The recent excavation work of Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archeology Peter Magee and a group of Bryn Mawr students may lead to a better understanding of the expansion of human settlements during the Ancient Near East Bronze Age, according to an article in The National, an English-language newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates.
Magee and the students have turned up evidence that the areas in which they’re excavating may have see the earliest known domestication of the wild camel.
From the article… Three American undergraduate students from the Philadelphia college are in charge of sifting through the never-ending piles of dirt.
Akshyeta Suryanarayan, 20, picked up a flat-looking rock and asked Mr Magee if it was a piece of pottery.
“No, that looks like a turtle shell,” he said.
“We’ve found a lot of interesting things, and it’s cool to learn how it works out here on an excavation site,” said Sara, while prodding a few pieces of 3,000-year-old bird bone.
“Our discoveries will mean that some of the early ideas about the transition into this more intense period of occupation around 1000 BC clearly need to be rewritten – some of which I wrote 15 years ago,” Mr Magee said.
“We need to think about the fact that new evidence changes opinions, including our own, and that is exciting.”
Good heavens! Oldest-known astrologer's board discovered
By Owen Jarus
Published January 18, 2012
| LiveScience
A research team has discovered what may be the oldest astrologer's board, engraved with zodiac signs and used to determine a person's horoscope.
Dating back more than 2,000 years, the board was discovered in Croatia, in a cave overlooking the Adriatic Sea. The surviving portion of the board consists of 30 ivory fragments engraved with signs of the zodiac. Researchers spent years digging them up and putting them back together. Inscribed in a Greco-Roman style, they include images of Cancer, Gemini and Pisces.
Neanderthals shared about 99.84 per cent of their DNA with us
A NEANDERTHAL walks into a bar and says... well, not a lot, probably. Certainly he or she could never have delivered a full-blown joke of the type modern humans would recognise because a joke hinges on surprise juxtapositions of unexpected or impossible events. Cognitively, it requires quite an advanced theory of mind to put oneself in the position of one or more of the actors in that joke - and enough working memory (the ability to actively hold information in your mind and use it in various ways).
So does that mean our Neanderthal had no sense of humour? No: humans also recognise the physical humour used to mitigate painful episodes - tripping, hitting our heads and so on - which does not depend on language or symbols. So while we could have sat down with Neanderthals and enjoyed the slapstick of The Three Stooges or Lee Evans, the verbal complexities ofTwelfth Night would have been lost on them.
Humour is just one aspect of Neanderthal life we have been plotting for some years in our mission to make sense of their cognitive life. So what was it like to be a Neanderthal? Did they feel the same way we do? Did they fall in love? Have a bad day? Palaeoanthropologists now know a great deal about these ice-age Europeans who flourished between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. We know, for example, that Neanderthals shared about 99.84 per cent of their DNA with us, and that we and they evolved separately for several hundred thousand years. We also know Neanderthal brains were a bit larger than ours and were shaped a bit differently. And we know where they lived, what they ate and how they got it.
Skeletal evidence shows that Neanderthal men, women and children led very strenuous lives, preoccupied with hunting large mammals. They often made tactical use of terrain features to gain as much advantage as possible, but administered the coup de grace with thrusting spears. Based on their choice of stone for tools, we know they almost never travelled outside small home territories that were rarely over 1000 square kilometres.
The Neanderthal style of hunting often resulted in injuries, and the victims were often nursed back to health by others. But few would have survived serious lower body injuries, since individuals who could not walk might well have been abandoned. It looks as if Neanderthals had well-developed way-finding and tactical abilities, and empathy for group members, but also that they made pragmatic decisions when necessary.
Looking closely at the choices Neanderthals made when they manufactured and used tools shows that they organised their technical activities much as artisans, such as blacksmiths, organise their production. Like blacksmiths, they relied on "expert" cognition, a form of observational learning and practice acquired through apprenticeship that relies heavily on long-term procedural memory......
