Recently excavated remains of a Siberian Arctic mammoth show signs of weapon-inflicted injuries by humans, say scientists, suggesting a human presence in the Eurasian Arctic ten millennia earlier than previously thought. It provides perhaps the oldest known story of human survival in the Arctic region, radiocarbon dating a human presence there to roughly 45,000 years ago, instead of 30 – 35,000 years ago, as previously thought.
Led by Alexei Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia, a team excavated a carcass of a woolly mammoth in 2012 from the frozen sediments of a coastal bluff near Sopochnaya Karga (SK), on the eastern shore of Yenisei Bay in the central Siberian Arctic. The find came to Tikhonov’s attention after it was initially stumbled upon by Evgeniy Solinder, a school-boy who was spending his summer with his parents who were working at a nearby weather station. Excavations quickly followed in September/October of 2012, after which the excavated remains were sent for cold storage in nearby Dudinks and then shipped to St Petersburg in early May of 2013.
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SK mammoth unearthed. Sergey Gorbunov is excavating the left side of the carcass in the head area. Photo by Aleksei Tikhonov
Paleolithic records of humans in the Eurasian Arctic are relatively scarce. Only a few sites in this region have yielded clues to an early human presence. In mainland arctic Siberia, the site of Berelekh, discovered by Nikolay Vereschagin in the early 70s, was for years the location yielding the oldest evidence for human migration into the arctic regions. It dated to about 13,000 years ago. But in 2001 another site in the region, known as Yana, produced evidence of a human presence dating back to about 27,000 -30,000 years. Excavated by archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko, also of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it yielded tools made from rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk, as well as hundreds of other stone artifacts including choppers, scrapers and other biface implements. “But I never thought that even this was the final age estimate for human migrations into the arctic,” said Pitulko. “Now we have much older evidence which goes back at least 45 thousand years. The [new Yenisei Bay] site is much older than everything known before in the arctic regions, and it is clearly located farther north from the areas where sites of that age have been found. It is about 20 degrees north (about 1900 km, or 1300 miles) of any site of comparable age…… and this is a big change.”
Using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, Pitulko and other colleagues closely examined the SK mammoth bones, which included the mammoth’s tibia bone, ribs, right tusk, and mandible. The mammoth’s bones exhibited a number of unusual injuries on the ribs, right tusk and mandible, all showing clear signs that they were inflicted with human-made implements. “The bones retain a number of damages resulting from human contact, both peri-mortem and post-mortem,” says Pitulko. “Most of them resulted from a hunting and/or butchering event. These damages are located on the left scapula, several ribs, and jugal bone. They are clearly related to the death of the animal which was killed and then partly butchered. They probably used a part of the prey, but most of the mammoth body was left on the ground.”
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Cut mark on the SK mammoth 5th left rib. Photo by Pavel Ivanov
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Aleksei Tikhonov (left) and Vladimir Pitulko discussing injury on the jugal bone of SK mammoth at Zoological Museum (RAS), St Petersburg. Photo by Pavel Ivanov
These findings leave no doubt, say the study’s authors, that people were present in the central Siberian Arctic by about 45,000 years ago. At this time, according to Pitulko, mammoth hunting by modern humans became a critical element in human survival in the harsh environment and lanscape of what is today Siberia, similar to the role buffalo played for Native Americans in North America. Removed from the hunted dead carcasses of their mammoth prey, “ivory became a substitution for materials used for shafts and points long and strong enough for killing large animals, not necessarily the mammoth,” said Pitulko. “Such tools are found elsewhere in the Upper Paleolithic, and this includes even full-size spears of ivory which are known from [the sites of] Sunghir, European Russia or from Berelekh, Siberia. This innovation became a really important discovery for humans and finally helped them in surviving and settling these landscapes.”
Thus, according to the study report authors, advancements in mammoth hunting likely allowed humans to survive and spread widely across northernmost Arctic Siberia at this time, representing an important cultural shift – one that likely facilitated the arrival of humans in the area close to the Bering land bridge, providing them an opportunity to enter the New World before the Last Glacial Maximum.
“This is especially important for questions related to the peopling of the New World, because now we know that the eastern Siberia up to its arctic limits was populated starting at roughly 50,000 years ago,” says Pitulko. “Until 15,000 years ago, sea-level (though changing) still remained low, which is clear from appropriate dates on terrestrial animals in the New Siberian islands. This presumes that the Bering land Bridge existed probably most or part of this time, so the New World gate remained open.”
Could modern humans have crossed over to the New World from here in these early times?
“Probably yes,” says Pitulko.
Future archaeological finds may provide additional clues to answering questions within this widely debated topic.
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An in-depth, full feature article about the Siberian mammoth findings will be published in the upcoming spring issue of Popular Archaeology magazine.
Some parts of this article were adapted and edited from the subject Science magazine press release.
“Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains,” by V.V. Pitulko; A.N. Tikhonov; P.A. Nikolskiy; and K.E. Kuper at the Russian Academy of Sciences inSt. Petersburg, Russia; E.Y. Pavlova at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia; and R.N. Polozov at the St. Petersburg Pediatric Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. Published in Science, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
PHILADELPHIA, PA January 2016—What was behind the legendary story of King Midas and his golden touch?
That is the question to be answered—not with chests full of gold, but with a spectacular array of 150 objects, including more than 120 specially-loaned ancient artifacts from four museums in the Republic of Turkey, keys to telling the true story of a very real and powerful ruler of the Phrygian kingdom. The Golden Age of King Midas is an exclusive, world premiere exhibition developed by the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Republic of Turkey. A special Opening Celebration on Saturday, February 13 kicks off the exhibition, which runs through November 27, 2016.
King Midas lived in the prosperous city of Gordion, a site in what is now central Turkey, circa 750–700 BCE, ruling Phrygia and influencing the neighboring kingdoms. He likely reigned during the time in which Homer’s Iliad was first written down. It was indeed a golden age.
Archaeologists from the Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) have been excavating at Gordion—and making international headlines with their discoveries—since 1950. The crossroads of many cultures over time, Gordion offers insight into thousands of years of history, but it is best known as the political and cultural capital of the Phrygians, a people who dominated much of what is now Turkey nearly 3,000 years ago. With its monumental architecture and a series of wealthy tombs belonging to Phrygian royalty and elites, Gordion has supplied the most important archaeological evidence for the unique material achievements of the once great Phrygian civilization.
From Myth to Man
Nearly 3,000 years after his death, we know King Midas by unforgettable stories told by ancient Greeks long after he was dead, stories like King Midas and the Golden Touch and King Midas and the Donkey Ears. An interactive “myth book” invites guests to explore the stories, while artifacts and excavation discoveries detailed throughout the exhibition begin to reveal the man behind the myths. The most extensive record of Midas’ activities comes from the annual records of the Assyrian kings, who referred to him as Mita, ruler of Mushku (Phrygia), on a clay tablet, ca. 713 BCE, on loan from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago for the exhibition.
A detailed timeline draws guests into the exhibition and back in time. It is at Gordion, where the story of Midas’ actual life and times truly emerges. One object from Greece takes center stage: an ivory lion tamer figurine on loan from the Delphi Archaeological Museum; it probably formed part of a throne dedicated by Midas to Apollo in the late 8th century BCE.
A Unique Opportunity
In 1957, the Penn Museum excavated a spectacular tomb, referred to as Tumulus MM, for Midas Mound. This was the largest of about 120 man-made mounds of earth, clay, and stone used to mark important burials at Gordion. Dated to ca. 740 BCE, it is believed to be the final resting place of King Midas’ father Gordios—a son’s spectacular tribute. The archaeologists entered the tomb, the oldest standing wooden building in the world, and beheld an extraordinary sight: the skeleton of a king in what was left of a cedar coffin, surrounded by the bronze bowls, serving vessels, wooden tables, and food remains from an extensive funeral banquet. The details of the banquet we now know thanks to the analysis of the sediment at the bottom of the vessels: a hearty lamb and lentil stew, and ample quantities of a drink containing wine, beer, and honey mead.
The discovery of an intact royal tomb nearly 3,000 years old is highly unusual, as is the excellent state of preservation of the associated artifacts.
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A partial view inside Tumulus MM—the burial chamber of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. Tumulus MM is the oldest known intact wooden building in the world. Exhibited: One of the three cauldrons found inside the tomb, probably all used for beer, features two siren attachments and two bearded demon attachments. Bronze drinking bowls are scattered across the floor of the tomb chamber, dated to circa 740 BCE, and excavated by the Penn Museum in 1957. Photo: 1957, Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2390.
Exhibited: Detail of one of the three massive bronze cauldrons from Tumulus MM, tomb of a Phrygian ruler, probably the father of King Midas. The figure of a siren and the associated ring handle form one of four attachments on the cauldron. The cauldron probably once held an alcoholic beverage made of barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead, part of an elaborate funeral banquet for the deceased ruler. The cauldron dates to circa 740 BCE. It was excavated by the Penn Museum at Gordion in 1957. Dimensions—Height: 20.2 inches. Diameter: 30.7 inches (diameter at rim: 23 inches). Capacity: about 40 gallons [=150 liters]. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2014_4080.
Exhibited: A bronze double-pinned fibula (clothing attachment) with shield, from Tumulus MM. Excavated 1957. Middle Phrygian period, ca. 740 BCE. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, G-2561.
Guests to The Golden Age of King Midas meet a life-sized photograph of archaeologist Rodney Young at the entrance of a space designed to resemble the wooden tomb and featuring many of the very objects the excavators first encountered. Inside this space, a video experience lets visitors explore the tomb as if they were in the tomb itself when it was sealed nearly 3,000 years ago. Now housed in Turkish Museums in Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya, and Gordion, most of these extraordinary artifacts have never before traveled to the United States. Site videos, including scenes taken during the world-famous excavation in 1957, bring guests into the moment of discovery.
There are no known visual records of what King Midas looked like, but if he resembled his father, there is some intriguing evidence. In 1988, the Penn Museum worked with Dr. John Prag and Richard Neave of Manchester University to develop a reconstructed plaster head of Gordios based on his skeletal remains; a plaster cast will be on display in the exhibition. With it is a selection from an assortment of 189 large bronze fibulae, used for pinning garments, that were found in King Midas’ father’s tomb and in others; they may have been used as calling cards at the elaborate funerals.
Objects from five smaller tombs excavated at Gordion—including a child’s tomb that contained an elegant and distinctive goat-shaped jug—provide more information about the site and the people who lived and died there. While no gold was found in the largest tomb, jewelry from a later tomb, ca. 530 BCE, is featured, including a distinctive gold acorn necklace.
Midas on the World Stage
Gordion is immense, about 2.5 miles wide. Penn Museum continues excavations and conservation projects on and around the citadel, a high fortress at the heart of Phrygia’s capital city, where hundreds of people lived and worked. A 3-D model of the citadel, enlivened by light and sound projections, offers guests a bird’s eye view. In the 1950s, archaeologists uncovered the oldest colored pebble mosaic floor known in the world in a large citadel building. Dated to the late 9th century BCE, it measures 35 by 31 feet; a recently conserved section of that floor, roughly five feet long, will be on display in the exhibition.
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This watercolor is of a colored pebble mosaic floor in a large building—the earliest known pebble mosaic floor in the world—excavated inside the citadel at Gordion in central Turkey in 1956. The mosaic, which measures 35 x 31 feet, is dated to the late 9th century BCE. Photo of watercolor by Joseph Last, 1956, Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 400833, Plan1956-17.
