Archaeology: The lost world

The most immediate way in which the map will be useful, however, is in giving context to marine archaeological finds. For more than a century, fishing boats — particularly Dutch beam trawlers, whose nets scrape the seabed — have been scooping prehistoric material out of the North Sea. Most of it dates from the Palaeolithic, the vast era that ended around 10,000 years ago, and includes the bones of woolly mammoths and reindeer from the last ice age. But there is also some more recent, Mesolithic material. Until now, archaeologists haven’t been sure how to interpret these scattered remains. But with the Doggerland map, “we’ll be able to position the archaeological finds within that landscape to understand their meaning,” says Hans Peeters of the National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage in Amersfoort, the Netherlands.

Lots of good stuff. This section particularly struck me:

Some of the artefacts have been radiocarbon dated to between 10,000 and 8,100 years ago, and all come from a small area just off the southern edge of the Birmingham map of Doggerland. The Dutch call it ‘De Stekels’ (‘The Spines’) because there are steep dunes that were probably once close to a river. Although the artefacts were lying loose on the seabed, Glimmerveen is convinced there was a Mesolithic settlement on or close to those dunes, and Peeters agrees. “You can look at it in a similar way to ploughed fields,” he says. “Objects may have been displaced, but not over very large areas.”

Which is neat because they're talking about some pretty fair characterizations of underwater sites.

Who were B.C.’s first seafarers?

Such was the case with the Hy?jun Maru, which was left rudderless in a typhoon off Japan and drifted for 14 months before washing up in 1834 on Washington state’s Cape Flattery headlands, just across from Pachena Bay. It contained three fishermen.

It is, in fact, one of 100 known Asian drift boats that have crossed the Pacific accidentally. (The last one to arrive came ashore on the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1987, empty.) But no one knows what to make of the evidence hauled up from the wreck that lies 16 kilometres off Pachena Bay in almost 150 metres of water, or the two supposed wrecks that are purported to have yielded strange artifacts from beneath nearby Clayoquot Sound. For all three have produced barnacle-covered Asian pots—probably Chinese—whose age may predate the earliest European visitors to this coast.

Pretty good long article.

Scientists use MRI at Kadlec to look at ancient Roman scrolls

Ancient scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in Italy in AD 79 spent some time in a Richland hospital room on Wednesday.

Edward Iuliano helped to bring the scrolls to town.

The director of MRI and radiology at Kadlec Medicl Center watched a TV documentary years ago about efforts to read the ancient scrolls and the story stuck with him.

The papyrus path

It is not well known that there were two Jewish temples in ancient Egypt. They do not form part of our traditional history, which concentrates on the going down into Egypt and the coming out of it, as based on the Torah accounts, for which there is little or no contemporary corroboration. But the two temples, though well attested by contemporary sources, have received little attention from our tradition.

One of these temples has been known about for nearly 2,000 years from Josephus Flavius and the Talmud, and its site was claimed to have been found just 100 years ago, but it has now been lost again. The other was never known of till just a hundred years ago and its site has only recently been discovered. The first is the Temple of Onias at Leontopolis dating to about 200 BCE, and the second is the Temple of Elephantine dating to 300 years earlier, to about 500 BCE.

THere's also a small Jewish community in Cairo, oddly enough, and a temple/synagogue. IIRC, it's near the old Coptic area.

Rare artefact found at Roman site

Archaeologists excavating one of the most important Roman sites in Britain have made an "extremely rare" find.

The team digging at part of the Roman fortress in Caerleon near Newport found what they believe is a legionary's ceremonial lance.

Dr Peter Guest said he thought the iron staff, broken into three pieces, was the first of its type found in the UK.

Video at the site showing the lance.

Hmmmmmm. . . Sex curse found at ancient Cyprus site: report

An unexpected sexual curse has been uncovered by archaeologists at Cyprus's old city kingdom of Amathus, on the island's south coast near Limassol, according to a newspaper on Friday.