It was mentioned in the novels, I, ClaudiusandClaudius the God in scenes spanning from the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius, and it was mentioned in the movie,Gladiator, in the scene where Maximus is informed that he had a loyal army encamped there and awaiting his orders. Historically, it is documented as the Roman harbor city of Ostia, the vital town of maritime commerce near the sea at the mouth of the Tiber River. Today it is a large archaeological site that now lies about 3 km from the sea, a distance created through time by silting and a drop in sea level. It is known for its well-preserved and impressive ancient buildings, mosaics and frescoes (see photo images below). Now, archaeologists are investigating a find here that has never been explored, using a new model of archaeological excavation.
Co-directed by Dr. Darius Arya and Dr. Alberto Prieta of the American Institute of Roman Culture, the team will be investigating a large, 10m long by 3m wide structure made of concrete walls faced with brick, vaulting, marble features and massive travertine blocks. Obscured now by vegetation and a large fig tree, it was once located along the ancient coastline. It may have been a part of the ancient port facilities, which have been and are now being extensively investigated, including an Imperial Age Roman wooden ship, the first Roman ship ever to have been found near Ostia and discovered by archaeologists of the Superintendency of Rome and Ostia in 2011. According to the project leadership, archaeologists "will operate on the leaner, low-impact/high-return model of archaeological investigation that is gaining ground over the traditional open-area excavation model and its high costs in labor, maintenance, and conservation".[1] Beginning in the winter of 2011-2012, they will defoliate and clear the structure so that they can document and analyze the standing remains. Next, a series of carefully placed trenches will be excavated along the standing walls to determine the foundation depths, the height of the structure, and its chronology. Finally, they hope to be able to study and analyze the various finds excavated from the trenches and determine the purpose and function of the structure and its relationship to the activities carried out at ancient Ostia.
In addition, the team hopes to continue important conservation work in a nearby area of ancient structures using an experimental technique that shows promise for protecting and sustaining them from the negative effects of invasive vegetation growth, a problem that continues to threaten their integrity and visibility. The technique is also expected to lower the maintenance cost of Ostia's ancient architecture.
The significance of the site of Ostia lies in its importance as a port and harbor for the incoming and outgoing ships of commerce and for military purposes. Here, the consular war fleet was docked in 68 BC, sacked and destroyed by pirates that same year. The building stones of the walls of the 3rd century BC castrum (or military camp) that was stationed at Ostia provide important information about the building techniques that were used during the Middle Republic period. At its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, it contained about 75,000 inhabitants. Archaeologically speaking, the architectural remains and artifacts of ancient Ostia have contributed and will likely continue to contribute immeasurably to the world's understanding of Roman life-ways from its early beginnings through the Imperial period. Large-scale excavations began in 1938 and have continued off and on under various auspices since that time. It is estimated that approximately two thirds of the city has been excavated, but much more remains in terms of additional excavation, study, conservation and restoration.
Prehistoric Bear Skulls Found Underwater in Mexico
19 January 2012Last updated at 07:55 ET
The ancient remains of four prehistoric bears have been uncovered by archaeologists diving in underwater caves in Mexico.Scientists think the extinct species lived in the caves in the ice age before they became filled with water.Human remains were also found.
Eastern Utah’s Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry is a treasure trove of predatory dinosaurs. In addition to elements from more than 46 individual Allosaurus, this fossil-rich pocket has yielded remains of rarer predators that lived in the region 150 million years ago, including the little-known Marshosaurus and the tyrannosaur Stokesosaurus. The charismatic, well-ornamented predator Ceratosaurus has been uncovered from these deposits, too, but the particular individual found in the Jurassic quarry might belong to a species that was only recently recognized.
Prehistoric Predators With Supersized Teeth Had Beefier Arm Bones
ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2012) — The toothiest prehistoric predators also had beefier arm bones, according to results of a study published recently in the journal Paleobiology.Saber-toothed tigers may come to mind, but these extinct cats weren't the only animals with fearsome fangs.
Take the false saber-toothed cats -- also known as nimravids -- and their catlike cousins, a family of carnivores called the barbourofelids.
These mammal groups lived millions of years before cats came to be, and had knife-like canines along with well-built arm bones, said Julie Meachen, a paleontologist at the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, North Carolina.