Part of the colored pebble mosaic floor, the oldest known in the world, found in a large hall excavated inside the citadel at Gordion in 1956. One of 33 panels removed for conservation and display in 1963, this piece was newly conserved in the summer of 2015 by the team at Gordion. It dates to the late 9th century BCE. Photo: Penn Museum Gordion Archive, 2015_04663.
The story of King Midas is the story of influence and power on an international stage with neighboring kingdoms on all sides. Here, the Penn Museum’s own collections shine: visitors are introduced to the spectacular gold work of the nomadic Scythians and the Lydians; distinctive metalwork of the Urartian Empire; monumental stone and ivory reliefs of the Assyrians; and stone sculpture of powerful Persia, which conquered Gordion in the 6th century BCE. An animated map provides a flyover of the region during and just after Midas’ time.
Gordion After Midas
While the Phrygian period at Gordion is the most renowned, this strategically situated site contains thousands of years of history, and the exhibition sheds light on what happened in Gordion in the centuries after King Midas ruled.
Guests will see fragments—and remarkable watercolor recreations by renowned archaeological illustrator Piet De Jong—of the famous “Painted House” built about 500 BCE, and excavated in Gordion’s citadel during the 1950s. The Painted House murals provide a rare glimpse into the religious rituals of the citadel’s residents, and the lives of its women, 200 years after the death of King Midas.
One of the most important historical accounts involves Alexander the Great’s 333 BCE visit to Gordion, where he purportedly cut the “Gordian Knot.”
The Exhibition Team
Dr. C. Brian Rose, Penn Museum’s Gordion Archaeological Project Director, is the exhibition curator, and worked with Turkish colleagues to select the loaned artifacts. Kate Quinn, Exhibition and Public Programs Director, led the exhibition team that included in-house interpretive planner Jessica Bicknell, and a team of in-house designers, as well as outside collaborators including Night Kitchen Interactive and Wish Design, Painting and Sculpture.
The Golden Age of King Midas is made possible with support from the 1984 Foundation; the Selz Foundation; Frederick J. Manning, W69, and the Manning Family; the Susan Drossman Sokoloff and Adam D. Sokoloff Exhibitions Fund; the Turkish Cultural Foundation, and Joan Bachman in honor of Mary Bert Gutman.
Does this interest you? See the in-depth free premium article, Uncovering the City of King Midas,for more about the news-making excavations at Gordion.
Admission to the special exhibition The Golden Age of King Midas (includes general admission) is $20 adults; $18 senior citizens (65 and above); $15 for children and full-time students with ID; $5 for active military. Admission is free for Penn Museum members, PennCard holders, and children 5 and younger. For more information about membership, including exclusive membership Midas programs, call 215.898.5093.
The Penn Museum has developed a wide range of special events, from scholarly symposia to children’s and family programs for the exhibition. Visit www.penn.museum/midas beginning January 12 for event and Midas Touch hotel package details. For information on group tours and group rates, call Visitor Services at 215.746.8183.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
The bacteria that causes plague, Y. pestis, may have persisted long-term in Europe from the 14th to 17th century in an unknown reservoir, according to a study published January 13, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lisa Seifert from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and colleagues.
Not all researchers agree about the role Yersinia pestis played in the second plague pandemic which occurred from the 14th to 17th century. Some suggest it may have been a result of a viral disease; however, most recent research on ancient plague demonstrates that the deadly disease existed thousands of years earlier than previously thought. In this study researchers recovered and analyzed ancient DNA from 30 plague victims of the second plague pandemic. They were excavated from two different burial sites in Germany, and spanning more than 300 years.
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Above: Original photograph of the triple-inhumation regarding the three male soldiers (Brandenburg, Germany), is dated to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Credit: Seifert et al.
Of 30 skeletons tested, eight were positive for Yersinia pestis-specific nucleic acid. All positive individuals genetic material were highly similar to previously investigated plague victims from other European countries and had identical Y. pestis genotype. The author suggest that in addition to the assumed continuous reintroduction of Y. pestis from central Asia in multiple waves during the second pandemic, it’s also possible that Y. pestis persisted long-term in Europe in a yet unknown reservoir host.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI—Death is inevitable, but what death shows us about the social behaviors of the living is not.
And recent University of Cincinnati research examining the ancient bereavement practices from the the Central Apulian region in pre-Roman Italy helps shed light on economic and social mobility, military service and even drinking customs in a culture that left no written history.
For instance, by focusing on the logistics of burials, treatment of deceased bodies and grave contents dating from about 525-200 BC, UC Classics doctoral student Bice Peruzzi found indications of strong social stratification and hierarchy. She also found indications of the commonality of military service since men’s tombs of the era routinely contained metal weaponry lying across or near the skeletal remains.
Another example: in the second half of the 4th century, an impressive increase in the number of tombs over a 50-year period indicates newer social groups gaining access to ceremonial burials that included use of the space by the living for a brief period of dancing and banqueting.
“After going through volumes of collected material, I realized that there was so much more that could be said about what was happening in the development of this particular culture,” says Peruzzi. “In spite of having no written history, I was able to distinguish three different periods and then connect them to the larger Mediterranean history to see how their society changed.”
She just presented her findings on these funerary practices in their broader historical context at the 2016 Archaeological Institute of America/Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
WINE, WOMEN, AND WAR
Because a major Greek influence on this region had already existed, Preuzzi was not surprised to find valuable Greek vases and artifacts among the Apulian tomb contents from the 1st period (525-350). The finely detailed imagery on these vases often focused on women engaged in everyday activities such as courting, processions and wine offerings, which opened interesting questions about the role of women in those communities.
Other tomb contents ranged from wine cups and feasting sets to metal weaponry among the male tombs. And according to Peruzzi, the objects were chosen intentionally and purposefully placed during funerary rituals to project a personal message about the deceased’s role in the community.
Peruzzi also found remarkable evidence for tomb reuse. In a curious and calculated fashion, several tombs had been reopened showing older bones and artifacts pushed to the side to make way for a newer body and its contents, possibly creating a link between the present funeral and the memory of the past one.
“The care in displaying the artifacts in these tombs is striking, especially considering that the objects could have been visible only during the brief period when the tomb was open,” says Peruzzi. “This gives the impression that during Period 1 the tomb was conceived not only as the final resting place of the deceased, but almost as the stage for dancing and a burial performance.”
A WIDENING WORLD
Throughout Period 2 (350-300), Peruzzi found that general trends in burial ceremony continued to focus around themes of banquet, war and women. But the increase in the number of tombs by this time strongly indicated that newer social groups were gaining access to this banquet-type funeral.
But much like in modern society, the elite now showed signs of breaking away from former trends to distinguish themselves from the general population. Items inside their tombs now included many new large Apulian red figure vases with generic iconography and repetitive designs.
“In this period we also find occasional assemblages containing very large vases with sophisticated iconographies that portray Greek tragedies,” says Peruzzi. “Scholars attribute this shift in taste to Greek influence, in particular the fascination with the military victories of Alexander the Great.
“The new growth of specific burial sites to the detriment of others in addition to newly constructed walls surrounding the communities also indicates a general movement toward urbanization in Period 2.”
NEW NEIGHBORHOODS
Now entering into an era of great transformation, Period 3 (300-200) began to shift from large numbers of individual tombs to larger chamber tombs—often containing whole families—with a new emphasis on elaborate funerary architecture around the tombs.
And as for grave site partying, not so much. The iconography of female beauty, happiness in the afterlife and piety toward the dead formerly found on vase designs had changed.
Instead, grave goods now contained bottomless, undecorated ceramics were created simply to be symbolic of the older communal feasting. And metal weaponry was now replaced by a small number of fibulae, hairpins and other personal ornaments.
With new defensive walls now surrounding larger communities and more sophisticated governmental systems developing, Peruzzi found the new class of elites shifting away from elaborate burial ceremonies to using different arenas to negotiate their status.
“By looking at artifacts in their archaeological and social context, I was able to illustrate changes never before recognized,” says Peruzzi. ” From the emergence of new social groups at the end of the 6th century B.C. to the gradual urbanization and separation of “ethnic” groups during the 3rd century B.C., the evolution of funerary practices can be successfully used to highlight major transformations in the social organization of Central Apulia communities.”
Source: University of Cincinnati subject news release.
For this project and dissertation, Peruzzi utilized published excavation reports, archaeological monographs, exhibit catalogues, academic journals and bulletins. Also, libraries and museums in Taranto, Egnaza, Gioia del Colle, Matera and Polenza, Ruvo, Rutigliano, Gravina, Bitonto and Ginosa, as well as the University of Foggia and the University of Bari in Italy and the University of Cincinnati.
Support for the dissertation research came from the Louise Semple Taft Fellowship, the Cedric Boulter Memorial Felllowship and the URC Graduate Student Research Fellowship. This paper was also possible thanks to the Grand Valley State University Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence Dissemination Grant.
Image: Top Left: A 19th century watercolor of the Tomb of the Dancers. Credit: Source/Sena Chiesa and Arslan 2004
Image: Center Right: A 4th century assemblage with fine Greek vases, banquet implements and metal weapons. Credit: Source/Riccardi 2003
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
A newly released study published ‘in press’ in the Journal of Human Evolution suggests that the Uluzzian stone tool industry, generally regarded by scholars to be associated with anatomically modern humans, has its roots in the Mousterian industry, a stone tool tradition that has usually been associated with Neanderthals.
In the study, Marco Peresani of the Universitá di Ferrara, Italy, and colleagues conducted an extensive examination of the lithic and bone technologies from assemblages recovered from the Fumane Cave in northern Italy. The Uluzzian is characterized as a lithic flake-dominated industry that exhibits various technological innovations, most of which are associated with the kinds of lithic technology that anatomically modern humans brought to Europe during the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, or arguably sometime between 40,000 and 50,000 years BP. They found that the Levallois production technique was the most used method used in the initial stage of the Uluzzian, and that Mousterian-style side scrapers and points were a clear feature in the initial phase. The Levallois, a production technique that was used to produce simple tools such as scrapers and knives by striking flakes from a prepared lithic core, has typically been associated with Neanderthals, as is the Mousterian industry. The authors of the study thus suggest that the Uluzzian cannot be conclusively viewed as one proxy indicator of the first presence of anatomically modern humans in Europe, who are thought to be the carriers of the cultural changes related to the Aurignacian, the first Eurasian stone tool industry clearly associated with modern humans.
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The Grotta di Fumane, or Fumane Cave. Thilo Parg, Wikimedia Commons
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The Uluzzian was first discovered in the early 1960s at the site of Grotta del Cavallo in southern Italy. This cave yielded about 7 meters of archaeological deposits representing the period during which scientists have suggested that Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans. Two milk teeth, attributed at the time to Neanderthals, were unearthed in 1964 by Arturo Palma di Cesnola (emeritus of the University of Siena) from the Uluzzian layers. The Uluzzian culture has been identified at more than 20 separate sites across Italy, and is characterised as consisting of an array of denticulates, sidescrapers, retouched pieces and splintered pieces, distinguished by a production process that differed from that of the earlier Mousterian (associated with Neanderthals) and the proto-Aurignacian (associated with anatomically modern humans).* Finds have also included what has been interpreted as personal ornaments, bone tools and colorants —- items typically associated with modern human symbolic behavior. Because the teeth from Cavallo were identified as belonging to Neanderthals who lived around 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, it was suggested that the Uluzzian and the complex ornaments and tools within it were also produced by Neanderthals.* But in a study published in 2011 in the journal Nature, Stefano Benazzi of the University of Vienna and his colleagues were able to compare digital models derived from micro-computed tomography scans of the human remains from Grotta del Cavallo with those of a large modern human and Neanderthal dental sample: “We worked with two independent methods: for the one, we measured the thickness of the tooth enamel, and for the other, the general outline of the crown. By means of micro-computed tomography it was possible to compare the internal and external features of the dental crown. The results clearly show that the specimens from Grotta del Cavallo were modern humans, not Neanderthals as originally thought.”**
The latest study results from Fumane Cave led by Peresani, however, add more complexity to the debate.
