborated after “complaining about a number of papers that had come out that used this default null hypothesis that cavemen had strong gendered division of labor, the males hunt, females gather things. We were like, ‘Why is that the default? We have so much evidence that that’s not the case,’” Lacy said.
The researchers found examples of equality for both sexes in ancient tools, diet, art, burials and anatomy.
“People found things in the past and they just automatically gendered them male and didn’t acknowledge the fact that everyone we found in the past has these markers, whether in their bones or in stone tools that are being placed in their burials. We can’t really tell who made what, right? We can’t say, ‘Oh, only males flintknap,’ because there’s no signature left on the stone tool that tells us who made it,” Lacy said, referring to the method by which stone tools were made. “But from what evidence we do have, there appears to be almost no sex differences in roles.”
The team also examined the question of whether anatomical and physiological differences between men and women prevented women from hunting. They found that men have an advantage over women in activities requiring speed and power, such as sprinting and throwing, but that women have an advantage over men in activities requiring endurance, such as running. Both sets of activities were essential to hunting in ancient times.
The team highlighted the role of the hormone estrogen, which is more prominent in women than men, as a key component in conferring that advantage. Estrogen can increase fat metabolism, which gives muscles a longer-lasting energy source and can regulate muscle breakdown, preventing muscles from wearing down. Scientists have traced estrogen receptors, proteins that direct the hormone to the right place in the body, back to 600 million years ago.
“When we take a deeper look at the anatomy and the modern physiology and then actually look at the skeletal remains of ancient people, there’s no difference in trauma patterns between males and females, because they’re doing the same activities,” Lacy said.
During the Paleolithic era, most people lived in small groups. To Lacy, the idea that only part of the group would hunt didn’t make sense.
“You live in such a small society. You have to be really, really flexible,” she said. “Everyone has to be able to pick up any role at any time. It just seems like the obvious thing, but people weren’t taking it that way.”
Man the Hunter
The theory of men as hunters and women as gatherers first gained notoriety in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, a collection of scholarly papers presented at a symposium in 1966. The authors made the case that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to prehistoric diets, contributing to the growth of bigger brains, compared to our primate cousins. The authors assumed all hunters were male.
Lacy points to that gender bias by previous scholars as a reason why the concept became widely accepted in academia, eventually spreading to popular culture. Television cartoons, feature films, museum exhibits and textbooks reinforced the idea. When female scholars published research to the contrary, their work was largely ignored or devalued.
“There were women who were publishing about this in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but their work kept getting relegated to, ‘Oh, that’s a feminist critique or a feminist approach,’” Lacy said. “This was before any of the work on genetics and a lot of the work on physiology and the role of estrogen had come out. We wanted to both lift back up the arguments that they had already made and add to it all the new stuff.”
Lacy said the “man the hunter” theory continues to influence the discipline. While she acknowledges that much more research needs to be done about the lives of prehistoric people — especially women — she hopes her view that labor was divided among both sexes will become the default approach for research in the future.
For 3 million years, males and females both participated in subsistence gathering for their communities, and dependence on meat and hunting was driven by both sexes, Lacy said.
“It’s not something that only men did and that therefore male behavior drove evolution,” she said. “What we take as de facto gender roles today are not inherent, do not characterize our ancestors. We were a very egalitarian species for millions of years in many ways.”
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Modern humans outside of Africa can trace around 2% of their ancestry to Neanderthals, but this proportion varies geographically, with Europeans carrying slightly less of this ancestry than East Asians. Now, ancient DNA from the past 40,000 years suggests that this variation may be attributed to expansions of Neolithic farmers into Europe starting around 10,000 years ago, because these groups had less Neanderthal DNA than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. For years, researchers have been debating when, where, and how often Neanderthals and Homo sapiens intermixed. Studies increasingly suggest that hybridization occurred in multiple waves, but it has been unclear why East Asian populations carry 8-24% more Neanderthal DNA than Western Europeans. A recent study*, authored by some researchers from the present study, proposed that spatial variations in Neanderthal ancestry could be explained by the various expansion ranges of early modern humans outside of Africa. To explore this hypothesis, Claudio S. Quilodrán and colleagues examined Neanderthal ancestry in 2,625 published human genomes from across Eurasia, ranging from about 40,000 years ago to the present day. In European DNA from around 40,000 years ago, they observed a prominent spatial gradient in Neanderthal ancestry that decreased from north to south. As hunter-gatherers continued spreading into Europe over the next 20,000 years, Neanderthal ancestry gradually declined. However, these earlier expansions still left European populations with more Neanderthal DNA than was present in East Asia during the same period. The DNA of early farmers in Europe, who started to arrive around 10,000 years ago, carried much less Neanderthal DNA than hunter-gatherers who already lived there, which may have contributed to the subsequent dilution of Neanderthal ancestry to present-day European levels. “This second range expansion is essential for explaining the pattern currently observed of lower [Neanderthal] ancestry in western Europe than in East Asia,” Quilodrán et al. write.
*Past human expansions shaped the spatial pattern of Neanderthal ancestry, Science Advances, 18-Oct-2023. 10.1126/sciadv.adg9817
Image, Top Left: Scientists study the human genome to determine the percentage of Neanderthal ancestry across various populations in Eurasia. PublicDomainPictures, Pixabay
UNIVERSITY OF YORK—For many people seaweed holds a reputation as a superfood, heralded for its health benefits and sustainability, but it appears our European ancestors were ahead of the game and were consuming the nutrient-rich plant for thousands of years.
Researchers say they have found “definitive” archaeological evidence that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten in the mesolithic, through the Neolithic transition to farming and into the Early Middle Ages, suggesting that these resources, now rarely eaten in Europe, only became marginal much more recently.
The study*, published in Nature Communications, reveals that while aquatic resources were exploited, the archaeological evidence for seaweed is only rarely recorded and is almost always considered in terms of non-edible uses like fuel, food wrappings or fertilizers.
Historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, Brittany and Ireland dating to the 10th Century, while sea kale is mentioned by Pliny as a sailor’s anti-scurvy remedy.
By the 18th Century seaweed was considered as famine food, and although seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants continue to be economically important in parts of Asia, both nutritionally and medicinally, there is little consumption in Europe.
The team, led by archaeologists from the universities of Glasgow and York, examined biomarkers extracted from dental calculus from 74 individuals from 28 archaeological sites across Europe, from north Scotland to southern Spain, which revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”
Samples where biomolecular evidence survived revealed consumption of red, green or brown seaweeds, or freshwater aquatic plants, with one sample from Orkney also containing evidence for a Brassica, most likely sea kale.
There are approximately 10,000 different species of seaweeds in the world, however only 145 species are eaten today, principally in Asia.
The researchers hope that their study will highlight the potential for including more seaweeds and other local freshwater plants in our diets today – helping Europeans to become healthier and more sustainable.
Karen Hardy, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and Principal Investigator of the Powerful Plants project, said: “Today, seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants are virtually absent from traditional, western diets and their marginalization as they gradually changed from food to famine resources and animal fodder, probably occurred over a long period of time, as has also been detected elsewhere with some plants.
“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally.”
“It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”
Co-author on the paper, Dr Stephen Buckley, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said “The bio-molecular evidence in this study is over three thousand years earlier than historical evidence in the Far East.
“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources.