The fermented cereal beverage of the Sumerians may not have been beer
This is an archaic writing tablet from Mesopotamia (approx. 3000 B.C.): The tablet which contains proto-cuneiform writing, belongs to the most ancient group of written records on earth. It contains calculations of basic ingredients required for the production of cereal products, for example, different types of beer
Archaeological finds from cuneiform tablets and remnants of different vessels from over 4,000 years ago show that even around the dawn of civilisation, fermented cereal juice was highly enjoyed by Mesopotamia's inhabitants. However, besides the two basic ingredients, barley and emmer (a species of wheat) the brew produced in the clay jars of the Sumerians is shrouded in mystery. Despite an abundance of finds and scribal traditions which point to an early love of fermented cereal beverages, reconstructing ancient brewing methods is very difficult, according to the historian of science and cuneiform writing scholar Peter Damerow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. A scholarly paper by Damerow, who passed away at the end of November 2011 in Berlin, carefully examines the beer brewing technologies of the Sumerians. However, the author also expresses great doubts as to whether the popular brew in ancient times was even beer.
Although many of the more than 4,000 years old cuneiform texts contain records of deliveries of emmer, barley and malt to breweries, as well as documentation of the activities, there is hardly any information on the details of the production processes, and no recipes to follow. According to Damerow, the administrative texts were most likely written for an audience that was already familiar with the details of brewing. They were not intended for informing the modern-day reader about the processes.
Moreover, the methods used for recording this information differ between locations and time periods. Also, the records and calculations are not based on any consistent number system. Instead, the Sumerian bureaucrats used different number systems depending on the nature of the objects to be counted or measured to count or measure.
This has cast doubt on the popular theory that Mesopotamian brewers used to crumble flat bread made from barley or emmer into their mash. The so-called "bappir" (Sumerian for "beer bread") is never counted as bread in the administrative texts, but in measuring units, like coarsely ground barley. Damerow also points out that the high degree of standardisation, which meant that the quantities of raw materials allocated to the brewers by the central administration remained exactly the same over long periods, sometimes even decades, makes it difficult to base any recipes on them.....
Expert unearths evidence of mass graves at Treblinka death camp
A FORENSIC archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka.
Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers.
British forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves, according to an interview in the Radio Times.
As Jewish religious law forbids disturbing burial sites, she and her team from the University of Birmingham have used "ground-penetrating radar".
Her work at the site, where the Nazis tried to destroy all traces of industrial-scale killing, is being followed in forthcoming Radio 4 documentary The Hidden Graves Of The Holocaust.
The programme's presenter, Jonathan Charles, a former BBC foreign correspondent, wrote in the Radio Times that the ground-penetrating radar had also discovered the foundations of buildings and that two are likely to have been gas chambers.
Sturdy Colls said: "All the history books state that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis but the survey has demonstrated that simply isn't the case."
She added: "I've identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable in size, and very deep, one in particular is 26 by 17 metres."
The programme's presenter wrote in the Radio Times that the pits contain the burnt remains of thousands of bodies.
The forensic archaeologist, who has now presented her findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka, said: "I really hope this is the first stage in a long-term programme to seek out those hidden graves of the Holocaust."
Survivor Kalman Taigman remembers his arrival at the camp's railway station, packed into a cattle wagon.
"I was with my mother. We were about 100 people in a wagon. They opened the doors, firing guns and hitting us, and sent us into a yard. I ran with my mother and tried to calm her.
"They told me to leave my mother but I didn't do it quickly and I was hit on the head. When I got up, she was gone. She went with all the rest of the women to the gas chamber."
Anthropology researcher searches for slave-era shipwreck
Anthropology professor Stephen Lubkemann thinks his planned trek into the sea will soon help shape the understanding of one of the ugliest aspects of human history: the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Lubkemann has spent two years pinpointing the site of a shipwreck near Cape Town, South Africa that killed more than 200 slaves being transported between East Africa and the Americas during the 1790s. If he reaches the sunken ship, he says the findings will add the first archaeological evidence to the 18th-Century slave trade.