** The Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour. Benazzi, S., Douka, K., Fornai, C., Bauer, C.C., Kullmer, O., Svoboda, J., Pap, I., Mallegni, F., Bayle, P., Coquerelle, M., Condemi, S., Ronchitelli, A., Harvati, K., Weber, G.W. In. Nature, Nov. 3, 2011. DOI 10.1038/nature10617
The study: “Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains,” by V.V. Pitulko; A.N. Tikhonov; P.A. Nikolskiy; K.E. Kuper at Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia; E.Y. Pavlova at Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia; R.N. Polozov at St. Petersburg Pediatric Medical University in St. Petersburg, Russia.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
CELL PRESS—When modern humans met Neanderthals in Europe and the two species began interbreeding many thousands of years ago, the exchange left humans with gene variations that have increased the ability of those who carry them to ward off infection. This inheritance from Neanderthals may have also left some people more prone to allergies.
The discoveries reported in two independent studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics on January 7 add to evidence for an important role for interspecies relations in human evolution and specifically in the evolution of the innate immune system, which serves as the body’s first line of defense against infection.
“We found that interbreeding with archaic humans—the Neanderthals and Denisovans—has influenced the genetic diversity in present-day genomes at three innate immunity genes belonging to the human Toll-like-receptor family,” says Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
“These, and other, innate immunity genes present higher levels of Neanderthal ancestry than the remainder of the coding genome,” adds Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS in Paris. “This highlights how important introgression events [the movement of genes across species] may have been in the evolution of the innate immunity system in humans.”
Earlier studies have shown that one to six percent of modern Eurasian genomes were inherited from ancient hominins, such as Neanderthal or Denisovans. Both new studies highlight the functional importance of this inheritance on Toll-like receptor (TLR) genes—TLR1, TLR6, and TLR10. These TLR genes are expressed on the cell surface, where they detect and respond to components of bacteria, fungi, and parasites. These immune receptors are essential for eliciting inflammatory and anti-microbial responses and for activating an adaptive immune response.
Quintana-Murci and his colleagues set out to explore the evolution of the innate immune system over time. They relied on vast amounts of data available on present-day people from the 1000 Genomes Project together with the genome sequences of ancient hominins. Quintana-Murci’s team focused on a list of 1,500 genes known to play a role in the innate immune system. They then examined patterns of genetic variation and evolutionary change in those regions relative to the rest of the genome at an unprecedented level of detail. Finally, they estimated the timing of the changes in innate immunity and the extent to which variation in those genes had been passed down from Neanderthals.
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An artist’s model depiction of a Neanderthal, at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Germany. Celldex, Wikimedia Commons
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This world map shows the frequencies of Neandertal-like TLR DNA in a 1000 Genomes dataset. The size of each pie is proportional to the number of individuals within a population. Credit: Dannemann et al./American Journal of Human Genetics 2016
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These investigations revealed little change over long periods of time for some innate-immunity genes, providing evidence of strong constraints. Other genes have undergone selective sweeps in which a new variant came along and quickly rose to prominence, perhaps because of a shift in the environment or as a result of a disease epidemic. Most adaptations in protein-coding genes occurred in the last 6,000 to 13,000 years, as human populations shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, they report.
But, Quintana-Murci says, the biggest surprise for them “was to find that the TLR1-6-10 cluster is among the genes presenting the highest Neanderthal ancestry in both Europeans and Asians.”
Kelso and her colleagues came to the same conclusion, but they didn’t set out to study the immune system. Their interest was in understanding the functional importance of genes inherited from archaic humans more broadly. They screened present-day human genomes for evidence of extended regions with high similarity to the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes,then examined the prevalence of those regions in people from around the world. Those analyses led them to the same three TLR genes.
Two of those gene variants are most similar to the Neanderthal genome, whereas the third is most similar to the Denisovan genome, Kelso’s group reports. Her team also provides evidence that these gene variants offered a selective advantage. The archaic-like variants are associated with an increase in the activity of the TLR genes and with greater reactivity to pathogens. Although this greater sensitivity might protect against infection, it might also increase the susceptibility of modern-day people to allergies.
“What has emerged from our study as well as from other work on introgression is that interbreeding with archaic humans does indeed have functional implications for modern humans, and that the most obvious consequences have been in shaping our adaptation to our environment – improving how we resist pathogens and metabolize novel foods,” Kelso says.
As surprising as it may seem, it does make a lot of sense, she adds. “Neanderthals, for example, had lived in Europe and Western Asia for around 200,000 years before the arrival of modern humans. They were likely well adapted to the local climate, foods, and pathogens. By interbreeding with these archaic humans, we modern humans gained these advantageous adaptations.”
Paper 1: American Journal of Human Genetics, Deschamps et al.: “Genomic Signatures of Selective Pressures and Introgression from Archaic Hominins at Human Innate Immunity Genes” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2015.11.014
This work was primarily supported by the Institut Pasteur, the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Paper 2: American Journal of Human Genetics, Dannemann et al.: “Introgression of Neandertal- and Denisovan-like Haplotypes Contributes to Adaptive Variation in Human Toll-like Receptors” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2015.11.015
Funding was provided by the Max Planck Society and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF BOZEN/BOLZANO (EURAC)—Scientists are continually unearthing new facts about Homo sapiens from the mummified remains of “Ötzi”, the Copper Age man, who was discovered in a glacier in 1991. Five years ago, after Ötzi’s genome was completely deciphered, it seemed that the wellspring of spectacular discoveries about the past would soon dry up. An international team of scientists working with paleopathologist Albert Zink and microbiologist Frank Maixner from the European Academy (EURAC) in Bozen/Bolzano have now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of Helicobacter pylori in Ötzi’s stomach contents, a bacterium found in half of all humans today. The theory that humans were already infected with this stomach bacterium at the very beginning of their history could well be true. The scientists succeeded in decoding the complete genome of the bacterium.
When EURAC’s Zink and Maixner first placed samples from the Iceman’s stomach under the microscope in their ancient DNA Lab at EURAC, almost three years ago, they were initially sceptical.
“Evidence for the presence of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is found in the stomach tissue of patients today, so we thought it was extremely unlikely that we would find anything because Ötzi’s stomach mucosa is no longer there,” explains Zink. Together with colleagues from the Universities of Kiel, Vienna and Venda in South Africa as well as the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the scientists tried to find a new way to proceed. “We were able to solve the problem once we hit upon the idea of extracting the entire DNA of the stomach contents,” reports Maixner. “After this was successfully done, we were able to tease out the individual Helicobacter sequences and reconstruct a 5,300 year old Helicobacter pylori genome.”
The scientists found a potentially virulent strain of bacteria, to which Ötzi’s immune system had already reacted. “We showed the presence of marker proteins which we see today in patients infected with Helicobacter,” said the microbiologist.
A tenth of infected people develop further clinical complications, such as gastritis or stomach ulcers, mostly in old age. “Whether Ötzi suffered from stomach problems cannot be said with any degree of certainty,” says Zink, “because his stomach tissue has not survived and it is in this tissue that such diseases can be discerned first. Nonetheless, the preconditions for such a disease did in fact exist in Ötzi.”
After completing their stomach biopsy, the two EURAC scientists transferred the genome data for analysis by their colleague Thomas Rattei from the University of Vienna. Rattei, in collaboration with geneticists from the USA, South Africa and Germany, came to a surprising conclusion: “We had assumed that we would find the same strain of Helicobacter in Ötzi as is found in Europeans today,” explains the computational biologist. “It turned out to be a strain that is mainly observed in Central and South Asia today.”
The scientists assume that there were originally two strain types of the bacterium, an African and an Asian one, which at some point recombined into today’s European version. Since bacteria are usually transmitted within the family, the history of the world’s population is closely linked to the history of bacteria. Up till now, it had been assumed that Neolithic humans were already carrying this European strain by the time they stopped their nomadic life and took up agriculture. Research on Ötzi, however, demonstrates that this was not the case.
“The recombination of the two types of Helicobacter may have only occurred at some point after Ötzi’s era, and this shows that the history of settlements in Europe is much more complex than previously assumed,” says Maixner.
Further studies will be needed to show to what extent these bacteria living inside the human body can help us understand how humans developed. The current investigations, the results of which have just been published in Science magazine, invite further research.
“Now that we are aware of how it works,” says Zink, “we are keen to continue.” Several research projects to take place in South America and Asia are currently at the planning stage.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER—The evidence for a new geological epoch which marks the impact of human activity on the Earth is now overwhelming, according to a recent paper by an international group of geoscientists. The Anthropocene, which is argued to start in the mid-20th Century, is marked by the spread of materials such as aluminium, concrete, plastic, fly ash and fallout from nuclear testing across the planet, coincident with elevated greenhouse gas emissions and unprecedented trans-global species invasions.
An international group of scientists is studying whether human activity has driven the Earth into a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. They ask: to what extent are human actions recorded as measurable signals in geological strata, and is the Anthropocene world markedly different from the stable Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years that allowed human civilization to develop?
The Holocene Epoch has been a time during which human societies advanced by gradually domesticating the land to increase food production, built urban settlements and became proficient at developing the water, mineral and energy resources of the planet. The proposed Anthropocene Epoch, however, is marked as a time of rapid environmental change brought on by the impact of a surge in human population and increased consumption during the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the mid-20th century.
Dr Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey said: “Humans have long affected the environment, but recently there has been a rapid global spread of novel materials including aluminium, concrete and plastics, which are leaving their mark in sediments. Fossil-fuel combustion has dispersed fly ash particles worldwide, pretty well coincident with the peak distribution of the ‘bomb spike’ of radionuclides generated by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.” “All of this shows that there is an underlying reality to the Anthropocene concept”, commented Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, a co-author and working group Chair.
The study, co-authored by 24 members of the Anthropocene Working Group, shows that humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a range of signals in sediments and ice, and these are sufficiently distinctive to justify recognition of an Anthropocene Epoch in the Geological Time Scale. In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group will gather more evidence on the Anthropocene, which will help inform recommendations on whether this new time unit should be formalized and, if so, how it might be defined and characterized.
A number of UK members of the group have contributed to this study, Colin Waters (lead author and Secretary of the group) and Michael Ellis, both from the British Geological Survey, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Matt Edgeworth from Leicester University and Colin Summerhayes from Cambridge University have provided significant input to this study and maintain the UK’s strong involvement in research into the Anthropocene concept.
Source: University of Leicester subject news releaseComposite image satellite view of earth at night, one visual indicator of how humans have changed the earth. Wikimedia Commons
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—The Romans are well known for introducing sanitation technology to Europe around 2,000 years ago, including public multi-seat latrines with washing facilities, sewerage systems, piped drinking water from aqueducts, and heated public baths for washing. Romans also developed laws designed to keep their towns free of excrement and rubbish.