“This strongly suggests that the nutritional benefits of seaweed were sufficiently well understood by these ancient populations that they maintained their dietary link with the sea.”
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The stone building is Isbister in Orkney, also known as Tomb of the Eagles where some of the seaweed samples analyzed in the study came from. Professor Karen Hardy
Bounded by the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, Azerbaijan is a country squeezed between Europe and Asia. Its capital, Baku, is popularly known for a medieval walled Inner City, and among its most famous sites is Yanar Dağ (or “Burning Mountain“), a mountain near the Caspian Sea that features a natural glowing fire that has been ‘burning’ more than 65 years. It is no wonder that many nick-name the country “the land of fire”. Among its treasures is another place known as “Medieval Agsu City”, where important archaeological investigations are being carried out………..
Created in 2019, the “Medieval Agsu City” State Historical-Cultural Reserve of the State Service of Cultural Heritage Conservation, Development and Rehabilitation under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan, is located in the Agsu district, Azerbaijan. In the 18th century, the medieval city of Agsu was the largest settlement in Azerbaijan in terms of population and territory. Built by Nadir Shah in May 1735 near the village of Agsu, Covering a 40-hectare area,.the fortress-city has long been the residence of rulers appointed by the Shah to the region – the Shirvan khans. The Agsu fortress is also considered to be the center of the revolts of Shirvan nobles against Nadir Shah. At various times, the Russian commander Count Valeryan Zubov and Naibussaltana Abbas Mirza attacked and besieged the fortress. Some of them even captured the castle. Famous 18th century travelers Samuel Gmelin, Bieberstein, Bronevsky and others have reported on the fortress. During the reign of the Shirvan khans, Agsu crafts, trade and culture developed to a high level.
Archaeological Excavations: What They Have Revealed
The first archaeological exploration work in the area was carried out in 1983 by the Agsu-Ismayilli expedition. More recently, however, the joint Agsu Archaeological Expedition has been conducting excavations of the medieval city through the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of ANAS and the National History Museum of Azerbaijan.
Despite being built in a short time, the most perfect urban planning of its time was applied. Stone-paved streets and roads, water and sewer lines, handicraft workshops, etc. discovered during the excavations tell the story of a modern progressive urban culture for its time. The interior and exterior walls, floors, roofs, as well as ovens and hearths of the houses in Shirvan were painted with a solution made of special rock called “juice”. This paint solution not only beautified houses, but also protected them from rain. One of the most interesting workshops in the city is a paint shop. The paint dusts found here were studied by an employee of Marmara University in Turkey. It turned out that the painting material was obtained from the madder (Latin “Rubia Tinctorium L”). Because the production and export of madder is one of the main events of the 18th century, this historical period is sometimes called the “Madder century”.
During the research, large public buildings with interesting architectural solutions – underground baths, the Juma Mosque, and ice house – were discovered in the area. There are large cemetery remains on 3 sides of the city.
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“Medieval Agsu City” State Historical-Cultural Reserve
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Bath complex, 4th excavation site.
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Mosque (Juma Mosque)
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Storage (ice storage)
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Handicraft quarter
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The reserve features 19 historical monuments. All of them are of local importance. Three of them are architectural monuments, while others are archaeological monuments. These monuments include the “Ancient Bath Complex”, the “Juma Mosque”, the “Main Square”, the “Buzkhana (ice house)”, and the “Handicrafts Quarter”, as well as other monuments in the area.
The remains of magnificent medieval buildings were uncovered while exploring the tomb in the Shikhmezid neighborhood of Agsu city, based on oral information of local residents received by the leadership of the Agsu archaeological expedition in 2012. At that time, preliminary archaeological excavations were carried out there in order to save the monument. Thus, the remains of a magnificent rectangular building built towards Mecca, using large accurate minestones, were discovered. The building consists of a large hall covering an area of about 400 square meters and a large number of relatively small rooms.
Fine tile patterns decorated with geometric and floral elements prevail among the finds revealed during the excavations. Architectural features, construction in the direction ofMecca, decoration with colored tiles and the existence of rooms around which hearth remains were found, increase the likelihood that the building is a mosque or the madrasah part of khangah.
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Above and below: The Shikhmezid excavations
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Although the people within the graves found in this area were buried according to Islamic rules, i.e. over the right shoulder and towards Mecca, more interesting facts emerged. Most of the graves were covered with 4, 6 or 8 jars. Such a burial custom has not yet been found in any Muslim country. Anthropological research revealed that the skull samples, which undoubtedly belonged to Muslims, are particular to the “Caspian” anthropological type, which represents local Azerbaijanis.
According to elderly residents of the region, the khangah and the tomb in the Shikhmezid neighborhood were destroyed as part of measures taken by the Soviet regime in the 1930s. The analysis of the finds displayed in the upper layer during the preliminary research shows that the Shikhmezid khangah complex, Shikhmezid tomb, Narli pir, and graves with jar covering, belong to the XIII-XVII centuries. They constitute a complex of monuments that have no analogues in the world.
During 2 years under the guidance of archaeologist Professor Gafar Jabiyev, the head of the Agsu Archaeological Expedition, a large number of finds were discovered as a result of excavations conducted in the area surrounded by the village of Shikhmezid (Sheikhmezid) of the Agsu district. The expedition, sent to the Shamakhi region by the Azerbaijan Learning and Research Society, under the leadership of Jamil Aleksandrovich Nasifi, visited Agsu and collected information about the Shikhmezid tomb and the remains of ancient mosques around it. As a result of archaeological research, the use of the Shikhmezid khanate as a yard was prevented, taken under the control of the Ministry of Culture, and prepared as a protection zone. It was included in the “Medieval Agsu City” State Historical-Cultural Reserve. Exhibition of the finds includes octagonal, cross-shaped tiles, glazed wall decorations, parts of pottery, vessels with botanical, geometric and celestial patterns, all found in the mosque-madrasa part of the Shikhmezid khanagh.
The Shikhmezid Tomb
Shikhmezid is a historical neighborhood in Agsu city. Shikhmezid was a separate village until the beginning of the 20th century and local intellectuals wrote about the presence of historical monuments there. Nasifi visited Agsu and collected information about the Shikhmezid Tomb and the remains of nearby ancient mosques. That information is reflected in Nasifi’s extensive article. The pomegranate tree in Shikhmezid Tomb was considered a sacred pilgrimage by local residents and the cemetery was called the “Narli Pir” Cemetery. State figures of the Shirvan region, their family members and intellectuals were buried in the Narli Pir Cemetery.
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Above and below: The Shikhmezid Tomb
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Shikhmezid Khanghah
The main part of the Shikhmezid khanghah, i.e., the mosque-madrasa building, was discovered during the archaeological research conducted in 2012-2013. The building consists of a main hall and cells, looking like Khalwatiya dargah. The walls here were built of well-hewn limestone and slaked lime was used as a fixing mortar. Huge walls give the building a special look. Numerous baked brick moldings and turquoise tiles indicate that the building had a brick dome. It is evident from the pottery-ware and other objects found there that the building was in continuous use since its construction. Unfortunately, other remains of the building extend to the land to the east and north, which is now used as a yard.
The exhibition, “Shikhmezid khanghah in Medieval Agsu City” is open in the historic Juma mosque on the territory of the “Medieval Agsu City” State Historical-Cultural Reserve. The exhibition is dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the excavations.