The search of the South Atlantic Ocean is one of five research initiatives piloted by GW professors that now have the support of an 18-month-old joint fund between the University and the Smithsonian Institution. The time since the partnership’s establishment was spent vetting project ideas and selections were announced Jan. 12.
Alongside Smithsonian curator Paul Gardullo, Lubkemann will lead a team of nine researchers from the U.S. and South Africa to the ocean floor in hopes that getting an up-close view of the shipwreck will reveal historical details.
“This is an area where archaeology could possibly make some contributions that would be unique,” Lubkemann said.
He added that although other teams of archaeologists have already studied shipwrecks from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this effort would be the first to analyze a ship that was carrying slaves when it sunk. Examining the ship’s size and technology will reveal goals and priorities for the slave traders – like concern about a British blockade or the importance of speedy transport, Lubkemann said.
A panel of four researchers from GW and four from the Smithsonian chose the five research projects over the last several months. The judges whittled 13 proposed projects down to five, each of which includes researchers from both organizations, University spokeswoman Angela Olson said.
Each project received $40,000 – an even split of the $200,000 contributed jointly by the University and the Smithsonian Institution.
The other four projects will tackle subjects spanning from the effects of primate breast milk on infant growth to the political and cultural ecologies of cell phones.
The Smithsonian Institution hopes the findings of the shipwreck study will contribute to its National Museum of African American History and Culture. The other projects will also work with Smithsonian museums and research centers.
“In the long term, some of our partners, such as the Smithsonian, are very interested in how the material we might locate can be used in their education programs to bring this kind of history to life for people who are not going to be diving at these sites like we are.” Lubkemann said.
The remains of the first HMS Victory are to be raised from the sea bed nearly 300 years after it sank, it has been reported.
The vessel, predecessor of Nelson's famous flagship, went down in a storm off the Channel Islands in 1744, taking more than 1,000 sailors to their deaths.
Along with a bronze cannon collection, some believe the ship was carrying a large quantity of gold coins from Lisbon to Britain that would now be worth a reported £500m.
According to the Sunday Times the wreck is to be handed over to the Maritime Heritage Foundation, which is expected to employ Odyssey Marine Exploration to carry out the recovery. Odyssey – a US company – found the ship four years ago.
Mexican Archaeologists Discover Kiln More Than 1,300 Years Old
Published January 21, 2012
Mexican archaeologists have discovered in the southern part of the country a kiln used by the ancient Zapotecs to make ceramics more than 1,300 years ago, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.
The pre-Columbian kilm was discovered in the Atzompa Archaeological Zone in Oaxaca state, which will be opened to the public this year, INAH said in a communique.
It added that this is one of the best preserved ceramic kilns ever found
and noted Oaxaca's long tradition in making pottery.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dino nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said. The hatchery and the baby footprints uncovered there are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough to at least double in size. The newly unearthed clutches of eggs, many with embryos inside, belonged to the plant-eating dinosaur Massospondylus, a prosauropod, or predecessor of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth, long-necked sauropods such as Brachiosaurus.
Mysterious 'Winged' Structure from Ancient Rome Discovered
A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.
Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room.
"Generally speaking, [during]the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms," said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.
The winged shape of the building appears to be unique in the Roman Empire, with no other example known. "It's very unusual to find a building like this where you have no known parallels for it," Bowden told LiveScience. "What they were trying to achieve by using this design is really very difficult to say."
Egyptians gave ibis birds a packed lunch for the afterlife
Can't have you going hungry
Ancient Egyptians paid special attention to the organs of their dead, embalming them so they would continue to function in the afterlife. Now it seems they did the same for sacrificed ibis birds, and even packed their stomachs with food so they wouldn't go hungry.
Ibis mummies are found in their millions at shrines in Egypt, where they were sacrificed to Thoth, the god of writing and wisdom. Andrew Wade at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleagues used a CT scanner to look inside two mummified adult ibises and one hatchling. This revealed that embalmers had removed their internal organs. The adult gizzards, complete with snail shells which may have come from the birds' last meals, were then replaced. The hatchling's body cavity had been stuffed with grain.