However, new archaeological research has revealed that—for all their apparently hygienic innovations—intestinal parasites such as whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica dysentery did not decrease as expected in Roman times compared with the preceding Iron Age, they gradually increased.
The latest research was conducted by Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge’s Archaeology and Anthropology Department and is published today in the journal Parasitology. The study is the first to use the archaeological evidence for parasites in Roman times to assess “the health consequences of conquering an empire”.
Dr Piers Mitchell brought together evidence of parasites in ancient latrines, human burials and ‘coprolites’—or fossilised faeces—as well as in combs and textiles from numerous Roman Period excavations across the Roman Empire.
Not only did certain intestinal parasites appear to increase in prevalence with the coming of the Romans, but Mitchell also found that, despite their famous culture of regular bathing, ‘ectoparasites’ such as lice and fleas were just as widespread among Romans as in Viking and medieval populations, where bathing was not widely practiced.
Some excavations revealed evidence for special combs to strip lice from hair, and delousing may have been a daily routine for many people living across the Roman Empire
Piers Mitchell said: “Modern research has shown that toilets, clean drinking water and removing faeces from the streets all decrease risk of infectious disease and parasites. So we might expect the prevalence of faecal oral parasites such as whipworm and roundworm to drop in Roman times—yet we find a gradual increase. The question is why?”
One possibility Mitchell offers is that it may have actually been the warm communal waters of the bathhouses that helped spread the parasitic worms. Water was infrequently changed in some baths, and a scum would build on the surface from human dirt and cosmetics. “Clearly, not all Roman baths were as clean as they might have been,” said Mitchell.
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Roman latrines at Lepcis Magna in Libya. Credit: Craig Taylor
Another possible explanation raised in the study is the Roman use of human excrement as a crop fertilizer. While modern research has shown this does increase crop yields, unless the faeces are composted for many months before being added to the fields, it can result in the spread of parasite eggs that can survive in the grown plants.
“It is possible that sanitation laws requiring the removal of faeces from the streets actually led to reinfection of the population as the waste was often used to fertilise crops planted in farms surrounding the towns,” said Mitchell.
The study found fish tapeworm eggs to be surprisingly widespread in the Roman Period compared to Bronze and Iron Age Europe. One possibility Mitchell suggests for the rise in fish tapeworm is the Roman love of a sauce called garum.
Made from pieces of fish, herbs, salt and flavourings, garum was used as both a culinary ingredient and a medicine. This sauce was not cooked, but allowed to ferment in the sun. Garum was traded right across the empire, and may have acted as the “vector” for fish tapeworm, says Mitchell.
“The manufacture of fish sauce and its trade across the empire in sealed jars would have allowed the spread of the fish tapeworm parasite from endemic areas of northern Europe to all people across the empire. This appears to be a good example of the negative health consequences of conquering an empire,” he said.
The study shows a range of parasites infected people living in the Roman Empire, but did they try to treat these infections medically? While Mitchell says care must be taken when relating ancient texts to modern disease diagnoses, some researchers have suggested that intestinal worms described by Roman medical practitioner Galen (130AD – 210AD) may include roundworm, pinworm and a species of tapeworm.
Galen believed these parasites were formed from spontaneous generation in putrefied matter under the effect of heat. He recommended treatment through modified diet, bloodletting, and medicines believed to have a cooling and drying effect, in an effort to restore balance to the ‘four humours’: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm.
Added Mitchell: “This latest research on the prevalence of ancient parasites suggests that Roman toilets, sewers and sanitation laws had no clear benefit to public health. The widespread nature of both intestinal parasites and ectoparasites such as lice also suggests that Roman public baths surprisingly gave no clear health benefit either.”
“It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelt better.”
Source: University of Cambridge subject news release.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE—A box of seemingly unremarkable stones sits in the corner of Dr Giulio Lucarini’s office at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research where it competes for space with piles of academic journals, microscopes and cartons of equipment used for excavations.
These palm-sized pebbles were used as grinding tools by people living in North Africa around 7,000 years ago. Tiny specks of plant matter recently found on their surfaces shine light on a fascinating period of human development and confirm theories that the transition between nomadic and settled lifestyles was gradual.
The artefacts in Lucarini’s office come from a collection held in the store of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) just a couple of minutes’ walk away. In the 1950s the well-known Cambridge archaeologist Sir Charles McBurney undertook an excavation of a cave called Haua Fteah located in northern Libya. He showed that its stratigraphy (layers of sediment) is evidence of continuous human habitation from at least 80,000 years ago right up to the present day. Finds from McBurney’s excavation were deposited at MAA.
In 2007, Professor Graeme Barker, also from Cambridge, started to re-excavate Haua Fteah with support from the ERC-funded TRANS-NAP Project. Until 2014, Barker and his team had the chance to spend more than one month each year excavating the site and surveying the surrounding Jebel Akhdar region, in order to investigate the relationships between cultural and environmental change in North Africa over the past 200,000 years.
Now an analysis of stone grinders from the Neolithic layers of Haua Fteah (dating from 8,000-5,500 years ago), carried out by Lucarini as his Marie Sklodowska-Curie Project ‘AGRINA’, in collaboration with Anita Radini (University of York) and Huw Barton (University of Leicester), yields new evidence about people living at a time seen as a turning point in human exploitation of the environment, paving the way for rapid expansion in population.
Around 11,000 years ago, during the early phase of the geological period known as Holocene, nomadic communities of Near Eastern regions made the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled farming existence as they began to exploit domesticated crops and animals developed locally. The research Lucarini is carrying out in Northern Libya and Western Egypt is increasingly revealing a contrasting scenario for the North African regions.
In a paper published today, Lucarini and colleagues explain that the surfaces of the grinders show plant use-wear and contain tiny residues of wild plants that date from a time when, in all likelihood, domesticated grains would have been available to them. These data are consistent with other evidence from the site, notably those from the analysis of the plant macro-remains carried out by Jacob Morales (University of the Basque Country), which confirmed the presence of wild plants alone in the site during the Neolithic. Together, this evidence suggests that domesticated varieties of grain were adopted late, spasmodically, and not before classical times, by people who lived in tune with their surroundings as they moved seasonally between naturally-available resources.
Lucarini is an expert in the study of stone tools and has a particular interest in the beginning of food production economies in North Africa. Using an integrated approach of low and high-power microscopy in the George Pitt-Rivers Lab at the McDonald Institute, and in the BioArCh Lab at the University of York, he and his colleagues were able to spot plant residues, too small to be visible to the naked eye, caught in the pitted surface of several of the stones from Haua Fteah. Some of the grinders themselves exhibit clear ‘use-wear’ with their surfaces carrying the characteristic polish of having been used for grinding over long periods.
“It was thrilling to discover that microscopic traces of the plants ground by these stones have survived for so long, especially now that we’re able to use powerful high-power microscopes to look at the distinctive shape of the starch granules that offer us valuable clues to the identities of the plant varieties they come from,” says Lucarini.
By comparing the characteristic shape and size of the starch found in the grinders’ crevices to those in a reference collection of wild and domestic plant varieties collected in different North African and Southern European countries, Lucarini and Radini were able to determine that the residues most probably came from one of the species belonging to the Cenchrinae grasses.
Various species of the genus Cenchrus are still gathered today by several African groups when other resources are scarce. Cenchrus is prickly and its seed is laborious to extract. But it is highly nutritious and, especially in times of severe food shortage, a highly valuable resource.
“Haua Fteah is only a kilometre from the Mediterranean and close to well-established coastal routes, giving communities there access to commodities such as domesticated grain, or at least the possibility to cultivate them. Yet it seems that people living in the Jebel Akhdar region may well have made a strategic and deliberate choice not to adopt the new farming practices available to them, despite the promise of higher yields but, instead, to integrate them into their existing practices,” says Lucarini.
“It’s interesting that today, even in relatively affluent European countries, the use of wild plants is becoming more commonplace, complementing the trend to use organically farmed food. Not only do wild plants contribute to a healthier diet, but they also more sustainable for the environment.”
Lucarini suggests that North African communities delayed their move to domesticated grains because it suited their highly mobile style of life. “Opting to exploit wild crops was a successful and low-risk strategy not to rely too heavily on a single resource, which might fail. It’s an example of the English idiom of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Rather than being ‘backward’ in their thinking, these nomadic people were highly sophisticated in their pragmatism and deep understanding of plants, animals and climatic conditions,” he says.
Evidence of the processing of wild plants at Haua Fteah challenges the notion that there was a sharp and final divide between nomadic lifestyles and more settled farming practices – and confirms recent theories that the adoption of domesticated species in North Africa was an addition to, rather than a replacement of, the exploitation of wild resources such as the native grasses that still grow wild at the site.
“Archaeologists talk about a ‘Neolithic package’ – made up of domestic plants and animals, tools and techniques – that transformed lifestyles. Our research suggests that what happened at Haua Fteah was that people opted for a mixed bag of old and new. The gathering of wild plants as well as the keeping of domestic sheep and goats chime with continued exploitation of other wild resources – such as land and sea snails – which were available on a seasonal basis with levels depending on shifts in climatic conditions,” says Lucarini.
“People had an intimate relationship with the environment they were so closely tuned to and, of course, entirely dependent on. This knowledge may have made them wary of abandoning strategies that enabled them to balance their use of resources – in a multi-spectrum exploitation of the environment.”
Haua Fteah continues to pose puzzles for archaeologists. The process of grinding requires two surfaces – a hand-held upper grinding tool and a base grinding surface. Excavation has yielded no lower grinders which made have been as simple as shallow dish-shaped declivities in local rock surfaces. “Only a fraction of the extensive site has been excavated so it may be that lower grinders do exist but they simply haven’t been found yet,” says Lucarini.
The uncertain political situation in Libya has resulted in the suspension of fieldwork in Haua Fteah, in particular the excavation of the Neolithic and classical layers of the cave. Lucarini hopes that a resolution to the current crisis will allow work to resume within the next few years. He says: “Haua Fteah, with its 100,000 years of history and continuous occupation by different peoples, is a symbol of how Libya can be hospitable and welcoming. We trust in this future for the country.”
Source: University of Cambridge subject news release.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY—Human material from the Anatolian site Kumtepe was used in the study. The material was heavily degraded, but yielded enough DNA for the doctorate student Ayca Omrak to address questions concerning the demography connected to the spread of farming. She conducted her work at the Archaeological Research Laboratory.
“I have never worked with a more complicated material. But it was worth every hour in the laboratory. I could use the DNA from the Kumtepe material to trace the european farmers back to Anatolia. It is also fun to have worked with this material from the site Kumtepe, as this is the precursor to Troy”, says doctorate student Ayca Omrak, at the Archaeological Research Laboratory Stockholm University.
Jan Storå, associate professor in osteoarchaeology and coauthor to the study agrees with Ayca. The results confirms Anatolias importance to Europe’s cultural history. He also thinks that material from the area needs to be researched further.
“It is complicated to work with material from this region, it is hot and the DNA is degraded. But if we want to understand how the process that led from a hunter-gatherer society proceeded to a farming society, it is this material we need to exhaust”, says Jan Storå, associate professor in osteoarchaeology, Stockholm University.