"A curse is inscribed in Greek on a lead tablet and part of it reads: 'May your penis hurt when you make love'," Pierre Aubert, head of Athens Archaeological School in Greece told the English language Cyprus Weekly.

I shall refrain from further commentary.

Blogging update Back to posting. What a week. Finally got said paper to the proofers and a bunch of other niggly little projects done. Go me. There've been two paper in the J of Archy Science that I've been dying to read, too which I shall get to after blathering on a bit and posting a few other items. One's on a spatial analysis of floor assemblages and the other is. . . .hmmmm. I think it was the crystal skull paper.

So anyway, a nice Saturday morning with a glass of iced tea and Styx blasting on the stereo. The Grand Illusion, as a matter of fact. I was a total Styx fanatic when I was in my late teens. I think they were the first concert I went to, too. Band called New England opened for them. Never did see them again though; I lost interest after the Pieces of Eight album when they went all weird. I think I bought the one right after PoE and didn't even bother with the Mr. Roboto one. That was one of two bands that went off the rails in the early '80s, the other being REO Speedwagon. Lawdy, did they ever change. I guess both widened their audience when they got away from hard rock, but they lost their major fan base and kinda went kaput shortly thereafter.

Does this have anything to do with archaeology? No it doesn't. Other than functioning as a lead in to the next post. . . . .

UPDATE: Okay, more blathering. Still having fun with the new big-ass TV. You know what the best part of it is so far? Concerts. A couple of the music video cable channels have some airing and it's great to be able to watch them one a big screen and get decent sound with it hooked up to the stereo. It's been mostly, ummm, older bands (I think they do most of them on VH1 Classic or something). I've seen ZZ Top, Styx, and Motley Crue, among smatters of others. I already had U2's Rattle and Hum and I stuck that in the DVD player the first weekend I had the dumb thing.

Still haven't actually watched anything in high def yet. I have an old cable box hooked up to it which doesn't take HD signals, but when I switched it with the other TV's new box, neither box would work on the other TV. Haven't figured that one out yet. Irritating though. Must get that figured out by football season which is LESS THAN 2 MONTHS AWAY.

Art of deception: Crystal skulls in British, US museums were fakes

Seeking the verdict of science, researchers from those two museums examined the skulls with electron microscopes, looking at tiny scratches and marks left by the carving implements.

These were then compared with the surfaces of a crystal goblet, rock crystal beads and dozens of greenstone jewels known to be of genuine Aztec or Mixtec origin.

The study appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, published by the Elsevier group.

I liked this part: The investigators also found a black-and-red deposit in a tiny cavity of the Smithsonian skull. X-ray diffraction showed it to be silicon carbide -- a tough compound that only exists naturally in meteorites but is widespread in modern industrial abrasives.

I linked to a couple of sites showing that most believe the skulls were fake modern anyway, based on lack of provenance, etc. So, no big news amongst the archaeoliterati.

Survival of the Sudsiest

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

True enough, as far as that goes (I like this quote as well: "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.")

I've posted several articles regarding beer production in ancient times, largely because beer was rather ubiquitous in ancient times, but also no doubt because beer is also rather ubiquitous among the fraternity of archaeologists (and until fairly recently with yours truly, the 'until' being a rather sad development). Some have even argued that much of the development of agriculture was due to the need to produce more beer. I even recall some discussion that much of the bread-baking facilities in Egypt were actually devoted to the production of 'bread' to brew beer from.

I can't comment on the genetic stuff Will expounds upon; I've never come across any references to it. I do have a faint memory tickle of some article or other commenting on the lack of alcohol in the New World and whether it was real or not. Seems like an interesting topic to do some minor research (i.e., web search) on.

Blogging update Yeah, I've been remiss the past couple of days. Bunch of stuff came up, not the least of which was a sudden flat tire on the ArchaeoWife's car. A screw is embedded in the tire. Happily, it's a very slow leak so she wasn't stranded or anything. That on top of putting the finishing touches on a paper (at least I HOPE these are the FINISHING touches!) left too little time for surfing news articles.