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Above and below: Shikhmezid Khanghah
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Jar-shaped graves
One of the important results of the archaeological excavations are the graves covered with jars (pitchers), which were found in the cemetery built to the south and west of the mosque-madrasa. Such Muslim graves were not recorded in the archaeology of Azerbaijan so far. It is interesting that jars were used instead of birthstones for both men and women grave sites, as well as for both adults and children. After a grave well is dug, its edges are built with river stones or baked bricks. After placing the corpse in the chamber, well-hewn wood is laid on, and the jars are arranged on it in a zigzag form (the jar’s edge facing north and south respectively). The number of jars differs: 9, 8, 7, 4, etc. This number is related to whether the grave belongs to an adult or a child. All discovered skeletons were studied by an anthropologist and it was confirmed that they belong to the Caspian anthropological type of southern Europeans.
Monitoring revealed that the remains of the walls and bent parts of the khangah were etched, eroded, and moss was found in the stone part. Various types of weeds and shrubs were found in the khangah area, damaging the monument. The collapse and removal of stones are fixed in some parts of the walls, about two meters and in some about a meter, caused by anthropogenic impacts. The monument must be re-cleaned in order to restore the khangah as it was during archaeological excavations. The research should be continued on both the mosque and the tomb, and necessary restoration and conservation work should be carried out.
Editor’s Note: Following is an interview conducted by Richard Marranca of archaeologist Guy Hepp, who is Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. Dr. Hepp has been involved in research related to the ancient people of Oaxaca, a atate in southwestern Mexico. Oaxaca has a rich history of human occupation going back as far as 11,000 years ago, though it is best known for the ancient Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations……….
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Part 1
RM (Richard Marranca):Hello Guy. It’s been a few years since we first met in Oaxaca and did the interview. I take it you recently returned from Tututepec? Can you tell us about this place and the Mixtecs?
GH (Guy Hepp: It’s great to hear from you, Richard. Yes, I volunteered on a project at Tututepec in 2022, directed by my good friend Marc Levine from the University of Oklahoma. This was coming full circle, for me, as Marc’s dissertation project in Tututepec in 2005 was my first experience in Oaxaca. Tututepec is both an ancient site and a modern town on the western Pacific coast of Oaxaca. It was the capital of a coastal empire stretching from near the Guerrero border to roughly the Isthmus of Tehuantepec during the late Postclassic period (1100–1522 CE). It is still the county seat in the region (largely for symbolic reasons) and one can still hear Mixtec spoken there, particularly by the older residents. There’s much to tell about Tututepec, including its founding by the famous hero-king Lord 8-Deer “Jaguar Claw,” whose exploits are recorded in the preserved Mixtec codices, but I refer you to research by Marc and others for the details.
RM:Can you say a few things about the excavation and ongoing research?
GH: I don’t want to spill the beans on Marc’s project, as this is his research area and he was kind enough to have me join his project as a volunteer. In addition to helping with the excavations, my focus has been on the ceramic figurines from the site. As I discuss below, figurines have been a specialty of mine since my MA project, completed in 2007. Marc has a wonderful relationship with the modern Tututepec community and an ongoing collaboration with the Museo Yucusaa, the town’s community museum. His research questions focus in part on craft specialization at the household and neighborhood levels. Tututepec is a fascinating inversion of a familiar trend. Rather than a large modern city crowding around archaeological ruins, the modern town has dwindled due to a shift in the population out of the defensible piedmont and onto the coastal plain below, where the local stretch of the Pan-American highway was built. As a result, modern Tututepec is dwarfed and surrounded by the terraces and preserved foundations of its ancient footprint. Marc has excavated in different parts of the site with the hopes of better understanding the economic specializations among the different households and neighborhoods and how those factored into the local economy.
RM:Is your focus the ceramic figures?
GH: I did a study of Formative period (2000 BCE – 250 CE) ceramic figurines from coastal Oaxaca for my MA thesis and have retained an interest in them in my subsequent work. Though an art history professor of mine would remind me that art need not directly mirror reality, I still find anthropomorphic (human-shaped) figurines one of our best ways to get a glimpse of how people in the past dressed and thought of the human body and identity. And yes, one of my favorite things about studying such figurines is that they give me an excuse to do scientific illustrations, which were my first entrée into professional archaeology when I was a high school student. Marc and I agreed that we would collaborate on a study of the Late Postclassic period figurines from Tututepec, as these are poorly understood but show some indications of widespread interactions and shared practices in Mesoamerica in the last few centuries before the arrival of the Spanish.
RM:Do archaeologists draw things or is that a specialized branch of artist-archaeologists? I recall a few Egyptologists who started out that way?
GH: Most archaeologists hire professional artists for their artifact illustrations and reconstruction drawings, though they might make their own schematic drawings of things like ceramic vessel profiles. Scientific illustration just happens to be a way I can bring two of my interests (art and archaeology) together. In fact, for me, archaeology is a wonderful sort of compromise that allows me to bring together my loves of writing, art, travel, music, teaching, and studying the past. Usually, I do pen-and-ink artifact illustrations using a standardized stippling technique. Later, I digitize these for publication. I’ve also done paintings such as an oil painting reconstruction of the ceramic vessel assemblage recovered from the Early Formative period (2000–1000 BCE) site of La Consentida during my dissertation project.
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Painting of the Tlacuache ceramic complex by Guy Hepp.
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RM: Do you generally draw objects from excavations and is that part of your job?
GH: I usually do illustrations of objects that are iconographic, meaning they bear decorations that I think may be useful for interpreting something about ancient beliefs, identity, or social practices. These artifacts may come from museums or excavated contexts. While museum examples may be more complete, they frequently lack the contextual information of excavated examples, which can help us better understand the roles they played in the past. Formal illustrations are still useful in the era of digital imagery because they can help us depict subtle surface details of objects, even eroded ones, that otherwise might just look like a blob in a photograph. Publishers tend to like these illustrations because they’re eye-catching, can convey a lot of information, are cheap to print, and don’t require color. When pigment is part of the decoration of an object, of course, we need to find a way to indicate that in the illustration or use photography in that instance. I began doing artifact illustrations for pay as a high school student (my first archaeology job) and have since done pro-bono illustrations for friends and colleagues just because I love to do it and it gives me a chance to work with some truly amazing pieces, such as a stone rain deity mask I illustrated for my friend Jeff Brzezinski’s project. From a copyright perspective, artifact illustration also gives me the chance to show imagery from other research projects or artifacts whose whereabouts are unknown without worrying about image permission. I simply re-draw the object and cite the source like a bibliographic citation, since the artwork is mine.
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Above and below: All artifacts illustrated here are from the Early Formative period (2000–1000 BCE) village site of La Consentida, Oaxaca, Mexico. Based on radiocarbon dates from the site, most probably date to about 1850–1500 BCE, specifically. All dates are calibrated. Figure above: Figurine depicting possible ballplayer with protective belt and broken tripod support for standing and repositioning. Image courtesy Guy Hepp.
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Playable bird instrument (ocarina) from ritual cache. One of the oldest known ceramic musical instruments in Mesoamerica. Image courtesy Guy Hepp.
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Head of a crested bird instrument (whistle or ocarina) with smoothed interior surface from resonating chamber. From early platform fill layer near human burials. Image courtesy Guy Hepp.