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A large part of results come from grave 6 in Kumtepe, excavated in 1994. Here the upper part of a skeleton. Photo provided by Project Troia, thanks to Peter Jablonka. Photo provided by Project Troia, thanks to Peter Jablonka.
Anders Götherstörm who heads the archaeogenetic research at the Archaeological Research Laboratory agrees that this study indicates further possibilities:
“Our results stress the importance Anatolia has had on Europe’s prehistory. But to fully understand how the agricultural development proceeded we need to dive deeper down into material from the Levant. Jan is right about that.”
The archaeogenetic group in Stockholm is presently advancing its collaboration with colleagues in Anatolia and Iran.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Archaeologists currently at work at the site of Jamestown, Virginia, the earliest successful English settlement in the Americas, plan to begin excavations at the spot of the 1907 Memorial Church on Jamestown Island. According to a recent published news update, beginning in the summer of 2016 they plan to excavate into the floor of the church in sections while keeping the historic church site open to visitors. The efforts will include an investigation into the remains of the 1617 church where English colonial America’s first representative government met in 1619.
The excavations at Jamestown are best known for the rediscovery of the remains of the 1607 James Fort by William Kelso in the mid-1990’s. Since then, archaeologists have recovered more than 2 million artifacts and thousands of features that evidence the remains of various structures, particularly those associated with the original 1607 James Fort. The findings testify to the successful establishment and growth of a key English colony and the place where the first English colonial government had its birth.
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Inside the currently reconstructed 1907 Memorial Church at Jamestown.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Using state-of-the-art dating methodologies, a team of scientists have obtained or confirmed a date range between .9 and .85 Mya (million years ago) as a time when a species of Old World monkey (Theropithecus) and an early species of human occupied the cave site of Cueva Victoria in southeastern Spain. It is a location not far from where many scientists have hypothesized that humans may have crossed over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at a time when seal levels were low enough to provide a land bridge between the two continents.
Using paleomagnetism, uranium-thorium, and vertebrate biostratigraphy dating techniques, Luis Gibert of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues from several other institutions conducted testing on fossiliferous breccia samples and other deposit samples from the cave. Their results showed that the fossil evidence for the Theropithecus presence was constrained to a range between .9 and .85 Mya. Similar dates have been obtained through previous studies on the Cueva Negra cave in the same region of Spain, which contained evidence of early human (Homo) fossils associated with what is arguably considered to be the earliest Acheulean-type stone tools in Europe.
The authors of the study suggest that the presence of the same species of Theropithecus, including Homo, at about the same time in North Africa, coupled with the absence of Theropithecus fossils elsewhere in Europe, supports the hypothesis of a dispersal of the two primates (Theropithecus and Homo) through the Strait of Gibraltar almost 1 million years ago. During this time, sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge at the Strait between Africa and Europe.
Previous studies by other teams have also suggested another, earlier human dispersal into southeastern Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar at about 1.3 million years ago, and the famous research and Homo fossil discoveries at Dmanisi in Georgia have suggested an even earlier Homo dispersal out of Africa, possibly through the Levant and up through Anatolia to the southern Caucasus at around 1.8 million years ago.
*Luis Gibert, et al., Chronology for the Cueva Victoria fossil site (SE Spain): Evidence for Early Pleistocene Afro-Iberian dispersals, 12 November 2015, Journal of Human Evolution. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.08.002
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Archaeologists who have surveyed and dug for decades on Roanoke Island and other locations in North Carolina have accumulated important, albeit comparatively scant, evidence that have raised new questions about the whereabouts of America’s first main English settlement location and the mystery of the ‘lost colony’ of 1587.
Busy at work at a site known as Salmon Creek (otherwise known as ‘Site X’), which has yielded evidence of a long-gone Native American village settlement not far from the waterline on land bordering the Western Albemarle Sound of North Carolina, archaeologists have recently recovered some tantalizing fragments. Among scores of artifacts that tell of the 16th-17th century presence of Native Americans at the location, the archaeologists have uncovered artifacts that are clearly European in origin. The finds included 27 sherds representing perhaps 4 vessels of 16th century Surrey-Hampshire Border ware; 3 sherds of a North Devon plain baluster jar—a ceramic ware commonly used during the 16th and 17th centuries as provisioning jars on sea voyages—a tenter hook, of a type similar to that used at the early Jamestown settlement and possibly used to stretch canvas to create temporary shelters or to stretch and dry animal skins; a priming pan from an early (possibly 16th century) flintlock gun as well as another possibly from a 16th century snaphaunce gun; an aglet of the type that would have secured Elizabethan clothing; a fragment from an iron buckle typical of the style worn in the 16th and 17th centuries; and a lead cloth seal that may possibly be 16th or 17th century. The site investigators say that the finds are significant in that the earliest recorded presence of English settlement in the western Albemarle Sound area did not occur earlier than about 1655.
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Excavations underway at the Salmon Creek site, or ‘Site X’. Courtesy First Colony Foundation
The recent findings have made news headlines at a variety of venues in 2015. But is it unequivocal evidence for the long-sought whereabouts of the famous ‘lost colony’ of 1587?
Yes and no, say the archaeologists of the First Colony Foundation, the organization under which recent excavations have been conducted at the site.
“The First Colony Foundation believes [hypothesizes] that it has uncovered archaeological evidence of Roanoke colonists’ presence at Site X,” write the site investigators in their report.* However, they qualify their statement with another statement documented in the same report: They “do not contend that Site X on its own represents the relocation site for the majority of 1587 colonists.”* They suggest that any habitation by Roanoke colonists at the site may have only consisted of a small surviving part of the original 1587 group.
So where did the rest go?
When colony Governor John White finally returned in 1590 to the 1587 settlement site after three frustrating years held in England due to the British Crown’s maritime conflict with Spain, he found them vanished, with no trace of their whereabouts other than the word ‘Croatoan’ carved into a tree or post at the abandoned settlement site. The Croatoans were Indians who inhabited an area in present-day Hatteras Island, in the southern North Carolina Outer Banks. His subsequent search effort in that direction ended in failure, after which he returned to England, never to see the colonists again. But recent excavations at a site known as Cape Creek on Hatteras Island have turned up, like Site X further north and west, some compelling artifacts that could give clues about a 16th century European presence there. Under a joint effort in 2015 carried out by Bristol University and the Croatoan Archaeological Society, findings at that site have included a small fragment of slate that may have been used as a writing tablet (showing a small letter “M” in one corner and found near a lead pencil) similar to that found at the 1607 James Fort excavations on Jamestown Island, Virginia; a part of the hilt of an English iron rapier (a sword of the type used in England during the 16th century); an iron bar; and a large copper ingot. But even before that, in 1998, investigations of the site by archaeologists under a East Carolina University project yielded a 10-carat gold signet ring thought to date to the 16th century. Engraved with the image of a lion or horse, it is suggested that it likely originally belonged to an English gentleman, as such items would have been more typically worn by English noblemen.
“We interpreted the site as a 17th century Croatoan Indian workshop complete with hearths for working and lots of metal working related items,” said Edward “Clay” Swindell, a key archaeologist who participated in the 1998 excavations where the signet ring was found. But he expresses an air of caution. “We need to be very careful about how we interpret our finds at these sites,” he emphasizes. “It’s easy to catch the ‘fever’ of looking for the ‘lost colony’, and this can color our conclusions. We’re looking at sites that bear a paltry few artifacts (related to European presence), and so it’s easy to cave into the temptation of saying, ‘this is it’ about the lost Roanoke settlement or the lost colony.”
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16th century gunlock excavated at Cape Creek site. Courtesy Dr. David S. Phelps and Charles L. Heath
In any case, though it appears that the original ‘lost colony’ group may have possibly split into smaller groups, for whatever reasons, and dispersed to different locations, excavations will continue at both locations and the archaeologists maintain that much more evidence must be unearthed and interpreted before any reasonable conclusions can be securely drawn about the how and where of the lost colonists’ fate.
Archaeologically speaking, however, a much larger question revolves around the actual location of the original 1587 main settlement site. For decades, it has been traditionally thought that the first colony site was located in the northern part of Roanoke Island. Since 1947, when National Park Service archaeologist Jean “Pinky” Harrington first began excavations, a succession of archaeologists have uncovered 16th century European artifacts at four different but closely associated sites in the area of the present-day Fort Raleigh National Historic site visitor center and museum. The museum displays some of the more significant relevant finds. But those sites, according to the archaeologists, have not yielded any evidence that would support domestic habitation, as has been found at the Jamestown (1607 James Fort) site much further north in Virginia. Now, archaeologists suggest that the main Elizabethan settlement likely may not be found in the vicinity of the Fort Raleigh National Historic site, but farther south and west on the island. The ‘Fort Raleigh’ sites may have actually only been northern extensions or stations connected to the larger domestic settlement located elsewhere.
With this, Popular Archaeology asked Swindell where he thought the main settlement might actually be located.
“Even Pinky suspected that the main settlement and fort was down south in the vicinity of Shallowbag Bay,” said Swindell.
Roanoke’s main town of Manteo abuts Shallowbag Bay, home to the town’s main marina and an ideal waterfront for docking boats of a variety of capacities. “This is a nice, deep area for portage and docking,” he says. “The entrance to the Outer Banks is more easily accessible. You have this nice sheltered bay that better accommodates the docking of ships. So you can imagine that this would be a better place to protect your ships and to actually bring supplies in, whereas toward the north (where the current archaeological sites are) there is really no (workable) place to keep your boats and offload supplies.”
Some (unprovenanced) small finds have popped up in the Shallowbag Bay area, but none of them have been pursued archaeologically, said Swindell. “We are hoping to pursue some of these leads, among other things.”
According to Swindell, there are plans to hopefully return to Roanoke to investigate more areas in search of the main colony site. For now, however, eyes and resources are focusing on places like Site X, where archaeologists hope to uncover more finds that will shed light on one of America’s most compelling historical mysteries.
A more in-depth feature article, Unearthing New Clues to America’s First English Colony, is published in the Winter 2015/2016 issue of Popular Archaeology Magazine.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, Dublin, Ireland, Dec. 28th, 2015 – A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, and the information buried within is already answering pivotal questions about the origins of Ireland’s people and their culture.
The team sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago, and those of three men from a later period, around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after the introduction of metalworking. Their landmark results are published today in international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
Ireland has intriguing genetics. It lies at the edge of many European genetic gradients with world maxima for the variants that code for lactose tolerance, the western European Y chromosome type, and several important genetic diseases including one of excessive iron retention, called haemochromatosis.
However, the origins of this heritage are unknown. The only way to discover our genetic past is to sequence genomes directly from ancient people, by embarking on a type of genetic time travel.
Migration has been a hot topic in archaeology. Opinion has been divided on whether the great transitions in the British Isles, from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture and later from stone to metal use, were due to local adoption of new ways or whether these influences were derived from influxes of new people.
These ancient Irish genomes each show unequivocal evidence for massive migration. The early farmer has a majority ancestry originating ultimately in the Middle East, where agriculture was invented. The Bronze Age genomes are different again with about a third of their ancestry coming from ancient sources in the Pontic Steppe.
“There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” said Professor of Population Genetics in Trinity College Dublin, Dan Bradley, who led the study, “and this degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues.”
“It is clear that this project has demonstrated what a powerful tool ancient DNA analysis can provide in answering questions which have long perplexed academics regarding the origins of the Irish,” said Dr Eileen Murphy, Senior Lecturer in Osteoarchaeology at Queen’s University Belfast.