Yet another controversial Biblical find Messianic message stirs debate

Scriptural scholars are abuzz over a stone tablet that is said to bear previously unknown prophecies about a Jewish messiah who would rise from the dead in three days. But there are far more questions than answers about the tablet, which some have suggested could represent "a new Dead Sea Scroll in stone."

Do the tablet and the inked text really date back to the first century B.C., as claimed? Where did the artifact come from? Can the gaps in the text be filled in to make sense? Is the seeming reference to a coming resurrection correct, and to whom does that passage refer? Finally, what impact would a pre-Christian reference to suffering, death and resurrection have on Christian scholarship?

It's a good article with lots of links to other articles on the tablet and relating to it. As usual, the provenance is completely unknown.

Archaeologist Stumbles on 2,000-year-old Mayan Mural

Archaeologists have dug up the oldest known Mayan painting inside a ruined pyramid deep inside a Guatemalan jungle. Dated at around 100BC, the paint-on-plaster mural depicts the Mayas' creation myth with an elegance and finesse suggesting the civilization developed much earlier than previously accepted.

"It was like discovering the Sistine chapel if you didn't know there had been a Renaissance - like knowing only modern art and then stumbling on the finger of God touching the hand of Adam," William Saturno, the archaeologist who found the ancient masterpiece, told a press conference.

Mr Saturno, of the University of New Hampshire in the US, stumbled across the mural in the remote site of San Bartolo in 2001 while trekking through the jungle looking for another set of ruins. Exhausted, he says, he almost fell into a looters' tunnel in his search for shade and then looked up to find the figure of the great Corn God peaking out from the dirt on the wall above him.

I'm going to look around for more on this. It's the first I've seen on it and the source is unfamiliar to me.

Archaeologist to examine bones found on C Hill

Bones found on the southwest side of C Hill are likely American Indian and had possibly been buried there a century ago, an archaeologist told police.

Deputies were called out to the hillside just above Curry Street behind the Carson Ranger station on the report of a Sierra Pacific Power Company backhoe unearthing skull fragments, leg bones and other apparent human remains just before 1 p.m. The backhoe was digging to install a power pole.

Archaeologists Found Skeletons at the Site of Serbia’s Medieval Capital

A team of archaeologists from Belgrade’s Philosophy Faculty discovered a tomb with two skeletons in the area of Gradina-Postenje, where Serbia’s medieval capital, Stari Ras, once stood, national media reported today.

The tomb with the human remains, the Serbian newspaper Vecernje novosti reported, was found in the south-western part of the church that was discovered in the area 10 days ago. According the archaeologists, the skeletons are 1.93 metres long, which means that they belonged to people who were over 2 metres tall.

New Orleans cathedral dig yields clues to history

Archaeologists digging behind St. Louis Cathedral are unearthing nearly three centuries of history: the porcelain head of a tiny doll, an ersatz colonial-era pipe from the 1800s, bits of pottery that Indians may have traded to the men who built New Orleans.

The current cathedral, completed in 1794, is the third church facing what is now Jackson Square. A small wooden church built for the first colonists gave way in 1727 to a larger, more ornate building. That church burned down in 1778, along with most of the city.

Now the first archaeological excavation ever at St. Louis, one of the nation's oldest cathedrals, is turning up bits and pieces from the lives of people who lived and worshipped there.

Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Peruvian Tomb

A well-preserved ancient tomb was found by a team of archaeologists in Ucupe, northern Peru. The scientists believe they have unearthed the tomb of Moche Indian leader.

Scientists said the 1,700 year old tomb was discovered in Ucupe, 416 miles from the capital city.

The tomb has well-preserved human remains and pieces of jewelry. It is believed to belong to a leader from the pre-Columbian Moche Indian and sheds light on that culture.

USU seeking new master's degree in archaeology

Utah State University is working to set up a new master's degree program emphasis in archaeology and cultural resource management, a discipline with many potential field opportunities in Utah.