Studies of human mummies show that ancient Egyptians often removed and embalmed the lungs and digestion organs before placing them back inside the body – perhaps so they might work in the afterlife. The ibis mummies suggest Egyptians believed that birds also travelled to the afterlife, says Wade. "It suggests the provision of an afterlife food source to the bird," he says, "and lends support to the idea that the viscera of ibises and humans alike were meant to continue their living function within the afterlife."
Stories of Bronze Age Scandinavian invaders killing men and enslaving women may have to be rewritten thanks to discovery of a series of virtual "time capsuals" in the Outer Hebrides.
Archaeologists have published the results of over 20 years of work in South Uist uncovering ancient settlements preserved under sand dunes dating from the Bronze Age to the modern era.
The team said the research challenges the existing belief that the Norse period marked a cataclysmic change in the Hebridean way of life.
Instead of supporting the view that the Scandinavian invaders killed men and enslaved their women and children, the archaeological evidence suggests a greater degree of intermixing and continuity than has previously been accepted.
The team roamed from the grassy coastal machair plains to South Uist's mountains, exploring hundreds of sites including Neolithic tombs, early Bronze Age occupations, Norse dwellings and blackhouses. The research is published in a book entitled From Machair To Mountains.
Editor Professor Mike Parker Pearson said: "South Uist has an extraordinary number of superbly preserved archaeological sites and landscapes from all periods. Best known are the settlement mounds of all periods on the island's machair, the coastal grasslands on shell sand, but the moorlands and mountainous areas also contain remarkable remains."
Before the South Uist investigations began, sites from the Middle and later Bronze Age were almost unknown in the Western Isles. The team discovered late Bronze Age evidence of burnt human cremations at Cladh Hallan, within stone ring settings, as well as burials beneath roundhouses from the same period.
Historic Scotland's head of archaeology programmes Rod McCullagh said: "The sites compare very well with almost any of the settlements of similar age anywhere in Europe outside Rome and the Aegean."
The findings build on earlier work on South Uist by Historic Scotland and other agencies since the 1950s - research that has also uncovered Iron Age settlements, Medieval townships and early modern shielings.
Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop said: "The findings show that these remote locations were attractive to human inhabitants from the earliest times and that communities have successfully survived here for thousands of years. The project has added substantially to our understanding of the history of the Outer Hebrides and western Scotland."
An ancient dog skull found in Siberia and dating back 33,000 years presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication.
When combined with a similar find in Belgium, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographic locations -- rather than at a single domestication event, as previously believed.
The raven-size creature long thought of as the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, may have been adorned with black feathers, researchers have found.
The structures that held the black pigment may have strengthened wing feathers, perhaps helping Archaeopteryx fly, scientists added.
Archaeopteryxlived about 150 million years ago in what is now Bavaria in Germany. First unearthed 150 years ago, the fossil of this carnivore, with its blend of avian and reptilian features, seemed an iconic evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
"...A crew of Viking mercenaries – some of the fiercest and most feared
killers in the medieval world – could be the occupants of a mysterious mass grave in the south of England, according to a new theory.
The intriguing hypothesis is being put forward in a documentary, Viking Apocalypse,
which will premiere on National Geographic UK on Wednesday, 25 January,
and attempts to piece together the identities of a group of men who
were apparently the victims of a horrific mass execution around the turn
of the 11th century.
Their burial pit, at Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, was found in 2009 while
archaeologists were working in the area ahead of the construction of a
new road. In it, researchers made the gruesome discovery of the
decapitated bodies of 54 young men. All had been dumped in the shallow
grave, and their heads had been piled up on the far side.
Radiocarbon dating revealed that the remains belonged to men murdered
at some point around the year 1000. This suggested a connection with
the Vikings,
because the Anglo-Saxons along the south coast at that time lived under
constant threat of Viking raids. Isotope testing on the men’s teeth
subsequently revealed that they had indeed come from Scandinavia. But
exactly who they were has remained a mystery...."
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