Whereas the early farmer had black hair, brown eyes and more resembled southern Europeans, the genetic variants circulating in the three Bronze Age men from Rathlin Island had the most common Irish Y chromosome type, blue eye alleles and the most important variant for the genetic disease, haemochromatosis.
The latter C282Y mutation is so frequent in people of Irish descent that it is sometimes referred to as a Celtic disease. This discovery therefore marks the first identification of an important disease variant in prehistory.
“Genetic affinity is strongest between the Bronze Age genomes and modern Irish, Scottish and Welsh, suggesting establishment of central attributes of the insular Celtic genome some 4,000 years ago,” added PhD Researcher in Genetics at Trinity, Lara Cassidy.
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Excavated near Belfast in 1855, the skeleton of the Neolithic early farmer woman had lain in a Neolithic tomb chamber for 5,000 years; subsequently curated in Queens University Belfast. Credit: Daniel Bradley, Trinity College Dublin
This is a reconstruction of the Neolithic early farmer woman head and face by Elizabeth Black. Her genes tell us she had black hair and brown eyes. Credit: Barrie Hartwell.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Analysis of the oldest-known cemetery in the South Pacific may help resolve a longstanding debate over the origins and ancestry of Polynesians. Modern-day Polynesians bear strong cultural and linguistic similarities to the ancient people associated with the Lapita Culture who settled on Vanuatu more than 3,000 years ago. However, the origin of the Lapita people remains debated, with recent biological studies suggesting that the group may be of mixed ancestry with a strong contribution from Melanesian populations, who were already established on islands to the west near New Guinea. Frederique Valentin, Matthew Spriggs, and colleagues conducted morphological analyses involving craniometric measurements of skeletons from a roughly 3,000-year-old cemetery at Teouma on the south coast of Vanuatu’s Efate Island. Measurements were taken on five ca. 3,000 to 2,850-year-old skulls recovered from the Teouma site and 270 more skulls from Australia, Melanesia, Western Micronesia, Polynesia, and China. They found that early Lapita remains comport with present-day Polynesian and Asian populations. Later generations, by contrast, begin to exhibit characteristics associated with a Melanesian phenotype.
Combined with archaeological data, their findings* suggest that Lapita settlers in Vanuatu expanded relatively quickly into Polynesia to become the primary contributor to modern Polynesians’ biological make-up. Melanesian migration from previously established areas followed during a time when the early Polynesians were effectively isolated, eventually dominating the original Lapita phenotype, according to the authors.
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The Lapita are perhaps best known for their distinctive pottery, an example of which is shown here.Torbenbrinker, Wikimedia Commons
*“Early Lapita skeletons from Vanuatu show Polynesian craniofacial shape: Implications for Remote Oceanic settlement and Lapita origins,” by Frédérique Valentin, Florent Détroit, Matthew Spriggs, and Stuart Bedford.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA—University of Colorado anthropology Professor Arthur A. Joyce and University of Central Florida Associate Professor Sarah Barber found evidence in several Mexican archeological sites that contradict the long-held belief that religion acted to unite early state societies. It often had the opposite effect, the study says.
“It doesn’t matter if we today don’t share particular religious beliefs, but when people in the past acted on their beliefs, those actions could have real, material consequences,” Barber said about the team’s findings. “It really behooves us to acknowledge religion when considering political processes.”
Sounds like sage advice in today’s world that has multiple examples of politics and religion intersecting and resulting in conflict.
The team published its findings “Ensoulment, Entrapment, and Political Centralization: A Comparative Study of Religion and Politics in Later Formative Oaxaca,” after spending several years conducting field research in the lower Río Verde valley of Oaxaca, Mexico’s Pacific coastal lowlands. They compared their results with data from the highland Valley of Oaxaca.
Their study viewed archaeological evidence from 700 B.C. to A.D. 250, a period identified as a time of the emergence of states in the region. In the lower Verde, religious rituals involving offerings and the burial of people in cemeteries at smaller communities created strong ties to the local community that impeded the creation of state institutions.
And in the Valley of Oaxaca, elites became central to mediating between their communities and the gods, which eventually triggered conflict with traditional community leaders. It culminated in the emergence of a regional state with its capital at the hilltop city of Monte Albán.
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The archaeological site of Monte Albán. Hajor, Wikimedia Commons
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“In both the Valley of Oaxaca and the Lower Río Verde Valley, religion was important in the formation and history of early cities and states, but in vastly different ways,” said Joyce, lead author on the study. “Given the role of religion in social life and politics today, that shouldn’t be too surprising.”
The conflict in the lower Río Verde valley is evident in rapid rise and fall of its state institutions. At Río Viejo, the capital of the lower Verde state, people had built massive temples by AD 100. Yet these impressive, labor-intensive buildings, along with many towns throughout the valley, were abandoned a little over a century later.
“An innovative aspect of our research is to view the burials of ancestors and ceremonial offerings in the lower Verde as essential to these ancient communities,” said Joyce, whose research focuses on both political life and ecology in ancient Mesoamerica. “Such a perspective is also more consistent with the worldviews of the Native Americans that lived there.”
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Associate Professor Sarah Barber found evidence in several Mexican archeological sites that contradict the long-held belief that religion acted to unite early state societies. It often had the opposite effect, the study says. Credit: UCF: Nick Russet
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Something else other than the rise of agriculture spurred the accelerated growth in human population sizes that in turn gave rise to urbanized civilization. At least, so suggests a recent study* conducted by H. Jabran Zahid of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and his colleagues from the University of Wyoming, the results of which are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using a statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates, the researchers estimated the long-term population growth rate for foraging societies in Wyoming and Colorado during the period 6,000-13,000 years ago, and found that the growth rate is comparable to growth rates previously determined for contemporaneous farming societies in Europe. It is a growth rate that supports the suggestion that the introduction of agriculture was not directly related to the long-term annual rate of population growth that so many scholars have traditionally theorized. The results are also consistent with recent genetic studies that have shown that worldwide human population expansion actually occurred before the advent of agriculture, during prehistoric times. The sudy authors report that the same rate of growth occurred across differentiating environments, suggesting that human populations successfully adapted to their environments and that population expansion may have occurred based on other factors, such as global climate change or endogenous biological factors.
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A scene in Wyoming. Greg Willis, Wikimedia Commons
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
ANAPA, DECEMBER, 2015 – The Volnoe Delo Oleg Deripaska Foundation, one of the largest private charities in Russia, has announced that Russian archaeologists working at the site of the ancient Greek city of Phanagoria near the Black Sea have discovered traces of a violent coup at the site, which at one time was the capital of the Kingdom of Bosporus in the 5th-4th century BC.
Following the Foundation-supported 12th archaeological season at the site of ancient Phanagoria, archaeologists reached ancient layers dating back to the 6th-5th century BC. They unearthed fragments of a city destroyed by a massive fire in 480-470 BC. It matches historic chronicles about power transition in the Kingdom of Bosporus when a Thracian dynasty of Spartocids deposed the ruling Archaeanactids dynasty in the 5th century BC.
The discovery suggests that the ruling dynasty’s takeover was accompanied by violent clashes that destroyed the entire city. Archaeologists will conduct a more thorough study of the city’s remains next year, as the recent archaeological season at Phanagoria was marred by heavy rains that hindered access to the finds. Among the recent discoveries thus far, however, are remains of a two-room sun-dried earth brick building dated to the 6th century BC. If the further studies confirm it was part of an acropolis, it will be the most ancient shrine found on modern Russian territory.
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Archaeologists excavating at Phanagoria’s eastern acropolis. Courtesy Volnoe Delo Oleg Deripaska Foundation
Among other finds in 2015 is evidence that supports the accounts of the city’s fall in the 10th century when the residents abandoned the area for unknown reasons. Archaeological finds, together with historic documents now confirm that Phanagoria was one of the main cities of Khazar Kaganate in the 10th century A.D., and that it was besieged by the Slavic warlord Helgu (often interpreted as Oleg) who was known as a diplomatic invader. He was believed to have forced locals to flee the city in exchange for immunity.
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The Khazar layers at Phanagoria. Courtesy Volnoe Delo Oleg Deripaska Foundation
The site of Phanagoria is known to have yielded a rich array of rare historic artifacts. Among them is an ancient naval ram used by the army of Mithradates VI of the Bosporan Kingdom to quell a popular uprising against him in 63 BC, as well as a palace of Mithradates VI dated to the 1st century BC, an ancient tomb with a stepped ceiling, the oldest temple unearthed on Russian territory dating back to the 5th century BC, and a number of submerged objects, e.g., the ancient city’s streets covered with sand, Phanagoria’s port structures, and ship debris.
The history of the site goes back to the time when it was first established as a colony by the Milesian Greeks in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.
Says Vladimir Kuznetsov, the head of the Phanagoria expedition:
“One of the main results of the Phanagoria fieldwork this year is the hypothesis about possible reasons for the residents’ exodus in the 10th century. Phanagoria studies allow us to tie the history of the Byzantine Empire, Khazar Kaganate and Ancient Rus together. We can see that the emerging Old Russian state had a strong political and social influence in the region. As for the ancient cultural layers, we possess unique historical artifacts that have no analogues in the world. We’re currently working with 6th-5th century BC layers covering 1,000 sq.m, so the new finds are to follow.”
Adapted and edited from the subject Basic Element press release.
This richly illustrated issue includes the following stories: Two remarkable discoveries that are shedding light on human beginnings in Africa; a traveling exhibit and an archaeological site that show how knowledge is more valuable than gold; a Spanish cave and a unique burial that are offering a tantalizing glimpse on the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe; the stunning visual reconstruction of an ancient Roman town; enlightening new finds at a remarkably well-preserved site of ancient Hellenistic-Roman culture overlooking the Sea of Galilee; rare finds that are shedding light on occult practices among ancient Greeks in Sicily; and an overview of the overwhelmingly rich archaeological heritage of Britain. Find it on Amazon.com.
Matthew Notarian is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Hiram College and a Trench Supervisor with the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Classics from the University at Buffalo, specializing in Roman archaeology. He also holds a B.A. from the University of Delaware. He has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and an exchange fellow of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Previously, he taught at Tulane University and Johns Hopkins University, and has participated in fieldwork at several sites in Italy and Greece.
According to the well-known myth, the fledgling city of Rome, founded in 753 BC, began with a potentially fatal flaw. By opening up its gates to runaway slaves, criminals, and exiles, Romulus had succeeded in attracting men to his newly established settlement. But it lacked women, and these less than ideal bachelors understandably had trouble attracting brides. The Romans invited their northern neighbors, the Sabines, to a festival, only to kidnap their young women, who became the first Romans’ wives. Not surprisingly, war followed, but the ensuing peace saw a dual kingship for the new city: Romulus and Titus Tatius, the Sabine leader. The city would never have survived beyond a single generation were it not for these events, leading the Romans to value a special connection to the Sabine people – two nations united by blood from the very beginning.