The university's board of trustees approved the anthropology program last week. If the state board of regents OK's the program, it could be offered in fall 2009.

no much else there, but expect to see a lot more of these.

Uncovering Evidence of a Workaday World Along the Nile

Archaeologists have long fixed their sights on the grandeur that was ancient Egypt, the pyramids, temples and tombs. Few bothered to dig beneath and beyond the monumental stones for glimpses into the living and working spaces of ordinary Egyptians.

That is changing slowly but steadily. In the last two or three decades, excavations have uncovered urban remains and swept aside the conventional wisdom that the Egypt of the pharaohs, in contrast to Mesopotamia, was somehow a civilization without cities.

Indeed. Matter of fact, this was part of my dissertation:

Egypt is one example of an apparently obvious case of a highly complex culture that differs in striking ways from other complex early civilizations such as Mesopotamia, yet is still regarded as a classic example of a complex preindustrial civilization. Wilson (1960), for example, noted that Egypt's towns and villages, as then known, did not appear to exhibit the degree of size, density of occupation, and range of non-agricultural activities as their Mesopotamian counterparts, and therefore did not qualify as true 'cities' as in the Mesopotamian model. Sjoberg (1960) however, argued that even though Egypt's city structures differed in many respects from the Mesopotamian model they still were cities in their own right. In any case, since Egypt exhibited all the other hallmarks of complexity -- monumental architecture, administrative hierarchies, specialized craft production, etc. -- the question of whether Egyptian cities were functionally equivalent to the Mesopotamian variety is somewhat moot.

Whether Egypt really was a 'civilization without cities' reflects deeper theoretical issues involving explanation of the initial development of cultural complexity. It also highlights, as Wenke (1997) notes, the typological nature of the comparative method: without a set of theoretically-derived necessary and sufficient conditions to define what "cities", "city-states", and "nation-states" are, comparison becomes a matter of simple (though in many ways useful) description rather than explanation.

There are a number of reasons why settlement archaeology languished somewhat. Part of the reason is simple geomorphology. Most of the habitable land is in the narrow ribbon of the Nile valley and over the Holocene with the rise in sea levels worldwide the Nile floodplain has been aggrading (building up sediment). So for the most part, settlements were built on top of older settlements -- which is the case elsewhere as well, but since habitable land is restricted, the population stayed in one place p until the present. Consequently, you don't get the numerous abandoned tells that you get in, say, Mesopotamia. Most of the settlements are either now covered by existing settlements and/or buried beneath tens of meters of Nile sediment. Plus the water table is pretty close to the surface so even if you can get an uninhabited valley area, you can't dig down very far. The ones that have been excavated have generally been on the desert fringe, which not coincidentally, also tends to be where the burials are.

Which is, of course, the other reason settlement archaeology has been somewhat ignored: they didn't have the rich artifact and epigraphic loads that most people find so fascinating. And even in a lot of cases where settlements have been excavated, many have been associated with major state projects (e.g., Lehner's pyramid builders village at Giza) or mortuary complexes (e.g., the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina.

I review a bunch of the settlement sites in the link above (specifically starting here).

Archaeologists dig Hot Springs’ history

Professional and amateur archaeologists have spent weeks unlocking clues below the surface that link the present-day Hot Springs area to a colorful past.

“The history of this area is really important to the people here, and we want to record the pieces of history that still remain before the area is totally developed and the information is gone forever,” said Tim Mulvihill, station archaeologist with the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

2,500-year-old artifact returned to Egypt

Egypt said Monday that it retrieved a 2,500-year-old limestone relief from London after its sale was blocked by Bonhams auction house there because it had been looted from a pharaoh's tomb.

A team of Egyptian archaeologists traveled to Britain to retrieve the artifact, which bears hieroglyphic text engraved in six rows and a cartouche of an ancient Egyptian queen, according to a statement issued Monday by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. It did not say when the carving was brought home.