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Part II
RM:Your essay, Landfalls, Sunbursts, and the Capacha Problem: A Case for Pacific Coastal Interaction in Early Formative–Period Mesoamerica, is wide-ranging and fascinating. So, there are objects in Mesoamerica that show influences from far away in S. America? Can you speak about this long network of exchange?
GH: When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they recorded long-distance expeditions of merchants using balsa rafts and traveling between distant coastal points in Ecuador and West Mexico. This exchange network is still not fully understood but has been replicated with experimental archaeology, studied with complex charts of offshore currents, and is likely responsible for the broad distribution of spondylus shell jewelry and some metallurgical techniques, including lost-wax casting, which seem to have been imported to Mesoamerica from South America. In the paper you’re referring to, I argued based on pottery decorations (particularly a motif sometimes called the “sunburst”) as well as basic ceramic forms and patterns of human dental modification, that this interaction network can be pushed much further back, to approximately 3,500–4,000 years ago.
This would explain why early ceramics in western Mesoamerica are dissimilar to those found closer to Central America, in a region called the Soconusco. It would also suggest that there were two ancient sources of Mesoamerican pottery traditions, one stemming from Central America and the other from northern South America by way of this Pacific coastal maritime route. This is a bold claim, but it actually revives work in the mid-20th century by scholars such as Isabel Kelly, who predicted by at least as early as the 1970s that we should expect to see evidence along the Pacific coast of “landfalls” by participants in such a network connecting South America and Mesoamerica. This project was fantastic to work on because it combined ceramic analyses from my dissertation work in Oaxaca with opportunities to visit some of the oldest pottery in the Americas (called Valdivia) in Ecuador and the Capacha phase ceramics of West Mexico. My paper was part of a larger research collaboration with scholars working mostly in later periods, and there’s much more to do. Linguistic evidence, for example, would be a strong way to support such an argument.
RM:Where did the shapes and objects first appear in S. America?
GH: This is a fascinating area of emerging research and one in which I’m not an expert. The Valdivia ceramics of the Pacific coast of northern South America are some of the oldest in the hemisphere but there are even older ceramics that are poorly understood from elsewhere in South America, including in the Amazon. If some of the earliest ceramics and complex communities existed in the Amazon rainforest, they are difficult to trace now, in part because of the highly acidic sediments of the forest and a lack of extensive study there.
I’ve seen it suggested by a Brazilian scholar that the Amazon rainforest itself is not a primordial, natural phenomenon but rather the remnants of an anthropogenic garden landscape long curated by native peoples to emphasize cultivation and support village life. We have so much more to learn about ancient human influence in the Americas and the true early origins of the Anthropocene.
RM:Were historians and archaeologists of past generations aware of this long-distance bartering and exchange?
GH: Arguments for long-distance trade and interaction were very common in archaeology throughout most of the 20th century. These fell from favor after about the 1970s and were replaced by an emphasis on local developments of many technological innovations. Without discounting the ingenuity of local populations to develop their own traditions and goods, I am in a camp of scholars who think that this theoretical pendulum shift away from “diffusionist” arguments may have been an over-correction. The baby was tossed out with the bathwater, so to speak, and we now tend to underestimate the abilities of ancient people to travel, navigate, communicate, and exchange goods and ideas across long distances. Calling me a “neo-diffusionist” might be going too far, as I think we always must remember that local people will adapt ideas from elsewhere to their own needs. I do think that we must follow the evidence, though, even when it suggests that people of the past surmounted daunting obstacles.
RM:Can you tell us about your upcoming plans for research in Oaxaca?
GH: I’ve recently submitted a grant proposal to return to coastal Oaxaca to study La Consentida, the Early Formative period village site where I did my doctoral dissertation work. If approved, this new study would take place over at least three seasons and include excavations at La Consentida, more excavations and mapping at a neighboring site called Cabeza de Vaca, and the first of what will likely be several seasons of laboratory analysis of the artifacts and other materials we recover. La Consentida, and likely also Cabeza de Vaca (based on some artifacts found at the surface) were among the earliest settled villages in Mesoamerica. Radiocarbon dates for La Consentida, for example, indicate that the site was occupied between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, which was a time of fundamental changes in Mesoamerica including the establishment of settled villages, a shift toward the first complex social hierarchies, and an increasing reliance on domesticated foods such as maize. Whereas the goal of my dissertation project was to gather as much information as possible about the broad topics of social organization, settlement practices, and ancient diet, my goals for this new project will intentionally be much narrower. The team and I (it will be a collaborative endeavor) will focus on remnants of domestic contexts, particularly houses and their associated refuse. We hope to better understand the social units (or “households”) that occupied the homes of Early Formative period coastal Oaxacan communities to question decades-old assumptions about gender roles, the organization of the family, and in general the social units that populated these settlements. For decades, researchers have assumed that the house in early Mesoamerican villages was the domain of women and that public space was reserved for men. But ethnohistoric evidence from Oaxaca describing the public and political activities of women and collectives, as well as the ubiquity of artifacts gendered “feminine,” such as figurines, really throw this into question in my opinion. At the very least, these old assumptions, which may say more about 20th-century Western society than they do about the Early Formative period, should be crafted into testable research questions.
For my dissertation project, I was in coastal Oaxaca multiple times, the longest of which had me living in a small coastal town for 10 months. Since my wife and I recently had a baby, and because I have teaching responsibilities during the academic year, I am hoping that this new targeted approach will help us address some very specific (but fundamental) research questions and take place in shorter, concentrated visits to coastal Oaxaca so I can still be a good dad at home!
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Guy Hepp is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. He holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.A. from Florida State University. His research is focused on early complex societies of Mesoamerica and especially the archaeology of La Consentida, an Early Formative period (2000–1000 cal BC) village in Oaxaca, Mexico. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright Program, was awarded the Society for American Archaeology’s 2016 Dissertation Award. In 2019, Hepp published a book based on his dissertation with the University Press of Colorado. He recently co-edited another book with the University Press of Florida and has authored publications about mortuary archaeology, paleoethnobotany, interregional interaction, radiocarbon dating, heritage politics, ceramic figurines, musical instruments, masks, and the archaeology of the senses.
You may recognize her from several documentaries such as Lost Treasures of Egypt, Unearthed and others.Egyptologist Aliaa Ismail of Factum Arte is a proud recipient of the National Geographic Wayfinder Award. She was previously awarded the Future 50 Leaders Award in 2022 by the Project Management Institute for using new technology to preserve ancient historical treasures. This award holds the promise of a continuing cooperation with her projects in the future as she is now an honorary NatGeo society member.
Like Sarah Parcak’s revolutionary use of LIDAR satellite scans to locate thousands of settlements and 17 previously unknown pyramid sites throughout Egypt, Aliaa is part of an exciting, new wave of guardians with a clear vision, embracing the latest technology to transform the field of archaeology for the better. These guardians of ancient Egypt devote their entire lives to researching, discovering, preserving, and educating the masses on the importance of one of humanity’s most impactful cultures.