The historical record, however, challenges this unlikely story. In reality, the Sabines were only definitively conquered by the growing Roman state in 290 BC under the general Manius Curius Dentatus. Undoubtedly, some of their land was confiscated and given to Roman veteran soldiers, a practice in keeping with Roman conquest. It was also at that time that the Romans awarded the defeated Sabines partial Roman citizenship (that is, without the right to vote in Rome’s elections). However, only a couple of decades later, in 268 BC, the Sabines were given full Roman citizenship, a groundbreaking concession for a non-Latin-speaking people. From this date forward, the Sabines and the Romans did enjoy something of the close affinity expressed in myth and legend. Several aristocratic Roman families claimed Sabine descent, such as the Claudii, whose members included the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. The founder of Rome’s second imperial dynasty, Vespasian, also hailed from Sabine country, bringing to the throne his ancestors’ characteristic austerity, hardiness, and no-nonsense approach to governance.
Nevertheless, the historical account of the conquest of the Sabines and their territory (called Sabinum by the Romans) leaves many questions about the impact of this event unanswered. For example: How did this political shift affect settlement patterns in Sabine territory? Can we detect the settlement of Roman soldiers and citizens in the territory by examining the archaeological record? How did this major restructuring of the relationship between the Romans and Sabines affect the economic ties between Sabinum and the city of Rome?
Since 2011, an archaeological endeavor, the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project (UST), operated under the auspices of Rutgers University, has sought to shed light on the long-term effects of the Roman conquest in one portion of the Sabines’ homeland.
The Sabina Tiberina
Today, the territory that encompassed ancient Sabinum is an area to the northeast of Rome called the Sabina (Fig. 1). It is a somewhat fluid region that spans parts of the modern regions of Lazio, Umbria, and Abruzzo. The Sabina is a hilly country, mainly given over to olive groves and dotted by picturesque medieval hill towns (Fig. 2). The uneven terrain makes for a meandering network of roads full of switchbacks that renders even modern car travel surprisingly time consuming (and nauseating to the weak of stomach). As a whole, the Sabina is divided roughly in half by the Sabine mountains, a formidable range running south to north that forms the foothills of the Apennines. The western boundary of Sabine country is the Tiber River and its valley (the opposite bank was the land of the Etruscans and the Faliscans, other rivals of early Rome), and this is what gives the western Sabina its name of Sabina Tiberina.
Unlike the Etruscan/Faliscan west bank of the Tiber, which has been extensively studied by archaeologists since the 1950s, the Sabine east bank has received considerably less attention. This is a surprising oversight given the importance of the river for trade with the city of Rome, a massive market with a million residents at its peak. The Tiber was the principal artery that gave the Romans access to central Italy. Moving goods over water was considerably cheaper and faster (especially downriver, as in this case) than overland travel in the ancient world. As a result, the Sabina Tiberina was an extremely valuable addition to Roman territory. Exploiting the fertile agricultural land closest to the river would have allowed Roman landowners to become very wealthy. It was also close enough to the capital that they could have reached their country estates in no more than a day or two’s travel.
One reason for the relative neglect of the Sabina Tiberina by archaeologists may lie in the region’s lack of urbanization in ancient times. While the Etruscans and Faliscans had developed an urbanized society with competing city-states (not unlike Rome and its other Latin speaking neighbors), the Sabines remained a more dispersed and rural people with few large cities. Enticed by rich settlements and a more forgiving terrain of rolling hills covered by plowed fields, generations of archaeologists systemically studied the west bank. On the other hand, the Sabina Tiberina, with its undulating, hilly terrain, makes archaeological survey (the systematic walking of agricultural fields in search of surface artifacts) difficult, if not impossible. This is not to say, however, that the east bank does not offer anything of historical interest. On the contrary, recent research on the Sabina Tiberina has suggested that the east bank of the Tiber may have been more heavily exploited than previously assumed, and many of its archaeological sites have yet to be studied using modern survey and excavation techniques.
The study area of the UST project (the ‘upper’ Sabina Tiberina) is its northern half, where the least amount of previous research has been carried out. The area had only one Roman town, Forum Novum, founded by the Romans at some point after the conquest in the early 3rd century BC in order to provide a market center for the dispersed estates of the region. By the 1st century AD, the town had been elevated to the status of a “true” Roman town (municipium in Latin), although research conducted by the British School at Rome in the early 2000s revealed that the town consisted of little more than a few public buildings and a nearby villa. However, what the region lacks in Roman urban culture is more than made up by a network of Roman villas – elite country residences connected to large agricultural estates.
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Fig. 1:Central Italy at the time of the Roman Empire, indicating the location of Sabinum and neighboring peoples. (Adapted from Pelagios Project)
The word ‘villa’ still brings to mind an image of a luxurious residence, and its ancient counterpart was a very distinctive type of lavish structure. Villas were arguably one of the most characteristic features of Roman culture, and one that spread across the Mediterranean and Western Europe with the expansion of Roman power. While many still debate the exact origins of this institution, it is clear that by the 1st century BC a wealthy Roman would likely have owned several of these types of residences across the Italian peninsula. In fact, it was a necessity for the ruling class – both socially and economically.
By definition, a villa was located in the countryside and it defined the center of a large agricultural estate. Since the landowners did not live in these properties year round, the residence served as a kind of country vacation home for the elite, but with all the comforts of city life. Villas were usually paved with mosaic floors and decorated with wall paintings and sculptures. Private bath complexes, decorative fountains, and formally planted gardens provided a suitable setting for a Roman aristocrat to devote himself to leisure, free from the pressures of political life in Rome. Yet central to the villa was a working farm. Land was the primary, and only socially acceptable, source of wealth for the aristocracy in the Roman world. Tended by slaves or tenants in the owner’s absence, these estates typically specialized in cash crops that were guaranteed to bring in a good return. These included olives, grapes (for wine), and even small game or other edible luxuries favored by the upper classes, such as snails, fish, and small birds. True Roman aristocrats owned several properties around Italy, diversifying against the risk of localized drought or disease. They made a habit of visiting each in turn throughout the year. The excuse was to check on farms and staff, but the true payoff was the opportunity to relax by hunting, reading, writing, and enjoying the pleasant setting of the estate.
The Sabina Tiberina, like much of the Italian countryside, was home to at least several dozen Roman villas. Many of these have been known for centuries due to their visible ruins dotting the hillsides and valleys of the region. Most were built with foundations of Roman concrete, which, by virtue of its durability, today leaves telltale masses of structural remains. Other villas were found when plows or other agricultural activity churned up large concentrations of broken pottery and roof tiles. A small number of sites even produced works of sculpture in earlier centuries. Very few, however, have ever been studied by professional archaeologists. One villa, located near the town of Cottanello, was extensively excavated in the 1960s by a group of amateur archaeologists. Only in the last few years have experts from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” returned to the site. Another villa, near the town of Forum Novum, was briefly explored with a few test trenches by British archaeologists over a decade ago. Outside of these two examples, no other villa in the region has ever been investigated by specialists.
The UST project has identified at least 15 villas of interest in the research zone (Fig. 3). One of the goals of the project is to study a select number of these sites using geophysical survey techniques – tools that require no digging to gain information about what is underground. These include ground penetrating radar, as well as magnetometry, a method that measures magnetic fields beneath the earth’s surface in order to discern significant anomalies, such as walls or voids. While the results are largely dependent upon local conditions, in the best case scenario they can provide plans of structures that are still underground. Nonetheless, in order to gain a more complete picture of a villa, such as a detailed understanding of its date and how it changed through time, there is no better technique than old-fashioned excavation. For this reason the UST project chose one particular villa in the region as the focus of intensive investigations – the villa at Vacone.
Fig. 3: Study area of the UST Project indicating sites of interest. The presence of cisterns often indicates a nearby villa, making these sites worthy of further investigation. (Map Data: Google, TerraMetrics).
The town of Vacone is located about 55 km north of Rome, perched on the slope of Monte Cosce, a formidable mountain that marks the border between the modern regions of Lazio and Umbria (Fig. 2). It is a very small town with fewer than 300 permanent residents, but the people of Vacone have a strong sense of their place in history. Every June, they observe the “Sacra Vacunae”, a festival that re-imagines the ancient Sabines’ celebration of their goddess Vacuna. Tradition holds that the town’s name derives from the name of the Sabine deity, whose temple sits beneath Vacone’s central church. While no definitive proof exists of a pagan shrine beneath the church, a few kilometers downhill stand the unmistakable ruins of a Roman villa.
Although known to travelers in the 18th century and earlier, the ruins of the villa were forgotten and only rediscovered in the 1960’s during road construction. Work crews stumbled upon the imposing remains of a vaulted structure called a cryptoporticus, built of Roman concrete and large blocks of local limestone, as well as a semicircular structure with a vaulted ceiling (Fig. 4). Further investigation revealed a second cryptoporticus just downhill from the first. Both could be entered through doorways and formed a kind of covered passageway. Such features are not uncommon in the architecture of Roman villas. However, these two particular structures formed the supports for a wide terrace upon which rests the main residential zone of the villa (Fig. 5). By the mid 1980s the cryptoportici were in need of repair, and a series of conservation efforts carried out by the Italian government shored up the remains. This work also uncovered one section of a well-preserved mosaic floor located on the upper surface of the lower cryptoporticus. This was removed and placed into storage, where it remains today.
As the UST project was getting underway in 2011, the Vacone villa was chosen for excavation for a number of reasons. First, the earlier work of the Italian government had exposed a series of doorways just to the north of the lower cryptoporticus. This strongly suggested that a series of rooms, possibly also paved by mosaics, lay waiting to be discovered to the north. Second, above the upper cryptoporticus were the remains of vats, channels, and a circular feature in the ground that surely belonged to a press for olive oil. Most importantly, the construction technique of the cryptoporticus wall, concrete mixed with rough large stones, suggested an early date, perhaps the 2nd c. BC or earlier. This would place the initial construction of the villa in the period not long after the Roman conquest of Sabinum, perhaps shedding light on the processes set in motion by this event. Therefore, the Vacone villa offers the possibility of examining several interesting facets of the Sabina Tiberina and its place in the study of Roman imperialism, the Roman economy, and, more generally, Roman society and culture.
Fig. 4: Upper cryptoporticus viewed from west. In the foreground is Room 12, paved in cocciopesto, which likely served as a storage area. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 5: Overall view of the villa from the south with the 2013 field crew. Both the lower and upper cryptoportici are visible. Note the clearly visible reconstructed sections in the lower structure. (UST Project Photo)
To date, four seasons of fieldwork have been carried out at Vacone. Every summer, undergraduate and graduate students from the United States and the U.K. come to Vacone to learn proper archaeological methodology while furthering the research goals of the UST project. They join an international staff that comes from Italy, the United States, U.K, and Australia. Many local residents of Vacone also generously volunteer their time and resources to help advance the study of this invaluable piece of Roman heritage.
At the end of the 2015 season, excavations had uncovered evidence of at least 32 distinct rooms, although some of these remain only partially excavated (Fig. 6). The vast majority of these rooms belong to the residential sector of the villa, as evidenced by the presence of mosaic floors and painted wall plaster in most of these rooms. The plaster is generally only preserved for a few centimeters along the walls, but hundreds, if not thousands, of fragments have been recovered and are awaiting study. Most walls were colored with red, black or yellow backgrounds and accompanied by a variety of designs, such as an unusual ring pattern not known from other sites, or another fragment containing a bird and plantlike motifs (Fig. 7). A particularly well-preserved section still in place on the east wall of Room 4, with an intricate geometric and floral design in black and red, provides a hint of the types of schemes that many of the villa’s walls once contained (Fig. 8). Other rooms of the villa also produced examples of molded stucco that once adorned the walls and ceilings.