In a world embattled by climate change, fragile ancient sites in Egypt can be destroyed in an instant and lost forever. Aliaa’s ongoing projects of creating 3D replicas of these important ancient sites makes them accessible to all, amplifying their importance on a global scale. To create the replica of King Tutankhamun’s tomb and Seti I, Aliaa (pictured left) and her Egyptian team of conservators utilized a variety of high-tech tools to collect the massive data necessary to forge an exact replica. For example: portable chemical imaging technology and X-ray fluorescence in chemical imaging technology were implemented to help uncover changes made in Egyptian tomb paintings by the original artists thousands of years ago that may never be noticed through plain eyesight. Additionally, hyperspectral imaging analyzed the painting on multiple wavelengths, such as ultraviolet or infrared, revealing more secrets than are visible to the human eye.
Before Factum Arte’s Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative (TNPI) was given permission to scan these tombs, the process of analyzing one tomb could take an average of 10 to 15 years. Now, the new digital tools and technological advances help shave years off the process.
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An Interview with Aliaa
EV (Eric Vasallo): What current projects are you working on and have you received the permit to begin documenting Nefertari’s tomb yet?
Aliaa: We have been waiting for years for permits in order to begin scanning and documenting Nefertari’s tomb as well as Ay’s (Tut’s successor) tomb. It is currently in pending status. I am hopeful to get good news next year and that this award will aid in this process of granting permission to continue our conservational work.
EV: Nicholas Reeves formulated his theories for discoveries of potential doorways behind the painted plaster walls of Tutankhamen’s main burial chamber using Factum Arte’s scans of Tut’s tomb. What other discoveries have been made during your projects while photographing and documenting the minute details of tombs?
Aliaa – Belzoni made wax and plaster casts of Seti tomb in the 1800’s to make a facsimile to show in an expo in London. Those marks are still visible in their scans – those casts with the original traces of ancient paints. His replica has been lost to time and is most likely hidden in a London basement somewhere.
My team and I are still processing the monumental amount of high-resolution data collected from Seti tomb and hope to create a partial replica to be permanently housed inside the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM).
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The team at work.
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The team together.
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EV: Does the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative (TNPI) anticipate any benefits toward your pursuits in utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) possibly to collect and interpret data faster than via human intervention? Where do you envision that technology being implemented in your field?
For Factum Arte’s VR tut experience their high-res data had to be downgraded to create the VR experience as these technologies work with low-res files. So AI promises to connect their high-res data to incorporate into a more detailed and immersive VR experience.
EV: What was the inciting event if any that led you to where you are today? What sparked your interest to become an Egyptologist?
Aliaa- I was born in Cairo, Egypt but my family soon moved to South Africa for work, and I essentially grew up in Lesotho not knowing anything about ancient Egypt. I was disconnected from the rich cultural past of my country. I enrolled in the American University at Cairo and originally planned to go for some architectural or engineering degree like my father and an elective came up which was a class on ancient Egypt taught by none other than Salima Ikram. She was amazing and after that class, it opened my eyes and I never looked back. I was 100 percent committed to passionately pursuing a career as an Egyptologist.
EV: If you had a billionaire ready to invest in your work, what dream preservation project would you embark on?
Aliaa – My dream would be to implement a program as a way to educate and empower local communities to learn of the importance of these neglected ancient sites, because these local people are ultimately the caretakers of the sites. This is why grassroots activism is so important to ignite interest and a love for these ancient sites to preserve them for generations to come instead of falling into obscurity and neglect. Looters, for example, always come from other cities. They are not locals. These local Egyptians that I train, will sustain the conservation after the grant money runs out. I always reinforce to them the importance of preserving an artifact and how the information held inside the artifacts is lost when it is sold on the black market.
EV: You were also given this award for your Green Desert Project, where you and your spouse have restored arid desert to its original green, fertile state. Where are you with this project?
Aliaa- The Green Desert project was started by my husband Abdo Ghaba’s father, Mohammed Hassan Ghaba on the West Bank of Luxor with a crop of wheat, hibiscus, peanuts, onions, date, and sycamore trees. He had a vision to restore fertility to the desert. Egypt in the 50’s encouraged people to settle on agricultural land and because of that shift, desertification has been encroaching across the country. In what used to be one the of the world’s most abundant bread baskets, today Egypt cannot feed itself without importing grain. The project is fully green. We use solar panels and deep well water which was very expensive to accomplish. We have successfully experimented with Guava trees, clover, and wheat crops. The Green Desert Project is self-funded, and plans are to start a crowd funding campaign to fund further work towards the project’s goal of planting 10,000 trees. The hope is to start a national, government sponsored project of increasing agricultural production nationwide. In the meantime, I am focused on nursing my newborn baby boy, Suleiman, named after a prophet.
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The Future
Technology is fast transforming the field of archaeology. Just this month, the first discovery using Artificial Intelligence was made in Peru’s Nazca lines. AI was able to recognize hidden geoglyphs previously invisible to the naked human eye.
Deep learning can simulate the behavior of the brain, learning large amounts of data. It is a driver of AI capable of performing analytical and physical tasks without human intervention and currently lies behind everyday products like digital assistants (Siri, Alexa) or self-driving cars. Deep learning can aid archaeologists in deciphering lost languages that have eluded scholars for decades. It can also quickly piece together artifacts in museum storage across the world and create a 3D virtual model for researchers to study. For example: there are thousands of cuneiform tablets yet undeciphered or translated in museum storage spaces. If you teach the Deep Learning AI how to translate the language held in the tablets it can quickly scan and translate the thousands of fragments, piecing them together in a fraction of the time it would take a human. The technology is not as “smart” thus far and would require human moderators to check the data it produces, but it still holds the potential to save money and time for scholars in the field.
One problem created by these new technologies spurring discoveries of ancient sites is that it is outpacing the authorities’ ability to care for them. The flipside is these new technologies can help lower the costs of excavation and make them less destructive with more powerful scanning tools.
Some academics estimate that over 60% of Egypt’s sites and artifacts are still hidden underground. If true, Aliaa and the other guardians in this new wave of techno-archaeologists will assure that the antiquities are excavated, protected and carefully preserved for future generations of humans to learn and understand the complexity of the civilizations that have given us meaning and changed our evolutionary path.
It is poetic justice for Aliaa’s mission, who once was a young, disconnected Egyptian herself, unaware of the importance of the ancient Egyptian civilization to humanity, to now actively re-engage and train a small army of local Egyptians, educating them about their priceless cultural heritage.
“If you are thinking 1 year ahead, plant seeds
If you are thinking 10 years ahead, plant a tree
If you are thinking 100 years ahead, educate the people.”
—- Chinese Emperor Kuan Tsu, 5th century BCE
Like a seed dropped into black fertile Nile soil, Aliaa Ismail is planting seeds for the future by educating and empowering her fellow Egyptians. Like the Ancient Egyptians in their quest for immortality, she has found a way of continuing her guardianship of Egypt’s rich cultural heritage for generations to come.
Join us in congratulating this pioneer transforming her field to a high-tech future. We certainly can’t wait to see what she accomplishes next.
Emerging technology such as LIDAR satellite scanning, Artificial Intelligence, and Deep Learning are already transforming the field but don’t expect archaeologists to hang up their trowels or brushes any time soon. They will be adding these tools to their arsenal, taking the field well into the future.
What will archaeology look like in 2030 or beyond?
Professor Frank J. Korn has retired from his teaching position on the Classical Studies faculty at Seton Hall University.He is a Fulbright Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and the author of nine books on various aspects of the Eternal City.He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who as “a notable classical educator and writer.”Recipient of the Princeton Prize for Distinguished Teaching, he resides with his wife Camille in Scotch Plains, N.J.The couple’s three sons –Frank, Ronald, and John and their families live nearby.His latest book–Below Rome, the Story of the Catacombs–which he co-authored with his wife, is available on Amazon or from the publisher, St. Johann Press, Haworth, N.J.