Many of the mosaics, on the other hand, are in good condition and are among the most noteworthy aspects of the villa. All are geometric in design and typically consist of black, white, and red tesserae – the small cubed stones that make up a mosaic floor. The red stones, quite rare in Roman mosaics in general, come from a quarry in the neighboring town of Cottanello. A few mosaics of higher quality contain multiple colors arranged in intricate designs, some even mimicking shaded perspective. For example, the mosaics of Rooms 10 and 4 both include border zones with complex shaded designs of triangles and diamonds in green, red, white, and black (Figs. 8 and 9). The border zone in Room 10 may have originally marked off a niche where a bed, either for sleeping or dining, may have once stood. Other notable mosaic designs in the villa include a double wave (Fig. 10) and checkerboard pattern, as well as a few variations on a net motif. Several rooms also contain mosaics of the type called opus scutulatum, which consists of a series of larger colored stones set into a background of single colored tesserae (white or black) or other types of plain pavement. Especially remarkable in the Vacone villa is ample evidence of repairs made to the mosaic floors in ancient times. In Room 8, for example, a large area of damage to an opus scutulatum was replaced in antiquity by red or white tesserae arranged to mimic the lost colored stones of the pattern (Fig. 11). Repairs to the mosaic are also evident in Room 10. In other rooms, mosaic floors that became damaged in ancient times were simply covered over by simpler paving techniques, such as cocciopesto (a pavement made of mortar and crushed ceramics). The buckling of the floors in several areas hints at structural issues in the villa’s design that may have possibly led to the villa’s eventual abandonment.
Not every room in the villa was paved with mosaics, however. Some rooms seem to have been used for storage or more utilitarian purposes. These areas produced a rich assortment of artifacts and were paved with more utilitarian flooring techniques, such as plain concrete, opus spicatum (a pavement made of bricks arranged in a herringbone pattern) and cocciopesto. For example, room 12, located adjacent to the upper cryptoporticus wall and paved in cocciopesto, produced over 3000 ceramic sherds, mainly cookware and storage containers (Fig. 4). Also noteworthy was an iron key and the remains of a bronze locking mechanism, probably from a storage chest (Fig. 12).
The main agricultural zone was located in the northeastern zone of the villa, beside the upper cryptoporticus. Excavation has revealed many more details about this area, including evidence for not just one, but at least two olive presses (Fig. 13). Once pressed, the olive oil ran along brick lined channels to a series of three vats that could be opened and closed to control the flow of oil (Fig. 14). These vats were used to separate the oil from the amurca, the watery byproduct of olive pressing. Another channel reveals how the liquid in the vats could be drained into the upper cryptoporticus, for reasons still under investigation. Preliminary research suggests that the presence of two presses puts the Vacone villa in rare company, with fewer than 30 other villas in the region of Lazio out of a total of over 300. At the very end of last season, we also discovered a basin for collecting juice from a grape-treading floor, not far from the pressing area. While further exploration is needed, this may hint at a shift from olive to wine production during the course of the villa’s occupation.
The villa has also produced a few surprises. During the second season of digging, a small void opened up during excavation near the corner of one of the villa’s largest rooms, Room 7. Two seasons of careful excavation in cramped conditions have revealed that this was a vaulted passageway leading to the lower level of the villa and the interior of the cryptoporticus below (Figs. 15 and 16). It had a floor of beaten earth and was full of broken pottery, including several lamps, a necessity in this gloomy underground section of the villa. This past summer, a secondary passageway was identified, opening perpendicularly to the original tunnel, that leads into a circular vaulted chamber. A two by two meter test trench centered on the midpoint of the round chamber was excavated to see what architecture corresponded to this feature on the ground level of the villa. This revealed a stone with a cut opening that sits directly atop the capstone of the vaulted chamber below (Figs. 17 and 18). This feature has defied early attempts to understand its function. The opening brings to mind a latrine or wellhead for a cistern, but its placement and surrounding architecture do not support these interpretations. Future excavation within the circular chamber will hopefully shed light on this mysterious feature. Furthermore, additional passageways or collapsed underground vaults were discovered last summer in the western end of the villa. Several floors of the villa also produce a distinctive (and disconcerting) hollow sound when struck. This suggests that more of the terrace may be artificially constructed than previously assumed. If so, there may be far more to be investigated in the underground spaces of the villa.
Finally, four seasons of fieldwork have finally begun to provide some indications of the villa’s chronology. Much of the evidence for the earlier phases of the villa came to light due to damage the villa sustained during agricultural work in later centuries. All across the site, deep trenches were dug, possibly for vines, that cut through the mosaic floors of the villa in several areas. Excavating within these cuts allowed us to gain windows into what lies beneath the villa’s mosaic floors, which probably date to the 1st or 2nd centuries AD. For example, beneath the floor of Room 3 we found an earlier floor in opus scutulatum, but paved with cocciopesto rather than the mosaic background of later floors in the villa (Fig. 19). Ceramic evidence currently suggests a date around 100 BC for this earlier phase of the villa, but future study will refine our knowledge of the villa’s initial construction.
On the other end of the villa’s history, we are also beginning to understand how the villa came to be abandoned. At some point, new walls were constructed along a different orientation from the walls of the imperial era villa. Many of these new walls were built through the mosaic floors of the 1st or 2nd century AD, indicating their later date (Fig. 10). At an unknown subsequent date, the rooms of the villa also came to be used for human burials. So far, six individuals have been found. Four were male adults in their 30s, one was a young child of indeterminate sex, and the last was a newborn, found within a drain inside the upper cryptoporticus. The only indication of when these individuals were buried comes from a medallion dating to 1700 discovered near one of the adult burials (Fig. 20). However, since there is clear evidence that the bones were disturbed after the initial burial, it could suggest a date when the remains were reinterred rather than the date of the original interment. As for when the villa was abandoned, preliminary evidence suggests the villa may have gone out of use as early as 200 AD. For instance, of the several coins that we have discovered on the site, the latest datable examples are from the 2nd century AD, and many were found on the surface of the latest floors, mixed in with the collapse of the structure. The same holds true for the diagnostic pottery found on site – no forms date later than about 200 AD.
Fig. 9: Rooms 10 (left) and 20 (right) viewed from the south. The mosaic pattern of Room 10 likely indicates a niche where a bed was located in the far end of the room. A repaired section is also visible in the border zone. Room 20 preserves the opus scutulatum design. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 11: Detail of repair to an opus scutulatum mosaic in Room 8. Note how the repairman recreated the colored stones of the original using mosaic tesserae. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 13: Pressing area viewed from the southwest. The circular pressing beds and channels for oil have been highlighted in black. In the background are the remains of a semicircular vaulted structure that was once a full dome. It may have belonged to a bath complex, but was later converted to agricultural use. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 14: Vats for collecting olive oil, viewed from the east. Note the channel running along the right side of the vats, which leads from the presses. The flow of oil could be controlled by blocking openings into each of the vats. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 16: Plan of southeastern section of villa indicating lower level passageways. The hatched areas indicate walls on the surface, while solid lines display underground tunnels. Note the side passage that opens into a circular vaulted chamber below Room 30. (UST Project)
Fig. 17: Room 30 with an opening into the circular chamber below, viewed from the west. The layout of the mosaic indicates that it was designed around the opening, which could be sealed by a cover, as evidenced by a lip carved around its interior. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 19: Room 8 viewed from the north. The newer mosaic pavement (opus scutulatum on a black background) is visible above. The older pavement (opus scutulatum on a cocciopesto background) can be seen at a lower level. A drain was cut through this older floor at the time that the newer floor was created. A large circular cut for an olive tree can be seen in the center of the photo. (UST Project Photo)
Fig. 20: Male adult skeleton discovered in Room 16, covered by a roof tile. In the inset is a bronze medallion found nearby depicting St. Peter and the doorways of basilicas in Rome, celebrating the Jubilee of 1700. (UST Project Photo)
Near the entrance to the site of the Vacone villa is a sign that reads “Villa di Quinto Orazio Flacco” – the villa of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. English speakers know this individual as the Roman poet Horace, famous for the adage carpe diem as well as a rich body of surviving work. One of the most salient details known about Horace’s life was that Maecenas, one of Augustus’ closest confidants and Horace’s personal patron, gave him a “Sabine villa.” This villa and its adjoining estate allowed the poet the space and time to devote himself to his poetry, and for this reason it provides the setting for several of the poet’s works. Generations of antiquarians and scholars have sought the location of Horace’s famous Sabine villa. Of the few clues to the location of Horace’s villa given in his poetry is the detail that it was located “behind the crumbling temple of Vacuna” (Epistles 1.10). As mentioned earlier, tradition holds that the town of Vacone took its name from a supposed temple of Vacuna beneath its central church. As a result, many local residents resolutely believe that the great poet once called their little town home.
Given the lack of evidence for this attribution, the UST project took little notice of this popular local belief. However, two discoveries, brought to light in 2013 and 2014, have given us reason to reassess this attribution, or at least the villa’s fascinating afterlife as “Horace’s villa” (Fig. 21). The first artifact uncovered was the rim of a dolium, a giant storage vessel that was buried in the ground, inscribed with HORATI F. The following year produced the rim of an amphora, an ancient vessel used to transport oil and wine, with the inscription HORATIUS. It is not out of the question that the excavation of a villa might uncover objects inscribed with the name of the villa’s owner. In fact, this very situation occurred at the neighboring villa of Cottanello, where a dolium rim was discovered identifying the owners as the Roman family of the Aurelii Cottae (and hence the namesake of the modern town). However, our initial excitement was quickly tempered by the realization that our inscriptions were not ancient, but fake. The letters were carved with a sharp object into the pottery after they had been fired, unlike genuine inscriptions that tend to be stamped into the wet clay before firing (such as the Cottanello dolium). Furthermore, the shapes of the letters were different than those used by the Romans, and the objects were found near topsoil, in contexts that were disturbed by later agricultural activity.
While it is impossible to give a precise date for this case of forgery, it is tempting to connect these objects to the 18th century. At that time, several travelers’ accounts reveal that sections of the villa were exposed and displayed to visitors as “Horace’s villa”. Some contemporary writers even mention inscriptions on display that “proved” this was the genuine villa of the poet. These inscriptions, one of which still survives to this day, were also counterfeit. Therefore, it is not out of the question that the two inscribed pottery rims date back to this time period. Even if the UST has not accidently uncovered the famous Sabine villa of Horace, it has nonetheless shed new light on the villa’s remarkable afterlife. As to the true identity of the villa’s owner, one can only hope that subsequent seasons will uncover a piece of evidence as telling as the two inscribed rims purport to be.
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Fig. 21: Upper: Rim of a dolium found in 2013, inscribed HORATI F. Below: Amphora rim found in 2014, inscribed HORATIUS. (UST Project Photo)
For additional information on the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, or to apply to participate in the excavation at Vacone, please see the project’s webpage at: fieldschool.rutgers.edu.
The Upper Sabina Tiberina Project is directed by Gary D. Farney (Rutgers University-Newark, Project Director), Dylan Bloy (Field Director), Giulia Masci (Site Director, Science Museum-London), Ian Travers (ICOMOS-Australia, Assistant Director for Excavation Operations), Candace Rice (University of Edinburgh, Assistant Director for UST), Tyler Franconi (Oxford University, Assistant Director of Finds), and Kimberly Brown (University of the Arts, Assistant Director for Survey Operations).
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