His storied life was dominated by two enduring loves: one of the heart, the other of the mind. The stunningly beautiful Laura was the object of the first; the romantic mystery of long ago Rome, the second. Both held him in thrall throughout his earthly days.
Born to a Florentine exile and his wife at Arezzo in Tuscany on July 20, 1304, Francesco Petrarch spent much of his boyhood in Avignon in Provence, in the south of France. In the schools there he was introduced to the Latin language, a subject to which he would remain passionately attached until his last breath. (Literally! As we shall see in due course.)
When his dear mother died in 1318, the precocious teenager mourned and honored her with exquisitely composed Latin verses of his own. By this time he was spending most of his time and all of his allowance tracking down the scarce copies of works by ancient authors. His father, an attorney, disdained his son’s feverish interest in such things as a waste of time and packed him off to the nearby University of Montpelier for law studies.
Some months into Francesco’s first term, the elder Petrarch, aiming to check up on his reluctant law student, paid a surprise visit to Francesco’s tiny, cluttered room. When the cranky parent spotted a volume of Vergil’s Aeneid and one of Cicero’s Rhetoric on a shelf, he angrily tossed both into the blazing fireplace. With the heartbroken young man reduced to sobs, the father was moved to rescue the two badly charred treasures from the flames.
By the year 1326, out from under his father’s thumb, Francesco had put aside all thoughts of a legal career and had turned his focus on becoming a published poet.
On Good Friday, April 6 of the following year, while attending services at the Church of Sainte Claire in Avignon he breathlessly beheld for the first time the lovely Laura who would become his version of Dante’s Beatrice who, sadly for the Divine Comedy composer, was already married. Dante had to resign himself to the cruel fact that his ardent love for one he considered the ideal of womanhood–beautiful, intelligent, dignified, modest, gentle, charismatic, with an air of mystery–would have to remain forever Platonic. He had to console himself with a collection of panegyrical poems to her, under the title La Vita Nuova.
The opening verses tell us much about the depth of Dante’s feelings:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand’ella
altrui saluta ch’ ogni lingua deven tremando muta e li
occhi no l’ardiscon di guadare…e par che sia una cosa
venuta da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.
….
(She seems so honest and kind my lady when she greets
others that every tongue becomes tremblingly mute
and eyes dare not even glance at her,,,and it seems she
may be something come from Heaven down to earth
miraculously.)
Like Beatrice, Petrarch’s heartthrob was also wed by now, leaving him with nothing but a burning, unrequited love. Unlike Beatrice, however, who stood aloof and denied Dante even a passing glance, Laura — while remaining ever faithful to her marriage vows–managed, even if perhaps unwittingly, to keep alive the love and ambition of the young Petrarch by her grace and warmth and smiles.
The young man softened his bitter disappointment by resolving to love her from afar, and immortalize her through his pen, making Laura the central figure of his Canzoniere, a vast harvest of 366 ardent love sonnets, written in Italian.
In one poem he tells of his first sighting of the woman of his dreams:
Ov’ Amore co’ begli occhi
cor m’ aperse
…e la’ v’ ella mi scorse
nel benedetto giorno
….
(Where Love opened my heart
with those lovely eyes
…and there where she noticed me
upon that holy day.)
In another, he depicts the object of his affection in an enchanting bucolic setting, seated on a sun-washed Spring day beneath a tree beside a murmuring brook:
Da bei rami scendea
(Dolce nella memoria)
Una pioggia di fior sovra il suo grembo.
Qual fior cadea sul lembo
Qual su le trecce bionde.
….
(From the beautiful branches there dropped
…How sweet the memory –
A shower of blossoms on her.
Some fell on her apron,
Others upon her blond tresses.)
…………………………
Meanwhile, his love of ancient literature was also growing ever more intense, taking him on long journeys in search of his idols–Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Livy, et al. The works of the fabled Roman authors, you see, had slipped into neglect and abandonment with the fall of Rome. The barbarian invaders had rampaged through the old empire, destroying everything in their path, among which were libraries and other centers of scholarship. The precious and priceless writings of the Classical Age virtually perished in this madness. The study of and interest in Roman literature had withered away, but Petrarch [portrait drawing, left] dedicated himself to doing something about it. For this, all Latin professors and their students, ever since, owe an enormous intellectual debt to him.
Never truly at ease in the world into which he was born, Petrarch sought to live among his friends of Classical Rome. In Latin literature he found ideals of truth and beauty, which he exhorted the whole Western World to reclaim. The wonders of antiquity clutched at his very soul. The past, he insisted, was the road to understanding the present and preparing for the future. He felt that the decline of humanity in Medieval times could be ascribed to mankind’s severance of ties to its own glorious past. Thus he thought it called for a renewal of knowledge that tied the present to antiquity. Consequently, he encouraged and fostered a return to primary sources by way of the study of the works of those long ago authors.
A tireless wandering classicist, he traveled throughout Italy and other parts of Europe in his quest for old manuscripts, however tattered they might be. He followed up rumors, chased down leads, made endless inquiries, bought shabby, worn codices at any price. Francesco even had friends and mere acquaintances on the lookout as well, urging them to forage among the bookshelves of monasteries, seminaries, academies, and other centers of learning. Driven by his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, he would read, annotate, and refurbish every treasured acquisition and then make multiple copies.
At Liege in Belgium he thrilled to his discovery of a dusty, cobwebbed copy of Cicero’s defense of Archias. During a sojourn in his native Arezzo, he stumbled upon a badly battered but still legible text of Quintilian. In Mantua he found Pliny’s Natural History. But it was in Verona, birthplace of Catullus, that Petrarch made the supreme discovery of his life. While scouting every nook and cranny of the cathedral library there, he unearthed from a huge pile of crumbled and crumpled old tomes a collection of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, as well as monastic reproductions of the statesman’s correspondence with Quintus, his kid brother, and with Brutus. Petrarch’s tenacity was paying off. He was ecstatic!
These letters afforded glimpses of the social life of Rome in the first century before Christ. They also shed much light on the pulsating political landscape of the dying Roman Republic, and on Cicero’s complex personality.
The quintessential scholar pored over every line in an all-out effort to know Cicero like a living, breathing friend. The similarities between the two writers–separated by thirteen centuries– were numerous and noteworthy. Both were sensitive, cultured, idealistic, humane men of letters. Both were practitioners of an elegant florid style. Both sang the praises of the old Republic. In fact, Petrarch hoped to live to see the day of its resurrection.
Coming to the conclusion that genuine correspondence on everyday matters constituted a literary genre of its own (i.e. letters addressed to private individuals but meant for a public readership), he suddenly developed an itch for letter writing. He honed his skills by penning long rambling open messages, in Latin, to his contemporaries and to his fellow literati from old Roman times such as Horace, Ovid, Vergil, and Livy. And of course, Cicero.
Here are the opening lines of his first of two letters to him:
Franciscus Ciceroni suo salutem.
Epistolas tuas diu multumque
perquisitas atque ubi minime
rebar inventas, avidissime perlegi
….
(Greetings from Francesco to Cicero,
I have read most eagerly
your letters which I had sought
for such a long time and found
them where I least expected to.)
Petrarch continues, sometimes lauding Cicero for his decency, his intellect, his eloquence etc., but more often calling him out for his shortcomings:
“Now perhaps it’s time to listen to someone else’s advice and constructive criticism, to a fellow writer, that is, who greatly
admires you and treasures your very name.”
Petrarch goes on to mention, in passing, many of Cicero’s important and influential friends such as Pompey, Brutus and Octavian–and bitter foes such as Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.He chastises Cicero for his tendency toward inconsistency and even pettiness:
“In one breath you speak glowingly of such people as your
brother and his son, of Dionysiuis Pomponius (Cicero’s
boyhood tutor), of Dolabella (a politician and general who
happened also to be his son-in-law) and in another breath
you turn on them in your wrath. But perhaps such mood
swings I should overlook.”
Yet Petrarch continues to pile on, chiding Cicero for letting petty politics rankle him and cost him his normally proper and dignified bearing; for ignoring the wise counsel of his dear brother Quintus; for often failing to practice the stoicism he preached; for letting himself be swept into the vortex of Rome’s political turmoil instead of holding himself above the fray.
The fourteenth century A.D. correspondent closes his letter to the first century B.C. recipient with this lament:
“You would have been better off now in your old age if you
had never held high office, never boasted of your triumph
over Catiline the conspirator, never yearned for power and
fame, if you had lived out your senior years indulging the
peaceful life of the mind that you so cherished: reading,
philosophizing, meditating on the eternal life, not on this
evanescent existence, and savoring the tranquility of your
cozy country villas.Farewell my Cicero.”
The scholar/poet signed off citing his whereabouts whence he penned this letter:
“From Verona, a city on the banks of the Adige in
Transpadane, Italy, June 16 in the year of the Lord you
never knew, 1345.”
Six months later, Petrarch sends Cicero another letter, much less critical and far more adulatory:
“I’m afraid you found my previous letter offensive. What I
found fault with was the way you lived your life, not your
intellectual achievements, especially your mastery of
language.…You are the father of eloquence and so
many of us cherish and thank you for the elegance of your
Latin. Whatever talent I have as a writer of prose, I owe
to you. As for any success I enjoy in poetry, however, I
must say I am indebted to Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil).
In your old age, you read works by him in his youth and
lavished great praise on them, and predicted a great
future for him…”
Petrarch continues in this vein for the rest of this rather lengthy epistle, and concludes with this “postmark.”
“From the land of the living, on the banks of the Rhone
In southern Gaul, (i.e. Avignon), December 19, 1345.”
So admiring of the words and deeds of the Classical authors was Petrarch that he sometimes found himself wishing that he had lived in their era so that he could have had the opportunity to meet them and know them in actuality rather than merely in his imagination.
He opens his letter to the historian Titus Livius (Livy) with these sentiments:
“I only wish, with Heaven permitting, either that I had lived
In your times, or you in mine, for I would have been all the
better for it. As it is though, I must content myself with
knowing you solely from your published works.”
Re:the condition of the books he found, he writes to the rhetorician Quintilian—–
“I just recently became acquainted with your literary talent,
having stumbled upon a mangled, shabby copy of your book,
On Oratory.
…..“Right at this very moment there might very well be–
somewhere on someone’s shelves, an edition of it in
good condition—without the owner having the slightest
idea of what an eminent guest is in his library.”
In a glowing message to the Roman historian Asinius Pollio, Petrarch gushes:
“Some years back I came up with the idea of sending social
letters to certain gifted authors of long ago, including you.
I congratulate you for your distinguished consulship, for your
brilliant mind and writings, and for a host of other
accomplishments; and for your wise decision to spend
the concluding years of your illustrious life in the pleasant
ambience of your idyllic villa up in Tusculum.”(Note:
Tusculum was a town in the Alban Hills, south of Rome.)
The ever scholarly Petrarch tried hard to learn Greek so that he might read, in the original, the Hellenic masters from across the Adriatic, particularly Homer; but he had scant success with the language. We learn this from his Latin letter to the author of the Iliad:
“I have long wanted to write to you if only I knew your native
tongue. I was not fortunate enough, however, to master it.”
Petrarch’s correspondence, with both his living and deceased friends, forge a record of life in the gloomy past of the Middle Ages in Europe and at the same time somewhat of an intimate diary of the Tuscan poet himself.
All his epistolary activities notwithstanding, Petrarch continued to find time and energy to produce some of the finest poetry ever written–much of it in Latin, the rest in Italian. His epic Africa, in Latin hexameters, extolled Rome’s victorious struggle against Hannibal of Carthage, while singling out, for the lion’s share of praise, the general Scipio, to whom the Roman Senate awarded the honorific: “Africanus” for his smashing conquest in the Third–and last–Punic War.
Another epic by Petrarch, Trionfi (Triumphs) composed in Italian, tells of a dream he had in which Humanity begins to move, ever so slowly but inexorably, toward a renewed belief and reverence for God.
Like Dante’s Divina Commedia, it was composed in the exceedingly difficult terza rima, a verse form consisting of tercets (i.e. three-line stanzas in which the second line rhymes with the first and third of the next stanza).
Petrarch’s abiding admiration of the glory that was Rome would induce him to return to the Eternal City from time to time. There he would lose himself in reverie amid the majestic rubble of the Forum Romanum. On one of his visits–April 1341–in solemn ceremonies on the Capitoline Hill, he was crowned by the Senate with a laurel wreath and proclaimed the pre-eminent poet of his era.
He and his circle of fellow intellectuals, including Bocaccio, had by their enthusiasm for the art, architecture, and literature of Classical Rome, inaugurated a movement which came to be known as Humanism, and which was to refashion European culture. It also laid the groundwork for the great creative epoch that followed. We know it as the Renaissance.
Francesco Petrarch is a most splendid example of how an inquiring, thirsty mind can be stimulated and energized for life by exposure to Classical Studies. He would be the perfect “poster boy” for the perennial campaign to restore Latin to its once prominent place in the curriculum of elementary, secondary, and higher education.
This extraordinary Man-For-All-Seasons died at his desk at his country house in Arqua, in the Euganean Hills near Padua, on July 19, 1374, one day shy of his seventieth birthday. He was found slumped over an open volume of … Cicero.
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The author and his wife in the main piazza of Arpino, Cicero’s boyhood hometown. (Photo by Teresa Mastrobuoni.)
GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA—Pittsburgh, Pa., USA: With its low quantities of rain and soaring high temperatures, the Sahara Desert is often regarded as one of the most extreme and least habitable environments on Earth. While the Sahara was periodically much greener in the distant past, an ancient society living in a climate very similar to today’s found a way to harvest water in the seemingly dry Sahara—thriving until the water ran out.
New research* that will be presented Monday, 16 Oct., at the Geological Society of America’s GSA Connects 2023 meeting describes how a series of serendipitous environmental factors allowed an ancient Saharan civilization, the Garamantian Empire, to extract groundwater hidden in the subsurface, sustaining the society for nearly a millennia until the water was depleted.
“Societies rise and fall at the pleasure of the physical system, such that there are special features that let humanity grow up there,” says Frank Schwartz, professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University and lead author of the research study.
Monsoon rains had transformed the Sahara into a comparatively lush environment between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, providing surface water resources and habitable environments for civilizations to thrive. When the monsoon rains stopped 5,000 years ago, the Sahara turned back into a desert, and civilizations retreated from the area—aside from an unusual outlier.
The Garamantes lived in the southwestern Libyan desert from 400 BCE to 400 CE under nearly the same hyper-arid conditions that exist there today and were the first urbanized society to become established in a desert that lacked a continuously flowing river. The surface water lakes and rivers of the “Green Sahara” times were long gone by the time the Garamantes arrived, but there was luckily water stored underground in a large sandstone aquifer—potentially one of the largest aquifers in the world, according to Schwartz.
Camel trade routes from Persia through the Sahara brought the Garamantes technology on how to harvest groundwater using foggara or qanats. This method involved digging a slightly inclined tunnel into a hillside, to just below the water table. Groundwater would then flow down the tunnel and into irrigation systems. The Garamantes dug a total of 750 km of underground tunnels and vertical access shafts to harvest groundwater, with the greatest construction activity occurring between 100 BCE and 100 CE.
Schwartz integrates prior archaeological research with hydrologic analyses to understand how the local topography, geology, and unique runoff and recharge conditions produced the ideal hydrogeologic conditions for the Garamantes to be able to extract groundwater.
“Their qanats shouldn’t have actually worked, because the ones in Persia have annual water recharge from snowmelt, and there was zero recharge here,” says Schwartz.
The Garamantes had a significant streak of environmental luck, with the earlier wetter climate, appropriate topography, and unique groundwater settings, which made groundwater available with foggara technology. However, their luck ran out when groundwater levels fell below the foggara tunnels.
According to Schwartz, two trends are particularly concerning. First, extreme environments are becoming more prevalent around the world in countries like Iran. Second, it has become more common to use groundwater unsustainably.
“As you look at modern examples like the San Joaquin Valley, people are using the groundwater up at a faster rate than it’s being replenished,” says Schwartz. “California had a great wet winter this year, but that followed 20 years of drought. If the propensity for drier years continues, California will ultimately run into the same problem as the Garamantians. It can be expensive and ultimately impractical to replace depleted groundwater supplies.”
With no new water to replenish the aquifer and no surface water available, lack of water led to the downfall of the Garamantian Empire. The Garamantes serve as a cautionary tale for the power of groundwater as a resource, and the danger of its overuse.
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Map location and satellite aerial imagery showing the region and landscape where ancient societies and Garamantes lived. Image from NASA/Luca Pietranera.
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Cross-section showing how a foggara or qanat works. An upward sloping tunnel is built into a hillside with vertical shafts until groundwater is reached. The groundwater then flows down the tunnel. Figure courtesy of Frank Schwartz.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)—Two million years ago, Homoerectus had expanded beyond the lowland savanna environments of East Africa and into the high-altitude regions of the Ethiopian highlands, where they produced both Oldowan and Acheulean tools, according to a new study. It presents a reanalysis of an early hominin fossil first discovered in 1981. The findings provide novel insights into the evolution, migration and adaptive capacities of early human ancestors. In Africa, the limited number of hominin fossils found in direct association with stone tools has hindered attempts to link Homo habilis and Homo erectus with particular stone tool industries, namely Oldowan or Acheulean. One region critical to studying this question is a collection of sites known as the Melka Kunture complex – a cluster of prehistoric sites on the highlands of Ethiopia at an altitude of ~2000 meters above sea level. In 1981, a fossilized infant mandible was discovered at the Garba IV site and in direct association with Oldowan lithic tools. However, the hominin species the fossil represents has been the subject of debate. In this study, Margherita Mussi and colleagues evaluate the geochronological context of the Garba IV site and re-assess the taxonomic affinity of the fossil mandible. Using synchrotron imaging to examine the internal morphology of the unerupted teeth in the Garba IV mandible, Mussi et al. confirm that it belonged to H. erectus. Moreover, combining preliminary argon-argon dates for the site’s stratigraphy with a more recently published magnetostratigraphic analysis, the authors argue that the fossil is around 2 million years old, making it one of the earliest H. erectus specimens yet discovered and the only one in clear association with an abundant Oldowan lithic industry. The overlying Acheulean tool-bearing strata, which date to ~1.95 million years ago, represent the earliest known evidence of Acheulean lithic technology. According to Mussi et al., the findings demonstrate that by 2 million years ago, H. erectus adapted early and quickly to a high-altitude mountain environment, first producing Oldowan technology and then Acheulean technology.
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Garba IV level E mandible of a Homo erectus child. Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture, with ARCCH permit
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Garba IV level E_child and fossil remains. Diego Rodriguez Robredo
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Handaxe 4516 from Garba IV level D, the earliest Acheulean so far discovered, dated 1,950,000 years ago. Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture, by ARCCH permit
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES—The Classic Maya constructed wetlands that can offer lessons for modern water management, according to a study. Classic Maya cities in the tropical southern lowlands of Central America relied on reservoirs during annual dry seasons and periods of climatic instability for more than 1,000 years until around 900 CE. However, stored water can stagnate and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Lisa J. Lucero combined evidence from archaeological excavations, sediment cores, and iconographic and hieroglyphic records to reveal that Maya reservoirs functioned similarly to present-day constructed wetlands*. In constructed wetlands, aquatic plants remove excess nutrients from the water and support diverse zooplankton, resulting in a self-cleaning water supply. Archaeological excavations unearthed gravity-fed reservoirs that were constructed at least as early as 400 BCE and developed into sophisticated water management systems by 700 CE, with dams, channels, switching stations, and filtration systems. Aquatic plants used in constructed wetlands are now common in the region. Pollen from water lilies (Nymphaea ampla) that only grow in clean water has been found in sediment cores from several Maya reservoirs. Water lilies are also featured prominently in Maya iconography and were associated with kingship. According to the author, uncovering how Classic Maya reservoirs supplied clean water could inform the improvement of contemporary constructed wetlands.
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Lidar map of Tikal, Guatemala, showing some of its reservoirs. Francisco Estrada-Belli, PAQUNAM LiDAR Initiative
Compelling stories dramatize and humanize major events and characters in the history of Ephesus, the ruins of which are a popular destination for tourists in present-day Turkey.Historium Press, 2023.Available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
WHO WERE THE AEGEANS? The exciting new podcast series exploring the mysteries of the ancient Aegeans, the Bronze Age people who inspired Homer's epic stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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Guy Hepp is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. He holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.A. from Florida State University. His research is focused on early complex societies of Mesoamerica and especially the archaeology of La Consentida, an Early Formative period (2000–1000 cal BC) village in Oaxaca, Mexico. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright Program, was awarded the Society for American Archaeology’s 2016 Dissertation Award. In 2019, Hepp published a book based on his dissertation with the University Press of Colorado. He recently co-edited another book with the University Press of Florida and has authored publications about mortuary archaeology, paleoethnobotany, interregional interaction, radiocarbon dating, heritage politics, ceramic figurines, musical instruments, masks, and the archaeology of the senses.
In a world embattled by climate change, fragile ancient sites in Egypt can be destroyed in an instant and lost forever. 
Like a seed dropped into black fertile Nile soil, Aliaa Ismail is planting seeds for the future by educating and empowering her fellow Egyptians. Like the Ancient Egyptians in their quest for immortality, she has found a way of continuing her guardianship of Egypt’s rich cultural heritage for generations to come.
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